Category: prepping

09:04 – It was 64.5F (18C) when I took Colin out at 0645, drizzling and foggy. We’ve had about 1.7 inches (4.5 cm) of rain over the last couple of days. The little dog showed up briefly yesterday morning, but we haven’t seen her since then.

Barbara picked out a refrigerator yesterday at Blevins, on her way home from the gym. It’s a black Whirlpool model. The new one is smaller than the old one, about 19 cubic feet versus I think 23, but that’s not a problem. The old one was larger than we really needed. The new one isn’t as deep as the old one, which keeps it from sticking out as far into the room. The new one arrived hinged on the right, which is the way the old one was set up. To me, it’d make more sense to have it hinged on the left so that the door would open away from the counters and work area, which the delivery guys offered to do, but Barbara likes it the way it is.

Barbara never liked our current stainless steel model since it was first delivered and she learned that magnets don’t stick to stainless steel. The new one is already covered with refrigerator magnets, notepads, and so on. The ice-maker was optional on this model, so we didn’t get it. I’m perfectly happy with using ice-cube trays.

When we powered up the new one, we left the temperature settings at the default “recommended” levels. I stuck lab thermometers in the refrigerator and freezer compartments. The refrigerator soon stabilized at about 3.9C (39F) and the freezer at -18C (0F), which is what everyone recommends.

The delivery guys hauled the old one down to the unfinished area of the basement, where we’d already made room for it. We let it sit overnight unplugged and with the doors open to get it completely defrosted and dried out. Today, we’ll plug it back in and set the temperature controls for both the refrigerator and freezer as low as they’ll go. We did have both of them set on 3/5, but I’ll crank those both up to 5/5. The refrigerator compartment may actually freeze, but that’s fine with me.

This afternoon while Barbara is out volunteering, I’ll clear a bunch of stuff out of the freezer in the garage and move it down to the new-old refrigerator. That’s mostly two categories: frozen agricultural antibiotics and other drugs, and relatively high-value #10 canned foods like Augason Farms powdered eggs. I plan to pack the downstairs refrigerator/freezer as full as I can get it, which means adding stuff like canned meats, jars of Alfredo sauce, cans of evaporated milk, and so on. Before I do that, I’ll intentionally freeze sample containers of each to make sure they don’t burst when frozen. Until I know that freezing won’t damage the containers, I’ll keep the refrigerator set at 3/5 to prevent freezing. And there’s always more stuff that I’d like to refrigerate or freeze: less stable chemicals, heirloom seeds, etc. etc. I won’t ever be short of stuff if we have unused space.

Barbara is delighted at the prospect of getting so much space freed up in the upstairs vertical freezer. As it stands, at least a third and probably half of the freezer space is taken up with #10 cans, retort pouches of antibiotics, and so on. She’ll have lots more space available for actual frozen foods. I don’t mind changing a lot of the stuff from the upstairs freezer to the downstairs refrigerator compartment. Freezing stuff extends shelf life more than refrigerating it, but the latter is fine.

And I already have some tentative plans for that extra space. I talked to Lori a week or two ago and told her that if she ever decided to sell bulk beef she could count on us for a quarter of a beef. When Frances and Al were up last weekend I mentioned it to them and they said they might be willing to go in for a quarter themselves.

08:49 – It was 65.3F (18.5C) when I took Colin out at 0655, with heavy fog. The little dog was again nowhere to be seen, although she did show up later.

Barbara is off to the gym this morning, and then to Blevins to look at refrigerators. I measured the refrigerator bay this morning to make sure that whichever one she chooses will actually fit the space.

One of my readers sent me a link to this article, with the subject line “even leftists are preppers now”. Which is true. You can’t get much proggier than Slate magazine.

But, like nearly all lefties who consider themselves preppers, this author can’t help slamming the prepper mindset. It comes from their delusional worldviews, where the government is always there to help people, 9-1-1 always works, and people never behave badly.

The old saying is that the only thing worse than a reformed whore is a reformed smoker, but I’ll add reformed prog to that list. As they say, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, and if push comes to shove, this author–and a lot of other progs–will quickly realize that humans aren’t the sweet, cuddly creatures that progs seem to believe they are. Our species, regardless of political persuasions, is the single most dangerous animal on the planet.

