value, 3000 words

Long time no post.  As you can see, I've been busy.  So, I designed this thing for a friend of mine and all the boys at my house wanted in on the act.  Four serious scarves later... I'm back at the blog.


I've charted out the pattern, and need to get some decent shots of the scarf in action.  But look for it Friday-ish, it worked up quickly and charted well.

So, about planning for power outages in the Summer.

I have a box filled with 4 flashlights, and 3 LED lanterns.  I also have a gas-range top which allows me to cook camp-style.  When I had my last child, I invested in a chest freezer.  In the spring, I make up a bunch of ice cubes, and keep them in 2 large bags.  If we lose power, we can move our most perishable items into the chest freezer to keep them cold for up to 3 days.

Otherwise, I also make sure that we do a lot of stir-fry meals, and a lot of soup in the summer.  All stuff that doesn't involve a functioning oven.

Then, just make sure that I have fresh water in case the town water gets nasty (it did one year, so I make sure to keep 5 gallons of fresh water bottled in the house).

And then, we play a lot of board games.  Lots of them.  Criminal amounts of card games too.

And then there's always the manual preparations for winter that can be done when there's no power.  For instance, knitting...

eventually I'll show you the figures on how the power of wool saves us roughly 400 USD a year over the course of the winter.  Knitting, there's very little it's not useful for.