Unexpected practice at self sufficiency!

Living in Montana, springtime can bring some definate surprises.

On Wednesday, we knew there was a storm headed our way, so I ran to the store making sure that we had milk and other necessities for a few days. Sometimes we get stuck at home as we get snowed in or the dirt road that leads to our house is so muddy that we cannot drive up to our home.

Thursday morning, the wind was howling, snow was blowing and the temp was dropping. I told the kids to get schoolwork done as quickly as they could because we tend to lose power in these types of storms...20 minutes later, we lost power. So we postponed schoolwork.

We reconstructed our day, and got cleaned up. I thanked God for our fireplace! I contacted the power company and was told it might be a while so we kicked up our fireplace to heat the house.

We went 29 hours without power. The kids thought it fun...however, I live on the crest of a hill. The community well requires a pump to get water to our house...as I write this, we have been without water now for 40 hours. Sweet Dear hubby stayed up all night last night keeping the fire going, then ran into town this morning to pick up 20 gallons of water (needless to say we are rationing that use) We do not know when we will get water back, we are hoping tomorrow morning.

I broke out my oil lamps (oil is now on my list as they are only 1/2 full now), I learned I want to pick up more candles and batteries. As we tried to heat the house with a relatively small fireplace, I have decided that I need to look for ways to restrict airflow with the exeption of the living area. A list of things to do now.

My darling and I have also decided that we need to look into getting an emergency water supply set up for essentials, like toilets. We did resort to melting snow to get them to flush. It is either that or he needs to build an old fashioned outhouse for just such an emergency.

We also loss phone use, so we were running down to my mom's to make sure she was okay. She would not come up here, so I was running down hot tea and last nite some hot homemade soup. She reminded me that she grew up in a house without central heating...I then reminded her that she did have a fireplace! But she would not leave her home.

We found out that my husband's cell phone is not holding a charge, but he had enough power to find out that my Mother-in-law, my sister-in-law and my young nephew were also out of power but came into town and got a hotel room.

A few years ago, we bought a new stove, and we were talking about that as the entire controls for the oven are electric, the stove and oven themselves are gas but have the electronic temp gages etc. We have decided that when we remodel the kitchen we are going to go retro to get an oven that will work even if electric is out. I was grateful that I could run the stovetop.