I haven't always understood, nor do I proclaim to fully understand, even at this time, the ways of women. Tori is my main and, certainly, most current experience of the gentler sex. As such, with our relationship moving quickly toward ten-years, it seems to me that I would grow to understand, at least, her. I am a man, though, and to me her "control panel" looks a bit like the control panel for a Leer Jet with Egyptian Hyroglyphs to describe functions of buttons and toggles and the directional manual written in Greek. (Even with my vast accumulated stored of knowledge, I cannot decipher Egyptian Hyroglyphs and I do not understand written or spoken Greek.) What I do know, though, is that sometimes Tori just knows things. I haven't always believed this, even though she assured me many times it was true. I believe most of the time now.
In the beginning of our relationship, she began to inspire in me a desire to store food. I didn't always agree with her methods. And sometimes, to be completely honest, I teased her about the "extra food" she felt compelled to bring home from grocery shopping trips. She had a terribly difficult time then, and to this day can rarely stay within budget when grocery shopping. This has been a source of concern for me, but because of past experiences, is much easier to overlook now than it used to be.
Over the course of many months "extra food" shopping, early in our relationship, Tori grew a good store of canned food items. I would say it was a solid three-month supply with pretty good variety. Sometimes I was in agreement with the "extra" purchases, sometimes I harrassed her about them. And then I seperated from the NAVY. At first this was really not a big deal, at least to me. Tori had been through an experience of tremendous job change when her Dad left the NAVY, so it was a big deal for her for months before my seperation. Perhaps her past experiences are the reason for the way she felt compelled to purchase "too much" food every time she went to the grocery store. Whatever the reason, the extra food she bought provided a good supplment to our increasingly meagre food resources of that transitional time. That reserve of food was extremely valuable. That experience was the beginnings of a foundation, in me, of belief in food storage.
I wish I could say I was as fast a learner and believer in food storage as I would like to say I was. But I was not.
My next experience which solidified my belief in Food Storage came after our second daughter was born. During the nine months Tori was pregnant with our second daughter, she again felt an urgency to build/re-establish our food storage. She continued her "extra" purchases from the grocery store, but I'd been doing the food shopping more since the time she'd been teaching full-time, so our compliation of canned foods was not what it would have been if she'd been to the grocery store more. With my approval, for the most part, Tori purchased a 1-year's-supply of food for 1 person from http://www.beprepared.com/ with some of our tax return money. Why a one year's supply for one person when we were becoming a family of 4? Well, our second child was soon to be born, for which homebirth we paid for out-of-pocket and a large portion of our tax return money was used for that purpose. As a result, we didn't have as much tax return money to spend on food storage as we might have had otherwise. Since we've pretty much lived paycheck-to-paycheck for most of our relationship, we did what we could.
A rather unexpected firing from a job, unexpected to me at least, sent me to Florida to find a job. Three weeks after our second daughter's birth (and about four months after the job hunting excursion), we moved to Florida with job leads, but no solid offer. We did have a house to move into, at least. Because we were able to sell the mobile home in which we lived, we had enough money to pay for the rental home for a couple of months, but not much beyond that after covering moving expenses. For the first few months of living in Florida, we went to the grocery store a total of, maybe, 5 times for very limited purchases (under or around $10 each time). The rest of our caloric needs were met by the food storage Tori had purchased with my agreement. I began to more fully recognize the providence of food storage. I came to fully believe in it and felt the reward of having it when it was needed.
The next time Tori felt compelled to purchase food storage, I was completely on board. We bought a nicer 1-year-supply for 1 person with some tax return money (again limited by another imminent birth) and it has provided needed cushion at times when funds have been low. Specifically, that food storage supply provided a good deal of nutrition for us during a time when I left one part-time job (out of two jobs; the other one being a full-time position) and it took a little bit longer than anticipated to find another second job.
Currently, we are working to build up our freezer supply a little bit at a time. We also have a couple extra pantry items that we're working to cycle (first in, first out). Our goal is to build a three-month pantry supply and then compile a one-year supply of longer-term food storage. We also need to re-establish our water storage. Currently we have only seven gallons of water on reserve. We aim at a three days worth, then a seven day supply of water for drinking and food preparation (about 3 gallons per person, per day). Thus far we haven't established more than seven days worth per person. But some day we would like to have significantly more so that we'd have enough to cleaning, bathing, and garden watering as well as drinking and food preparation. We'll see how that goes.
Stay tuned for more on food storage!
Eat Well,
J.G.
1 comment:
Food storage is such a blessing. It is nice to not HAVE to go shopping b/c you always have food in the house.
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