Category: Barbara

11:38 – Barbara left early to drive down to Winston, where she’s running errands and meeting friends for lunch.

One of things I like about this area is the reliable rainfall. We’re not quite literally in a temperate rainforest, but almost. The usual definition is at least 55 inches (140 cm) of rain annually, with no dry season and moderate temperatures. Sparta averages 52 inches (132 cm) of rain annually, but otherwise fits the definition. The rainfall is also pretty evenly distributed, with an average of two days per week with measurable precipitation, averaging about 0.5 inches (1.27 cm) each. When we were looking at homes in next-door Ashe County, I asked our realtor about droughts. His response was that they’d had a dry spell ten years or so ago, but shortage of water wasn’t generally much of a problem there. If anything, the converse.

We had 2 inches (5 cm) of rain yesterday, bringing us up close to 30 inches year-to-date. Our electronic rain gauge says we’ve had only 21.52 inches YTD, but relative to our physical rain gauge it reports only 70% to 75% of what we actually get. So, while much of western North Carolina is in abnormally dry to severe drought conditions, those of us in the Blue Ridge up near the Virginia border are doing fine, as usual.

What that means in terms of prepping is that I’m comfortable with 30 days’ worth of stored water. Even if we couldn’t get water from our well, we’d be fine until the next rain came along.

10:45 – Barbara has been gone for five days, and is due back sometime tomorrow afternoon. Colin and I both miss her terribly. Last night we started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix streaming. It’s been probably a dozen years since I watched it, and it holds up pretty well. I did cut my Netflix rating from 5 to 4 stars some time ago. Buffy is still good, but it’s not quite top drawer any more. My favorite thing about Buffy, then and now, is that the vampires are actually thinly-disguised stand-ins for progressives. What could be more appropriate? Progs ARE vampires, sucking the life out of American society. I like Buffy’s sarcastic PC term for progs: Undead-Americans. Buffy does to them what I’d like to do, if only I had super powers and a Mr. Pointy. Kill them all. Let Satan sort them out.

With Barbara gone all week, I didn’t have time to do any prepping other than working on some lists of stuff I want to learn/do/acquire if, as, and when.

09:28 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then packing to leave tomorrow on her trip to Brasstown, NC, which, as it turns out, is more like 300 miles from here than 200. It’s a five- or six-hour drive, depending on what route she takes.

I’ll try to convince her to toss a comprehensive emergency kit in the back of her car, and to keep her gas tank full enough to get home from wherever she happens to be. It’s not that I expect a disaster to occur while she’s away. I don’t, but there is a small but finite chance of something really bad happening at any moment, and there’s no reason for her not to have a good emergency kit in the car. Having it with her costs nothing but an extra five or ten cents worth of gasoline to haul the extra weight.

People sometimes ask me what I think the chances are of something “really bad” happening. My simple wild-ass guess is that there’s maybe a 3% chance of that over the next year, 20% over the next five years, and 50% over the next ten. So, while the probability is close to 0% of it happening today or next week or even next month, I think the odds are very high that it will happen sometime over the next 10 to 15 years. That doesn’t mean we have 10 or 15 years to prepare, because the probability of it happening tomorrow is just as high as it happening 15 years from tomorrow.