Font Size:     

Category: prepping

Tuesday, 19 April 2016

10:14 – We’re having a few days of beautiful weather around here. Highs in the 70’s (low 20’s C), sunny, and little wind. Barbara left this morning on a trip down to Winston to visit the dentist and run some errands. It’s supposed to be in 86F (30C) there today. As usual when Barbara’s away, Colin is lying at the front door barking at everything and nothing.

Here’s another book you might want to grab a copy of: The LDS Basic Food Storage Recipe Book. It’s available in PDF, Word, and RTF formats and includes 70 recipes that use ONLY the following items, which are included in the LDS one-month basic supply kit.

Product

#10 cans

best if used by

Wheat

3 cans

20+ years

White Flour

1 can

3-5 years

White Rice

2 cans

3-4 years

Quick Oats

1 can

4-5 years

Macaroni

1 can

6-8 years

Pinto Beans

1 can

6-8 years

White Sugar

1 can

20+ years

Powdered Milk

1 can

2-3 years

Cooking Oil – or –

1-24 oz bottle

2 years

Shortening*

1-3# can

8-10 years

Salt

2-8 oz shakers

20+ years

 
I’m sure these recipes do the best possible job of turning basic staples into edible meals, but wow. Why cook with only those ingredients when it’s easy and inexpensive to add spices, a few cans of vegetables and meats, and a few cans of powdered butter, cheese, and eggs to turn those edible meals into appealing meals? Appetite fatigue is a very real issue, particularly among children and (in my experience) women.

Also, I’d drop those cans of wheat berries and replace them with white flour, macaroni, spaghetti, rice, other other bulk carbohydrates. Wheat berries must be ground unless you intend to boil them down to mush, and grinding is time-consuming and takes a lot of effort. And a good manual grinder isn’t cheap. Better to store bulk staples that don’t require processing. And, unless you and your family already eat a diet heavy in whole wheat, the effects of suddenly changing to heavy consumption of whole wheat are likely to be unpleasant. For those reasons, I don’t store wheat berries, period.

Read the comments: 61 Comments

Monday, 18 April 2016

09:38 – We just finished moving a bunch of concrete blocks from the garage, where we’d temporarily stuck them, out to the concrete pad outside the garage door. Is it just me, or do concrete blocks weigh two or three times as much as they used to?

Frances and Al just had the crawl space in their house in Winston redone to seal it and eliminate a water problem. It’s a much taller area than I think of as a crawl space. More like a basement without much headroom. It’s even heated and air conditioned. Al, who’s about my height, can walk around stooped, and Frances can walk around without bending down. Frances mentioned that they now had space to store a bunch of LTS food and water. I’m not sure if she was serious or not. Just in case she’s serious, I just emailed her a PDF of the LDS Preparedness Manual, which is an excellent starting point. If you don’t have a copy, grab one now.

Read the comments: 138 Comments

Wednesday, 13 April 2016

10:47 – The taxes are finished and in the mail, and Barbara and I are back to work on science kit stuff.

I just ran a bunch of labels for the 2-liter soda bottles we have sitting around in large trash bags. The labels read:

Untreated Well Water – Do not drink unless you first boil, chlorinate, or micro-filter. May be used for cooking if water is brought to a full boil. May be used for toilet flushing at three 2-liter bottles per flush.

At a guess, we might have 300 empty 2-liter bottles sitting around. Filled, those would give us 100 toilet flushes or, alternatively, 540 more liters of drinking water after treating them. (It’s 540 rather than 600 liters, because we’ll fill them to only 1.8 liters in case they freeze.) We drink the well water untreated, of course, but it’s one thing to drink well water fresh from the tap, and another to drink unchlorinated well water that’s been sitting in bottles for weeks, months, or even years. The well water tested coliform-free, but it does contain some bacteria that show up as a blue scum in the shower.

This is yet another example of a prep that costs little or nothing and doesn’t take much time. Everyone should be filling containers with water and storing them. Water outages are actually pretty common, and having lots of stored water can turn what would otherwise be a serious emergency into a minor inconvenience. My goal is to have a three-month supply stored for Barbara, Colin, and me. Nine gallons a day; four gallons each for Barbara and me, and a gallon for Colin. That totals 810 gallons, or about 3,200 liters. Call it 108 cubic feet, or a cubic space about 1.45 meters (4.75 feet) on a side.

Read the comments: 94 Comments

Tuesday, 12 April 2016

10:04 – I should be able to finish up the taxes today and be able to get back to kit stuff.

