An overload of cuteness!

A female bunny we adopted ended up unexpectedly having a litter of bunnies. Turns out she was already pregnant when she arrived here, but showed absolutely no signs of pregnancy until they were born. The mother is such a patient, gentle doe, and her daughter (pictured) is very much the same. I couldn't resist taking a photo of her when she was little - fast asleep and content on the piano. She was about 2 weeks old here.

February Challenge - Toilet paper

This month's challenge is to store at least 2 weeks worth of toilet paper. In an emergency situation, this is not something I particularly want to go without. An unused roll can double up as tissues, paper towels and I have even heard of people using clean toilet paper rolls (with the paper on of course) to apply pressure to wounds to stem bleeding - I guess that was all they had available.

There are some alternatives. I've heard of "wee wipes" (instead of using toilet paper for 'number 1's', you use small square cloths made from terry toweling or other spare soft cloth you have around). I'm not game enough for those, and the emergency situations I'm thinking off - I'm not quite sure if I'd have the water spare to wash them. Bit of a delicate situation, isn't it!

If you already have two weeks worth, perhaps challenge yourself further and, if you have the space, store 4 weeks worth.

Perhaps also think (not for very long through - lol) about how your family would manage if you weren't able to use your toilets. Emergency situations for toilet happenings don't always need to be in the form of a big natural disaster. We had tree roots get into our pipes on the nature strip resulting in us not being able to flush the toilet for a few days. That wasn't so bad for us, but the plumber advised me there are worse scenarios where sewer water has backed up and overflowed in the bathrooms. Eek!

If you do a lot of camping, you may have a camping toilet. Perhaps you have some cheap 'almost disposable' buckets that could be used as chamber pots at a time of need.

Okay, enough grossness for one day ;D Time to water the garden before my 'eating plants' shrivel up.

Week 5 of the 2011 Food Storage Challenge

Week 5 $10 challenge

2 can tomato soup, 2 kg powdered milk

Week 5 $20 challenge

4 cans tomato soup, 4 kg powdered milk

Soup

So why are we storing more soup? Soup is versatile when it comes to food storage. It doesn't take much to prepare (make sure you store extra water), you can add other things to it such as pasta, vegetables, meat, fish etc. Of course, if you don't like tomato soup, store another type of soup. You could even store pasta sauce. I like to store tomato paste instead. You can get little tins of tomato paste from Aldi quite cheaply.

Powdered Milk

Powdered milk isn't particularly pleasant on its own, but in an emergency situation, is a great source of calcium. I have posted some ways to use powdered milk previously on my blog here: http://denleydiaries.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-to-do-with-powdered-milk.html. You can disguise the taste by adding drinking chocolate or Milo or any other flavour. My bread maker recipes call for powdered milk, so I always have some in my pantry cupboard.

If you don't wish to store so much powdered milk, store alternatives such as evaporated milk, coconut milk, even sweetened condensed milk (probably not for drinking though). There are alternatives out there such as rice milk as well.