Be Prepared for Anything

It can happen at any time - in the middle of the night, in nice weather, in the winter, during a storm.

The electricity can go off and stay off for awhile.

The last time we had an outage, I was actually in the middle of coloring my hair and was glopping on the color goo when suddenly I was surrounded by darkness.

I was in the bathroom and it was in the evening. I could hear my children calling from other rooms and I couldn’t do anything - my hands were covered in hair color. Thankfully, my husband was home.

We have a specific spot where we keep flashlights, batteries, matches and candles - so hubby knew exactly what to do. He grabbed flashlights for everyone then wedged one on the shelf next to the shower so I could rinse out the color.

Knowing where things are hasn’t always been the case. We used to have flashlights, matches, batteries and candles in dozens of assorted places and if the power went out we had to dig around in the dark, hoping and praying we hit an actual working flashlight.

I got tired of that happening so I gathered everything up and put it all into a box which now sits on top of a freestanding cabinet in the kitchen.

If you don’t already have such items in an easily-accessible place, you should. It’s invaluable if the power goes off.

This last power outage was caused by a blown transformer and the power was out for about two or three hours.  Last winter there were a number of outages due to ice storms, but thankfully we never lost power.

Nevertheless, I keep my box ready just in case. I’ve even bought a couple of wind up flashlights that don’t require regular batteries.

My next project is to create a busy box for my kids. It will contains card games and a few fun, no-electricity-required activities just in case of a power outage.

So, are you prepared?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS