09:00 – When I walked Colin at 8:15, it was already muggy. The next two or three months are going to be miserable, particularly for furry guys like Colin. It’s no coincidence that all of the South’s big cities were sleepy little towns before air conditioning became widely available. Summer in the South can be pretty miserable.
I’m still struggling with the manual for our AP Chemistry kit. The problem is that the 2013 revision of the AP-recommended labs went from the old 22 labs that were mostly Structured Inquiry to only 16 labs that are all Guided Inquiry. As College Board says up-front, they had to reduce the number of labs because Guided Inquiry labs take a lot longer. They recommend that at least six of those labs, covering a wide range of topics, be done as Guided Inquiry investigations. It’s acceptable to do the others, as well as supplemental labs, as Structured Inquiry. Here are Wikipedia’s descriptions of the four levels of inquiry-based learning:
Level 1: Confirmation Inquiry – The teacher has taught a particular science theme or topic. He or she then develops questions and a procedure that guides students through an activity where the results are already known. This method is great to reinforce concepts taught and to introduce students into learning to follow procedures, collect and record data correctly and to confirm and deepen understandings.
Level 2: Structured Inquiry – The teacher provides the initial question and an outline of the procedure. Students are to formulate explanations of their findings through evaluating and analyzing the data that they collect.
Level 3: Guided Inquiry – The teacher only provides the research question for the students. The students are responsible for designing and following their own procedures to test that question and then communicate their results and findings.
Level 4: Open Inquiry – Students formulate their own research question(s), design and follow through with a developed procedure, and communicate their findings and results. This type of inquiry is often seen in science fair contexts where students drive their own investigative questions.
Obviously, whether by name or not, all four of those levels have their place in science education. The problem in a homeschool environment is that Guided Inquiry requires a guide. In other words, College Board assumes that these labs will be taught by a science teacher qualified in AP Chemistry. Some homeschool parents will meet that requirement, but the majority will not, and will be very uncomfortable in the role of AP Chemistry teacher. On the other hand, we’ll probably sell a lot of AP Chemistry Kits to public and private high schools that do have teachers qualified to teach AP Chemistry.
So I’ve decided on a compromise. I’ll write up all 16 of the core lab sessions as Guided Inquiry labs, which will be all that’s available in the student lab manual. The teacher’s manual will include materials for teachers who are doing the labs as Guided Inquiry, but will also include full alternative procedures for those who decide to teach some or all of the labs as Structured Inquiry. I’ll provide the teacher’s manual in both PDF and DOC formats to allow teachers to cut-and-paste material from that manual to create a modified student manual.
It’s a lot of work, and I’ll have to do this all over again when I do the AP Biology kit.
I fixed that for you. 🙂 lol
Apparently, the Army is unhappy with their M9 and is shopping around for something better:
Army Wants a Harder-Hitting Pistol
Geez. Until 1985, in the M1911 in .45 ACP they had the best defensive pistol that ever was or ever will be. Why not just pull all those pistols out of storage and re-issue them?
The thing about stopping power is completely bogus. The simple truth is that, based on mountains of real data, a .45 ACP stops an attacker with one shot about 95% of the time, versus about 40% to 50% for the .36’s (which include 9mm, .357 Magnum, and all others in the bore diameter).
I believe that the cop mentioned had to shoot the bad guy eight times to kill him, but the real question is how many times did he have to shoot to stop him. Anyway, even if true, that’s an outlier. Anecdotes do not equal data.
In terms of one-shot pistol stops, you’re simply not going to do any better than a .44/.45 class pistol. With one-shot stops about 19 times in 20, there’s just nothing close. And it’s pretty difficult to top that 19/20. Even 7.62mm class rifle rounds frequently require multiple hits. Hell, people have been hit with .50 BMG rounds and 12-gauge slugs and kept shooting. Not often, certainly, but the point is that there’s no hand-held weapon that gets to 100% one-shot stops.
Marshall and Sanow have a lot to answer for.
The spec ops guys have already been using .45’s and .308-and-up since ’85.
But watch the Army put out RFP’s for a whole new caliber.
One problem with CCW and .45’s is the ability to conceal/carry and if in a smaller variation, the recoil. Same problem with .44 and .45 revolvers, which are even bulkier. If carrying semi-openly is not a problem where on lives, great! But waltzing around even here in Vermont with a .45 or .44 strapped on and either partially visible or printing through a summer shirt ain’t real smooth.
Well, they do make derringers in .45 ACP and .44 Special. Only two shots, and they’re a handful, granted, but nothing you shouldn’t be able to handle.
They’re more than a handful and sure I can handle them OK but the blast and recoil for only two shots when more may be necessary? The equivalent in a long gun would be a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, which is of course lethal at short range, but once you’ve shot your wad, that’s it. Better make those two shots count, and if there’s three or four assailants? Some of the stories I’ve seen lately of home invasions and business robberies involved multiple perps, at least one or more also armed with handguns.
