Pioneers we ain't!

So I was watching American Idol last night (which I am SO glad is back!) and when it was over I decided to watch the news until Jake was ready to go to bed - yes, we go to bed pretty early and I have no problem admitting that. Anyway - back to my story...

So I was watching the news and the top story was how this community in Immigration Canyon had a planned power outage of 7 hours to fix something, but horror of horrors - it lasted up to 30 hours at a time in some places! I mean, I can understand how bad that would be, especially in winter, but if it's that bad, pack up and spend the night in a hotel! They interviewed this one lady who was really upset about the extent of the outage saying that sleeping at night was really cold (remember this for later) when the power is out. That makes sense. I wouldn't want to sleep at night without heat. But then they went on to outline the other horrors of living 30 hours without power. The biggest one was how this lady (same lady as above - in fact, she was the only one they interviewed...) had hundreds of dollars of food in her freezer that had thawed and was now worthless and had to be thrown away.

Ok. Let's think about that statement just a little bit. I'm going to start with the first part. Who has hundreds of dollars worth of food in their freezer!?! Maybe if you are storing someone's wedding cake, but I definitely don't have that much. I just took a quick look in mine - some ice cream, a few frozen pizzas, a baked ziti waiting for a day I don't want to cook, and a lot of deer meat that I refuse to cook. That doesn't even come close to even a hundred dollars! I doubt we're even approaching $50! But we are starving college kids with no children, so maybe that's the difference...

Now let's go on to the more obvious part of this statement that had me laughing for quite some time! The food in her freezer had thawed and was now worthless and had to be thrown away. Hm.... If I am about to loose hundreds of dollars in food, I would do some quick thinking and look at my surroundings to find maybe some resources to help save my investment. Lets all brain storm together, shall we? It is the middle of winter. I live in Utah. I live in Northern Utah. I live in a canyon. I live in a canyon next to a big mountain. I am living through one of our more stormy winters on record. I had a hard time sleeping last night because it was so cold. Any ideas coming to any of you to save your freezer items? Cause obviously none came to this lady. If she had been crossing the plains, I doubt she would have survived long.

Even if you have never been to Utah, you most likely know that Utah claims to have the greatest SNOW on earth. And everyone - regardless of whether you have ever seen snow or not - knows that snow is cold and if you stay in it too long you will FREEZE. Wow. What a concept for someone living in Northern Utah! Hello! Put your stuff outside in the snow! I don't live in a canyon and I still have at least a foot of snow outside my door right now.

Now some of you might say that this is an obvious conclusion to me because I am a certified science teacher and of course I would think this way. But you don't have to be a science geek to know stuff like this! All you have to do is read The Boxcar Children. And I've read The Boxcar Children which taught me that you can put your milk in a stream to keep it fresh. Obviously this lady's childhood library was seriously lacking.