Are you prepared to handle Mount Washmore?

My week and a half without a functioning washing machine ended Monday afternoon. Let me tell ya, you really learn appreciate the conveniences of modern life when you have to do laundry for six people by hand! I'm glad that I faced this little challenge when I still had hot water flowing from from the tap and power to run the dryer.

This caused me to put some thought to the essentials you need to do your family's laundry in an emergency scenario. Clean laundry might not be your first concern during TEOTWAWKI, but I guarantee that you will be thankful to have a plan in place.

Breathing Hand Washer
Image from lehmans.com

Basic List of Laundry Supplies:

1. Water - Do you have enough water stored to do laundry in an emergency? I know that I don't, but I hope to remedy this problem in the next few months. I do, however, have some natural bodies of water nearby. If I collected water from these sources, ran it through a rudimentary filter to catch sediment, and then boiled it, I could use it for my laundry. Sounds like a hassle, doesn't it?  
2. A large pot or kettle - You need to be able to heat the large amounts of water it takes to clean your clothes. I plan on using my water bath canner.
3. A way to heat water - I hope you've already thought about how you will cook your family's food during an emergency. Woodstove, outdoor grill, butane stove, whatever - the same thing can do double duty and heat water for your laundry. Just make sure you have enough fuel on hand to do the job. Of course if you are relying on some tiny little camping stove, it might not be capable of heating huge kettles of water.  
4. A three month supply of laundry detergent - Track the amount of detergent you use over the course of three months, then make sure you have that amount on hand at all times. Don't forget to rotate your stored detergent since it does technically expire. A quick Internet search revealed that it lasts 9 months to a year if it is unopened. 
5. A "washing machine" - When I washed all my family's laundry by hand, it was literally with my hands in hot soapy water. It got the job done, but I was left with tired, waterlogged hands at the end of it. A minimal investment in a plunger-type hand washer would have made my life so much easier. I washed my clothes in my laundry sink. You might set aside a couple of clean five gallon buckets for this purpose if you do not have a dedicated laundry sink. 
6. A wringer - This is a more pricey investment, but key to a more enjoyable laundry experience. Otherwise you will have to use your hands to wring out excess moisture from your wet laundry and I can assure you from experience that you will not find wringing multiple pairs of jeans or a mound of towels to be fun. Lehman's sells two wringers ("good" and "best")and you can attach them to a 5 gallon bucket, chair, or other hard surface. 
7. Somewhere to hang clothes to dry - An outdoor clothesline or indoor drying racks. Check out all the options that Lehman's has. No, this post was not sponsored by Lehman's! I just really like them. :)

For extra credit: 

• Store a one year supply of laundry detergent. You might consider storing the ingredients for my homemade powdered recipe as it is both cheaper and more compact to store. 
• Buy a real off-grid washing machine, if you have the funds and the place to store it. I don't!

You'll note that I haven't addressed ironing. That's because I don't iron if I can possibly help it! If ironed clothing is important to you, Lehman's does has a selection of irons you can use off the grid.

Have you ever had to wash clothes by hand for an extended period of time? What are your must-haves to do laundry in an emergency situation? 

Ask the readers: Your Favorite Can Opener

If you are a prepper, chances are you store a lot of canned food, be it from the Piggly Wiggly or an LDS Cannery. If the only can opener you own is electric or a dinky one attached to a faux Swiss Army knife, you need a good manual can opener, stat!

Can you imagine if TSHTF and you didn't have a way to open your cans? You'd be a little frustrated, just like the cat in this video.





Sesame Street was so much better back in the day. "Elmo's World", which seems to take up most of the current incarnation of the show, makes me want to gack.

Oxo Good Grips Can Opener. Image from Amazon.com

I own a pretty decent manual can opener that I use all the time, an Oxo Good Grips Can Opener. It is very easy to turn and cans open smoothly. I have noticed that the plastic around the handle appears to be breaking down a little bit after a year of continual use. I definitely need to develop some redundancy in this area. I think we should have three manual can openers, minimum, to be safe.

