Good morning to everyone! Today has been busy so far. If you follow my tweets, you can see what has been going on. Pork Chop, my youngest son, is with Grandma Ada because his school was canceled today. Houston has been pounded with rain in the last week and last night we got 9-11 inches. To say the least there are parts of west Houston that are impassible. Luckily I can work from home today! I did head out to the Ear Nose and Throat specialist that is doing my Septoplasty in May for a hearing test. I have a 15% hearing loss in my left ear so that is not good, more on that in a later post Last night while we were getting ready for bed something interesting happened that made me aware of how disorganized the house is. About 9 pm Skeeter was in the shower and Mama and Pork Chop were playing Sudoku. It was storming outside pretty bad with lighting, rain and thunder. Suddenly the lights went out! The kids screamed bloody murder. Skeeter was the loudest!
I scrambled to get flashlights….but I did not know where they were. I know that they are
"somewhere" in the house, a term which infuriates my wife when she asks me where something is. So we begin fumbling around in the dark looking for a source of light. This goes on for about 5 minutes before we remember that Pork Chop has a flashlight in his bed. Ding! We have A light! Then I take the flashlight and start to go get the matches so I can light some candles. Oh no! They are "somewhere" in the house as well, of course NOT where they are supposed to be. After about 10 more minutes of fumbling around, digging through drawers and stressing out we finally get some candles lit and find another flashlight. On top of that we notice that when the power tries to come back on that all of our smoke alarms sound. That is because the batteries are NOT in the smoke alarms! At this point I am feeling like quite a schmuck! You would think that being the Cub Master for my son’s Cub Scout Pack and my brother in law who was a Boy Scout that we would have "Been Prepared", but we were not. Especially since we just lived through Hurricane Ike last September. Nonetheless one of my goals today is to locate all of the flashlights and matches and get them to a central location. Here is my list of emergency preparedness activities for the day.
- Locate flashlights, check batteries and place in central hall closet
- Locate hand crank radio and place in central central hall closet
- Locate matches and several candles and place in the central hall closet
- Put batteries in all smoke alarms and test
- Note a reminder in my Google Calendar to check the smoke alarms every three months
- Here are some good links to good emergency preparedness sites
