What I Did This Week To Prep 4/6/12

I'm a day late posting this.  In addition, I really didn't do that much this past week.  Work has been sucking up a lot of my time.  Plenty of excuses, no good ones.

I did my normal workouts, but nothing special there.  Admittedly, it was a struggle to do it this week.  I had lot's of temptation and excuses to blow my workouts off.  Fortunately, I summoned up the moxy to do them anyway.

I started creating a 2 week meal plan.  I've (of course) created this in a spreadsheet (can't help myself-love spreadsheets).  My goal is to create the 2 week meal plan with all ingredients required for each meal.  The ingredients will include quantities in a common measurement.  The sheet will then add up all the quantities and create a shopping list based on the amount of the common measurement in a package.  It will also be set up to repeat the 2 week cycle as many times as I designate-in this case, I'm setting it up to add up 6 months worth the 2 week cycles.  It assumes that 1 month equals 4 weeks (not true, but simplifies calculations).  I'm also starting to accumulate pricing data for the ingredients to add into the spreadsheet.  I've gotten 2 meals entered and tested.  Barb and I will now work together to decide what the rest of the meals will be and create the ingredients list for each meal.

Our goal is not to have the 6 months of food be completely dry stores.  It will be a mixture of dry stores and frozen.  This is b/c we are storing the food with the idea that we'll need it in the event 1 of us loses a job (personal emergency).  We figure if we were in a SHTF scenario (national or global emergency), we would not weather in place.  We would bug out carrying is much of the dry stuff that fits in the BOV.  We haven't really thought out that part of the plan-we have focused our planning on personal and local emergencies first (see Modern Survival Philosphy | The Survival Podcast link).

I had pea gravel placed in the fenced in area between my deck and shed.  By the term "had", I mean I hired my landscaper come in and do it.  I did this for several reasons.  First, it gives our dogs a place to use the restroom without coming in with muddy paws.  Second, it covers up the mud so that we can get access to the storage shed (we store gear there) and our fire wood pile, also without becoming bogged up in lots of mud.  Third, it gives us a dry, out of line of sight place to camp if the house were to collapse in the event of an earthquake (regional emergency).  Finally, once we acquire a BOV, we'll store it in this area (there is a 10 foot gate).  Having the rock will help keep the vehicle from tearing up this area.

At the same time, I also had a garden bed created against the 4 foot tall section of fence bordering our yard (we live on a corner lot).  We intend to transplant all of our potted strawberries to this bed.  We also intend to plant blueberry bushes and asparagus plants into this bed later this spring.  Our plan is to start with this stuff, then expand this garden bed with other plants next year.

What did you do?