Dear Diary: Apocalypse Much? Diary for the end of the world. With recipes.

By Shaundi Lee Chic

Are you prepared to care for your family in an emergency? Do you know how to make End of the World Pie with just the scraps left in the pantry? How about Power Outage Casserole?

Here's a quick read that'll get you up to speed for the end of days -- or just a power outage, or just a snow day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shaundi Lee Chic
• Release date: Jul 2, 2014

Shaundi Lee Chic

The author is not quite as old nor quite as cranky as the book's narrator, but she's at least as good a researcher, and she does have John Donne's sermons and all the episodes of Gilligan's Island.

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Dear Diary: Apocalypse Much?

Diary for the end of the world. With recipes.

Shaundi Lee Chic

Published by Shaundi Lee Chic at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Shaundi Lee Chic

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

September 13, 2013

Sweeties, I’m emailing you this diary-how-to kind of thing that I’ve been working on for a few years; it spells out our researches on getting through a crisis, including actual recipes. I think we're getting to the point where the news is scaring everybody a bit, not just me. Husband says if the worst happens, it’s still aways away, so there’d be time to act on some of these ideas. I'd advise printing it all out, but having it on your phone is easy enough; it's short. I guess at some level I had you guys in mind while writing all this up.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: 2011

Chapter 2: 2012

Chapter 3: 2013

Chapter 1: 2011

September 13, 2011

Mom calls it soap opera brain. I always think of it as English Major Brain, but it means the same thing – certain personalities, confronted with certain situations, mentally spin cotton-candy-gobs of possible succeeding scenarios, most of them awful.

So when husband introduced me to apocalyptic fiction in the form of Alas, Babylon, he started a process that no power on earth can stop or slow – my brain working on preparing for the end of days.

A few months ago, my poor back-of-brain began obsessing, demanding I go to Costco and buy a 20 lb bag of pinto beans. My front-of-brain kept dismissing it as silly, but obsession will out, and I bought the bag, a good plastic tub to put it in, and put it in the big closet.

I’m an old-ish woman now, and my brain's got enormous amounts of data gleaned from many many books and many many years of living. I’m capable of spinning out intricate, complex scenarios of a multitude of apocalypses, and now I’m in the mode of preparing for each of them.

September 15, 2011

"Sustain my innocents." Hafta admit, sometimes at work I read inmate letters more thoroughly than is really necessary for the job: the colorful language and misspellings are often entertaining; the legal arguments are often intriguing.

Today came across this great phrase – he meant, obviously, to say something along the lines of proving up his innocence. Unintentional irony, as it's probable he is the father of innocents that he is failing to provide sustenance for. But anyway, a great phrase for its actual meaning.

And as we all know, it's usually up to the womenfolk to do the really important sustaining.

I guess it’s a good idea to write up everything I’m learning from my crazed, obsessive end of the world researches – I may forget things – I may certainly forget things, and it’d also be good to have a document that would cross-train husband if something happened to me. Plus, it’s marginally better than just talking to myself.

September 20, 2011

Came across the really quite satisfying fact today that there is wild yeast in the air all around us. I’d often wondered about how people leavened bread before you could go to the store and buy yeast, and now I know – you create a sourdough starter with just flour and water, and those two things collect up yeast from the ether, and you use that to make bread. Or, in my case, you buy starter online.

September 22, 2011

Husband had a nasty boo-boo on his leg – got worse over the weekend, and we didn’t want to go to the hospital, so we tried something we read in one of our prepper books: a garlic clove grated up and mixed with ¾ cup red wine, which you let steep for 15-20 minutes, and then soak it in a cloth and apply to the wound. We did this a couple of times over the weekend, for 20 minutes or so at a time, and the boo-boo got substantially better; we’d originally planned to take him to the doctor first thing Monday morning, and we wound up just letting it continue to heal on its own. The book said this recipe was used during the civil war on the battlefield.

In one of the prepper faux documentaries we saw, the main character eventually dies from an infection from a small cut on his hand because there were no antibiotics – they probably had garlic and wine.

I still need to research why Europeans don’t use an article with hospital.

October 20, 2011

Okay – I’ve put together a bugout bag for work. I actually kind of like the idea of sheltering in place, but bugging out I find terrifying. Hurricane, wildfire, flood, volcano, zombies, every movie, every tv show has scenes of people stuck in their car on highways trying to get away, just stuck there with only the resources available in their car, competing with kajillions of other people for food and water along the route. And then later in the show, people limping by the side of the road, dehydrated, sick, wishing for death.

A work bugout bag is fairly simple – a lightweight backpack with good tennis shoes (my good velcro tennies), socks, bottle of water, flashlight, face mask in case hafta run through smoke or fumes, maybe I should put in a package of crackers or squeezie fruit. Can’t help but remember the pictures of New Yorkers having to walk home on 9/11 – those who had tennis shoes and water ready were substantially better off.

Doesn’t apply to us at the moment, but thought it was a great tip from the class I took -- when you have kids, it’s a good idea to have a recent picture in your bugout bag of you and your kids so that you can prove they are your kids. In the kind of emergency where you hafta bugout, your kids may be bugged out from wherever they are, and you might need to retrieve them from a shelter – it’s a good thing; you don’t want anybody to be able to just grab your kid and go.

I’m also practicing on the elliptical machine to try to get to the point where I can sprint half a mile – half a mile from work should get me far away from most disaster events. . Plus, you always see news footage of people running away in an inelegant manner; I'd want to look graceful for online news posterity. In most disasters, I’d have to abandon the car in the parking garage; hate parking garages, wouldn't want my last minutes of life to be in one; it’d be better just to hike a half a mile away and wait till an all-clear, or hike home and deal with the car later.