A Side Note..

Rex Mundi's Damn Diary has some observations on the insanity of Snow-Shopping in East Tennessee. I want to toss my two cents in...

Before preparing to leave work early to come home today, I took a quick mental stock our our home's food supply. If all access was cut off from our house, how long could we actually hold back starvation? I mean, watch all the people loading up on milk and bread (and beer, and Cheezy Puffs, and beer, and Kit Kats, and..oh, did I mention beer?) and you'd think they were either going to a) feed an army, or b) board an army. I did stop and pick up one (1) loaf of bread (because there were only about 2 slices left in the bag at home), 1 1/2-gallon of milk, and 1 1/2 gallon of chocolate milk for my hyper-picky chocolate-milk-addicted daughter. And that was it. Oh, and some firewood.

Even with that, we could survive on the soup, frozen dinners, crackers, popcorn...what else - syrup? Golden Grahams? Left-over Halloween candy? We could survive for days, a couple of weeks probably before our food supply would actually run dangerously low. And that's assuming there was no way to even get help from anyone in our neighborhood.

So...the eternal question: What Gives? I imagine some houses looking in their cupboards around April or May and discovering a cache of canned goods that would rival a Y2K Bunker. The bread has long molded, and they used up all the milk on cereal and milkshakes.

In our society, we have to have what we're used to. Having to improvise, make do, be frugal is an alien concept.

But then, it's such a time-honored East Tennessee tradition - who am I to interfere? No, where did I hide that bag of Funyons....

UPDATE (12:59 am): Whoa, looks like Rich Hailey and I are eating from the same bowl of Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk. And he eat it much better than I.