Category Archives: Uncategorized

Signs of the times

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Drove up to Lowe’s the other day but they were closed for the Easter holiday. Ok, no big deal. What was terribly interesting though was that the closing up process including getting on a forklift and stacking pallets of heavy materials about nine feet high in front of the doors and loading entrances. Clearly, they are not taking chances on crash-n-snatch robberies. I understand this sort of thing is SOP in more urban locations, but its the first time I’ve seen that sort of thing out here.

Interestingly, the CostCo across the street from Lowe’s also appears to be…hardening…itself. Their remodel included moving the main entrance to the facility and that main entrance is now ‘picket fenced’ with concrete bollards every six feet or so to, presumably, prevent someone from crashing the place in a vehicle, looting, and scooting.

Once, when the Hells Angels were in town many years ago, I actually recall CostCo having a shotgun-toting guard at the front entrance. Never saw that again until about a year or so ago in the panic phase of the Wuhan Flu epidemic.

Heinlein said that one of the signs of a sick society, one that was on the decline, was the breakdown of civility and manners. I look around at the balkanization, increasing crime rates, the apologists trying to justify it, the social zeitgeist, and I am certain that I am not “better off than I was four years ago”, to borrow from Reagan…at least not socially.

I can’t say if it will ever get better but I can feel fairly certain that it will continue, if not get worse. All I can do is take measures to protect myself and my interests. I can’t change the course we are on, and I probably don’t want to. Sometimes to make an omelette, you’ve gotta break a few legs. Perhaps if this decline hits enough people hard enough they’ll shake off their indifference and step up to the plate….change laws, change politicians, change direction. Not holding my breath, but you never know.

Getting Paddled III

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Well, I got an email from Mr Springfield that my paddled PTR’s have shipped. I have to give him credit, I’d been following my bank balances to see when I would get billed and he billed after the work was performed and the guns were on their way. So…so far, thumbs up. FedEx is supposed to deliver them today. We shall see.

And, because I am an impulsive type, I had him throw in a trigger pack with a trigger job to try out. Because..why not?

Patriots Day

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My favorite holiday. Dedicated to the notion that otherwise law-abiding citizens sometimes just need to shoot at The Man.I will argue that there is virtually no finer way to observe the holiday, short of leaving an upper decker in the executive bathroom of the British Embassy, than to go out and spend some time practicing with your freedom-rifle.

Wheat at WinCo

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WinCo has that little corner of the store that carries what could best be described as ‘preparedness minded’ products….bags of flour, rice, salt, sugar, 5-gallon buckets, lids, etc…but one thing that was notably absent was wheat. Oh, flour they’ve got plenty of..but wheat? Not so much.

So, I was a bit surprised to se this today:

Hard white wheat in 25# bags. I wonder if they’ll get more varieties or if this is a one-time ‘gauge the response’ sort of offering. Regardless, it’s a welcome offering.

Propane

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For those of you who are local, or semi local, the place to get propane at the moment seems to be Bretzz RV on Reserve St by the interstate. If you’re a ‘member’ of their ‘propane fillup club’ or whatever the heck they call it you wind up at $0.99/gal. Which means you can fill your average barbecue bomb (which is about $30 new at CostCo just down the street) for $5.

I’d been there the last two weekends but for various reasons their filling station was closed. Not today, though. Five bucks and I’ve enough propane to keep me heated, fed, and illuminated for a few days worth of power outage. I’ve got about four or five of these tanks at the monet, I’ll probably make it an even six. I had refrained from getting anything larger because I didn’t want to incur the penalty to mobility. A 20# barbecue bomb is easy for anyone to handle…when they get bigger, not so much.

By the by, signing up at Bretz’ is free, and they don’t ask for ID, so just go down there, sign up as Heywood Jablowme, and save a few bucks on getting your tank filled.

And, just because if I don’t make a reference to ‘King Of The Hill’ in a propane post someone will feel obligated to do so in comments:

Nineteen years

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Well, its the anniversary of the blog. I started this thing back in 2003 and in that time we’ve had…hmmm…Bird Flu, SARs, 2012, Hurricane Katrina, Obama, inflation, Ebola, Zika, Wuhan Flu, and a few other interesting events. But..still here. And I haven’t had to use my AK… this was a good day.

