Category: prepping

09:36 – It was 55.5F (13C) when I took Colin out this morning. They’ve called off the blizzard that was to arrive later today. Instead, we’re to have very heavy thunderstorms this afternoon and early evening, with very high wind gusts, and then heavy rain overnight. A cold front is moving in, and temperatures are to fall to near freezing over the next 24 hours, and then to well  below freezing after that. Barbara is off to the gym and to run errands, after which we’ll be doing kit stuff.

Colin was running short of his Alpo Snaps treats, so yesterday I ordered several more boxes for him on Walmart.com. While I was at it, I added a 26-pound bucket of Augason brown rice, another #10 can of Augason dehydrated celery, and another #10 can of Augason cheese powder.

Speaking of which, another country heard from. I got email from a woman named Jane. She and her husband, Tom, have been married for about three years now. She’s 24 years old and he’s 26. They live in a small town in a rural area that sounds a lot like Sparta, with maybe 50% more population. He’s a utility company lineman, and she’s a teacher at the county middle school, where she got on full-time a year ago last autumn. They’re both from the area, and have millions of family members who live nearby. Well, dozens anyway. They bought a house a year ago, soon after she was hired on full-time, and she found out recently she’s expecting their first child this summer.

She’s been following my blog since she graduated college, moved back home, and got married. She mentioned that she’d emailed me back around then to ask advice about prepping on a budget. I don’t remember that message, but I respond to a boatload of similar emails so that’s not surprising.

She says she started small, both for budgetary and space reasons. (She and Tom were living in an apartment before they bought their home.) Originally, she’d just buy a few extra items at the supermarket every week. If she had one can of something on her list, she’d buy two instead. That progressed to the point that she’d wait for a sale and then buy a case of this or that. Eventually, they decided to join Sam’s Club and started making the three-hour round trip to Sam’s once every few weeks to fill up the back of their SUV.

Tom originally wasn’t very enthusiastic about prepping, but he wasn’t opposed, either. Like most husbands, he learned pretty quickly that “Yes, dear” was the easiest way to ensure domestic tranquility. Watching and reading the news over the last couple of years gradually converted him to being more supportive, and the 2016 campaign finished converting him completely. Finding out he was going to be a father just redoubled his determination to do everything he could to protect his growing family. So now they’re both on-board.

Jane says they think of themselves as “sane preppers”. They haven’t gone overboard on any one aspect of prepping, except perhaps LTS food. They have a ton of that–actually much more than a ton–and are continuing to build their stockpile. But, as Jane says, this is all stuff that they eat anyway, and it’s not going to go bad anytime soon.

I’ve said before that I’m uncomfortable going into detail about what I buy, not from any OPSEC considerations but because I don’t want people to just copy me. And I know from hearing it from numerous people that that’s just what some people do. Including Jane, originally. I’d mention ordering, say, six #10 cans each of Augason egg powder, butter powder, and cheese powder, and she’d place exactly the same order as soon as she read it.

I finally decided it really shouldn’t bother me. It’s not like I’m buying a lot of useless stuff, so if people buy what I buy they’ll at least be advancing their preparations. I just hope they also listen when I talk about buying boring stuff like bulk staples. And if Jane decides to order the same Augason stuff I mentioned above, that’s okay with me.

Jane isn’t looking for any advice at this point. She thinks they have all the important stuff taken care of, so now they’re just filling in some minor stuff. She says they’re fortunate in every way. They live in an excellent location. She and Tom both have secure jobs with decent incomes and good health insurance through their employers. With her parents’ help, she’s already paid off her student loans. They owe the bank only for her car loan. Their house was purchased from a family member, whom they’re paying back directly under a formal loan agreement. They won’t even have much in child-care expenses because they have two grandmothers and several aunts and great-aunts who are looking forward to helping them with daycare when their grandchild arrives. So they’re in just about an ideal position.

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09:52 – It was 50F (10C) when I took Colin out this morning. Our high today is to be 68F (20C), but then a cold front comes through. The high tomorrow is supposed to be in the early morning, with snow coming in tomorrow evening. Today I’ll be working on taxes again. Barbara is at the gym this morning and volunteering for the Friends of the Library bookstore this afternoon.

There was a story in the paper yesterday about a 12-year-old girl in Winston-Salem who had died Valentine’s Day of the flu. A follow-on article this morning said the hospitals in Winston-Salem were limiting visitors to try to keep the flu from spreading.

Every time I read about flu deaths, I think about my mother’s mother. My mother was born just as WWI ended, which was a few weeks after the first cases of the Spanish Flu occurred in New Castle, PA. Pennsylvania as a whole was very badly affected by the flu, but Lawrence County was luckier than most of the state. Not that it seemed that way at the time to the people living there.

