What will you do without Air Conditioning?

What if our area is without power for a few days because of Hurricane Irene?

How hot are we going to get?

Are you prepared to sleep with all the windows open?  Do you have screens for all your windows?  I don't know about your house, but my rooms are configured in such a way that there are NO cross breezes in my home.  Oh, how I wish for one of those homes built before air conditioning, when they knew how to put windows on all four sides of the house!

Here is one helpful tip:

If you have any mylar emergency blankets (they cost about $1.50, and look like a big sheet of foil), you can tape them up on the inside over your windows and that will reflect a lot of the sun out of your house.  Your rooms will be a lot cooler.

My apologies

I can't get that email from the Midkiffs to post properly.  Sorry about that.  I hope you can read it one way or the other.

How to get notifications from Greensboro Cannery

The following is an email I got from the outgoing manager of the Greensboro, NC cannery.

When Sister Midkiff and I took over we would have 2 weeks notice of upcoming price changes 


and we could easily notify everyone so they had time to stock up before prices went up, but now


 with the system that runs on the internet the last price change we received an email late


Thursday night that prices would be adjusted the following Monday when we opened. The


 managers no longer have to make the price changes in the cash register, it's all done in Salt


 Lake City and when the manager opens the cash register it's done. If you would like to be


 notified of upcoming price changes or any other news related to emergency preparedness,


 email Elder and Sister Mangum at  wel-hsc-greensboro@ldschurch.org and give them your


 email address and maybe include your home and cell phone #s.

From Brother and Sister Midkiff

Preparing for Hurricane Irene?

What the heck!!!  I just came home from a three day trip across the country to see my son get married, and hadn't seen the news.

I clicked on the internet, and found out that there is a chance that Hurricane Irene may be coming to North Carolina on Friday!

Of course, Irene may sputter out or hit someplace else, but I am certainly glad I have lots of emergency preparedness stuff already in my home.

I have written several blog posts about hurricanes before, so click on the label "Hurricanes" on the right margin of this blog and you can reread them.

What are you doing to prepare?  Post some comments please, and tell us all.

Joseph Smith Movie in Cary Tues. Aug. 23

One Night only:

Joseph Smith
Vol. 1: Plates of Gold

One night only in Cary, NC

Tues. Aug. 23, 2011 at 7 pm.
Galaxy Cinema
770 Cary Towne Blvd.,  Cary NC

For tickets visit  www.JosephMovie.com

Groups rates available:   eric@josephmovie.com
801-599-7973

How to make Homemade Buttermilk

http://9fordinner.blogspot.com/2011/01/bit-more-buttermilk.html

Go to this link to see how Jenny buys a small container of buttermilk, then adds powdered milk to it to create a whole gallon of buttermilk.  This is a great money-saving tip, and a great way to use your food storage powdered milk.

Free buckets

My friend works at ChickFilA, and she gets these dill pickle buckets for free.  Her husband told me how he gets the pickley smell out:  He washes the bucket out with soap and water, then fills it with water and about a cup of baking soda and some bleach, and leaves it in the sun for a couple of days.  He said that this usually does the trick.

I have also heard that you can ask Sam's Club bakery or other bakeries for their empty frosting buckets.  You will need to wash them to remove all the greasy frosting residue.

I don't know if the lids would be reusable. You may have to buy the lids somewhere else.  But at least the buckets would be free.

(New buckets are around $4-7 each, and lids cost around $1.50-3.00 each, depending on where you get them.)

How to Turn off Your Water at the Road

http://www.3steps.org/Site_3steps.org/Water_turn-off.html

Bobby's Bathroom Adventures

http://www.3steps.org/Site_3steps.org/Sanitation_-_Bidet.html

A really well-done 8 minute video on how you can cope if someday there is a crisis and there is no toilet paper available.

Lessons She Learned from Unemployment

Here is a blog I just discovered.  It is written by an LDS mother of seven children.  Today she is telling about all the things she has learned about food storage in the past three years, while her husband has been unemployed/underemployed.  These are great things to be aware of!

http://9fordinner.blogspot.com/2011/08/lessons-learned-food-storage-and.html



(Thanks to Kerilee J. for telling me about her.)

A Campfire Cooking Rack

Don't you hate me for getting all these great yard sale finds?

Here is another piece of camping equipment I got for only $4.  It is a foldable rack to place over a campfire.  It is about 20" by 12", and it is about 12" tall.  I will be able to set pots and pans or hot dogs right on it.  We haven't been able to figure out why the grill has narrower openings on one side and wider openings on the other.

Maybe I could even set my Coleman camping oven on it.  I will have to test that out.

Oven for Coleman Stove

I considered it a miracle when I found this (30 year old?) Coleman camping oven at a yard sale for $4.  It folds down completely flat, but when you put it together, it works like a charm.  It even has a temperature gauge on the front.

As you can see, I just set it on top of my propane camping stove, and turned on the flame.

It has a rack inside just like a normal oven.  I baked this carrot cake in about the same time it would take to bake one in my electric oven.  I probably should have put the rack a bit higher, I think the bottom of the cake was a little burned.

(In case you are wondering, this is the carrot cake batter that I had intended to bake inside my solar oven, but by the time I mixed up the batter, clouds had covered the sun so I was forced to bake it in this oven instead.)