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Category: science kits

Monday, 20 April 2015

10:21 – We decided to make a quick Costco run yesterday morning. The only prepping supplies I picked up were a couple large cans of Country Time lemonade ($6.79 each), 10 pounds of oats ($8.29), and an empty 20-pound propane cannister ($26.69). Well, that and two pairs of Kirkland jeans ($13.99 each).

I grabbed the 10 pound box of Quaker Oats right as Barbara was picking up two large boxes of cereal. She told me not to buy the oats. She doesn’t like oatmeal, and I almost never eat breakfast. Oddly, she likes oat bars and oatmeal cookies. Perhaps I’ll make her a batch of oatmeal cookies and/or oat bars with whatever is left after I transfer the bulk of the oats into 2-liter bottles. Even without an oxygen absorber, they’ll stay good in 2-liter bottles for at least five years if not ten. With oxygen absorbers, their shelf life is essentially unlimited.

What about Plodia interpunctella (pantry moths, weevils)? Not really a problem. They lay eggs in flour and other grain products that are stored in paper sacks or containers otherwise subject to access by the adult bugs. Using an oxygen absorber in a foil-laminate Mylar bag or a PET or glass bottle is a definitive solution. It suffocates the eggs or immature insects. But transferring the Quaker Oats from a sealed bag directly to clean 2-liter bottles also works pretty well. It’s not like a passing pantry moth is going to have much chance to land on the oats and lay eggs.

Some sources recommend putting the bottles in the freezer for a week or two to kill insect eggs. The only problem with that method is that it doesn’t work. It reminds me of that old joke about the guy tearing off strips of paper and tossing them out the train window in Vermont to keep elephants away. That works for the same reason freezing works. They both keep away the pests, elephants or weevils, because there weren’t any there in the first place. And a long line of scientists ending with Pasteur and Tyndall in the 19th century finally definitively falsified the concept of spontaneous generation, despite the millennium-long insistence by the Roman Catholic Church that spontaneous generation was the source of life.

I need to ship overnight kit orders and build more kits.

12:08 – It seems that Amazon is clearing inventory of their Fire HD7 tablets. Not the HDX7, but its predecessor. They have them on sale, today only, for $79 in the ad-supported version. I just ordered one for myself, along with a $12 folding case. The original HD7 is more than good enough for what I use a tablet for, which is mostly quick checks of email and web sites.

I got an HDX7 for Barbara, but I use it as much as she does. So much, in fact, that she’s started calling her Kindle Fire my Kindle Fire. Not good. So, once this HD7 shows up, her Kindle Fire goes back to being her Kindle Fire and I’ll have my own.

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Wednesday, 15 April 2015

08:56 – Why More Men Are Sitting Down to Pee In my case, it was training by women, starting while I was in college. One girlfriend dumped me after about the third time she got up to pee in the middle of the night and sat on bare porcelain. Well, actually, it was worse than that. She got wet. It took years for me to retrain myself to sit as the default option.

I fell back into “power reading” mode last night and blasted through two of the novels I’d gotten from Kindle Unlimited–510 pages worth–as well as about half of a non-fiction title. Call it 700 pages total. For decades, that was pretty routine for me, maybe 400 to 500 pages of fiction a day. Some weekends I’d go through a dozen novels or more. But for the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve been spending a significant fraction of my reading time on the web and averaging only maybe a couple hundred pages of fiction per evening, or even less. And a lot of that is repetitive because there just isn’t that much new fiction that I want to read. Much better to re-read something I liked.

Kit stuff today. I need to get a dozen or two biology kits built and get started on more chemistry kits, which are starting to run low. One weekend soon we also need to get a bunch of components shifted from their shipping boxes to the inventory shelves and get solid inventory numbers on them.

I also have some longer-term stuff to work on. I’d like to ship at least one new type of kit this autumn, and ideally two. That requires groundwork and time. And of course I’m still putting in serious time on the prepping book.

12:23 – I continue to be impressed with these Ultrafire Cree flashlights. They’re focusable by sliding the front barrel in or out. At tightest focus, the beam becomes square rather than round, as the lens is actually focusing the LED. Walking Colin last night, I pointed the light on tight-beam at the house across the street, which is 50 yards away. The beam at that distance was smaller than the pattern of a 12-gauge shotgun with an 18-inch open cylinder barrel, and it was bright enough to read by. Too bright, in fact, to be comfortable for reading. So I turned it toward a house down the street that’s about 150 meters distant. At that range, the tight-focus beam was still far more than bright enough to aim by, and I suspect it would have been sufficient out to 200 meters or more. I think I’ll clamp one to Barbara’s Ruger Mini-14. The only modification I’d make is to tape the focusing collar in place to keep it from sliding under recoil.

