09:49 – Barbara just left to drive down to Winston, where she’s spending Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday with Frances and Al. They’ll do a few errands Saturday, and then she’s heading back. As usual, it’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me.
They’re going to the Greensboro craft fair tomorrow. Since they’ll be out in a crowd, I suggested she put a gub in her purse. Better to have a gub and not need one than need a gub and not have one.
I got a lot of items checked off my prepping list this month. We’ve added close to one person-year of LTS food (250 pounds of macaroni, 80 pounds of beans, 2.5 gallons of vegetable oil, and other miscellaneous stuff that totals about 730,000 calories, or about 2,000 cal/day for a year). I also added a pressure canner, four dozen more wide-mouth quart canning jars, and some reusable lids. The new gas cooktop has arrived, and we’re scheduled to get a 250-gallon propane tank installed on December 9th. I called an electrician to come out and get a cut-over switch installed for our generator and install a propane adapter kit on it. I have the beginnings of a small solar power system, with four 100W panels and a charge controller. More to do there. I’ve boosted our antibiotic stocks, with half a dozen to five dozen courses each of doxycycline, SMZ/TMP, metronidazole, levofloxacin, and amoxiclav. And various other miscellaneous stuff.
As I keep saying, it’s not that I expect anything catastrophic to happen, although that remains a real possibility and one that I want to be prepared for as well as realistically possible. What I really expect is for things to continue getting gradually worse. I don’t think there’s any way to turn that around at this point. Basically, I think we’re in the calm before the storm. I have no idea when that storm will occur or what form it will take. It may be five years coming, or ten. Or it may occur tomorrow. But it will occur at some point.