08:21 – Barbara is going out to dinner with friends tonight, so Colin and I are on our own. I told him that if he’d catch something I’d cook it. I hope he comes back with a squirrel or a rabbit, but he’s just as likely to bring back a good stick.

It’s currently foggy with a cold drizzle, but we’re supposed to get up to 72F (22C) today. Depending on which forecast you believe, we may have freezing rain and sleet tomorrow, with a low of 23F (-5C).

I see that congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) has reintroduced a bill to address the vulnerability of this country’s infrastructure to EMP, both artificial and natural. My own take is that an EMP attack is extremely unlikely, but the threat of a natural “EMP” event resulting from a coronal mass ejection (CME) is very real and very likely. The planet came very close to being nailed by a massive CME in July 2012, and NASA estimated the likelihood of such an event hitting the planet as 12% between 2012 and 2022. Depending on the severity of the CME, such a strike could cause anything up to and including the electrical grid being down for months to years, which would wipe out not just electric power, but communications, transportation (including food), and even water purification.

It seems that such massive events occur on average about once per century. The last one was the 1859 Carrington Event, which was also the first one that humans really noticed. Before that, we had no electricity, no electronics, and nothing else that would be affected by a massive CME. Humans just took no notice of earlier events because the only evidence of them would have been magnificent aurorae. But one thing is for sure: we’ll notice the next one. One credible study suggested that a Carrington-class event occurring today would result in the die-off of 65% to 70% of the US population within 12 months, most by starvation.

08:01 – I finally “borrowed” my first book under Amazon Prime yesterday. I’d given up on trying with Barbara’s and my monochrome Kindles because every time I tried it would lock up the Kindle, requiring a complete reset. Something in the firmware of those older Kindles doesn’t get along with our D-Link wireless router. I figured out the problem one time. It has something to do with the B/G/N mode setting on the router, but it’s not worth the hassle so we just keep our mono Kindles in airplane mode. Fortunately, the WAP works fine with Barbara’s Kindle Fire HDX, so that’s what I used to borrow the book.

Once I’d downloaded the book to Barbara’s Kindle Fire, I used the Amazon website to download the book to my hard drive, dropped it into Calibre to strip the DRM, and transferred it to my mono Kindle. We do all our reading on our mono Kindles, so formerly I’d download every title twice, once into a directory of books for my Kindle and then a second time into a directory for Barbara’s Kindle. That was getting old, so now I routinely download the book once, drop in into Calibre to strip the DRM, and then we can transfer it to either Kindle without worrying about which copy works on which Kindle.

The book I borrowed is Alpha Farm by Annie Berdel, which several websites had recommended. If I were going to waste time writing a review, the heading would be “Stop her before she writes again”. Like most prepper books I’ve seen, fiction and non-fiction, this one is complete garbage. Even elementary school spelling, grammar, and punctuation escapes this woman. The book is full of misused and misspelled words, run-on and fragment sentences, and odd constructs that leave the reader with no clue what the author intended to convey. She apparently doesn’t even realize that she’s supposed to use periods to end sentences. The narrative switches back and forth from first- to third-person, and even characters switch back and forth between names. The author has apparently never met a woo-woo conspiracy theory she doesn’t like: HAARP, chemtrails, government causing severe weather and earthquakes, vaccines causing autism, and on and on. Fortunately, I’m a very fast reader. I got through this piece of crap in half an hour or so, but that certainly was a wasted half hour.