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Tuesday, 14 April 2015

08:47 – I’ll mail the taxes today and this hassle will be over for one more year. I just wish I didn’t have to write checks with five numbers before the decimal point.

Barbara said last night that she wanted to look at Sparta, NC first as a potential relocation site rather than visit Dobson, NC. That’s fine with me. Dobson is a bit closer to Winston-Salem than I’d like, and it’s also only a couple miles from I-77. There are also chicken factories near Dobson that produce tens of millions of birds a year. Of course, there are also huge chicken factories in the Sparta area.

After I get the taxes off, I’ll be working on kit stuff. Our inventory on a lot of bottled chemicals is very low, so I need to make up new batches of a couple of dozen of them. I make up the ones that we use in the largest volume in batches of 8 to 12 liters at a time, assuming they’re stable. I make up others that we use in smaller volumes or that are less stable once mixed in batches of 1 or 2 liters at a time. Once mixed, they all need to be filtered and then bottled in kit-size containers.

I’m working on a bunch of different sections in the prepping book. Right now, I’m working on the section on providing minimal electric power in a long-term grid-down situation. Essentially, that means being able to recharge enough AA/AAA NiMH cells to keep stuff like flashlights/lanterns, and radios, as well as ebook readers, tablets, and other small electronic gear running. The easiest and cheapest way to do that is with a small solar installation charging lead-acid storage batteries. All you need to do that is one or more solar panels and a $12 to $30 PWM charge controller, and in a pinch you can get by without the charge controller. In a formal solar installation, you’d use deep-cycle batteries to store the charge, but in an emergency you can use ordinary vehicle batteries, which would be readily available in large numbers. Vehicle batteries are optimized for providing very high current for very short times, which means they don’t last nearly as long if you use them in low-draw/long-time environments, but that’s a minor issue.

15:02 – I just joined Kindle Unlimited for the free 30-day trial. Someone asked, so here’s the deal: when you’re looking at the book’s page you see the Buy icon with the usual drop-down list, which in my case includes three physical Kindles, the Kindle-reader app, and the option to download the file for transfer via USB. If you click on the Read for Free with Kindle Unlimited option, you can still pick the download for transfer via USB option, but it doesn’t actually work.Instead, the usual next screen comes up and asks you to pick the device to transfer the file to, which in my case is set to default to my own Kindle.

So I now have ten books queued up for delivery by Wi-Fi to my Kindle. The problem with that, as I’ve mentioned before, is that my Kindle frequently crashes when I let it access Wi-Fi. Sometimes, the crash is so bad that I end up having to do a hard reset, deleting all of the books from the Kindle. Fortunately, Amazon allows you to manage your KU titles, and one of the options on that page is to transfer the book by USB. So I downloaded all ten of the titles to my hard drive, dropped them into Calibre to strip the DRM, and then transferred them by USB to my Kindle. They all work fine, but seven of the ten aren’t worth reading. I hate to be harsh but my reading time is too limited as it is, and I don’t have time to read books that are mediocre or worse.

Four of those seven are by Steven Konkoly, whose The Jakarta Pandemic was an excellent PA novel, particularly for a first-time author. The four in question are all non-fiction prepping books he’s written with a co-author with whom I’m not familiar, but as it turns out they appear to be one actual book. The first in the series is listed as 246 pages, with the second, third, and forth volumes roughly 60 or 70 pages each. Unfortunately, unless I’m missing something, those latter volumes appear to be simple chunks of the full book. The whole work might be of some use to a complete newbie prepper, but there’s very little specific information there. For example, in discussing firearms, Konkoly makes no specific recommendations other than to say that one married couple of his acquaintance intended to wait things out on their boat. Konkoly recommended either a pump-action shotgun or a .308 rifle (unspecified as to brand or action). The wife was concerned about her ability to handle either, so Konkoly fired the .308 with her close at hand. It was too loud for her, so she ended up with the shotgun. I read maybe 20 pages of the full volume and found only more of the same. No specific recommendations anywhere to be found. So those four titles are going back immediately to free up slots for me to download more. (With KU, you’re limited to having 10 titles “checked out” at a time. If you want to get an eleventh title, you have to “return” one of the ten you have out.) I did a quick scan on the remaining six titles, and three of them are garbage. The other three I’ll have to check further to see if I want to devote the time to actually read them. The good news is that there are thousands of cozy mysteries available under KU, including many series that Barbara may be interested in.

