09:17 – It was 69.8F (21C) when I took Colin out at 0700, partly cloudy. Barbara has some work to do in the garden this morning, and is volunteering at the Friends of the Library bookstore this afternoon. Our dinners the last couple of evenings have been mostly from the garden: potatoes, green beans, and yellow squash casserole. Knowing I like meat, Barbara grilled a couple of pork chops Sunday evening for me to have Sunday and yesterday along with the rabbit food.
We’ve been watching the 2008 BBC version of War & Peace. Lots of cuties, a good dress once in a while, so I’m happy. The plot has something to do with Russia and Napoleon, but I’m not really paying much attention to that part. We also have the Aussie series A Place to Call Home in progress, with the extraordinary Marta Dusseldorp, as well as Dalziel & Pascoe, with the extraordinary Susannah Corbett.
As I remarked to Barbara, I’d be pretty happy watching just historical costume dramas and documentaries, with no contemporary series other than Heartland and one or two others. I think she feels pretty much the same way.
We got a lot of chemical bottles filled yesterday. Today, I’ll be making up still more chemical solutions. While I’m at it, I need to order a few thousand more bottles. We’re down to only a few hundred of the 15 mL bottles left in stock, and we use a lot of them.
Kathy’s comment yesterday about how little the bulk food/calories cost them got me to thinking, so I calculated just how much they did spend on their dry bulk LTS stuff.
~ $100 – 400 pounds of white flour
~ $120 – 400 pounds of white rice
~ $360 – 400 pounds of assorted pasta
~ $140 – 300 pounds of white sugar
~ $100 – 120 pounds of oats
~ $ 50 – 80 pounds of cornmeal
~ $ 80 – 100 pounds of assorted dry beans
~ $ 18 – 48 pounds of iodized salt
~ $ 70 – 18 gallons of vegetable oil and shortening
~ $180 – 24 large jars of herbs and spices
or roughly $1,200 for enough food—literally a ton, at an average of about $0.60/pound—to feed four people for one year on iron rations. That’s about 500 pounds of food and $300 per year per person. The only additional cost, other than their time, was about $150 for LDS foil-laminate Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers.
Of course, they actually spent about five times that much, but most of that was on canned foods, particularly meats. (If not for the meat as supplemental protein, they’d have needed a lot more beans to provide complete protein, probably 250 pounds rather than 100.)