Category: Random Stuff

Hot and humid.  Yesterday I was inside most of the day, but what I saw seemed cooler.  Just as humid though.

Did a bunch of lifting and carrying, and I am going to feel it today.

This weeks preps were mostly buying things.  If I were you, I’d be looking at guns (carry and long), ammo, and armor.

Time to rotate your stored fuel.

Time to look at all your liquid fuel small engines.  Get them running.

I’ll be busy today, and tomorrow still so I hope the world holds together for a bit longer.  It’s certainly still going crazy- Baltimore is no longer prosecuting dope crimes.  Anyone want to guess what they’ll get more of?  Or what will happen to the police force?

We’re gonna be on our own.

n

Hot and humid. Seriously. Hot. Yesterday was a tiny bit cooler for longer but the heat caught up.

I did get some stuff done yesterday, just not all I wanted to. I rotated 20 gallons of stored gas this week. Refilled the jugs but haven’t added stabilizer yet. Gas is about $2.20/ gal at the moment, so I don’t mind rotating stock.

I also got some good stuff in an estate auction last night. Buying online is all well and good, but the paranoid think that there is merit in having stuff that doesn’t come with a database and surveillance state attached to it. Since we know .gov went to grocery stores and pulled loyalty card purchases for “arab” food after 911, even the beans in beans, bullets, and bandaids can be cause for concern. The other two ‘B’s might trip you up too. I can certainly think of other items that might trigger a closer look under some circumstances. And hey, they may be expired but they were cheap!

I am helping set up for my non-prepping hobby’s regional event today and attending on Friday and possibly Saturday. I’ll probably help tear down too. Community. Getting out of the house. Meatspace!

That means I’ll be away from my desk… so you guys behave!

n

Hot and humid again.  Yesterday had scattered thunderstorms and localized heavy rain.  The north side of town got a bunch and the rivers/creeks/bayous were all high on their banks.

I did pickups and some work cleaning up stuff in storage.  Not anywhere near as much as I needed to get done though.

A couple of days ago my wife had a contractor come and look at finishing our master bath.  This is the one I got half done, as our emergency shelter.  Even leaving off all materials and the extra labor to do the FEMA wall structure, the estimate was over $30K.  Wow.  That is about double what I’d have expected for a normal bath update, complete.  I think my wife might have reassessed my value as a DIYer.  So we’re NOT getting someone in to finish.  I’ve got to suck it up and prioritize getting the room done.  It’s a truism that the longer these projects linger, the more it sets back NEW projects.

Speaking of, I’m not making much progress on the driveway, patio, and garage cleanup.  I’m just not getting stuff out of here quickly enough.  Not sure what I’m going to end up doing about that, but if I can get my other space ready, I can possibly do auctions of much of the stuff that was destined for ebay.  I wouldn’t get as much for it, but it would be gone and I wouldn’t have to ship it.  That is my medium term plan at the moment.

Ham radio lunch today, I’m going to try to make it.  It’s at a location that attracts a few extra guys, and I missed it last time it was there.  Next week it’s down the street from my house, so that one is a no brainer.  Conditions for listening to shortwave or HF have been uniformly bad here at home, and I need to compare with the others to see if it’s just me, or a wider issue.    I think there is some new noise source here, and bad conditions- nice double whammy.

I better get back to it.

n

Hot and humid, I’m sure. Yesterday had T-storms scattered around town. Nothing at home or where I was, but I could see them. Hot as blazes too.

I spent part of the day doing auction pickups. I scored some good preps to go along with the fishing poles and reels I got at the yard sale.

At one auction, I got 3 Mr Buddy propane heaters, 3 camelbak backpacks (two minis and one small), a small “tactical” back pack, a big box of fishing tackle, a cast (fishing) net, a really cheap weapon laser (<$50 retail), and some other odds and ends. I now have enough camelbaks for everyone in the family, in an appropriately sized backpack for a day hike, and ‘baks for more serious bags too. I’ve got one just for my Expedition now too, and I should have one just for the ranger as well.

One of the odds was a GunVault Micro. I use one for my Shield when traveling and thought it would be good to have another. I prefer the Mini for everything else. I’ve had the micro not open with the code if there was pressure against the clasp. It always opens with the key though. It’s a good size and shape to fit in a laptop sleeve which obscures it from the kids.

Another odd was a pool pump and filter- the kind for a small wading pool. I’ll test it, then put it up with the vinyl pool that I have “just in case” I need to harvest rainwater. It won’t purify water, but it will do a decent job of filtering out the big stuff. It was less than $16 and falls into the “unlikely but just in case” category. I can always use the pump by itself.

I picked up some stuff to help out my gun store buddy, which is always good, and a few more odds and sods for me. Not much to resell, but good cheap preps.

This particular online auction is mostly store returns and open box merch with some estate stuff mixed in. Go to estatesales.net and drill down to your town to see if you have any similar local online sales. Also try hibid.com. They have more local online stuff. If you treat it like a yardsale, and don’t pay too much, or buy cr@p you don’t recognize the quality and brand, there are bargains to be had. In general I paid 1/3 or less of retail, and so far, it’s been better than I expected.

I also had a chance to pick up some really inexpensive stuff one of my neighbors needs. It can’t hurt to be though well of by your neighbors. Help them out when you can, establish a relationship. Meatspace!

