Doomsday Prepper, Hoarder, or Disorganized Storage

Moving is always a PITA, but it seems harder the longer one lives in one place.  We’ve lived in the same house behind the corncob curtain for 34 years.  Although we moved to Florida seven years ago, the final push to clean up and clean out the house behind the corncob curtain has caused me to display some RCA dog looks and has provoked some interesting questions.  Are we elementary doomsday preppers or budding hoarders?  Or are we just practical schmucks who have stored oddball items for that “rainy day” with no thought or plan? 

This fall a couple of odd-ball events occurred which might have led me to prep for an electronic doomsday.  This season, road crews cut through fiber optic cable not once, but twice.  This fiasco interrupted telephone service, landline and cell phone, internet service, and TV cable.  These events caused thousands of customers to be without telephone and internet service for as long as two weeks!  There’s nothing like being thrown back to the Stone Age when one doesn’t have any means of calling to report service outages or worse.   Add to that, my cell phone died – twice.  Yup, I’m now on my third cell phone.  Of course, one of these dead phone events coincided with yet another internet outage.  Coincidence?  I think not!! 

However, I’m just not enthused about a “prep-over”.  The whole digging a bunker, storing food and water plus guns and ammo just makes me weary! Also a steady diet of peanut butter and Tang just doesn’t have any appeal.   

Besides the unusual events this season here behind the corncob curtain, I’ve been making some discoveries in the house.  Taken together, these might be signs of lame efforts at prepping, or, at worst, hoarding!  Recently, I cleaned out a crawl space in our garage.  I found  five Christmas tree stands.  Now, storing these doesn’t seem like good prep idea, unless these carry some significant scrap metal value; but I don’t anticipate this market rising substantially in a post-doomsday world.  Also found were TWO old toilet seats!  OK, we don’t have canned food (or Twinkies) or water stored here, but in an apocalypse would toilet seats really be a highly sought-after, much-needed commodity ranked higher than food?  However, in a less dramatic scenario, I know I’d just drive up to “Home Desperate” to buy a replacement seat if one were to break down rather than hunt through a crawl space above the garage ceiling.

 

I’m finding weird stuff too.  More fuses than we would ever use and batteries that have expired.  This last one is a cruel tease especially if you need a flashlight and discover it doesn’t work and all the batteries you’ve hoarded don’t work either! 

Going through dressers and getting rid of clothes that are out of style, out of size, or are for sub-arctic temperatures has been slower than I thought it would be.  Why?  I found money!!!  While this is a good thing, I now have to search through clothes, under shelf lining, etc. to see if more cash has been stashed. 

In conclusion, I think we’re very poor doomsday or even emergency preppers and I took the first step to any hoarder threat and threw out the toilet seats and Christmas tree holders with no regrets.