Pet Preparedness

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Prepare Your Pets for Disasters *

by Victoria Gorrell

Your pets are an important member of your family, so they need to be included in your emergency plan. To prepare for the unexpected follow these tips with your pets in mind:

  1. Make a plan
  2. Build an emergency kit
  3. Stay informed

Make a Plan

If you have a plan in place for you and your pets, you will likely encounter less difficulty, stress and worry when you need to make a decision during an emergency. If local officials ask you to evacuate, that means your pet should evacuate too. If you leave your pets behind, they may end up lost, injured or worse.

Things to include in your plan:

  • Have an evacuation plan for your pet. Many public shelters and hotels do not allow pets inside. Know a safe place where you can take your pets before disasters and emergencies happen.
  • Develop a buddy system. Plan with neighbors, friends or relatives to make sure that someone is available to care for or evacuate your pets if you are unable to do so.
  • Have your pet microchipped. Make sure to keep your address and phone number up-to-date and include contact information for an emergency contact outside of your immediate area.
  • Contact your local emergency management office, animal shelter or animal control office to get additional advice and information if you’re unsure how to care for your pet in case of an emergency.

If you plan to shelter in either the Plaza or the Manor, your pet must be in a pet carrier or kennel. There will be other pets at your shelter-in-place location. It if YOUR responsibility to care for your pet and have it under your supervision during the evacuation. Please have at least 48 hours of food and water for your pet.

 Build a Kit for Your Pet

Just as you do with your own emergency supply kit, think first about the basics for survival, such as food and water. Have two kits, one larger kit if you are sheltering in place and one lightweight version for if you need to evacuate.  Review your kits regularly to ensure that their contents, especially foods and medicines, are fresh.

Here are some items you may want to include in an emergency kit for your pet:

  • Food. Keep several days’ supply of food in an airtight, waterproof container.
  • Water. Store a water bowl and several days’ supply of water.
  • Medicine. Keep an extra supply of the medicine your pet takes on a regular basis in a waterproof container.
  • First aid kit. Talk to your veterinarian about what is most appropriate for your pet’s emergency medical needs.
  • Collar with ID tag and a harness or leash. Include a backup leash, collar and ID tag. Have copies of your pet’s registration information and other relevant documents in a waterproof container and available electronically
  • Traveling bag, crate or sturdy carrier, ideally one for each pet.
  • Grooming items. Pet shampoo, conditioner and other items, in case your pet needs some cleaning up.
  • Sanitation needs. Include pet litter and litter box (if appropriate), newspapers, paper towels, plastic trash bags and household chlorine bleach to provide for your pet’s sanitation needs.
  • A picture of you and your pet together. If you become separated from your pet during an emergency, a picture of you and your pet together will help you document ownership and allow others to assist you in identifying your pet.
  • Familiar items. Put favorite toys, treats or bedding in your kit. Familiar items can help reduce stress for your pet.

* Information from https://www.ready.gov/pets

Virtual Craft Fair

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Read more

What’s New in October

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Do you want to get a personal email notification of a new Complement issue or new material?   Email us at openinforvm@gmail.com and we will put you on the mailing list

Past articles are all on display;  If there is a “Load More” link at the bottom of the page, clicking it will bring up the older articles. 

EXTRA EXTRA EXTRA

See the Arts & Info section for late-breaking news on the upcoming Craft Fair and Silent Auction !!

 

Plus, updates and new materials have been added to the Coordinators’ Corner on the Prepare page.

 

NEWS & VIEWS

 

Emergency Power at Home: Why, What and How, by Joni Johnson
      – An electrifying article!  A real turn-on!

Readiness Review Reminder, by Bob Buddemeier
      – Do you know what’s in your go-bag?  Or where it is?

Bringing Lawn Bowling Back to Its Former Glory, by Joni Johnson
      – Maybe if the balls were spherical?

         in Big, Borrowed, or Both

3550:  the Portland Mirabella quarterly magazine (most recent issue)

Mirabella Monthly, Newsletter of the Seattle Mirabella (Current issue)

 

ARTS & INFO 

Silent Auction, by Joni Johnson  NEW
– Spend big, win big!

