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Category: weekly prepping

Friday, 23 October 2015

08:30 – The bread we baked yesterday turned out fine, actually better than our earlier efforts. The bread was noticeably drier this time. If I didn’t know we’d made it ourselves, I would have thought Barbara bought it at a bakery.

We’re rapidly getting through watching the BBC Historical Farm series. We’ve finished Tudor Monastery Farm and Secrets of the Castle, and are 3/4 of the way through the 12-episode Green Valley series. Next up is either Victorian Farm or Victorian Pharmacy. We finished watching series one of Little House on the Prairie, and will start series two shortly. It’s kind of hokey, with inferior writing and some truly bad acting, but it’s interesting nonetheless for a reasonably accurate representation of rural life in the 1870’s. It maintains a strong focus on self-reliance and getting the job done no matter what.

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • Although the offer we made on the house up in Sparta is still hung up in paperwork, we’ve started packing up stuff on the assumption that it will go through. If not, that’s fine, because we will eventually be relocating, whether it’s to Sparta or somewhere else in the western North Carolina mountains, and the stuff we’re packing up can sit in boxes for a long time without us needing it.
  • I continued work on the open-pollinated seed kits. We’re currently awaiting the outcome of the germination testing after a freeze/thaw cycle. I’m still working on the planting guide.
  • I started work on organizing reference books for the Kindles. Step One is to use Calibre with the de-DRM plug-in to produce portable copies of each book. Step Two is to organize those books into Kindle categories in an on-disk directory structure on my PC. Step Three is to use the on-line tool at this web site to create the Kindle category structure on disk and then transfer it to our Kindles.

We won’t depend entirely on Kindle ebooks. They require power and aren’t ideal for displaying PDFs and other graphics-heavy titles. I don’t believe that a Kindle would be damaged by an EMP, but it’s possible they would if they hadn’t been stored in a Faraday cage. But overall, Kindles are an excellent and inexpensive way to store literally thousands of books in a very small space. Many more books than we’d have space to store in pbook form. And of course those ebooks can also be backed up to USB flash drives for later transfer to a surviving Kindle or tablet. In fact, I’ll probably convert each of them to epub format just to maximize their potential usefulness.

All of that said, your library should also include as many useful pbooks as possible. Disregarding fiction, our library currently contains probably 1,000+ useful or potentially useful pbooks, many of which we picked up for nothing or next to nothing at library booksales or used bookstores, and all of those will definitely be going with us when we relocate. When she was packing up books in the living-room/library the other day, Barbara was about to put a full print version of Encyclopedia Britannica in the Goodwill pile. I immediately reclaimed it, not because we have any current use for it, but because it’s a potentially priceless collection of knowledge.

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

Read the comments: 65 Comments

Friday, 16 October 2015

08:25 – Barbara is off to the gym this morning. Then she’ll presumably continue with the cleaning and packing up. We got a fair amount done on my office yesterday, but we have a lot more to do. We’ll start on my office bookshelves, which are something like 60 lineal feet, nearly all filled with books. Probably half or more of those books will go into the discard and Goodwill piles. I mean, it was kind of neat to get copies of my O’Reilly books in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and so on, but I’ve never even looked at them other than for a moment after they arrived. Some of them are in languages that I not only can’t read, but can’t even identify.

I’ve done nothing to prep this week other than stuff related to our relocation and work on the open-pollinated seeds kit.

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

Read the comments: 29 Comments

Friday, 9 October 2015

08:12 – Barbara is off to the gym this morning. She’s finished yard work until more of the leaves come down, so she’ll run some errands that she was putting off during our recent heavy rains. Then we’ll work on science kit stuff.

We started watching Little House on the Prairie yesterday. I’d never seen it, since I was in college and grad school when it started its run. Barbara saw the first season or two before college, and liked it then. It’s set on a farm in rural Minnesota in the 1870’s, and seems to be a good family-oriented introduction to the prepper way of thinking: self-reliance, overcoming challenges, working if you expect to eat, and so on.

