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Friday, 8 May 2015

By on May 8th, 2015 in science kits, weekly prepping

08:00 – More science kit stuff today.

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 ordered half a dozen #10 cans of Augason Farms Morning Moos Low-Fat Milk Alternative from Walmart. At 3.5 pounds per can, that’s 21 pounds (~10 kilos) total, or enough to reconstitute about 35 gallons (132 liters) of whole milk equivalent. We already have 42 pounds of non-fat dry milk powder from the LDS Home Storage Center, but that stuff is intended mainly for cooking and baking. You wouldn’t want to drink it straight or use it for hot cocoa or over cereal. We also have 48 12-ounce cans of evaporated milk, each of which reconstitutes to a quart of whole milk, for another 12 gallons of milk equivalent, and several #10 cans each of cheese powder and butter powder and of course lots of vegetable and olive oil for the lipid component. All in all, we’re now in pretty good shape on long-term dairy storage.
  • I spent a fair amount of time researching stuff for our move up to Jefferson/West Jefferson area in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Incidentally, Walmart usually has the best prices on Augason Farms stuff, even at their regular prices, but their sale (rollback) prices are better still. For example, in April they were selling the #10 cans of Augason powdered eggs at $17/can. They’re now back up to $21/can, which is still better than other vendors. If you’re stocking up, it makes sense to wait for them to put the items you want on sale. You can find which Augason Farms products are on sale at any given time at this link.

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

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Thursday, 7 May 2015

By on May 7th, 2015 in Barbara

08:51 – Barbara took today and tomorrow off work. She’s headed out on a day trip to North Wilkesboro with Bonnie Richardson. They probably won’t be back in time for dinner, so Colin and I will share roast beast sandwiches.

More kit stuff today.


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Wednesday, 6 May 2015

By on May 6th, 2015 in personal, prepping, science kits

10:12 – Barbara wants to move quickly on relocating, which means we need to schedule a couple more day trips up to Jefferson for research and reconnoitering, followed eventually by a week-long trip as a final check before we make the jump. And I have to plan and stage everything to minimize disruption to the kit business, which is going to mean building and transporting a large number of kits so that we can ship from either location until we finish the move.

That also means I need to replace my 22-year-old Trooper with a 4×4 pickup truck with a trailer hitch. We’ll hire a moving company to move the furniture, but we’ll move a lot of our stuff ourselves as we gradually transition from completely here to completely there.

For the time being, I’ll also stop adding to our stored food. We’re at 2+ person years as it is, and the last thing we’ll need is more stuff to move. Once we’re up there, I’ll make a couple of more big Costco/Sam’s Club/LDS Home Storage Center runs with a trailer to finish stocking up. After that, we can depend on local supermarkets, the Walmart Super Center, the farmers’ market, and so on.

More kit stuff today.


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Tuesday, 5 May 2015

By on May 5th, 2015 in prepping, science kits

08:42 – I wasn’t feeling very well yesterday, so I took the afternoon off. Among other things, I decided to watch Supervolcano with Shaun Johnston (Grandpa Jack from Heartland) on Netflix streaming. I was expecting it to be pretty cheesy, but it was surprisingly well done. I’m not a geologist, let alone a volcanologist, but there weren’t any big scientific clangers that I noticed. Unusually for such a film, it looks like they tried hard to get the science right, or at least right enough not to be intrusive.

I’m always amused by people who think they’re preparing for such an event. A VEI 8 or 9? Give me a break. In the first place, the probability of such an event is probably less than 0.00001 in any given year. In the second place, how does one go about preparing for an extinction event? The last such event, about 73,000 years ago, almost wiped out H. sapiens. By some credible estimates, the surviving human population was only a few thousand in Iberian caves. A VEI 8 or 9 occurring today would kill billions of people in the first year after the eruption. Even a VEI 7 event like Tambora 200 years ago would kill hundreds of millions of people from starvation resulting from crop failures.

More science kit stuff today.



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Monday, 4 May 2015

By on May 4th, 2015 in government, personal, prepping, science kits

07:57 – Forty-five years ago today. Four dead in Ohio. Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer. Kids minding their own business. Murdered by the government. Never forget.

Barbara mentioned yesterday that she prefers Jefferson/West Jefferson to Sparta. I agree, so that’s where we’ll focus our attention. It’s 83 miles and about 1.5 hours from our house in Winston-Salem, which is about as isolated from big-city troubles as one can get on the East Coast. The nearest towns of any size are Sparta, about 30 miles ENE, and Boone, NC, about 25 miles SW.

More science kit stuff today.



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Sunday, 3 May 2015

By on May 3rd, 2015 in news, science kits

09:42 – I see there was more rioting and looting in Seattle. Not surprising, considering that it’s one of the more “progressive” (i.e., suicidal) cities in the country. After the DA in Baltimore filed felony criminal charges against six cops on evidence barely adequate for misdemeanor civil charges, I’m surprised the Seattle cops bothered to respond at all. We’re at the point now where an awful lot of big-city cops are retiring if they’re eligible and looking elsewhere if they’re not. If they keep handcuffing their cops, sometimes literally, those big cities are toast.

