Precious bodily fluids
----------------------
gunnarfrost reminds us[1] that we are 60% water and urges us to drink even when
not explicitly thirsty. Solid advice.
On a related topic, I mentioned much earlier[2] that I like to keep my house
prepared for 72 consecutive hours without any functioning utilities (i.e. no
electricity, no gas, no water, no phone or internet) just in case, but had been
kind of slack in getting back to this point after moving to Finland.
I've decided to slowly start getting this under control, and today I bought two
quite nice 10L plastic water tanks with surprising comfortable carrying handles
and little taps on them, to keep some emergency water handy. 20L is just a
*little* bit shy of the most common recommendation for two people for three
days. The covnentional wisdom seems to be "one gallon per person per day",
which in non-crazy units is 23 litres for us. Later I will add some 1L or 2L
PET bottles to the pile to make up the extra. I like to keep some of my
emergency water in smaller bottles like this, so that if I have to evacuate in a
hurry I have something that I can easily throw in a bag. In general, I am a bit
skeptical of "bug out" scenarios, as I think they are mostly pandering to macho
fantasy (which I am in no way immune to, but I try to at least be self-aware
about it), and "bug in" scenarios seem much more realistic to me. From a
practical standpoint, we don't own a car here, so I'm not exactly going far in a
hurry anyway.
I also bought a tiny alcohol-burning stove. I mostly plan to use this on hiking
or camping trips once winter is over, but as a nice side-effect it means we will
be able to heat food and water in the house even if there is no power, which is
definitely a plus. I still need to actually stockpile some non-perishable food
before that matters much, though.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gunnarfrost/20180201.post
[2]
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/lightweight-prepping.txt
