Last Night's Preparedness Club Meeting

Here are a few examples of what we discussed and did at last night's Preparedness Club meeting. The theme of the meeting was 98.6 Degrees: How to Keep Warm in Emergency Situations.

Basically you keep warm by wearing proper clothing and staying dry, hydrated and nourished. Your body is a furnace and will create heat if you give it simple and complex carbs mixed with a touch of protein and an adequate amount of fat.

I had 5 crockpots plugged in, each with a different hot chocolate (Chocolate Ovaltine, Stephen's Gourmet Hot Cocoa Milk Chocolate, Ghirardelli, Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate Sensation packets, and Nestle Rich Milk Chocolate in packets) and we did a taste test. I also had my own recipe in a thermos (see post My Hot Chocolate Recipe) that I let each sister sample. What was amazing, was that the hot chocolate was put in the thermos 12 hours previous to the time we drank it and it was still hot. The Stanley satinlees steel thermos is great..unbreakable! No glass vacuum chamber. I got this one last winter (January or february) at Wal*Mart for $19.97.

I had 5 kinds of GORP for us to sample.

I had activated a few Hot Hands products an hour before the sisters came so they would be nice and hot. These are amazing products. I encourage you to get some for your car and home...97 cents for a pack of 3 of the bigger ones...and 97 cents for a pack of 6 of the smaler ones. If you tend to be cold, you can put one small one in each side of your bra. Truckers and outdoorsmen wear the bigger ones in their shirt pockets.

I told them the story of the children's blizzard of 1888, where my great great uncle died of exposure as a child while attempting to walk home from the one room school house in the worst blizzard of American history. I had the book there and tried to instill in the sisters a healthy fear (caution) of the weather and how it can suddenly turn deadly!

We took a space blanket out of its package, passed it around and Sister Earl wrapped it around herself as an experiment. We learned that it does make you warmer. It reflects radiant heat back into your body!

We learned about what to do to keep warm in a stranded car in a winter storm, and how to keep warm in your house when the furnace is not functioning.