Content at Minimum Week 2: Going Bigger

The ER Bag:

For me, living mindfully has included emergency preparedness. The mindfulness that makes me aware of my impact on the planet makes me mindful of all sorts of risks, too (read: I’m an overthinker). I started my emergency preparedness with a simple emergency room packing list and that was enough for a while. After a few years where I did need to go to the ER several times, I packed what I could off that list into a backpack for easier departures.

Recently, Jace and I have been working on a much more thorough emergency preparedness project. We’ve been gradually putting together supplies we could use for either sheltering in place or evacuating. Since we have those larger kits now, I figured there was probably some redundancy between them and my ER bag. I decided to eliminate any duplicates and put the things I need for the ER in a (very) large plastic ziploc, label it, and put that into the evacuation kit. If we need it for the ER, we can just open the bigger box, grab the ziploc and shove it into a backpack.

There weren’t actually as many redundant items as I expected, but I’m still glad I consolidated. It freed up a backpack I really like and would rather use than have sitting around just in case, and it freed up a patch of floor that the backpack used to occupy!

My ER bag includes:

• A comfortable change of clothes including underwear and warm socks (with no metal like snaps or clasps in case I need a scan). This was the main area where I was able to consolidate.
• A small toiletries kit with a toothbrush, mini toothpaste, comb, hair tie, tiny tube of lotion, and a washcloth. I may add a travel bottle of soap since I’m allergic to so many kinds and hospital soap is so harsh.
• A few coloring pages and colored pencils.
• A bowl, a small bag of kibble, a small bag of treats, and poo bags for Arlo. (Remember that hospital staff will be under no obligation to care for your service animal, including taking them out for potty breaks or keeping them in a safe place while you get a scan or procedure done!)
• A set of supplies for accessing my port. While hospitals will have their own, I like to make sure I have the supplies I prefer and know I won’t be allergic to. I needed to add these to our larger emergency stores anyway and I don’t have enough stuff to make two backup kits.

I bring some other things with me to the ER, like chargers, a stuffed animal, and a blanket; this is just what I’m able to keep packed ahead of time.

The Kitchen (Part 1):

I also started on the kitchen this week. I expect the kitchen to be one of the most difficult parts of this project. We have lots of things to go through, many breakable dishes, and of course we have to keep using the kitchen the whole while. In other circumstances, I probably would have left the kitchen for the end of this project. Unfortunately, we’ve been having problems with bugs in our kitchen for a long time. We’ve been having success with a new treatment to get rid of them, but keeping the kitchen clean is a big deal for controlling the problem.

So, with that in mind, I started working on the kitchen. I found it hard to go through in an ordered way. I’m starting to think that’s going to be a theme for the CAM Project as a whole. So far when I’ve worked on an area, I’ve completed the sorting and boxing in one day. I’ve spent most of a week on the kitchen, doing a little bit at a time. I’ve sort of bounced from area to area and task to task. I tend to be a very precise and organized person, but it takes some chaos to get there!

I’ve done two things to make this difficult part of CAM easier. First, I put an empty laundry basket on the counter and started putting items I knew needed to stay in the kitchen into it. This way, I wasn’t leaving things in the drawers or cabinets and could see my items. The second thing I did was pay attention to what I was using. I wanted to take as many of my non-necessity items out of rotation, so they didn’t keep ending up in the dishwasher. For example, I knew which dishes we were going to box up, so even before I dealt with the dishes I switched to only using the ones we were keeping out.

Up until now, I’ve just been using the handful of cardboard boxes I had in the house to pack things away. I knew I would need to buy moving boxes when I started tackling larger areas. I went to Home Depot and got a few. I’ve made the mistake in the past of buying extra-large boxes. Just don’t do it! They’re so big that they’re hard to maneuver and much too heavy when full. I bought five medium boxes, two large, and some more packing tape since we were running low. 

I don’t want to be wasteful as I pack things up since a major driver of the CAM Project is my concern over the environmental impact of all our stuff. I did buy a cardboard insert for packing our glasses and drinkware, but I skipped on the bubble wrap or other plastic packing material. I save the plastic bags we get when we pick up groceries (how I wish they would switch to paper bags or cardboard boxes!) and either use them as small trash bags or take them back to the store for recycling. I brought out my stash and wrapped our plates and bowls in them so there were layers of plastic between each breakable item. When we unpack them, the bags can be reused or taken in for recycling.

I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of what we decided to keep in the kitchen right now. I’m hoping that in the next week I’ll have finished getting things sorted, so my plan is to detail what we’re keeping in rotation in the next post. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll figure out the image formatting issues I’ve been having so I can show what our cabinets look like at the end.

If you’d like to leave a comment, let me know which item in your kitchen you wish you never had to wash again. (I think I would choose the blender.)