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • We made a trip up to Sparta, NC to look at houses, and ended up putting in an offer on one of them. If the owners accept our offer, we’re scheduled to close on the house early next month. In that case, we should actually be moved up there by the end of the year, although we’d still be down here in Winston a lot to get the present house ready to go on the market.
  • I ordered more open-pollinated seeds for the heirloom seed kits and started a culture of mixed species of Rhizobia spp., a nitrogen-fixing bacteria that can increase legume yields by an order of magnitude. I’ll use that culture to produce a shelf-stable suspension in phosphate-buffered saline, which can then be reactivated simply by reculturing it in a dilute mixture of table sugar and beef or chicken broth.

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

Read the comments: 21 Comments

Friday, 2 October 2015

08:28 – Barbara is settling in well to working for ourselves rather than for a paycheck. One of the things she was looking forward to was being able to go to the gym during the day instead of after work. She had been going after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which made for late dinners and short evenings those days. Yesterday, she went to the gym during the day. She’ll probably start going three times a week instead of twice.

I’ve started preliminary work on a new line of science kits that we’ll introduce in 2016. The working title for the line is Science Basics, and the kits will be designed to sell for $99 each. They’re intended for students who will not go on to major in science in college, and will provide reasonable rigor and scope for a standard one-year laboratory course in biology, chemistry, or forensic science. I’m not too concerned about cannibalizing sales of our more expensive full kits. It’s a different market, and homeschoolers who are on a tight budget, which is to say many of them, should welcome these inexpensive kits. I’ll also design them to minimize the use of any really hazardous chemicals. They’ll also be micro-chemistry based to minimize clean-up and disposal issues.

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I ordered some gun accessories from Midway USA, including a magazine loader for AR-15 mags, a tactical sling for the Ruger AR-556, four more 30-round Magpul AR-15 magazines, and two Tapco 30-round magazines for the Ruger Mini-14. That takes us to eight total mags each for the AR-556 and Mini-14, which should be sufficient. We’re in decent shape right now on .223/5.56mm ammunition, but once we get relocated I want us both to shoot familiarization on both of those rifles. Rather than shoot up the good stuff, I think I’ll order a few test 20-round boxes of the cheap TulAmmo stuff from cheaperthandirt.com. If it functions reliably in both rifles, I’ll go ahead and order another case or two. The stuff is steel-case and so not reloadable, but at around $0.22/round the price is hard to beat, assuming it works reliably.
  • I continued research into the Sparta, NC area as a possible relocation destination. I was pleased to find the Alleghany County Rifle Association has a range outside Sparta. If we end up buying a house in the Sparta area, one of the first things I’ll do is join that club. There’s also a good gym for Barbara. There isn’t much shopping, but that’s okay. We can make the half hour trip to the Walmart Supercenter in Galax or West Jefferson whenever we need to, and we’ll be coming down to Winston-Salem for a Costco run every month or two. And there’s always walmart.com and amazon.com.
  • I managed to get in a few hours’ work on the prepping book. As of now, I intend to devote at least two full days a week to working on it until it’s complete.

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

Read the comments: 15 Comments

Friday, 25 September 2015

08:20 – Barbara is taking a vacation day today and heading out to run errands. We’re in pretty good shape on science kit inventory, so we’ll spend most of this weekend getting things organized, inventoried, straightened up, and cleaned.

The biggest benefit to having Barbara come to work full-time for our business is that by having her do stuff that I’ve been doing until now, my time will be freed up to do stuff that needs my attention. Things like developing new science kits and writing the manuals for them, as well as other things we need to do to grow the business. One of those things is devoting lots of time and effort to the prepping book, which the other demands on my time have forced me to let slide.

As my editor at O’Reilly would no doubt confirm, getting me to declare one of my books finished and ready to publish isn’t easy. He’s basically had to pry every one of them from my fingers, because I always figure that just a bit more work will make the book better.

But with Barbara available to work on science kit stuff I plan to get serious about finishing the first volume of the prepping book, spending at least two full days a week on it. I’ll then get it into print with Amazon’s CreateSpace service as a first edition, with updated and expanded/improved edition(s) to follow. Volume One will cover the first day through the first year, with Volume Two covering emergencies that last longer than one year.

