Month: April 2016

Wednesday, 20 April 2016

12:09 – Barbara went to the gym this morning, and has a noon meeting with a group that’s organizing a charity golf event and asked her to help them do it.

It’s about time for us to get some plants started in pots, so we’ll be doing that over the next week or two. We’re still vulnerable to a hard freeze for the next month or so, so we’ll set the pots out on the deck and bring them in if very cold weather threatens. I want to get several of the herbs started, because most of them are very slow to germinate. Once they get started, most of them tend to flourish like weeds, and all of them are hardy enough to survive our winters once they’re in the ground and established. We’ll also plant a few of each of the vegetables, mostly for a continuing supply of seeds, but I’m sure we’ll also have plenty of fresh produce this summer and autumn.

More work on science kits today and for the rest of this month.


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Tuesday, 19 April 2016

10:14 – We’re having a few days of beautiful weather around here. Highs in the 70’s (low 20’s C), sunny, and little wind. Barbara left this morning on a trip down to Winston to visit the dentist and run some errands. It’s supposed to be in 86F (30C) there today. As usual when Barbara’s away, Colin is lying at the front door barking at everything and nothing.

Here’s another book you might want to grab a copy of: The LDS Basic Food Storage Recipe Book. It’s available in PDF, Word, and RTF formats and includes 70 recipes that use ONLY the following items, which are included in the LDS one-month basic supply kit.

Product

#10 cans

best if used by

Wheat

3 cans

20+ years

White Flour

1 can

3-5 years

White Rice

2 cans

3-4 years

Quick Oats

1 can

4-5 years

Macaroni

1 can

6-8 years

Pinto Beans

1 can

6-8 years

White Sugar

1 can

20+ years

Powdered Milk

1 can

2-3 years

Cooking Oil – or

1-24 oz bottle

2 years

Shortening*

1-3# can

8-10 years

Salt

2-8 oz shakers

20+ years

 
I’m sure these recipes do the best possible job of turning basic staples into edible meals, but wow. Why cook with only those ingredients when it’s easy and inexpensive to add spices, a few cans of vegetables and meats, and a few cans of powdered butter, cheese, and eggs to turn those edible meals into appealing meals? Appetite fatigue is a very real issue, particularly among children and (in my experience) women.

Also, I’d drop those cans of wheat berries and replace them with white flour, macaroni, spaghetti, rice, other other bulk carbohydrates. Wheat berries must be ground unless you intend to boil them down to mush, and grinding is time-consuming and takes a lot of effort. And a good manual grinder isn’t cheap. Better to store bulk staples that don’t require processing. And, unless you and your family already eat a diet heavy in whole wheat, the effects of suddenly changing to heavy consumption of whole wheat are likely to be unpleasant. For those reasons, I don’t store wheat berries, period.


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Monday, 18 April 2016

09:38 – We just finished moving a bunch of concrete blocks from the garage, where we’d temporarily stuck them, out to the concrete pad outside the garage door. Is it just me, or do concrete blocks weigh two or three times as much as they used to?

Frances and Al just had the crawl space in their house in Winston redone to seal it and eliminate a water problem. It’s a much taller area than I think of as a crawl space. More like a basement without much headroom. It’s even heated and air conditioned. Al, who’s about my height, can walk around stooped, and Frances can walk around without bending down. Frances mentioned that they now had space to store a bunch of LTS food and water. I’m not sure if she was serious or not. Just in case she’s serious, I just emailed her a PDF of the LDS Preparedness Manual, which is an excellent starting point. If you don’t have a copy, grab one now.


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Sunday, 17 April 2016

11:42 – We made a quick trip down to Winston yesterday to check on the progress of the painting at the old house. We left at 8:25 a.m. and got home at 12:45 p.m. Of that, about 2.5 hours was travel time, so we spent less than two hours in Winston. We hauled up another Trooper load of stuff, which just about cleared out the old house.

Frances and Al hauled up another load in their pickup, and spent the night here. They left this morning, and should be arriving home right about now.


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Saturday, 16 April 2016

08:19 – Barbara is pretty much recovered, other than a persistent case of laryngitis, so we’ll be working on house stuff today that we’ve let slide for the last several days. Other than that, not much going on.


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Friday, 15 April 2016

13:02 – We’re doing a few things around the house today, but otherwise taking it easy.

I just read an interesting article by Jack Perry: The End is Not Near, It has Begun

“The end is not near. The end has begun. You wanted to know how it will end? Well, take a look around. You’re living in it. If you live in a major city, you already know this or suspect this. If you live in a rural area, you already know the federal government could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect you that much. We’re not going to fall into some dystopian dog-eat-dog future. We’re going to cease to be the United States and become a collection of different countries..”