Virtual Craft Fair, by Connie Kent  NEW
– It turns real on Nov 1.

2021 Craft Fair Coming!, by Connie Kent
      – Stand by for a mid-month special edition!

RVM September – October Event & Entertainment Schedule

October Library Display, by Anne Newins
       – The play’s the thing!

What Goes Around, Comes Around, by Madge Walls
      – A novelist’s notes on writing a novel

Book Review:  The  Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, by Bonnie Tollefson

Nit-Wit Newz, by A. Looney
      – Squirrels, booze, and infrastructure
     

PREPARE

The entire Prepare page is being revised and updated — check back frequently

Pet Preparedness, by Vicki Gorrell
– “Let meowt onto the woof!”

Coordinators Corner — Reports, comments, Q&A, Final document drafts for review and comment
      – This month: Report on 10/06 Coordinators meeting (radio training, Safety Vests).  Information document drafts for review: Personnel backups; Communication Workshop plan; Preparedness Review and Great Shakeout

 

 

 

 

What Goes Around, Comes Around

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Finishing a Novel during Covid Time

By Madge Walls

My novels have routinely taken six years to finish. Why? Working fulltime, many other distractions, and sheer laziness. Add in my favorite activity of reading other author’s novels, and you get the picture.

When Covid-19 hit in the spring of 2019 and Rogue Valley Manor closed down all group activities and began delivering all meals to our doors, we had to make peace with being basically shut-ins. How, then, to keep busy?

There in my computer lay my unfinished work, The Visiting Girl, inspired by the early life of movie star Katharine Hepburn’s mother, a suffragist who’d had to fight her guardian/uncle to attend Bryn Mawr College according to her late mother’s will and wishes.

I’d become bored with the novel after working on it for those six years. But when I went back to it, I realized I had unwittingly set the tale in 1900 through 1923 (reflecting the elder Kate’s young life), when my characters’ lives would have been impacted by the Spanish flu pandemic, The Great War, Prohibition, and the women’s suffrage movement.

As I dove deeper into my research, I saw more and more how our life today seems an echo of that era: our own Covid-19 pandemic; the wars of our adulthood—Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan; efforts to prohibit mask and vaccine mandates; and women’s rights that we are still fighting for. I was blown away by the similarities—do we never learn anything?

Guiding my characters (or having them guide me!) through their perilous times a century ago in Philadelphia and Portland led me to take a deeper look at our own dilemmas. The exercise was fascinating and opened my eyes to our recent history as never before (how bored I was with US History in high school!). Not only did I finish the novel, but I gained a whole new and evolving understanding of NOW.

Big thanks to Joanie Fotheringham for the perfect title of this essay: What Goes Around, Comes Around.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Editor’s Note: Copies of Madge’s new novel will be available at the Craft Fair on November 1 in the Auditorium.

2021 Craft Fair Coming

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You are invited

What: 2021 RVM Craft Fair

When: 1 November 2021Craft

Where: Manor Auditorium

When: 9:30 am to 2:30 pm

What: Fiber Arts (crocheting, knitting, quilting, sewing); Books, Glassware, Greeting Cards, Jewelry, Photography, Polished Stones, Miniatures, and Woodworking

Watch for the Virtual Fair on this site in mid-October.

See samples of crafts for sale in the Manor Auditorium display cabinet in mid-October.

Silent Auction in the Manor Lobby the last week of October.

No R.S.V.P. necessary

RVM Campus Evacuation Guidelines for Fire

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This presents information from the “All Residents” memo and attachments from Stan Solmonson, 8/19/21

The memo and the attached Exhibits 1-3 are as distributed.  Exhibits 4 (RPG Coordinators and areas of responsibility) and 5 (RVM Neighborhood Coordinator Maps) have been updated to the most recent versions.

