I'll fess up to the extent of ours...you can laugh, I'm over it now.
I have a brother who is a programmer and was working like mad for 18 months or so to correct things and he did tell me that there could be problems. We live in the country and people go a bit berzerk when we have a winter storm warning, so I decided to take things seriously.
I learned everything you could possibly want to know about food storage and pantry management. I canned (which I do anyway, but still) green beans, corn, tomatoes, chili, whatever I could get my hands on (veggies from our gardens). DH (masonry contractor) built me a fireplace with a cooking crane and I bought cast iron cookware to use on it. We filled milk jugs with water and stored them in our fruit cellar. At the time, there was this online coupon thing where you could buy certain products and get cash back and combined with the occasional grocery store sale, they PAID me to take picante sauce home.
It's made with veggies, you know.
I'm glad to say that I only had a few "strange" things around (flax seed for egg substitute for instance) and we did (eventually) consume everything that I had bought. OK, not the fruit cocktail, but that was donated to Harvest for Hunger, so I felt OK about it. The water jugs were gradually dumped into the washer for clothes when it was clear that the earth had not come to an end...THAT was a pain in the rear! I have had occasion to cook over the fireplace when the power has gone out and it has kept us warm during those outages, too, which is a good thing. Sometimes we just like to make s'mores in the winter.
Yes, I felt purty darned silly at 1201am, but it was nice not having to go to the grocery store for awhile...and I have an AWESOME hot cocoa mix made with powdered milk!
