We’ve realized that having our SWYE* preps established allows us to now only buy those items when they are on sale; that’s when we stock up  –  and that’s why we like Costco (initially, it seemed counter-intuitive that having food storage would help us save money on a regular basis). So we made our monthly trip to Costco. Not much on the coupon front this time, they’ve been disappointing lately. We got a 3-pack of good, leather, work gloves; protective equipment in a collapse will be very important – preventing injuries, even little ones, will be so much easier than treating them. We picked up another 3-pack LED small flashlight set; we have a flashlight in each car plus another one, and extra batteries, in the BOBs – but I thought it’d be helpful to have an extra flashlight clipped to the outside of the BOB to be able to find things inside the bag (Repetitive & Redundant). LED flashlights are great; because of the low-energy requirement of the LEDs themselves the batteries last a long time, and they put out a lot of light. Ibuprofen was on sale so we got extras; in a collapse, with all the sore muscles and orthopedic injuries, it’ll be good to have plenty stored – plus we use it and rotate it on a regular basis.

On our continued quest to find property near Sequim a new listing came online that looked good. We had our realtor look at it and he said it was a great value and highly recommended coming to see it soon. We scheduled an appointment for this last weekend, but before we could go it was already under contract – I guess it was a good deal. Unfortunately, even if we had seen it we weren’t ready to move that quickly. The quest continues…

Ryan, who is good at and enjoys small construction projects, built  a box to put underneath our pool table for extra storage. Even with our large suburban home and me trying to be ultra organized, we are still beginning to run out of space. I know most people don’t have a pool table and thus can’t use this suggestion, but I wanted to help you think of creative ways to use the space you do have.

While we were at the hardware store getting the wood for the under the pool table box, we also picked up wood to use to build a small greenhouse for the backyard (we had to borrow a friend’s truck, so we got everything we needed in one trip – can’t wait to get a truck of our own). We’re ordering our seeds this weekend and we’ll build the greenhouse in the next couple of weeks. And yes, of course, there will be a how-to blog post when we get it completed.

(Monday: Can You Hear Me Now? – Cell Phones and Power Outages)

*For my list of abbreviations and other information, open the above ‘Check Here…’ page tab.