If you’ve found the 19 years worth of brain droppings to be entertaining, or even informative, I welcome you to sign up for my Patron account. a buck or two a month goes a long way towards keeping the lights on, the domain registered, and the mindless ramblings of a weird gun nut in Montana flowing. And, lets not kid ourselves, gearing up for the apocalypse ain’t cheap.

What’s been the most interesting part of blogging over 19 years? Hmm. Looking back at old posts and seeing how my forecasts of the future did (sometimes) or did not (most of the time) turn out the way I thought they would. And, wow, I’m such a different person than I was when I started this blog. Not worse, not better, just…a different person.

But! Still a person with a keen interest in being prepared and having enhanced resilience.

On a much lighter note, I like to needle Friend Of The Blog ,Rawles from time to time about how I predate his blog by about two years, although he has managed the remarkable accomplishment of managing to post every single day whereas I usually average a post every three days.

When will enough be enough? A lot of blogs have come and gone in that nineteen years and one day there’ll be a time when this one goes dark as well. After all, it’s not easy saying the same thing over and over, in dozens of different ways, for almost two decades. And, considering that the ostensible mission of this blog was to chronicle my own adventures in preparedness, after almost twenty years I should be pretty much done in terms of getting my ducks in a row. But…no, it seems there’s always more to do, to learn, to buy, to pack away, etc.

Next year will be the twenty year anniversary. Maybe I’ll have a cake or something………….

Getting Paddled II

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According to the UPS tracking numbers, the PTR’s I sent to Bill Springfield arrived the other day. As I’ve mentioned several times before, the semi-auto HK91 platform really benefits from having the original mag release on it rather than the pushbutton release. So much so, in fact, that it is worth the $$$ to me to have it performed on my older guns.

If you decide to buy a new PTR or other G3 clone, hold out for one that has the paddle mag release already on it.

I am hoping to get my PTR’s back sometime next week (I hope) at which time I’ll be happy to report back on what I think of the job that was performed.  Stay tuned.

On tonights episode of “Will It Digest”….

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Cleaning out the freezer and…pork ribs from 2011. Ah, such carefree days….

Your ‘best by ‘ dates, I laugh at them. Ha! Ha, I say!

So, how’d they turn out? Well, unless something rather untoward happens in the next eight hours, just fine. Why wouldnt they? These were vacuum sealed, and have been sitting below zero for the last eleven years. The moral of the story here? If you package meat properly, and keep it consistently frozen, it should be just fine literally a decade later.

This is now officially the oldest meat I have eaten out of my freezer, wildly trouncing the five year old turkey I had a few years back.

Ah.the memories……..

Link – Why is there a shortage of canning jars and lids?

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A reader was thoughtful enough to send me this link and there’s some interesting details in it. Specifically:

What consumers didn’t know was that canning lids (around since 1884) and canning jars (around since 1858) are no longer being made by Ball and Kerr, the two big manufacturers of American canning supplies. A few years before the pandemic, these companies had sold out to a mega-corporation called Newell Brands.

….

Since Ball and Kerr were just two more of multiple brands bought out by this company, consumer demands for any one product are not a priority for the mega-corporation. When the 2020 pandemic created a huge demand for canning supplies, Newell Brands decided it would not try to sell Ball and Kerr products at every store handling canning supplies as in the past, but only through online giant Amazon and select major chains such as Walmart and Ace Hardware stores.

I didn’t know that. Did you? I’ve not verified the information on my own, but if true it would mean that domestic production of canning supplies is all under one company which may or may not care about how available those items are.

There are, of course, offshore options. When theres a void in the market you can usually rely on the Chinese to swoop in, create a knockoff version thats 1/10th the quality at 1/2 the price, and then flood the market with it under several different names. Everything I read says that the Chinese canning lids are 50/50 in terms of efficacy.

Clearly canning lids have sort of migrated into the Uncertain Goods category. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stock up on a healthy amount of them, albeit much later than I should have.