Of course in a home or biz one hopes one has ready access to something heavier and really quickly.
Whaddya do out on the street when accosted by several armed assailants? Fire twice and run like hell? Not that any of this is a regular thing for us here, as my VA interlocutors keep telling me, so why not ease up on the Condition Yellow/Orange all the time…etc….after forty years….
I don’t know how much experience you have with derringers (or double-barreled shotguns), but some of them can be reloaded pretty quickly. I have shot old-style derringers that required punching out the empties with a dowel, but some of them have extractors/ejectors that work pretty well.
Well, I’m over sixty, like you, and the fingers seem to do a bit more fumbling of late with stuff like that, which is another reason for my concern; my up-to-date bifocals give me 20-20 vision and I can still punch holes in distant targets and clear leather pretty fast but fumbling around with reloads that are probably loose in my pockets, already cluttered with other little EDC tools, is not good.
I don’t even understand why the M1911 got phased out. Standardisation with NATO, wasn’t it? Seems like a pretty good gun, and the replacement seems a bit wonky. I’ll bet the guys who made the decisions didn’t have their arses on the line in any real sense.
That’s about right, Greg; we just hadda get on the same page with NATO and no doubt there were various financial incentives and kickbacks and lobbying behind the scenes. And you are right also on the decision-makers not being up on the line and if they ever were up there, they either forgot it or now have much more political considerations to deal with. Some of the very topmost brass that have landed in hot water in recent years had sterling combat records but once they got those stars, and this includes a certain Navy spec ops admiral, they went Mordor-toxic. Sad.
Standardization with NATO, # of rounds, and size of the grip, IIRC. Of course I was Navy when they switched over. M1911A1, M-14, 12 ga Pump with 00-buck was what we used and we didn’t switch over.
Got trained by Marines for Aux Security Force. Those guys were nuts.
” M1911A1, M-14, 12 ga Pump with 00-buck was what we used and we didn’t switch over.”
Outstanding. Couldn’t be a better assortment.
“Got trained by Marines for Aux Security Force. Those guys were nuts.”
Roger that. In the AF we trained the “auxiliary security forces,” mostly cooks and medics. We cut them major slack when out with us on deployments and drills and actual hostile fire sometimes, and they gave us the complete run of the chow hall in the one case, and in the other the medics took care of our piss tests and STD shots.
In designated “combat zones.” or “hostile fire zones,” and in the frequent absence of nearby Marine and Army units, the AF security police were responsible for air base defense. Dunno if that is still the case; but I do remember being assigned with Marine and Green Beret units in RVN and Thailand and the regular jarheads were OK but the LRRPs were certifiable; we rarely saw the Berets but WE provided security for THEM when they were on the bases.
As a fairly tall drone, I got the machine-gunner duty, so my assortment was a Smith .38 revolver and the M-60, with ammo. I also sometimes carried the M-79, which I wish I had now, along with that M-60 and about a dozen spare barrels, the asbestos gloves, all the spare parts and a million rounds of ammo.
My Charter bulldog .44 special kicks like a son of a gun. Has five shots though.
http://www.charterfirearms.com/products/charter_bulldog_74420.asp
After 20 bullets shot through it, I had a blister on my shooting hand. I guess due to the recoil.
Johnny Carson used to carry a .38 special snubbie everywhere he went. I think I need about a dozen of those.
I guess that it is illegal to ship the dreamers straight back home but it sure would be cheaper:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/8/istook-flying-illegals-home-would-be-995-percent-c/
Why would it be illegal? And why shouldn’t the states affected take action on their own?
As I just told the UPS guy, I’m going to be pissed if they ship any of these little disease vectors to Winston-Salem. I’m pissed enough that they’re already shipping them elsewhere. And I wonder how many of them are now living in the homes of Obama, Pelosi, Clinton, et alia. Seems to me that if they’re going to foist these diseased illegals on anyone it should be to the people who support them being here.
Incidentally, has anyone heard if Obama is going to present a $3.7 billion bill to Mexico, not to mention a bill for the trillions that they already owe US taxpayers?
Incidentally, has anyone heard if Obama is going to present a $3.7 billion bill to Mexico, not to mention a bill for the trillions that they already owe US taxpayers?
Mr. Bob please don’t give up your day job for comedy. Your jokes suck. 🙂
Obummer presented the bill to Congress already. $3.7-billion. So we’re on the hook for that, and as with anything like this, you can assume that it will actually be doubled or tripled in the end, like the worthless Sandbox wars. That accomplished not only nothing but created millions more enemies who loathe us and hate our guts and would gain entrance to Paradise by killing as many of us as they can. Thanks, Barry, George, Bill, George, et. al. and of course our great pals the Brits and the Israelis.
Rest assured if any state takes it unto itself to repatriate illegals or do anything much about anything anymore, the Feds will stop it immediately, and they evidently already have many times now and have some kind of hold on the states’ leaderships. To wit: al fifty governors lying down for the overseas wartime use of their national guards; which to me is outrageous.
