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Squatters II – The gear edition

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So what does the 22-year-old ‘screw the system’ parasite carry with them to ease their travels and accommodate their worthless existence? Glad you asked:

Lets start with the basic package…the backpack.

20150125_121111My wife, who has dealt with the kinds of people in her worklife, tells me that there are two classes of critter: ‘rubber tramp’ and ‘leather tramp’. The difference is that one lives outta their car, the other lives on foot. After that, there is a subspecies of ‘hippie homeless’ which are the younger crowd who are just, like, y’know, doing their own thing, man. A separate subset of the usual Sterno-guzzling, brushed-their-teeth-with-a-hammer, career homeless you see laying in puddles of urine.

Open the top flap of the pack and we get:

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Lets see..a couple space blankets, nail clippers, tickets for being in the park after hours, orange pack cover, elastic bowtie (???), ziploc bags, playing cards, packet of oatmeal, a note from another hipster who crashed at his place before he got evicted (name.Facebook redacted), and a few other small items. Interesting to note that there’s some signs of thinking ahead here…some food, matches, waterproofing, etc.

Lets move on to the side pockets…..

20150125_121748A rather extensive sewing kit, a plastic box full of safety pins and dental floss (the only personal hygiene item found. Probably used as extra-tough seewing thread), a cheap multitool, some paracord, river shoes, and markers for the ubiquitous “Need food. Anything will help. God bless” career enhancer.

In the body of the main pack:

20150125_122445Dog treats, a burner phone instruction book, a very cheesey but sharp sheath knife, some electrical tape, toilet paper, and a stunning collection of summonses/tickets and court proceedings that tell the story of our missing waste of skin. Apparently, at the tender age of 22, the lad was sacked from his job. In a fit of rage, he proceeded to trash a hotel room to the tune of $2800. While that would be enough for most people, he also acquired tickets for drug paraphernalia (wow, that was not spelled the way I thought), sleeping in the park, and a whole bunch of failures to appear. Sadly, it caught up to him and he spent a week or two as a guest of the county. He lamented that no one would take his calls from jail and that all his friends and family didnt seem to care šŸ™ Boo hoo, right?

After early January, he falls off the radar. Im guessing he split town in a hurry to avoid restitution of re-arrest for his chronic failures to appear. Nonetheless, whats interesting about all this is the things that this wretch carried in his pseudo-post-apocalyptic travels. There are a few more items that I have to cart off to the dumpster, like his sleeping bag and some clothes, but this is the most ‘gear’ portion of this stuff. Apparently, being able to sticth together clothing was very important as well as keeping warm. There was absolutely no first aid gear of any kind, nor any kind of personal hygiene gear…no soap, no toothbrush, no razor, nothing.

Of course, I suppose your needs are easily met when you freeload by crashing in peoples apartment buildings uninvited.

Do I have sympathy for this guy? Nope. If he were homeless and it was five below zero out, and he said “Dude, I’ll shovel out your sidewalk around the building if you’ll let me sleep in your basement for the night” that would have been one thing. If he had left a note apologizing for his trespass and acknowledging his crime that woulda been another. But instead, he’s a drug-using hipster who crashes in the basement, drops a deuce in a nonfunctioning toilet, and leaves his gear and food waste behind. So..no sympathy.

Squatters

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Ugh…’real life’ has intruded lately, making my posting a little more sporadic than usual. I’m doing a sort of ‘property manager’ thing for my landlord. In exchange for a deal on the rent, I’m keeping an eye on the building, vacuuming the common areas, showing apartments to prospective tenants, etc.

The other day a tenant told me that the lock on the front door of the building was not working. Sure enough, the deadbolt would work regardless of the entry code you entered. The tenant mentioned that he had encountered people in the basement of the building where the laundry room is who did not belong there.

The basement of the apartment building is a rats warren of storage spaces, closets, not-up-to-code living spaces, and generally a great place to hide. So…grab the 870 and a flashlight and lets go look for squatters.

As it turns out, while I did not find any squatters I did find their nest:

20150121_201942A backpack, sleeping bad, spoiled food, and some personal belongings. All of which smelled horribly of body odor. In addition to the gear, there were a couple notebooks where the parasite had written about his hitchhiking and riding the rails across the US. The food labels were dated around Christmas so this guy left his gear and never came back, apparently. I’m guessing he either got tossed in jail or did something that made him leave town in a hurry.

