Preparedness for when

[Deleted User]

'Lo ELAINE - well done on all the prepping, lovely to have you post and let us know we've been useful. Stay warm and safe in your Red Zone Home, Cheers Lyn xxx.

vanoonoo

sounds great elaine241 and I sincerely hope you never NEED to use any of it, but that you enjoy using all of it!

my toes are cold

boultdj

vanoonoo wrote: »

sounds great elaine241 and I sincerely hope you never NEED to use any of it, but that you enjoy using all of it!

my toes are cold

Only thing's I can think of for helping with the cold toes is put bed socks on 'cause there thicker, or do a hot water bottle, put it in a pillow case and then put your feet in, or wiggle your toes about, but that could be hard to do if you'v got something like artheritus[sp?] in them, or the easy 1 my Gran use to do, go back to bed and think stuff the housework:eek:.

GreyQueen

vanoonoo wrote: »

sounds great elaine241 and I sincerely hope you never NEED to use any of it, but that you enjoy using all of it!

my toes are cold

:beer: Ditto to that, Elaine done good.

Well, shockingly, I turned my alarm off and let nature take it's course and woke just before 9 am! Unheard of. Must have needed it. No more snow (it snowed yesterday morning from about 9 -12). I know from past experience of the city pavements not to treat this as a good thing however; the snow gets compacted down to about 1 inch of grey ice which gets polished by passng feet and more frozen overnight and which then turns into an ice rink.

This morning I will Y*xTrax and trapper-hat up and head up to the library which is only half a mile away as I like it up there and need some garbage reads to intersperse with the worthy difficult stuff. Thinking along the lines of werewolves, mebbe vampires, although they're a bit 2011, mebbe some steampunk or the odd thriller. The odder the better.

I also want to see if the rest of the world is going up-town. The past several days have seen the city centre bereft of shoppers, so that won't be helping retailers at this difficult time. It's people's jobs at the end of the day.

Hope everyone is warm and well, all present and accounted for, fed and sheltered. Laters, GQ xx

ETA forgot to say yesterday but Craigywv's trick with the second purse doesn't sound daft to me, sounds most excellent common sense.

pineapple

Just done a recce with the hound. Snowed in just where I live but the road 'up t'top' is still clear (though virtually no traffic). So it's not quite 'The Day after Tomorrow' here just yet. We get an episode of this most years and 1 in 3 the road actually comes to a standstill. It's still snowing but quite mild imo. Which probably means I looked a tad silly got up like Nanook of the North with my ridiculous yeti hat! :rotfl:

BigMummaF

craigywv wrote: »

....have a pursewhich if i go into my stores i buy off myself....

Before Muvva's sensibubbles popped, she would do the same sort of thing with the big boxes of soap powder & treated the washing machine like a launderette; by putting a bit of change in her 'soap purse' each time she did some washing, there was usually more than enough to cover the cost of the next box of powder AND put some towards the lekkie bill!

BessieBooBoo wrote: »

....Although we were all allowed out 'early' it seemed like all employers had the same idea....
Ddog loved the snow....

Not all employers :mad: My lot had to go the distance, even tho the 'outside' worker ended up sitting in the mess room from 12:30 till the usual knock-off but their boss does have a few screws loose at the best of times

Apparently Pup wasn't too keen to go out the back door so No3 took him for a w-a-l-k, then the rascal kept going into the garden to bounce around like a loon :rotfl: He didn't walk till early evening, preferring to imitate a certain literary tiger & bunny-hopping to get about!
He too, attacks the hoover with such venom in his growl that he sounds like a with cinematic sound enhancers...worse than his fear of window cleaners, Bless 'im He goes scatty when they're around--not necessarily anywhere near our home--& runs up & down the stairs, barking till he makes himself cough, then literally shivvers when he has to go outside for the first couple of times after they've left the area There is no reason we can see for him to be like this, as our window cleaner thinks he's a lovely pooch & has always been friendly toward him...
OH..just remembered something!You probably know but I'll say it anyways..Please make sure you clean your pets paws & legs after they have been near grit/salt this time of year, as the stuff the councils use can cause nasty repercussions when Tiddles et al lick their feet clean themselves.