I once had a Charter Arms .44 Bulldog; sure, them revolvers and pistols with the 4 in the caliber designation kick, and the smaller they are the harder they kick, not to mention what ammo you feed them. And with the cylinder bulk, they’re harder to conceal, too. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately and mulling over the alternatives and believe I am coming around to SGM (ret.) Kyle Lamb’s personal config, which is S&W M&P Shield (9mm, presumably with hot, effective loads), extended mag, spare mag, and Blade-Tech OWB holster worn in appendix-carry mode. With my backup Taurus .357 snubby (hot loads in this little puppy spew flames and kick like a mofo).
“Mr. Bob please don’t give up your day job for comedy. Your jokes suck.”
Hey, c’mon now; Bob’s trying. His is a special genre of hew-muh.
Here’s what you want:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmerling
As well as the usual suspects from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan we now have people coming from Sri Lanka. The bleeding heart lobby in Australia are making it as hard as possible to turn them away:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-09/government-accused-of-piracy-by-lawyer-julian-burnside/5586084
“Sri Lanka has indicated it will not take them back and Mr Burnside thinks India would be unlikely to.”
Lynn, from a “looks cool” point of view I think your XDM .40 is really nice. Too bad you irretrievably lost it in the Brazos.
The Semmerling is from twenty years ago and was sold back then for over $700; plus this: “The Semmerling fires from a static, fully locked breech, producing considerable recoil.”
I’d be willing to play with one but they’re likely to be two to three times that price now, at least…oh my…lookee here:
“About the lowest you can expect to touch a Derringer-made example is $1800 in used but good condition. The Boston-made Semmerling Corp models, of which only an estimated 600 were born and more than a hundred of which are in museums, run more than twice that much as they were in the words of someone close to the company, “manufactured with a single purpose and for a special audience”
http://www.guns.com/2013/05/17/the-semmerling-lm-4-pistol-sleek-strange-secretive-sought/
Something tells me that all of this won’t end well.
The FBI had 9mm, but then there was some semi-famous shootout (don’t recall the details) and special agents were complaining their rounds were ricocheting off of vehicle windshields. So, they switched to 10mm, but then the female special agents couldn’t handle the recoil. So, they switch to .40 S&W but they just retrofitted the 9mm frames to uses a .40 S&W barrel and now they have metal fatigue.
When I was Active Duty USAF we had M9s (Beretta) for anti-hijacking with whatever rounds had the least penetrating power (don’t want to be blasting holes through critical aircraft systems in flight during a shootout). Had to wear it in a shoulder holster under our flight suits and had a USAF Concealed Weapon permit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a downsized weapon designed for concealed carry, so it was uncomfortable as hell to wear. At the time all of the spec ops in the various branches were using M1911 .45ACP. Though, in all honesty, many of those guys pretty much carry whatever weapons they want and a lot of it is personal property they acquired outside of official channels.
“As well as the usual suspects from Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan we now have people coming from Sri Lanka. The bleeding heart lobby in Australia are making it as hard as possible to turn them away…”
This could be an indication that things we may have feared twenty or thirty years ago or were at least a little bit nervous about, are coming to fruition now, only about a hundred times worse. The original “Camp of the Saints” dealt with a semi-fictional treatment of boatloads of people arriving in southern Europe from Africa; this has now become a worldwide phenomenon.
But…as one of our RINO saviors spewed recently…they do it “out of love.” The implication being that we in the industrialized West should joyfully open our arms wide and take them all in, however many tens of millions, no questions asked, and rush to provide them with everything they need (humanitarian aid!) and let’s just ask that pesky question again, shall we?
How many of these fine folks have you taken in so far, Mr. Jeb Bush?
How ’bout you, Miz Pelosi? You, Mr. Reid?
Any spare rooms available in your houses, Mr. Michael Moore, Mr. William Gates???
Naw, dint think so. You goddamned hypocrite rat-fucking scum.
“…many of those guys pretty much carry whatever weapons they want and a lot of it is personal property they acquired outside of official channels.:
Roger that. Same deal back in my day.
Out in the sticks we just commandeered whatever we felt like taking anyway; some guys liked and carried the AK’s; I did not. But didn’t like the 16, either, so was happy to haul around the 60. Well, not happy, exactly, but you know what I mean.
If I was in the mix again today and thirty or forty years younger, and over in one of them hot-as-hell climates, I think I’d carry a .45 and depending on terrain, a shotgun in urban locales and/or an M-79-type weapon. Out in the great wide open I’d be hauling a scoped .308 semi.
I’m told that where we are right now I don’t need a carbine, haha, and should be all set with just a shotgun. Yeah, OK.
“You goddamned hypocrite rat-fucking scum.”
Damn it Dave, stop mincing your punches and pulling your words.