The fact he was chronicling his journey leads me to believe he’s more of one of these 20-something hipster-homeless guys rather than some Sterno-chugging genuine homeless wretch.

So..if you’re going to go on a grand adventure, what does the parasitical traveler take with them? Theres a decent but no-name backpack, a Slumberjack sleeping bag, some clothing, a bag of small rocks, a small metal tin full of ‘slogan’ patches you’d sew on clothing, some smoking materials, snack wrappers, and not much else. Im guessing the truly valuable things like money, ID, a knife, etc, are things this guy kept on his person.

So what to do? Well, this crap goes in the dumpster. (Although I’ll keep a couple carabiners that are clipped to the pack.)

Clearly what is going on here is that someone discovered that the basement was nice, warm, and relatively unoccupied. When the temperature got too cold, they hid out in an out-of-the-way room in the basement. Rent-free. This is why we can’t have nice things.. because there is always some idiot who thinks that their need for something trumps your ownership of it. The landlord pays taxes on the building, pays for repairs, takes the financial hits of irresponsible tenants, tries to keep the place running, and some waste of skin decides that since its a cold night, perhaps that basement should be made available for those who need it.

This is the problem with the world today. Too many people figure that because they need something they are entitled to have it, at the expense of others. The most annoying case of it I see now are people who owe money on student loans and because they can’t pay them back (usually due to spending money on a course of study with no real financial future…Gender Issues In Renaissance Art, for example) decide that those loans should be ‘forgiven’. Geez, man..I’d love to have the .gov cut me a check for $50k and then have them forget about it when I claim it was predatory lending.

I’m probably feeling bitter because tax season approaches and, as a self-employed person, I get the full treatment.

Unfortunately, people like this are going to be exceptionally pervasive during any true crisis. They’ll demand that you ‘do something’ on their behalf because you have ‘all that [food/fuel/water/medicine/clothing]’ and they don’t. Never mind that their deficiencies could have been easily remedied if they’d actually done more thinking about the future and less pot-smoking down at the park with their buddies. Worse, they convince their fellow-travelers in .gov to give some legal standing to these demands for ‘fairness’.

These squatters are just symptomatic, but extremely emblematic, of the greater issue. Sadly, it is one that I don’t think I’m going to be able to resolve on any level greater than the immediate surroundings of the building I’m maintaining.

Folks you meet at CrossFit..or..How To Survive In The Woods

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More CrossFit. Behold, a sweat angel:

20150109_184915This is what happens when after the workout you flop down on your back on the floor to try and get your breath back. This is also what it looks like, I would imagine, after the paramedics peel you off the floor and ship your carcass to the hospital.

But, more interestingly, the fella instructing the class had his own ‘lost in the woods’ survival experience that I was curious about. He got turned around while out hunting and wound up having to spend the night in the sticks as it dumped 13″ of snow on his position and the temperature clocked in around 0 degrees. He survived with no apparent injuries and was helicoptered out the next day. I asked him what happened:

Him and his hunting buddy drove up a forest service road way back into the boonies, they then parked and rode their mountain bikes further in, they then parked the bikes and hiked in on foot. They then split up, one guy heading up one ridge and one guy heading up the other. After a while he broke for lunch and as he was eating he spied a mule deer out of the corner of his eye. He chased after it and by the time he came up for air he realized he had gotten turned around. He wandered for a while, back tracking, climbing up and down the hills, before realizing he was well and thoroughly turned around.

The weather was starting to change and daylight was fading fast. He built himself a big fire , broke out his mylar blanket, and settled in for the night. He would alternate between getting wood for the fire and sitting on heated rocks to stay warm. His cellphone was dead and had minimal signal. At one point he tried it and it had just enough charge for him to get a GPS coord and to text those coords to his wife. But…he would have to make it through the night before help could get to him. The next morning he tried wandering towards what he thought was a road and as he did so the rescue ‘copter flew right over him on its way to the coords of his campsite. He was sure he’d screwed the pooch but they circled around again and he waved ’em down with his space blanket. The recovered him and got him to safety.

1383305_10203834820924062_7193706435147102802_nI asked if he had carried any special survival gear and he said it was just the mylar, nalgene bottle, celphone, firestarter, and the usual hunting gear….no extra clothes. He said he normally would have carried a spare cellphone charger with him but it was in his truck and they had taken his buddys rig to go hunting. What he did do, which made all the difference in the world, was once he realized he was well and truly lost he made camp while there was still light to see what he was doing and got a big fire going. He did mention that he will make sure to take his GPS along next time. (I’d go with map-n-compass as a backup, but Im not going to armchair quarterback this guy to his face.)