We finished watching Heartland S9 last night, along with the first two episodes of Murdoch Mysteries S9. Heartland S10 starts shooting in about a month. Given that Amy, the character, announced her pregnancy in the final episode of Heartland S9, I have a pretty good idea of what S10 will be about. Like a lot of other fans, I suspect that Amber, the actress, is either pregnant or considering it.

I get a lot of email from preppers who are in various stages of preparing. One recent email was from a guy who’s very well equipped with LTS staples. He has literally tons of rice, flour, pasta, oats, beans, and so on in #10 cans, Mylar bags, and pails. Enough to feed him, his family, and several close friends for more than two years, at least from a nutritional viewpoint. What he lacks, in common with a lot of preppers, are the herbs, spices, bouillon, etc. needed to make all that bulk food appealing. His total of that stuff is half a dozen large Costco jars of assorted herbs and spices. That won’t go very far toward making tons of bulk staples worth eating. I suggested that his next Costco run should be devoted exclusively to stocking up on things that will add flavor to all those LTS staples. The PET jars that Costco supplies herbs and spices in are decent LTS containers. No matter what the best-by dates say, those PET jars will keep their contents usable for years. If he wants to improve on that, he can repackage them in foil-laminate Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers.

He also mentioned that his next project was building Faraday cages to store backups of his sensitive small electronics like radios, battery chargers, solar panels, charge controllers, and inverters. I suggested that until he has time to build formal Faraday cages, he simply keep those items in their original cardboard boxes and wrap them completely in heavy-duty aluminum foil, which makes a pretty decent Faraday cage. Also, putting those foil-wrapped boxes in plastic bags and then adding a second layer of aluminum foil improves the level of protection significantly.

Read the comments: 44 Comments

Sunday, 10 April 2016

10:30 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning. We’ll do more kit stuff this afternoon, but we’ll also take some down time. As Barbara commented yesterday, now that she’s retired we don’t have weekends any more. Every day is the same, which doesn’t mean that we don’t still need some time to relax.

We’ve been binge-watching season 9 of Heartland. Three episodes Friday evening, six last evening, with the other nine over the next couple evenings. I need to get the final three DVD’s created and burned today.

We’ve been cooking and baking a lot more from long-term storage. My goal at this point is to test various recipes, with the primary goals of (a) using only LTS ingredients (although we sometimes cheat, such as using fresh eggs, milk, or butter rather than the powdered versions); (b) keeping the number of ingredients as small as possible; and (c) keeping the cooking process as simple and fuel-efficient as possible, for example by Thermos-cooking rice or pasta rather than simmering them on the stove.

For dinner yesterday we had the leftovers of a simple pot/skillet dinner that used the following ingredients:

Macaroni, 1 lb. box, cooked
Chicken, 12.5 oz. (7 oz. dry) can
Corn, 15.25 oz. can
Augason Cheesy Broccoli soup mix, 2 cups (185 g)

1. Cook the pasta, then drain 4.5 cups of the pasta water into a second pot and bring it to a boil. Cover the pasta to keep it hot.

2. Whisk the cheesy broccoli soup mix into the boiling water until it’s thoroughly mixed, add the drained chicken and corn, return to a boil, and allow to simmer for 15 minutes, stirring frequently.

3. Stir the cooked pasta into the sauce, bring to a boil, and allow to simmer for 5 to 10 minutes. Serve.

Calories total about 2,800. Serves four.

Read the comments: 65 Comments

Saturday, 9 April 2016

11:02 – We got a lot done yesterday, and are now back at comfortable stocking levels on all of our science kits. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be making up and bottling chemicals and making up small-parts bags, chemical bags, and other subassemblies that we need to build more kits.

I got email the other day from someone who said I seemed to be extremely critical of the new breed of PA fiction novelists and asked if there were any I’d recommend. Fair enough.

The problem isn’t with the classic PA novels published in the 80’s or earlier. Stuff like Earth Abides, Malevil, Lucifer’s Hammer, and so on. Those were written back when traditional publishers actually employed editors who saw to it that the books they published at least used proper English. The problem is with more recent novels, and not just the self-published ones. Traditionally-published books like One Second After are desperately in need of an editor, but publishers no longer edit manuscripts comprehensively. Most books are lucky if they get a computerized spell check.

Self-published titles are as bad or worse. Even the best of them aren’t what I’d call well-edited. But the best of them are at least readable. Among those I’d nominate for that class are:

David Crawford’s Lights Out, a massive tome that follows a group of people living in a semi-rural subdivision after an EMP takes down the power grid. Unfortunately, Crawford’s follow-up book, Collision Course, is mediocre at best.