My grandmother told me what it had been like. Like most people, she was terrified, afraid to leave the house, literally. Afraid to stand on the front porch and talk to the next-door neighbors on their front porch. Afraid to touch the mail that was delivered to the box next to their front door. Afraid to use the tap water without boiling it. Afraid to walk to the grocery store across the street. Local businesses shut down, at first just the bars and restaurants and churches and other gathering places, but soon all of the businesses. Men no longer went to work because they feared bringing the contagion home with them. And through all of this, my grandmother was more than 8 months pregnant and ready to deliver her baby any time. And this amidst a pandemic disease that was selectively killing healthy people in their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s.

Fortunately, it being 1918, my grandmother, like most wives at the time, both urban and rural, had a very deep pantry of dry staples, commercial canned goods, and foods she’d canned herself. They lived exclusively on those stored foods for the first weeks following the arrival of the flu. They heated with coal, and had both electricity and oil lamps for lighting, so they really didn’t need to leave the house.

They didn’t know it at the time, but the flu came in waves. Within a few weeks of the first cluster of deaths, the authorities declared an end to the emergency, which unfortunately was premature. The flu returned at least twice more, killing more people each time. Eventually, people had to leave their homes, if only because they were running short of food. When they did go out, they stayed as far as possible from other people, and they wore face masks. The fear persisted into mid-1919, when my mother was 6 or 7 months old.

When my parents were first married, they moved in with my mother’s mother, where they lived until I was two years old. I remember my grandmother’s basement, which was filled with shelves packed with dry staples, commercial canned goods, and home-canned jars of food. Which in retrospect was understandable. My grandmother had lived through WWI, followed by the Spanish flu, followed by the Great Depression, followed by WWII, followed by the threat of being nuked by the Soviets. Is it any wonder that she was what nowadays would be called a prepper? Of course, back then pretty much everyone was a prepper. They had reason to be.

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10:00 – It was 34.8F (1.5C) when I took Colin out this morning, very gray and with a light drizzle that’s to turn to snow later. Barbara is heading down to Winston shortly, where she’ll spend the night with Frances and Al and then drive back up to Sparta tomorrow afternoon. Colin and I are getting ready to have wild women and parties as soon as she leaves.

Barbara sent me a link Saturday to a PA novel that was free for the download through yesterday. I’d never heard of the author or the series, but I downloaded it just to take a look. I finally got around to looking at it last night. Very odd. It’s written in the first-person present, and reads like it was written by a 30-ish stay-at-home military wife with four kids who’s a huge fan of The Walking Dead. It turns out that’s just what it is. Her main characters are thinly-disguised variations of the main cast in TWD, and there are zombies all over the place. Not my cup of tea, but it and the rest of the series get very good reviews if that’s your kind of thing.

Interesting headline in the morning paper: “Evacuation Lifted for 200K Californians: Dam is repaired, but officials say fix may not hold” I believe that if I lived downstream of the tallest dam in the US, with more than a cubic mile of water behind it, I’d think twice about returning home after reading that headline.

I’ve seen remarkably little in the MSM about the disruption that was caused by this evacuation. I did get email from one reader who evacuated. He said things were an unmitigated fustercluck. Roads and bridges bottlenecked or completely blocked by cars that were broken down or out of gas, two-hour lines at gas stations that still had gas, which wasn’t many of them, and a trip to a friend’s home that would ordinarily have taken him 45 minutes that ended up taking eight hours.

There are a lot of takeaways here, but the biggest to my way of thinking is that it’s really, really important to keep your gas tank as full as possible. For some reason, most people let their gas tanks get down to a quarter or less before they refuel, and more than a few wait until they’re running on fumes. That makes no sense to me, given that it takes only a couple of minutes to stop at a gas station and fill up.

My 1993 Isuzu Trooper SUV has a 22.5-gallon gas tank and averages about 16 MPG real-world, for a 360-mile range. When the trip odometer gets up to 50 miles, I start thinking about filling the tank. If it gets to 100 miles, I’ll make a special trip to fill it.

Lori, our USPS carrier, drives a RHD Jeep that looks a lot like the CJ-7 I used to have. I asked her one time how much gasoline she goes through driving her stop-and-go postal route. She goes through about two-thirds of a tank per day, so she stops at the gas station every day after she finishes her route. Her Jeep is also her personal vehicle, so she starts out every morning full.

Barbara starts with a full tank when she’s heading down to Winston. She burns 5+ gallons for the round trip, so if there’s another pipeline break or some other interruption in fuel supplies, she can always get home.

February MTD kit sales revenue is already at 90% of revenue for all of 2/16, 110% of revenue for all of 2/15, and on track to match revenue for 2/14, which was our biggest February ever. Of course, this is a time of year when sales could just drop dead.

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