So, I'm asking my readers: do you have a favorite, rock star manual can opener? What's your go-to device for opening TEOTWAWKI eats?

Sew... What?

Since Hubby Dear and I became parents eight years ago, our home has grown to resemble less a place where civilized people live and more a daycare center. Some of that is to be expected when you have more kids than adults in the family. It doesn't help, though, that our kids' grandparents lavish them with more toys, gewgaws, and plain ol' plastic junk than we know what to do with. Our once spacious-seeming house is becoming overloaded. A garage sale or giant donation to the Salvation Army definitely needs to be in the works.

So when my mom emailed and told me that she was giving The Thinker a sewing machine, my first reaction was less than pleased. The Thinker loves craft projects and has been learning how to sew with Grandma over the past few months, so it wasn't totally out of the blue, but still! Something else to take up MORE space!

When I related my frustration to Hubby Dear, he gave me a wicked grin and said, "Don't you want to learn how to sew? Won't that be good for when the SHTWXYZ?" (He loves to tease me with his own creative prepper acronyms.)

I stopped mid-complaint. He had a point. Perhaps this sewing machine wouldn't be such a bad idea. Maybe I should learn sewing basics along with The Thinker.

Now, if you knew my mom, you'd know that she's not going to just go off and buy some plastic piddly kid's sewing machine. Nor is she going to get a brand new adult sewing machine. My mom owns an antique store and estate sale service and spends untold hours at auctions. That is where she came across our family's newest preparedness tool. (Not that Mom knows I prep or even what prepping is. I'm still strictly on the down-low.)

My The Thinker's new sewing machine was made about 1951. Mom assured me that it works fabulously, even better than her own sewing machine (which is a young'un made in the late 60s).

She had a brand new electrical cord installed on it and it came complete with instruction manuals and with a bunch of gadgets that I can't identify. When we're not using it, the machine slips right inside and we can use it as a desk.

The only problem is that I don't have a clue how to use it. I can sew on a button and do some basic mending, but the sewing gene seems to have skipped me. The manuals that come with the machine are pretty easy to understand, though, so I think I can figure this out.

It didn't take me long to come up with a candidate for my first sewing project. This project is definitely something I would NOT have considered a year ago. You'll never believe that I am getting so excited about sewing....... (wait for it....) .......



my own menstrual pads.



(I can hear all of my male readers clicking their browsers in a panic and finding something else very manly to read. I know I have a few guys that read my blog. Sorry dudes. This topic had to come up sometime.)

Cloth pad from Instructables.com

You can try to store a lot of feminine hygiene products, but in a SHTF situation, they will run out sooner or later. My journey toward self-reliance has also made me more aware of how much I'm spending on plastic crud that will sit in a landfill forever. I have also read testimonies from many women that say their periods became lighter, shorter in duration, and they experienced fewer cramps when they started using cloth pads.
You can buy cloth pads in several different places -Amazon, Ebay, Etsy are a few of them - but they are expensive. That's what started the whole train of thought that led me here. Things are about to get interesting.

Now I need to:   

A) figure out how to use this sewing machine
B) find a pattern for cloth pads that is easy for a beginner like me with an ancient sewing machine and
C) get brave, buy the materials and get started.

Wish me luck!

Do you sew? Do you use cloth pads? Have you sewn your own cloth pads and have some tips for me? Have I lost my mind?

Pre-TEOTWAWKI Shopping List

Image from yourfamilymoney.wordpress.com

Do you follow The Survival Mom's blog? If so, you probably read her recent post called "Survival Shopping at Costco". She tested out James Wesley Rawles' contention that it is possible to do a last ditch, pre-TEOTWAWKI stock-up at Costco.

Now, we don't have a Costco anywhere near us and Sam's Club is pretty far away. Depending on what I think is about to go down, I may not be comfortable going or sending Hubby Dear on a shopping expedition an hour or two away. But we do have a couple of grocery stores, a farm supply store, and a mini version of Wal-Mart in our town and we can find a lot of useful items there. That's assuming, of course, that nobody else gets the same idea and strips the stores bare before I get there.