Franklin Horton’s Borrowed World series, another post-EMP series. This one has the major characters stranded in Richmond, VA after the event, and walking back to their homes in rural southwest Virginia. Horton is a competent storyteller and writer. The first book in the series is a bit rough, but he gets better as he goes along. The third book in the series, which I’m reading now, was just released yesterday. All three are available under the Kindle Unlimited program.

Boyd Craven III’s books. (Note that there is also a Boyd Craven II, presumably his father, whose books I haven’t tried.) I started by reading The World Burns, Episodes 1-3: A Post-Apocalyptic Story, yet another post-EMP story that was originally published as three separate “books” of about 70 pages each. I almost gave up on Craven after reading only the first 10% or so of this title. It’s horribly edited, with frequent grammatical barbarisms, misused words, and so on. But, unlike many of the recent PA writers, Craven is actually a story-teller, so I kept reading. After reading that one, I decided to give one from another of Craven’s series a try, so I grabbed Good Fences: A Scorched Earth Novel, the first in that series. Craven had an editor for this one, and it shows. The editing isn’t perfect, but what minor errors remain aren’t intrusive. I’ll look forward to reading more of Craven’s titles, all of which are available under Kindle Unlimited.

Theresa Shaver’s Stranded series, four full-length YA PA novels that have a bunch of teenagers walking home to Alberta, Canada after (of course) an EMP. Shaver is another competent storyteller and writer, and the series is decently edited. All are available under Kindle Unlimited. Shaver has another series that I haven’t read yet.

Angery American’s *ing Home series, which is now up to seven books, none of which are available from Kindle Unlimited. These are the weakest of the group I’m describing here, but they’re very popular and they are better than the average recent PA novel. I probably don’t need to mention it, but they’re set in a post-EMP world.

If I ever do get time to write a PA novel/series, you can bet it won’t be post-EMP. That’s been done to death. So have pandemics, for that matter, although much less than EMP. If I do one, it’d probably be set after a 9.2 quake on the New Madrid seismic fault, cutting off the eastern US from the states west of the Mississippi.

Read the comments: 27 Comments

Friday, 1 April 2016

08:06 – We got a lot of science kit stuff done yesterday, with more on the schedule for today.

I think I’ve mentioned .308/7.62mm API’s (armor-piercing incendiaries) “blue tips” in the past. They’re a handy thing to have on hand. From personal experience firing them, they’ll punch a nice hole in a steel engine block, and the incendiary charge is more than enough to ignite gasoline, and often even diesel. I used to have a bunch before I accidentally lost them in the lake.

As far as I remember, the ones I lost were heavy hand-loads made with pulled bullets, which may have been US-issue .30-06 bullets or NATO 7.62mm bullets. They had very pale blue tips, robin’s egg blue or even sky blue, not the darker blue tips found on some current US-issue (frangible?) ammo. I believe the charge is white phosphorus. I do remember that they generated a bright flash when the bullet hit even thin metal like an auto body (we used to shoot at junked cars a lot…). Presumably the tungsten penetrator core continued unaffected by losing the incendiary compound that surrounded it.

I was going to recommend that everyone pick up at least a few rounds of this stuff, but as far as I can tell it’s no longer available, except perhaps under the counter at a gun show. That’s a pity.

Read the comments: 44 Comments

Friday, 25 March 2016

09:37 – Barbara, Colin, and I went down to Winston yesterday. We had an appointment with a realtor to look at the house. Barbara had errands to run and was meeting a friend for lunch. She had to leave not long after the realtor arrived, so I showed her around the house and got her recommendations about what to do to get the house ready to go on the market. Otherwise, Colin and I spent our time punching out wall anchors, dozens of them, and spackling the holes.

When Barbara returned mid-afternoon, we packed up more stuff from my lab, and then headed for Costco. I returned the Lenovo desktop system, which had stopped working. I booted it up once and went through the windows registration crap. The next time I tried to boot it, it simply sat there at a blank screen. No hard drive spin-up noises, nothing. So back it went and I got a credit to my credit card.

Meanwhile, I installed a new hard drive in my old main system, a Core i7 Extreme, and got Linux Mint installed without a problem. Well, other than the fact that I have no Internet connectivity because that system has no WiFi adapter and I can’t get the powerline Ethernet to work up here in my corner. I ordered a D-Link DWA-140 USB Wifi adapter the other day, and it showed up yesterday. It’s supposed to run with Linux Mint, so I’ll get that installed and can stop using this Mint notebook as my primary system.