Download Entire PDF with updates:  VIEW/DOWNLOAD

Component parts:

Cover memo       VIEW/DOWNLOAD PDF

Evacuation Protocol (Exhibit 1)     VIEW/DOWNLOAD PDF

Communication Protocol (Exhibit 2)     VIEW/DOWNLOAD PDF

Resident Preparedness Group (RPG) Summary (Exhibit 3)     VIEW      DOWNLOAD PDF

RPG Coordinators and Areas (Exhibit 4 UPDATED)     VIEW/DOWNLOAD PDF
— SEE NOTE AT BOTTOM OF PAGE

RVM Neighborhood Coordinator Maps (Exhibit 5 UPDATED)
North Village (Areas 1-3, 11)     VIEW/DOWNLOAD PDF
South Village (Areas 4-10)     VIEW/DOWNLOAD PDF

 

NOTE:  The Coordinator information linked above omits some personal contact information.  The complete listings, in both PDF and Excel Spreadsheet form, are posted on myRVM.  To access RPG information posted there, do one of the following:

1.  Keeping this page open, also open myRVM, then click
https://a.mwapp.net/p/mweb_ws.v?id=82274946&c=[NT]102121234_120674598

2.   Copy the above link, open myRVM, and paste the link into its address bar.

 

IN REVIEW

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This column provides access to RPG documents that are in the final draft stage, and are being made available to residents and RVM staff for final review and comment before they are adopted and posted in the appropriate section.  Comments or questions should be directed to rpgrvm@gmail.com.

RPG Functional Reliability: Personnel Backups  Draft for Review 10/02/2021  To view or download the PDF, CLICK HERE

This document describes the need for having backup replacements for absent coordinators, and suggests approaches to addressing the need.

Readiness Review Reminder

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By Bob Buddemeier

Autumn is here, and we are almost out of wildfire season.  That means you can take a break from worrying about how Slithers, your pet rat-snake, would adapt to being evacuated to the Plaza.  Does it mean you can take a break from worrying altogether?  No way!  Winter is coming.

Let’s suppose you are an outdoorsy aesthete, waiting eagerly for the first snow to come so you can drive up into the back country to feast your eyes on the winter landscape.  It does, and you do, and the car slides off the road into a narrow ravine with no cell coverage.  “Aha,” you think proudly, “I have my Car-Go-Bag in the trunk.”  So you scramble around, open it up, and pull out — a broad-brimmed hat, some sunscreen, and two extra water bottles.  Uh-oh.

Or maybe you are the homebody type, planning to stay snug and warm inside all winter.  So when the precocious 8-year-old in Fresno who got a laptop for Christmas crashes the entire U.S. power grid, you decide to go to bed to keep warm.  But that little light on the electric blanket control doesn’t go on.  Think!  Did you bring any real blankets, or were those all downsized?  Uh-oh.

Moral:  Eternal vigilance is the price of preparedness, with organization, self-awareness, and other very scarce commodities mixed into the price along with vigilance

But, FEAR NOT! The Residents’ Preparedness Group (RPG), with complicity of the RVM Emergency Preparedness Task Force, has devised a plan for keeping all of us somewhat ready to survive the next earthquake, wildfire, power outage, or other misadventure, foreseeable or unforeseen.

The Plan:  Every 6 months, Fall and Spring, we’ll have a Readiness Review week.  The selected times are (1) the week containing the 3rd Thursday in October (the Great ShakeOut – more on that below), and (2) the week containing April 15 (Tax day – considered a disaster by many).  RPG and RVM will be reviewing their own programs, but especially reaching out to residents with reminders, information updates, demonstrations, advice and assistance with emergency preparations, and for those interested, classes and exercises.  Your local coordinator (the neighbor in the lime-green safety vest) will be in touch.

Upcoming – the week of the Great Shakeout (shakeout.org/Oregon/) – October 17-23, with the actual Shakeout on 10/21/21, at 10:21 a.m.   We expect everyone to luxuriate in the expanded significance of the whole week, but to focus down on the core event – The Great ShakeOut is an international promotion of earthquake awareness and safety.  Any number can (and do) play.

