In June 2012, a derecho was on its way to Virginia. I had never heard of a derecho, but I knew enough to heed the warnings I heard on the news. I needed to beef up my emergency kit, and – as with most things I have to do on my list – I was waiting until the last minute to do this.

My kit wasn’t completely lacking at the time. I had plenty of bottled water for everyone in the house, but my brother-in-law was visiting. We weren’t prepared for the extra body. I took inventory of everything else and learned that my spare batteries had been stolen from the kit by my daughter who used them for an experiment to learn if charging the dirt in a potted plant would make it grow faster and bigger. (It didn’t, FYI.)

So I grabbed my keys and headed out to the grocery store to see what supplies I could manage to find on such short notice. News outlets were reporting shortages of everything across the region. I had no luck at the two grocery stores near my house for either water or batteries. I had what I thought was a genius idea and walked across the parking lot to the Radio Shack to see if I my luck would improve. Apparently there were a lot of geniuses in the parking lot that day.

I was starting to get frustrated, and standing in the parking lot wasn’t getting me anywhere. As I stared blindly across the street trying to figure out my next move, I realized I was staring at a store whose entire inventory ran on batteries. A store that sold batteries to go with said inventory to ensure its customers could avoid temper tantrums later. A giant toy store!

I walked into the store and was immediately rewarded for my creativity. There next to the checkout aisle stood an entire wall – floor to ceiling – of glorious black and gold batteries. I wanted to cry. I grabbed what I needed, checked out, and then immediately posted to my social networks where my local friends could find this rare commodity.

Inspired by my creativity and luck, I started thinking about how to solve my bottled water problem. I thought back to a recent snowstorm that left the stores out of milk and the good luck I had finding it at a gas station. Yes, it was priced higher than the grocery store, but I was going to have milk. So I headed over to the gas station, and EUREKA! there was water. Smaller bottles instead of gallons, and at a much higher price, but there was water.

There are two morals to this story. The first is to make sure your emergency kit is always well stocked. It’s important to check this when the skies are clear, and there is no disaster in sight. After this event, I set up a quarterly task in my productivity app to do just this. The other is that no matter how much you might try to prepare for a disaster or bad weather, sometimes what you have is just not enough. Having a houseguest made it necessary to ensure we had more supplies on hand. Our “Plus 1” rule for our emergency kit means we have enough for every member of our family – plus one.

When disaster strikes, many people find that their plans have gaps or their kits are short a few critical items. If this ever happens to you, don’t panic.  Instead, focus on what you do have, be prepared to get creative, and remember that there’s probably more than one place to get the things you need.