Husband Plans: Emergency Preparedness
When my husband gets involved with planning, a REALLY efficient, inexpensive, easy plan gets turned into something horribly expensive, overwhelming, and extremely difficult to accomplish for numerous reasons.
Perfect example: our recent emergency preparedness conversations. My husband actually has some very valid experience. He lived in a country that was turned upside down overnight due to connections with the economy of Russia in the early 1990’s. He witnessed a whole nation of people who lived very comfortably become a population of mostly unemployed, desperate, hungry people very quickly. They lost electricity, running water, and for a time, it’s amazing that people figured out how to survive. But they did, and my husband was one of them. SO, one would think that this experience taught him some REAL efficient, inexpensive survival skills, yes? Well, I’ll tell you this story, and you decide.
Because we are in Hollywood, it makes sense to prepare for an earthquake. We sat down together to list items we’d need for an emergency. I had about 10 critical items in mind–stuff like food, cash, water, flashlights, and a radio. After conferring with my husband, the list grew to 100 items, including things like flotation devices, raincoats, tea, and honey. (I am not joking, the list actually included these items.) Naturally, this list did not get purchased–too many things, much too expensive, and no place to store these numerous items.
However, with all the recent stuff about food shortages and Costco limiting rice sales, and so on, it seemed prudent to revisit the list. So, I said, “You know, we really should probably get some emergency type items. But that list we made was too long–let’s get a few things now that we’d really need in the case of an earthquake or other emergency.” I’m thinking water (still don’t even have that), weather radio, map, pocket knife.
My husband says, “Well, two things I can think of right off hand would be a SHOVEL or LARGE STICK and a LARGE PLASTIC BOX.”
You can imagine my facial expression as he said this. It was kind of a tilted head, perplexed, confused, frustrated type look. But giving him the benefit of the doubt, I asked why we might need these things. The stick/shovel is to dig the car out should it lose traction while driving out of town (hu?!? We’re in Hollywood, not the Amazon jungle), and the box is to store all of the other things we get.
So, there you have it. Emergency preparedness from an expert who’s lived through a severe crisis and learned…hmmmm, a lot from it.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:49 pm
I got to “two things I can think of right off hand would be a SHOVEL or LARGE STICK” and I couldn’t read any more for laughing.
Yeah. I lived in California for a while, then in NYC during 9/11. We’ve got several emergency boxes. There’s even a teevee in one. But then, my wife packs them.
Regarding his clothes: perhaps he’s anti-fashion as an artistic statement? And you have to agree that Beowulf is better than Slayer.