As you know, even when cell reception is too spotty for voice, text messages can often get through. In his case it made all the difference.

It was an interesting conversation, mostly because this is the first time I’ve actually gotten to talk to someone who had one of these experiences and it was quite interesting to hear the first-hand account. He also says, by the way, his subsequent hunting trips have not been as deep into the sticks as that one. His wife keeps him ‘on a short leash’, as he says.

My own experiences hunting and getting caught in bad weather tell me that while it is very easy to go overboard and encumber yourself with too much gear, there’s definitely a possibility of undergearing yourself as well. Its a tough balancing act to keep things light enough for tromping up and down mountains all day and having the gear you need when things go sideways. Something to think about.

 

Back to the gym

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Had an interesting, although brief, conversation the other day that I thought might be worth repeating.

For reasons that don’t need going into at this juncture, I have signed back on to CrossFit. After the last session the instructor asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to work on in the sessions. I said that I wanted to work on stamina and endurance so that at the end of the class I’m not laying on the floor gasping for air (which is usually how I end a class). He then asked, ‘what about outside class?’ I misinterpreted the question and thought he was inquiring how things were in general in m life. No, thats not what I meant. he said. Then it dawned on me what the real question was. “Oh. I get it. Well, I need to work on things like being able to carry heavy objects over distances..things like water and fuel cans, climb over obstacles, run distances with gear, pick up people and things and move them around…you know, your basic end-of-the-world survivability stuff.”Ā  He nodded his head and said that was pretty much what he was shooting for as well.

That’s pretty much what made me interested in CrossFit, the notion that it wasn’t about being able to do one thing – like running, or lifting a record-setting weight – but rather that it purports to promote ‘functional fitness’. That is to say, the things you do in the real world…jumping up onto things, climbing things, running with weights, pushing/pulling things.

The way I figure it, no matter what flavor of apocalypse youre expecting, you’re going to need to do things like carry a spare tire a couple hundred yards to a vehicle, lift heavy debris off a roadway, unload a dozen 5-gallon fuel cans off a truck and then into another one, run distances while carrying stuff, etc, etc….all those physical things that are going to make the apocalypse such a pain in the butt. Thus far, CrossFit seems to support those sorts of physical tasks. So…back to CrossFit for a while.

I metnion it because it is so easy to get wrapped up in all the other sexy stuff in preparedness and ignore things like physical ability. And Im the first one to agree that it’s a lot easier and more fun to order preparedness gear off the internet and consider yourself ‘prepared’ than it is to do the really crappy, annoying, loathsome things like exercising regularly.

10/22 mag prefs

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If you had to pick one .22 rifle as ‘the survivalists .22 rifle’ it would be highly unlikely that anyone would strongly disagree with the choice of the Ruger 10/22. Having been around for around fifty years, pretty much everyone makes accessories for the gun and if there’s a gun shop out there that doesn’t carry 10/22 rifles or accessories, I haven’t seen it.

Problem is,as with just about any semiauto, some mags are good and some are crap. My experiences have been that there are a handful of good magazines out there and plenty of bad ones.

For an amazing amount of time, Ruger only offered the 10-rd mag for the 10/22. Thats fine, theyre really really good mags. But, they are limited to ten rounds and sometimes you just dont feel like swapping mags all the time. Ruger eventually introduced some 25-round factory mags but, interestingly, they have a mixed reputation….a very rare case of a factory mag not being as good as the aftermarket mag.

20150101_140305

If your needs can be met with a 10-rd mag, the factory Ruger 10/22 mag is pretty much the best and only way to go. These mags are several years old.

For aftermarket Ruger 10/22 mags its pretty hard to go bad with the Butler Creek stuff. Sure, your mileage may vary, but my experience has been almost uniformly positive. The Butler Creek mags come in two flavors: Hot Lips and Steel Lips. The Hot Lips are mags with plastic feed lips and the Steel Lips are the mags with…well, you can figure out.

Back in ’94 I grabbed as many Hot Lip mags asĀ  I could and used them for the next ten years, as Slick Willie’s repulsive ‘Assault Weapons Ban’ made making new mags holding ten rounds a crime (unless, of course, those mags were for the cops or military…in which case they had to be marked as such.)

