Stuff and Things
Welcome to those of you just tuning in. Yesterday's post touched on the topic of a Bug Out Bag without going into too much detail about what should be in one's bag.When an emergency and/or disaster happens, you wind up doing one of two things: hunkering down to tough it out, or running for the blinkin' hills. ("Hills" can be your front yard, your designated meeting place, Mount Shasta, Vancouver, whatever.) You can look up any number of things online that will give you basics for a Bug Out Bag, like a 3 (or 7) day supply of water, extra shoes, warm clothes, first aid kit, food, lights, the usual suspects. These are things your brain jumps to when things are going bad, items for the preservation of self, so I won't dwell on this too much.But if you have to run, things are pretty dang bad, and you will likely need to conduct some sort of financial or life infrastructure recovery process once you're able to get situated. The things you need for the recovery process are a million miles away when you're freaking out. One of the points repeated in NERT training was that the primary concern of emergency personnel in an emergency is preservation of life, not rushing a burning building to retrieve personal items. They help make sure you’re not dead. It’s up to you to make sure you can get your life back on track.Things that are good to have in your bag:
- Cash (small bills)
- Checkbook
- Birth Certificates
- Passports
- Accounts Document (account numbers and phone number for the company...credit cards, insurance policies, credit union/bank)
- Medical Documents/Critical Medical Information/Health Care Directives
- Emergency Contacts/Next of Kin (Analog)
- Backup Drive/Digital Archives
- Marriage/Partnership Documents
- Divorce Documents
- Child Custody Documents
- Social Security Cards
- Naturalization Papers/Residency Documents
- Military/Veteran's Papers
- Investment Certificates
- Bank/Credit Union Information
- Appraisals of items you'd expect to claim on insurance (pictures/video count if you need to prove you owned it "Yes, we had a couch shaped like a pair of lips...")
- Home Improvement Records
- Deeds and titles for property (home, car, rv, boat...)
- Wills, Trusts, Power of Attorney
Do we have all these things in our bag? No, our lives aren't quite that complex. But if your life is, you may want to give some thought to the items on the list, and decide which ones would be beneficial for you. Does the list cover everything? Not at all, but then again, there are as many ways to do this as there are people. Even knowing these are things that may be useful at some point in the future puts you one step ahead of where you were.
Whew. Now, for those of you just coming into this, on March 1st, I started a 30 day wardrobe challenge, where I pick 30 items and wear them for 30 days. The initial reason I started this was to take a look at my wardrobe now that I've fully embraced the notion of being an organizer and no longer employed in an industry that needs me to wear the fancy suits (bye bye, evil black pantsuit!). The other reason that crept up was that I was hiding from blogging. If I had to post every day, even if it was just "this is what I wore today, here's a picture," it would help me to get over not posting. Hello there, motivation.
So with all that said, here's what I wore today: Straight leg jeans cuffed to the knee, the favorite Fluevog boots, open neck t-shirt, jersey asymmetrical collar jacket, bead from Dream Muse on a chain. I want to be able to dance, or at least be comfortable, because tonight I am going to Oakland to see Me'shell Ndegeocello do a Prince covers show. (This and the Prince concert within 3 weeks of each other has me all kinds of giddy.)