Month: February 2016

15:13 – We just spent several hours getting steel shelving set up in my office and moving/organizing/inventorying stuff onto those shelves. Having enough food to feed Barbara, Colin, and me for a year or more gives me a sense of security. Having still more in the form of bulk staples that can be stretched with the soups, sauces, spices, meats, and other stuff we have on the shelves also puts us in a position to help family, friends, and neighbors if it ever comes to that. Speaking of which, the chicken tetrazzini turned out very well. It made enough to feed 4 to 6 people, and everything in it was shelf-stable.

We filled seven 2-liter Coke bottles with bread flour yesterday. That turned out to be such a PITA that we transferred the remaining 25 or 30 pounds from the 50-pound bag into heavy freezer Ziplock bags, which isn’t really long-term storage, but we use enough flour that it’ll be fine in the Ziplocks. The 2-liter bottles work pretty well for sugar, rice, oats, and similar bulk foods, even cornmeal, but it’s a real struggle to get them filled with fluffy stuff like white flour. So we still have a sealed 50-pound bag of white flour sitting waiting to be repackaged.

For that, I plan to use one-gallon foil-laminate Mylar bags from the LDS store. To keep down the dust, we’ll probably fill Ziplock bags first, and then seal the filled Ziplock bags in the foil/Mylar pouches. Until yesterday, I would just have sealed the foil/Mylar pouches with a clothes iron set on high, but I read something yesterday about the LDS church recommending that their pouches be sealed only with one of the impulse sealers they sell, or the equivalent. Apparently, a clothes iron doesn’t get hot enough to do the job reliably. The impulse sealer the LDS church sells costs $410, but I understand that many LDS wards and branches have impulse sealers available to borrow or rent, so I’ll probably check with our local LDS church the next time we’re ready to repackage bulk staples.

09:57 – Not much interesting going on around here. Barbara is upstairs washing out more 2-liter Coke bottles. Once those have dried, we’ll transfer 100 pounds of bread flour to them. We need to get the steel shelving set up in my office and the unfinished basement “natural area” if only to have shelf space for all these bottles we’re filling.

Although I’ve been calling this long-term food storage, it’s actually medium-term in the sense that these are the containers we use routinely and cycle through. The next time we buy bulk sugar, flour, etc., it goes into the 7-mil foil-laminate Mylar bags sold by the LDS store. I have a box of 250 of those bags on the shelf, along with enough oxygen absorbers to add one per bag.

I also need to get my new desktop system set up, although I’m not happy about running Windows on it. Once I get it set up, I’ll probably pull a couple of backups of the Windows installation and then pull the hard drive and stick it on the shelf. I’ll install a fresh hard drive and install Linux Mint on the system. Now that USPS Click-N-Ship again supports Regional Rate boxes at the Commercial Base Pricing rate, I no longer really need Stamps.com, which was the reason I needed a Windows system in the first place. Not that the new desktop will go to waste. My little notebook system, with only 4 GB of RAM and a slow hard drive simply couldn’t cope with the load I was putting on it. The other day, I had so much stuff running that it simply locked up. The cursor would move, but I couldn’t even quit any of the running programs, let alone start any others. I’m pretty sure the system was using 100% of the available RAM and the processor was 100% occupied trying to swap stuff out of RAM to disk and back. A hard reboot solved the problem temporarily, but the long-term solution is simply that I need more capable hardware to do what I do.

14:12 – I’ve finished the urgent administrative stuff, and everything is submitted. We’ve both been working pretty much non-stop for what seems like forever, so we decided to pretty much take the day off. We did transfer 100 pounds of sugar to Costo PET nut jars and some 2-liter Coke bottles, along with 50 pounds of rice. This afternoon, we’ll repackage 100 pounds of flour, 25 pounds of cornmeal, and 25 pounds of oats to PET bottles, but that’ll be pretty much it for the day.

USPS belatedly discovered that they’d accidentally removed support for Regional Rate Boxes A and B from Click-N-Ship, but they finally got it restored and working. What’s interesting is that USPS never offered retail pricing for Regional Rate Boxes. You could take one to the post office, but they’d charge you postage according to weight and zone, just as if you’d used a regular box. That means there wasn’t any retail pricing for those boxes, so Click-N-Ship now charges Commercial Base Pricing for them, just as they always did. Since about 98% of our stuff ships in either a RRA or RRB box, that means I don’t need stamps.com any more. I’ll use up the postage I prepaid with them and then go back to using USPS Click-N-Ship. That means I’ll have to pay $18.75 to ship a Large Flat Rate Box with USPS rather than the $16.35 I pay Stamps.com, but we use so few Large FRBs that it doesn’t really matter. Not enough to come anywhere near the $16/month that Stamps.com charges, any way.

I just finished reading Ellisa Barr’s EMP YA PA novel Outage (Powerless Nation Book 1). Despite a few 1- and 2-star reviews, it’s a decent book. There are two sequels, and all three are available to read for free under Kindle Unlimited. I plan to read both sequels.

Now that Barbara has agreed that it’s better to re-watch good stuff that we last watched 20 or 30 years ago, so long that we’ve forgotten any details, we have Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders back in our queue. We’ve watched half a dozen of the Morses and a couple of the Midsomers and remembered very little about any of them. Some of them, we don’t remember ever watching at all. Others are vaguely familiar, but that’s about it.

10:11 – We made a run down to Winston-Salem yesterday. We dropped Colin off at the old house, Barbara dropped me off at the dentist and then went on to get her hair cut. She picked me up, we made a Costco run, picked up Colin and a load of stuff at the old house, and headed home.

The only shelf-stable stuff I got at Costco was 100 pounds each of white sugar and bread flour and 20 pounds of oatmeal. That totaled $84 and about 375,000 calories, which is a 4 to 5 person-month supply of calories, although obviously not nutritionally balanced. We’ll repackage all of that in 2-liter soda bottles over the coming week.

As we were driving down the mountain yesterday, the check-engine light came on in the Trooper. It’s a 1993 model, although with only 135,000 miles on it. We called a local mechanic when we got back. He said to call back this morning and talk to Lynn, which I did. He said he was booked solid for the coming week, which is always a good sign, but he’d try to take a quick look at it on Thursday. If it’s something minor, which he suspects it is, he may be able to fix the problem on the spot. Otherwise, he’ll have to work it into his schedule sometime next week.

I’d intended to call our realtor and get her recommendation for a mechanic, but Barbara felt strongly that we should just call B&T Tire and Automotive. She’d met Bob (the B in B&T) when she was out looking for a Christmas tree and stopped there to get directions to the tree farm. She really liked Bob, who’s about our age, and said she instinctively trusted him. So I called B&T yesterday when we got back from Winston and ended up talking to Travis (the T), who told me to call back today and ask for Lynn.

The thing is, Sparta is like any small town anywhere. As a local, one can trust just about any local business, because word gets around fast. It’s in everyone’s self interest to deal honestly with other locals. So the first time we deal with a local business, I make it a point of telling them that we’ve just moved to Sparta and (more importantly) that we’re now full-time residents.