So, for ten years I had about a dozen Hot Lips mags to use. They held up quite well but they eventually started having problems. But, it was a good opportunity to learn just how much life you could get out of a $15 magazine before it needed replacement. The answer, it seems, is about ten years.

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Ca. pre-1994 Butler Creek Hot Lips mag on left, new Butler Creek Steel Lip mag on right. Note the plastic feedlips on the Hot Lips mag showing wear and fraying from years of use.

The Steel Lips magazines, obviously, were a good bit more durable in the feed lip department than the Hot Lips mags. They charge a bit more for the Steel Lips magazines but I’m of the opinion that it is very much worth it. I still sock away the Hot Lips mags, but if I come across a good deal on the Steel Lips I’ll go ahead and get as many of them as I can.

Now that Ruger has re-introduced their Charger 10/22, and brought out the American Rimfire, both of which take the 10/22 magazine so it’s really not a bad idea to get the most durable mag possible. Ten years of regular usage showed that the plastic Hot Lips mags could serve well, but I think in the future I’ll be socking away the Steel Lips more than the Hot Lips.

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New BC Steel Lip mag (L.), pre-1994 Hot Lips mag on right shows signs of wear and age from being used frequently during 1994-2004. Mag still functions but it best saved for ‘range use’ or non-critical usage. A replacement is about eight bucks….for now.

The only other aftermarket non-BC mag for the 10/22 I’ve found that was any good are the Eagle brand mags. These are also a plastic-lip mag but they can usually be found in bulk at bargain prices…sometimes around $5-6 ea. They’re good for using at the range and otherwise taking the pressure off of your stash of Butler Creek mags…but for packing away a rifle, case of ammo, and a dozen mags, I’ll stick with the Butler Creek mags.

The best sources I’ve found for deals on the BC mags are either CDNN, MGE, or GAS. You 9or your dealer) will have to subscribe for their email specials but usually once or twice a year they’ll have specials on the 10/22 mags. When they do, don’t cheap out and buy five….get as many as you can afford. They’ll always have a good value and if there’s another magazineban they’ll really be worth their weight in silver.

For carrying magazines, there’s a couple outfits that make single-pouch mags that ride on your belt and, if you don’t mind looking a little like Carl Spackler, there are some chest rigs out there as well. When the gophers are about to overrun your position, and the haze is too thick for air support, a rig like that might save you from being pounded into the dust by thousands of tiny feet.

“License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit – ever. They’re like the Viet Cong – Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that’s all she wrote…” -Carl Spackler

So, just my two cents worth, but if you’re gonna go with the 10/22 for most of your .22 rifle needs you’d be doing the smart thing to go heavy on the Butler Creek mags.

Signage

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Remember a few posts back I saw a sign in the window of a local shop? Well, someone thought I shouldn’t be without, and this little gem showed up in the mailbox the other day:

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I’ll be giving it a prominent place in the shop window for the world to see. Much thanks!

 

2014 in review

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Well, 2014 hits its end in another few days. How did 2014 fare in terms of preparedness? Lets see…

It was a gun heavy year. At least four or five rifles and shotguns, and no less than a half dozen handguns. It wasn’t so much that I had any more money than usual, it was that I took advantage of some deals that came along.

Ammo was still a big deal with .22 ammo going from being ‘virtually unobtainable’ to simply ‘still overpriced’. The availability is there, if you’re willing to pony up about ten cents a round. I shot very little .22 this years, and with the acquisition of my Sparrow I now need to get a goodly stash of subsonic .22 as well.

In the centerfires I put back a little bit more .223 which is always good. I didn’t shoot very much centerfire ammo at all this year…probably less than 500 rounds total. Virtually all of that was used in function testing new guns.

Food levels remained pretty much the same. Went through one package of freeze drieds during hunting season and thats about it. Towards February we’ll pick up half a beef and restock the freezer. In short, the level of food around here stayed pretty constant.

Rotated some fuels during the year with fresher stuff. Again, zero-sum game. Fairly even amount of fuel as what the year started with.

A quick bit of math in Excel shows that the average cost, with premium, for silver acquisitions this year was $19.50 per ounce. Since the premiums can run anywhere between $1 and $3, depending on the form of silver, that would mean the spot price of silver purchased during the year was between $16.50-18.50.

Any consumables used during the year – batteries, toilet paper, soap, etc – were all replaced so we’re on an even keel there.