Having to devote a lot of time to working on science kits, making sure our Obamacare coverage is in effect as of 1 October, and researching relocation issues, I haven’t had much time to devote this week to prepping. Here’s what I did to prep this week:

      • I read 77 Days in September (The Kyle Tait Series Book 1) by Ray Gorham. It’s yet another TEOTWAWKI novel that has the protagonist walking for months across country to get home after the entire electrical grid in North America is destroyed by an EMP attack, but at least this author seems to have been paying attention when his teachers were covering spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. Either that or his wife, who is also his editor, fixed his draft manuscript. This is a very odd book. It may be the only extant example of a PA romance novel. It’s almost a Harlequin PA novel, replete with love letters from the protagonist to his wife via the daily journal he keeps on his long journey home, reproduced in full in the book. The real problem I have with this book is that the protagonist is a complete wimp. In one segment, someone steals the guy’s cart, which contains all his food, spare clothing, tent, and all the other possessions he needs to make it home. He takes his .22 rifle and follows the guy, eventually confronting him. The thief shoots at him with a pistol, and he shouts to the thief to keep the cart because he doesn’t want anyone to be hurt. But the thief comes after him, and his only concern is to escape without being hurt or hurting anyone else, specifically the thief. The thief starts shooting at him and hits the protagonist in the arm. Even then, the protagonist hesitates to return fire because he doesn’t want to hurt the thief. Give me a break. He finally shoots the psycho thief and reclaims his cart, but he feels guilty about it. This guy is too dumb to live. His wife, hundreds of miles away in Montana, is also too dumb to live. A deputy sheriff has been pestering her and obviously intends to rape her. She has a pistol. Does she carry it? No. Does she tell any of her friends what’s going on? No. When the likely rapist shows up drunk at her door after multiple warnings to leave her alone, does she shoot him? No. At his request, she gives him a hug, hoping that he’ll then leave her alone. Geez. I’ll give this one two stars because the author at least avoids most of the grammar and spelling errors that are rampant in most PA novels. If I were rating it solely based on plot, dialog, and so on, it’d get one star. The second volume begins on the day he arrives home, and is a more traditional PA novel.

I understand why PA novelists like to use an EMP attack as a plot device. An EMP attack–or a Carrington Class Solar storm, which would have similarly devastating effects and one of which in 2012 missed striking our planet by about a day–is by far the worst thing that could happen. Worse than a 1918-class pandemic virus, worse than a full-out nuclear war, worse than a Lucifer’s Hammer-class asteroid impact, worse than anything else imaginable. And it very easily could happen. If it did, the best response for most people would be the old Civil Defense advice for a nuclear attack:

1. Remain seated
2. Bend forward and place your head between your legs
3. Kiss your ass goodbye

I’ve read all of the unclassified reports on EMP I’ve been able to get my hands on. I may even have seen some of the classified ones that were on Clinton’s server. The consensus seems to be that a bad EMP attack would have very severe effects on our electrical grid and everything else that’s attached to a reasonably long conductor, but it’s very unlikely to destroy the computerized systems in all recent vehicles. Many, perhaps, but probably not even a majority. It’s also very unlikely to cause every plane in the air to crash. Airliners are, after all, sometimes hit by lightning, which seldom causes them to crash.

    • I started doing serious research into the Sparta, NC area as a possible relocation destination. It’s a bit closer to Winston-Salem than Jefferson is–60 to 70 miles versus about 90 miles–but it’s far enough away that I’d be comfortable living there. The underclass population is close to zero, and there’s no serious crime to speak of. It’s just a plain old mountain town, rather than being artsy/craftsy/touristy like the Jefferson/West Jefferson area. There’s some shopping, including chain supermarkets and drugstores, but the nearest Walmart Supercenters are in Galax, VA and West Jefferson, which are both about half an hour from Sparta. Sparta has a good county hospital, and the people who live there tend to be independent and self-sufficient, as you’d expect for the North Carolina mountains. At first glance, homes seem to be more affordable than they are in the touristy Jefferson area.
    • I picked up another 10-day course of high-dosage amoxicillin/potassium clavulanate, a very useful broad-spectrum antibiotic. With some infections, one course of this could mean the difference between life and death. Bacterial resistance to plain amoxicillin is now so widespread that many physicians prescribe it pretty much as a placebo. Clavulanic acid salts are β-lactamase inhibitors, which allow the combination drug to work against bacteria that produce β-lactamase and therefore render plain amoxicillin ineffective.