Read the whole article. It’s not unlikely that things will begin to unfold as Perry predicts, although I think his prediction that the federal government will be able to keep things together for 10 or 20 years is probably much too optimistic. More likely, things will catch fire at some point and then the whole thing will go over like a row of dominoes, in a matter of weeks or at most months rather than years.


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Thursday, 14 April 2016

13:04 – We spent all morning at the hospital for Barbara’s colonoscopy. Neither of us got much sleep last night, particularly Barbara. She’s supposed to take it easy for the next 24 hours, eat only soft, bland food, and not operate a main battle tank or other other heavy equipment.


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Wednesday, 13 April 2016

10:47 – The taxes are finished and in the mail, and Barbara and I are back to work on science kit stuff.

I just ran a bunch of labels for the 2-liter soda bottles we have sitting around in large trash bags. The labels read:

Untreated Well Water – Do not drink unless you first boil, chlorinate, or micro-filter. May be used for cooking if water is brought to a full boil. May be used for toilet flushing at three 2-liter bottles per flush.

At a guess, we might have 300 empty 2-liter bottles sitting around. Filled, those would give us 100 toilet flushes or, alternatively, 540 more liters of drinking water after treating them. (It’s 540 rather than 600 liters, because we’ll fill them to only 1.8 liters in case they freeze.) We drink the well water untreated, of course, but it’s one thing to drink well water fresh from the tap, and another to drink unchlorinated well water that’s been sitting in bottles for weeks, months, or even years. The well water tested coliform-free, but it does contain some bacteria that show up as a blue scum in the shower.

This is yet another example of a prep that costs little or nothing and doesn’t take much time. Everyone should be filling containers with water and storing them. Water outages are actually pretty common, and having lots of stored water can turn what would otherwise be a serious emergency into a minor inconvenience. My goal is to have a three-month supply stored for Barbara, Colin, and me. Nine gallons a day; four gallons each for Barbara and me, and a gallon for Colin. That totals 810 gallons, or about 3,200 liters. Call it 108 cubic feet, or a cubic space about 1.45 meters (4.75 feet) on a side.


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Tuesday, 12 April 2016

10:04 – I should be able to finish up the taxes today and be able to get back to kit stuff.

We finished watching Heartland S9 last night, along with the first two episodes of Murdoch Mysteries S9. Heartland S10 starts shooting in about a month. Given that Amy, the character, announced her pregnancy in the final episode of Heartland S9, I have a pretty good idea of what S10 will be about. Like a lot of other fans, I suspect that Amber, the actress, is either pregnant or considering it.

I get a lot of email from preppers who are in various stages of preparing. One recent email was from a guy who’s very well equipped with LTS staples. He has literally tons of rice, flour, pasta, oats, beans, and so on in #10 cans, Mylar bags, and pails. Enough to feed him, his family, and several close friends for more than two years, at least from a nutritional viewpoint. What he lacks, in common with a lot of preppers, are the herbs, spices, bouillon, etc. needed to make all that bulk food appealing. His total of that stuff is half a dozen large Costco jars of assorted herbs and spices. That won’t go very far toward making tons of bulk staples worth eating. I suggested that his next Costco run should be devoted exclusively to stocking up on things that will add flavor to all those LTS staples. The PET jars that Costco supplies herbs and spices in are decent LTS containers. No matter what the best-by dates say, those PET jars will keep their contents usable for years. If he wants to improve on that, he can repackage them in foil-laminate Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers.

He also mentioned that his next project was building Faraday cages to store backups of his sensitive small electronics like radios, battery chargers, solar panels, charge controllers, and inverters. I suggested that until he has time to build formal Faraday cages, he simply keep those items in their original cardboard boxes and wrap them completely in heavy-duty aluminum foil, which makes a pretty decent Faraday cage. Also, putting those foil-wrapped boxes in plastic bags and then adding a second layer of aluminum foil improves the level of protection significantly.


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Monday, 11 April 2016

10:13 – I have to at least get started on our state and federal income taxes today. It’s probably no coincidence that every year during the first half of April I’m in a bad mood.

We got through all but the last four episodes of Heartland S9 last night. We’ll watch those last four tonight. Tomorrow we’ll start on Murdoch Mysteries S9.

Last night, I read Thomas A. Lewis’s Tribulation. This was a first for me, a PA novel written by a leftie/prog/greenie/climatista. It’s competently written and, no surprise, quite similar to other TEOTWAWKI novels. The major difference is that instead of conservative propaganda threaded into the story-line, we get prog propaganda in this one. Still, it’s not bad. Even Kirkus Reviews had nice things to say about it.


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