Where you live in Wisconsin you are extremely unlikely to go without power for any length of time. Now if you lived in northern Wisconsin that might be a possibility. I lived there for 33 years and it never happened. I even lived way up by the border to Minnesota for awhile and was fine.
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I’m afraid all the hurricane snacks are gone. 
(Cookies, crackers, poptarts, junk, wine)
I’m slowly working my way thru actual nutritious stuff like canned goods and those Indian meals in pouches, so it doesn’t expire and replace it as we are able. (though Boyfriend’s job loss might mean replacing it more slowly than we’d like. We’ll probably just watch for sales.)
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That’s what they all say until the grid goes down.
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Northern New England here, but not. the north country!
The only time we’ve had a power outage for > 1 day was when the ice storm took out the grid for weeks. Then I discovered that our power company prioritizes population centers. Well, that makes sense, but their power went out again more than once and every time it did we got pushed back again. Apparently, there’s little to no weight given to how long remote areas have been without power when populated areas are also down.
I know one woman with money who was so disgusted with how long it took to put her power back on that she lined her driveway with woodsheds and the roofs of all those sheds had a solar array on it. I was at her house a few times buying books and she said, angrily, “I’m never going to be at the mercy of the power company again!”
We, on the other hand, moved into a local hotel because DH had to work (remote). We slept there, ate a meal there every day, he’d work, and we’d go back and forth, feeding the cats, dealing with the power company, etc. It was better than melting snow for water, living with flashlights and candles, etc.
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Haha I live in southern New England and we lose power all the time. But we have the highest per capita trees per population density (something like that) and almost all of our power infrastructure is very old and above ground. The biggest threat is downed trees and tree limbs. Also I live semi-rural now.
Hurricanes and tropical storms are a big problem because of wind, ice storms because of ice. We are close enough to the ocean that we regularly get cat 1 and 2 winds if a hurricane’s path hits us. Blizzards are not that bad, unless it gets very warm and then melt and then freeze and then lines down because of ice. 
We lose power for at least 24+ hours every couple of years, and have a big outage every decade or so. We lost power for 5 days 2 years ago during Isaias, and it wasn’t even a hurricane anymore by the time it got to us. Though that was partially the fault of the power company not positioning crews in advance to a threat they had a great deal of advanced warning for. (To be fair, a lot of states were impacted also.) The big time time before that it was the big Halloween blizzard of 2011 - I wasn’t living here then but my sister lost power for a full week. And there were multiple times during my childhood when we lost power for days both in the summer (hurricanes) and winter (blizzards)! I’ve always lived in houses with wells too, and no house generator, so we always paid attention to the weather and forecasts for big storms!
I bought a battery backup and solar panel and plugin cooler this year - not cheap but way cheaper than a whole house generator and will keep important meds (and cream for coffee lol) cold in an extended emergency. Of course we got no hurricane action this year as a consequence. I’m kind of excited to have to use it for the first time! I had a wood stove installed last year as well, so neither will I freeze to death! 
(That was really not cheap, but an awesome investment for forever!)
ETA: I gladly accept hurricanes and blizzards (which you can prepare for) to not have to deal with wildfires, earthquakes, and tornados! (We do get baby tornados but they are itty bitty and rare.)
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When we lived in Michigan we didn’t have power for 3 days after an ice storm. We hadn’t been there very long and didn’t know anyone and didn’t have any money and dh just got up every morning and went to grad school. It was so cold.
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Power systems are weird. I’ve lived in suburbs, city, and relative outskirts of a college town, in sun and in snow. I have never experienced more outages than my current place in the southern parts of LA County. I think it’s mostly that an old above ground system runs right by a major arterial and people keep crashing into it. They are local enough to go out for dinner and not need emergency supplies, though.
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Now if that happens you can afford to go to a hotel.
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We got a small generator a while back. It isn’t enough to power the house but it is enough to keep the fan on the woodstove going or the well pump powered.
I do not want to melt snow for water ever again, if I can avoid it! I do not really want to haul buckets of water upstairs to bathe again either.
About 10 years ago, our furnace died, over a long period of time and many service calls. Finally. the manufacturer said, “lifetime warranty or not, we’re not going to fix it” and we were stuck. We bought a new, soapstone lined woodstove and 4 cords of wood instead of the new furnace equipment. (Don’t know what the labor would have been; don’t want to know!)
Three years ago, we bought a minisplit. Maybe we could run it with the generator, although I don’t know if the generator is big enough?
