Level One Prepper: An Exploration of Ketchup Water Balloons and Strippers
It’s funny how life has changed us since stay-at-home began in March. In Texas, stay-at-home ended officially in May, but in all likelihood some form of stay-at-home will stay with us for the near future. I think it was interesting how my family prioritized jobs and tasks during stay-at-home. For instance, my wife took to organizing. She’s always excelled at putting things in order and finding the right place for them, but since March she’s become this Four-Star General of it. My kids prioritized school work first (yeah!) and social media/YouTube/video games second. Me, I became a projects-around-the-house kind of a guy. In hindsight, I was a like a Level 1 Prepper trying to get ready for the apocalypse. I failed miserably.
To detail how bad I am at this, I have exhibit A, “The Deep Freeze,” and exhibit B, “The Stripping of The Stained Glider.”
We have a not-so-old Deep Freeze that I repurposed for the storage of food. My idea was to get ready for this upcoming fall/winter. I thought it would be good to be able to store frozen foods so that we wouldn’t have to visit the grocery store so often. It took me two weeks to remove all the rust and gunk out of the interior (cause it’d been sitting in the garage). The ranking officer in command of organizations (and beautiful goddess) gave me plastic shelf liner to put down over the rusty parts.
Now it was time to freeze things, right? Wrong. Sort of. I kept finding new ways to destroy foods by freezing them. One day, I tossed a bunch of vegetables in there. SMH. No, you can’t store lettuce in the deep freeze! Once you bring it out of freeze and try to make a salad, the whole thing turns into wet seaweed. What happens to tomatoes is even weirder. You have to cut them up before freezing them unless you genuinely like the idea of ketchup water balloons. Seriously. After thawing, the roma tomatoes had the feel of plump water balloons. Nobody wants to eat water balloons. Poke one, and they bleed water. You see what I mean? Useless prepper!
Also, don’t try almond milk. Milk seems to work fine as long as you write down the date that you remove it from deep freeze. If you don’t, your kids will assume that the milk in the fridge is a month past its expiration date and never drink it. As for the almond milk, I’m not a chemistry major, but something happens to that stuff. Something that looks like yellow water separated from white chunks that NEVER mixes back together, no matter how furiously or how long you shake that carton. I went at it like I was competing in a shake-weight endurance contest, yet for the rest of the time we poured it into our coffee, we’d get white floaties.
Exhibit B is the glider Mom and Dad gifted me before their move to Washington. I hauled it and a bench here from their home in East Texas. The family helped me move the patio furniture into the backyard, and it looks so nice out there! But the glider needed a new stain on it. Especially since Houston gets so much rain.
I did what I always do when encountering a new task, prepper or otherwise: watch a YouTube video. I found a 15-minute clip of a guy showing how easy it is to strip the surface of a wooden table. And, as a Level 1 Prepper, I already had all the tools I needed: stripper, steel wool, and stain. So I moved the glider onto a tarp Friday afternoon and began stripping.
Worst. Decision. Ever.
The guy in the YouTube video was working indoors. I was working outdoors. In the afternoon. In Houston. In the summer! Did you know that the H in Houston stands for Heat and Humidity? I grew a pile of caps, wraps, shirts, and shorts that I sweated through in the 3+ hours it took me to strip the stain from the glider. The guy who did it made it look so easy! I apparently belonged on one of those failed home project reality TV shows. And I wasn’t renovating a house! I was just stripping stain from a glider!
I still have to sand and stain it, but hopefully I can learn from my mistakes and not make it so hard on myself. After stripping, I was worn out and wiped. I went inside, took a shower, and just laid in bed in the dark. So sun, please!
On the plus side, by spending the rest of the day inside, my son and I got to watch most of Revenge of the Sith together. It was the second time he’d watched it that week, and he enjoyed watching it “for the memes,” which means to point out lines in the movie that make great memes. Like quotes such as “It is treason then” or “Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?” Man, that’s a whole new way of watching a movie.
But all in all, we’re doomed in my house if the apocalypse ever happens ‘cause at the end of the day, my butt is still a Level 1 Prepper.
