Month Eight in Review and Month Nine Prepping Plans

What I accomplished this month:

1. We bought and assembled a Shelf Reliance Harvest 72”. It looks maaah-velous and works great. I never did get around to getting a wooden board for the top. Hopefully next month.  
2. I bought a Brother P-Touch Labeler. I love it! I can't believe we've gone so long without one of these things. Label makers might be old news to many of you, but I'm like a little kid with a new toy. 

 You simply type in your wording:

And it prints out a cute little label:

Et Voila!

Organization!

Now there's no excuse for confusing the salt with baking soda. I'm looking at you, Hubby Dear....

 



3.   I continued to build up our food storage. This month I mostly bought canned goods to work on filling  up my Shelf Reliance unit. I planned to buy a lot more food storage, but I came to the end of the month and found that I had spent all my budget on regular groceries. This is because of item #4. All that fresh produce is expensive in the boonies!  

4.   Diet and exercise. Hubby Dear is competing in a "Biggest Loser"-type activity at his work and has shed nearly 15 pounds since he started on January 7th. I hate the male metabolism. I started before he did but have only lost somewhere between 5-8 lb. It's all about getting healthy anyway, right?

5.  I scored a few freebies like dental floss and OTC meds due to couponing. 

6.   My family was subjected to several rounds of canned meat taste tests (here, here, and here). I think I finally have the whole canned meat thing figured out now! ;)



What does Month Nine have in store?





Piece of junk?


1. I want to get a vacuum sealer like a FoodSaver. I mainly want to use it for vacuum sealing mason jars of nuts, chocolate chips, etc. I'm having a hard time figuring out which model to get, though, since the reviews of the most popular infomercial one aren't great. Do y'all have any recommendations for me?          
2. Stock up on first aid items - bandages, OTC meds, and more. One of my goals this year is to broaden and deepen our medical preps. 
3. Buy more items for food storage. I'm not sure what exactly, since it kind of depends on what goes on sale.   
4. Firm up our plans and buy our seeds for the upcoming garden season. Hubby Dear needs to finish rounding up the material for our Square Foot Garden soil mix.
5. Continue to diet and exercise. Oh the Joy.
6. Make a wooden board to fit across the top of my Shelf Reliance unit.



Month Seven in Review and Month Eight Preps

Month Seven:

This month of my Prepping Plan featured a few bumps, namely on the grain mill front.

I bought a lot of food storage-related items this month. I have another 100 lbs of beans, 90 lb of wheat, and lots of odds and ends like drink mix. My food storage buckets seem to have multiplied all of a sudden. I wasn't aware that I had this many.

Buckets galore but we need so many more

I also bought a couple of packs of Can Organizers, which made neat work of one of my cabinets. I learned how to can meat and found out it wasn't so scary after all. I also made a first aid kit out of an Altoids tin for my purse.

Tall, dark, and handsome

Month Eight Preps:

I feel a lot of pressure to complete my food storage ASAP because the specter of high inflation looms ever larger, so next month will also be focused on that area. If I can get rid of some of the junk in my storage room, I plan on buying a nifty Shelf Reliance shelving system. It should really help maintain FIFO (first in, first out) when it comes to my canned goods. I also plan on buying a few more items to fill my shiny new shelves.

The weird thing about these Shelf Reliance organizers is that they don't come with a shelf across the top. That's too much space to waste so I'm going to figure out what kind of wood I need to buy and get Hubby Dear to cut a piece to serve as a shelf.

I also plan on getting a P-Touch labeler so that I can create neatly printed labels for all my storage containers. I've always wanted one of those, so I'm pretty excited about that purchase. That's it for Month Eight.

Do you have any preps planned for next month?

Coming Soon: 2010 in Review and Goals for 2011