Saturday, February 06, 2010

This, Is Why We Prepare









If you lived in the Washington DC area right now, this is what you would see at your local Safeway.
They are forecast to get between twenty and twenty eight inches of snow shortly and everybody and their dog panicked and cleaned out the store.
Imagine not only not having food and lights and such already stored but being broke to boot?

This is a recurrent problem in this country and it seems a lot of people have the memory of a fucking gnat.

Just tonight, I went to get some beer, as I was leaving, there is a discount store next door and I got in the truck and started to drive off but that damn discount store started calling me. I didn't ignore it, either. I parked and locked the truck and went inside, not having a clue what it was I was going to find.
I went up and down five aisles before I found it,Quart jars of Prego Mushroom spaghetti sauce for a buck and boxes and boxes of different kinds of pasta for seventy five cents apiece.
Twelve dollars and fifty cents later, I hauled out enough to eat on for a week straight, easily.
I also got three packets of Country gravy mix, some Hamburger Helper, a bag of rice and a bag of pinto beans. For twelve fifty, I bought enough food to eat on for three freakin' weeks. Who cannot justify that?

Call me crazy all you want, I'll just fart in your eye and pick my teeth when there isn't a damn thing on the shelves.



H/T Gawker for the pics and the article I swiped 'em from.

6 comments:

  1. Bad Tux11:17 PM

    Just checked my pantry and I have about 20 days of food up there, plus a case of MRE's, plus some miscellaneous camping food. So figure I have about a month's worth of food around the house. Of course, most of that is because I buy at Costco, and a) it's fucking hard to get out of Costco because the lines are 100 miles long and everybody's got shit piled up to the ceiling in their carts so the lines move about 1 per hour, and thus b) when I go to Costco, I buy a cart piled to the ceiling full of shit and then don't go back for another couple of months (not that it's possible to buy in small quantities from Costco in the first place, but I don't buy a case of 18 Korean noodle bowls or one package of 8 cans of tuna or one bag of 8 pounds of coffee, I buy two or three cases and four or five packages of tuna and 2 or 3 bags of coffee just so I don't have to go the fuck back to that hellhole anytime soon). And my last Costco run was a week ago, tells ya I hauled home a ton of shit that's currently stacked to the top of my pantry.

    Water's the real PITA when that kinda shit happens. I have maybe four days worth of water hanging around between various gallon jugs, individual water bottles, water bladders from camping that I haven't emptied out, that kinda shit. On the other hand, I have ten gallons of gasoline down in the garage (two 5-gallon jerry cans), and a camping stove that burns gasoline, so I suspect I could boil a *lot* of water with that to have enough drinking water from the nearby stream if I needed it (as nasty as that water looks -- all brown and sluggish and shit -- if ya gotta, ya gotta, and chances are if boiled it ain't gonna kill ya).

    The biggest problem is that if anything bad happens here, it's likely to be an earthquake -- and all this food and shit ain't no good if my apartment building shakes down! So it goes.

    BTW, this Echo crap fucking sucks. I keep telling it to give me an email notification if anybody responds to the thread, but it never does. What a pile of shit. Glad I started in December 2004 after Blogger introduced their own comments system so I never had that Haloscan on my blog, otherwise I would be spittin' mad about now...

    - Badtux the Prepared Penguin

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  2. Bustednuckles11:35 PM

    I hear ya BadTux, I used to live in San Jose myself and we had quite a few rock and roll moments. I left about six months before the last big one that broke the Bay Bridge and cracked Candlestick in the middle of a game. One thing you might want to look into is making your own version of a Berkely Water Filter. There are plans all over the internet. I am lucky in that regard, I am five blocks away from the Columbia river and a half mile from a fresh water tributary.
    The thought of hauling water doesn't appeal to me but I know if I have to, I canl. I bought a used fold up Italian bicycle with a rack on the back, just in case.

    Thanks fer stopping by.

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  3. Anntichrist S. Coulter6:06 AM

    (PART 2 from these asinine comments...)

    But remember back about 3.5 years ago, when I said that all of this shit was GOING TO HAPPEN?!?!? First they fuck you on gasoline (and then yo-yo it so fucking bad that you wanna barf from the vertigo), then MILK, then food, then junk/prepared food, then it's the "luxuries" like cigarettes & OTC meds... And of course, GENOCIDAL JINDAL down here is trying to fuck us ALL out of the very CONCEPT of Medicaid... And it always happens in that exact order, even though it's been a while since we had a republicunt gubner try to KILL-OFF THE POOR PEOPLE. Hardly the first time, will never be the last, but infuriating and insulting nonetheless.

    So there ya go: After they've fucked the working-class & poor out of their basic daily essentials, like vitamins & oh, I dunno... FOOD, then so many new people have to apply for FOOD STAMPS, they have to CUT BACK ON EVERYBODY'S BENEFITS. Nice how that little niche fits together PERFECTLY, ain't it?

    When I watched the rich motherfuckers bailing out of the stock market almost 4 years ago, I fucking *KNEW*. When ads during "The Situation Room" were ALLLLL about "WE'LL TEACH YOU HOW TO BUY & TRADE STOCKS AND *YOU* TOO CAN BE A MILLIONAIRE OVERNIGHT!", aimed specifically @ the working-class peoples, IT'S PRETTY FUCKING OBVIOUS WHO'S MAKING THE PROFIT IN *THAT*,. iddnt it? Fuck the working class, we shouldn't have to pay SLAVE LABOR, ANYFUCKINGWAY. Wall Street in a nutshell. Or a jock strap, however you put it.

    Would expand on in more detail, but I'm 6 hours behind on my sleep, so I'll shaddup before I make a COMPLETE ass of myself. Keep watching the mailbox!

    XO
    J

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  4. Hermitjim8:46 AM

    Going to look a lot like that in a lot more places pretty soon! Hope everyone has been paying attention!

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  5. Buzzman9:29 PM

    I always thought my grandparents were a little too worried about stocking up. They learned the hard way and we don't have to.

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  6. Bad Tux2:15 PM

    Busted, I have two different water filters (a ceramic one and a microtube one) and if you let the water settle, they do a decent job (don't try pumping directly from brown water though, they'll clog super-quick!). But they don't remove viruses, and I fully expect that raw sewage is going to be a problem if the power is out for any amount of time. Thus boiling.

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