I had ZERO PSI out of 60 PSI in that tire.  NOTHING.  I was ashamed I had let it get in such bad condition.

Naturally, I checked the tires on the minivan as well.  No air needed in the tires in use, but the spare was 25PSI instead of the 60 PSI needed.  Not a good thing again.

Moral of the story -Go make sure your spare is properly inflated.  Be Prepared.

(FYI, this is not my car.  My trunk looks much more messy, with wood chips and leaves and chemlites.)

So what happens when you do hear the alarm going off and need to evacuate?  What is your evacuation plan?  To create an evacuation plan:

• Draw a floor plan of your home, making two ways out of every room. Don’t forget to include windows in your escape plan.  No great artistic rendition needed.  Squares and the little door and window symbols.  (I’ll have to come up with something special for the so 70’s sliding glass door off our bedroom…)  Go ahead and mark where your smoke detectors are as well – if you see a huge gap in coverage, it would be a good idea to fix that.  Now if you want a really spiffy floor plan, you can create one online courtesy of the Government of Queensland here.

• Walk through your home and inspect all possible exits. Find two ways out of every room, especially bedrooms.  It doesn’t count as an exit if the door is blocked with dishpacks and book boxes, or the windows are painted shut.
• Establish a safe meeting place for your family outside the home.  This should be something easy to identify at night (like a streetlight across the street) and should be far enough from the house that you will not be in the way of firefighting efforts.

For more information see http://www.befiresmart.com.  Next time I’ll discuss communicating your plan to your children.

- BattleBlue1

So when was the last time that you checked your fire detectors to make sure that they still worked?  Can’t recall?  DO IT.

I have added it to my handy-dandy calendar reminder system – click the calendar picture to the right to see reminders of what you should check this month.

-BattleBlue1

Well duh you say.  You already know that it is a good idea to have a headlamp in your car so you can see what broke when you are on the side of the road at night.  You need to have some in your house too.  I recommend a headlamp for every adult in the household and perhaps one for every older child too.  Headlamps allow you to walk around and perform work with both hands free.  While I personally have Petzl headlamps, Home Depot has a special 4 for $20 deal going on now.

A fun alternative for younger children is to give them a chemlight.  Popping a chemlight can make a dark house much more fun.  Chemlight crimes will for sure be committed (clubbings, theft, inside the house throwing, loss of accountability) but it sure beats having a scared little one crying in the corner until bedtime.

Area lighting is another concern.  A lighted dinner might be a nice thing.  For this purpose a battery powered lamp is in order.  Coleman makes a slew of them, so go find one that will work for you.  There are very affordable <$15 lanterns that will do the job well.

Make sure you have backup sets of batteries, because Murphy will go through them like candy.  Put your headlamps in one place so you know where they are supposed to be (bottom right box in the stack of boxes in the garage does not count).

Why did I not mention candles and oil lamps as lighting possibilities?  I think those are great ways to provide lighting when the power goes out.  The increased fire risk is something I wanted to avoid.  So while it is a great way to light a the family dinner or getting ready for bed, the running and curious hands in my house right now make me want to pursue a flame free solution.

(Just a side note – the L-shaped Army “flashlight” does not count as one for your house.  Weighted club, yes.  Effective flashlight, no)

- BattleBlue1

Now those who think this is just going to be a pyromaniac how-to guide of various ways to combine fuel, oxygen, & sparks and are about to click away in disgust, let me say this:

Uncontrolled fire is a bad thing.

That’s why there are fire extinguishers.  Fire extinguishers are a good thing too, since a conflagration in my house is certainly a circumstance where fire is not a good thing.  So my suggested action today is that you answer two easy questions:

1. Do you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen where it is easily accessible?
2. Is it charged?

Go check now.  Then come back.

Really, I mean it.

Now as your reward for potentially saving your own life, here is a great video I found (in HD!!) on how to use the extinguisher.

Ok, so that was alright.  But what of this Magnificent Public Service promised by the post title?  That is this – every so often I am going to mention something like “You should check your fire extinguisher once a quarter”.  But who really goes and writes that down?  Therefore, I have created the BeyondBePrepared Google Calendar with all these snazzy reminders in them to help you remember to do this preventative maintenance & checks thing.  Now if only I could figure out how to put the calendar in the side bar….

what was I doing?

-Battleblue1

* There was smoking paper several feet away from the house but no active ignition

I am assuming here for a moment that you have enough common sense to not be drinking and driving, running drugs, or other random felonies that may come to mind.  Chris Rock says it better than me with his guidelines (only for those of you who can laugh through the profanity).

What I chiefly want to remind you about is to have your paperwork in order.

• Do you have you license, registration, and proof of insurance?
• Are they all in one place in the car?
• Can you access them easily and present them together?
• Are the papers CURRENT?

If you can answer YES to all those questions, then all you have to do is swallow, don’t be stupid, and await the outcome.  You won’t have compounded the issue by leaving that proof of insurance in the mail pile on the table at home.  So go check your paperwork, and if you are feeling really adventurous, toss those cans and bottles in the trash – you don’t want to appear like you’ve been drinking anything but Dew.

-BattleBlue1

I’m here to warn you about the Grinch.   Yes folks that’s right, Christmas is in December this year, the 25^th to be exact.  This gives you just under 5 months to be ready to give gifts and holiday cheer to those around you.  You may think it is too soon and too HOT to even begin to think about snow and ice and the big fat guy but as DH and I have learned over our 6 years of marriage:

Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Poor Performance is rushing around from Black Friday to Christmas Eve trying to find that perfect gift at the perfect price.  It is often the cause of a common seasonal ailment known as Grinchieness.  So if you don’t want to be a Grinch this December spend 30 minuets today thinking and writing down the people you are going to buy gifts for.  Then assign a dollar amount to each gift.  In our family we do a list for all the gifts we give in a year including family birthdays, birthdays the kids may get invited to, upcoming graduations, weddings and births as well as Christmas gifts.  Bellow is an example of a list:

If you notice there is a spent column.  This is to help you keep track not only how much you have spent but who you have already purchased a gift for.  Others you might want to add to the list are teachers, babysitters, other friends or neighbors.  Remember to also budget for extra food as a gift.  Even if you plan to make baked goods for some people the ingredients for these treats can add up.

