Tag Archives: logistics

Article -In Remote Alaska, Meal Planning Is Everything

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That first summer in the Arctic, Adam, who had already spent several summer seasons in Bettles, arrived a few weeks before me and told me that I had to go to the grocery store in Fairbanks and buy as much food as possible. What he really meant was, buy as much food as you can push in a grocery cart back to your hotel, repackage it into boxes, then get it all into a taxi to the small Alaska Bush plane office, and pay for it as freight on the flight.

What Adam hadnā€™t shared ā€” but what quickly would become second nature to me ā€” is that in the tiny town, we would develop our own rituals around eating. Yes, things like fresh strawberries would be hard to come by, but together weā€™d craft innovative solutions to tasks more easily accomplished in less remote places. Weā€™d communally grow vegetables with our neighbors. Weā€™d order food from thousands of miles away, weeks ahead of time. And we would hardly ever be eating alone.

An interesting read on what you have to deal with when the nearest Trader Joe’s, HEB, or Safeway is hundreds (or thousands) of miles away.

Have you actually done menu planning for The End Of The World? I mean, I know you’ve got all sorts of stored food, but have you actually thought about what a particular meal, say breakfast, would look like? I have. For me, breakfast looks like the following:

  • Oatmeal, Cream of What, Cornmeal porridge
  • Scrambled eggs
  • Hash browns
  • Corned beef hash
  • Pork chops
  • Orange drink
  • Biscuits
  • Strawberries, blueberries, bananas
  • Instant milk

Thats actually a better breakfast than what I eat now. See, it isn’t enough to just throw back an assortment of storage food. You have to give some thought to what sort of menus youre going to be looking at. How many different breakfasts can you do? Lunches? Sinners? Snacks?

For some ideas, I have always recommended this website and it’s very impressive list of ‘storage food recipes’: http://safelygatheredin2.blogspot.com/2008/11/alphabetical-recipe-list.html

But the important thing to take away from the article listed above is that you have to plan out what your meals will be if you have any hope of efficiently and economically getting your food storage squared away. Go plan a weeks worth of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. How many ingredients ‘cross over’ to other meals? Figure it out, get the most variety and utility from the least amount of items. Its a good exercise.

Rotating and reminiscing

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One of the cool things about being a survivalist (or, at least, a moderately prepared survivalist) is that your stockpiles become snapshots of the economy in different periods of time. For example, today I rotated out some canned tomatoes. Tomatoes,Ā  because of their high acidity, need to be rotated fairly frequently….a couple years is about all I’m willing to trust in a metal can (even lined ones). In glass jars is a different story, but for cans….a couple years, tops.

So, I headed up to WinCo, cornered the grocery manager, and asked him to order me up a few cases of my preferred tomatoes. As I was swapping them out with the previously stored ones, I could not help but notice:

As you can see from the image, these were purchased at CostCo in 2020. $5.99 for eight cans. Thats $6 divided by eight. That comes out to seventy-five cents per can. Todays cost at WinCo? 66% more per can. Must be that Putinflation that Dopey Joe keeps deflecting to.

Get used to it.

And, while I was at Winco, I checked for remaindered meat. WinCo doesn’t discount as much as Albertson’s used to, but they will discount by 30% when meats are approaching their ‘use by’ date. Me, I’m a big fan of animal protein, so I cleaned ’em out on small breakfast-type steaks. These’ll get vacuum sealed and put away in the deep freeze for use in the coming economic disaster….which means I’ll probably be eating them next month.

Canning deal

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A little inventory, math, and inventory math told me that while I’m pretty well positioned on canning lids, it might be a good idea to lay in a few more jars. A couple dozen cases of 12, at least. So, since Saturday is my somewhat-usual shopping day I decided to hit a few places around town and find the cheapest price on cases of pint jars. I stopped after my second attempt:

Uhm…okay. I’ll take them all. So that works out to about $0.83 for one new pint jar, ring, and lid. I’m good with that.

I like the pint jars for their single-serving proportions. I do keep quarts around, of course, but the majority of the jars I have are pints.

I’m sure there are other brands out there but the stakes are too high for me to tkae my chances on Johnny-come-lately brands or, worse, made in China stuff. Ball and Kerr, in that order. Nothing else.

So I managed to put a pretty good chunk of my jar needs into the green. Thats good. I need to get down in the basement and do a thorough inventory of jars, lids, and bands. They are something I usually don’t track because a simple look at the shelves tells me there’s “a lot” of them, but I suppose I should be more precise.

