I went to Walmart today and finished replacing all of the food items that the Mrs. and I donated to the food bank last month. Got to watch those expiration dates on the food items.

I also got a couple of solar-powered lanterns for $15 ea. I haven’t seen those before. I’ve been looking for a battery charger with a hand-crank to put in my emergency kit, and one that will charge a cell phone, but I haven’t found one yet. Might check e-bay.

The DHS recommends that every household maintain food and water for a week’s worth of self-sufficiency. I really can’t figure why anyone would have any less than that. Katrina’s aftermath kind of changed my thinking on doing more than just thinking about self-sufficiency, and actually doing the necessary things to fend for ourselves.

Interestingly enough, DHS has recommended that hospitals maintain sufficient supplies of food, water and meds to fend for themselves for up to 90 days. Ninety days! I dare say very few hospitals have enough storage space to keep that much food, water, and generator fuel on hand. In this day of “just in time” inventory management, it is asking a lot for our community hospitals to allocate resources to purchase that quantity of supplies. By the same token, I can’t imagine why the government would ask them to do so if there weren’t a real probability of the day coming when this type of preparation would be necessary. I told Mrs. Nuke that if 90 days was good enough for the hospital, it was good enough for us too.

My bro-in-law gave me a food dehydrator that he had in storage. I’m going to try my hand at making jerky next week. Maybe some banana chips, too. Any of y’all ever used one of these thingamajigs before?