11:37 – The morning paper reports a home invasion in Walkertown, a few miles from here. Two masked invaders robbed the home and fatally shot one of the occupants. Barbara has a metal baseball bat sitting in the corner at the front door. I think I’ll replace that with a 12-gauge pump, even though we live in a very low-crime neighborhood.
Work on the prepping book continues. At the moment, I’m writing about why it’s a terrible idea to buy one of those X-person/Y-year emergency food kits that Costco and Sam’s Club sell.
14:31 – I just checked statistics and found that the prepping book is now 123 pages and about 46,000 words. It’s still full of gaping holes and nowhere near ready to have anyone see, but my impression is that I’m about 30% of the way through the first draft. I’m pleased with progress so far and I hope I can continue at the current rate.
“Barbara has a metal baseball bat sitting in the corner at the front door. I think I’ll replace that with a 12-gauge pump, even though we live in a very low-crime neighborhood.”
I endorse that change.
Neither youse guys nor us have kidz at home, so there goes one possible caveat. Here in northern New England it’s the back door that gets almost all the usage, esp. in rural areas and small towns like this one. