In which I obsess

As a resident of southern California, I recently decided it might be prudent to care about earthquake preparedness.  Now, the building I live in was built in 1941 and seems to be in fairly decent shape, so I'm not really concerned about that.  Check! 

I'm not worried about food - I have enough gorgonzola and 5 year gouda to keep me busy for a couple of days, and after that, I won't have to worry about going to the bathroom.  So, check, check!  

The one thing I am worried about is water, so on Sunday I purchased the requisite one gallon per person per day for three days = three gallons of water. When I got home, the dilemma began.  The logical place to keep them is the kitchen, but where in the kitchen?  In the cabinets above the counters or down below?  What if I put them up top and then the ceiling caves in and I can't get to them?  What if they are in the bottom cabinets and those get blocked by debris?  What if I can't get into the kitchen at all?  Should I keep the water in a different room - what about the bathroom - in the closet?  Maybe I should get six more gallons of water, three for the closet, three for the bathroom.  Keep some under the bed.  Right.  Pretty soon my apartment, filled with plastic jugs of water, is going to look like some bizarre art installation in Chelsea.  One day I won't show up for work and they will find me prostrate on my living room floor buried under the nine hundred water bottles of water I had to store on the bookshelf JUST IN CASE.

These are the kinds of things I worry about.  And this is me medicated, folks.

Last night, I watched Nightline and they were recapping the day's events in China where thousands of people, including many children, were killed in an earthquake.  After that report was over, I finished reading Elie Wiesel's Night and then laid there thinking how lucky, lucky, lucky I was, even if it was only for that moment, to be safe, warm, comfortable and hydrated in my own bed.