boosted from gothamist.com
People are funny. Okay, maybe not ‘people’ – maybe just ‘me’. Yesterday I was looking in our fridge and noticed we are low-ish on cream, which I use for my morning coffee. By ‘low’ I mean I have enough for 2 or 3 days – even a week, if I’m not piggish (and I’m usually not – just a splash will do, to take the edge off, y’know?). And we could use some lettuce and a couple of other things. But nothing essential – we just got a new bag of dogfood, I have enough starchy stuff to carry us through a month and I have a freezer full of stuff. So I looked at it, shrugged, and went on my merry way, whistling a happy little tune.
Today. Glanced at the Quad Cities news (usually our weather comes from the West) and saw …omg! a Winter Weather Advisory alert. 3-5″!!! O.M.G. I immediately tried to figure out if I could manage to get up to The Wal-Mart to GET BREAD & MILK before this blizzard hits!
What is THAT all about? We have PLENTY of food. Coffee. Cream. Bread. And we have a grocery store in town – 2 blocks away (pretty much everything is Two Blocks Away) – it’s too pricey for huge stock-ups but if we need a roll of toilet paper I’m sure we can afford it.
But the rush to hoard…what is that all about? I’m sure it’s an ancient trigger, from our earliest hunter-gatherer days. I find it intriguing, even as I hustled down to the local grocer for cream. No bread, though. They only have white sandwich, ala Wonder. I’m not a savage!
I should’ve planned ahead
Do you rush to the grocery at the first hint of a blizzard? What do you get? I do wish I’d stocked up on Mallomars. I only have FOUR BOXES!
oh! I so much LOVED all your reminiscences on perfume! The Girl has a new pawdicure, so she was thrilled to poke a polished pawnail and the draw winners are:
Elizabeth C
James H
gmail your evilauntieanita, remind me of the post and I’ll get some fun stuff out to you asap!
If it’s a big enough storm (and I mean the calling out of work sort) I make sure we have the essentials. Milk for cereal, bread, cookies of some sort, eggs….and most importantly…gas for the generator and snowblower! We aren’t long capacitated by snow here in Connecticut.
Since my DS (age 21) and DD (age almost 18) eat like a horde of picky locusts, I have to make sure that I have their choices on hand or suffer the emotional battery otherwise.
Loved reading this, I miss you!
MUST always have toilet paper & coffee in the house. I’m a little on edge this morning, we are down to 6 pods of coffee so will have to pick some up after work.
Hubby thinks it’s hilarious that I have a Thing about the toilet paper. He often surprises me with a huge package of it and calls it my present.
We haven’t really had a lot of snow since moving back to Iowa so there hasn’t been that “ I gotta get to the store “ thing.
Hugs and kisses to you and the Girl!
I’ve lived in ND and MN for the last 13 years, so blizzard warnings only mean don’t drive on open highways — in town isn’t pleasant, but it’s not usually dangerous, just slow. That said, I will stock up on coffee, milk, and makings of some comfort foods just so I don’t *have to* go out in big snowfall unless absolutely necessary, just because I prefer to snuggle in.
I’m in agreement with a big supply of coffee and milk. I order coffee pods from an online source and receive a monthly shipment so I never run out. My husband and I couldn’t function without morning coffee! I stock up on eggs, fish and chicken in freezer, apples and oranges, canned fish, and frozen veggies when I know I won’t get to the grocery. Usually Colorado storms don’t keep us from the grocery store though, it’s just down the road. My dog has his own freezer with his food, always well-stocked with a variety of proteins and goat milk, called Benson’s Pantry 🙂
My little house has adequate kitchen storage space for two people and I’ve always been a shop ahead shopper with backups of pantry stuff and I make sure we ALWAYS have coffee. We don’t eat a lot of bread or milk and Kroger is less than a mile away, we’re good. Stay warm, Ms A ??
Living in a small apartment I cannot afford to hoard so I’ve learned that I need to have some basic stuff in the fridge and I can live 3-4 days on it. There’s always fresh salad and fruit, mozzarella, eggs, toast and in the freezer is some fish and meat/sausages. As for coffe, I’d wake up in the middle of the night if necessary to have the complete package ready when I need it. Normally I have coffe and tea for at least a month ahead on stock. I’m taking no risk there.
I can be obsessed about “stocking up,” to the point that I freeze vegetables from my garden in the summer even though it has been clear for years that I prefer fresh veggies and go to great lengths to grow them all winter. Also, sorry to say, a week of starvation would do me a world of good. So it doesn’t make sense on any level. Which doesn’t stop me.
I am a hoarder. :-). Since we live half the year in California and half the year in Quebec, inevitably there are certain brand name items that are available in only one of those places, so I buy a bunch of whatever it is (freeze dried hash browns, stir fry sauce, pancake mix, tea, vitamins) and haul them to the other place. Fortunately the grocery store is across the street from the place in Quebec (which does get severe weather) so no worries there, but I really hate running out of anything, especially milk for my tea and bread/butter/jam. I could live on toast and tea (and Kraft dinner) for a week if I had to.
We live in the backwoods and lose power a fair bit, so staying stocked up is second nature. I understand why people get bread; doesn’t need to be refrigerated and you can fix a lot of different things with it. But I have never understood the burning need to rush out and buy milk. The coffee aspect never occurred to me, because I don’t drink it and my husband takes his black. But your mention of cream makes me wonder if coffee/tea isn’t the biggest driver of the milk frenzy.
I love your stories and especially about the cream. I have to say I don’t usually put cream in my coffee but around Thanksgiving and Christmas when the eggnog is around, I’ll start to hoard that. So while there’s no hoarding and stocking up on provisions for a storm necessarily here in California I do stock up a lot on the eggnog, and I freeze it. There is nothing, nothing in this world as delicious as a fresh Nespresso with some frothed hot eggnog topping it.
Having really cold weather and snow storms are a fact of life in Cleveland. But we usually get a couple days notice though. Everyone seems to panic. I work at a grocery store and you can’t get anything out fast enough. But we always make sure that we are stocked up on coffee, tea, milk and dog food before anything hits. It’s rare that we have bread because we are leftovers kind of family. If we need bread, we got enough flour, yeast, salt and water to make bread with. We usually stock up on meat to freeze and get tons of noodles for soup.