Anyway, it seemed like a good deal and that it might not be a bad idea to take advantage of it. So..I did.

Lego guns

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Someone asked me in email about gunsmithing/armorer courses. I thought about it a minute and realized that, for me, while I know enough to (usually) get a gun apart, back together, and diagnose problems, I try to avoid the issue altogether by selecting guns that don’t usually require ‘gunsmithing’.

If the end of the world happens to occur, the odds are pretty good that taking your malfunctioning thundertoy to the services of a competent gunsmith will not be an option. So, whats a survivalist to do? Well, the most obvious thing is – don’t break your gun. Some guns are more prone to breakage than others. But since we can’t always be confident our gun won’t break, the next reasonable step is to have a gun that, if it does break, does not require gunsmithing but rather a simple parts swap. For that, two guns spring to mind – the typical survivalist pairing of a Glock and an AR. (Yes, an AK wins on durability, but when it does break youre going to need a welder, rivets, a mill, or other specialized treatments.)

Starting with the AR, it’s hard to think of any other semiautomatic non-pistol-caliber carbine that doesn’t require the services of a full-service gunsmith to tweak, maintain, or repair (note I am not talking about making a match-grade target AR..I’m talking about just a rack-grade hand-it-to-a-grunt level of AR.). FAL, G3, AK, whatever…most of the common ‘battle rifles/carbines’ require some degree of professional skill to swap a barrel, or fit internal parts that need replacing. The AR is pretty much plug-n-play. I suppose the metric to be used is ‘can I repair this without needing a lathe or a milling machine’? Bad barrel on the AR? Swap the upper or change out the barrel. Broken sear or somesuch? Trigger group parts drop in. There seems to be, in my experience, very little, if anything, that requires hand-fitting or machining to be done to keep, or return, an AR to functionality.

Even more so with the Glock. If you’re building some type of uber Glock for competition, maybe theres things you want to polish or hand-fit. But for running around during a crisis I don’t believe theres a single part on the Glock that wont just drop in and function. To be fair, virtually every modern polymer gun is like that, though. Glock seems to have gotten it right first, though. The antithesis of this would be the 1911 which, with modern machining specs, has improved in terms of drop-in parts but I would bet you money that you could take a stripped frame, order a buttload of Wilson parts from Brownells, put it all together, and it won’t run because something, somewhere needs a bit of stoning or metalwork. Not so with the Glock.

Typical Glock repair kit

Typical 1911 repair kit

So, for me, my need for learning advanced gunsmithing skills is obviated a bit by selecting guns that, broadly, don’t require them…or require so little of them, skillwise, that it isn’t a challenge (or expense) to develop those skills and acquire the tools.

Shotguns? A bit trickier, but I have taken apart a lot of Mossberg 500-series and they’re pretty plug-n-play as well. Not as much as an AR, but Id say they are the least ‘skill intensive’ shotgun in terms of repairs.

When you get into things like hunting/’sniper’ rifles, all bets are off. The Savage series of rifles are probably the easiest to deal with since you can headspace and remove/install barrels with simple tools and not need a mill/lathe operation.

By the by, even if youre not a tinfoil-hat-type like yours truly, there are still some scenarios where you won’t have gunsmithing as an option even without bombs falling and boogaloos in the street.

Under a Biden administration, for example, your AR or FAL becomes a ‘Turn them all in‘ sort of item and then your option of taking it to a gunsmith is about as viable as taking your unregistered machinegun in for a tune up. You’re either stuck with a broken gun, have to find an ‘underground’ gunsmith, or DIY. And DIY is a lot easier with a Lego gun.

Whatever you get for that upcoming uncertain future, keep in mind how easy (or not) it will be to repair and maintain. For now, I’d say the Glock and AR kinda sit at the top.

The utility of vacuum sealers

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Fella I know, who is getting started in the realm of preparedness had his birthday earlier this month.Ā  I got him what I think is one of the best gifts you can get a fellow survivalist: a vacuum sealer. For the record,Ā the best gift you can probably get for a survivalist is a huge chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. For this survivalist, the best gift you can get is a slightly drunk and mildly self-esteem-challenged Jennifer Lawrence. Or, if you’re on a budget, her body double.

Thing is, most people have a very narrow view of what a vacuum sealer is good for. In fact, the gift was met with a ‘my freezer is already full’ response. A lot of folks, in my experience, don’t think creatively about the uses for one of these things that have nothing to do with food. So, lemme mention a few of the non-food things I do with mine and maybe it’ll send you down a new road of thought in regard to using yours. (Or getting one.)