Tell us what you really think… 🙂
Chad, is this what you were thinking of?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
Yeah, that’s the infamous shootout; they made a tee-vee movie out of it and did a pretty good job with it, too, IIRC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Line_of_Duty:_The_F.B.I._Murders
Hey sportsfans, remember that douchebag New Orleans mayor from the Katrina catastrophe, Ray Nagin?
WSJ nooz feed just told me he’s been sentenced to ten years in the Fed system. Buh-bye, Ray; laissez les bon temps rouler, asshole.
Oh, you guys and your guns…
Reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine about storing food. He said he and his wife had maybe a one-month supply at home, if that. He said the problem was that they had nowhere to store anything. I pointed out that he had a fair amount of space in his attached garage, not to mention under beds and so on.
As he was about to leave, the conversation ended something like this:
Me: “You know what really worries me?”
Him: “What?”
Me: “You and your wife have all these guns. Hell, you told me not long ago that you and your wife had 500 rounds each of buck and slugs for just your shotguns.”
Him: “Yeah, so what?”
Me: “Think about it. Lots and lots of guns and ammo, but no food. Do the math.”
He just laughed. He did say that the LDS store would be their first stop come the apocalypse. He also mentioned that he was getting ready to leave to do a long-term project in England and would be away for a couple of months. He said he’d told his wife that if something really bad happened while he was gone to throw all her important stuff in her vehicle and come to us. Which is fine with Barbara and me. His wife is a shooter, and if the shit ever hits the fan we’re gonna want all the friendly shooters we can get.
Indeed.
Friendly…and competent shooters. Combat-experienced should get a premium.
Been watching the flick “Defiance” recently; another half-hour to go on it; they’re a band of Jewish and Russian partisans in the forests circa 1942 and the question/controversy and conflict arises over whether or not the “fighters” should get a larger ration of food. Considering that they’re doing the most dangerous work and probably using up the most calories the fastest.
Any thoughts on that here among the cognoscenti? I say they should, within reason, and they ought also to scavenge and scrounge themselves on their various lethal errands, of course.
In re Ray Nagin:
http://www.wwl.com/Ex-mayor-pleased-with-10-year-sentence–feds-objec/19377041
Pleased? Jeez, Ray, what’s it gonna take to wipe that smirk off your face?
He could’ve (and should’ve, IMO) gotten as many as 34 years. Would love to see how pleased he would’ve been then. Meanwhile, his wife is penniless and on public assistance.
In re Ray Nagin:
http://www.wwl.com/Ex-mayor-pleased-with-10-year-sentence–feds-objec/19377041
Pleased? Jeez, Ray, what’s it gonna take to wipe that smirk off your face?
He could’ve (and should’ve, IMO) gotten as many as 34 years. Would love to see how pleased he would’ve been then. Meanwhile, his wife is penniless and on public assistance.
The judge in the Nagin case said:
The judge said, "Mr. Nagin displayed a commitment to help New Orleans during its toughest times during Hurricane Katrina."
Remember Nagin’s “I’m gonna make NO a chocolate city” speech? The racism came out of his mouth and Obummer saw him as a detriment to the libturd cause. I thought Holder would step in save said Nagin. Guess not, but still time for Obuttwad to pardon him.
These Moochelle inspired food bans are getting ridiculous. Restricting bake sales at a school. Way to go Tennessee. I guess no cupcakes for class birthday parties either. Geez. What’s next, Soylent Green for lunch. Summary execution at the Obummer flag pole if caught with a Twinkie.
“”Mr. Nagin displayed a commitment to help New Orleans during its toughest times during Hurricane Katrina.””
WTF does *that* mean, anyway? He better have had a fucking commitment to help the city he was mayor of then! WTF does THAT MEAN?
It’s just too bad the gov down there and bunch of other pols and hacks ain’t goin’ in with him; also the cops who deserted their posts, but hell, they’ve had cops down there who were/are robbers, rapists and murderers. What’s a little desertion?
“Restricting bake sales at a school.”
Well, gee MrAtoz; they gotta do the tings day good at, ya know; cain’t retrict the southern border…cain’t restrict NYC and Mordor air space on 9/11…cain’t restrict the banksters and financial wizards from robbing us blind…
Got to know yer limitations; dat’s why all the bake sale stuff, cops busting lemonade stands, sending in SWAT for overdue library cards and organic lettuce, and running spec ops teams out to a Nevada ranch to kill some cows and screech about right-wing militia and suchlike. They’re all totally useless and dead weight.
When I walked Colin at 8:15, it was already muggy. The next two or three months are going to be miserable, particularly for furry guys like Colin. It’s no coincidence that all of the South’s big cities were sleepy little towns before air conditioning became widely available. Summer in the South can be pretty miserable.
Can you shave Colin? We shave our 12 year old cocker spaniel every three months or so. She looks weird, like a hound dog, but she does so much better walking two miles with me each night.
