Getting paddled

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I have…a bunch…of PTR91 rifles. Many of them were manufactured before PTR started offering the paddle magazine release that was standard on original G3 rifles. For stupid ATF reasons, semi-auto G3 copies (HK91, etc.) couldn’t have the paddle release because the infrastructure of the release allowed the use of full-auto parts in the gun. Long story short: if you want the paddle release you have to install it in a way that prevents the use of full-auto parts. Most manufactures said ;screw it’ and simply omitted the paddle since the design also incorporated a magazine push-button release.

TOP: no paddle, BOTTOM: paddle. (Not to be confused with getting your bottom paddled.)

 

But….that release button is awkwardly  located. The paddle release is the way to go. PTR finally made the paddle release a standard item on their guns and it is wonderful. Now, what about the guns that pre-date that? Well, there is a small(!) aftermarket of people who will mod your non-paddle gun to have the paddle. First in the field: Bill Springfield.

I’d been reading about his work for a few years. I contacted him and asked if he had a quantity discount. And….I just sent off a buncha PTRs for him to modify. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The conversion is normally around $200. Since a new PTR with the paddle is around $1050-1100, and most of my PTR’s were acquired in the $600 range, it makes more economical sense to have the conversion done.

The G3 platform suffered from a couple issues that keep it from being an awesome platform, but all those issues can be mitigated nowadays.

Mill

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Finally decided to pull the trigger and purchase the wildly expensive, but well regarded, Country Living Grain mill. No sooner had I ordered it than the price went up a half hour later. I suppose demand must be high, but geez…it went up something like $70 not long after I ordered it. Fortunately, I beat the increase.

I purchased it because I’m finally at a point in my life where I can afford such things, and also because I’m expanding my cooking repertoire and I’d like to grind my own cornmeal. This, naturally, means I need to start stocking dried corn. I already have a small (<50#) amount of wheat sitting in storage (thank you LDS cannery), but given my enjoyment of things like pasta it makes sense to have the materials to start making it from scratch. Sure, I store flour…and it stores well enough…but not as well or as long as the wheat itself. So…grain mill. I figure between wheat, corn, and rice I’ll be pretty well covered for making things like flour, porridge, polenta, etc.

And, because I’m a suspender-and-a-belt kind of guy I ordered the spare parts kit and a few other accessories as well.

I’m rather looking forward to experimenting. I haven’t baked bread in quite a while and I’m wondering how much of a difference in flavor will be noticed between freshly ground flour and store-bought. There’s a bakery three blocks from where I live and once in a rare while I’ll get some bread there and, dang it, it’s good. So good that just a thick slice of it and some soft, creamy butter is practically a meal all by itself. But, in addition to bread, I also wanna take a swing at making my own fresh pasta and that sort of thing. Also, I’ve found a recipe for a cornmeal porridge that I really, really like and would like to try with fresh cornmeal. So..I guess it was time to spend the money and get the grain mill.

Now I need to head out to the places that sell bulk grains and start seeing whats available. Nice thing is, even without an end-of-the-world it’ll still be nice to have fresh bread and that sort of thing.

Rotation

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It’s not just theory…you really do need to rotate stuff from food storage. Today’s example: salsa from two years ago. It keeps just fine in the classic ‘cool, dark place’..like my basement…but I figured it was time to update. So…a quick trip to CostCo. As you may notice, there are some markings on the lids. The ‘C’ in a circle indicates it was purchased at CostCo, the price is marked on it, and the date.

I keep quite a bit of this sort of product on hand. Cook up some chicken (or open a can of chicken), shread it up, cook it in a bunch of salsa, mix in a large amount of cooked rice, cover with Mexican cheese blend, and eat with corn chips. Cheap, filling, and pretty yummy.

But, the takeaway here is that you need to rotate through your stuff otherwise when you finally need it you might not like what you find. Also, ‘best buy’ dates are wildly conservative.

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.

Tribe recognizes tribe

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We’ve all heard people in the preparedness community ask this particular question: “How do I meet like-minded people?”

As I’ve said before – if you have an interest and are active in a field that appeals to surivivalists (guns, backpacking, military/LE, radio, ‘primitive’ camping, being a Mormon, etc.) you probably already know several survivalists and just aren’t aware of it. But, may times you discover, in a casual conversation, that the person you are engaging with is on the same wavelength. Todays example comes form me standing at the deli counter picking up some chicken strips for lunch. The kid behind the counter takes my order….

Him: Three chicken strips today?
Me: Yeah, thanks. How are you doin’ today?
Him:I saw today wheat is up 33%.
Me: Hmm. Well, it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.
Him:Yeah. I’m trying to put some stuff back.
Me:Yeah, me too. I just cleaned out two cases of canning lids from aisle 6.
Him: Me and my brother can. We’ve been doing a lot of canning lately. I need to get water, though.

And we chit chat for another minute about the topic of socking away food against inflationary increases and filling up propane tanks this weekend.

Thats how it happens. No secret handshakes, no coded ‘Want to meet’ ads in Craigslist, no Friday night meetup at the VFW. It happens organically all the time…just keep your ears and eyes open. Tribe recognizes tribe.

Concrete Lego

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I freakin’ love the idea of these.

