Category Archives: Uncategorized

Night weirdness

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So there I was, trying to drift off to sleep at 11pm last night. I was in that half-asleep-half-awake stage when I heard, as if in a dream, a sound that I thought was someone knocking at my door. Sometimes in that half-asleep stage I’ll get some auditory hallucinations…but these seemed rather real.

My first inclination was to ignore it, but then I figured I better go check it out. I pad in to the living room, buck naked, and glance at the security cameras. Sure enough, there’s some idiot standing on my porch.

Now, I learned a long time ago, and at great cost, that the best course of action when there is a stranger at your door, is to not open the door to ask what they want. Instead, I go up to the door and yell “What do you want?”

Back comes this meek and sorry voice saying “I just want talk to someone”. Are you freaking kidding me? This scraggly bearded hippie is either drunk, stoned, both, or otherwise not in their right mind.

So..definitely not opening the door.  “No. Go away.” (‘Go away’ sounds less confrontational than ‘get lost’. So I go with that.)

He turns around and wanders into the night.

So… Back to bed for me? Well, that was the plan. Except my neighbors on both sides are women who live alone. :::sigh::: Pull on a pair of sweats and a hoodie, slip on my shoes, grab the MP5A2 and step outside to make sure he’s not freaking out the neighbors. No sign of him. Ok, duty fulfilled…time to go back to sleep.

This isn’t the first time some sort of weirdness like this has occurred. I think the reason is that my computer room is at the front of the house and since I leave the computer and monitors on all night, it gives the impression that someone is awake in the house. Thus, someone wanting to interact with a human, for whatever reason, is going to go to the house where the lights are on. I may need to start turning off the monitors at night since it seems to be the flame that draws the whacko moths.

Before anyone asks, no, this isnt a particularly dangerous town. At least, it didnt used to be. The two biggest ‘threats’ in this town are drunk college kids and crazy homeless people. Neither one is particularly better than the other, and both are tremendously annoying but its still calmer than NYC or LA.

Mountain House math at CostCo

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“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Was up at CostCo and beheld this:

Five Day Meal Kit, eh? Hmmm. Lets run some numbers. First, lets grab the data off the back of the box:

So, this is supposed to be five days of food for …I’m guessing one person. Without evidence contrary to that, let’s run with it – five days for one person.

According to the box label, you’ve got a total of fifteen pouches in there. Makes sense, right? Three meals a day for five days is fifteen meals.

The next thing of interest is the caloric value of each meal. This is going to be a tad misleading. Lets take the first item listed on the box…Beef Lasagna. The box says 220 calories. Thats about 1/10th of your daily recommended calories (if you follow USDA guidelines of 2000/k per day). But keep reading…each container is two servings. So, each pouch of that Beef Lasagna is actually 440 calories, or about 1/5th of your daily calories. Slightly better.

So keeping an eye on those calories-per-serving and servings-per-container, you can see that if you add up the entire caloric value of this box you get…an average of 1488 calories per day. Thats about 75% of your daily 2000 calories. And thats 2000 calories for just sitting there doing nothing. Factor in chainsawing downed trees, hanging looters, hauling supplies, etc, etc, and you’ll see that 1488 calories is better than nothing but you better plan on adding a few notches to your belt.

Does that mean that a package like this has no value? Heck, no. I’l take 1488 calories of freezedrieds stored in a 5-gallon-bucket in the back of my truck over the 2500 calories of food that got destroyed/looted/washed away/burned in my house. Something is, usually, better than nothing.

Now, if you took this box, dumped out the pouches and sealed ’em up in a five gallon bucket with some pouches of tuna, packets of oatmeal, instant coffee packets, Gatorade pouches, and maybe a few small cans of Dinty Moore….well…you’re sitting pretty when the dinner bell rings in Heleneville.

The takeaway from this post isn’t that freeze-drieds arent the Perfect Solution. You should already know that. The takeaway here is that you need to read the labels and do the math. Don’t plop down $320 for four of these, stick ’em in a closet, and pat yourself on the back thinnking you, the wife, and kids are now ‘taken care of’.