Formerly, I’d have said that progs would be in deep doo-doo if TSEHTF, but that was because I temporarily forgot that progs are extraordinary hypocrites. They believe that the world owes them a living and is there for their benefit. But now progs, demonstrating that they’re world-class hypocrites, have begun buying gubs. They won’t have any clue how to actually use them, if that becomes necessary, but as they say even blind pigs get acorns. So it seems that we Normals are likely to face a bunch of armed blind pigs if push comes to shove.

09:41 – It was 54.0F (12C) when I took Colin out at 0640, clear and breezy. The little dog was again nowhere to be seen, although she did show up shortly after we came back in the house. She was gone again by the time I took Colin out after his breakfast.

Frances and Al made a quick trip up. They arrived Friday afternoon and stayed the night. We had an early dinner yesterday, after which they headed back home because they had things to do there.

We’ve never been happy with our current refrigerator. It’s a Whirlpool, and is the only Whirlpool appliance that we’ve ever been unhappy with. It’s only about ten years old, and we’ve had problems with it for about eight of those years, starting with the ice-maker dying shortly out of warranty. The only reason we’re still using that refrigerator is that it still works. We actually talked about leaving it at the Winston house when we moved, but there were so many costs involved in moving that we decided to take it along with us.

I overheard Barbara and Frances the other day as they were packing stuff into the refrigerator. Barbara mentioned she’d like to replace it. So this morning I suggested we head over to Blevins this week and buy a new one as an early Labor Day gift to ourselves. She said that was a great idea.

I get the old one. We’ll move it downstairs into the unfinished area, where it’ll become my lab/LTS storage fridge. I already have one of those 3-foot tall dorm fridges down there, which we’ll also keep. That’ll give us a total of four units: the new kitchen refrigerator/freezer, the old one, the dorm fridge downstairs, and the vertical freezer in the garage.

I’ll move all of my stuff from the vertical freezer in the garage. Right now that includes a bunch of #10 cans of high-value stuff like Augason powdered eggs and bulk quantities of various antibiotics. The highest value stuff will go in the freezer part, which I’ll set to the lowest temperature possible. The less critical stuff will go in the refrigerator part, which I’ll also set to the lowest temperature I can. Relative to room-temperature storage, that will extend shelf-life by at least a factor of four. I’ll pack the refrigerator part solid with stuff like jars of alfredo sauce, canned meats, Nestle Nido, evaporated milk, etc.

09:36 – It was 61.7F (16.5C) when I took Colin out at 0630, clear and breezy. The little dog was nowhere to be seen, although she did show up shortly after we came back in the house.

Barbara commented yesterday that she seemed kind of thin and scraggly when she saw her, when she arrived in our front yard in company with a beagle. She also noticed that she’s a girl and has her adult teeth.

I’m afraid she’s been abandoned and is scavenging/hunting. She’s a sweet little dog, and I hate to see that. I’ve given her a couple of little dog treats, figuring every little bit helps. We’re going to keep an eye on her over the weekend. If we don’t find out where she belongs by Monday, I feel that we need to do something, even if it comes to feeding her. I don’t like to see a dog suffer. It abrogates the deal humans have had with dogs for 40,000 years.

Which kind of relates to an email I got from someone who was going through the list of antibiotics I posted. He wanted to know if any of them had activity against worms and other parasites, and if not what he should be stocking.

With the usual disclaimer that I’m neither a physician nor a pharmacist and can’t offer medical advice, the short answer is no. Metronidazole is useful against giardia and some similar parasites but is not an antihelminthic.

For that, my first and second choices would be mebendazole and albendazole. Unfortunately, both require a prescription and are pretty expensive, at least in the US. My next choice would be pyrantel pamoate.

It’s widely available as an OTC drug under various names, notably Reese’s Pinworm Medicine. You can buy it at Walmart or Amazon. One ounce of the 50mg/mL suspension sells for $7 or $8, and is roughly two adult doses. Or you can buy bulk generic stuff for roughly a buck an ounce in 32-ounce bottles, which is roughly 60 adult doses. It’s effective against pinworms, hookworms, and roundworms. The weird thing about this product is that it’s intended for human use, but is purchased at least as often for treating pets and livestock.