Of course, I could see a couple problems. First, unless you’ve got some lovely earthmoving equipment at your disposal, moving these things by yourself or with just one or two trusted friends is going to be difficult. Then there’s the matter of having enough concrete on hand….a wheelbarrow and shovel, or a portable mixer from the tool rental place, ain’t gonna do it. And then theres the matter of time…if you can only afford one mould, its going to take..what? days…for one block to dry and cure. And when you may need hundreds of blocks…well, thats a lot of time.

I suppose you could buy the mould and make a deal with a local concrete supplier. Give him the mould(s) and as him to make you as many blocks as you need. But, then you’re still locked into the transport and privacy issues.

A smaller version of these might make more sense. I sure do like the idea, though, of concrete Lego. Just the things for building outbuildings and that sort of thing. And probably make excellent anti-vehicle barriers for the perimeter of the property.

Cool idea, lotsa potential. Logistics is a bit tricky though.

Russian ruble pegged to gold?

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This is interesting…….

Russia sets fixed gold price as it restarts official bullion purchases

Opinion: Russia just made a case for owning gold — and nobody noticed

Good for the price of gold! Russia anchors rouble to gold

So, as I read this, it seems that Russian oil will be paid for either in gold or in rubles, rather than dollars, since the rate of exchange is such that you’ll pay less for the oil in gold or rubles than you would in dollars. Or, looking at it from a different angle, the dollar is worth less than rubles and gold.

I need to read more about this…

 

More buying

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A few months back I came into a bunch of guns through an estate purchase. A few of the guns were superfluous to my needs. For example, I have utterly zero use for .40 Glocks. But, I never say no to paperless handguns at low prices, so I held them figuring I’d sell them somewhere down the line.

Ran into the mailman the other day and he mentioned that one of his coworkers had ‘seen the writing on the wall’ and wanted a good quality handgun. Did I have anything for sale? Why, yes…yes I do. (We’ll ignore the wildly obvious jokes about postal workers and guns for the moment.)

So, made a sale and had a bit of disposable cash. What to do? Well, a pizza was definitely called for. And I picked up a gift for an LMI friend of mine. The rest? Why, it goes to gilding the lily with a trip to CostCo for a few things to pump up the Preponomicon. For example, the local RV place is doing $5 propane fillups on barbecue bombs. So..another 20# was purchased to be filled because you cant have too many fuel options available.The rest goes into the land fund for the anticipated land purchase at the end of the year.

Even without the specter of inflation, pandemic, WW3 v2.0, etc, there is no guarantee that the job you think is secure will be there tomorrow. I’m not saying you need to live everyday like its the last ‘normal’ day…Im saying that you just need to remember that it really could all change tomorrow..from the mundane like a water heater repair or fuel pump replacement…to the big stuff like a job loss or earthquake. Have the mechanisms in place to increase your resilience and you don’t have to live everyday like its the last normal day..you can just live like its a normal day.

What I feel is required to make me feel safe and secure is probably going to be different in terms of items and quantities than what makes you feel safe and secure. But I’ll tell ya, if I lost my job tomorrow I would be annoyed by it…inconvenienced by it…but crippled by it? Nope. The lights would stay on, the water would still be hot, and the calories would remain unchanged. I wouldn’t want to stay unemployed a minute longer than I had to, but I could go quite a few months if I had to.

Those little, personal, EOTWAWKI’s will happen to you far more often than the big ones. For every hurricane, earthquake, or civil war you go through you’ll go through dozens of smaller, personal crises. Normalcy bias and the ‘that never happens’ mentality is what keeps most people from increasing their resilience and survivabilty against these things. “Oh, that never happens” right up until the time it does. It’s only a disaster when you’re not prepared against it.

Squirrel!

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Think about all the very newsworthy crap going on in the world right now…Russians invading, pandemic, inflation, supply chain issues…..and people suddenly shift their focus on an actor slapping another actor. If I were of the conspiratorial mind, I’d wonder how much the Biden administration paid Smith to distract people from the real issues going on.

Weekend

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Did the weekend ‘Co sopping (WinCo and CostCo) and since gas is, thus far, cheapest up at CostCo I filled up there. Mind you, I still had 3/4 of a tank of gas…but I filled up because its a uncertain thing about where the price of gas is going to go, so…err on the side of frugality and caution. For the record, it was $3.89/gal. when pretty much every place in twon was $4.10. Heck of a time to be living in when we view $3.89 gas as a bargain.

CostCo itself was unremarkable. There was rice, toilet paper, pasta, water…no signs indicating purchasing limits. So far, so good. I suspect that most people who would be inclined to stock up have already done so.

A friend of mine hit the LDS cannery the other day. It was reported back to me that they were out of quite a bit of stuff and they were a bit dodgy about letting how much inventory they had on hand be known.

Me, I’m a fairly satisfied camper. I’m good on pretty much everything although it’s not a bad thing to gild the lily by having a bit more on hand than anticipated to be necessary.

I’m thinking that as inflation starts hitting people where they live, and interest rates go up, the housing market is going to cool down and prices may start coming down. I’m going to go ahead and stay on my course to buy some property at the end of this year but who knows if the world will accommodate and not blow itself up before then.

I can’t really say what the rest of the year is going to look like but it won’t be boring…pretty sure about that.