Alas Poor Yorick, I Knew Him Well

There was an interesting question posed on Slashdot today about what you would take with you in the event you had to leave your home in a hurry. This being Slashdot, a website dedicated to “News for Nerds”, the question was in the context of items being converted into an electronic format and saved on an USB thumb drive.

Since I’m betting that a good portion of the family who reads this blog doesn’t know what a thumb drive is and certainly doesn’t own one, that particular point is of minor consequence.

But it’s a subject worth a thought, given recent Hurricane disasters in Louisiana and Texas (both relatively close to my families), wildfires in California, Terrorist attacks on the East coast and abroad, Tsunami’s in Asia--which, too, are a very real threat on the West coast--oh and let us not forget that Tornado Alley passes right over both my parents houses. Then there’s the really obscure catastrophic events like the two volcanoes I live within blast radius of (Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier), locust plagues, nuclear or biological attacks, meteors, alien invasion…man you could give yourself ulcers thinking about all the ways you might suddenly get splatted.

How real is this stuff to me? Well, an interesting side note, history’s fastest recorded wind at 318 mph was caused by the May 3rd, 1999 Oklahoma tornado that started just miles from my parents house; in fact they watched the funnel cloud touch down from their side porch (if I’m remembering the story correctly). The city I live in right now was covered in Ash from the 1980 Mt. St. Helens blast. My wife and I were in the 6.8 magnitude earthquake on Feb 28th, 2001, centered just 2 miles from where we were at school; I was stranded on the Island of Oahu during the 2001 Terrorist attacks that grounded all aircraft; I was in San Diego, California during the 2003 wildfires and could see the flames from the hotel where I was staying. Aunt Patti has lived through numerous hurricanes during her Florida days. My old hometown has flooded at least twice that I can remember, and Texas? Texas is prone to hurricanes, tornados, floods, and yes-even earthquakes! You crazy in-laws...

So what do you take with you if you have to run on short notice? Well, reading reports of Louisiana/Mississippi/Texas survivors, backing up family photos is the number one thing that should be on your list. A scanner attachment for your home computer can be purchased for under a hundred dollars at your local office supply store. Scanning photos at the highest resolution setting may be time consuming, but not only is it a great way of backing up all your precious memories, it’s also a way of sharing them with other family members. DVD storage is probably your best medium as of today but CD format will work. While you’re at it, why not scan in your Marriage license, birth certificates, family trees, and anything else you think is worth having after the unthinkable. But remember, they have to be transferred to some sort of storage medium (like a CD or DVD) cause if they’re still in the computer at the bottom of the levee, then you’re never getting them back.

Another thing I noticed, at least at my parents house, is that just about every important phone number they have is posted on the kitchen wall next to the phone… Are you the same? Would you remember the phone numbers to call all your loved ones to tell them you’re okay if that phone number cheat-sheet suddenly disappeared? Here’s a trick that isn’t full proof, but is kinda handy in a lot of non-emergency situations too: just about every internet email service (Yahoo!, gmail, Hotmail, etc.) has a contacts or addresses function; start keeping backups of your correspondence / contacts list on one of these services and then if you’re at work or out of town and you want to get that phone number you can just log on to your email account. And for all of you who were like me and keep everything in your cell phone, let me tell you about the time my lifeline spent 6 hours at the bottom of the Skokomish river. Those things aren’t bullet proof and if I haven’t called you in a while, now you know why!

You know, come to think of it, I started this thought in consideration of mega-catastrophic events, but the same applies to a house fire or even a robbery. Maybe it’s time for me to start making backups of all my important memories!

Just a thought.

:jnl