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

11:44 – We’re just back from a small Costco run. The only long-term storage stuff I got was a dozen one-gallon bottles of Kirkland water. I covet those 1-gallon PET bottles, both for storing solutions for science kits and for recycling as long-term storage containers.

On the way to Costco, we stopped at Gander Mountain and bought our first M4gery, a Ruger AR-556 with a few spare MagPul magazines. Barbara I wanted to buy two, but I Barbara convinced her me that one was enough for now. And it’s true that we already have a vintage Ruger Mini-14 with spare magazines, not to mention a dozen or more other shotguns, rifles, pistols, revolvers, and assorted other ordnance, so one AR probably is enough for now.

Just in passing, I asked the guy if they had any bricks of .22LR. He said no bricks, but they did have buckets of Remington .22LR HVHP, at $80 for 1,400 rounds, so I grabbed a bucket of those as well. Just under six cents a round seems pretty reasonable nowadays.

Read the comments: 25 Comments

Friday, 18 September 2015

09:49 – Barbara is taking a vacation day today and heading out to run errands. We’ll spend the weekend doing science kit stuff. We’re low stock on just about everything.

Speaking of low stock, apparently there’s some kind of significance about this month for many Mormons. Some book or other written by a Mormon woman but not endorsed by the LDS Church is predicting a catastrophe this month, and I’m sure the severe flooding in Utah is reinforcing those fears. The result is that long-term food storage vendors are seeing a gigantic flood of orders. Augason, Thrive, and others are unable to keep products in stock, both on-line and in stores. Even Walmart.com is back-ordered on many of their shelf-stable food items because of the panic buying.

We’ve been covered up working on science kit stuff, but I did manage to get a few items that might be useful in the future. Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I read Lights Out by David Crawford, which is a different kind of PA novel. It focuses on a typical exurban neighborhood dealing with the effects of a continent-wide long-term power outage. The protagonist isn’t Rambo, which is a refreshing change. It’s a decent book, not great but a lot better than most of its genre. And it does give one something to think about.
  • I started design on a new kit. This one isn’t a science kit per se. It’s an heirloom seed kit, and I’ll sell it on-line via the prepping book. I’m not happy with any of the current heirloom seed kits out there, many of which appear to have an almost random selection of seeds, chosen without consideration for factors like reliability, ease of growing, nutritional value, climate adaptability, suitability for both northern and southern latitude day lengths, and so on.

The other problem with these seed kits is that they simply don’t include enough seeds. Ideally, of course, every prepper would already be keeping a garden, but the reality is that many preppers store heirloom seeds “just in case”. One kit I looked at included only one ounce (28.4 g) of bean seeds, which is 70 or so seeds. Yeah, under ideal conditions and assuming everything goes perfectly, those 70 bean seeds could produce a lot of beans. But what if conditions aren’t ideal or things don’t go perfectly? What if they’ve been in storage for so long that the germination rate is only 40%? What if animals or insects wipe out most of your crop? That’s why my kit will include 300 g of bean seeds, or roughly 750 seeds.

Then there’s the choice of plants. Nearly all of the seed kits include lettuce. Lettuce! It takes up precious space, requires a lot of work, and provides almost no nutrition. What’s the point to trying to grow it at all? Conversely, very few of the kits include turnip seeds. Turnips produce a massive amount of food and have high nutritional value. Anyone considering planting lettuce would do well to plant turnips instead. Or beets.

All of the kits include onions, which is fine. Onions are important for flavoring bulk staples. The problem is, many of the kits include long-day onion seeds. Long-day onions are fine if your latitude is about 45 degrees or higher. But at lower latitudes, the days never get long enough for those onions to flourish.

Almost none of the seed kits I looked at include even a basic selection of herbs, which are essential if you’re trying to cook appetizing meals from bulk staples. An herb garden doesn’t require much space, and I consider it mandatory to have the seeds necessary to keep a reasonably comprehensive herb garden, so those will be included in our kit. Another essential that these kits all leave out is tobacco seeds. Tobacco can be grown successfully up to about 55 degrees latitude if one has the proper seeds, and tobacco is an extremely desirable crop, if only for trade.