It was kind of weird not to have electricity and A/C last Saturday, basically noon to midnight. It was overcast all day so it did not get hot but it got very muggy inside the house. Really makes one want to get a natural gas generator but they are very expensive installed, 17 KW for $12,000. But so nice to always have enough power to run the A/C unit.
BTW, I have a single A/C unit for the entire 3,000 ft2 house. It is a two speed, 16 SEER five ton system. Really works like a champ and keeps the electric bill down even with the house thermostat at 73 F.
Why do you need 17 KW? I’d think that a 5 or 6 KW generator would be more than sufficient. Just buy a window air conditioner with enough capacity to cool a couple of rooms.
As to fuel, I remember a guy I knew 35 years ago had a standard 5.5 KW generator modified to use natural gas. I don’t remember all the details, but I do remember that the mod was simple and cheap, and that he said that on natural gas he could go literally 10 or 20 times the number of hours between oil changes that he could if using gasoline. Where he lived, he lost power any time there was a serious wind storm or winter storm and the power was usually out for anything from several hours to two or three days, depending. So he put a fair amount of use on that generator.
Where he lived, he lost power any time there was a serious wind storm or winter storm and the power was usually out for anything from several hours to two or three days
The longest I have lost power in my current house is for 8 hours and that was during a major winter storm such a storm being very unusual. The house got cool but never got really cold. I have about 16 inches of insulation in the attic. A generator would be an expensive item that rarely gets used.
Where I grew up in Oregon, 15 miles up the valley from Rogue River, it was not uncommon to lose power for a week at a time. Getting to the lines to fix them was a real problem for the power company. The lines crossed our fields and one time they had to get trucks in to fix the lines. The trucks got stuck in the mud. The POCO brought in dozers to get the trucks out and the dozers got stuck. The dozers and the trucks remained on our property for several days until the ground dried some and the POCO brought in some really heavy duty winches. They had to repair the significant damage to our fields but that waited until spring.
We got by as we had a house that was built in 1900. Only two rooms were heated, the kitchen and the living room. My aunt and uncles bedroom and the bathroom had an electric heater but those did not work when the power was out (Duh!). The kitchen was heated with a gravity feed oil stove that also had a cooking surface. That same surface being used to heat water. The living room was heated with a wood burning fire place. Water was gravity feed from a spring. My bedroom was damn cold but several blankets resolved that issue.
For light we had some battery powered camping lanterns modified to run off a couple of six volt tractor (huge) batteries. Those batteries would last a the entire time in continuous running. If the batteries would get discharged they were connected to the tractor and the tractor started. Food was kept cold by just keeping it outdoors over the top of the large pantry which was located in a separate building.
We would live like this for a week at a time on several occasions while I lived there.
Our longest power outage was after an ice storm 20 years or so ago. We were without power for something like four days, with temperatures down in the teens. We didn’t have much firewood, and had actually started discussing whether to burn furniture or books when the power came back on. The day we got power back, I ordered natural gas logs for the upstairs fireplace. We kept the downstairs fireplace wood-burning, just in case.
That’s our main worry here; having the power go out and stay out over the course of a typical long, cold and bitter winter. So our objective is to get things set up to not only survive three to six months of that, but to live reasonably comfortably. The woodstove is in place but of course we’d want about four cords of firewood stacked and racked. And we need to get an alternate pumping means for the well as it runs off electricity. That would take care of heat and wottuh, plus, of course, we have, what, a trillion gallons of fresh wottuh just down the street. For light we’ve got a random assortment of oil lamps, lanterns, candles, flashlights and batteries, which I’ve gotta organize and probably add a few things here and there, also candles and matches, wicks, and lamp oil, kerosene and the like.
Enough food right now for maybe two or three weeks, so we have to ramp up on that and get it organized. More blankets would be good and we’d probably also close off all but a couple of rooms, as in Ray’s case, keep the living room and kitchen open. Heavy-duty plastic over all the windows and I’m getting a snowblower for this next winter, though shovels have been all I’ve ever had for half a century. Gotta organize the first-aid stuff and see about getting an emergency supply stocked up of Mrs. OFD’s meds.
Continuing to work on the firearms and ham radio stuff as time allows and am considering a local college’s EMT/Paramedic training certification course this next school year.
We’ll probably get a bit more motivated for all this as we start seeing the leaves turning next month.
Power has gone out twice in the 8 years we’ve been in Vegas. 20 minutes the first time when some power dufus screwed up on a new house and turned the whole block off. Less than 5 minutes last year when NVPower put in their remote spy meters on the house.
I just checked, and the closest LDS store to you appears to be Belmont, MA. Even so, it might be worth the drive. As I mentioned, Barbara and I ended up hauling back 28 cases (168 #10 cans) of stuff from our LDS store. That totaled something like 630 pounds of dry goods and cost a bit over $1/pound. With that and the canned goods we have in stock, Barbara and I could eat reasonably comfortably for a year. (More likely, as I’ve said, we could feed two dozen family, friends, and neighbors for a month, or a dozen for two months.)
