Category: prepping

08:58 – It was 70.7F (21.5C) when I took Colin out around 0715 this morning, sunny and cloudless. Barbara is due back tomorrow. Only one more day.

Well, that was weird. FedEx showed up yesterday with a box from Walmart. It contained: four 5-pound bags of Aunt Jemima yellow cornmeal; five 2-pound boxes of Alpo Variety Snaps dog treats; two 12-ounce cans each (minimum order) of Armour Treet luncheon meat and Walmart Great Value luncheon meat (I wanted to compare both of these to the more expensive Spam); and one 22-ounce can of baking powder. Oh, yeah. The weird part. Walmart shipped this 38-pound order via FedEx air rather than ground, and (for the first time) they required a signature.

Last month was really dead in terms of kit shipments. We did something like 33% of the revenue we did in May 2016, which itself wasn’t very good. But things may be looking up. As of this morning, so far in June we’ve sold five kits, and kit sales typically accelerate noticeably after mid-June.

Yesterday, I also repackaged the 20 pounds of cornmeal, because I didn’t want Barbara to come home and find still more bulk food that needed to be repackaged. With tamping to settle it, 3.5 pounds of cornmeal fit in a 2-liter bottle. I still need to add oxygen absorbers, but they’re down in the main deep pantry, which is inaccessible until the contractor finishes work downstairs and we can get all the furniture and other assorted stuff moved back into the main downstairs room.

I also did something I’d been thinking about doing for a long time. I made up a 5% w/v iodine standard solution (as potassium iodide), which is 65 mg/mL. The adult dosage for prophylaxis against radioactive iodine-131 is 130 mg (which is obviously arbitrary since 130 mg of potassium iodide contains a conveniently round 100 mg of iodine), so an adult dose is 2 mL. I packaged that solution in 30 mL bottles, which just happens to be 15 doses.

When Lori showed up yesterday morning to pick up a Priority Mail shipment, I asked her if she had any KI tablets or solution in her preps. She didn’t, so I told her to remind me this morning and I’d give her a bottle each for herself and her daughter Casey. I packed the two bottles and a few graduated disposable pipettes in a quart ziplock to hand to her when she picks up the outgoing boxes this morning.

When I had Colin out a few minutes ago, I stood and counted the vehicles passing out on US21. The final count was:

17 tractor-trailers, dump trucks, and other commercial trucks.

53 pickup trucks, 14 of them with trailers

37 SUV’s, 7 of them with trailers

41 regular cars, 2 of them with trailers

I watched the Homestead Channel again after dinner last night. I got through the entire first season (10 episodes, mostly about 15 minutes each) of An American Homestead. It’s about an extended family of six people. Parents Tim and Joanne, 20-something daughter, Jaimie, her husband Zac, and their two pre-school boys.

Together, they buy 100 acres in the Ozarks that is completely off-grid, 20 miles from the nearest gas station. No grid power, water, sewer, or any of the other conveniences we all take for granted. Their only connection to the modern world is the DSL phone line they use for Internet access, powered by solar panels.

They’re preppers, of course, but of the homesteading sub-class. Tim and Zac are always armed, at least with sidearms. Tim and Joanne used to live in Texas. Jaimie, Zach, and their kids lived in St. Louis. But they’re all sick of the rat race and consumer society and wanted to get back to the land. Tim, Joanne, and Jaimie were missionaries and spent a lot of time in third-world areas, so they do have some experience with living off-grid.

What they’re doing is not something I’d ever want to do, but it’s interesting to watch.

I’m currently doing a final read-through of Franklin Horton’s latest PA novel, which is scheduled to become available on Amazon late this month. It’s excellent, as are all of his books. It’s also incredibly dark, as are all of his books.

08:47 – It was 57.2F (14C) when I took Colin out around 0630 this morning, once again blindingly sunny.

Barbara called yesterday afternoon to ask me if the drop-ceiling installers were here. They weren’t, and didn’t show up yesterday. Elaine at our contractor had told me last week that they had a major project in progress that had an absolute deadline of 31 May, and had severe penalties for not meeting that deadline, so I’m not surprised they didn’t make it out here. Barbara and I agreed that it’d be fine with us if they didn’t show up here until next week, after she returns. Two more days until she gets back.

I’ve written off another prepping site that I formerly recommended. Lisa Bedford (Survival Mom) has a pretty good book out for beginning preppers, and her site has featured more than a few decent articles. Like nearly all of the women prepper authors, she has woo-woo tendencies–herbal medicine, “natural” foods, short expiration dates, and so on, but she largely kept that in check and made sane suggestions.

Then I read this article on her site yesterday. It’s not just bad. Everything about it is wrong. She pushes two types of food in this article: MRE’s and freeze-dried. Both of those are horrible choices for preppers, if only because they have the highest cost per calorie of any LTS food available. But Lisa stocks both of them in large quantities.

And by large, I mean 96 cases of MRE’s (1152 MRE’s total) and 400 #10 cans of freeze-dried foods for her family of four. She thinks of the #10 cans of FD food as cheap (!) alternatives to MRE’s, which cost $20 to $30 per person PER DAY. FD is cheaper than MRE’s, barely, but only in the sense that gold is a cheap alternative to platinum. And her family cycles through those MRE’s every three years, eating 288 MRE’s per year among them. Geez.

She’s also somehow concluded that people can overdose on MRE’s. Yes, the military recommends that MRE’s not be eaten exclusively for more than 21 days at a time, but Lisa takes that to mean only 21 days’ worth of MRE’s can be eaten per year. So, I guess she plans to pig out on MRE’s for three weeks and then eat FD foods for the rest of the year.

