Re-reading some books

Posted on by

Ok, sure I’m prepared for the zombie apocalypse, and to a degree, everything else. But, my particular apocalypse is economic. It could be a general economic apocalypse like a new(er) depression or massive trade war, or it could be a very personal economic apocalypse like an extended bout of unemployment or a huge undelayable expense like a hernia surgery or something.

A while back I came across this book. That link will take you to my review of it. While the story may not have enough gunplay and cannibal armies for some peoples tastes, the character sketches were what sold me…the everything-will-be-all-right characters, the it-cant-happen-here-characters, and the we-adapt-or-we-die characters.

But for me, what I found most compelling was the descriptions of extended families forced to share one house, people crammed into every space, dinners of bread soaked in grease, homes being squatted in and owners forced out, take-by-force food fights, etc. All he scenarios that seem plausible in a societal collapse. As a result, it makes me wanna go double-check my food supplies and squirrel away more cash and metals. And guns.

Anyway, I picked up a used copy on Amazon for six bucks since I loaned out my other copy and never saw it again. I don’t mind not getting the books back if I loan them out. If it bothered me, I wouldnt have loaned them out in the first place. But to me its worth the cost of a ten dollar book to share it with someone I like if I think it will nudge them towards a more preparedness-oriented lifestyle.

Where would I go?

Posted on by

Nope, still here. Just busy this weekend. Remember when we had Lincoln’s Birthday and Washingtons’ Birthday as federal holidays? Then they combined them into this one holiday in order to free up a day for a federal holiday for Marty King day. But, when I was a kid, I remember getting two different holidays for the president’s birthdays.

Weather here went from a summer -like 38* to about 10. But, like some sort of displaced Donner Party member, I wandered up on to a hilltop hike on the edge of town where the wind, no lie, was coming down hard enough that I coulud jump straight up in the air and land about 8″ away from where I started. It was the kind of howling, relentless wind that you see those idiot hurricane reporters leaning against. But..If I want to test winter gear some time that was easily the place to do it.

Regular posting, such as it is, will resume towards Tuesday. In the meantime, fellow bunker-dwellers, keep doing what you’re doing.

Swine dining

Posted on by

I don’t mean to blow my own horn here (and, really, who amongst us is flexible enough for that anyway?) but sometimes I do like to brag…. thus:

So..I’m in Albertson’s and I do my usual patrol through the meat department. Sitting on the shelf are four pork whole tenderloins, marked down from $4.99/# to $2.99/#. Now, that’s all well and good, but Zero can do better. Those four (and keep in mind that number ‘four’) tenderloins are also marked down an additional 30%, knocking it’s per pound price down to about $2.09/#. Thats not bad for animal protein. But…Zero can do better.

Me: “Hey, you’ve got these pork tenderloins marked down 30%. If you mark them down to 50% I’ll take ’em.”
Him: “They’re already on sale at $2.99 from $4.99.”
Me: “I know, but Im the kinda guy who needs to feel like he’s really getting a deal, you know? Mark ’em down to 50% and I’ll take all of them.”
Him: “All of them?”
Me: “Sure. All of them.”

Here’s where the wheels flew off my grand plan. Remember that number four from earlier? Well, there were, in fact, four pork tenderloins sitting on the top shelf marked down to 30%. What I did not notice, were the other twenty packages sitting below it, also marked down to 30% off. And…I just committed myself to taking them all.

Uhm. Well.

The happy ending is that in the final analysis I wound up paying $1.50/#. The more interesting part is I wound up with almost 60# of pork tenderloin. The really interesting part is that I had one hell of a time re-arranging the stuff in my already overloaded freezer to accommodate it. I literally cannot fit any more food in my freezer. And, yes, I’m thinking about purchasing another freezer.

Can NOT be re-assembled to make a complete pig.

My normal procedure is to line a baking tray with foil, season one of these things with some sort of spice blend (Old Bay is actually rather nice), cook it up, slice it thin, and snack on it cold. But, lately I’ve noticed that glazing it with sweet chili sauce is actually pretty darn good.

Anyway, I think this counts as a pretty sweet score. I could literally stop buying meet for the next several months and be just fine. Oh, and mind you, there are two tenderloins in each of those packages. Yum.

