so we finally went shopping this past weekend for our emergency kit. it only took a few gigantic earthquakes, katrina, rita, and wildfires--not to mention 9/11 and post-9/11 duct tape and cellophane hysteria. we finally did it. oh sure, we still need to get a good whistle and a few spacefood sticks, but we did a good job. (don't worry, we aren't really going to have spacefood sticks in our emergency kit. we will have actual important kinds of food.) we went to target and managed to get most of what we needed. i had already gotten gallons and gallons of water, which i found out later is the wrong kind of water, because it goes bad. i didn't know it could, but apparently it can. but it's good enough for now. if armageddon comes tomorrow, i think my water will still be good.
well, we ended up putting everything in 2 separate duffels, so we can each run easily from the burning house/smallpox spores/deadly fires/tsunami/tornado/dirty bomb, and we have just about everything we need. it's kind of weird to go through a store and pick out the few items that one will carry through the apocalypse, though. is this pink folding mirror better than this blue one for signaling that we survived the blast and have taken shelter next to this old building? or how about the one bra that i will wear as we hike across the desert? and of course, i have a spare pair of glasses in the emergency kit, but i really don't like the way i look in those. does that mean that even though i have a nice bra, i'll have to wear those ugly glasses for the rest of my life? and what about the dog? we have a ton of kibble, but how long until we can get back to the pet store? what about chewies? should we bring any?
we were standing in the store deciding which duffel bags to keep everything in and my husband said to me: well, we'll be grabbing all our stuff and we'll be on the move... and i thought: i don't want to be on the move. i don't want to be running through the wasteland with a duffel bag full of water purification tablets and with my dear diabetic dog flailing around on the end of leash. we were standing in target, running scenarios and it was really awful. i felt pretty bad about it for the rest of the day. but when we got home, i remembered i had saved a pretty nifty little blue plastic container with a mirror on the inside of it. it snaps closed and everything. it was from a set of crest whitestrips that i used for about 4 days, before i decided the feeling of that goop in my mouth for 20 minutes was really gross. we put the crest whitestrips box into our kit because it will hold something really small and important and we can use it to signal for help. i knew the thing would come in handy! so i think i'm going to grab the other really nice compact mirror we got at target, since we won't be using it. every time i take it out to look in it, i will think how close that mirror came to being the mirror at the end of the world.
