08:56 – It was 29.1F (-1.6C) when when I took Colin out this morning, with snow flurries and light winds. Barbara is off to the gym and supermarket this morning, and plans to take Bonnie, our next-door neighbor, out for lunch. Bonnie turns 89 years old today.
The SSD for Barbara’s notebook is supposed to show up with the mail this morning, so I’ll spend some time today getting her notebook running on the SSD with Linux Mint 18.1 LTS. I’ve been using the Cinnamon environment for years, but I think I’ll install the KDE version for Barbara since she’s used to MS Windows.
Finally. The price of powdered eggs skyrocketed when the chicken plague struck, and has stayed high since then. When I last bought powdered eggs, right before the plague, I paid $17.50 for a 33-ounce #10 can. Almost overnight, that price doubled, and finally reached about $50/can. It’s gradually declined since then, but as of even a week ago it was still at $27/can or so. When I checked Walmart yesterday around dinnertime, they had Augason #10 cans of powdered eggs for $12.99.
At first, I figured they were actually going to ship the #2.5 cans rather than the #10 cans they were advertising, but I checked Amazon, which also had the #10 cans for $12.99. Obviously, the new, much lower price of eggs has kicked in. So I ordered four more #10 cans, which is just under 24 dozen eggs.
Augason rates the shelf life as 10 years, but as usual that’s imaginary. I remember in 1979 spending the night with a prepper friend. The next morning, his wife made bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast. After breakfast, he handed me a #10 can, which was military-issue from 1944. I’d just eaten 35-year-old eggs reconstituted from powder, but I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. I’m sure these Augason powdered eggs will be as good decades from now as they would be if I opened them today.
At $12.99 per can, if you need powdered eggs to add to your preps, now is the time to grab them. I’m not storing enough eggs to have scrambled egg breakfasts, but they’re also useful for cooking and baking.
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09:58 – Here’s an interesting datum about the longevity of writable optical media. I just downloaded Linux Mint 18.1 (I decided on Cinnamon for Barbara because it’s not the pig that KDE is) and was looking around for a disc to burn it to. There was a stack of old Verbatim DVD+RW discs just lying in a pile, so I grabbed one. It had last been written on 14 May 2006, almost 11 years ago. It read fine. The last six digits of the checksum, which were all I’d recorded, checked out. I just wrote and verified LM to the disc without error. Understand, this pile of discs wasn’t even on a spindle, just a random disc I grabbed from a random pile of old discs. So maybe there’s hope for very old writable discs.