What I’m Doing: June 2026

Here’s a fair question after last week’s piece: do those eight projects really fit in a weekend? They do. I know because we did them.

“What I’m Doing” will be a recurring feature here. A straight up look at our own journey, our plans, what worked, and what didn’t. We’ve conducted our resilience assessment, carved out a budget, and prioritized how we’re going to spend our available time. This is where I show the work behind the writing, what went smoothly and what I’d been putting off, with the grade I’d honestly give myself.

For this week, we are finally getting around to fixing some foundational holes in our basic resilience that needed to be addressed.

Eight weekend projects

We literally took our own advice and worked through the projects from last week’s Field Notes. For a lot of them it was the classic ‘well, that’s pretty much done’ or ‘I can do that on the fly.’ Neither statement was entirely true. Here’s our status.

1. Develop a family emergency plan. Probably the best ninety minutes you can spend for peace of mind in a crisis. None of the answers were difficult, but we’d never spent the time to discuss, decide, and document the when, the where, and the who.

Cost: 12 sheets of paper and some ink. · Time: a rewarding evening documenting important decisions.

2. Find and label your shutoffs. Again, basic stuff. And again, undone. Walking the family through where the water main shutoff was located proved to be time well spent. Instead of expecting them to dig through my workbench, we’ve placed a dedicated wrench at each shutoff. The electrical panel was already labeled, but we moved the snow tires that were stacked in front of it for easier access.

Cost: $16.88 (Lowe’s gas-and-water shutoff tool). · Time: under an hour.

3. Pack a go-bag. Well, this is getting embarrassing. Sure, I keep tools and recovery straps and foul-weather gear and blankets and water in my rig all the time, but we didn’t each have a dedicated go-bag in the house for the things you aren’t thinking about while you’re rounding up pets and family ahead of a wildfire. So we dedicated two daypacks from the gear closet and filled them with what we had on hand: food bars, a flashlight, a rain jacket, a beanie, sun hat, sunscreen, bug spray, a mylar survival blanket, a lithium battery pack (charged), water bottles (1 L each, plus a water filter), and cash from a run to the ATM.

Cost: nothing. We had it all, just not assembled. · Time: almost two hours if you include the trip to the ATM for cash.

Note: not in our go-bag is a first aid kit. We keep separate, dedicated kits for home and travel.

4. Set aside two weeks of water. OK, partial credit on this one. We have water filters, and I know how to open the drain valve on the water heater, so that’s 40 gallons of available, hopefully potable, water. Against FEMA’s standard of one gallon per person per day for two weeks, the two of us should be fine. What I hadn’t done before was actually open that valve to confirm two things: that it would open, and that rusty sludge didn’t pour out the bottom. Both came back good. Then we filled the water jerry cans we already keep for camping and rafting; another five jugs at five gallons each. That puts us at 65 gallons. Better than nothing, and we’ll expand on our plans in a future ‘What I’m Doing.’

Cost: free (had the water jerry cans). · Time: < 1 hr.

5. Build a two-week food buffer. Technically we already have this, if you add up the canned, dehydrated, and freeze-dried food on hand. The raised beds are already putting out fresh vegetables. In addition, we expanded the larder two ways: bought four cases of canned black beans and a box of tuna, and plugged the garage freezer back in for more frozen reserves (and we have a small generator with extra fuel in the event of a power outage).

Notes: we eat black beans and tuna regularly, so it’s easy to cycle through and keep it from expiring. And the cost of running the garage freezer is more than offset by being able to buy during sales, in bulk.

Cost: essentially nothing, it’s just some of our groceries bought ahead. · Time: our usual grocery run with a fuller cart.

6. Build a clean-air room. This one was unnecessary. We already had HEPA filters in the furnace and a separate standalone HEPA unit from past smoke seasons. We did confirm we have spare filters on hand.

7. Meet the neighbors. I’ll give myself a C- here. We know a handful of neighbors by name, and I went out of my way to introduce myself to another while walking the dogs this week. I don’t have phone numbers yet, and certainly nothing formal like a tool-sharing network. But I have two goals for the summer: meet three more neighbors, beyond ‘hi,’ (an actual conversation with names); and host an end-of-summer neighborhood BBQ. For real.

Cost: nothing (until the BBQ – I’ll report back in September). · Time: Zero—already on a dog walk.

8. Build a small power backup. Also already in place. We don’t have whole-house solar or battery backup. I can’t quite justify it, because our roof orientation runs east-west. With southern exposure you get solar gain all day and all year; with an east-west roof you only get half your generation in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. Instead, in the event of an outage we run a small (1000W) generator to keep the fridge and freezer going, and our camper has a couple of solar panels, a lithium battery, a camp stove, a fridge, and a small AC unit. If the power goes out and the heat is unbearable, we can head to higher elevation and enjoy a few days of mountain air.

9. Extra credit, clear the five-foot ember zone. This one earns a ‘NEEDS ATTENTION.’ Our house sits inside a Wildland-Urban Interface zone. Our neighbor across the street is just outside it, but that line means nothing to a fire. We live in a drought-prone area that sees wildfires every year, and the cost of our homeowner’s insurance has tripled in the last five years. I have a plan, taking down some tall junipers against the house (dry tinder) and adding water storage, but that’s its own Field Note. For now I’ll just admit I’ve procrastinated on pulling the mulch and flammable plants out of the first five feet. That’s next month. I promise.

None of this is dramatic. A few sheets of paper, a $17 wrench set, two daypacks, a row of jugs, and a not so great report card. That’s the point. Resilience is mostly unglamorous maintenance, done a little ahead of time.

What are you working on?

Later this summer: our approach to Fire, Power, and the Numbers.