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Monday, 13 April 2015

08:58 – Thanks to everyone who made suggestions about finding books that are available under Kindle Unlimited. This link allows you to search only books that are available under that program. It wasn’t an option the last time I looked. Either that, or Amazon had it so well hidden that I couldn’t find it. I’ll probably sign up for the KU 30-day free trial later this week and give it a try.

More of the same today, building and shipping science kits. We’re trying to get ahead of things now. April is the worst month for sales, but summer is approaching fast. Sales volume will start to increase next month, climb further in June, and start going crazy in July. In all likelihood, there will be days in July and August when we ship more kits than we do in the whole month of April, so we have to be ready to meet that demand. That means not just building subassemblies and full kits, but getting purchase orders staged to get stuff ordered in time to arrive here when we need it, including allowances for stuff that’s backordered.

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Saturday, 11 April 2015

11:34 – We’re doing the usual Saturday stuff. I’m doing laundry and Barbara if off running errands, having lunch with a friend, and visiting her sister. We took some time this morning to make up a batch of the non-regulated chemical bags for biology kits, which was the last subassembly I needed to build a new batch of those kits.

Speaking of which, I need to get some purchase orders issued for kit components. Yesterday, I ordered a bunch of bottles and caps. That was the first time I’d ordered caps by the case of 10,000 rather than by the box of 1,440. They’re 20% cheaper by the case, and we’ll use them eventually, so it made sense to order by the case. I’m just wondering how big a case will be. A box of 1,440 is medium-size, so at roughly seven times as many caps, the case will be a pretty large box.

I’m running out of Zippo lighter fluid. I have a couple of 4-ounce (118 mL) cans in our car emergency kits, but I won’t touch those. (I know they’ll store well because a few months ago I opened a can that had been made in 1979 and it was full and worked fine.) The two 12-ounce cans I keep on my desk and end table in the den are empty or nearly so. I’m going to refill them with VM&P naphtha, which works as well as the official stuff and at about $15/gallon (3.79 L) at Lowe’s is a lot cheaper than paying $8 per 12-ounce can for the Zippo-branded fluid.

I’ve been reading a lot of prepper fiction lately, and almost invariably it has the protagonists bugging out with backpacks across devastated urban landscapes. Also almost invariably these protagonists are in their 20’s or 30’s, with equipment, skills, and physical conditioning that would be routine for SEALs, Green Berets, or Delta Force but are anything but the norm for regular people, including those in their 20’s and 30’s.

Now, when I was in my late teens through mid-20’s, I could run with those guys, and shoot with them, for that matter. I thought nothing of playing serve-and-volley tennis all day long in the August heat. My eyesight was better than 20/10. I hunted. I backpacked. I shot frequently on ranges and in funhouses for everything from combat pistol to clays to rifles out to 1,000 yards. I was in shape and as ready as anyone could be.

But I turn 62 years old in June. The state requires me to wear glasses to drive. My BMI is well down in the so-called normal range, and I think I’m in pretty decent physical condition for my age. But I’m a very pale shadow of what I was 40 years ago. Barbara is also in pretty good physical condition. She goes to the gym twice a week and is physically active day to day. But she’s had both knees replaced. In short, in a serious emergency, I can’t see either one of us being able to hike out carrying heavy packs. It’s just not on. Oh, we have what we need in terms of gear and so on, and the spirit may be willing but the bodies are weak. If we were faced with the need to evacuate on foot, we’d give it our best, but we’d almost certainly die trying.

That’s why my focus is on hunkering down in our home. In nearly any type of emergency, staying put will be the optimum decision for us. And for almost anyone else. Sure, a man of 27 might be a good candidate for SEAL Team Six, but what about his wife, his child, his mother and dad, his sister, and so on? None of them are going to be hiking cross-country carrying 80-pound packs. Nor would any of them be your first choice in a firefight. What they can do is function as what amounts to garrison troops to help defend your home, if it ever comes to that. Let’s all hope it never does.

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Friday, 10 April 2015

07:52 – I got a couple dozen chemistry and forensic kits built yesterday, just in time to fill overnight orders. I’m working on more biology kits today.