Two thousand calories per day is a baseline. And there are a lot of people who think that number is of questionable value. Only you know what kinda caloric stockpile will work for you. Run the numbers. Being prepared is sometimes a pain in the butt, but do it anyway. We can all probably stand to miss a few meals and wind up being the better for it, but in a crisis there is very little that calms you down and gets your brain on an even keel more than a tasty hot meal at regular intervals.

So, yeah, pick up some of these at CostCo…at $6 per pouch its not a terrible value. But don’t think youre done once you throw that box in your cart.

9mm haul

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I get all sorts of emails across my monitor from various dealers and distributors having sales of this and that. Right now, it appears $0.235 is the new floor for major manufactured 9mm ammo. More than a few vendors are selling Rem or CCI 115 ball at this price. Some are including shipping. I pointed this out to a buddy of mine who then ordered up 30 cases (30,000 rounds) for his shop.

Now, ‘for his shop’ is misleading because when his friends and other hangers-on found out about it, it became “hey can I get a case or two at that price?”. As a result, out of that 30 cases, 22 of them are going to friends and associates…only eight will actually go on the shelves.

I, being nobody’s fool, took three.

The preponomicon has a couple of line items for 9mm ammo…regular and subsonic. My goal was pretty simple…keep five thousand rounds of each on hand. Keeping true to my nature, I’ve gone a little past that. But…extremism in the form of ammo storage is no vice, and moderation in the accumulation of ammo is no virtue.

You may notice this is the first time I’ve thrown a quantifiable number out there in regard to how much ammo I think I need to keep on hand. Your mileage may vary, of course. But I don’t think the end of the world, as I anticipate it, will be one long running gun battle. I’ve got more years behind me than ahead of me at this point, and the number of rounds I’ve needed to expend, rifle and pistol, to keep myself safe can be counted on one hand. Of course, I just got through posting about we have those unforeseen disasters that come out of left field that no one ever considers but even then, it’s hard for me to find one that requires me to expend that much ammo.

Practice? Thats a different story. I reload, and I have ammo set aside for practice. But for ‘in case of emergency break glass’ ammo, I’m fine figuring 5,000 rounds, not all in one basket, should get me and the people I care about through most situations.

While I’m on the subject, when it comes time to lay back ammo for Der Tag, I always go with big-name-brand manufacturers and, if possible, keep it in the original packaging. Why? Two reasons – first, I trust Remington, Winchester, Federal, and the other big guys more than I trust Steve’s Discount Reloading or Glorious Turkmenistan Factory No. 8 when it comes to quality control. Second, on the off chance I need to resell or otherwise market that ammo, the original packaging throws more confidence into the deal for the buyer that he’s getting good ammo and not something from..well….Steve’s Discount Reloading or Glorious Turkmenistan Factory No. 8. (And, please, let’s not start that whole ‘ammo you sell/trade can come back and be used against you’ discussion. Every single thing you trade or sell can come back to be used against you…trading food feeds people who might harm you, trading medical supplies heals people who might harm you, trading fuel helps people who might harm you, etc, etc, etc.)

To the best of my knowledge, the most ammo used by one citizen in armed self-defense in a single encounter was 105 rounds by legend Harry Beckwith…a statistical outlier so far on the edge of the bell curve that you need a map and compass to find him. Even in Katrinaville (or is it Heleneville now?) I am highly doubtful anyone has had to dump more than a magazines worth of freedom seeds at anyone.

But…you do you. For me, five thousand is the ‘magic number’ for my 9mm needs, but thats a minimum…there is no maximum.

Winter approaches

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Winter is definitely approaching. The evenings and mornings are cold, and the days, even the sunny ones, are getting cooler. Which always reminds me of this:

It is getting nigh upon time to break out the Filson.

In addition to getting the wool outta storage, it’s also time to make sure all the Plan B gear is ready to roll… alternate heat sources, generator ready, fuel laid in, etc, etc. We seldom get power failures here in town that last more than a couple hours, but there’s always the chance that a Black Swan Swan Of Color event will come along and throw a curve ball that no one expected. ( / North Carolina has entered the chat ).

Every region has it’s own particular set of threat potential. Prepping for a hurricane in Iowa makes about as much sense as prepping for wildfire in Manhattan or a 7.0 earthquake in Nebraska. Statistically, the odds are close to zero. (But…never actually zero.)

