And still the weather is hot and humid. Freaking sun. Burns like the blazes. 108F in the sun at my house yesterday, and it was only partly sunny!
So I stayed inside and did paperwork for our tax accountant. I didn’t get to the storage unit to reorganize and make more room. I did get some stuff sorted for later auctions, and did get some cleaning done. I also spent time watching and bidding on the dozen auctions that closed last night.
And I won a few things that will be helpful here and at the BOL. Another freezer (to sell to a neighbor at the BOL), a metal cabinet for food storage up there, a couple other small things. I also got a bunch of stuff related to my non-prepping hobby. I should flip most of it in November at our local swapfest.
One of the things I’ve wanted for a long time finally came my way. The 1968 Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s the one I grew up with and I consider it to be about the perfect age. New enough the science isn’t laughable, but pre-dating all the eco-warrior ’70s bullspit, and all the PC multi-culti nonsense. My dad read through it twice. He was very hard to beat at Trivial Pursuit 🙂 I’ve managed to buy a couple other lesser sets from around the same period, but the EB is the best. Crazy to want it, I know. The scenarios where it’s useful are so ‘out there’ it should make me blush. I don’t care. I’ve just expanded my ‘rebuild society library’ by a factor of ten. I’ll pass it off as nostalgia if I have to. It was pretty close to the sum of all human knowledge at the time it was produced, at least from the ’10 Thousand foot level.’ It’s like having the internet in 24 volumes. Well, without all the pron and cat pix. Ever since my siblings gave mom and dad’s set away at a garage sale, I’ve wanted to replace it. I just didn’t want it enough to pay the price it brings. This week I got lucky and got a set for under $20. Hooray.
FWIW, I consider hard cover books and a good library to be essential preps. Western Civ doesn’t HAVE to die. The whole Renaissance came about because of books. Electronic storage and ebooks are malleable and fallible (doesn’t quite rhyme) and while paper books have their failure modes too, at least they can’t be ‘stealth edited’ or rendered unreadable by a change in file format, or hardware obsolescence. Good collected works volumes are available for a dollar or less. There’s no reason not to own most of the western canon. Own them electronically too, but own them.
Stack up knowledge and learning, history and art. Stack those deep too.
nick