This week was consumed by taxes and kit stuff, so I didn’t get much done in terms of prepping. Here’s what I did to prep this week:

I almost gave up on it early, which would have been a mistake. Here’s an email I sent to the author yesterday (which includes minor spoilers):

Hi, Steven

As a prepper for more than 40 years, I downloaded your Jakarta Pandemic a few days ago when Amazon had it for free. (I’m giving away my age group when I tell you that my first reaction to the title was that you’d misspelled Djakarta…)

I really wasn’t expecting much. I’ve seen so many post-apocalyptic and prepping novels by self-published wannabe authors that I’ve come to expect them to be mediocre at best and usually just about unreadable. I was surprised to see that you’re actually a pretty talented writer.

I’ll admit that my first reaction to many of the points that “Gunny” raised in an early one-star review of the book was complete agreement. I liked Charlie Thornton as soon as you introduced the character and your initial representation of him as loony-toons nearly turned me off reading the rest of the book. I’m glad I continued. Gunny’s other points about Alex breaking his own quarantine rules and so on seemed valid until I realized that most people think they know what they’d do in a given situation but when faced with that situation may in fact take completely different actions. People are nothing if not unpredictable.

Same deal when Alex faces down Manson and his goblins. I agreed with Gunny that Alex would have to be nucking futs to go into that situation voluntarily with an empty shotgun. I’d go into it with my shotgun in Condition One. Hell, Condition Zero.

But as I read and thought about what you wrote I realized that you had in fact thought all of this through and were writing Alex as a nuanced character, as subject to doubt and inconsistencies as any real human. That’s when I realized that you were a real writer, so I immediately bought the first book in the Perseid Collapse series, just to make sure it was queued up and waiting when I finished the first book.

After reading the Perseid Collapse, I went over to your website and downloaded book two in that series and then turned around and bought book three. Now I feel guilty because I have four of your books and got two of those for free.

Incidentally, if I have one criticism of Jakarta, it’s that I found a lot of stuff that the proofer should have caught, from simple typos to sentence fragments. This was particularly evident in the last half of that book.

As someone who’s been writing professionally for 20 years, I can’t imagine not using a “kitchen cabinet” to catch stuff like that. I’ve used volunteer proofers/editors for every book I’ve written, and they’re very good at catching stuff before the publisher’s copy editor sees the manuscript. And not just typos and barbarisms, either. I’m currently writing a non-fiction prepping book, which I’ll self-publish in print with Amazon CreateSpace, and I have quite a few volunteers who make substantive comments on the content itself. They’ve made me rethink in several cases.

At any rate, congratulations on your prepping novels. Any more in the works?

Best regards.

Bob

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Thursday, 9 April 2015

07:59 – The federal and state taxes are finished and ready to go in the mail, so the top priority for today and tomorrow is to build more science kits. We’re down to exactly two left in stock, both biology kits. I’ll make up two or three dozen biology, chemistry, and forensics kits today and tomorrow, which’ll get us back up to reasonable inventory levels for this time of year.

Incredibly, some people are defending the actions of that murderous South Carolina cop, even after they’ve seen the video. Idiots who defend thuggish cops like Slager are as bad as the rabble-rousers who incite violence and racial hatred when cops are forced to shoot thuggish punks like Michael Brown.

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Friday, 3 April 2015

07:36 – This can’t be good. With less than one week to go until it crashes out of the euro, Greece is on the edge of the precipice. Greece draws up drachma plans, prepares to miss IMF payment

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I ordered another case of 12-count 28-ounce cans (21 pounds total) of Keystone Meats canned ground beef. Including shipping, it costs less than $5/pound, versus $4/pound for fresh ground beef at Costco. That’s not much of a premium for shelf-stable meat. Keystone gives a best-by date five years out, but as usual that’s a gross understatement. We don’t like it as well as fresh ground Costco beef, which is probably a higher grade of meat and definitely contains less fat, but the canned stuff is fine for spaghetti and casseroles.
  • I ordered a case of 24-count 11-ounce cans (16.5 pounds total) of Crider Chicken Bologna, which is basically ground white-meat chicken with some spices added. It can be sliced as lunch meat or diced for use in chicken casseroles and other recipes. I wanted to order one case to try. If Barbara and I both like it, great. We’ll order more. If she doesn’t, I’ll eat it with crackers for lunch. At $32/case, it’s not much of a risk. The best-by date is listed as two years out, but again that’s completely imaginary.
  • I ordered more Augason Farms dehydrated foods, including two more #10 cans each of Chicken Bouillon Powdered Extract, Cheese Blend Powder, Butter Powder, and Dehydrated Diced Red and Green Bell Peppers Mix. I would also have ordered two or three more #10 cans of Egg Powder, but they were out of stock. Note that all of these are “meal extenders”, things that can be used to make bulk dry staples like rice, flour, and instant mashed potatoes palatable.
  • I added about 20 liters (5 gallons) of Costco bottled water, which is about a 5 person-day emergency supply, and another 20 liters in recycled bottles.
  • I put in another couple days’ work on the non-fiction prepping book. I’m up to about 400 manuscript pages and I’m nowhere near finished. I’ve already decided to make it two volumes, with the first covering through the end of one year and the second covering long-term preparation. I wish I could put in more time on it, but doing taxes will occupy a lot of my time for the next couple weeks and keeping the kit business running and getting ready for the summer/autumn rush is already a full-time job.

