Yodabunny wrote:
So here in southern Ontario we've had the worst ice storm I've ever seen. Thousands without power, myself included.
I've been up all night keeping the wood fireplace going to keep the living room warm enough for the kids to sleep in. I have a lung infection and the wife and 6 year old are sick. It's been fun...Ran out of wood at 7 am and had to go hunt some down, which again, was fun given everyone bought it out, along with the road salt, everywhere. Managed to find some compressed logs at a lumber yard and bought all they had and some bags of offcut. Even finding candles, non-scented, for lighting was a chore.
Now, if it was just me none of this would be an issue, I'm fairly rugged and know how to keep warm, survive etc, but it's different for the kids, and certainly for other families who aren't lucky enough to have a wood fireplace to take some of the bite out or don't know how to handle these situations.
Are we too reliant on technology these days? Should we be doing a better job of teaching our children low tech survival skills?
I'm at work right now, so have power and internet, but at home we don't. I think we got hit with the same ice storm you guys did.
We had plenty of warning so we filled up the generator and a spare gas can. We've become more independent since we've moved into the woods as power outages are pretty frequent.
It's only a short term fix though. If we were out of power for long, I imagine it would start getting difficult to find fuel for the generator (also the noise from the generator drives me crazy). We have a wood stove but if we relied on it alone for heat, we'd need to stock way more wood.
We took a couple treks out into the woods yesterday. The icing is pretty magnificent, but I'm worried about my little peach tree.
I've never really thought about teaching the kids survival. We camped a lot so they know how to start a fire and use the coleman stove/lantern. My daughter though commented once (after she was an adult living away from home), that she used to loved power outages because it meant family board night rather than each of us doing our own electronicy type thing.