The other thing that worries me about many of these kits is how the seeds were processed and stored. Doing it right involves a lot of work, and my guess is that very few of these companies have bothered to do that work. If the seeds are dried properly (to ~7% or 8% moisture content but not much lower, which would “harden” the seeds and reduce germination rates) and frozen, they should remain viable for a long time. That’s how the international seed banks do it, and that’s why their vaults are located in arctic climes. I also noticed that most of these seed kits advertise that they’re packed with an oxygen absorber, which tells me that these companies don’t know what they’re doing. Using an oxygen absorber buys you nothing and may actually shorten the shelf life of the seeds.

I’ve done some germination testing of the Lima bean and carrot seeds that we include in biology kits. After five years stored just in PE bottles with no special dehydration or other treatment, I got germination rates of 50% to 60% (versus 85% to 90%+ on fresh seed). Germination rates of seeds also depend heavily on species, but I feel comfortable saying the seed kits we produce will yield reasonable germination rates after at least three to five years stored at room temperature and considerably longer if kept frozen. If nothing else, we can include a lot of seeds for species that tend to lose viability quickly over time. It doesn’t matter if the germination rate is only 10% if you have ten times as many seeds as you intend to plant.

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

Read the comments: 92 Comments

Friday, 11 September 2015

07:19 – Wow. Fourteen years since islam attacked this country and we’ve done nothing about it except make life harder for Americans. I don’t even blame this lack of action on Barack Hussein Obama II, who’s done exactly what one might have expected him to do, just from his name. But Bush had seven years to do something, and he did nothing either. Except make life harder for Americans.

Nearly all of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but I did manage to get a few items that might be useful in the future. Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I bought two hundred feet of clothesline and a pack of 100 clothespins. Very cheap now, possibly very important later.
  • Colin convinced me to order five 2-pound boxes of Alpo Variety Snaps dog treats for him.
  • While I was at it, I ordered a few bottles of Bertolli pasta sauces in what amount to canning jars. I got a couple jars each of Italian Sausage Garlic sauce and Five Cheese sauce, just to try, and four jars of Mushroom Alfredo sauce, which we already know we like. I also ordered two bottles each of KC Masterpiece Barbecue Sauce in Original and Hickory Smoke flavors, a couple jars of Smucker’s Strawberry Jam, a stainless steel flour sifter, and an oven thermometer.
  • We did pick up a few long-term storage foods at Costco last weekend, including 22 pounds of assorted pasta and a few minor items like 12 gallons (45 liters) of bottled water, six large jars of applesauce, a can of Gatorade lemon/lime drink mix, and a couple large boxes of Ritz crackers.

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

Read the comments: 71 Comments

Friday, 4 September 2015

07:37 – If you ask preppers what they’re preparing for, most will have a primary or even a sole concern. Not that it really matters much, because if you’re prepared for one specific type of emergency you’re almost by definition prepared for other types of emergencies. The essentials are always the same: water, food, shelter, sanitation, medical, communications, and defense.

If someone asks me what I’m preparing for, my standard answer is a zombie apocalypse. Anyone who’s prepared for that is prepared for anything. So we stock water, food, and the other necessities, including of course anti-zombie guns.

But my real primary concern is the same as it has been for years: societal breakdown and violent civil unrest. Not all zombies are the walking dead. We have plenty of live zombies in Winston-Salem. They’re also known as underclass scum, and they’re at least as much threat as real zombies. More so, because they’re just as violent as and a lot faster than those shambling things in the TV shows. Fortunately, they’re not any smarter.

The so-called Black Lives Matter movement was serious enough. It’s resulted in rioting, looting, and arson in cities and towns across the country and a lot of ambush shootings of whites and cops. But it’s nothing compared to the calls from racist black demagogues for blacks to stalk and murder white people and cops. An unfortunately high number of young black men seem to be responding to that call. Predictably, LEOs nationwide are concerned about being ambushed, which of course makes them more likely to shoot first. Their attitude is increasingly better-safe-than-sorry, and who can blame them? Police recruiting is down by 50% or more in many departments, and many career cops are taking early retirement or simply resigning. Again, who can blame them? But it’s not a good omen for society to watch the people who are supposed to defend us instead giving up and looking for other means of earning a living. If the government can’t or won’t defend us, we’ll just have to defend ourselves.

