Snow day

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Winter seems to have arrived a tad early. It dropped about 4″ of snow here in the valley bottom overnight. That means it dumped a lot more up in the hills. Fortunately, I was pretty much prepared for this. I had just gotten the snowblower back from its annual tuneup a few days ago so at 8am this morning I was doing my mitzvah for the neighborhood and cleared the snow from the neighbors sidewalks and driveways. Do they ever thank me? Rarely. Do they ever offer to pay for gas? Never. But, being a glutton for abuse I continue to do it anyway. I have a history, it seems, of letting people take advantage of me.

Driving was a bit o an adventure. Even with 4-wheel drive you still have to be very ‘in the moment’ while driving. And its really easy to see who the drivers are who were formerly from warm snow-free states. Theyre the ones that think that, at an intersection, they can just stomp on the gas and clear the intersection before the crosswise traffic gets to them. They learn the hard way. I had already pushed two idiots out of icy intersections before 10am. Unsurprisingly, they were women. They seem to just think the answer to being stuck on ice is to stomp the gas pedal down further…thatll fix it! Not.

I’ll be heading to the hills next week to do some hunting. Opening day was today, but it’s like Beirut during the busy season out there. I’ll wait until the middle of the week when folks are at work and I can have more of the woods to myself.

Other than that, a quiet weekend. I’m catching up on business stuff, gotta do some homework, and really gotta jump on the housecleaning. Nice thing about being a paranoid survivalist is that I really don’t have to leave the house unless I really want to. I’ve got food aplenty and no reason to go out in the cold if I don’t have to.

Two weeks until The Most Important Election Of Our Lives(tm) and the start of Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo. Or not. I’m of the ‘not’ camp.

And, finally, if it is going to be a heavy winter as some people are forecasting it to be, I am looking forward to finally get to use these babies. Let it snow!

Annnd…just when I thought it was going to be a quiet, inexpensive day I get an email from one of my vendors saying that, surprise!, they have the Magpul happysticks for the Glock in stock. How many? Doesn’t matter. I’ll take them all.

Article – Americans Are Frantically Buying Military Gear Before the Election

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Conflict is on America’s streets in 2020, and “tactical apparel” has become a lifestyle industry serving militarized law-enforcement agents and the freelance gunmen who emulate them. Less than two weeks before Election Day, orders are rolling in. Since last year, online purchases have driven a 20-fold jump in sales of goods like the $220 CM-6M gas mask — resistant to bean-bag rounds — for Mira Safety of Austin, Texas. “It doesn’t matter who gets elected,” founder Roman Zrazhevskiy said of his new customers. “They think that no matter who wins, Biden or Trump, there are going to be people who are upset about the result.” Not long ago — perhaps a generation — dressing like you’re going to war was for the veteran who never quite made it back from Vietnam or the angry young men who obsessed over gas masks and combat boots at the military surplus store. (Every American town seemed to have one, and only one.)

I have to snicker because there really should be a distinction here and it is completely missed in the article – people buying the gear now are interesting, but not as interesting as the ones who already bought it long before this happened.

Rioting? Sure. In places like NY, California, Chicago, various parts of the south. But a nationwide blood-in-the-streets uprising like you see in the Middle East everytime some dictator gets out-dictated? ‘Technical’ pickup trucks? No..not a chance.
I suspect that with all these articles about ‘Americans preparing for anarchy’ might morph into a self-licking ice cream cone. Really, such a circumstance is the sort of thing media types salivate over so it seems it wouldbe in their interest to instigate/foster/encourage such chaos.
I think that in three weeks we’re gonna see that this whole thing, no matter who wins, was not the ‘Purge’-like event that people were forecasting.

Bigfoot riding a unicorn

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I don’t know about you, but at my local CostCo this is a sight that is rather rare:

A five-pack of Clorox bleach wipes. They are, apparently, some sort of magical talisman that keeps the Kung Flu at bay. Or, at least, thats what one might reasonably suspect from the way these things are snapped up within moments of hitting the floor. Other than their rather convenient disposable nature, they don’t do anything a bucket of water/bleach and a rag won’t do. However, I do track their availability everytime I am at CostCo because I’m curious to see what is and is not flying off the shelves as people get the hoarding bug again. oh, and of course these were marked as one-to-a-customer.