  • Ā Compressing high-loft items of clothing so they take up less space in a pack
  • Preventing powdered items from clumping – The cleanser that comes in the cardboard cans? I put each can into a bag and vaccuum seal it so that after years of sitting on the shelf it hasn’t drawn moisture and caked into a rock-like consistency.
  • Water bottles that get left in the vehicle in the winter are vacuum sealed in a bag so if the plastic bottle does explode from freezing (which almost never happens) any leakage is contained. And the water is still potable.
  • All the fire-starting materials in my hunting/bushwhacking packs are vacuum sealed to keep them dry, clean, and in one place.
  • Small first aid items get vacuum sealed for rather obvious reasons.
  • Critical documents are vacuum sealed so they are protected from moisture, wet, etc. For example, my birth certificate(s) and passport(s) are sealed up and sitting in the safe. (Uhm..yeah…plural….I know a guy…)
  • In the Pelican case I keep in the winter vehicle kit there is an an entire change of clothes that has been vacuum sealed to consere space and keep the clothing clean and dry so that in an emergency it’s ready to use.
  • Bulk first aid gear that would normally take up space gets vacuum sealed to allow me to pack more of it in a smaller space, as well as to protect it.
  • Have a dog? Dog food MRE’s. Phydeaux’s kibble and treats packed into individual servings.
  • Toilet paper that you keep in the truck or at the cabin. If you’re putting together a bugout bin or kit you really, really wanna make sure the TP is protected.
  • Medications in tablet form. Most pills come in plastic bottles that offer good protection, but a lot of stuff comes in blister packs and although you’d think those foil and plastic sheets would offer good protection…not always. So, into the sealer they go. Try to keep stuff in original packaging when you do this…last thin you want is a little vacuum sealed bag of unidentified pills laying around with nothing to tell you what they are or how much to take. And the cops really get curious when large quantities of pills are loose in a plastic bag.
  • Bars of soap. Bar soap seems to ossify over time. Seal ’em up so theyre still useful years later.
  • Road flares. Seal ’em up, wrap in cardboard to protect the integrity of the plastic bag, and tuck ’em away in your vehicle. Wet flares are the literal damp squib at a rescue.
  • Small electronics that absolutely need to be protected. Handheld radios get vacuum sealed with dessicant and then tucked away in a protective case of some kind. Suspenders and a belt, perhaps… but its an extra step that costs virtually nothing and makes sure that you have communications when you really, really need it. And thats worth pretty much anything.
  • Batteries. Water and batteries do not mix..at least, not in a good way. I store batteries in plastic tubs but I also vacuum seal the large CostCo-sized bulk packs of batteries.

The list goes on, but I think you get the idea. And, yeah, they are also handy for food as well. If you haven’t bought one already, do yourself a favor and don’t cheap out. Yeah, there are some models that are $50-$75. Skip them. This is not the kind of item you want to cut corners on. Get the Foodsaver brand, not the Cabelas, not the Walmart, not the other brand you’ve never heard of. Get the Foodsaver branded rolls of material as well. Plan on spending about $200. I absolutely promise you that it will be the best $200 you can spend on preparedness gear. Do it.

 

Shelf Reliance

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Food rotation is one of those important things to keep in mind when storing food. Sure, a 15-gallon drum of rice will last virtually forever (if my Y2k stash is anything to go by), but it’s probably a good idea to rotate through whatever you store every few years.

When it comes to canned goods, there are zillions of can ‘rotation shelves’, ‘organizer shelves’, and other can distributors. I had a can organizer that I bought years ago when they were up at CostCo. It has served well for a number of years but, as of late, I’ve kinda ramped up the inventory of canned goods. This means I need to haveĀ  more cans positioned so that the oldest ones get used up first. So, it was time to expand on the modular can organizer.

First step, clear off a run of shelving:

Next step is to unbox these guys:

Grab a couple cans off the shelf to make sure the spacing is correct, and start assembling. The whole thing snaps together like Lego so…no muss, no fuss.

Finish assembly, slide into shelf, and start adding cans…oldest go in first:

I then ran a second row across the shelf next to it, but since it’s pretty much identical to this one there’s no point in documenting that.

Now, yeah, you can buy some cheaper units. And, if your even halfway talented with a saw and a hammer you can fab up something on your own. However, what I was after was modularity.This unit can be configured for variable width to accommodate different size cans, they can be linked together to form one long continuous run, and, very conveniently, they seamlessly integrated with the existing unit I had which was about 15 years old. So…very backwards compatible, which is nice.