Once you know who you are buying for and how much you have to spend you now have 5 months to watch for sales and comb clearance racks.  This is a great way to make your money stretch farther.  It is not about being stingy but about being responsible and stress free around the holidays so you and yours can celebrate the JOY of the Season without a Grinch in the midst.

-MommyViews

If you had to provide transport RIGHT NOW to medical care, how would you do it?

I suggest you take 4 minutes to think through what you would do.  Discuss it with your spouse (or your roommate if you are single, or your plush shark if you have no roommate).

Here is the scenario I consider:

Sitting with the family at the dinner table, Bud-Bud, my 9 month old son, grabs a wondering grape, pops it in, and chokes.  No sound, no air, just flailing.  After 1 minute of trying to dislodge the grape with no success, I reach a decision point – call 911 and wait for the ambulance, or take him to medical care myself.  Now having thought this through ahead of time, I know that it is 0.9 miles to the nearest emergency room with no lights on my route.  It takes four minutes to drive there normally, but if I am moving at super daddy speed I can make it in three.  So my timeline is:

Immediate action on choking – 1 minute

Enough time to make sure that Bud-Bud is around to take care of me in my old age.

The same scenario for the most part still takes place if I am at home alone with the kids – the kids either get thrown in the car or they remain in the locked house until a neighbor gets there.  I know I know, kids at home alone, but haven’t they wandered around the house by themselves when you go out to get the mail, or when you are taking a nap and they get up without you hearing?   CPS might understand in this instance (if they’ve got all three neurons firing at the same time).

When considering medical help nearby, don’t think solely of hospitals.  Consider:

• Manned fire stations (many firefighters are paramedics)
• Medical clinics (during business hours)

I would not really consider chiropractors or dental doctors in my list – they would probably not have the tools needed to care for emergency situations.  Add psychiatrists and rocket scientist doctors to that list as well.

The best scenario I came up with for a fire station or ambulance response to my house was ~8 minutes when you include 911 talk time, dispatch call, & medical team travel time.  Your situation IS different, so think about your local resources and do the time/distance bit in your head.  It may very well be your best course of action to call 911 and wait for help.

Those of you with trained medical professionals in the house don’t blow this off since the trained one might be the one injured.  Now, if you have a doctor and an ex Special Forces medical sergeant as husband and wife (like one family in my church), feel free spend the five minutes planning and discussion talking about immuno-plasma therapy in immunity challenged populations.

So what are you waiting for?  Get on Google Maps and plan out your route now!

- BattleBlue1

PS:  I made the bit about immuno-plasma therapy up.  Sounded good, though…

Answer: Don’t have it at your house!

Now I know that is just not what you are thinking. Most of you are at best giving me the courtesy chuckle and smile. That’s ok, because most of the time my attempts at humor receive the same response.
In seriousness, though, if you have something that really needs to be safeguarded, why not consider using a safety deposit box? I looked into one recently and found them surprisingly inexpensive – $30 per year at a local credit union.  So for less than three dollars per month you can have an offsite storage location to put your will, valuables you have but don’t use, and other important things.

Access is typically fairly painless and nobody knows what is stored but you.  The thing I might actually find offsite storage most useful for is a copy of my computer hard drive.   If a burglar or fire were ever to take computer, a copy of my data 3-6 months old would help to limit the loss.   Originals of documents like birth & marriage certificates, insurance paperwork, and other things that you don’t use often, but would be a pain to replace are good candidates for safety-deposit box storage.

Of course there are downsides to this – $30 per year is still $30, and it is inconvenient to go to the bank to update your computer hard drive backup.  Or to check whether you really cut your youngest child out of his inheritance after he kept you up all night the evening before you went to see the layer about your will.   Additionally, bank often does not assume the liability if your box is stolen during a robbery or if a fire burns up Great Uncle Stanley’s prize stamp collection.   But if one of the worst things that could happen does, you’ll be better prepared.

- BattleBlue1

Great creativity thinking of this stuff!  But back to reality.

Here the rest of the items to consider storing in your car for emergencies:

• Spare quart of oil, double bagged
• Water bottle
• Snack that won’t go bad in the heat
• Blanket
• Jumper cables
• Air compressor

I hesitated to add the last one, but small air compressors come in so many car emergency kits it couldn’t hurt to have one.  Just don’t use it for routine tire fillings – they aren’t built for anything other than emergency duty.  I used my little emergency compressor routinely for about nine months until it died, so it definitely fulfilled its safety-related function.

There are many car emergency kits on the market.  Amazon has plenty of these listed, and you can always check out Walmart.  The one that caught my eye was this one – simple, has more tools, and small.
You will have to determine what you are comfortable with.  If you are confident you won’t melt in the rain, you don’t need the one with the poncho.  If you have a Geo Metro, you don’t need the 136-piece duffle bag.

Other things to consider are your local conditions and the seasons.  Living in Alabama, I don’t need to put a small shovel and sand in my car, but it would be prudent to include more water.  In Alaska you might want to add your survival rifle in some situations.  The main thing is to think and consider what you need.

I hope your faith in me is restored after the shockingly small list of “must-have” stuff I suggested previously.  Stay safe, and watch out for the milk truck pulling out in front of you.  Guy almost killed me on the way to work Thursday…