On my way to 12-step

Posted on by

“There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.” – Rilke

Ok, here’s the thing….. I’d wanted a ‘tactical’ 10/22 takedown for a while. This one isn’t exactly what I had in mind but…Magpul takedown stock, Nikon .22 scope with BDC, Tactical Solutions threaded barrel…and all for less than the dealer cost of the other one.

Sexy bast, innit?

My impulse control on guns is so low these days. A psychologist would probably say I’m either punishing myself for something or I’m trying to fill some sort of aching void in my life. Regardless, there had darn well better be a zombie apocalypse at some point so I can justify this nonsense.

To do

Posted on by

Havent had a zombie dream in a while….

Dreamt I was in, what I am guessing, was NYC. I was running around with someone else, no idea who, and we had nothing but a backpack full of bandoleer’d .223 ammo, a couple M4’s and a couple tricked out Glocks. I t went well until my partner had their carbine fail and had to switch to their pistol. After that we had to work our way through the city streets as panicked resident tried to evacuate along the elevated subway lines. Ah, good times…good times.

Interestingly, I haven’t watched either of the Walking Dead shows in about a year. Just too busy. I’ve got them recorded on the DVR, but I never seem to get around to it. Same for new fiction…there are a couple books I want to read but it seems like there is always something more productive to be doing. I suppose that’s what being a grown up is.

One thing I do make time for, though, is keeping an eye on personal stockpiles of gear and resources. In fact, I’m heading up to CostCo in a little while to top off a few things and price a few others. At the moment, I feel okay with most of what I have, but I really want to get the freezer back up to %110 of capacity. I used a buncha stuff outta there over the last few months to take some pressure off my budget between gigs, and now is the time to get it back up to that comfortable margin of safety.

Plus, winter approaches and it’d be nice to get some soup and whatnot in the freezer for those cold winter days when I don’t feel like cooking but want something nice. Literally, the easiest is to make the soup, put it into a a vacuum bag, let it freeze solid, seal the bag in the vacuum sealer. Then all I have to do is pull the pouch outta the freezer, throw it in a pot of boiling water (thus not having to deal with waiting for it to thaw), and heat it up that way. No mess other than the spoon and bowl I use to consume it. And, of course, it keeps forever.

At some point I need to review how my preparedness goals for 2019 turned out and start thinking what they will be for 2020. Perhaps I’ll create a separate section on here to keep track of that sort of thing. THe public shame of not achieving those goals might be the motivation I need. We should make it a project…you get your goals together, I’ll get mine together, and we’ll post them around December and see how we do on getting ’em done.

Moar Ruger

Posted on by

This time, though, not another 9mm.

Something a little different from the run-of-the-mill cataloged pistol…if you know what to look for.

ETA: It’s a Ruger #5058… a .44 Mag Redhawk but with special grips and a full-length barrel underlug that is unique to this model. Basically, its a scaled-up GP-100 in .44 mag. Special run for Lipsey’s Distributing. I beame aware of them a few months back and found that they were doled out to Lipseys in dribbles and drabs…I found this used one online. It’s been a while since I had a .44 mag wheelgun and I wanted the Ruger for it’s end-of-the-world durability but really disliked the aesthetics of the usual Redhawks. This guy, however, appealed to me. I need to swap the fiber optic sight for something more durable, but otherwise the only other thing that might happen to this is a trip to Bowen for a little tweaking here and there. Finding a holster might be a trick since no other 4″ Redhawk has the full underlug but I suspect a 4″ Anaconda holster will fit fine.

Link – Prehistoric Preppers: A Look Back at Pre-Y2K Survival Gear and Conventional Wisdom

Posted on by

Last month I mentioned that this year is the twenty-year anniversary of the Great Y2K Scare. I happen to be bopping around the interwebs and came across this dated-but-still-interesting piece about how things have changed preparedness-wise since then.

As a child in the 1980s who came of age in the 1990s. I lived through an odd era of the gun culture. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, a lot of survivalists and those preparing for WWIII suddenly had less to worry about…until President Clinton was elected and the threat that Y2K posed became a thing.

Thinking back on such a time, I now laugh at a lot of the ideas and beliefs that ran rampant in certain segments of the population. But exist they did.