You can order of Amazon if you’re so inclined.

Given how much I’m spending these days on beefing(!) up the food storage, the last thing I need is to waste money on cans of food getting shoved into a dark corner, being discovered years later, and having to be discarded because they should have been used up years earlier.

How’s your short- to mid-term food storage coming along? I’m feeling pretty good with what I have so far. I need to fine tune a few ‘luxury’ items I want but….starve to death? Not a chance. However, for practicality’s sake, it would be nice to take about half of this and move it to the Beta Site.

Incremental progress

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A few weeks back, I got a tad more religion in terms of keeping an up-to-date list of what I have and, more importantly, what I needed. It’s settled into a routine now where, every weekend, I print out my most up-to-date version of the Preponomicon and head off to Costco or Wallyworld. I tell myself “I’m not gonna spend more than $XX today” and I try to stick to that. Thus far…meh…I do a fair amount of sticking to the amount I promised myself I’d spend, but, more importantly, I am always better provisioned after each trip.

Food was, of course, the biggest priority. Can’t repel the zombie hordes if youre weak from hunger, right? And while the food isn’t at 100%, it is mostly all in the green levels so I am comfortable moving a little bit into the other categories. Most notable, cleaning and hygiene.

Don’t let The Walking Dead fool you… wear the same sweat-stained shirt for days on end in the summer, while getting coated in dirt, grime, and bodily fluids, and take a hot shower once a week with laundry done even less frequently…. and you’re headed for major problems. Eat from filthy stained tableware, plates, or cookware and you’re gonna have a bad day. Add the threat of pandemic into the mix and now you relly have a reason to try and keep yourself and your environment reasonably clean. You don’t have to be fastidiously OCD clean, but try to keep yourself and your living conditions as clean as if you had a hot date coming over tonight.

So, what’s sitting on the wire shelving in large quantity? Pine Sol, Simple Green, Lysol, Clorox (which needs to be rotated every so often), sponges, bleach wipes, paper towels, brillo, laundry soap, dish soap, disinfectant, shower soap, shampoo, floss, toothpaste, toothbrushes (shouldn’t that really be teethbrushes?), mouthwash, TP, Q-tips, Kleenex, deodorant, lip balm, and a buncha other goodies. After a long day of hanging looters, quelling riots, and rescuing morally-challenged coeds from Aryan blood gangs wouldn’t you want to look and smell nice for the celebratory barbecue later that evening? Truth is, though, decent hygiene and sanitation prevents a whole lot of badness that you would prefer to avoid during a crisis. And it’s a lot easier to stay somewhat clean when you have the necessary resources. Plus, hey, in times of economic uncertainty when your paycheck is unexpectedly cutoff it’s kinda nice to know you don’t have to spend money on any of those things for over a year.

Just one more thing to ‘get into the green’ levels on the list. But, gotta admit, when i run out of something in my day-to-day usage it’s darn convenient to just trot downstairs and pull some extra off the shelf and get back to business.

Housecleaning

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I often joke than when I die, the garage sale will truly be epic. Might also be historical too since some stuff has been in storage for over 2o years. Since I have some time on my hands these days, I’m cleaning up a few things and laying eyes on things I have not seen in a very, very long time.

Freeze drieds from pre-Y2k, old flashlights, rain ponchos, MRE entrees, etc. There’s quite a bit of stuff. And, surprisingly, some did not hold up as well as I would have expected. Case in point – sometime in the wee hours of the new millennia CostCo had a close out on Baygen windup flashlights. They were, as I recall, $20. I think I bought about six or eight. I pulled one out of the box and kept it handy in the bunker for when the power goes out and I need something to find my other gear with. Out of curiosity, I pulled the others out of their boxes and tried them out. None of them worked. Not a one. Perhaps almost 20 years of inactivity deteriorated the internal capacitors or something. But…not a single one worked. Instead, they’ve been taking up space for the last two decades. Obviously, this was before I had adopted the protocol of ‘function test everything before you put it away for the Deep Sleep’. Lesson learned. Interestingly, the one that I took out of the box and use from time to time still works. So, wither that was the one winner in the bunch or the inactivity of the others proved to be detrimental. Regardless, the lesson is the same: test before rest.

Everything else seems to have held up fine. Ammo still works, flashlights work when you put new batteries in them, etc, etc. But its interesting to see how the technology has changed….krypton bulbs replaced by LED, electronics being smaller and more full-featured, that sort of thing.

