Hurricane Irene

• Rice - 1 sack. check
• Spam - 2 dozen. check
• Cookies (5 packs), crackers (3 boxes), snack bars (200+pcs) and chips (2 cans)- check
• Portable stove, fuel - check
• Swe-cha's food (gerber & earth's best jars and a huge pot of homemade lotus root and red bean soup)- check
• Someone who can cook rice in a pot (instead of a rice cooker) - check
• Flashlights, batteries - check, check

• Freezers & refrigerator set to HIGH.
• Water containers filled w/ drinking water. 6 more spare gallons of drinking water plus 2 extra cases of individual water bottles.
• Extra water containers filled w/ water in the bathrooms in case pipes burst & we don't have clean running water.

• Laptops & spare batteries fully charged.
• Kindle, PSP and DS fully charged.
• Camera battery full charged.
• Cellphones fully charged (& spare batteries too).

• Plants, outdoor tables, pots and the George Foreman grill brought in from the balcony.
• We might run some tape on the windows (we were reminded by MIL). We feel that this is overkill for our area... but hey, there's nothing to lose so we'll do it anyway.
• During the day, we wash dishes as we use them - no more soaking & leaving it in the dishwasher for an evening run as we might lose power later on.

Last night, while talking about the preparations we still need to do before Hurricane Irene arrives, hubby suddenly looked worried, "If we lose power, how will we take a bath ?"

"We can use candles to light the bathroom," I replied.

"Noooo, that's not the problem. If there's no power, there's no hot water heater. How will we take a bath without hot water ?" Worried siya talaga, haha!.

"For Swe-cha, we boil water on our portable stove to heat it up & give him a bath from a pail using a tabo. For us, we rough it out. Cold showers. Summer naman eh. "

Hubby cringed. Arte. *laughs*

I guess, this is it. We're as ready as we're ever going to be. The thing is, the water, food and batteries stockpile ? That's normal in our household :) We almost always have that much on hand because I stock up when there's a sale.