In closer to home news, today at after school care, one daughter got a (baby) tooth knocked out in the gym, and the other snipped off a piece of her knuckle with scissors during an art project. Second day of school. The YMCA that runs the after care didn’t have a first aid kit in the gym, and had to move all the kids together to where the kit was to treat my daughter. Lesson learned for the YMCA counselors I hope. You have two kits, one stays in the gym, one in the cafeteria, FFS.

On the other hand, for some reason, I’m out of knuckle and finger tip bandaids too. I’ll be fixing that later today. I think I threw out the ones I had as they were not Bandaid ™ and had lost their ‘sticky’. If I did, I completely forgot to replace them. Prepper and dad fail. From now on, I’m sticking with the brand name. And I need to go through ALL the kits and check adhesiveness and replace as needed.

Some ebay stuff to do today, and a couple of items to pick up, so I better get tuit…

nick

Probably just as warm and wet as usual. I’m writing this last night, so I can be sure and get everyone out the door with a good breakfast this morning. It’s been tight doing it the way I did it last school year.

I’m hoping to get some more work done this week to get another couple of loads to auction. I have some volunteer work wrt my non-prepping hobby on Thur and Fri, and my ham radio lunch on Wed, so it’s gonna be a busy week in any case.

One of the things I’ve been looking at is what food and tools people took with them when they came to the US or emigrated west. I’ve got some lists from the cattle drives, and from Plimoth Colony. If I can get a couple more, I think there is a good article in it.

To be honest, I’m thinking of how I could enter the article contest at survivalblog.com. Those prizes look sweet, and some of the articles are not great. I could do better, I think. It couldn’t be anything I’ve previously written for here. I feel like I’m cheating a bit whenever I consider it though.

Well, it’s something to think about anyway.

I better get some sleep so I can get up and start this day…

n

81F and humid this morning.

Back and bladder woke me up. Dreams were unpleasant so I got out of bed much earlier than needed today.

News is all the same as yesterday.

I’m going back to bed.

n

81F and 98%RH at 8am. HOT humid and wet in various places and degrees yesterday. Because the rain was from T-storm cells, it was pretty localized. There were a lot of cells, and they were spread across most of Houston, so you could have rain on the south side of a bridge, and dry on the north. In several places I got pounded so hard you couldn’t see 20 ft, but it didn’t last long.

The news lately is full of stories about individual people. The stories about movements, trends, and actions by state agents are a bit lacking. Watch the other hand…

Lots of errands to run today, kids are doing some activities with friends, and I’ll be able to get out of the house. We’ll see how I do on the list.

Keep stacking, keep working to improve your capabilities and resilience.\

n

78F and saturated. All my windows are covered in condensation. That’s never a good sign.

This week blazed by. I got very little done on any front other than starting school.

A few more things were added to the grocery shelves (not literally, the shelves are empty, stuff is going into bins stacked under a tarp until I’m sure the rat problem is over. This makes it much harder to know what I’ve got.)

I did rotate 3 cans of gas and discover that some had evaporated, so that’s something.

Garden is still failing in slow motion.

World is still here, but the rate of change seems to be accelerating. Lawlessness among certain parts of the population seems to be increasing dramatically. The cops are learning a hard lesson at the moment. We’ll be living with the aftermath of that lesson for a while. (Us vs. them only works until ‘they’ realize you can’t be everywhere, or see everything, and depends on the largest parts of society thinking they are more “us” than “them”. ) 800,000 sworn officers of all types in the whole USA. 1.2 million CHL holders in TX alone. Someone get me a number for ex-cons in the USA…

With that cheery thought, what have you done to get ready?

n

76F and 99%RH. Rain didn’t continue much past the initial downpour, but the cooler temps did.

First day of school. So exciting, so terrifying!

Most of their immediate classmates will be very familiar to them. The school does move kids between two homerooms to break up cliques and try to keep down the drama. They had 4 kids not return this year, and they have a few new kids in the ‘mainstream’ class. I’ll have to wait a bit to see what the actual enrollment numbers look like, but my guess is fewer than expected overall, especially among the migrants.

Oh, and the bus drivers are all over the scanner today. First day for them too.

Meanwhile, we’re watching to see if commies do what commies usually do in Hong Kong, what the markets will do today, and waiting to see if today is the day it all goes pear shaped. I certainly hope not, I’ve got more stacking to do.

Stay frosty today.

n

81F and 96%RH this am. Early this am. Did I really get up this early every day for school? Yes I did. I sure don’t feel like it today though.

Today we’ll be meeting the kids teachers and tomorrow is first day of school. Yikes. Fall is fast approaching. I used to consider Fall to be start of school, but we haven’t even had Labor Day yet, and there is plenty of hot sun left in the year.

Our school district added a Chief of Security and Safety. Unfortunately they promoted from within, and although the guy is a 28 year veteran of the District, they didn’t list a single credential related to his new job. They also promised campus based advisor teams, maybe I can get on ours. I guess we’ll see. I think it’s a step, hopefully in the right direction.

The world continues on its way. Perhaps the mess in Hong Kong will keep China’s attention focused inward for a while. Hmm, funny how that might work. How very convenient…

And Epstein’s guards might have been asleep on the job, literally. Funny that a guy so connected, so important as a potential informer, so much the focus of attention, could succeed with a suicide while in custody. No matter which way you look at it, from what starting or ending point, it’s Banana Republic time when it can happen in a federal lockup.

Keep stacking. We are further along than we realize.

n