Hunh….an extra $1200 in my account today. Corona money.
Which is good since one of these will be here Friday.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Excel-ence in logisitcs
First off, that last poll really surprised me. A full 50% of you people don’t keep track of what you have using anything more complicated than what’s between your ears. And only 1/5 of you use anything more technologically advanced than a paper and pencil.
Why am I surprised? Well, you’re sitting in front of a computer right now, aren’t you? You know how to work the thing, don’t you? So it seemed reasonable to figure that people who can figure out how to use a computer would take advantage of it for this sort of thing. However, a previous poll showed that the readership around here is..shall we say…a bit ‘seasoned’…and perhaps with the older demographic there is a resistance (or ignorance) towards the technological. Who knows. All in all, though…I was very surprised.
I use spreadsheets for keeping track of all my stuff that I need to consider myself ‘prepared’. You can call it your Master List, Inventory, TOE, or whatever. Since I have a bizarre sense of humour, I call mine The Preponomicon.
Anyway……
I use Excel. Mostly because I’m familiar with it and because I still haven’t sat my butt down in front of the computer and mastered Access. My spreadsheets don’t have anything really fancy to them, but I do have them wired up to alert me when inventory levels are at particular thresholds. This is signalled to me by changing the colors of the cells that show my percentage of quantity. At the moment it’s set up like this:
100%-90% = Green – All good
75%-89% = Light green – Okay, but you might wanna jump on this
50%-74% = Yellow – Next trip to the store, get this stuff
0%-49% = Red – Get this fixed ASAP.
It looks something like this:
How do we do the color change? Conditional formatting. Somewhere in your menu bar you’ll see it.
From there, under “Manage Rules”, are the rules I made:
And here’s the actual rule saying that if the value in that cell is equal to 90%, or more than 90%, make it green:
For the other values its just a mater of creating a separate rule for each one. And, yes, you can also use a rule that uses a color gradient rather than just these….I just went with something basic. What’s that you say? Still seems overwhelming? Alright, how about I give you a template to work with?
Fairly simple….Just a basic template. As you add stuff to your list copy the cells in Column M downwards to your new line. I threw in filters for the column headers in case you want to sort or see only a specific category.
Delete or add columns to add/delete the things you want to sort by. I de facto go with four categories so I can narrow down my focus….Gun stuff, Magazine, Glock, 9mm……Food, Dry, Freeze Dried, Rice & Chicken……Hygiene, Dry, Paper, TP….. that sort of thing. I throw two descriptors after that for brand/model and size. If you really want to go nuts, add a column for ‘servings per qty’ and ‘servings total’, throw in some math, and get yourself an idea of how many servings of oatmeal three five pound sacks will provide. I’m sure there’s someone reading this who is chuckling to themselves that this is a kludgy spreadsheet and that there’s a more streamlined way to do this. Hey, have it. Just showing ya what works for me.
If your virus warning pops up as you try to open the template, ignore it. They do that if there isn’t some sort of certificate or whatnot. This is just a half dozen or so lines of Excel.
If you find this useful, how about thanking me in a renumerative way? Oh, and I lay claim to the term ‘Preponomicon’ which, if you haven’t figured it out, is a nod to the necronomicon from ‘Evil Dead’.
Mag(a)
So these arrived today:
Ruger Mini-14 factory 20-rd mags…marked ‘BLEMISH’. I think that means it was for the Blem military.
Price? $19.99 ea for a Ruger steel factory mag. w00t.
Big thanks to the person who emailed me and told me about this deal.
I know, I know…why didn’t I pass this on to you guys? Easy…about a half hour after I ordered…OOS. (Out of stock). Right place, right time.
(I swear, every single time I play with Mini-14 folder or the mags I wind up whistling the A-team them. Every. Single. Time. And I’m not even aware Im doing it! Curse you, Cannell!)
Poll – The Preponomicon
[yop_poll id=”21″]
Life in the petri dish
One of the more amusing and annoying consequences of The Current Situation is that every time I am out in public and feel the urge to cough or sneeze, I have to stifle it or risk am impromptu Salem witch trial.
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If anyone was curious, the Home Depot SKU for those buckets is 084305392411.
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I’m continuing to polish up my existing inventory of necessities. The basics were covered long, long ago. Now it’s just getting the final touches…little things that, while not necessities in any sense, are nice to have to make eating stored food a little more enjoyable….jarred garlic, soy sauce, salsa, etc, etc. One of the things I do need to pick up more of is disposable eatingware…paper plates, plastic tableware, that sort of thing. While this is, for now, a ‘grid up’ disaster it is likely the next one won’t be. Electricity may not be available. Water may be better used for drinking than washing. So…let’s scrap the need to wash dishes and just have a couple hundred paper plates, knives, forks, and spoons on hand.