Our relocation search is going much slower than we’d hoped, but we’re patient. We will get away from Winston-Salem to a small town, eventually. If we’re overtaken by events, we’ll just have to deal with it, come what may. If rioting, looting, and arson comes to Winston-Salem, we’ll be as ready for it as anyone can be.

Most of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I bought a hundred feet of paracord and a pack of ten snap-buckles, to be divided between our car emergency kits. I got the real made-in-the-US stuff, not that cheap and cheesy Chinese garbage they peddle at Home Depot, which isn’t even real paracord.

Otherwise, we’re in pretty good shape. I do intend to pick up more pasta on our next Costco run. It’s cheap, stores forever, and it’s useful to have a lot of it on hand.

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

Read the comments: 136 Comments

Friday, 28 August 2015

07:33 – Who would have believed even a few years ago that the European financial crisis, which remains an existential threat to the EU, would turn out to be a mere sideshow? The real threat now is the invasion of Europe by millions of undesirables, mostly muslims. Americans who are rightly concerned about the invasion of the US by millions of Mexican undesirables should thank their lucky stars. Sure, a disturbingly high percentage of those Mexican wetbacks are murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and other scum, but most illegal Mexican immigrants want nothing more than a better life, albeit at taxpayer expense. The muslims who are invading Europe have no intention of assimilating. They intend to make Europe theirs, another outpost of their perverted so-called culture.

And Europe has even fewer controls on illegal immigration than the US does. As of now, Europe has essentially no national borders, and would have no way to defend them against such an invasion even if it did. Even the UK, Europe’s last bastion of semi-sanity, has already been invaded by upwards of five million who were born outside not just the UK but the EU, and Merkel is currently attempting to force the UK to accept hundreds of thousands more of them. Per year. Will there always be an England? Not the way things are going now.

Hint to Europe: the only way to respond to such an invasion is to use armed force. These aren’t “refugees” or “immigrants”. These are invaders, and the proper response is to slaughter them wholesale until they realize that they aren’t welcome in Europe. If Italy had any sense, it wouldn’t be using its navy to rescue these invaders. It would be cordoning off its waters with gunboats with orders to sink any boat or ship attempting to enter their waters illegally. If the UK had any sense, it would block its end of the Chunnel with military forces with orders to machine gun anyone attempting to enter illegally. Haul the bodies in garbage trucks to the sea and toss them to the sharks. Because that’s what these invaders are: garbage. Men, women, and children. None of them belong in Europe, let alone the UK.

Truth be told, it’s too late for continental Europe. It’s toast. Even if it had the will, which it doesn’t, it no longer has the means. The barbarians are not just at the gates, but among them. The muslim invasion has succeeded. But the UK at least still has a chance, albeit a small one, to stem this tide and fight off the invaders. But I’ll be surprised if the UK takes any effective measures to defend itself. The British government isn’t what it once was, nor is the RN, the RAF, or the British Army.

I finished season one of Jericho (2006) on Netflix streaming. This is my third time through. Barbara and I watched it once on DVD soon after it ran originally and then I convinced her to watch it a second time on Netflix streaming a year or so ago. It gets better and less confusing with multiple viewings.

This time through, I’m appreciating more just how nuanced the plotting and writing are. I could have done without the terrorist plot thread that runs through the whole series. I’d have preferred they just deal with the aftermath, its effects on a small community, the personalities, and how they deal with it, but that’s a minor nit. Within the limitations of a network TV series, they did an excellent job. Sure, there are quite a few minor issues with it. For example, a month or two after the EOTAWKI, they have a group gathered in someone’s home, with the room illuminated by literally dozens of candles and battery lanterns. One would think that at that point they’d be trying hard to conserve candles and batteries. And the writers seem to think that barricades of old cars and wooden pallets will stop bullets, when of course they won’t even slow them down much. But again, those are minor nits. The situations and scenarios are realistic, as is the behavior of the many characters. I wish it had run for more than a season and a half.

If you’re at all concerned about the state of things, I’d strongly recommend that you binge-watch this series. Watch it two or three times, and think about it. Think about how you’d deal with the issues that they bring up. It’s fiction, not a non-fiction preppers’ manual, but a key part of prepping is mental preparedness, deciding what you’ll do if a particular thing happens. For that, Jericho is excellent.