I like how “…will get you killed.” is the punchline to every disagreed upon evaluation of a piece of gear…”that [AK/Baofong/Sleeping bag/knife/gas can] will get you killed”. That’s pretty much darn near becoming a trope.

The bit about the lack of AR ubiquity has a bit of truth to it. Back then it was pretty much an AR or AK world with the occasional Mini-14 or HK thrown in just to keep the diversity thing going. But if you had an AR it wasn’t nearly the exercise in ballistic Lego that it is now. Maybe you changed the sling around and found a carry-handle-mounted scope. Other than that, it was a stock A2 or CAR. So, yeah, that changed.

I wonder sometimes whatever happened to those people I saw on the news with the desert scrubland retreats that they bought and cavernous basements of 5-gallon buckets. Did they follow through and keep the lifestyle? Or did they pack it all up, ship it to Goodwill, and move on to a different cause célèbre?

I will say, my thinking has shifted a tiny bit since then. While it’s strongly about being prepared, there is a larger note of resiliency. I’ve come to realize, maybe a bit late, that the small End Of The Worlds will happen far more frequently and often than the big End Of The Worlds. Those small EOTW’s look like job layoffs, house fires, illnesses, car problems, etc, etc. And while five-gallon buckets of wheat will come in handy in Mad Max-ville, they aren’t going to do much to get a transmission repaired next week. So…smart spending, smart saving, smart lifestyle….and underneath all of that, the constant and steady incremental activity of getting things more prepared, more resilient, and more resistant to ‘problems’.

Anyway, its an interesting little article and, for those of us old enough to remember, a fun little poke at an interesting time in our shared collective survivalist past.

Costco Powdered Eggs review

Posted on by

I’ve never heard of anyone in the military who had to eat powdered eggs and had anything positive to say about them. Perhaps the military gets a lower grade of product…or perhaps military food preparation is abysmal.. or all of the above. My experience with powdered eggs has been okay. Theyre not “Ohmigod these are awesome!” but they aren’t “What the hell is this crap?” either. On a few occasions I have fed them to people without telling them what they were and no one said anything. I find them to be acceptable, and certainly a better alternative to no eggs. Anyway….All powdered eggs seem to be extremely distasteful before cooking. You get this orange-colored thing that looks like pancake batter and smells like burnt cheese from a toaster oven. It isnt until you start cooking them that some sort of transformative process begins and they become more appealing. These eggs, branded as “WildRoots” and picked up at CostCo, were exactly like every other powdered egg product I’ve tried. Not bad, not great, but definitely a worthy addition to the food storage. As mentioned a couple posts back, my local CostCo had them on closeout, marked down from $6.97 to $2.97 which is a stupidly good deal.

For those of us who, at the moment, don’t have a backyard full of chickens but want to maintain a semblance of ‘normalcy’ when it comes to breakfast, and have some protein on hand, these would be an excellent choice. Canned bacon, dehydrated eggs, hash browns, biscuit/muffin mix, powdered milk, Tang, canned fruit, pancake mix, honey, and you’ve got a pretty decent breakfast with a shelf life of several years. After a long night of manning the barricades, chasing looters, and guarding the house, a breakfast like that would be rather welcome, I should imagine. In a slightly more realistic vein, these are an excellent choice for hunting cabins and other non-grid locations where store-bought eggs aren’t an option and you’re not around often enough to keep chickens.

They are packaged in a foil-ish paper pouch but I would vacuum seal this stuff up to be extra sure it is protected for long term. If you can’t find these at your local CostCo, here’s the nutritional and company info:

Don’t get annoyed if you can’t find them at your local CostCo. It seems that powdered eggs are powdered eggs are powdered eggs… there doesn’t seem to be much difference between ones I’ve tried. Augason Farms sells #10 cans of powdered eggs and I’d bet they are identical to this stuff. Only major difference is packaging and CostCo’s remarkable discount.

At $2.97, it’s worth buying a box just for the experimental value.

 

Costco eggs closeout

Posted on by

Remember a few weeks back I discovered that Costco was selling powdered eggs? Well, I was going through Costco and saw this:

The price ending in “7” instead of “9”, as well as the asterisk in the corner of the placard, indicate that this product is being moved out with no plan to restock it. So, if you’re close to the Missoula Costco and want a smoking deal on some powdered eggs…this is your chance. Hell, I have cases of #10 cans of eggs and I still picked up three packages. For three bucks you’dbe crazy not to. How are they….thats a post that’ll be ip in a couple days.

