Prepped & Ready Weekly, Issue #19

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There is a window every October when nothing is urgent. The storms have mostly moved on, the garden is winding down, and the furnace has not been tested yet. That window is the best time of the year to do the slow, unglamorous work, so this issue is 7 pieces of exactly that.

3 quick things this week

• A full pantry is not a meal plan. Two adults and 2 school age kids land near 7,200 calories a day, and the water your cooking needs comes on top of your drinking gallon.

• Your out of area contact needs to be 100 miles out. Any closer and they are sharing your dead cell towers and your overloaded local circuits, so they cannot relay anything.

• One inch of rain on 1,000 square feet of roof is about 623 gallons on paper and closer to 530 in practice. The roof is rarely what limits you. The tank is.

This week

The Atlantic is quiet this morning. No active tropical systems anywhere in the basin. Hurricane season still runs through November 30, so this is a lull and not an all clear, but a lull is useful.

It is a good week to pull up your county hazard plan and to write down the phone numbers you currently only know as names in a contact list. Both take an evening. Neither one can be done well in a hurry.

Emergency Meal Prep for Families: How to Turn a Pantry Into Meals Kids Will Eat

Most of us build a pantry the same way. Buy what keeps, stack it on the shelf, feel better. Then the power goes out on a Tuesday and you are standing in front of 40 cans trying to assemble something a 7 year old will eat without a negotiation.

The gap between a stocked shelf and an actual dinner is wider than it looks. It comes down to 3 tiers of food (no cook, one pot, needs water), a calorie target per person that most people set too low, and the cooking water almost nobody budgets for. We worked out a full 3 day plan for a family of 4 with every number attached.

The 4 hour refrigerator rule and what to do with the food already sitting in there is in this one too.

How to Create a Family Emergency Contact List That Works Without Your Phone

Try this. Write down every phone number you know by heart. For most of us that is a short and slightly embarrassing list.

That is the whole problem. Your contact list lives inside a device that can be dead, locked, or in the other room, and the emergency where you need it most is the one where none of those things go your way. There are 6 roles that belong on a paper card, and 2 of them are the ones almost everybody leaves off.

We put the whole thing into a wallet card you can copy tonight, with the 100 mile rule, the number to call when it is not a 911 emergency, and the lock screen feature on your phone that still works when the phone will not open.

The CBD Brand that Actually Does What It Says

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Emergency Shelter Materials: How to Judge Tarps, Pads, and Cordage

Tarps get sold on numbers. Denier, hydrostatic head, 550 pounds of cord strength. Every one of those is a real measurement of something. Just not always the thing you are being sold on.

This one is a spec guide with the marketing filtered out. Which rating actually predicts whether a tarp keeps you dry, why the foam pad matters more than the tarp does on a cold night, and the honest answer on whether a mylar blanket counts as insulation. It does not, and the reason is worth 30 seconds of your time.

There are 3 complete kits at the end, sorted by carry weight and budget, with the one specification that matters for each item.

Community Risk Assessment: How to Find Out What Hazards Your County Actually Faces

Somewhere in your county, a planner has already ranked every hazard your area faces, estimated the losses, and posted the whole thing in public. Almost nobody reads it.

It is called a hazard mitigation plan, it gets refreshed on a 5 year cycle, and it will tell you more about your real local risk than any national map ever will. There is a companion document that runs the response side, and a separate public record that lists the hazardous chemicals stored near your house.

No software, no GIS skills, no cost. Here is how to find all 3 and what to look for once you have them open.

Off Grid Rainwater Harvesting: How to Size, Treat, and Store a Whole House Water Supply

The yield formula is the easy part. Multiply, trim it for what the gutters really catch, and you can size a roof in about 5 minutes.

What most build guides skip is the weight. A full cistern is one of the heaviest objects on the property, and what it sits on is a structural decision, not a landscaping one. The treatment order matters just as much, because a potable system is a sequence, and running it out of order quietly defeats the whole thing.

Annual rainfall tells you whether this works at all. Something else entirely tells you how big the tank has to be, and that is the number most people never calculate.

Rainwater Harvesting for Livestock: How to Catch and Store Enough Water for Your Animals

Animals drink a great deal more than people do, and they do not wait politely for the next rain.

The good news is that your barn roof is almost certainly the largest water collector on the place, and nobody is using it. The arithmetic is the same as a house, but the sizing question is different, because livestock demand is steady and dry spells are not. There is also a water quality problem specific to tanks in warm weather that can turn bad in a hurry, and an opaque, covered tank is most of the fix.

Roof yield per inch, tank sizing against your longest dry stretch, and the roofing material question answered honestly rather than hopefully.

Essential Oil Blends for Relaxation: What the Evidence Supports and How to Dilute Them Safely

Lavender has more human trial data behind it than any other relaxation oil. That sounds like a strong endorsement right up until you see how thin the whole field is.

So this is a careful read rather than a cheerful one. What the evidence actually supports, the dilution percentages by age, and the oils that do not belong anywhere near small children or cats. The safety section is the part worth reading twice, and all of it is sourced to NCCIH, poison control, and the Merck Veterinary Manual.

There are 4 blends with exact drop counts at the end, for when you want the ritual without the guesswork.

Worth a watch

If the water stories above got you thinking, The Bug Out Location covers food and water storage, well systems, and off grid power on an ordinary budget. It is a practical channel with very little theater in it, which lines up well with most of this issue.

Before you go

If a neighbor would get something out of this, forward it along. And if somebody forwarded it to you, you can get it twice a week for free.

You never know, but you can always be ready.

Logan