Nearly all of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I bought a case of two dozen 12-ounce cans of Harvest Creek Pulled Pork from Costco. I wanted to compare this product against the Keystone Meats pulled pork, which Barbara thinks is just okay in barbecue sandwiches. If she likes this stuff at least as well as the Keystone product, we’ll standardize on it for pulled pork. I’d been paying Walmart $3.59/pound for the Keystone pork in 28-ounce cans. The 12-ounce cans of Harvest Creek pork are $3.33/pound, and are also a better size for us than the 28-ounce cans. Keystone pork is available in 14.5-ounce cans, but at a noticeably higher price per ounce.
  • I bought another case of two dozen 11-ounce cans of Crider Chicken Bologna from Costco. I tried a can of this mechanically-separated chicken. It’s okay, if a bit bland, but it is cheap meat protein at under $2/pound. It can be sliced for sandwiches or cut into chunks for stir-fry, stews, casseroles, etc. It’s basically just chicken meat.

With what we already have, that’ll do for now in terms of shelf-stable meats, other than periodically replacing what we use. If we ever do need to eat solely from long-term storage, our diet will be considerably lighter in meat than it is now, but we’ll have enough to get along.

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

Read the comments: 65 Comments

Friday, 21 August 2015

08:39 – Barbara returns sometime this afternoon or this evening, which means Colin and I need to get rid of the nekkid women and dead bodies. Fortunately, we get recycling pickup (blue cart) and trash pickup (black cart) today, so I figure we’ll recycle the nekkid women and toss the corpses in the trash. Or vice versa. We got yard waste pickup (green cart) yesterday, but neither Colin nor I was quite ready to get rid of the nekkid women. Or the dead bodies.

Nearly all of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I bought a box of 15 packets of Oral Rehydration Salts, with each packet sufficient to make up a one-liter serving. Actually, we stock the chemicals we’d need to make up hundreds of liters of ORS solution on-the-fly, but I wanted the commercial product to shoot an image for the book. Also, it’s not a bad idea to have these on hand for an emergency, and they’re cheap enough. What’s bizarre is that they have an expiration date two years after the manufacturing date. All the packets contain is anhydrous glucose and some inorganic salts, all of which have real shelf lives measured in centuries or millennia. These won’t go bad any time soon.
  • I continued work on our long-term food storage inventory spreadsheet. Overall, we’re in pretty good shape, although there are a couple areas that need attention.

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

11:49 – When I was talking to Kim yesterday, she mentioned that her aunt had just been taken by ambulance to the hospital. I figured she must be pretty old, since Kim’s mother, Mary, is in her mid-80’s. I asked Kim if this was her mother’s sister or her dad’s. Kim said, no, that it was actually her great-aunt, her mother’s aunt. My estimate of the patient’s age went way up.

When I talked to Mary this morning, she said her aunt had a urinary tract infection. UTIs can be very serious, particularly in older women, where they’re often asymptomatic until the infection is well advanced. One of the standard treatments for UTIs in patients who can tolerate sulfa drugs is sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim, AKA SMZ/TMP. Like all sulfas, sulfamethoxazole is a broad-spectrum antibiotic, which is useful for a lot more than UTIs. But bacterial resistance to sulfas is pretty widespread, so they’re often used in combination with TMP or another DHFR inhibitor. The two in combination work synergistically and are more effective in most situations than sulfas used alone.

From a prepping standpoint, a lot of people buy Thomas Labs Bird Sulfa tablets, which contain 400 mg of SMZ and 80 mg of TMP each, or Fish Sulfa Forte, which are twice that amount. The problem is the cost, which is $0.50 per tablet or thereabouts. Here’s one place that sells bottles of 500 SMZ/TMP tablets (800/160 mg) for $115, or less than half the cost per tablet. If you’re storing antibiotics for a large family or group, you might want to grab a bottle and stick it in the freezer.

Note that I am not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV. Sulfa drugs would not be my first choice of a broad-spectrum antibiotic, not least because severe sulfa allergies are quite common. But SMZ/TMP is effective against a pretty large number of bacterial pathogens, and it’s something I’d want in my toolkit.

I just added a new category that I’ll use when I write about something that I’ve found that’s particularly important or a particularly good deal.

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