My favorite holiday. Dedicated to the notion that otherwise law-abiding citizens sometimes just need to shoot at The Man.
I will argue that there is virtually no finer way to observe the holiday, short of leaving an upper decker in the executive bathroom of the British Embassy, than to go out and spend some time practicing with your freedom-rifle.
Wheat at WinCo
WinCo has that little corner of the store that carries what could best be described as ‘preparedness minded’ products….bags of flour, rice, salt, sugar, 5-gallon buckets, lids, etc…but one thing that was notably absent was wheat. Oh, flour they’ve got plenty of..but wheat? Not so much.
So, I was a bit surprised to se this today:
Hard white wheat in 25# bags. I wonder if they’ll get more varieties or if this is a one-time ‘gauge the response’ sort of offering. Regardless, it’s a welcome offering.
Propane
For those of you who are local, or semi local, the place to get propane at the moment seems to be Bretzz RV on Reserve St by the interstate. If you’re a ‘member’ of their ‘propane fillup club’ or whatever the heck they call it you wind up at $0.99/gal. Which means you can fill your average barbecue bomb (which is about $30 new at CostCo just down the street) for $5.
I’d been there the last two weekends but for various reasons their filling station was closed. Not today, though. Five bucks and I’ve enough propane to keep me heated, fed, and illuminated for a few days worth of power outage. I’ve got about four or five of these tanks at the monet, I’ll probably make it an even six. I had refrained from getting anything larger because I didn’t want to incur the penalty to mobility. A 20# barbecue bomb is easy for anyone to handle…when they get bigger, not so much.
By the by, signing up at Bretz’ is free, and they don’t ask for ID, so just go down there, sign up as Heywood Jablowme, and save a few bucks on getting your tank filled.
And, just because if I don’t make a reference to ‘King Of The Hill’ in a propane post someone will feel obligated to do so in comments:
Nineteen years
Well, its the anniversary of the blog. I started this thing back in 2003 and in that time we’ve had…hmmm…Bird Flu, SARs, 2012, Hurricane Katrina, Obama, inflation, Ebola, Zika, Wuhan Flu, and a few other interesting events. But..still here. And I haven’t had to use my AK… this was a good day.
If you’ve found the 19 years worth of brain droppings to be entertaining, or even informative, I welcome you to sign up for my Patron account. a buck or two a month goes a long way towards keeping the lights on, the domain registered, and the mindless ramblings of a weird gun nut in Montana flowing. And, lets not kid ourselves, gearing up for the apocalypse ain’t cheap.
What’s been the most interesting part of blogging over 19 years? Hmm. Looking back at old posts and seeing how my forecasts of the future did (sometimes) or did not (most of the time) turn out the way I thought they would. And, wow, I’m such a different person than I was when I started this blog. Not worse, not better, just…a different person.
But! Still a person with a keen interest in being prepared and having enhanced resilience.
On a much lighter note, I like to needle Friend Of The Blog ,Rawles from time to time about how I predate his blog by about two years, although he has managed the remarkable accomplishment of managing to post every single day whereas I usually average a post every three days.
When will enough be enough? A lot of blogs have come and gone in that nineteen years and one day there’ll be a time when this one goes dark as well. After all, it’s not easy saying the same thing over and over, in dozens of different ways, for almost two decades. And, considering that the ostensible mission of this blog was to chronicle my own adventures in preparedness, after almost twenty years I should be pretty much done in terms of getting my ducks in a row. But…no, it seems there’s always more to do, to learn, to buy, to pack away, etc.
Next year will be the twenty year anniversary. Maybe I’ll have a cake or something………….
Getting Paddled II
According to the UPS tracking numbers, the PTR’s I sent to Bill Springfield arrived the other day. As I’ve mentioned several times before, the semi-auto HK91 platform really benefits from having the original mag release on it rather than the pushbutton release. So much so, in fact, that it is worth the $$$ to me to have it performed on my older guns.
If you decide to buy a new PTR or other G3 clone, hold out for one that has the paddle mag release already on it.
I am hoping to get my PTR’s back sometime next week (I hope) at which time I’ll be happy to report back on what I think of the job that was performed. Stay tuned.
Blog anniversary this Friday
Man, has it really been 19 years? Apparently so, as of this Friday.
Maybe I’ll go get an ice cream cake or something.
Guess I better start writing Friday’s post……….
On tonights episode of “Will It Digest”….
Cleaning out the freezer and…pork ribs from 2011. Ah, such carefree days….
Your ‘best by ‘ dates, I laugh at them. Ha! Ha, I say!
So, how’d they turn out? Well, unless something rather untoward happens in the next eight hours, just fine. Why wouldnt they? These were vacuum sealed, and have been sitting below zero for the last eleven years. The moral of the story here? If you package meat properly, and keep it consistently frozen, it should be just fine literally a decade later.
This is now officially the oldest meat I have eaten out of my freezer, wildly trouncing the five year old turkey I had a few years back.
Ah.the memories……..
Link – Why is there a shortage of canning jars and lids?
A reader was thoughtful enough to send me this link and there’s some interesting details in it. Specifically:
I didn’t know that. Did you? I’ve not verified the information on my own, but if true it would mean that domestic production of canning supplies is all under one company which may or may not care about how available those items are.
There are, of course, offshore options. When theres a void in the market you can usually rely on the Chinese to swoop in, create a knockoff version thats 1/10th the quality at 1/2 the price, and then flood the market with it under several different names. Everything I read says that the Chinese canning lids are 50/50 in terms of efficacy.
Clearly canning lids have sort of migrated into the Uncertain Goods category. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stock up on a healthy amount of them, albeit much later than I should have.
Melancholy observation
Remember this scene from ‘Red Dawn’?
It occurred to me that years ago I saw myself as one of those kids in the truck, and now I see myself as the guy saying “Boys, get in there and get sleeping bags and food”. Age comes on apace, I guess.
Article – Abandoned Russian Tank Tagged With ‘Wolverines’ in Shout-Out to 1984’s ‘Red Dawn’ (Photo)
I was going to say ‘life imitates art’ but Red Dawn wasn’t exactly art. It was a heavy-handed nod to the Reagan era (and nothing wrong with that), but I wouldn’t call it art.
Nice to see that someone over there….maybe a foreign journalist, maybe a Ukrainian with a grasp of English, A can of spraypaint, and a Netflix account…….appreciated the situation.