IIRC, a normal course of treatment is one dose to kill the live worms, followed by a second dose a week or ten days later to kill any newly-hatched worms. A 32-ounce bottle provides a varying number of courses, depending on the weight of the patient. For small children, the dosage is 1/2 to 1 teaspoon (2.5 to 5 mL), which means the bottle contains 90+ to 180 courses. For large adults, the normal dosage is 4 teaspoons (20 mL), so the bottle contains about 24 courses.

Have I mentioned that I love living in Sparta? We just got the bill from Shaw Brothers for fixing the septic tank mess. I cringed as Barbara opened the envelope, expecting a bill for $3,000 or $4,000. It was $875, total. Of that, $350 went to the septic tank service for pumping out the tank. In Winston-Salem, ISTR, it costs $300+ per hour just to rent the excavator they used.

08:31 – It was 63.1F (17.3C) when I took Colin out at 0625, clear and calm.

We got more bottles filled yesterday, with more on the schedule for today. Barbara is off to the gym this morning and will make her weekly supermarket run on the way home. Ordinarily, she does that Fridays, but Sparta will be a mess this Friday with roads blocked off for a music festival.

While Barbara was volunteering yesterday afternoon, I took a break from filling bottles to fill other bottles. I got 50 pounds (23 kilos) of cornmeal transferred from the paper sacks it came in to 2-liter soft drink bottles, at 3.5 pounds (1.59 kilos) per bottle. Now I just need to get those bottles labeled, oxygen absorbers in them, and move them to the downstairs LTS food storage room.

In terms of weight and calories, that 50 pounds of cornmeal translates to about 85,000 calories and one person-month’s worth of food. A few people have taken issue with me calculating LTS food stocks on that basis rather than in terms of meals, so I’ll say that that 50 pounds of cornmeal also equates to about 120 batches of cornbread, or 10 batches a month for a year.

Starting last weekend, we’ve had a strange dog running loose in the neighborhood. It looks like a miniature Malamute, with the Malamute face and both eyes blue. It comes right up on our porch and looks in the front door, which drives Colin nuts.

Monday and yesterday, it showed up about 0730, which leads us to believe that someone down the road from us owns it and is letting it out loose in the morning. It has no collar, which is actually the norm around here. Most people around here don’t put collars on their dogs, and allow them to run free. In fact, of everyone we know who has a dog, we’re the only ones whose dog wears a collar. Lori told us yesterday when she delivered the mail that her dogs don’t have collars and run free. Gene, Bonnie’s nephew, stopped by to visit yesterday and said the same about his dog. Gene and Lori both said that all their neighbors recognized their dogs and no one cared about them running loose since they weren’t bothering anyone.

But Barbara was worried that someone had dumped this dog, which happens all too frequently, not just here but also down in Winston. So she called Animal Control, who said they’d send someone out with a trap. She was afraid that the dog would be hit by a car, although we noticed that, like Colin, this dog looks both ways before it crosses the road.

I really didn’t want Animal Control involved. This dog is a puppy. Barbara noticed that it still has its puppy needle-teeth, and it behaves like a puppy. It’s not aggressive. It just wants to play. I was concerned that if Animal Control picked it up, it’d end up being euthanized. And if the puppy belongs to a neighbor down the road, the last thing we want to do is steal those people’s dog.

Three guys from Animal Control showed up yesterday afternoon with a trap. I told them that after talking about it with Barbara we’d decided that we didn’t want to trap the dog. It’s not bothering anyone, and we were just concerned about its welfare. I said I’d prefer just to keep an eye on the puppy to make sure it wasn’t abandoned or in distress. They agreed that that was the best solution, and said they didn’t normally trap dogs unless they were aggressive, causing damage, or worrying livestock. So I apologized for getting them out here needlessly and they said just to call if we needed them.

Bonnie’s former house is to close Friday. My guess is that Grace will be moving in over the weekend. She starts work this month as a first-year teacher at Sparta Elementary School. The kids go back August 21st, and teachers start before that, so she doesn’t have much time to get moved in and settled before she starts work. Grace loves dogs, and has been dogless for the last four years when she was away at college. If it does turn out that this puppy was abandoned, it wouldn’t surprise me if Grace decided to give it a home.