FD is also outrageously expensive. We don’t stock any of it. To compare, a pound of canned Keystone ground beef (or chicken or pork or turkey) from Walmart costs about $3.60. That same pound reconstituted from FD costs three to four times that much. But I’m sure Lisa chose FD meat because she thinks canned meat has a short shelf life. It doesn’t. The USDA says that properly canned meats–either commercially-canned or home-canned–are safe and nutritious indefinitely. I’ve posted before about tests done on meats and other foods that had been canned more than a hundred years before they were opened for testing. They tested fine. No biological contamination, so they were safe. Minor loss of vitamins, particularly A and C, but they remained nutritious. They even looked indistinguishable from freshly canned products.

I read an article on Rawles’ blog a few days ago that summed things up pretty well. The author says pretty much what I’ve been saying for decades: dates on canned foods are imaginary. They have no basis in reality. Properly-canned foods remain safe to eat and nutritious essentially forever, assuming the container has not been compromised.

Lisa also believes that FD foods in general have much longer shelf lives than dehydrated foods, let alone canned foods. That’s wrong. All of those shelf-life numbers are entirely bogus. Her can of FD peas with a rated shelf life of 30 years will in fact be unchanged after 300 years, but then if she had a can of ordinary Green Giant wet-packed peas, they’d also be fine 100 or more years from now.

As to FD versus commercially-dehydrated food, the only difference is the amount of remaining free moisture. The actual numbers vary slightly, but typical FD food has had 98% to 99% of the free water removed, while typical commercial-dehydrated food has had 93% to 96% removed. Yes, the FD food is SLIGHTLY drier, but not enough to make any difference in real-world shelf-life. Either type of food will last essentially forever.

So, every $30 Lisa spends on MRE’s feeds one person for maybe a day. That same $30 could feed that person for a month on dry bulk LTS food, albeit with a pretty boring menu. Or she could spend that $30 on bulk + canned and feed that person a tasty normal diet for a week, with lots of meat.

Some might point out that MRE’s and FD are easy-prep, and that’s a valid consideration. But it’s just as easy to make meals from dry and canned foods with little or no prep. If you can boil water, cook some macaroni or rice and dump a can of Dinty Moore beef stew or Chef Boyardee ravioli over it. Or just eat the stuff cold, straight from the can.

08:59 – It was 60.7F (16C) when I took Colin out around 0715 this morning, mostly cloudy. Colin actually behaved pretty well yesterday. Only four more days until Barbara returns. We thought the sheetrock work downstairs was finished–it looked great to Barbara and me–but Sam just showed up to put on another coat of mud.

We made cornbread for dinner before Barbara left, and finished up a can of baking powder. So of course I added that to my Walmart list, along with another 20 pounds of cornmeal. I already had five boxes of Alpo Variety Snaps for Colin on the list, along with almonds for Barbara.

We periodically have breakfast-dinners, and I’ve been wanting to try johnnycakes one of these times. Those are a traditional Southern breakfast food, and are basically pancakes made with cornmeal instead of wheat flour.

Also, the last time Barbara was at Costco, she bought another case of Kirkland bottled water. This time, instead of getting the 40-pack of 500 mL bottles, she got an 80-pack of 8-ounce (237 mL) bottles. They’re cute little things, and they fit in her pocket while she’s out working in the garden or yard. I’m going to have her start saving those little bottles and transfer pancake syrup to them from the awkward gallon (3.78 L) jugs we buy it in. One of the small bottles will suffice for one or two meals, and won’t be nearly as messy as using the big jugs.

10:01 – It was 48.3F (9C) when I took Colin out at about 0645 this morning, sunny and calm. We had another inch or so (2.5 cm) of rain in the 24 hours ending yesterday afternoon.

Calligra seems to be fine for my purposes. The default theme was terrible. Hover-over tool tips, for example, were displayed at white text on a pale yellow background, making them unreadable. Switching themes cleared that up right away.

I haven’t tried it with a long document yet. The biggest I’ve edited with Calligra Words is listed on the bottom status line as 164 pages. It seems to work fine. I’m intrigued by another part of the suite, Calligra Author, which is described as an e-book editor. The only real difference I see between it and Words is that Author offers the ability to save-as epub. That seems like a pretty minor feature to justify calling Author a completely separate component.

Things are a bit disorganized here. We had to move a bunch of furniture out of the affected area downstairs, which is about 400 square feet (40 square meters). So we have tons of books and other stuff stacked in the unfinished area. The two downstairs bedrooms, which were affected only slightly (damp carpet right at the doorways, etc.) are also crammed full of stuff from the affected area. That makes it very difficult to get to anything, let alone add more.

There’s still about three person-months’ worth of dry bulk food on a cart out in the garage. Barbara picked it up on her Costco run a week or so ago, but we can’t repackage it until we can get to stuff like empty bottles, oxygen absorbers, etc. that are inaccessible in the main deep pantry downstairs. For the time being, we’ll move it into the laundry room upstairs until we have the time and supplies to repackage it.

Barbara said yesterday, “No more food, please.” Which is a fair request. We’re currently in pretty good shape on food, everything from dry bulk LTS stuff to canned goods, including meat. Enough to keep Barbara, Colin, Frances, Al, and me fed for a long time. As usually happens to serious preppers, the question becomes when is enough enough? We’re not at that point, yet, but we’re comfortable enough to take a break from adding more stuff other than incidentals.

Thinking about it this morning, I decided that we’re better-prepared than 99.99% of the general population and probably 99% of serious preppers. That’ll just have to do, for now.

Barbara announced a few days ago that she wanted to bake cookies this weekend, but when I asked this morning she said that could wait. She wants to make a chocolate cake instead, so that’s what we’ll be having for our evening snack.