Category: prepping

10:33 – We just moved a bunch of stuff up from the garage into the attic over the garage. Today, we’ll install more shelves in the garage and move stuff onto them. We also have a 50-pound bag of flour to transfer into empty one-gallon Costco water bottles. Two-liter soda bottles are fine for sugar, rice, corn meal, and other free-flowing materials, but their narrow mouths make them a PITA for flour and other materials that jam in the funnel. We still have a bunch of old 3-liter bottles down in Winston that are currently full of water. We’ll empty those and re-purpose them for flour. That leaves us with hundreds of 2-liter bottles that we’ll rinse with dilute chlorine bleach and fill to 1.8 liters with water, in case they freeze.

10:31 – Our Internet service is back to normal. Apparently, the gremlins just went away. I’m now getting normal throughput on my notebook sitting on the dining room table, whereas I was getting 0.1/0.1 Mbps down/up the other day. No changes to anything. It just started working again. I hate that.

Barbara did a quick Costco run yesterday before she headed back up to Sparta. I’d asked her to pick up another case of toilet paper, which she did, but she also picked up another case of paper towels. She’d also stopped at BB&B, where she picked up various stuff for the house, including some small kitchen items like a whisk and a set of biscuit cutters.

I re-read Ted Koppel’s Lights Out last night. It’s a short book, and well worth reading if you haven’t already. One of the points that Koppel makes in passing is the differing levels of preparedness of different areas. Urban residents typically keep very little food on hand. If they’re underclass, they probably keep about a day or two worth on hand. Even if they’re middle-class or better, they probably keep little shelf-stable food on hand because they mostly eat out, eat only fresh foods, or cook microwave meals. Suburban residents are typically better stocked, which corresponds with my own experience. A typical suburban home probably has at least a week or two worth of food on hand, and many have more. Costco and Sam’s Club shopping has encouraged that trend. Suburban homes have more storage than urban apartments, and lots of suburbanites stock up during monthly Costco/Sam’s runs. Rural dwellers are typically even better prepared. I’d guess that the typical home in Sparta has at least a month worth of food on hand, and many/most probably have more. And that’s just regular people. Those who would class themselves as preppers–and there are probably a lot more preppers in this area than in a typical suburban area–have a lot more. It’s ironic that the closer one lives to food-producing areas, the more likely one is to have a lot of food stored. That’s probably because rural residents are on average a lot more conscious of the need to be prepared and a lot less likely to count on the government to do anything to help them during an emergency.

Barbara just got the electric co-op newsletter, which announced that our electric rates would be reduced by about 1.8 cents/KWh. Last month, we used 1,723 KWh at about 10.2 cents/KWh, so our electric bill should be going down by roughly 18% for the rest of this year, a result of cheap natural gas. Yet another example of why low oil/gas prices are a huge benefit across the US.

Living in an all-electric house, I’m well aware of the dangers of a grid-down scenario. That’s why one of the first things we did when we moved in was install a wood stove large enough to heat our home and, if necessary cook on. That means my main concern about electricity at this point is that we have a well for water, so we need to be able to power the well pump if the grid goes down. As a stop-gap measure, we have a generator large enough to power the well pump. We also have a gas station with probably 40,000 gallons of gasoline about 100 yards from our house. But our next major acquisition will probably be a solar installation sufficient to power that well pump for at least 10 or 15 minutes a day. With a flow rate of 5 to 6 gallons per minute, that’d give us 50 to 90 gallons of water a day, which we could live with. We could probably manage that with one or two 100W panels and the associated electronics and deep cycle batteries.

15:13 – We just spent several hours getting steel shelving set up in my office and moving/organizing/inventorying stuff onto those shelves. Having enough food to feed Barbara, Colin, and me for a year or more gives me a sense of security. Having still more in the form of bulk staples that can be stretched with the soups, sauces, spices, meats, and other stuff we have on the shelves also puts us in a position to help family, friends, and neighbors if it ever comes to that. Speaking of which, the chicken tetrazzini turned out very well. It made enough to feed 4 to 6 people, and everything in it was shelf-stable.

We filled seven 2-liter Coke bottles with bread flour yesterday. That turned out to be such a PITA that we transferred the remaining 25 or 30 pounds from the 50-pound bag into heavy freezer Ziplock bags, which isn’t really long-term storage, but we use enough flour that it’ll be fine in the Ziplocks. The 2-liter bottles work pretty well for sugar, rice, oats, and similar bulk foods, even cornmeal, but it’s a real struggle to get them filled with fluffy stuff like white flour. So we still have a sealed 50-pound bag of white flour sitting waiting to be repackaged.