Here are the rules:  pay attention because we are in the area of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which is thought to be ripe for a Great or Very Great Earthquake just about any old time.  So, we are going to simulate a serious earthquake beginning at 10:21 and lasting for 4 minutes or so (this is not one of your quick-and-dirty California quakes).  You are supposed to take the appropriate action for your location and condition at the time.

First, if you are lucky and attentive, you feel a very noticeable but not devastating shaking.  That is your friend the p-wave arriving to let you know that in not more than a minute, the big bad s-wave will arrive and shake the crap out of everything.

Whatever you feel first, ACT!  Inside, DROP, COVER, AND HOLD.  Anywhere, get away from things likely to fall on you, such as tall furniture, overpasses, power lines, breaking windows, etc.  If you’re not sure of what to do or how to do it – well, that’s why we have these days and weeks.  Find out.

The following linked references are available on both the myRVM Emergency Preparedness page, and on The Complement/Prepare.  Both sites have other information as well.

Recommended Earthquake Safety Actions  What to do when it hits.

Earthquake Preparedness Guide — Disabilities  Not limited to people with disabilities – preparation advice is good for everyone.

 

Book Review –  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

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  by Bonnie Tollefson

Book Review –  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, Laura Imai Messina, The Overlook Press, 2021

A few months ago a fellow resident said to me with a subtle curl of the lip and a wrinkle to the nose, “Eww, you read series fiction.”  Yes I do.  I enjoy the continuing story of the characters and reading books that feel comfortable.  Sometimes the characters develop and occasionally the author does.  Series can be found in almost every genre of fiction, so it is not as tho I read only mysteries.  However, in recognition of her tastes, this quarter I went to the RVM library to find a book to review that was not part of a series or by an author known for series work, and I found a gem.  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina is a novel set in Japan, written in Italian, translated into English.  The author is Italian, born and raised in Rome, who went to Japan to improve her Japanese.  Fifteen years later she still lives in Japan with a husband, two children and a job teaching Italian.

Yuri, a main character in the book, became the host of a call-in radio show in Tokyo after losing her mother and young daughter in the March 11, 2011 tsunami.  She hears one evening about a garden with a phone booth where one can talk to the dead.  The Wind Phone helps many people deal with the loss of loved ones.  This is a book about grief, a book about hope, and a book about love.  It can be a quick read or savored, but it contains something for everyone.  The author includes the information on research conducted on how many hugs are required in a day for survival, as well as acknowledging that the truth is “that love is a miracle.  Even the second time around, even when it comes to you by mistake.”  I won’t include a spoiler about what happens to Yuri, but since hope and love are components of the story you might guess. Near the end of the book “Yuri came to understand that there was always joy somewhere within unhappiness.”

The March 11 tsunami was an actual event just as the Bell Gradia garden and the Wind Phone are real.  In the author’s note Laura Imai Messina says “For me the Wind Phone is mainly this: a metaphor that suggests how precious it is to hold on tight to joy as well as pain. That even when we are confronted by the subtractions, the things that life takes from us, we have to open ourselves up to the many additions it can offer too.”  An important lesson for us all.

The book can be found at both the RVM library and the Jackson County Public Library.

October Library Display

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by Anne Newins

This month’s display will feature fiction and non-fiction books about actors.  Why are people interested in actors’ lives?  It seems to me that when young, one reason many people are curious about actors is because it gives them vicarious pleasure.  Most of us are not simultaneously rich, good-looking, and famous.

However, by the time actors have been in the business long enough to have biographies written about them, our interest in them may have changed because we have aged ourselves.  It is hard to believe that a seasoned actors  like Audrey Hepburn, Michael Caine, Robin Williams, or Ingrid Bergman would not have had challenges, some sort of artistic insight, or viewpoints different from our own as well as unusual life experiences.

Fictional work about actors gives an author tremendous leeway in terms of character development, usually skewing towards their flaws.  After all, who wants to read a novel about a boring, nine to five sort of person?  Suspense writers are drawn to actors, including popular authors like Jonathan Kellerman and Michael Connelly.

This month’s display also will include biographies about Michael J. Fox, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, novels by Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, Kristin Hannah, Stuart Woods, and many others.

The display table is located near the main entrance of the library.