We need to return to the old arrangement: the cops leave middle-class people alone and spend their time beating and shooting underclass people. Whatever it takes to keep them in their own areas and away from normal people. In return the middle-class people make sure the cops aren’t prosecuted for doing what it takes to keep the scum in their place. That’s how it’s been for more than a century, and that’s how it needs to be again. Of course, that’s not going to happen, which is why the big cities are toast, with the medium cities not far behind.

More science kit stuff today.



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Saturday, 2 May 2015

By on May 2nd, 2015 in personal, prepping

10:03 – Barbara and I spent the day yesterday scouting out potential relocation areas. We left at 9:35 a.m. and headed for Sparta, NC, which is about 70 miles and 90 minutes from Winston-Salem, most of it by 2-lane road. We picked up a lot of brochures at the welcome center/Chamber of Commerce, and then spent an hour or so walking around town and then driving around some of the residential areas. The people were universally friendly and there wasn’t an underclass person to be seen. Barbara and I both liked the place and thought it was a suitable place for us to live.

After having lunch at a nice little restaurant, we headed for Jefferson/West Jefferson, which is another 20 miles or so down a two-lane, further away from Winston-Salem, but nearer Boone, NC. We liked that area as well. It’s about twice the size of Sparta, and not quite so “mountain-y”.

Both areas have chain businesses like supermarkets, auto parts stores, drugstores, and so on, but Jefferson/West Jefferson has more of them than Sparta. J/WJ also has natural gas service to many areas, fiber-optic broadband in and immediately outside town, and other amenities that Sparta doesn’t offer. Both have decent medical care, and neither has any significant underclass population.

One thing that surprised me was the amount of agriculture. I was expecting Christmas tree farms, chicken factories, fruit orchards, wineries, and not much else, but there’s a great deal of general agriculture. Just driving along main roads, we saw hundreds of dairy and beef cattle and huge fields of general crops. West Jefferson even has a roofed structure set aside for a farmers’ market, which runs every Saturday April through November. Despite being in the mountains, this area can obviously feed itself, if worse ever comes to horrible.

Basically, these areas, particularly J/WJ, provide amenities and resources similar to Winston-Salem, but on a smaller scale. I think these areas suit both Barbara and me. I’ll do a great deal more exploration on line, and I’m sure we’ll be making more trips up to check things out further. We want this to be our last move, so we need to be sure before we jump. At some point, we’ll probably take a week off and rent a place up there as a final check. When we’re sure, we’ll buy a home and some property and move up there.

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Friday, 1 May 2015

By on May 1st, 2015 in science kits, weekly prepping

08:30 – More kit stuff today, although it’s not urgent. We’re actually in pretty good shape on finished goods kit inventory for now. What I’m working on now is for later, when I’ll barely have time to ship all the orders, let alone build more kits.

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 got PTT/VOX headsets for our radios.
  • I ordered a few more #10 cans of Augason Farms stuff from Walmart, all meal-extender stuff like bouillon, dried soups, etc.

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

Read the comments: 35 Comments

Thursday, 30 April 2015

By on April 30th, 2015 in news

08:06 – The morning paper presents a false dichotomy, a poll asking if religious rights should trump gay rights or vice versa. In doing so, they’re making the false assumption that rights can ever be in conflict. As libertarians have been saying ever since there have been libertarians, your right to swing your fist ends at the other guy’s nose. Gay rights and religious rights are not and never have been in conflict.

Do gays have the right to marry and to enjoy all the benefits of that state? Absolutely, and religious people have no right to stop them from doing so. Do religious people have the right to refuse to do business with gay people, or do churches have the right to refuse to marry gay couples? Absolutely, and gays have no right to force them to do so. It’s government that’s at fault here, stirring the pot by refusing to grant rights to gays that it freely grants to non-gays, and by forcing religious people to act against their own deeply-held beliefs by providing products and services to gays. Both of those are utterly wrong, and both cause needless conflict between gays and religious people. The obvious solution is for government to treat gays and straights even-handedly and to stop forcing anyone to do business with people they don’t want to do business with.

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Wednesday, 29 April 2015

By on April 29th, 2015 in news, science kits

08:51 – The morning paper reports that the rioting, burning, and looting in Baltimore has been the worst seen in any US city since the late 1960’s. I wouldn’t have known that from what the MSM news websites are reporting. Something doesn’t add up here.

So much for LBJ’s “Great Society”. After three generations–the underclass breeds much younger and much more prolifically than decent people; why wouldn’t they when someone else is paying for it?–the government has looted most of the wealth of the productive middle class and transferred it to their clients: government “workers” and the worthless specimens of humanity that make up the underclass. This whole house of cards is going to collapse at some point in the not too distant future. Productive people have had enough. I said yesterday that I feared looting, rioting, and burning was becoming the new normal. It’s actually worse than that. I think before too much longer we’ll look back fondly on the days when this kind of crap was restricted pretty much to the inner cities.

I’m still making up solutions for science kits. I needed to make up more than I realized, so I’ll spend today doing that as well.

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