The problem is keeping a clear head in the chaos. I'd like to think that my preps will help me be cool, calm, and collected, but the truth of the matter is I tend to freak out. Not to mention the fact that I'll have four kids with me and shopping with my crew is always an adventure. And Hubby Dear? He's more likely to be cool and calm than me, but he's also pretty clueless. He did read One Second After, reads my blog, and listens to me blather on about preparedness, but it's just not his thing.

So what I did to combat these problems is make several copies of Lisa's Pre-TEOTWAWKI shopping list. I put a copy in my Preparedness Binder and one in the glove box of each of our vehicles. If Hubby Dear or I decide that something is about to go down, we'll use our secret codeword  (Read Alas, Babylon, anybody?) and be ready to do some guerilla shopping.

Of course the best thing to do would be to get completely prepared ahead of time so we don't have to fight the local yokels for the last package of Charmin. It's unlikely that we'll have a few days' notice before the End of the World, anyway.

 Download Lisa's shopping list here. It's a good tool to help you make sure you've got all the bases covered.

A Generation of Nincompoops Meets the GPS

The Harried Homemaker et al. hit the road!

This week we enjoyed one of the fringe benefits of homeschooling - an off-season mini vacation. Hubby Dear arranges his vacation time around family birthdays, so we were able to celebrate the anniversary of Mini Me's birth with a trip to the big city. We looked a little bit like the Beverly Hillbillies, all six of us stuffed into our burgeoning vehicle, the kids' noses glued to the window as they checked out the sights.

As I have noted before, Hubby Dear is more or less anti-prepping, though he has come to tolerate it as time goes by. He may be against preparedness, but he is firmly for technology. He's into gadgets like I'm into bulk supplies of hard winter wheat. It's remarkable we're as happily married as we are.

On this vacation, Hubby Dear decided to utilize the GPS on his Droid which, for the technophobes in the audience, is a "smartphone". He used the voice search function, selected our destination with a simple touch of the screen, and loaded the instructions. I should mention that we're well-acquainted with the particular metropolis we were visiting. But Hubby Dear loves his gadgets and enjoys watching the GPS work its magic. He practically rubbed his hands with glee.  

Hubby Dear's true love, the GPS on his Droid

"Honey, you know we should really look up the directions before we go,"  I said before we left the Harried Homemaker Acres. After all, we were visiting a couple of attractions that were new to us.

"Why bother? We have the GPS," he answered blithely.

To cut a long story short, the GPS would have led us astray twice if we didn't already have first hand knowledge of the area. One of those miscues would have been very unfortunate and we would have likely never found our destination.

The irony in this is that I had just finished reading an article from the AP entitled "Are we raising a generation of nincompoops?". You can read the article here, but the main idea is that kids today are so used to technology that they can't do simple tasks like use a manual can opener. Back in my public school teacher days, I was always surprised at how difficult my high school students found reading maps. What do they teach kids these days? Apparently not map skills. Why bother? You have the GPS!

Technology is great. I may not be as into gadgets and gizmos as Hubby Dear, but I do enjoy sitting in my air-conditioned house, sipping an ice-cold Coke Zero and munching a cookie baked in one of my dual electric ovens. I also like writing this blog on my computer while listening to music on my iPod. The problem is that we have chosen to cripple ourselves by an over-dependence on technology.  If that technology is all of a sudden gone, we could very likely find ourselves as lost as that GPS would have led us.

I don't know that TEOTWAWKI will ever happen in my lifetime. What I do know is that my family is very vulnerable should something of a SHTF nature occur. Do I have the knowledge, skills and means to keep us warm in the winter? How about feeding my children without easy access to a fully-stocked grocery store? Could we grow all we needed to eat and then preserve the surplus? What about medicine? Clothing? Everything else that is essential to life?

Heavy questions indeed.