But even then, stuff comes out of nowhere that virtually no one foresaw. No one in Manhattan thought they’d ever have to walk off the island because things were shut down on 9/11. I’m sure the folks in Hawaii never thought there’d be a wildfire that turned parts of Maui into a moonscape. And there’s equally as unprecedented and unexpected stuff still out there. We prepare against the likely but sometimes life throws a curve ball that no one could have reasonably expected.

All of these things do have common denominators, though…various forms of infrastructure failure, transport and mobility problems, supply disruptions, etc. Maybe you can’t prepare for every event, but you can prepare for the consequences that they all have in common.

It’s easy to get complacent when it comes to preparedness. You get comfy…cocky even. And then something happens that shocks you back to the mindset that “maybe I’m not as ready as I think’. I suspect this last batch of hurricanes is doing that for a lot of people.

As I said, winter is coming here in Montana and while I’ve always thought Im more than ready for some blizzard-induced winter drama, I’m starting to think that I need to change my thinking a bit and be open to some of the more unlikely-but-not-impossible scenarios that may arise.

So..back to list-making and inventory-taking.

Cat carrying

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I recall that I once said Hurricane Katrina would be the benchmark for future disaster responses until something bigger came along. Is this episode in the southeast that event? I dunno. But while it’s not the same song as Katrina, it certainly rhymes in places.

One thing I’m noticing is that the level of animosity, distrust, and downright antagonism for the federal response is orders of magnitude higher than it was in Katrina. Check out this headline: Armed Militia ‘Hunting FEMA’ Causes Hurricane Responders to Evacuate—Report.

I’m putting this down as a ‘friend of mine heard the story from a guy who had a friend who told him….’ To paraphrase a famous quote, ““the first casualty of disaster is the truth”. Armed militias hunting down FEMA? Thats the sort of thing you see in a self-published ‘post apocalyptic fiction’ series on Amazon. In real life? Mmmm….maybe? I’m skeptical.

But there is no disputing that there is a lot more political anger going on in this crisis than in Katrina. I was going to say ‘If you need a reason to be prepared, avoiding having to deal with .gov types and FEMA is a good one’ but that’s not really true. Your reason to be prepared is wanting to be able to take care of and protect yourself and the people you care about. That’s it. You don’t need another reason. That’s the One True Reason.

Mark Twain said that  “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” Katrina was a learning opportunity…some took it to heart, some did not. The .gov, it appears, on a federal and local level, has some cat-carrying going on at the moment.

I’m thousands of miles away from this particular tragedy. Many of you are, too. I’m paying attention, filtering the noise from the signal, and observing what works, what doesn’t, and incorporating those lessons into my own activities. Maybe I’ll never see a hurricane in Montana, but infrastructure failure, floods, blackouts, fuel issues, looting, water shortages, traffic chaos, etc, are not unique to hurricanes…they can happen anywhere. So..it pays to learn from other peoples experiences. I’ve no desire to carry a cat by the tail when I can learn the same lesson from someone else who already got clawed.

 

Blogs from the wet country

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Learning from other people’s experiences is the cheat code to being squared away. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel when Grogg and Thol did it for you a few thousand years ago. As a result, any time there is a disaster or other time-to-use-your-preps event, I always read the blogs of people who were there and ‘saw the elephant’, as it were. Why should I learn stuff the hard way when someone else already paid for the course?

Was flipping around the internet and found this worthy read – Big Country Expat

These After Action Reports (AAR) are almost always worth reading. Did they do things right? Learn from it. Did they completely drop the ball? Learn from it. You learn from other peoples failures just as much as you learn from their successes.

Another AAR: https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/10/detailed-after-action-report-from-north.html

One of the common threads in these and other blog posts I’ve seen lately has been the undeniable certainty that once the ATM’s and electronic payment systems are disrupted, cash becomes the only form of payment. The lesson learned: keep a big wad of cash in your safe and don’t touch it.

I know you guys have been following other blogs that are reporting back on the situation out there in hurricane country. Share some linkage and let’s learn from other people’s experiences so we can save ourselves the pain.

Article – Through Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Amateur Radio Triumphs When All Else Fails

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Amateur radio is definitely one of those things I’ve neglected over the years and need to dig into.

