THE STORE AND OLD TEXT BOOKS

"The Store" is what we call non-perishable food and household items we keep on our storage shelves in the basement. One time my sister in law AN visited us and I asked my husband to get a container of coffee from The Store. "It is already 10:30 p.m., could you wait until tomorrow to go to the store?", AN said. We had to explain to AN that The Store was actually just our food supply in the basement. I used to laugh at my mother for her constant shopping to make sure we had enough toilet papers and other essential cooking ingredients. Now I am turning into my mother! I shopped once a week for bread, lunch meat, fruit and vegetable for salad. I keep an eye for items that are on sale such as crackers, canned soups and cereal. A local supermarket also has special discount of $10 for every $50 purchase on the last Thursday of the month.

Here are a few things I learned from the training with CERT - Community Emergency Respond Team. Also adding to what the Lone Gunman wrote about items to have in case of natural disaster.

Canned foods - Remember to also buy those that don't need can opener or have can opener that does not need electricity.

Water supply - Keep a minimum of three gallons of water for each person - one gallon per person per day - two weeks' worth of drinking water if you have storage space.

First aid kits, clean clothes, towels, whistle to signal for help, heavy duty large trash bags (to keep things dry), and flashlights with extra batteries, keep all these items in a sturdy backpack.

Develop an emergency plan for your family, where to meet and the best way to connect in the event you got separated, unable to come home or roads were impassable.

Up to this point, I donated almost 60 books to the local library and all of the music cassette tapes. The library even accepted old records, but not used text books! The photos above showed the stack of text books from my graduate school at Saint Louis University. You could tell one of my study habits was marking the pages with colorful mini post-it notes (photo below). From these titles, Power of the Press, The Four Theories of the Press, Ethics in Communication etc., you could also tell that I majored in communication (journalism & public relations). The price tags were somewhere between $60-100 for each of these textbooks and of course they didn't hold value after each semester because the professors assigned different books or required the latest edition. The school bookstores would pay less than $15 for these books. I was too lazy to participate in the exchange with other students.

To this day my husband still complained about the time when he carried two heavy suitcases back to Michigan after a visit to NYC. That was during Thanksgiving in 1988 when CP came to NYC to ask my parents for my hand in marriage. In preparation for the move to Grand Haven, CP asked me to fill up the suitcases with my earthly possessions. I did not have much then since I lived in a small rented room in Woodhaven. CP claimed that he almost dislocated his shoulders carrying the suitcases full of textbooks from Hunter College. I could not recall exactly what those textbooks were or how long I kept them after I moved to Grand Haven. For now I am keeping the textbooks from SLU and will get rid of them when we are ready to move to a retirement home :)