We did add fairly heavily to the supplies of first aid gear. That was the result of a lethal combination of eBay, a PayPal account, and late-night boredom. On the bright side 4,800 bandaids should last us a good while.

No major turmoil in the family, no job losses, dog is in good health, still married, truck still runs, house is still standing, so all in all I’d say that while 2014 wasn’t any remarkable advancement there weren’t any real losses…so I call that a win. Yay for homeostasis. Actually, thats not true…as I (poorly) proofread this, it occurs to me that we used a windfall to knock down almost 16% of our mortgage in one stroke. That shaved 2.5 years off the 15-year mortgage and really felt good.

There were no power outages or infrastructure failures that affected us this year, so it looks like the ‘fragile infrastructure’ that threatens to throw us into ‘grid down chaos’ at any moment might be a bit more resilient than we thought. Or, more likely, the appropriate challenge simply hasnt occurred yet. There was a little ebola buzz around here what with out local hospital being one of the handful of designated ‘ebola-ready’ hospitals. They are now backing away from that status and I suspect its because theyve discovered that all it takes is treating one ebola patient to bring a hospital to its knees in terms of function, readiness, and fiscal health.

I’m hoping 2015 will be a year of advancement. I’d like to make some progress on the mortgage towards paying it down early, I’d like to do some production-capacity upgrades at the shop, and a few other things. I dont do ‘resolutions’…I figure if something is a good enough idea, why wait until New Years to implement it? But I think 2015 will be a year with a focus on that ‘ol filthy lucre …. say what you will, money is the most concentrated form of energy available to the average joe and things go a lot easier with it than without.

Just some ramblings

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Im fascinated at the notion of the North Koreans determining what movies we can and cannot watch. I have a conspiracy theory that the .gov paid Sony to pull the movie and compensate them for their loss in order to avoid the threatened ‘events’ that would take place at theaters in the US that showed the movie. But…thats all conspiracy theory. On the other hand, you can bet right now that industry underwriters are changing their policies to specifically exempt this sort of blackmail in future studio insurance policies.

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For a guy who fancies himself as being somewhat above-average in preparedness and thinking ahead, you wouldn’t think I’d be this far behind on Christmas shopping. And, oddly, its like this every year.

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Ryan linked to an excellent land nav post over at Max Velocity. Great reading and very informative. A worthy read for everyone, even those of us who know our way around a map and compass can use some reminders every once in a while.

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In local news, that was-it-or-wasnt-it ‘self defense’ shooting turned out to be a ‘wasnt’. The kid shouldnt have snuck into the guys garage, but the guy shouldn’t have gone around town telling everyone he was setting up a trap and that he was staying up nights to “kill some f***in’ kid”. No winners in this thing, but its the best hand out of what was dealt.

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I’m looking forward to hearing about everybody’s AAR on their gifts this holiday season. (There are several gift-giving-themed holidays going on this month, so rather than list specific ones I just go with the general catach-all of ‘holiday season’.) And if anyone comes up with some holiday sales on things that are germane to our shared interests, I’d like to hear about ’em.

 

Old, old man

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Well, it was mandated that we return to CrossFit. After a hiatus of a couple years and much pizza.

The notion of climbing stairs or trying to get out of a chair fills me with dread right now. Im so sore. But….its gotta be done. I am not gonna be one of those fat gun guys you see at the range.

But, oy, the pain. I am an old, old man.

I was checking my list of ‘personal records’ from when i was last at CrossFit and that was three years ago. I’d be amazed if I could lift half the weight I used to.

Unfortunately, when the apocalypse gets here the folks who can run faster and longer, carry heavier loads, climb objects faster, and not pass out anytime they have to run a few blocks, will have the advantage over…well…this current version of me. So…back to the pain factory.

Link – 100 Amazing How-To sites

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So this has been sitting in my browser tabs for a while:

http://earthweareone.com/100-amazing-how-to-sites-to-teach-yourself-anything/

Man’s primary tool of survival is his mind, we are told. Makes sense to me. No reason not to keep learning. The A-Team and McGyver didn’t succeed on strength of arms, but rather on ingenuity.

Heinlein’s famous quote about “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.” comes to mind.

This is, apparently, a literary device….the ‘competent man‘….if you’re old enough to remember Aherns uber-survivalist, J. Rourke, you pretty much know what a ‘competent man’ in the literary sense is.

While we may not have our gear with us or about us all the time, we usually take our brain everywhere we go so we may as well stock it with useful stuff.