Provisioning Again

When we were getting ready to leave Florida, and I was provisioning, there wasn't really time to do it right.

To do it right, you need to make a plan, understand how much space you have, how long you are going to be 'out', and plan how much food to buy.

As you buy it and store it, you have to keep track of what's where. When you buy 2 months worth of food at a time, it's pretty important to do proper planning, as well as have a 'stowage plan'.

At that time, I was really rusty, and not very familiar with Soggy Paws. And we were kind of pinched for time. So I just sorta winged it... I went to the Commissary at Patrick every day for about 5 days, and bought a piled-high cart load. And I just crammed it in the lockers that Dave pointed out to me, pretty much 'willy nilly'. I just kept buying, seat of the pants, until there wasn't any more room aboard. (I did have a little experience, from cruising before).

Dave also had a bunch of stuff in boxes from his storage area that either came his way from his Boy Scout Charter days or bought in 2005 when he last thought he was leaving soon for parts unknown. So that added to the 'mystery mix' aboard. (I'm still finding stuff I didn't buy, and probably won't use, in fairly large quantities).

So, bottom line, there WAS no storage plan on Soggy Paws when we left in May.

This time, I wanted to do it properly. No excuses now, time-wise. I'm retired, right?

So I started by pulling every last thing out of every deep dark locker, inventorying it, and starting from scratch. Soggy Paws has a lot more, deeper, storage space than I had on Island Time.

I put my inventory directly in an Excel spreadsheet. It took me about 4 days to get thru all the food lockers, write everything down, and make a list of what more to buy.

I was nearly done...buying and stowing... and keeping track of it all... until last night... when I was trying to clean junk off Dave's computer... to install something new.

I guess I accidentally deleted my 'What's Where' spreadsheet.

When I couldn't find it this morning, I tried in vain to recover it. I tried 2 different 'undelete' programs, but since I'd installed a bunch of stuff after deleting it, it is apparently gone forever.

*(&^%$!!

I hadn't gotten around to backing it up to another commputer or a thumb drive. :p

*Sigh*

So I have to go back thru the lockers and re-inventory everything AGAIN.

I COULD just go back to 'willy nilly' mode, but I found so much stuff that I didn't remember I had, when I was inventorying lockers, that I really want some kind of record of what's where.

I probably won't keep it up over time, but when I'm trying to figure out where that package of Brownie Mix is, at least I'll have some idea of where to start looking.