We’ll continue to add stuff, both more from the LDS store and more canned goods, but my sense of urgency is lower now than it was a month or two ago. As a matter of fact, I think I hear the UPS truck out front. Don should have a case of 24 28-ounce cans of Keystone Meats canned hamburger. The company says it’s good for at least five years, but I’m betting that it’ll be just fine for the next 20 years or more.
Incidentally, the prices on the LDS web site apparently include shipping. The prices at the store are a lot lower. For some stuff (like the instant dry milk and the dry mashed potatoes) the LDS store is as cheap a source as you’ll find. For other stuff (like sugar, white flour, and rice) the LDS store prices for the canned products are higher than buying in 25 or 50 pound bags at Costco, but the stuff is canned and has a very long shelf-life.
For that kind of stuff you can save money by “canning” the dry goods in clean, dry 2-liter soft drink bottles. (The PET used in these bottles is extremely impermeable to oxygen, an order of magnitude better than other common plastics.) For example, canned rice or sugar at the LDS store is something like $0.70/pound, while a 25 or 50 pound bag at Costco runs more like half that.
Given your current finances, I realized that there’s not a lot of slack, but doing even a little bit is better than doing nothing. If I were you, I’d start stocking up on the canned goods that you like. You’re going to buy them anyway, and they’re going to cost more later than they do now. You might as well buy them in bulk now at Costco or Sam’s Club.
This is a better list of the LDS store locations than the one I used when I wrote my last comment. That one didn’t list the Greensboro location. Here’s one that lists a MA location, but Worcester rather than Belmont.
http://providentliving.org/self-reliance/food-storage/home-storage-center-locations?lang=eng
Incidentally, has anyone heard if Obama is going to present a $3.7 billion bill to Mexico, not to mention a bill for the trillions that they already owe US taxpayers?
From what I have heard/read, the majority of the kids coming over are from countries South of Mexico.
Maybe so, but they arrived here from Mexico.
“… If I were you, I’d start stocking up on the canned goods that you like.”
Roger that; working on it.
Thanks for the tips and also the LDS store links; that location in Woostuh, MA? I know exactly where it is and it’s just around the corner from my middle brother, sister and nephew and almost just around the corner from our son and DIL and grandkids. Pretty droll; next trip down there I’ll take the truck and load that puppy right up.
Yeah, the incoming hordes are from south of the border, period, and that can be all the way down to Tierra del Fuego; plus we’re getting more from Asia now, too. I’ve seen some of the pics and vids and we may just as well import a bunch of leper and TB colonies wholesale, WTF.
But those imbeciles calling for impeachment and bellowing about treason, etc, which it is, in my view, are missing the main point; this catastrophe would have also occurred during a RINO administration, too, either Bush would have done the same shit. We even have one of the Bush family, a reputed Prez contenduh, saying they “do it out of love.” Meanwhile the TX gov spews and fulminates and makes a lotta noise but does nothing, and I’m not faulting him; he can’t. The Feds have demonstrated time and again that they can do whatever they want and damn the torpedoes and the consequences (for everybody else.)
How long have they thus demonstrated? Well, quick history recap: since they confiscated the nation’s gold. Since they put us all on automatic payroll withdrawal for taxes. Since they initiated military conscription. Since the Great Eliminator and his war criminal thug generals invaded and destroyed the South. And since they sent troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays’s Rebellion, in Pennsylvania and Maffachufetts, respectively.
Let me guess. They live on Weasel Brook.
One of the problems with most of our undocumented/illegal immigration from Mexico and Central/South America is that we’re not getting skilled educated middle class immigrants. We’re being inundated with unskilled laborers with third grade educations. At least with many of our Asian immigrants we get skilled workers. Even African immigrants are typically skilled and educated because only the wealthy in Africa can afford to send their relatives to the US. So, even if these south of the border immigrants were natural born US citizens, but with their exact same résumé they wouldn’t be qualified to hold down a job that would support themselves let alone their family. We’re basically being flooded with riff-raff. I say we open the borders to unlimited immigration from anywhere so long as you pass a health check, criminal background check, and have provable STEM skill set.
As for the immigrant children flooding the border, they’re as much victims in this as are US taxpayers. As a father it sickens me that any parent would put their child on a bus or train, unsupervised, with a one-way ticket to a foreign country. Those parents should ALL be arrested in their home countries for child abandonment and child endangerment. F_cking savages.
That’s interesting. Here’s the Worcester LDS store:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3205785,-71.801055,70m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
and here’s the Greensboro LDS store:
https://www.google.com/maps/@36.093185,-79.976641,77m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en
Ours looks a lot bigger than the MA one. You can’t tell it from Google, but ours is surrounded by a chainlink fence topped with razor wire.