 

No business like snow business like snow business I know

Posted on by

You know, it was just as I predicted. Here in the valley we got snow that barely stuck to the ground (or as the more uneducated would say, ‘didnt hardly stick’). Basically, it was exactly as I anticipated. “But Helena got nine feet of snow! But Billings got seven feet of snow!…”, etc, etc. May be, but you know what? I don’t live in Billings or Helena, so I’m really pretty unconcerned about that. I said that where I live it was going to barely register as snow and thats pretty much how it played out. I call this one in my favor.

But thats this time. Next time…who knows? Which is why we try to maintain a particular level of readiness for these things.

Winter approaches

Posted on by

If you live in the ‘Redoubt’ region you are undoubtedly aware that this weekend is supposed to be some sort of early-season snowpocalypse. Honestly, with all the hand-wringing going on you’d think we’d never seen snow before. But, I suppose the news media need something to get all worked up about.

True enough, though….it IS fall. Time to say goodby to summer and get the winter gear out. I had a pretty good experience getting the Watergun coated a few months back and I think I’m going to get that Danish winter camo pattern applied to one of my PTR’s and one of my AR’s as well. As I used to tella buddy of mine, “The revolution is not going to happen on a sunny day.”

Im kinda hoping we do get a huge amount of snow because I’ve got a couple sets of snowshoes I really haven’t had a chance to play with very much. I’d like to give them a bit of a workout.

Also, this is the time where hunting season is nigh. I find it highly doubtful I’ll have time to go this season but I like to think the possibility is there. Stranger things have happened.

In the meantime, I need to fire up he snowblower this weekend to make sure it’s ready for winter. Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while, so I suppose its possible the hopeless clowns at the weather bureau might have been right and we get a major dump of snow this weekend. We shall see. I’d be utterly flabbergasted if it dumped anything even close to what they are forecasting. If there’s more than an inch of snow I’ll be quite surprised.

The ultimate survivor, it seems

Posted on by

I suppose it is sort of fitting that “The Survivalist” series of books has managed to …uhm..survive…after the death of it’s author. I may be a little late to the party on this, but it appears that despite Jerry Ahern dying a few years back his famous pulp series is continuing on…

I am a bit perturbed by this. Ahern’s original series, which is a guilty pleasure, required a certain suspension of disbelief if you wanted to make it through his books. But, despite the outrageous over-the-top invincibility and deus-ex-machina luck of the main character, there was still a bit of a foundation in reality…at least, up until a dozen books in where it became more sci-fi than just -fi. But even that still had a bit of a tenuous basis in reality. This book tells us “Corrupt politicians, Neo-Nazis, Aliens, the returned Atlanteans or those thought to be dead for centuries; who is about to finally bring down the human race?” Aliens? Atlantis? Ah, poor Jerry….they should have thrown the copyrights in the casket with you and let the series die a somewhat dignified death.

This somewhat parallels the old “Guardians” pulp series which met a similar fate – the original author moved on and strings of ghost writers came in and all consistency went out the window as, again, somewhat-based-in-reality gave in to shark-jumping nonsense.

Hands down winner, though, for most dissatisfying way to end a series goes to “J. Johnstone” of the infamous “ashes” series. A series of pulp novels so formulaic I literally believe they used the exact same text from the previous books and simply changed supporting character names and locations. The final chapter to this series was so dissatisfying and limp that it effectively alienated the few fans the series had left.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is a genre that used to be pretty fringe. It’s become far, far more mainstream as the whole ‘zombie’ thing has become a cultural touchstone for such fiction. Early fiction did exist, of course, but they were standalone books…not series. As best i can tell, Ahern’s series was the first modern post-apocalyptic serial. It’s heartening that there is still an audience for it, but it’s a little sad to see it become what it appears to have become. It’s like an old Hollywood starlet, far past her prime, slathering on makeup and old costumes to try and recapture the magic from her heydaynd instead being a pathetic and pitiful caricature of her past.

As much as I liked Ahern’s series, I think I’m going to give the post-mortem installments a pass.