For that, I plan to use one-gallon foil-laminate Mylar bags from the LDS store. To keep down the dust, we’ll probably fill Ziplock bags first, and then seal the filled Ziplock bags in the foil/Mylar pouches. Until yesterday, I would just have sealed the foil/Mylar pouches with a clothes iron set on high, but I read something yesterday about the LDS church recommending that their pouches be sealed only with one of the impulse sealers they sell, or the equivalent. Apparently, a clothes iron doesn’t get hot enough to do the job reliably. The impulse sealer the LDS church sells costs $410, but I understand that many LDS wards and branches have impulse sealers available to borrow or rent, so I’ll probably check with our local LDS church the next time we’re ready to repackage bulk staples.

09:57 – Not much interesting going on around here. Barbara is upstairs washing out more 2-liter Coke bottles. Once those have dried, we’ll transfer 100 pounds of bread flour to them. We need to get the steel shelving set up in my office and the unfinished basement “natural area” if only to have shelf space for all these bottles we’re filling.

Although I’ve been calling this long-term food storage, it’s actually medium-term in the sense that these are the containers we use routinely and cycle through. The next time we buy bulk sugar, flour, etc., it goes into the 7-mil foil-laminate Mylar bags sold by the LDS store. I have a box of 250 of those bags on the shelf, along with enough oxygen absorbers to add one per bag.

I also need to get my new desktop system set up, although I’m not happy about running Windows on it. Once I get it set up, I’ll probably pull a couple of backups of the Windows installation and then pull the hard drive and stick it on the shelf. I’ll install a fresh hard drive and install Linux Mint on the system. Now that USPS Click-N-Ship again supports Regional Rate boxes at the Commercial Base Pricing rate, I no longer really need Stamps.com, which was the reason I needed a Windows system in the first place. Not that the new desktop will go to waste. My little notebook system, with only 4 GB of RAM and a slow hard drive simply couldn’t cope with the load I was putting on it. The other day, I had so much stuff running that it simply locked up. The cursor would move, but I couldn’t even quit any of the running programs, let alone start any others. I’m pretty sure the system was using 100% of the available RAM and the processor was 100% occupied trying to swap stuff out of RAM to disk and back. A hard reboot solved the problem temporarily, but the long-term solution is simply that I need more capable hardware to do what I do.

14:12 – I’ve finished the urgent administrative stuff, and everything is submitted. We’ve both been working pretty much non-stop for what seems like forever, so we decided to pretty much take the day off. We did transfer 100 pounds of sugar to Costo PET nut jars and some 2-liter Coke bottles, along with 50 pounds of rice. This afternoon, we’ll repackage 100 pounds of flour, 25 pounds of cornmeal, and 25 pounds of oats to PET bottles, but that’ll be pretty much it for the day.

USPS belatedly discovered that they’d accidentally removed support for Regional Rate Boxes A and B from Click-N-Ship, but they finally got it restored and working. What’s interesting is that USPS never offered retail pricing for Regional Rate Boxes. You could take one to the post office, but they’d charge you postage according to weight and zone, just as if you’d used a regular box. That means there wasn’t any retail pricing for those boxes, so Click-N-Ship now charges Commercial Base Pricing for them, just as they always did. Since about 98% of our stuff ships in either a RRA or RRB box, that means I don’t need stamps.com any more. I’ll use up the postage I prepaid with them and then go back to using USPS Click-N-Ship. That means I’ll have to pay $18.75 to ship a Large Flat Rate Box with USPS rather than the $16.35 I pay Stamps.com, but we use so few Large FRBs that it doesn’t really matter. Not enough to come anywhere near the $16/month that Stamps.com charges, any way.

I just finished reading Ellisa Barr’s EMP YA PA novel Outage (Powerless Nation Book 1). Despite a few 1- and 2-star reviews, it’s a decent book. There are two sequels, and all three are available to read for free under Kindle Unlimited. I plan to read both sequels.

Now that Barbara has agreed that it’s better to re-watch good stuff that we last watched 20 or 30 years ago, so long that we’ve forgotten any details, we have Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders back in our queue. We’ve watched half a dozen of the Morses and a couple of the Midsomers and remembered very little about any of them. Some of them, we don’t remember ever watching at all. Others are vaguely familiar, but that’s about it.