If you do go, call to check hours first. Some or all of the LDS stores are run by volunteers and have short hours. Ours is only open Mondays and Tuesdays from 9:00 a.m. until noon, Wednesdays from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and the second and fourth Saturdays of each month from 9:00 a.m. until noon.
Also, Google maps lists the MA site as being both store and cannery. That’s worth asking about as well. The Greensboro store used to be a cannery (where they can actually can bulk dry goods for you), but they discontinued that a few years ago after LDS built a huge canning plant in SLC. From what they told me in Greensboro, they could actually buy the stuff from the LDS canning plant and have it shipped in for less money than they could do the canning themselves.
@Chad
Yes, as I’ve said many times, I’m perfectly happy to allow immigration of Mexicans as long as they won’t be a net burden on our social welfare systems. I’ll take all of the Mexican doctors and scientists and engineers that want to come here. What I think we should refuse to take (at gunpoint, if necessary) is what you call the riff-raff. We already have plenty of poor, stupid, uneducated people. The last thing we need is more of them.
Why do you need 17 KW? I’d think that a 5 or 6 KW generator would be more than sufficient. Just buy a window air conditioner with enough capacity to cool a couple of rooms.
The 17 kW generator is actually only $3,500 and is even available at Sams Club. The expensive part is the labor to hook it in and run a natural gas line from the meter.
http://www.samsclub.com/sams/15kw-standby-gen-centurion/prod9070206.ip
I am also contemplating building a home on our commercial property. I would need enough power to run our well which pulls 4 KW all by itself.
As for the immigrant children flooding the border, they’re as much victims in this as are US taxpayers. As a father it sickens me that any parent would put their child on a bus or train, unsupervised, with a one-way ticket to a foreign country. Those parents should ALL be arrested in their home countries for child abandonment and child endangerment.
I am hearing that most of the kids already have at least one parent, uncle or aunt here. The Border Patrol is spending an incredible amount of money and time delivering the kids to these people.
“Let me guess. They live on Weasel Brook.”
Haha, nope; they live a couple miles due north just over the Woostuh line in the lovely burg of West Boylston, MA. Son and DIL and grandkids live about five miles northeast of there in the quaint little town of Jefferson (Holden), MA. All inside the Megalopolis, which is not good. But no one listens to me and wives won’t move from down there no matter what. DIL grew up here in VT, rural VT, even, but has now been nearly totally sucked in by the plethora of “so many things to do” and all the stores and shopping and school stuff for the kidz, etc, etc. Life is grand. On their recent July 4th visit up here again she was depressed at how dull life is and there’s “nothing to do.” OK, hon.
The LDS store is in the Greendale area of north Woostuh, which was a huge manufacturing center back in the day, esp. for industrial abrasives, and saw a large influx of Scandinavian types, mostly from Sweden and Finland. The ones who made some money got out and moved to towns just to the northwest of Woostuh, like Paxton and Rutland. I am just a font of useless anthropological and sociological crud from years as a cop there and the courses I took back then in those subjects, localized.
Up here it’s salt-of-the-earth Vermonters, with many of the rural people having family backgrounds a la Quebecois and who speak French at home and with accents in public that sound like they’re rolling marbles around in their mouths. My own is a harsh nasal twang derived from growing up near the Rhode Island border with MA and then later just twenty miles from Boston. When we drive down that way Mrs. OFD sez it gets really strong/exaggerated the closer we get.
Beautiful day continues here; still no checks for wife at the P.O. We’re now well past the 30-day period her paymaster ass-hats say they have to pay people. And another outfit has stiffed her so far for work she did back in April. Plus no checks for a year now from Canadian social security. I’m getting in the frame of mind where I may watch “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” “Heat,” and “The Town” again to get some ideas.
We are going to install generators at the transmitter and main studio of the radio project. Although we never had more than about 20 minutes of power outage until this year, in the last 2 months, there have been 2 outages of over 4 hours caused by auto accidents, and one of 2 hours caused by a fire in the field next to the tower.
A 7kw unit will be installed. It can run on either natural gas or propane. There is natural gas in the neighborhood, but no connection to our location. Because we just rent the tower space, we’re not sure if getting a natural gas line will be simple or unduly complex, so we will just install and use propane ourselves if getting natural gas proves a problem or a slow-up. Whole thing will be under $3k, including auto-start and switchover. We already have Eaton commercial power conditioning and power backup (far more expensive than the generator), so there will be no interruption whatever, once the generator goes in.
The tower crew hooked up the new grounding of the coax and properly took it to a real ground, not just the tower itself. Apparently, the lightning rods were already okay. Fine job they are doing, as it was confirmed that the recent transmitter outage was from a lightning hit to the improperly grounded outer coax cable. The tower crew also remounted the whole stretch of the coax, which apparently was suffering from wind damage. They also removed some unused, abandoned wires and coax. Several tenants have left since we arrived — a 2-way radio system, pager company that went belly-up, and somebody who left a lot of equipment just as we were arriving. No idea what their business was.
