I spent the next couple of days getting the cabin supplies organized. Most of the canned food was still in cases in the garage where I had put it. I had to build some shelves in the basement first. I had all the materials, some was left over from the cabin, and others I had brought up just recently. I made the shelves out of two by fours and plywood, which didn't take long.
I made quite a few trips from the garage to the basement, putting the food and other supplies on the shelves. The basement was kept cool because it was underground, and I had placed some good insulation around the whole cabin, so there wasn't much chance of freezing during the winter.
I also got the water barrels down in the basement, and filled them up with water from the well. During those first few days, there weren't many problems with the electrical supply, so I used it as much as I could around the cabin.
I had a good supply of water from the well, but I was a bit worried about the reliability of the electrical power. There was a stream close by the cabin, and a small spring that was on the hill right in back of the cabin. The spring had a good supply of clean water, so I spent some time running a pipe from the spring down to the cabin, which gave me a good supply of gravity-fed water for the cabin. I used some PVC pipe, wrapped it with some foam insulation, and buried it in the ground to protect it from critters and cold weather.
I spent some quality time with the chain saw (noise wasn't a problem yet), cutting down a few dead trees into some logs for firewood. I had a log splitter that I had used before, but since I had a limited supply of fuel, I also became intimately familiar with the axe and chopping block. I wore some heavy duty gloves while splitting the wood, but I still got a few good blisters. I was a bit out of shape, so I also found a few new muscles that I didn't know I had before, and they were sure complaining.
I was used to working with my hands, but on a keyboard, not an axe or shovel or other tools. But there were things that needed to be done, so I did them. By the time the sun went down each day (well, the first few days it was a bit before the sun went down), I was pretty tired, so I fixed a quick simple dinner and went to bed early.
I spent about ten days getting things organized for my survival. I was so busy working around the cabin that I didn't have time to listen to the radio for any news. I thought about turning on the radio, but part of me didn't really want to know what was happening out there. I had enough indication of the problems people were having when I listened to the radio the first day at the cabin just after the Problem started. All indications were that things were only going to get worse, and I didn't need to know about it that bad.
But at the end of a bit more than three weeks of working to get the cabin set up for my survival, I started to get a bit curious. So that evening, as I sat down to dinner, I turned on the radio. That night, the electricity was on, which didn't happen every night. I tuned the radio to the Sacramento all-news station. It was about 5:30 at night, and the news was on.
And it wasn't good.