Prepper

Chapter Eight

I am up at dawn and I go straight for the Tylenol. Ah, bourbon you cruel mistress.

I have black coffee on the deck, which is covered with tiny beads of dew. The fog hangs like a grey blanket, it feels very maritime. I am still trying to manage life with less sugar, I give in to my sweet tooth and sneak a cube from the cupboard. It cuts the bitterness just enough and I go back to watching wisps of fog.

Merida meanders through the yard seeking the ideal place to do her business. Something odd pops into my head -- coffee doesn't grow here, a lot of things don't. It's a fairly respectable agricultural region, plenty of farms and greenhouses, good soil, long growing season, but coffee, citrus fruit, anything that thrives in warmer climes, these are not locally produced. I start thinking about all the things in the kitchen right now that are only available because they have been imported. Turns out it would be much faster to count what can be obtained locally. I can live without coffee, but I would rather not. If that is a genuine reality of the near future, I should see if I can stock up.

It's quiet enough that I can hear the waves on the break wall in the distance. Water on rock, the perpetual symphony of background music when you live near the water. The massive white stones seem the stronger of the two; passive, immovable, turning the crashing surf aside time and time again. But the waves are unrelenting and over time, their persistence pays off, the stones become sand and the water remains, unforgiving and unrepentant. At least water shouldn't be a huge problem, I have twenty-six-thousand square kilometers of dihydrogen monoxide a short walk from my door, but ensuring potability could require some extra work.

Mental note: water purifier, iodine tablets, bleach

Kate is also up, fussing about the kitchen packing a lunch and eating breakfast at the same time. She excels in this sort of multi-tasking. She has to get to work today, they have expanded her role at work and she's now part of a small committee dedicated to emergency preparedness planning. She tells me the work is very interesting, but scary at the same time. I don't tell her how much I can relate. She takes a break and sits with me briefly to finish her coffee. She's obeyed the house rules, her coffee is truly black. I need to convey to her Ari's warning without conveying this sense of dread that hangs over me.

"We need to be a little better prepared, in case things get worse." I start. "I'm going to stock the pantry downstairs with some more food. I think I will take your Dad up on that chicken offer too. How hard can that be. I just have to build a coop, get some chicken feed and keep the cats away - right?."

"Something like that, my Dad will know what you need to do, I'll call him from work. My mom has some preserves for us anyway, she's been doing a lot of canning this summer, so if you are out and about, swing by and pick that up. Great dinner last night, oh my God - those olives!"

"Yeah, you really did a number on those olives."

"If you see Ari today, be sure to thank him again for me. It was such a nice evening."

Nice, sure, right up to the point where he brought up the end of the world. I'm in no rush to visit Ari today. "Sure, I'll tell him that your really enjoyed yourself."

I spend the day busying myself with every task and chore I can conceive in an effort to avoid the inevitable visit to Ari's house. I wish to avoid more doom and gloom, or maybe avoid another dose of reality - they may well be the very same thing.

Our cable is still out, which means no Internet either, which sucks for me because I wanted to download plans for a chicken coop. I could hotspot my phone, but I just don't want to make the effort, so I rough draw a chicken coop on paper instead. I check it over a few times to make sure I haven't accidentally designed some sort of M.C. Escher nightmare. Satisfied that that is not the case, I turn my attention to seeing if I have all the supplies on hand to cobble this thing together.