1. Wash all your clothes/bedding/towels before the storm hits. There's no telling when you'll have another chance.
2. Keep a large supply of crappy towels on hand. We used to have lots of beautiful white towels. They are now a large supply of crappy towels.
I ended up using towels to stop water coming in through the windows and doors, ooze seeping out of the freezers and fridge, wiping off after playing in the rain, etc...
3. Keep a small notepad with you at all times! Something will occur to you but if you don't write it down you'll forget it. It's also critical for writing information down that you hear on the radio.
4. Keep a flashlight with you at all times while the power is out. This means during the day and night. You will constantly find yourself hunting around in dark closets, garages, etc in your house and other people's houses. It's a pain to have to go and find a flashlight all these times.
5. It gets dark inside the house well before it gets dark outside. That's another reason to always keep a flashlight on you. You will be spending a lot of time working outside and it'll get late. Then you'll have to stumble around inside your house looking for your flashlight when you do go in even if it's still light outside.
6. Those little cylume lightstick braclets are awesome for marking you flashlights, radios, water jugs, cat, furniture and other stuff you need to see in the dark. Amazingly, ones I activated on Friday night were still glowing faintly Tuesday night! They are really cheap right now for Halloween so by several containers of them. Also, they come in assorted colors so you can assign a color to a particular type of thing (yellow for flashlights, blue for water, evil green for cats, etc...)
7. Set your house up like a blind person lives there. In otherwords, have an assigned spot for everything and when it's not in use return it to that spot. That way you'll always know where a particular radio/flashlight/axe are and you won't have to hunt for it in the dark. It took me two days to figure this tip out.
8. According to the Red Cross insulin will last for one month at 86F. I thought it had to be kept cold. I'm not a diabetic, but when I heard that information I wrote it down in my notebook to share with y'all.
9. Don't dump your water right after the storm. A friend in another part of town had filled up all their bathtubs before the storm. After Ike passed the water was still on so they drained the tubs and took baths before going to bed. The water was turned off during the night, they are now hauling water from a pool three blocks away to flush their toilets.
10. Scoop out the kitty litter during daylight hours. It's really hard to do by the light of a flashlight.
11a. If you have a generator running outside you still better also have a carbon monoxide detector in the house.
11b. Keep an eye on the direction of the wind. The people right next door to me were running their generator on their back patio. During the night the wind shifted direction and started blowing it's exhuast into their house. Luckily their CO moniter when off and woke them up in time.
12. Where there are damaged roofs and downed fences there are nails. Where there are nails someone wiil step on one. This results in a 14-hour wait in the emergency room.
13. Just because someone has a chainsaw doesn't mean they know how to use a chainsaw. The stunts and stupidity I saw with saws was mind-boggling. I watched one guy start cutting through an 18" thick limb but before it cut all the way through the wood split and the section he was cutting dropped three feet down to the ground. However, it was still attached the rest of the tree by a 2" thick, 3' long strip of highly stressed wood. He cut through this strip before I could yell a warning. The string sprung back up vicously and nearly removed his face. I warned him again but he siad it was okay. The same thing happened with him three more times before he finally started making the first cut underneath the limbs.
14. People will drive through your yard to get around a tree blocking the road. This is very hard on sprinkler systems.
15. If you have a gridle you can cook ANYTHING on a barbecue grill. Never go into an Apocalypse without a gridle.
16. Cargo-shorts styled swimsuits are great clothing to wear after during/after a hurricane. They are quick drying and can be washed while you are in the shower. Keep 2-3 pairs on hand.
17. Devote your energies to first taking care of the food in your fridge/freezer, THEN clean up the yard.
18. It is legal to have tigers as pets in Texas. In a hurricane one or more of these tigers may escape. Keep this in mind when you are placing all your raw, spoiling meat in your garbage can.
19. The more aluminum foil and ziploc baggies you have the better off you will be.
20. Your ice maker isn't nearly as powerful as you think it is. Fill every cooler you can find with ice before the storm hits.
21. Thinking "I don't need and D-cell batteries." is your brain's way of telling you you need D-sized batteries.
22. Put all your extension cords in an easy to get to place even if you don't have a generator.
-Blast
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