What was I at CostCo for? I needed to pick up another 50# of rice. I have about five or six large gallon pickle jars on the shelf that I keep my rice in. They sit on the shelf in the kitchen and it gets used up in the course of things. When I get down to the last jar, I pull one of the Gamma Seal-ed buckets from storage and refill them all. Then it’s time to refill the bucket. So…a couple bags of rice. Which, by the way, do not appear to have been depredated yet.

And one final thing about COstCo before I drop the subject entirely – it isn’t even Halloween yet and there are freakin’ Christmas items out for purchase. What the hell, man?

Solo Stove

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A few years ago a very generous friend of mine gave me a Solo Stove as a gift. Its a steel woodburning stove designed for, I’d imagine, camping use. It’s basically a large steel can with a grate at the bottom and an arrangement of vent holes to allow efficient burning of twigs and sticks. The primary advantage being that you don’t need to carry fuel since you’re running around in an environment that is lousy with it….trees, bushes, deadfall, blowdown, etc.

But, I got busy with things and it just sat there on my filing cabinet collecting dust. Finally decided to try it the other day and dang if it didn’t create quite the little conflagration. The design gets plenty of air to the fire and as a result, once this thing gets a cheery little blaze going it burns hot and it burns fast. Most interestingly, it burns thorough….everything is reduced to powdery ash. It burns stuff quite completely.

I just grabbed a handful of twigs, snapped them down to about hand-width, tossed the loosely in this thing and lit it with a lifeboat match. Once it started buring I added progressively larger sticks until things were going along rather nicely.

The biggest drawback I found was bulk. This thing is bulky.  I’ts pretty light for its size, but it takes up some space. For backpacking, I’d think twice about taking it along. However, for car camping, vehicle survival gear, or that sort of thing this would be about ideal. I suppose it’s bulk, rather than it’s weight, is the biggest drawback but if you can clear the square footage in your pack to take it with you I suspect it would be immensely handy on a backpacking trip… just a matter if youre willing to give up the necessary space in your pack.

Even if you’re not sitting a canteen cup full of water on top of this thing to boil, it creates a nice little ‘campfire’ where you want without leaving a blackened pile of half-burnt debris on the ground. Never underestimate the calming and spirit-lifting effect of having a small fire in front of you when you’re sitting in the dark at night in the middle of nowhere.

I think that with the advent of ridiculously light canister stoves these days this sort of product has a very limited appeal, but I suspect that small demographic happens to be the one we survivalist-types fall into.

Anyway, it took several (three, I think) years but I finally got around to playing with this thing. Considering it was a thoughtful gift from a friend i really should have used it sooner so I wouldn’t like like an ungrateful idiot. Ah well…they know me better than that.

 

Books – The Ultimate Prepper’s Survival Guide

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Today, Tuesday, is ‘book bomb’ day for ,Rawles’ new book….”The Ultimate Prepper’s Survival Guide”

If you’ve been thinking about getting a copy, today is the day to do it. I was fortunate enough to get an advance copy several weeks back but I’ll probably pick up an extra copy as a gift for someone. A timely Christmahanukwanzakah (or Festivus) gift for the not-quite-yet-an-LMI on your list.

Not sure if its” the ultimate preppers survival guide”  or “the ultimate preppers survival guide”. What if I’m not the ultimate prepper but just a really good one?

Self-looting

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““The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

That being the case, apparently I am the greater thing. I was supposed to do something important today and..I forgot. And then it was too late. Fortunately I managed to humble myself enough that I was given a reprieve and got it done on the ‘do over’. Moral of the story: you are usually your own worst enemy.

As it turns out, you are also your own worst looter as well. We all have lovely stockpiles of food and supplies, along with a gun or two to protect those hard-earned supplies from the locusts, right? And yet who winds up doing the looting? Yourself, naturally. (Or the folks you share the house with.) You take a few batteries out of storage and never replace them, you pull some MRE’s for a hunting trip and fail to make a note of it, you grab a bottle of mouthwash off the shelf and don’t think to subtract it from your List. Thats how 99% of us get looted without a single disaster being declared.

