I’m kind of lazy about important things. We don’t have wills, although we have tons of life insurance. I occasionally change my winter tires, but sometimes I forget to. I keep all our important documents in a safe, but I don’t have them scanned.

One thing we don’t have is an emergency plan. With all the impending chaos on the east coast tonight, and last night’s 7.7 earthquake on the west coast, it was no surprise that many of us on twitter were discussing emergency preparedness. I’ve always (gently) scoffed at it. I enjoyed watching people hoard beans and water bottles for Y2K, as I’m sure they will do for December 21 this year. Maybe I just have a Mayan sense of humor…!

But them I stopped and took stock of our little acreage and was pleasantly surprised at what we do have in case of an emergency, just by default:

•two wood stoves, and nearly 4 acres of fuel, er trees that we can chop and burn to stay warm and cook
•at least one 18-litre bottle of water, and usually as many as 5 since our tap water tastes gross!
•a cold room full of food, including soups, beans, pastas, snacks, baking supplies, etc
•in the winter we have nearly 4 acres of snow if we run out of water, and in the summer we have our slough and water tablets
•Hubz’ work truck had a generator, and we have a power inverter for our car cigarette lighters. My car charger will also run when the car is off

There you go: food, heat, power, and water without even trying! Who knew? I guess we should expect guests in the event of widespread chaos