Monthly Archives: February 2021

Cold weather musings

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The problem with having had a relatively mild winter is that when we actually get seasonably correct temperatures it feels so much worse. Case in point – this winter had been quite mild..I don’t recall it getting below 20 degreese at all. And yesterday..*bam!*…it was -1 degrees. And it felt like it.

Everyone want to live in a place like Wyoming or Montana or Idaho when they think about being a survivalist, but it seems not everyone thinks through the fact that it’s going to be bloody hard to stay warm during an apocalypse. Sure, you can have a couple 500-gallon propane tanks or 500-gallon oil tanks hidden away on your property, but at some point you’re going to have to think about staying warm using other resources hat aren’t dependent on a functioning system of infrastructure.

When I eventually get Commander Zero’s Bunker O’ Love And Lingerie Proving Ground built at the Beta Site it’s going to have to take this sort of thing into account. The obvious answer is a woodstove of some kind but, geez, thats gonna be a lot of wood to chop for a bad winter. Of course, the smart thing to do would be to optimize things so that while you may be burning wood you are at least doing it efficiently….good insulation in the building, an efficient stove, a system to move hot air around, a way to isolate unheated rooms, etc, etc.

I suppose if it truly is Ragnarok and all youre concerned with is just staying alive with no regard to style and normalcy you could just shut down al your household systems, pile into one small room of the house, and dedicate whatever resources you have to just heating that one room. I like to think that with a bit of planning, engineering, and thinking, I could come up with some sort of redundant systems to heat a ‘getaway’ cabin. But, I suspect the real efficiency and utility comes long before you start installing heat sources…it comes when you start building the structure and get in your insulation, ductwork, weather-resistant entry/egress points (doors,windows), etc. If I really think about it, I suppose the smart thing to do in any future construction is to design one of the rooms of the building to be the ‘lifeboat’ room…in a crisis it would be the one room to have power, heat, and water when the rest of the building has to be shut down.

Anyway, nothing like 0-degree weather to put on e in the frame of mind of “Hmm…how would I heat this place if the utilities went off today?” The answer, by the way, for me in the short term is kerosene. Long terms is a completely different story, but for the short term of a few days to a few weeks, I likes me the kerosene. Highest BTU’s of any fuel, stores forever with no treatment, can be used in stoves, heaters, and lamps, is portable, and won’t explode. Good stuff.

The quest for people chow

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Do you think pets get truly bored with their food? I mean, cats and dogs can, literally, eat nothing but whatever comes out of a 40# of dry mix and seemingly be okay with it. Why can’t that be done for people? You know…Purina People Chow, or some sort of equivalent.

Futurama, of course, addresses the issue with ‘bachelor chow’, as seen here. Technically, as best I can tell, there is no such thing as People Chow but there is a very, very close approximation – MPF. But good luck getting ahold of that. It turns out that Purina does (or did), in fact, make a Primate Chow. Humans are primates, right? Sooooo…couldn’t a fella just have a couple cups of primate chow in the morning, another for lunch and another at night? Maybe not according to the guy who tried it….and vlogged it.

There is a certain appeal to the notion of simply scooping out a nutritionally satisfactory and somewhat palatable food product into a bowl and not having to screw with cooking, dishes, cleanup, and groceries. And if you can do it cheaply, all the better. But…what if you have the ability to cook and you have access to…a freeze dryer?

You get freeze dried beef bourguignon as your People Chow.

I actually like beef bourguignon quite a bit if it’s done properly and you cut back on the carrots. But what fascinates me most about this tongue-in-cheek video is that darn Harvest Right freeze dryer. I saw one up at the local feed store a few months back and decided at the time that it just didnt make financial sense since a) I already had a pretty large stock of freeze dried food in storage and therefore didn’t really have a genuine need and b) I’m a cheapskate. But….Mountain House doesn’t offer a version of beef bourguignon, or a lot of other foods I like, and it would be kinda cool to be able to freeze dry stuff that I prefer. But, dang, for the price of that unit I could buy, literally, a pallet of freeze drieds all packaged and ready to go. But….the unit would let me do more food than that initial amount. What i really need is to find four or five local LMI who’d be willing to pony up the $$$ and we could do it as a group sort of thing and eventually one person would buy out everyone else. (Or, alternatively, when everyone has made as much as they ever plan on needing, sell the thing and divide the proceeds among the original investors.)

I’ve communicated with several people who have uses this thing and almost all of them complain about the oil system that is used. There is an oil-free version but its about $1500 extra, which is darn near and extra 30-50% on top of the several thousand price tag the thing normally comes at.

I suppose until I take leave of my senses long enough to decide to purchase a freeze dryer, the closest thing to people chow is going to be those lifeboat ration bars which seem to meet pretty much most of the basic requirements – somewhat nutritional, calorie dense, long shelf life, no prep, no mess.

But, man, freeze dried General Tso’s would be totally awesome.

Testing out the Kifaru pullover

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Kind of a medium-cold today (unless you live in the land of possums and banjoes, in which case it would be considered apocalyptically cold). It was about ten degrees this morning. (Thats -12 C. if youre in a country that never landed a man on the moon.) So, seemed like a good opportunity to try out the Kifaru pullover that I picked up a few weeks back. Verdict? Really nice. It definitely does a good job of keeping me warm and it compresses down into a reasonable size when I’m not wearing it. I got it on sale for $200 and I’d say it was quite worth it. It’s not something I’d wear everyday, I have a couple sheeps worth of Filson for that, but for packing it away in a bag for when I’m hunting or otherwise out in the elements and want to have something for an emergency…perfect.

it’s funny…years ago, spending $200 on something like this would have seemed like a much bigger deal than it does now. The cynic in me says that its not as big a deal because $200 today ain’t what $200 was a few years ago, but the real reason is that I’ve (so far) navigated my life to the point that, once in a while, I can just say “Eh, why not?”.