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The media is, as usual, full of mixed messages. On the one hand, everything is available in copious quantity – shop as usual. On the other hand, we read that some food producers/processors/suppliers are closing up or cutting back as their labor force calls in sick. For some reason I am reminded of the old Soviet joke where the bureaucrat visits the potato farm and asks how things are going:
“Comrade, if we piled up all the potatoes we harvested, they would reach up to god’s ankles.”
Comrade”, the bureaucrat chides, “You know there is no god.”
“Comrade,”, the farmer says, “You know there are no potatoes.
When it comes to news….Doveryai, no proveryai
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So what’s going on here in Zeroland? Not much. Still feeling like my region is in that half-normal,half-not-normal stage. Other than people wearing masks, salad bar sneeze guards everywhere, and lots of marking tape on floors, there doesn’t seem to be too much change. Thus far, this is turning out to be the least dramatic apocalypse I could have imagined…I mean, up until the point I cough up a lung or something. Sure there are some rough spots…the economic toll isn’t pretty….but so far I haven’t had to hang looters, repel boarders, eat my neighbors, cook over a camp stove, sleep in a sleeping bag, or take a dump in a hole in the ground. First World lifestyle maintained: Achievement unlocked!
But…it’s still early…might not wanna put that Donner Party Cookbook away just yet.
Arrival
Observations
As many of you, I am sure, have noticed…a good part of my postings aren’t so much about what I’m doing as much as they are about what Im seeing. Couple reasons for that…first of all, I’m fine. I’ve got food, fuel, supplies, etc. So do you. So there’s no need for the back-patting festival of constant posts saying “People were on line for [item] but I had plenty…”.
What I do wind up posting about is the details about how this is all unfolding and what the takeaway from it is. What worked, what didnt, why didnt it work, why did it, what should I have done, what shouldnt I have done, and so forth. In short, we’re in the middle of a global experiment in disaster management, what can we observe and learn from it? Disaster planning rarely gets a global-level real world event to examine, dissect and learn from. Katrina was the benchmark for hurricane preparedness modeling, Kung Flu is going to be the benchmark for how pandemic planning is to be planned. In reality, there’ll be a lot of ‘white papers’, death by PowerPoint, committee’s and hearings, and then very little will actually be accomplished. Bureaucratic inertia. But on an individual level, guys like you and me should be taking notes like crazy. You could probably get a lot of info just from this exercise:
Ask yourself what concerned you most during the crisis. Then ask what would have made you not concerned (or less concerned). Then, for next time, go do/get whatever that thing was that you think would have made you less concerned. Example:
What concerned you? I was worried we wouldn’t have money coming in to pay the bills.
What would had made you less concerned? Having money in the bank.
So for next time: have a large emergency fund saved up
What concerned you? The grocery stores would be devoid of food
What would had made you less concerned? Having a full pantry and freezer
So for next time: build a stockpile of stored food
What concerned you? I’d die because I’m already in poor health
What would had made you less concerned? Having taken better care of myself
So for next time: start what you can to get back into shape and being healthy
You get the idea, I’m sure.
Notably, it’s interesting to see what people rushed out and bought and in what order. According to virtually every source, toilet paper and rice/pasta were the first things erased from the supermarket shelves. It was only after a week or two, presumably when people had time to think, that they started figuring out what else they might want to stock up on.
Those things that the knee-jerk panic buyers bought? Those are things you should plan on becoming virtually instantly unobtainable. Keep plenty of those. As things progressed and people had more time to think, other stuff started disappearing. Noticing what went fast in those early days is a good indication of what you should already have had on hand.
Really forward thinkers got things done that otherwise are now rescheduled. Dental cleanings, vehicle maintenance, in-person banking (loans, mortgages), etc. That was pretty smart and something that didn’t occur to me until later.
Lotsa lessons to be learned in this crisis, guys. Just gotta keep your eyes and brain open to learning them. Maybe the next pandemic won’t be for another hundred years like the last one, but we just don’t know. In the meantime, we’re getting first-hand real-world examples of how people will respond. Take it all in and use that information to your advantage.
Rice and networking
There are a lot of reasons to zip your lip about your secret life as a survivalist. I won’t enumerate them all because if you’re reading this you’ve already figured most of them out. However, there are some advantages to having a few trusted fellow survivalists know about your interest – case in point: I got a text message early in the morning from someone I know advising me that the local restaurant supply store had 50# sacks of long grain rice in stock.
I’d have missed that opportunity if someone I knew hadn’t kept an eye open on my behalf. So, there is some merit to having a few people (preferably fellow survivalists) know what you’re up to.
