{"id":2879,"date":"2018-05-31T08:03:25","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T12:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kneedeepinit.com\/?p=2879"},"modified":"2019-09-01T09:50:38","modified_gmt":"2019-09-01T13:50:38","slug":"preppers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kneedeepinit.com\/preppers\/","title":{"rendered":"Preppers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hurricanes can’t read a calendar. But we can, and it tells us that on June 1 the 2018 Hurricane Season starts (and it goes to November 30). The National Hurricane Center (NHC) sets these official dates as the most likely times for hurricanes to form, and it’s all based on historical statistics. I’m sure they tend to be overly cautious because they want people prepared, and I’m OK with that. The season peaks in late-August through September as the difference between water and air temperature is the greatest then. But the statistics don’t take into account the oddball years, like in 1908 when a hurricane formed on March 6! And there was a late December hurricane in 1954 that lasted all the way to January 6, 1955!<\/p>\n

So here we are in late May prepping for the 2018 Hurricane Season, or the Zombie Apocalypse, it works for both. I started with a spreadsheet I found online that I imagine was put together by a Type A Mom with a whole lot of worries swirling around up in her head. She had things in this list like toilet paper and feminine hygiene products (as if you’re going to run out of these!), aluminum foil, mop and buckets, paper towels, soap, mirror, toothpaste, every last item<\/i> in the first aid kit, and other normal things that you simply have, you don’t have to prepare ahead! She had 2 can openers in case one doesn’t work! I can tell you, if I’m hungry I have about 7 ways to open a can, not including my teeth. Anyway, we took a machete to her list and came up with our own that is much easier to implement and still covers us very nicely.<\/p>\n\t

I have to keep checking my language because I have a tendency to say \u201cwe’re prepping for the hurricane\u201d. I think I say it that way because to do this right, the mindset needs to be \u201cwhen it happens, we will do this\u201d, rather than making it some abstract idea that one day a storm may come.<\/p>\n

That said, with the stress around this island after last year, the wording still needs to be \u201cprepping for hurricane season<\/b>\u201d! Some people were even nervous earlier this week over the sub-tropical storm Alberto, which was at the time 1300 miles away in the Gulf of Mexico and moving farther away from us. Obviously, any storms are going to be a touchy subject for the next 6 months, but I’ve also heard others here with a fairly cavalier attitude about it all. We’re somewhere in between, planning for the worst, hoping for the best, and not getting stressed about it. Of course if we’re in the middle of a hurricane later this year the blood pressure will probably rise a bit, but we have a stout house and a good plan so we don’t worry<\/a> much – it just isn’t worth it.<\/p>\n

I’ve been through several of them in my lifetime, growing up on the east coast of Florida. Some of those were major storms (Category 3 or greater), starting with Donna a week before I was born in 1960. I even heard a rumor once that if I was born a girl, my name would have been Donna. But those storms were almost all when I was a kid (I moved to Colorado after college). That meant of course that it wasn’t my responsibility to prepare for it, that was for Mom and Dad!<\/p>\n

Since we’re the adults now, and we chose to move into the hurricane belt, it’s on us to prepare. To help with that, there is a non-profit group here called Vieques Ready whose goal it is to have people better prepared than they were last year. Their checklist is a great place to start, but we’re going to attack it in reverse order because you know, we’re crazy like that<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Starting at the bottom, we have:<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\"Checklist\n\t