07:22 – We’re still hard at work on building science kit inventory. Sales are still slowish, at around one kit per calendar day, but that’s starting to pick up as we get later into July. In August and into September, we’ll start having days when we’ll be processing orders for anything from five or eight kits a day to two or three dozen a day, which is why we’re building finished-goods stock now. Some days in August, we won’t have time to do anything except ship kits.
Part of my prepping is researching relocation issues. One of the things that I looked at yesterday was shooting ranges in the Jefferson area. I found one, the Ashe County Wildlife Club. It sounded great, until I looked at the membership application. One of the required fields in the form was my NRA membership number. I’ve never been an NRA member, because I consider the NRA to be far too soft on gun-control issues. They accept, tacitly and sometimes explicitly, such outrages as the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA), the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the restrictions on concealed weapons in the North Carolina Constitution and those of other states. They’re even okay with prohibiting convicted criminals from possessing firearms, which is a gaping hole that the government can easily use to restrict the right of all citizens to keep and bear arms.
But I could live with that if I had to. I’d bite my tongue and join the NRA, or perhaps Barbara could join and I could shoot as her guest. What really annoyed me was their requirements for members. Stuff like helping to maintain the property is fine and reasonable. But they also want me to pledge to “promote and support” “The Pledge of Allegiance and open, Public Prayer as they relate to our Club Meetings and Events.” Seriously? I have big-time problems with that. I’ll happily pledge allegiance to the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, both as written, but not to their flag and certainly not to the delusion that the United States are “one nation, under god”. That’s the equivalent of asking an observant Jew to eat pork as a condition of membership.
Fortunately, the Ashe County ham radio club has no such policies, and is quite active in ARES and similar emergency radio service groups. I suspect a lot of the folks in the ham radio club are also involved with emergency management at the county and local level, and would be people I want to get to know anyway.
I really want to do a complete inventory of our stored food, but I just don’t have time right now. My guess is that it’ll have to wait until we relocate. Putting all this stuff back on shelves in our new home will be a convenient time to count everything. Someone suggested bar-coding, but that’s overkill even for me.
I’ve been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction lately, from probably 40 or 50 new-to-me authors. One lesson I’ve learned is that most of them are junk–written by author wannabes who don’t have even basic grammatical skills. Seriously, many of them need to repeat elementary school English. And even those who do write with at least basic competence are usually hopeless when it comes to details like plot, dialog, and so on. Some months ago I read One Second After and criticized the author for his lack of skill. Since then, I’ve found that his skills are, while still pathetic, head and shoulders above those of most PA novelists.
Another lesson I’ve learned. It used to be that when I read the first of a series and liked it, I’d go grab the rest of the series all at once. No more. A high percentage of these PA authors who manage to do a reasonably good job on their first books–and this is incredible to me–actually go downhill on later books. For example, the first book in the 299 Days series was just okay, but showed promise. I assumed the author would get better in his second and subsequent books. Not even close. They get worse, and the more he writes the worse he gets. So now, I read the first book and grab the second if the first is passable. Literally half a dozen or more times already I’ve found the the second book is worse than the first.
None of these guys even approach the good PA novels from the 80’s and earlier, but there are still a few who show some promise, notably Steve Konkoly, Angery American, and (so far; I’m 50% in to his first book) Thomas Sherry. Like almost all of their competitors, these guys still get hung up on equipment, going into great detail. Instead of saying, “He picked up his rifle,” they’ll go on for paragraphs (or even pages, literally) filled with details about the make and model, the brand, capacity, and construction material of the magazine, the type of red-dot sight installed, the type of ammunition including bullet weight, and on and on. Like good science, good writing should be parsimonious. These guys are anything but.
16:24 – We just got back from West Jefferson. We found a house that suits both of us and told our agent to put in an offer for it. We’re offering about 75% of the asking price, but the asking price is far above market, so our offer is reasonable.
The house is smaller than our current house, 3 bedrooms and 2 full baths with just under 1,900 square feet of living space on one floor. There’s also a basement of the same size that’s fully below grade. Barbara says that’s mine, and it provides plenty of room for the business, long-term food storage, and other stuff. The stairs to the basement are the widest I’ve ever seen in a residence. They must be five feet wide. The house sits on about 1.2 reasonably flat acres with two outbuildings.
The only downside is that it has an oil-heated boiler with hot water heat and no air conditioning, but there’s room in the basement if we want to install duct work for a heat pump. Interestingly, there’s what appears to be a cut-over switch for a generator, although there’s no pad. There are also hundreds of empty, clean canning jars on shelves in the basement. There’s also a large ducted firebox in the basement that has one duct running to either end of the house to provide heat through floor grills. It looks to me as if the former residents believed in being prepared for bad winter weather.
The house is actually pretty close to downtown West Jefferson, but it’s in the midst of agricultural land. In fact, the back property line abuts an active farm that has cows grazing. I wonder if they moo in the morning like roosters crow.