I'm going to write a prepper article about this for Survival Podcast where I write articles. The thrust of the article will be what you need to store, if anything, that is readily available right now but you would be incapacitated without it. Take an inventory to determine if there is something you absolutely cannot do without and still function.
I have extreme dry eyes. I put a drop of Walgreens brand eye ointment in each eye before I go to sleep. If I don't do that, the covering over my cornea will rip when I open my eyes, either one eye or both. The eye cannot be kept open due to the pain. It hurts like hell and you will shut your eye or eyes. The eye has to be closed, a bandage put on it and tape used to provide enough pressure to keep the eye shut. It takes three days for the eye to repair itself. I am useless for three days because there is still pain there.
The eyes work together as a pair and when one eye moves, so does the other. If both eyes are closed, the pain from the torn one is not as noticeable because it doesn't move as long as the other one doesn't move, so you end up with both eyes shut as much as possible for those three days.
A tube of the ointment is over $5 and that is the Walgreens brand, the cheapest one. Liquid drops don't work, it has to be ointment to stay on the eye all night. One tube, and they are very small, will last a month and maybe a month and a half. I keep trying to buy two at a time to try to build up a stock, but I can't seem to get enough of them to last a year. I think I have three extras now and that is not enough. I must remember to get more.
My sister-in-law was here and saw me use mine and she has that problem and has had hers rip before, so now she uses that, too, every night.
If power went out and stores were closed for many months, I could not function without that ointment and right now, those tubes of ointment are just across the street in Walgreens. I'd like to have 12 tubes to know I've got enough and then not use any of those tubes now. That is over $60 but it also means I function or not.
Is there something available to you right now that you absolutely must have in order to function and it doesn't take a prescription to get it?
CALLING ROSE PEOPLE:
I have two David Austin rose bushes/plants in the dirt ground of the garden that didn’t get killed in the summer of 2011. I have not touched them since then and they were growing totally out of order with long branches here and there. About two days ago, I whacked all of them off with manual hedge clippers.
They are not exactly symmetrical as I just whacked off limbs. It is my understanding they will grow large again in spring.
Do I need to do something to them now? The limbs, rather I should call them stalks, not limbs, are short but I could cut more - should I do that or leave them the way they are now which is about one and a half feet tall. Don’t tell me I killed them as I have a hard time cutting anything off a plant in the first place.
What about rose food? I don’t have any. Should I apply rose food and if so, what and when? I don’t have a bottle sprayer thingy that attaches to a hose so it needs to be something I can mix in a big water/sprinkler jug I have or it needs to be granules to sprinkle around the plant which would be the easiest thing to do.