A 7kw unit will be installed. It can run on either natural gas or propane. There is natural gas in the neighborhood, but no connection to our location.
So are you getting one day, three days or one week of propane? The good side of propane is that it is there on site. The down side of propane is that you have to buy a 100 gallon or 200 gallon tank and the cost to fill it is expensive ($4/gallon plus delivery charge).
BTW, the latest FEMA guidelines call for shutting in natural gas systems down in an localized emergency such as tornado, hurricane, etc. I’m not sure how common sense will be applied to the decision to cancel.
I got a quote of pulling a natural gas line onto my commercial property. It was $7,000 for about 1,000 ft of pipe plus a gas meter just off my gravel road that runs the length of my property.
All of this neat-o wunnerful stuff with propane and natural gas, relies, of course, on electricity to pump it and transport it and fire it up, not to mention, oh wait, it’s already been mentioned, the costs of getting it onto one’s property in the first place. Let’s hope the Grid stays up forever.
And that we don’t haveta go back to steam and wottuh power again.
Water power is awesome! We get 6% of our electric power in the USA from hydroelectric plants (back in 2008, who knows what it is today):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power_in_the_United_States
My dad was a steam boiler and turbine engineer back in Ancient Times and later become an insurance inspector for that stuff and a senior supervising engineer, without having finished high school (went off to the Good War and der unterseebooten) and bossing guys with graduate degrees. His dad was the Water Commissioner for the City of New Bedford back in even more Ancient Times.
We have so many rivers and falls in New England that I’m guessing we could more or less easily go back to using that kind of power again, and as it is, we get much of our power now from Quebec Hydroelectric.
http://www.hydroquebec.com/en/
STEM marches on, and while no one has been looking, solar is actually getting damn close to competitive with utility power. Solar cells and arrays are getting much more efficient and the prices are dropping fast. I suspect the day is not too far off when solar will become a major player. We’ll always need fossil/nuke plants (and/or pumped hydro) to smooth out the load, but my guess is that we’ll start seeing a large-scale move to solar within the next ten years.
I’m guessing we could more or less easily go back to using that kind of power again
I have a friend that works on hydro systems designing them. He told me that all the rivers in the US that can be damned and used for useful electrical generation have been damned. There are small rivers and streams that could be damned but the output would be small and the damage to surrounding country would be large.
His main job at this point is pumping systems where water is pumped into reservoir during the night and then released during the day. The turbines can be used as pumps or generators. When I visited him in Alabama at such a site I was able to go into a turbine housing, visit the control room, etc. The switches that switch the system from generator to motor were significant chunks of copper. The control would rumble when one of the turbines was brought online.
The turbine housing that I was able to go inside was under repairs. Seems like something went wrong and the force of the water had bent a 2″ diameter steel pin and they were having to replace the pin.
“All our times have come
Here, but now they’re gone
Seasons don’t fear the reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain
(We can be like they are)”
Solar cells and arrays are getting much more efficient and the prices are dropping fast.
I like the concept of solar power because it is almost in line with the power needs peak for air conditioning which is 3 pm to 7 pm. The downside with solar power is that the panels have a plastic cover over the cells which must be kept clean (snow, sand, dirt, bird droppings, etc). And over time that plastic panel get scored and must be polished or replaced (can this even be done?). Kinda like headlight covers that fade over time. One article that I read is that the plastic panels need to be replaced every 10 years or so which I found hard to believe.
So are you getting one day, three days or one week of propane?
Dunno. This is just the planning stages; after the second 4 hour power outage in less than a month, the decision was made to install a generator. Our chief tech works designing and installing cell phone towers, so whatever they use will likely be our solution. Of course their transmitters are very low power (2 to 7 watts, as I understand). Not sure how many of those they have to power, but we need to feed 3kw of RF up the antenna 24/7. Unlikely we need more than about 10 to 12 hours reserve. We use REMC power, and up until now, they have been far more reliable than the city electric supplying the studio.
In the major TV operations I have worked in, we always had sources of power from 2 different feeds, coming from entirely different directions. We did not even have automatic switch-overs, but just manual, requiring downtime of about 2 to 5 minutes. In all my working career of being daily in a studio (over 30 years), I think we switched power sources three times. Power has been pretty darn reliable in the places where I have been. Most of those studios were downtown, where power feeds were buried, and not overhead. Chicago came in above ground, and it was one of the places where I remember we had to switch, due to a traffic accident taking out a pole the feed line was on.
As far as power usage, except for air-conditioning, that has gone down dramatically over the years I have been alive. A radio station used to use huge amounts of power for all the audio equipment; now the entire studio to feed the audio link to the transmitter is about 75 watts, exclusive of the 2 computers needed to run it. Back in the tube days, we had to have special high amp service to feed all that was needed.
So while solar efficiency is climbing, the amount of power we all need is declining, making solar a more effective alternative. Although Vaclav Smil does not agree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJxmlNyu4sE