I put a little bacon joint in the slow cooker last night for our lunch today & it smells luvverlee, so best go see if it's done....

pineapple

Just got a batch proving. At the mo I'm experimenting. I read somewhere you should handle the dough as little as possible so you don't knead it and should aim at no more than 4 minutes for the mixing (I don't use a bread maker).
It's always going to be denser than white bread but omg what a delicious nutty flavour when toasted.
If it goes belly up, I can always use it as rocks for self defence! :rotfl:

GreyQueen

Well, with the weather being how it is, I have had preptastic things on my mind and have got around to a couple of things which have been pending for some time.

It occurred to me that if I should have to evacuate Provincial City at short notice under my own steam not public transport, I would need to have a map. I can perfectly well find myself around on the main roads but in event that SHTF, the motorways and A grade roads may be impassable or bandit-ridden. Stranger things have happened in perfectly-civilised countries.

I always tell myself that NO ONE ever woke up and thought to themselves Hmm, I wonder if we'll be in a refugee camp this time next year? Geopolitics can grind the little people as easily as the armies. And sadly often do, as my rellies who spent an uncomfortable WW2 as Brit cits in an occupied European capital city have told us all about.

Now, I know the area around the Hometown, for about 15 miles in all directions, minutely. I was one of the last generation of free-range children and went all over on foot and on pushbike. I'm confident that you could drop me anywhere in the area of the hometown, be it on heath, wood or farmer's field and I could orient my way to the ancestral home. I also have family in a skein of villages stretched over a large part of that county.

Howsomever, I am not a native of Provincial City although I have lived here for 20+ years. I know some parts of the city like the back of my hand, some sketchily, some not at all. I don't have the intimate knowledge of the backroads which I would need to get me from PC to the Hometown, although I have an approximately knowledge. If you're tired and stressed and on your pushbike or on foot, you don't want to be going out of your way, even by a mile or two.

I once biked across England and Wales, so take my word for this. I have never been so tired before or since, either.

So, I have purchased a large scale AA road atlas at the 99p store (they are routinely available for £1.99 in most discount places) and have pulled its staples. I've taken the pages which cover the part of the country I'm in and the adjacent areas inc the Hometown and a considerable area beyond. I have marked up the most efficient backroads route to the HT. I put the next-nearest area pages on the reverse.

The next bit is the clever bit, and I'll state right now that I stole this idea from cycle tourists whom I shared hostel space with in the Outer Hebrides years ago. They had "laminated" their maps between sheets of clear sticky film (available in £land and loads of other places. They'd even trimmed off the bits of sea which they didn't need.

This gives you a handy rollable, foldable waterproof map. And lovely tho the Outer Hebrides are, they're nothing if not moist. You could of course use a real laminator, although mine only takes A4, but this leaves you with a rigid and less packable map.

So, I now have a double-sided map which covers most of my region, never mind my immediate area, made with plenty of leftovers from £2 worth of kit.

Last summer I went on a small (mis)adventure into the fine county of Yorkshire and the elderly borrowed car broke down. No biggie, we had breakdown cover, so I called it in and waited for the pickup. I was the navigator at the moment and was directing our journey from a road atlas on my lap. So when the car suddenly rolled to a halt with no warning, I knew exactly where we were, to within about 100m.

The garage rescue guy remarked that a lot of people don't know where they are when they breakdown and he spends a lot of time driving around the area looking for them. Even though we were on an A grade road. Because they don't have maps aboard their cars because they are a) numpties or b) totally reliant on sat-nav.

When the weather warms up, I have a plan to explore the environs of PC more closely by bicycle, expecially timing the route thri the 'burbs from my city centre gaffette to the route I would use to evacuate becuase it is in the direction of family, on a higher elevation and inland.

BTW, whilst I was poddling around doing my map I also covered an A-Z of my city to make it more water-resistant and was listening and half-watching ferfal's latest video's about bug out bags.

THIRZAH

What a good idea, Greyqueen. We live on the edge of the Peak District and do have OS maps of this area. DH loves maps and we always buy an OS map of the area when we go on holiday.

We buy those cheap map books from the Works. They tend to get damaged after a while owing to my habit of leaving them on the car floor so we replace them every year or so. We must have several lying around. I shall try your idea with the sticky film.

So many people these days don't use maps. Last year my sister and BIL drove from York to here-it normally takes us 11/4 hours. They didn't look at a map but put the Sat Nav on. It took them by the shortest route through the centre of two large towns so the journey took them nearly 3 hours!

boultdj

Last time I used a crap-nav it was for getting to & from a strange town it was telling me to turn right and go 17 mile's that way:eek: and in front of me at the juction is a sign say home town,left turn 10 mile's to go:rotfl:,