Self-discipline, obviously, is whats called for. But if you live in a household with other humans, it can also be hard to convince them that, yes, it actually is important that you make a note of something when you take it out of storage.

It seems like no matter how meticulous I am, when I do an inventory there is always something that is off on the count. And I know it’s my own fault…at some point I was in a hurry, grabbed something, and thought “I’ll take care of that later” and later turns into … never.

As 2020 continues it’s donkey punches to our ‘nads, keep in mind that with our increased supplies and the perceived higher risk of needing them, now is not the time to be your own worst looter.

America Stone knife sharpener

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Several weeks back I got an email from a fella asking me if I’d be interested in trying out a sharpening tool he was promoting. I love free stuff, so, ‘Sure!’.

Thus far, my hands down favorite knife sharpener has been from these guys. The one that I highly recommend has been this one. And while it’s been awesome for sharpening my pointy stuff, it doesn’t quite fit in the pouch on my knife sheath.

So, I received this stone and pouch in the mail the other week. It’s a pretty unassuming stone…a ceramic-ish looking stone that is rounded on one edge and beveled to a point on the other. Here’s the website, and there is a video on YouTube to explain it’s use:


Yes, its a pretty DIY video but production values don’t really have much to do with whether information is  accurate or useful. It would have been nice to have some good close ups, but you get the gist if you watch it all the way through.

Anyway, I watched the video and decided I’d try it out on one of my hard-used knives…specifically my Glock knife that I use for hunting. Here’s what it looks like these days:

It had a small nick in the edge about 3/4 of the way down the blade and the video said that using the wedge/pointed shape of the stone would take care of that so….off we went. Three strokes each side using medium force, and repeated this a dozen or so times. Then, as the video says, I used the rounded side to sharpen things up. And…it worked. How sharp? Well, there’s always the ‘will it cut paper’ or ‘will it shave the hairs on your arm’ sort of tests which are kinda unquantifiable. Like everyone else, I test the edge with my thumb and pull the blade across my thumbnail. If the edge bites into the thumbnail , I know its really sharp and will cut. My unofficial test is to slice up some cardboard boxes…I try doing that, gauge the effort required, then sharpen and try cutting again. The subjective difference in effort required tells me what I want.

I did find that this stone did not work as effectively on thin, flexible blades. I suspect this is because as you move down the length of the blade, the force you exert cause the blade to bend away from you..throwing off the whole process. So, for a long thin-bladed slicing or fillet knife it might require you to do something to hold the blade in a rigid, unflexing manner. For my Glock knife, which has absolutely zero flex in it, not a problem. For pretty much any knife that isn’t a fillet knife, there shouldn’t be any issues.

Did an outstanding job on my Glock knife, and, interestingly, a prety admirable performance on my good kitchen Henckel knives.

What I’m most interested in is whether the stone would fit in the knife sheath I like to use. (The SpecOps sheath) As it turns out, the stone is about the size of a couple sticks of chewing gum…so not only does it fit in the pouch, you could actually fit more than one in there. So if you have a knife like the USAF ‘survival knife’ or a Randall with those pouches on the sheath, this thing should fit in it just fine.

So, what’s the final word? It seemed to do what was promised and it did something the Worksharp did not do, which is fit into the pouch on the sheath. I think, for me, the greatest use for this is for an in-the-field sharpener. Gut your elk, break a few joints, touch it up on the stone, cut some more, break it up some more, touch it up on the stone…that sort of thing. It also did a really nice job taking a nick out of the blade, which kinda surprised me

Durability? Can’t say. I did drop it once on my kitchen floor and it didnt break or shatte, but that’s strictly anecdotal. However, it’s small size and mass means that it probably would survive being dropped more than a larger, heavier stone would. .

I’d like to get a couple more of these for my other knives and kits. I can see where I might, when at the house, do my sharpening on something larger like a Lansky sharpener system or a series of Smith stones, but as a field sharpener this thing has some nice merit – it works, seems to not require much attention to angles, and fits in a tiny space – all big pluses when you don’t want to carry more weight than you have too.