Heating with wood is something pretty routine after 7 years of that.
If you’re contemplating heating with wood full time, I recommend getting a pneumatic wood splitter. You can get small ones at Tractor Supply. Makes prepping wood for the stove something I could do (tiny, old woman) although it’s time consuming! If I had kids, I probably wouldn’t have done it, has the potential to be dangerous, but so does an axe.
btw: heating with wood was cheaper than heating with the minisplit. Both of them are cheaper than running the propane furnace used to be!
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It is obvious that we missed our 2020 visit to my ILs because we’re eating down the things that expired in 2019 atm. The soda was ok. The chutney was fine in the pork braise. We haven’t yet attempted the fancy waxed cheddars - maybe tomorrow. The boxed chocolates only expired in Sept, we’ll test them after dinner.
To be fair my pantry has expired wasabi paste and some package curry pastes from when I was cooking slightly differently and was overly optimistic at a sale.
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Expiry dates are simply…a suggestion, haha.
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That would be a luxurious solution, but you never know with really bad weather, I guess. I do like having options!
Interesting - I heat with propane (baseboard hot water, demand water heater). Supplementing with 1 cord of wood last winter cut my propane costs in half but didn’t cost the difference in wood, and wood is quite expensive here. I don’t have a house blower for the stove though, and the stove heats the front of the house really well but the back of the house remains pretty chilly. (It’s ok, I don’t spend much time back there.) My house is really small and it would cost a lot to install a mini split, but I wonder if it would be worth it. I’ll probably never solely heat with wood. Luckily (at least so far) propane has not increased in price the way home heating oil has. 
This is what my parents did - a small generator to power the fridge, well pump, and I think, the bathroom outlets. Even a small generator is really expensive though!
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Yep. I think we got it on CL?
If your wood stove has enough flat surface, you may be able to use an eco-fan? After initial expense, $0 operating cost. The shape of our stove’s top/the soapstone liner make it impractical for us. Our old one had an even narrower top. And I wouldn’t use one in a house with small kids.
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I actually have an ecofan! It’s a really great idea, but my stove is super tiny (can only accomodate 12" logs in the firebox, it’s basically one of the smallest Morso on the market - my whole house is only 700 sq ft so anything bigger would have been massive overkill!) The ecofan I got actually doesn’t quite fit squarely at the back because the surface isn’t big enough! So I lose some efficiency there because I have to angle it, and it hangs off a bit and blows partially directly toward the pipe instead of past it. The stovepipe comes out the top, not the back. It does definitely help the circulate the air around instead of just pooling at the ceiling of that one room and making it really hot, just not enough to push enough air out of the room (it does somewhat, the kitchen and dining room achieve ok temps too, just not the back of the house). Mostly I just live in the living room in the winter. I am going to hang a small electronics fan (low powered, low speed) at the top of the doorway of that room to also help move the hot air out and to the rest of the house. If it seems to help I might put one in the hallway as well. 
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The first cheddar was probably still edible, but not enjoyable, so we have binned it.
The chocolate was enjoyable.
On topic learning- use your nice things while they are still nice
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I follow this woman on instagram and I like alot of her posts about finances. This one in particular was helpful for me. Everyone has different levels of comfort for their emergency fund but this gave me some ideas for my particular situation. We are going to settle on a 4 month income replacement emergency fund. Might be high for our situation but with the upcoming kid having more cash is going to bring peace of mind.
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I am so happy that I’m building up a freezer meal stash again. After my krewe’s parade on Saturday, we went to the parade afterparty which was at a bar that served nothing I could eat and I was hangry. Could’ve stopped somewhere in the VERY restaurant heavy neighborhood we were in but instead we went home and I heated up some leftover mushroom and leek quiche, sprinkled some cheese on it, hanger solved. YUM.
My goal is to build up a stash so that during carnival season when I’ll be going out more and have less time, I can just pull something healthy out of the freezer and not have to think about cooking.
So far in there I’ve got vegan red beans with fake sausage, black bean chocolate chili, some lentil-mushroom meatballs, I think still 1 piece of quiche, the bean/lentil chili I just made… hm, I need to put something in there that doesn’t involve beans. Oh, I might also have some spicy tofu and veg curry.
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All that food sounds so good!
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Everything came out well except the meatballs which were just ok but with enough sauce and toppings served over pasta are something I will eat.
Note to self. You don’t like brown lentils. Now that they are used up, do not buy more. (I think they may actually have been leftover lockdown stash!)
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