Keeping busy as the holiday season crawls along towards Christmas.  Have holiday baking to do, presents to wrap (last minute thing around here since we still have a Santa believer), but for the most part, I am prepared for Christmas.

We got a couple days of snow, meaning a couple snow days off school for the kids.  Snow is not the norm here, so people aren’t really prepared, no one knows how to drive in it (myself included, I can’t lie!), and pretty much the city shuts down.  Even if they manage to get the main streets clear and things moving, we are stuck, because we live at the top of a series of steep hills.  If you make it to the bottom of the first, and try to move out into the bigger world, you get to a junction with a hill going up left and a hill going up right.  Getting home is a big challenge, even if you make it out.

Besides, we live in the boonies version of suburbia, pockets of homes surrounded by protected wilderness.  So the road deicers never make it this far.

I still haven’t received my water barrel storage unit ordered on 10/28.  Part of me worries that I am getting scammed.  But I did email at the end of November and got a quick response that they are waiting on material from their fabricators, which if the email was accurate they would have received the first week of December.  The website says “Turn around time is typically 3 weeks.   So the sooner you place your order…the sooner it will be ready but there is a lead time for the fabricators to make everything.”  All I can do is hope I am not getting strung along so that it will be too late to register a complaint with my credit card company.  My gut tells me that they are just a small company (or even just “a guy”) and since they have to outsource everything, I just need to be patient, and eventually they will come through. I was “order 204” not 14,204 or 183, 204.  So, I am practicing patience.  And hoping I am not an idiot.

However, I haven’t wanted to fill up my water barrels, only to have to empty them to rack them, so I feel a little vulnerable.  On the other hand, its winter and we get precipitation fairly constantly.  If the SHTF and I didn’t have to worry about legally collecting rainwater (only collecting roof runoff is legal here), then I could put out the kiddie pools and buckets and tarp collectors and have plenty of liquid to run through the berkey.