Michael David, the electrician our realtor recommended, showed up at 8:00 this morning to look at our situation and tell me what needed to be done to run our well pump and pressure tank from our Generac generator. He said there were two options, doing it right or doing it cheap (but legal) and less convenient. I asked him to explain the right way first. That involves him installing a cut-over switch in our breaker box that in one position routes the utility power to our house and in the other position cuts the connection to the utility power and makes the connection to the generator. With that option, we can run anything in the house that the generator has enough power to drive, simply by switching regular breakers off or on. There’d be a sealed box on the outside wall with a connector for the cable from the generator. I asked him about how much that’d cost us, and he said about $350. That was a whole lot less than I expected, given that when I’d gotten a quote down in Winston 10 or 15 years ago, the electrician had told us $900 for just installing a Frankenstein DPDT knife switch to isolate the house from utility power. Just for giggles, I asked Michael how much the cheap option would cost and how it’d work. It would involve them installing a cut-off and receptacle at the pressure tank and then running a cable from the generator across the basement, throwing the switch, and connecting the cable. It’d also allow us to run only the well pump and pressure tank. He said that option would cost maybe $200 or $250, so the choice was a no-brainer. I told him to do it the right way and give me a call to set up a time.

Other than that, I haven’t done much prepping this week. I did put in a Walmart order for half a dozen boxes of Alpo Variety Snaps dog treats for Colin, a half dozen boxes of Krusteaz Cinnamon Crumb Cake mix, and (to get to the $50 required for free shipping) three one-gallon jugs of pancake syrup. Those arrived very early this morning. Barbara hauled in the boxes while I was downstairs with the electricians. When I got back upstairs, Barbara said we had a leak in the box with the pancake syrup and that she wished I’d stop ordering stuff that can be dented or leak from Walmart’s website. They apparently hire baboons to pack shipments. Except for glass containers, they use no packing material whatsoever, just throwing the cans/jars/bottles randomly into the shipping boxes for UPS to abuse in transit. Fortunately, the three jugs of pancake syrup were in their own box, and the leakage was minor. I’ll rinse off the stickiness in the sink and check to see if any of the bottles are leaking. If so, I’ll repackage the contents in PET gallon bottles.

Read the comments: 62 Comments

Thursday, 24 March 2016

07:14 – We’re working around the house today. There’s a lot remaining to be done in the lab area. We moved our generator from the garage to the lab area yesterday, and picked up some concrete blocks and pressure-treated lumber at Blevins that we’ll use to build a firewood rack. I’m not sure we’ll get to that today, but it needs to be done soon. We got enough components for a rack large enough to hold a face cord. Once we get that one set up and some wood delivered, we’ll probably add another one or two racks. I’d like to have at least a full cord in place before autumn. And I definitely want to get things setup as soon as possible so that we can use our generator to power the well pump and pressure tank.

I wasted a lot of time trying to get our Brother 3070 color laser printer working. The best explanation I have for the problem is that that USB port on the printer seems to be only partially functional. Linux sees the printer and thinks it’s available, but print jobs sent to it simply disappear without printing. The printer also has an Ethernet interface, so I may set it up as a network printer, but for now I’m using our older Brother 5250-DN laser.



Read the comments: 45 Comments

Wednesday, 23 March 2016

10:35 – Since Barbara was taking Colin to the vet for his damaged claw anyway, she decided to have them do his annual checkup, which was due next month. They did the checkup, gave him boosters of his vaccines, and otherwise did everything that needed to be done. The total bill? $28. At our vet in Winston, it would probably have cost five times that.

Email from Jen. Her husband had lunch with one of the other vets in his practice. She mentioned her concern about the state of the world and the country, and the conversation shifted toward being prepared for emergencies. Jen’s husband was noncommittal, but did say that he and Jen were also very concerned about the state of things. The other vet and her husband are early 30’s and have two young children. They’re also Mormons. She said that her primary worry right now is that they live in-town in a condo, and don’t have space for the supplies they’d like to store.

Jen and her husband have of course socialized with this young family, and they all like each other. Last night, Jen and her husband talked about letting the other vet know that they are serious preppers, and inviting the other family to store supplies at their place, with the idea that if things do get really bad the young family could relocate to their place for the duration. Jen says they see a lot of upsides to such an arrangement, not least that it would add another medically-skilled person and boost their adult count to at least eight people and potentially more with the other family that Jen already has made arrangements with. So they’re going to talk it over with the other family about inviting the young vet’s family to join their group.


Read the comments: 31 Comments
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- // end of file archive.php // -------------------------------------------------------------------------------