Category: prepping

09:46 – Barbara is off to the gym this morning. She’s volunteering all afternoon at the Friends of the Library bookstore.

Yesterday, wanting to make sure she was aware of the FDA rules change on livestock antibiotics that takes effect January 1st, I asked Lori, our USPS carrier, if she routinely treated her beef cattle with antibiotics. She said she didn’t, and used antibiotics only if one of her cows actually became ill.

In passing, I asked her if, with less than two weeks until the election, she’d made a run yet to stock up on food. She said she’d made a big Sam’s Club run over the weekend, and now had a bunch of canned goods as well as bulk dry staples sitting around in sacks waiting to be repackaged. She washed/sanitized a bunch of two-liter bottles, and is now just waiting for them to dry.

Nick posted a comment this morning that’s worth reading. It links to a Daily Mail article that describes just how ill-prepared the authorities in Washington and Oregon are for the catastrophic earthquake that may occur at any time. Depending on how powerful that quake is, its epicenter, and when it occurs, it might easily kill millions of people, particularly in heavily-populated coastal areas. The authorities are now suggesting that people store two weeks’ worth of food, up from three days. That may help a bit, but of course less than 10% of the population are likely to follow that advice. As always, the authorities want to avoid scaring people, when scaring people is exactly what they should be doing. What they should have announced is something like: “There is going to be a catastrophic earthquake. It may not happen for years, or it may happen later today, but it IS going to happen. When it does, it will be too late to evacuate, and this earthquake and its aftereffects will kill many people, at least tens of thousands and possibly millions. The government will do all it can to render aid, but our ability to do so will be very limited. We strongly recommend that you prepare now by making provisions to provide water, food, heat, sanitation, and other essentials for yourself and your family. You may be on your own for weeks to months.”

09:35 – Barbara and I both had dentist appointments yesterday in Winston. On the way home, we stopped at Costco to pick up a few things.

When we pulled into the Costco parking lot, Barbara said, “No more flour, sugar, or rice!” I did pick up one teeny, tiny 50-pound bag of rice, but other than that I restricted myself to canned goods: another two dozen cans each of cream of mushroom and cream of chicken soup, a dozen jars each of Ragu spaghetti sauce and Mott’s applesauce, a dozen cans of tomato paste, and a few miscellaneous items.

We’d arranged to have a termite inspection done by a person recommended by one of our neighbors. She showed up late yesterday afternoon and did a walk-around of the exterior and interior of the house. Termites are much less a problem in our climate than they are down in Winston, but we still figured it was worthwhile to get the house under a pest-control contract. Apparently, pest-control companies no longer use chemical treatments to protect homes. Instead, they use biological warfare, treating the foundations with a bacterial slurry that infects any termites that come into contact with it. When they return to their nests, they spread the infection to all their buddies, who up and die.

While she was looking around downstairs, the inspector opened the door to what Barbara calls our water closet. She commented, “You’re storing water. Good for you.” I asked if she was a prepper, and she said she was and that nowadays anyone with any sense was preparing. She next looked at our food storage room, and again expressed her approval, saying that the more people who were prepared, the better. She also commented that prepping was the norm up here, and that many of the homes she visited had similar levels of preparation. My own experience up here confirms that. I’ve mentioned that many of the homes we looked at before we bought this one had large stocks of supplies. Pretty much no one up here thinks preppers are crazy. About the minimum level I’ve encountered is, “We really need to get better prepared.”

Barbara and I are still watching The Walking Dead, although the violence and despair is starting to wear on her. We just watched the last couple episodes of season two last night, in which multiple major characters were eaten. I think we’ll start limiting it to one episode per evening. I keep telling Barbara that this series is really about a plucky band of Normals facing down a huge crowd of Clinton supporters and Dead Lives Matter rioters, so we should be cheering every time one of those bastards is shot in the face.