At this point, I’m reasonably comfortable with our level of preparedness. We can keep the five of us–Barbara, me, Frances, Al, and Colin–in food and water for several months, and would be able to help friends and neighbors in a shorter term emergency. From this point on, it’ll be replacing what we’ve consumed and making incremental additions to our longer-term stores. With the weather getting better, we’ll also spend some time making day trips to several small towns to the northwest of us to see what they’re like.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Sunday, 29 March 2015

08:40 – As to the co-pilot who intentionally crashed that German airliner, it appears that he was not a convert to islam. All muslims are nuts, but not all nuts are muslims.

Barbara is cleaning house. I just got back from walking Colin. When the street is clear, I sometimes take him off leash so that he can run home. He runs home, up onto the porch, grabs a stick, and is lying in the yard waiting for me when I get back. This time, he started off in a beeline for home, but then hung a left and ran down a driveway. When he’s done that in the past, which doesn’t happen often, he’s always been sniffing around at the bottom of the drive. I shout “go home” and he heads for home. This time, he was nowhere to be seen. I found him on the street behind ours, sniffing in someone’s front yard. He let me approach him and put him back on leash. When we got home, Barbara told him he was a Very Bad Dog. He’s four years old now, which is about the age that our others have become reliable in responding to voice commands regardless of how interesting something else is to them. We’ll see.

We’ll be working on kit stuff this afternoon.

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Thursday, 26 March 2015

09:19 – It now appears that that German airliner was intentionally crashed by a suicidal/homicidal maniac co-pilot who had locked the pilot out of the cockpit. No word yet on whether the co-pilot was a muslim nutcase or just an ordinary nutcase.

Barbara and I need something new to watch, so I’m burning DVDs of series eight of Heartland. The final episode doesn’t officially run until Sunday, but I have the first 17 episodes, which’ll hold us until I can get the final episode. They’re running a preview streaming of the final episode today in Canada, so it’ll probably be available via torrent tomorrow. I’ll probably burn these to DVD+RW discs rather than DVD+R because the official boxed set will be available for purchase by September or October. I’ve bought the official boxed sets for all seven available seasons as they’re released, and will continue doing so as long as the series continues.

Today I’ll be working on kit stuff and the prepping book. I have to make up 8 L of one solution for the biology kits and bottle it, which is the last thing I need to make up a bunch more biology kits.

The doorbell rang at 0643 yesterday. It was Hasani, one of the neighborhood kids, asking if he could borrow a cane for a school project. Barbara’s alarm is set for 0645. When it goes off, she showers and I take Colin out the front and get the paper. I see Hasani most mornings, so he knew we’d be up when he rang the bell.

Yesterday afternoon, I was talking to Mary, Kim’s mom, and she mentioned that they’d had a scare that morning. She said that someone rang their doorbell in the middle of the night and that she and Kim had called the police. At first Mary said it had been at 4 or 5 that morning, but when I mentioned Hasani ringing our bell at 0643 she said it might have been around then. I said I’d ask Hasana when he brought the cane back after school and Mary asked me not to say anything. She’s in her 80’s and is sometimes a bit vague, especially when she’d just woken up. I think she was worried that people would think she was foolish. I reassured her that she’d done exactly the right thing, which is also what the cops told her.

Of course, I asked Hasani if it had been him. He’s in middle school but he’s a really big boy, about as tall as I am. I told him that Mary and Kim had been scared when he rang their bell while it was still dark out. I didn’t want to make the kid think he’d done anything wrong, but told him that he needed to remember that women living on their own tend to be nervous about unexpected visitors when it’s dark out. I ignored Mary’s request because I wanted to make sure that it had been him and not a potential intruder. I’ll talk to Kim today and let her know that she doesn’t need to worry about the person who rang her doorbell.

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