Like the tens of thousands of other North Carolina residents, the power to Witherspoon’s neighborhood was completely out. It was impossible to communicate with the house down the road, let alone anyone several miles away. Unable to send text messages or make phone calls, radio became the one form of communication left in rural North Carolina. After fixing what he could on his own property, Witherspoon, a lifelong amateur radio enthusiast, began distributing handheld radios to his neighbors.

No doubt being able to communicate with people outside the affected area is important, but being able to communicate with people within the affected area is absolutely critical. From what I’ve been reading, despite the disdain for them as the Hi-Points of radios, the Baofeng radios have been heavily represented in this episode.

I have some handheld radios that I keep on the charger, with spare batteries, specifically for contact with close-by people. If I’m roaming around the neighborhood checking on the situation it’s nice to know that the people back at the house can contact me, and vice versa, if something needs to be communicated.

One thing I’ve been absolutely dragging my feet on is getting the antennae set up for the Icom 7300 I picked up last year. I need to get off my butt, climb up on the roof, and get something up there. I probably should start investigating the local amateur radio scene and see if I can find that particular brand of boffin…the radio nerd who is also a survivalist…to help me get things set up.

In fact, really, I should probably do some sort of communications audit and see what exactly I have, and what I need, in regards to this sort of thing.

What to power a house with

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Let’s say that you find that perfect chunk of dirt and you decide to build your modest dwelling there. It’s pretty much an ‘off grid’ situation so you’re on your own for power. The way I see it there are things that you’ll need to run:

  • Generator
  • Well Pump
  • Lights
  • Fridge/freezer
  • Heat/Water heater
  • Stove
  • Assorted small devices (phone charging, table lamps, laptop, etc.
    (Not a complete list, I know)

So now, you’ve got a choice about how to run things..you can go with propane, gasoline, diesel,  or electric (from generator, hydro, PV, wind, etc.)

And, of course, you could do some combination of the various fuels/ systems….you could run your lights and accessories offa PV system, your well pump off a generator, and your generator, heat, water heater, etc. off propane.

Or you could try to do one fuel to cover all those needs…something like everything being electric and running off a generator.

So, my question is…how would you set things up? To my way of thinking, propane would cover all systems…propane to run the generator, freezer/fridge, heat, water heater, stove, and the electrical would have its needs met from the propane generator. Although, most likely, I’d just wire for DC and use 12v LED light fixtures and lamps. Laptops already charge from DC. Use propane for everything else.

There’s also nothing that says a household can’t be a multi-fuel affair. I’m thinking that for my anticipated needs, some sort of PV battery system (unless I’ve got running water for a turbine, or perhaps a windmill) to run the low-draw electric like lights, radios, etc, and then propane to do the heavy lifting of generator-driven electric well pump, propane stove, water heater, fridge/freezer, and furnace.

The drawback to propane is that you cant just walk down the road, borrow some from a neighbor, and carry it back to your home in a bucket like you could with diesel or gasoline. And theres the matter of getting a truck out to your location to refill your tank. I’m not sure of the regulations regarding transporting a large propane tank to get it refilled, but I wonder if a 250- or 500-gallon tank, permanently mounted to a trailer, hauled into town once a year to be filled, and then returned home and reconnected to the house system would work.

Yes, I’m sure I could live in a cabin with a woodstove that heats the place up and makes my hot water but I like to think that in a pre-apocalypse world I would strive for a bit more comfort and convenience than that.

So…if it were you…and you had to provide for lighting, heat, hot water, well pump. and device charging, what would be your fuel of choice? Keep in mind, we’re trying to keep as low a profile as possible…so a tanker truck of some flavor coming by twice a year is not optimum.

Augason Farms Cheese Powder

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As I mentioned earlier, the local WinCo had restocked on Augason Farms food storage. One of the things that was there that I had not seen previously was the cheese sauce. Off the top of my head, the thing that would benefit mostly from this would be the simple meal of macaroni-and-cheese.

The LDS cannery people offer #10 cans full of elbow macaroni, and that stuff keeps quite a while. A case of that, a can of this cheese blend, and you can feed a lot of people without too much fuss. Nutritional value? Probably sketchy. But macaroni-and-cheese will fill up the entire church basement full of refugees without too much fuss. Bonus is that the kids are probably already used to it. Its a no muss, no fuss meal.