But, anyway… if you’re like me (and, Crom, I really hope youre not) and want a good, compressible piece of outerwear you can tuck away for those times when the bottom drops out of the thermometer unexpectedly and you’re away from home….excellent choice.

Article – Want to Get Out Alive? Follow the Ants

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Here’s an interesting question for you. Imagine you have a room full of people. In the middle of the length of one wall there is an emergency exit. Call an emergency and have everyone try to leave as quickly as possible through the exit. Time/count the amount of people that make it through the exit. Now repeat the same experiment, but put an obstruction in front of the emergency exit..like a stanchion or room divider. Do you wind up with more or less people exiting quickly? Surprisingly…more.

Shiwakoti experimented with different exit scenarios using square petri dishes that had exits located in the middle of a side and in the corner. Shiwakoti found that an exit located in the middle of the wall with no obstacles in front of it was the least efficient set up. He measured the efficiency of an exit by the amount of time it took the ants to get through it. On average, it took 50 ants 18 seconds to get through an unobstructed mid-side exit. Adding a column in front of the mid-side exit reduced that time to 14 seconds. A corner exit with a column in front had an escape time of less than 11 seconds. But the best escape time was achieved with a corner exit without a column in front—less than 9.5 seconds.

A very interesting article. TL;DR version…if you ‘obstruct’ the exit somehow, you reduce the number of avenues of approach which reduces congestion at the exit. You ‘funnel’ traffic more effectively.

I bring this up because, first of all it is fascinatingly counterintuitive, but also because I was thinking about the little habits we get into as survivalists (or, arguably, the little habits we should get into) and the one that I was reminded of was that whenever you enter any space (a building, a fenced area, a room, a theater, a mall, a bus, etc) one of the first things you should do is look for the alternate ways to get out of there other than the way you just came in. Most people do not do this. This means that when someone yells ‘fire’ in that crowded theater, 99% of the people are gonna run to where they came in….you, on the other hand, will head to the exit that is being virtually ignored. Which brought me to another interesting bit of data about emergency exits. Quick: what color is the exit sign? Red, right? Thats what we usually see. But in virtually everywhere else but North America exit signs are green. Why? Because almost universally red means ‘stop’ or ‘danger’, and green means ‘safe’ or ‘go’. So when you are engaged in looking for the exit sign, you have to be cognizant of the fact the exit could be green or red.

Another little known fact, but one that makes epic sense if you think about it: emergency doors must open outwards…and any entrance/exit that uses a revolving door must be flanked by conventional doors. Think about it…a crowd of panicked people surging against an exit door means if you had to pull it open, you’d die. And a revolving door is 50/50 even when there isn’t a panic. Where did these rules come from? Bad times in history.

A fascinating little rabbit hole I wound up in today as I was thinking about remembering to be more diligent about checking out where the exits are.

Let’s see if this works…..

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If you are local, or local enough that you are willing to drive into Missoula, I’m doing a small(!) group buy on some Mountain House #10 cans of freeze drieds. And, guys, I mean a small amount…about a total of 100 cans. Basically its first come first served, cash only, absolutely no ‘can you ship it to me’, ‘can I pay you and have you hold it until I can come into town next month’, and most definitely no ‘can you hold onto it for me until my VA/SS/Stimulus/Unemplyment check arrives’. If we set a time/location to transact and you can’t make it for whatever reason, the next guy gets a chance. I stopped doing these things because of the amazing amount of work that went into it for very little reward as people flaked out, stalled, hemmed, hawed, and otherwise wasted my time. Not trying to be a jerk, but in some cases I really felt taken advantage of.

Send me an email and I’ll fire you back a list with what is still available. No minimum required, you can buy one can if that’s all you want. BUT…you need to come pick up that can, with cash in hand, on the agreed day. I’ve already placed the order, and expect it to ship next week, and should be here the week after that…so let’s figure around the fourth week of the month.

Demise of the Cheap Tree Rats?

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Well…this is interesting:

The current (and possibly last) owner/boss of that particular forum is not the same guy who has been running it all along. He picked it up way back from someone else who passed it along to him. Editorially, it changed, for the worse in my opinion, after that. While always a bit hypocritical with a heavy dose of judgement, it’s a rather long-running forum. In fact, it’s probably the one of the first I ever signed up to. (I was there really, really early but had to create a new account when they changed hands or had some big crash, as I recall.) I think I originally signed up around ’97. I was there for their big Anti-Catholic purge way back when, and I followed along as the current guy in charge had his feud with the local government (Craftbury VT Selectboard)  about who had right of way to the property he had his ‘compound’ on. (Mention of it on the board was quickly quashed and deleted without comment by admins, even though a quick Google search of the public records of the town meetings would tell you all you needed to know.)

I suppose that big boards like Arfcom or FALfiles can make good coin with their discussion forum advertising, but I would think it requires a pretty large userbase and a large amount of advertisers who aren’t worried about being judged ‘by the company they keep’.

I have to hand it to them. though. Over the decades they  managed to remain fairly active and relevant. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone wants to step up and buy the place. It’ll be also interesting to see who will wind up moving up the hierarchy for the title of longest-lived preparedness discussion forum. Stay tuned.