I’m not driving in that

Posted on by

So it’s about -2 outside, which is bad enough but the wind is insane. And the roads are slicker than Mikhail Baryshnikov at a Wesson oil party. No real reason to risk limb and lira out there on the roads. BUT….I’m trying to clean my kitchen and while I have plenty of fuel for the flamethrower I am out of dish soap. So…do I risk losing momentum and halting my kitchen cleaning? Or do I go driving on the frigid skating rink and risk everything for a $6 bottle of Dawn? Well, neither…

One simply trots down to the basement, peruses the shelves, and finds a half dozen jugs of the stuff sitting patiently on the shelf.

In this particular case, about eight years ago I tucked this guy away in case I needed it. And that foresight is keeping me from skidding through intersections and into traffic this very evening.

The point? Well, we stockpile things against that uncertain future when the zombies rise or the economy crashes. But those same preps have a happy way of coming in handy at opportune moments. In this case, I can completely eliminate the risk of heading to CostCo on a freezing, icy, winter day.

Because this stuff is one of the things I stocked up on (mostly for economic reasons), I can wait until the weather is nicer before I have to go up there and replace it. Sure, stocking the usual guns & freeze-drieds is important, but stockpiling the incredibly mundane day-to-day stuff pays off too.

I have literally not left the house all weekend and I can be perfectly content, fed, warm, clothed, entertained, and secure without exposing myself to ‘The Vortex’. Prior planning pays off, people.

ETA: Since I’m cleaning my kitchen, and scrubbing the floors for the first time in…well…ever. I decided to resort to some…force multipliers. Check out this BAMF:

Man is a tool-using animal, baby. And this tool was AWESOME. My bathtub is so smooth and clean now that I might actually slip in the tub now. And this sucker did some major work on my kitchen floor. Recommend.

Seed starting for spring

Posted on by

So I picked up a buncha seeds from Victory Seed for this years plantings. Clearly, they have to be started indooors since its cold outside. Turns out they make little heating pads to sit your seed starters on. Well, thats all well and good but…I’m cheap.

So…

$3 at Goodwill gets me a pyrex baking tray and lid. Put my little peat pellets in there and insert the appropriate seeds. Add some water and cover. Now, what to do for a heat source…

Well, the DVR for the security cameras runs 24/7 and throws off heat. Lets set it on top of that.

And, sure enough, it works great. In my 65-degree house these little guys germinated and sprouted in about a week. The clear glass lets in light, and the lid holds in the heat and moisture. In effect…a heated greenhouse.

So there you have it…waste heat being repurposed. I suppose someone will ask why not put it on a heating vent or something like that. Obvious answer: the heat isnt running 24/7, the security cams are.

This worked out so well I have another one of these sitting on the cable/dvr box as well.

And, for the sake of completeness, here’s the ones I started from seed back in the first week of January:

Poor little guys can’t even go outside for another three or four months.

 

Adventures in food storage

Posted on by

Well, let’s pull some stored-for-a-while food off the shelf and see what happens:

An eight year old pound of spaghetti purchased from Costco. Storage conditions? Put into a plastic tub with a lid and sat on a wire shelf in my basement for the last eight years. Results?

Absolutely fine. Cooked up just as you would expect.

I’m not surprised. There are foods that you need to very deliberately and carefully package away for storage and there are some that are just….bulletproof. My experience has been that pasta, kept dry and vermin-free, keeps pretty much indefinitely. In this case, I just proved it’ll last at least eight years.

Another food that requires, basically, zero babying is rice. I kid you not, I had a 15-gallon blue barrel full of rice from my Y2k stash and ten years later it was just fine with the only attention in its packaging having been to pour it into the barrel and screw on the lid. I would bet you that rice poured into a clean jar with a tight fitting lid would last virtually forever.

Does that mean these are the optimal ways to store these particular items? Heck no. But what it does mean is that you can sock away pounds and pounds of a staple food that goes a long way towards helping to stretch out your other foods and do it without a lot of effort.

My experience, and your mileage may vary, is that in my climate and in my house I can take these plastic sealed packages of pasta, stuff ’em into a plastic tub with a tight fitting lid, tuck them away on a shelf in a cool dark place, and it stores just fine.

I suppose if you live in the south or some other equally humid environment its a different story, same if youre in an environment that is known for creepy crawly things, but where I live it’s practically a high-altitude desert.

