Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

It’s another dreary day in the post-apocalyptic world. The radio is nothing but static and pre-recorded FEMA announcements, trying the lightswitches shows that the electricity is still off, peering outside shows no traffic on the streets..unsurprising since the gas stations are all looted and burned, and there is the sounds in the distance of infrequent gunfire and screaming. So…..whats for breakfast? Well, as it turns out, the post-apocalyptic breakfast menu around here is actually better than what it is before the collapse. If you were so inclined, you could have a breakfast featuring:

Orange drink, scrambled eggs, oatmeal (choice of four flavors), pork chops, strawberries, bananas, pancakes, biscuits, corned beef hash, and granola with milk.

Everything a growing lad needs to rebuild the world after it implodes.

I’m dong a semi-annual re-inventory and update of whats in the food storage and so far have determined that, come the apocalypse, we might do pretty fair for ourselves. At the moment, just in #10 cans of dehydrated and freeze dried, theres 40 different foods from various sources including Auguson Farms, Mountain House and the LDS Cannery.

Further packed away in 5-gallon buckets are salt, sugar, oats, corn, rice, pasta, wheat, and a few other bulk items. Then theres the shelves full of wet-pack (‘canned’) vegetables and things like soups, stews, sauces, condiments, oils, meats, etc, etc. So, all in all, I think we’re doing pretty fair. The real headache is keeping track of all of it…hence todays adventure in organization. Someday I’ll have an iPad so I can just stand there and update my spreadsheets in realtime, but for now a clipboard and pen will have to do. By the by, I have a date-stamper that I use for just this occasion…after I crack open the boxes and check everything the box gets stamped with “REVIEWED SEP 26 2011″ on the box so I know its at least been checked on this year to make sure nothing bad occurred during its patient wait.

Now, realistically, do I expect that someday something will happen and there will be nothing available save what I have on hand? Nope. But here’s what I do believe: having a large stock of food onhand will offset or reduce the hardships and stresses caused by unemployment, underemployment, short-term disasters, inflation, and a host of other ‘more likely’ events.

Which do you think will happen first: your employer lays you off or cuts your hours in half…..or…….the Chinese invade along with a UN occupying force of ‘peacekeepers’? I dunno about you, but I’m more confident in the need to have a Plan B in case of a change in employment status than I am in the need to suddenly learn Mandarin. The way I figure it, we budget around $400/month for groceries (what can I say, we have some expensive tastes) and if we can be prepared enough to live off of what we have stored in a crisis, well, thats $400 a month we don’t have to worry about when every dollar counts.

Anyway, today is Pull Stuff Off The Shelf And Make Sure It’s Logged Properly Day. When that’s done, an updated copy of the spreadsheets will be dumped into my phone and into my email so I can access it from just about anywhere. This way when I wander over to Rosauers and am torn about whether to purchase more egg mix or dehydrated apples I can check my figures and see if we really need more or if the resources can be better used elsewhere.