Long-time readers of this blog may have noticed that new posts have been very sporadic over the last couple of years. A series of issues kept arising, including the pandemic and various personal matters that resulted in there always being a bunch of matters that needed to be addressed ASAP and always had to take priority to writing blog articles. That’s ok, writing a blog is something that can go in fits and starts… however, the same issues have affected staying up to date with my quake preparations and making sure emergency supplies like food and medicines aren’t expiring. And that’s the reason for me mentioning all this: it underscores that there will always be reasons to put off taking quake precautions or keeping them up to date, and there will sometimes be reasons that make such postponements unavoidable, until the point is reached that the risk to the future of putting them off starts to outweigh the risk at the present of not doing them now. Where that line is, is a matter for personal choice and priorities, of course.
I’m distressingly late in checking my food supplies to replace any that are no longer good, and as I reported the last time I replaced my expired supplies, this is a real issue! Some stored foods really do go bad, there was the amazing exploding vitamin pill incident, and even the plugs for emergency power of mobile devices become defunct! The problem is that earthquakes can hit at inconvenient times. And lest you figure you typically keep enough food around and usually are not near the end of your prescription refill cycle, remember that quakes can occur when you are low on food and medicine. In fact, Murphy’s Law would seem to dictate that this is exactly when the next large quake will occur! After all, how many times have you gotten a bad cold right when it was time to buy more Kleenex?
“Fortune favors the prepared mind” (yes, yes, I know, there are different translations), to which Murphy laughs and says, “I eat procrastination for breakfast.”
So one purpose of writing this article, along with needing to finally break the silence and get these articles flowing again, is to goad myself into pulling out the emergency supplies and doing the expiration check that I have not done since early 2019 (too long!) even though I have a bunch of other things I need to do. Hopefully, some of you will also realize you have been saying about basic earthquake precautions that “it’s on my to-do list” for the past 10 years.
The other purpose: one of the matters that kept me from blog writing was the passing away of my mother Joyce about half a year ago, after the better part of a year of many health problems. It’s ironic because she was the main inspiration for a lot of my insights about quake safety, the talks I give (which have recently also been sporadic), and the blog articles that I write. She went through the 1971 Sylmar quake in the San Fernando Valley, along with me and our family. Then she lost her apartment in the 1994 Northridge quake, and went through the whole ordeal that those who have seen my talk know about, including being stuck in her apartment until being freed, and losing just about everything. She moved to nice safe Simi Valley, where earthquakes don’t seem to cause as much of a problem, and ironically ended up having to evacuate a few times due to wildfires; then ended up in an assisted living facility in her final year where she had to deal with COVID outbreaks. (There’s no perfect solution to avoiding earthquakes.) It was seeing all the stuff she had stuck down to surfaces in her Simi Valley apartment that initially made me think she was over-reacting, but then got me seriously thinking about the issue and realizing how sensible it was.
During her health issues last year, at one point when she was a bit out of it due to the health problem du jour, she asked me out of the blue without context “is this the end of the blog?” I thought she might have been a little disoriented since we had been talking about something else, but then realized that even in her state, she must have noticed the absence of Quaketips update e-mails. I assured her that it was not the end of the blog, and indeed, it isn’t.
Next time, I’ll be reporting on my field trip to the earthquake supplies section of a major department store in Tokyo.
>>back to blog