As an aside, I did wind up picking up a couple sacks of rice. Thing is, as it turned out, I was out of food grade 5-gallon buckets. Pro Tip: Keep extra buckets and lids on hand so that if there are any ‘last minute’ additions to your stockpile you can have the needed containers. The internet is full of expert advice on what is or is not considered a food grade bucket. And…none of it agrees. Just because your bucket has a ‘2’ stamped in the little recycling triangle doesn’t make it so. So, I headed off to Home Depot to look for a thick (.090 mil or better) HDPE food grade bucket. Turns out, they make it pretty easy to tell if the bucket is food grade:
Well, THAT was easy.
Conveniently, the bucket was, literally, marked as food grade. Cool. How many you got? I’ll take them all.
After that it was a quick washdown with 50/50 bleach/water, and then leave them to thoroughly dry. If the interior of the bucket doesn’t smell like a swimming pool after you wash it, wash it again and use more bleach.Then hammer on a couple Gamma Seal lids, fill with rice, slap a date label on there, and good to go.
This is actually one of myriads of ‘failures’ or oversights I am discovering that I have made. In this case, I should have had a stash of extra food-grade buckets around for last minute acquisitions-of-opportunity and that sort of thing.
I already had a couple hundred pounds of rice on hand but rice keeps forever, transports easily, and…I like it. So, why not grab another 150#?
While we are on the subject, here’s a collection of rice recipes. Me, I’m genetically predisposed towards towards arroz con pollo and, sure enough, that’s probably where tonights dinner is heading.
So, for those keeping track, here’s a Lesson Learned From The 2020 Flu: have extra storage containers on hand and in quantity for last-minute purchases or relocation/redistribution of supplies.
Article – Coronavirus may cause some food shortages, warns government task force
From the “No kidding, Sherlock”-Dept:
Told you. This isn’t anything that someone with a modicum of sense couldn’t have figured out on their own. In fact, its probably the reason people were stockpiling toilet paper. Even if they didn’t figure it out consciously, some part of them realized that toilet paper, bags of rice, and trays of meat do not deliver themselves to the grocery. It takes humans to create the product, load the truck, drive the truck, maintain the truck, offload the truck, and a million other things. And, yeah, they are cogs in a machine…and once you bust a couple teeth off a cog the machine starts acting weird.
You’re going to see this happen as cops, doctors, merchants, mechanics,infrastructure operators, computer techs, delivery people, and just about everyone who does things you don’t normally do on your own either becomes sick, stays home to avoid being sick, stays home to avoid violence, or is quarantined to stay home. Doctors appointemnts? Rescheduled? Car repair? Rescheduled. Contractor? Rescheduled. Mortgage broker? Rescheduled.
Might not happen that way, I suppose. Nature, and commerce, abhor a vacuum. Someone, somewhere, will see a need and fill it to make a few bucks. However, i’ts still a good idea to have stuff put back for when the WalMart is closed and there’s a curfew.
I imagine that the suburban and rural areas will weather it out better than the big cities, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be without it’s exciting moments.
Also, note that .gov has a way of saying “nothing to worry about” and then becomes “there’s a possibility” which is then later retold as “may be isolated cases” and eventually winds up as “expected in some areas”. In short, when .gov tells you ‘everything is fine, nothing to worry about’ thats when you need to back the pickup up to the loading dock at Walmart.
Thoughts on ATM’s
One of the more interesting aspects of The Current Situation(tm) is that I’m having to consider things, and think through scenarios, that were heretofore not considered.
For example, a few posts back i mentioned that I decided to pull out some cash to line the gun safe with…’just in case’. Just in case of what? Well, banks runs or outright closures mostly. I was half-right…every bank in this town closed their lobbies and now it’s strictly drive-up banking.
I went to my local ATM today and when I went to select the amount to withdraw I noticed that they had upped the amounts available to $700. Hmm.
Explore this with me: As a ‘convenience’ to customers, the bank increases the amount you can withdraw to $700. Assuming that they figure people will take advantage of that, that’ll empty out an ATM faster than when the limit was the usual $350-400, right? So, and I’m guessing here because I’m not 100% of how ATM cash magazines work, the ATM’s must be packing more cash than usual in them, right? Or, at least being refilled more often than usual. Seems logical, right?
So then we see articles like this one stating that there is anticipation by some businesses that some civil disturbances may be on the way. Is it hard to imagine that the big national bank will, ‘for safety’, close down ATM’s or limit their availability (say, shutting down outdoor ATMs and leaving only ones in occupied buildings up) to preclude people robbing these flusher-than-usual ATM’s? Wells Fargo, for example, might shut down their ATM’s in the lonely drive up lanes outside their buildings to keep someone with a tow chain and a hemi from stealing it, but leave the ones in the lobby of WalMart open. That sort of thing.
Come to think of it, as people realize that you can withdraw twice as much money as usual from your ATM, I suspect robberies of ATM users will increase.
I’m sure my thoughts on this are unique and nothing is going to change in regards to ATM accessibility….but I’ve been wrong before.