Thoughts on preparedness.

Unfortunately, we had a nasty little incident at our place last night, which has gotten me thinking about the value of being prepared whilst I dealt with the aftermath today.

We don't know how, or on what, but while our family was glued to the last 10 minutes of Masterchef, one of our dogs sliced a huge gash in the underside of his tongue. He didn't make a single noise - which is astounding - but evidently he sat (on the sand-coloured carpet) behind the lounge where we were sitting, bleeding profusely, for some time before running from one end of the house to the other, looking to get outside I suppose. Why he didn't whine I truly have no idea, but he lost a lot of blood for his size and managed to get it on everything in his path - floors, walls, curtains, cupboards, toys...

DH stood up to put the kids to bed when the show finished and as you can imagine, almost had a heart attack when he saw what was happening! It was total chaos for the next 5 minutes while he grabbed the dog and put him in the bath tub to contain the mess and calm the dog whilst I tried the calm the kids.

One late-night trip to the vet for stitches later we are seven hundred and fifty dollars poorer, yikes! The dog is sore and sorry for himself, but will be fine, thank goodness. But as you can guess I've spent the day washing every. single. cloth. in the house, scrubbing the walls, bathroom and curtains and trying to get the remainder of the enormous pools of blood out of the carpet behind the lounge (Right where you look into the lounge room as you come in the front door. Sigh). I got most of it out last night with cold water and umpteen dozen old cloth nappies, but of course in daylight it looks dreadful. Double sigh.

So what has this got to do with preparedness? I guess it was vivid reminder for me that bad things can happen very quickly and how utterly blessed we are to live with close proximity of services (like on-call veterinarians!) many of us take for granted.

I cop a fair amount of friendly stick from friends who think I'm a little over-zealous when it comes to stockpiling etc, but really, how easy would it be for both DH and I to be laid up with the 'flu or a nasty gastro bug at the same time and be unable to go grocery shopping for a week? Or for one of us to be called away to a family emergency and leave the other one without a car and kids to feed for an extended period? The money we spent on vet bills last night is more than three weeks worth of groceries for us, so if we weren't budgeting carefully we'd be in some serious strife right now.

I think sometimes there is a fine line between being thought of as a "nutter" and being admired for coping efficiently with the unexpected. I'm just glad our unexpected emergency was nothing too significant in the grand scheme of things.

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On a side note, if you haven't read it already, you should read Sharon Astyk's description of Pat Meadow's "Theory of Anyway" regarding action we should be/are taking to deal with climate change and peak oil, and then read Pat's additions to Sharon's thoughts here. It neatly sums up why I do what I do. As Sharon says:

"...95% of what is needed to resolve the coming crisis in energy depletion, or climate change, or whatever, is what we should do anyway, and when in doubt about how to change, we should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing "Anyway." Living more simply, more frugally, using less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our community, these are things we should be doing because they are the right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to save our lives is merely a side benefit (a big one, though)."