Not As Prepared As I Thought!

Our electric company scheduled an 8 hour power outage that took place yesterday. They've been warning us about it for weeks, which was really quite nice of them. It was in the 30's yesterday and I got up early to warm the house up, make a nice hot pot of coffee and bake some muffins. At exactly 8am the power went off and stayed off for almost 9 hours.

Although others in the area were upset, I was thankful for the outage. For me, it was like a practice run for the possibility of outages this winter and I found that although I was "prepared" for this one, in all actuality, I was not. Since our home is fully electric (sigh..) we have to improvise a bit. We do have a generator and we tested it out to make sure all is working properly, but didn't really use it yesterday except to run a hot plate to cook dinner on. That's an expensive way to heat up food! I should have had something else like canned heat or tea lights. 

I also need to can some soups or stews so that they will be available to heat up. Nothing warms you up like they do! I'm pretty much an ingredient canner, so I found this to be another weak spot in my being prepare! We did have water and juices but didn't need them, since we are on public water and we didn't lose it. That could always change though.

The house did cool down some, but wasn't unbearable - especially with wearing layers.  The generator will take care of that problem, though. That is, until we would run out of gas. I say that, because I was in an outage that lasted a good week. That was a fun one. We had freezing rain and then snow while there were still leaves on the trees. It took down lines, trees, transformers, made roads impassible and the snow really piled up and covered some of the downed trees, which added to all the mayhem.

I can now take one needed item off the list. I just ordered a pack of Safe Heat Chafing Fuel. That will be one less thing I will need to be concerned about next time. I'm going to have to still put up some soups, but that won't be a problem.

Well, today will be filled with canning up the applesauce and apple butter I made a couple of days ago. I forgot about the power outage when I was cooking it up, but no problem. I just put the big pots out on the grill and that kept them nice and cold. I'll have to heat them up and then adjust the spices, but not an issue.