Its some of that older, more dated stuff that should probably be upgraded. My older MagLites, for example, should be swapped out for LED. Older MRE entrees swapped out for newer. ALICE gear upgraded to MOLLE, etc.

Also, according to the last inspection dates I noted on the boxes, it’s past time to inspect the #10 cans in storage for damage. I’m 99.9% confident everything is fine, but why take chances? Plus, during the course of things I may find other issues that I hadn’t thought about.

So…off to the basement to deep-deg through layers of time like some sort of prepper archaeologist. It’s like a cross between Indiana Jones and Burt Gummer.

Momentum

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Funny..it seems like it was just two or three weeks ago my focus was rather intense about getting topped off on various foodstuffs and other items. And now…the sense of urgency seems…diminished…I suppose. That is, of course, the classic survivalist trap – you get fired up over something and pursue it with great intensity and then that intensity wanes. And then, something big happens, and you’re caught flat-footed.

Solution? Well, for me, it’s reminding myself that we aren’t out of the woods by a long shot. Oh sure, virus-wise its a maybe-maybe-not thing, but my concern is more economic. The repercussions aren’t going away anytime soon and I need to be in a position to not only survive it but be able to take advantage of the situation as the less-foresighted suddenly have to choose between their pre-ban Bennelli M3 Super 90 or making the mortgage that month.

Did you know that, as a group, the Mormons came out of the Great Depression better than when they went in? Because of their conservative nature and dogma they weren’t as impacted as most other groups. As a result, they were in a position to take advantage of opportunities that arose.

From an economic standpoint, the impact the virus (and it’s ‘control measures’) inflict on the economy are pretty big. I don’t see a lot of new hirings for the rest of the year, I can see a lot of places shuttering up from not being able to withstand the revenue loss of a couple months, surviving businesses might have to cut back hours/employees, and the smarter folks will cut discretionary spending to the bone to make sure hey have enough cash ‘just in case’. In short, the worst person to be right now is a Starbucks barista with $50k in student loans, a car loan, credit card debt, and a month-to-month lease with roommates. (Actually, thats a pretty crappy position to being pretty much anytime.)

Other things I find interesting are how the media beatas a slightly different drum every few days. Drug shortages one day, restricted airline travel the next, and the current crsis du jour is….meat shortage. Here’s how strong an influence that media can be – I saw no less than three articles on various news wires predicting a beef shortage. My natural inclination was to think “Ok, time to head up to CostCo and buy a case of beef” and then I realized, waitasec, I don’t really eat beef. (True fact: other than cheeseburgers, I don’t eat very much beef. Rarely do I eat a steak. My go-to animal protein is chicken and Italian sausage.) But the media hype had gotten to me to the point that I was almost ready to go stock up on something I don’t even really eat. Insidious the way these media panic stories mess with your head.

On the other hand, as I said, there’s also the problem of them not messing with your head and you becoming complacent or losing your momentum/initiative. Thats what I have to be on guard against right now. The ship is sinking, and it’s a slow leak, but the fact it is happening slowly does not change the fact that it is happening.The Current Situation seems to move slowly and invisibly but it is moving….and not for the better (economically). So, stay focused, keep your eye on the big picture, and stick to the plan.

Scenes from Costco

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If you flip around the blogosphere enough you start seeing those clickbait ‘Things That First Disappear From The Shelves During A Crisis” sorts of lists. Apparently my local CostCo is proving to be a source of a bit of empirical data:

Most of that stuff on the first sheet makes a lot of sense, the rest…well…reasons.

Interestingly, we’ve seen that, as far as a pandemic goes, the masses went straight to the TP and rice aisle and cleaned ’em out. The more savvy folks hit canned goods and then went to the appliance store and bought freezers.

There’s that saying that the military is always planning on fighting the previous war. (Which is why a lot of guys fought Gulf War I in woodland camo.) It’s easy to fall into the trap of preparing against the previous disaster…meaning that you you’re so wrapped up in what did happen that you neglect to prepare for what could happen. Take note of what sailed off the shelves this time, but don’t make the mistake of assuming it’ll be the same way in the next one.

As an aside, when I go to CostCo I also usually hit WallyWorld. The selection is broader at WalMart and the crowd is not restricted to members like CostCo is, so WalMart is probably a better representation of what the hordes will be after. While WalMart has had some of its shelves swept clean, they get them restocked mighty quick. Their logisitics footprint is probably bigger than Costco’s and their network of supply and transport is probably also commensurately larger. Point being, sometimes wading through the human genetic frappe that is their customer base may pay off when you can’t find something elsewhere.