September is National Preparedness Month (NPM) here in the USA. Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the existence of NPM until we were already well into September, so I didn't have any cool preparations planned. Here are some things I'm better prepared for this year than in past years:
If some kid is telling me the "Interrupting Cow" knock-knock joke, I'm just going to roll with it. My knee-jerk know-it-all instinct is to try to shut the joke down to demonstrate that I'm in the know, I am too clever to be taken in by this joke. But if some kid is learning how to tell jokes, I shouldn't disrespect the classics.
I've accumulated several cans of canned food. I used to be proud of my emergency food supply: a few pounds of dried beans. But if an earthquake knocks out my stove, I might not have a good way to cook those beans, and they're not-so-edible raw. A past employer gave out emergency kits to employees; those kits contained emergency rations that lasted for years. But those kits were many many years old, and even emergency rations don't last that long. So I bought some canned food. And once a month, I eat something canned and then buy something canned to replace it. So if an emergency knocks out my stove, I should have a few days' food to eat that won't have gone bad meanwhile.
Also if a kid tells that joke where they have to interrupt suddenly saying "Timing!" I'll let them get away with that, too. It ain't easy, but I believe that children are the future.
Maybe next year I'll be more ready for NPM but I doubt it. I'm not too impressed by this here blog post I just threw together, but I guess I'll upload it anyhow, if only to annoy Javascript programmers who use the npm Node Package Manager tool and are probably confused to see an NPM blog post about beans in tomato sauce, pickled beets, and such.
