Getting prepped

 Getting ready. One event for sure,  but maybe two. 

It’s possible that we’re gonna get another hurricane here in New Orleans. So like anyone with any awareness, I’m getting equipment overhauled and groceries stocked in. This nice old dual-fuel lantern is part of the kit. I picked it up years ago in broken state from some garage sale or flea market and never did anything with it. It got packed away and forgotten about in my attic where it sat for years until I recently rediscovered it and ordered the missing parts for it. And here it is, lighting in the first try after probably a decade or more in pieces. Gotta love these Coleman products. 

I used to collect these whenever I found one for sale cheap, figuring they’d be handy in power-out emergencies. I’ve used them a lot both back in West  Virginia and here in New Orleans when the weather has put the regular lights off, and being a pack rat, I’d amassed over a dozen of them over time. When Hurricane Ida came last year, I offered them to neighbors who had no alternative light sources but probably not surprisingly, the kind of people who live in hurricane-prone areas without back-up gear tend to not want to learn how to operate devices like white gas lanterns, and I was able to loan out exactly none of them. 

I’ve just gone through them all and I only need two in my house; one for the bedroom and one for the living room/kitchen. So I prepped three, giving me a spare, just in case.  The rest are getting packed for the other event, which is actually a certainty. In roughly six weeks, Merida and I will begin to move our stuff out west and set up our new homestead out at the mines. And it’s there that these lanterns will all find a use, cleaned and overhauled and placed at various locations underground. For my mines out there didn’t have electric lights back in the day and they sure don’t have any now. The nearest active power line is miles away. So these old lanterns, many long-ignored, will now find new utility lighting up areas of my mine workings. I’m kinda glad now that none of my non-prepping neighbors wanted any of them last year.