The point, if there is one, is that some foods just lend themselves to longish storage periods without a lot of fancy prep and packaging.

Gear that never will self-actualize

Posted on by

We’ll start with a hat tip to Tam for this link: I Am a Stryker-X Assault Backpack, and This Airport Lounge Is an Insult

Y’know, I’ve a lovely Tactical Tailor 3-Day Assault Pack that I have been slinging around almost everyday for something like 13 or 15 years. Actually, lemme blog it up…ah..3/19/2004 is when my TT bag reported for duty. So..about 14 years.

Anyway….

I have never assaulted anything (except good taste), if I did I would hope it wouldnt take three days, and if it was going to take three days I’d imagine I’d need more gear than what fits in a 3-Day Assault Pack. But the simple fact is that while I hope I never have to live the zombie-apocalypse lifestyle, gear that is designed to do so will more than adequately meet my day-to-day needs and be able to handle that sudden, unexpected hiccup in societal cohesion.

In short, if it’s good enough to climb the mountains in Afghanistan its good enough to sling over my shoulder while wandering downtown Montana.

Same for military surplus stuff. Someone spent a zillion dollars to develop product X, they built enough of them to get the per-piece price down to almost nothing, and then they tested the design to be durable enough to win a war. Why wouldn’t I take advantage of that?

Broadly speaking, there are only two drawbacks to overkill when it comes to gear: weight and price. Crap thats built to survive Ragnarok is not going to be cheap. And it ain’t gonna be light. But what it will do is give you exponentially better chances of keeping your act together when that 0.1% chance of disaster hits. Plus, that stuff literally lasts a lifetime. Buy once, cry once, and rock on.

I’ve paid some stupid money for gear in the past and….every single piece of expensive gear I paid a lot of money for is still with me today, functioning 100%, and has never let me down.

So just because you’re not planning to jump out of a helicopter and into a sangar in Sangar doesn’t mean you don’t want the high-speed,low-drag, high-price,low-discount gear. Life is short, it’s shorter with low-quality critical gear.

Winter weather

Posted on by

Well it is genuinely nasty out there today. Yesterday was rain and some snow melt…and then around three this morning it was followed up with the bottom dropping out of the thermometer and the heaviest gusting winds I’ve seen in a long time. So, what you have here is ice everywhere and a tremendous amount of wind. I’m going to go ahead and get the generator staged because I’d say it’s 50/50 that there’s going to be an interruption of service.

However, last night I did some grocery shopping so I have no need to leave the house. My plan is to sit here and listen to the wind rattle the windows and watch the carnage on the news.

I’ve food, heat, water, internet, and strong sense of self-interest… so, yeah, not a problem.Should make for some interesting listening on the police radio today.

 

…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 3 AM SUNDAY TO
2 PM MST MONDAY…

* WHAT…Mixed precipitation followed by heavy snow and blowing
snow expected. Ice accumulations of a light glaze Sunday morning
with the arrival of the arctic. Total snow accumulations of 4 to
6 inches in the Missoula Valley, and 5 to 8 inches in the
Bitterroot Valley. Winds could gust as high as 40 mph in the
Missoula Valley.

* WHERE…Missoula/Bitterroot Valleys.

* WHEN…From 3 AM Sunday to 2 PM MST Monday.

* ADDITIONAL DETAILS…Travel could be very difficult. Areas of
blowing snow could significantly reduce visibility. The cold
wind chills as low as 15 below zero could result in hypothermia
if precautions are not taken.

Battery inspection and generator run

Posted on by

Well, its the first of the month. Two things I gotta do today – battery checks and generator run. I decided that every month Im going to check he batteries in the devices that I leave batteries in. Ideally, this will be frequent enough that if a battery does crap the bed it won’t have time to really do the horrible corrosive damage that usually occurs. We shall see.

Generator run is just a good idea. Haul it out every other month or so, run it for a half hour under various loads, clean it up and put it back in storage. Simple.

Yeah, sometimes its a pain in the ass but its one of those things where a lousy thirty minutes of minimal effort will save you a metric buttload of headache further down the road.

So, I’ve got about a dozen devices on my checklist for inspection, and then a half hour on the generator. Nothing sexy about it, but this sort of thing is what you do when youre a survivalist.