 

 

Who’s scrying now

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I don’t remember exactly what the flavor of apocalypse it was, but I had another end of the world dream last night. My own fault…Kung Pao at midnight was pretty much an ‘E’ ticket to this sort of thing.

Then I wake up, read the news, see the media trumpeting an inevitable Biden victory and realize that perhaps it wasn’t so much a dream as it was foreshadowing.

No matter who wins, this election is going to be forever tainted and considered illegitimate by whichever side simply because of the preponderance of mail-in voting. Add in the usual political chicanery of missing ballots, found ballots, absentee ballots, and the classic Chicago-style dead voter ballots, and you get a recipe for an election result that one side is going to decry as obvious Third World style vote rigging.I am also forecasting that, no matter who wins, the stock market will drop like a roller coaster the first week of November. A Trump victory will bring enough chaos and ‘unrest’ that the market will get spooked and drop, and a Biden victory will bring enough fear of economic turmoil that the market will get spooked and drop. I also think that metals will drop alongside the market as people sell their metals to raise cash to either buy into the market at the bottom, to cover calls, or to just ‘get cash’. As all that metal hits the market, the price goes down.We saw this in March.

Right now, I’m trying to wrangle as much cash on hand as possible so that when the market (and PMs) crap the bed I can jump in and buy. If I’m wrong (and I am completely willing to accept that I might be) then all thats happened is I have a buncha cash laying around that I otherwise would have invested a month earlier.But, this is 2020…the year where fortune took off the gloves and started bare-knuckling it. Anything can happen. Fortunately, as a paranoid survivalist, I’ve kinda been preparing for anything.

As I tell my friends, the great thing about being a pessimist is that the worst thing that can happen is that things go just the way you planned for.

 

Article – U.S. gun sales soar amid pandemic, social unrest, election fears

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Oct 15 (Reuters) – Andreyah Garland, a 44-year-old single mother of three daughters, bought a shotgun in May for protection in the quaint middle-class town of Fishkill, New York. She joined a new and fast-growing local gun club to learn how to shoot.

She has since applied for a pistol permit and constantly hunts for increasingly scarce ammunition – making three trips weekly to a local Walmart. “They’re always out,” she said.

Like legions of other first-time buyers who are contributing to record sales for the U.S. gun industry this year, Garland’s decision to take up arms is driven in part by disturbing news about the coronavirus pandemic, social unrest over police killings of Black people and a potentially contested election that many fear could spark violence.

“With everything going on around us,” she said, “you see a need.”

Don’t kid yourself….the need has always been there.

When Y2K fizzled into a nothingburger there was speculation that yard sales that spring would be a treasure trove of NIB generators, storage food, etc. Personally, I never saw it (at least not until years later) but it seems likely.

I wonder if in a year or two we’ll see a surge of pumpguns and 9mm pistols on the market as people get rid of that thing they bought in 2020, never used, and ‘just want it out of the house’. Buying opportunities may be coming.

Personally, I’m at the stage where an unfortunate rifle squad that lost their gear in a boating accident could completely re-arm themselves from me.

Wheat in the chaff..or..still deals to be had

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Ok, so after being rather disappointed over a lovely PTRGI on ArmsList that was basically cheese in a trap, I went back to the well for another sip.

  • S&W M&P-15, new in box (And, indeed, the bolt face and inside of the receiver supports that)
  • Magpul BUIS
  • 360 rounds of assorted ammo..some steel, some brass, some match
  • (4) 30-rd Pmags and a cute 40-rd Pmag
  • and…..no paperwork. A free-range AR.

The punchline? $650. In the current market I’m factoring the ammo at $0.40/rd and the mags at $10. So $194 for the accessories That makes my allocated basis for the gun about $450~… but the no paperwork part? That has an intangible value. This ias pretty much the exact sort of deal a paranoid survivalist like myself wants – new guun, reasonable manufacturer, accessories, ammo, decent price, no paper trail. 10/10.

And, since TPIWWP….

Do not be lonely, little AR….your brethren are coming soon……very soon….