So…lets crank a can open and see what we have:

A can of … orange powder. What a shock. Theres a lot in there. There’s also a handful of oxy absorbers hidden in there too. I’m guessing this stuff is pretty hygroscopic, so get what you need and then seal that can back up. The can says to use a 2:1 ratio of water:mix. I followed the instructions and did exactly that.

The instructions say to bring the water to a boil and whisk in the mix, stirring for a couple minutes until it thickens. The thickening part seemed to take a while. My suggestion would be to use some of the starch-loaded pasta water to help thicken this stuff. I guess we better make some elbow macaroni to go with this.

Elbow macaroni is kind of a staple in many storage food pantries. Any interesting shaped pasta should work for this purpose…shells, penne, ziti, orrecchiette, orzo, etc. So, cook up some elbow macaroni until it is al dente, drain, and mix with sauce.

And…thumbs up. It was pretty good. It did need to be a bit thicker but thats easy enough to do. I might throw in a little butter, and perhaps use milk instead of water next time. But, overall…….good product. A little goes a long way, by the way.

Definitely good for mac and cheese. Theres a recipe on the can for making a queso dip. Im told that sprinkling this on popcorn would have some appeal as well. For me, it seems like an excellent choice for feeding a buncha people in a hurry with something everyone will like and that doesn’t require a lot of effort. So, yeah…I’ll pick up a couple cans this weekend and tuck ’em away with the LDS cans of elbow mac.

Go. Buy with confidence.

Last Blogger Standing II

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First off, for context, let me link to a five year old post: Last Blogger Standing

I’ve gotten a couple messages in the last few days from people noting that it seems like the number of preparedness blogs (or related material) seem to be dwindling.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful that are no longer around. The most sorely missed, by me anyway, was Self Sufficient Mountain Living which was my favorite. Claire Wolf has stepped back and semi-retired from her blog, Dakin shuffled off the non-corporeal plane as did a couple other folks. And some folks just up and disappeared, leaving their blog up with their last post being years ago.

At this point, and please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, I think the longevity title is between me and ,Rawles. As I’ve said before, I am most definitely not in this for the money, its more of a passion/vanity project for me. A little Amazon affiliate money shows up once in a while, and Patreon kicks in a few bucks a month, but other than that….nada. And that’s fine. I will say, however, that if you ever do think “Dang, he really nailed it on the head with that last post” please feel free to send me something in the mail or Patreon. I;ve even had people email me gift cards in the past. I’m not proud, I’ll happily take whatever renumeration you want to give.

In the last few years, I feel like my motivation has changed when it comes to this blog. More and more, I feel like my mission, such as it is, is to encourage and motivate the people who think like me, and to help bring people over to ‘my side’. Sort of a combination of morale officer and recruitment officer. To make sure that you know you’re not being ‘crazy’ or ‘weird’ when you buy three cases of TP at CostCo, bury a 10/22 in the woods, or map out ‘bug out routes’ from your AO. The world is on fire and people are telling you everything is fine. Anyone who doesn’t increase their resilience in the face of what we see on the news today is the crazy one.

I’ve no intention of leaving the blogosphere any time soon. Especially how, year after year, it seems we are getting into those ‘interesting times’. Why would I?

Of course, some things are out of my hands. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, have a widowmaker heart attack tonight, or die in another home invasion….who can say? Maybe one day I’ll wake up and just want to re-invent my whole life and that’ll include leaving the blog behind. Could happen. But, for now, I’m not planning on going anywhere.

So, yes…it does seem like the number of preparedness blogs is going down. But one other reason for that, and this might be a good thing, is that perparedness is becoming more mainstream and less niche…therefore it doesn’t need the ‘underground’ of blogs and websites (or, gong back really far,BBS’s and Usenet groups) that supported it back in the day.

Perhaps preparedness/survivalism is finally ‘out of the closet’ enough that the need for a handful of standard-bearers has passed. Certainly, it seems like its less fringe and more mainstream these days.

Regardless, I agree…it does seem that the presence of active preparedness blogs (that aren’t just shills for ad revenue) seems to be on the downward trend. But, your buddy Zero is here for now.