I have been anxiously awaiting USPS and UPS packages the last few days and for the next few days.  After going over our budgets, Mike and I have decided to spend some of our savings on food and things that we would need to live off the grid if we had to. 

If you haven't started collecting water, DO IT NOW!!!!!!  Save your juice containers, your soda containers, and your small water plastic containers.  Although you can save some water in clean milk jugs, it's not really recommended.  Milk jugs are made to break down over a short period of time so if you do need to use them, be wary of where you store them.  If they start leaking you don't want anything else ruined and who ever wants to clean up a mess.  I think what I'm going to do is store some milk jugs on my back patio.  I won't fill them up all the way so if they freeze, they won't split open and the outsides will get dirty but the water inside will still be good especially for hygiene.  I detest spending money for water but at the rate I'm going, I may need to splurge.  The price of water containers for camping is around $15.00 for 5 gallon jugs, plus 5 gallons of water weighs 40lbs.  Also want to advise:  Do Not Put Your Water on Your Concrete Floor.  Put a board under your stored water.  Your water will absorb a concrete taste if it's sitting directly on a concrete floor.

We made a purchase order of some food stuff that is not available in a grocery store.  Items such as butter powder, sour cream powder, dried whole eggs, freeze dried mozarella cheese and also ordered some hard red wheat and hard white wheat.  Just ordered some #10 cans of the wheat so we could experiment with it before buying the giant 6 gallon pails.  Of course we also purchased a wheat grinder and a book on how to cook with wheat.  Today I received the grinder but still need the book and the wheat.

I'm in the process of putting our food into the FOOD STORAGE ANALYZER at www.BePrepared.com/Analyzer.  It's free to use and it's provided by Emergency Essentials which is where we found the best prices on food and some other supplies with a maximum of $12.00 shipping & handling.  It allows you to put in your items and you input the servings, calories and all the other stuff on the nutritional label and it gives you a breakdown of how many days food you have, along with percentages of protein, dietary Fiber, vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, etc..  So far I've input (along with our order not yet received) about 33 days worth of food.  It's amazing some of the knowledge I have learned after reading these nutritional labels.  There is vitamin C in a lot of foods that I had no clue.  I learned that fruit cocktail is not a cost effective nutritional purchase.  Buy Mandarin Oranges or Pineapple for more nutrition.  If you have children and even if you don't, you might need that heavy syrup in your fruits.  With what I've inputted so far, I'm still low on calories, calcium and iron. 

We also made a trip to Aldi's last night for a couple of items we were out of.  Of course we only purchased about 20 different items but 10 of them were single items and the other 10 were cases of canned good.  I only purchased 3 containers of coffee so far.  Mike was under the impression that when TSHTF, he won't get any coffee.  I don't care that it has ABSOLUTELY NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE, I will have coffee.  That's something else we purchased, a old fashioned perculator that we could use on a campstove or a fire pit.  A few weeks ago we purchased from Bass Pro Shops, some cast iron dutch ovens and skillets.  We can use them now and also they'll hold up over a wood or charcoal fire for the long haul.  You can actually make things in a dutch oven on a camping trip that most people wouldn't dream of cooking except at home.  Check out youtube channel and search "dutch oven cooking".  It will make you hungry though.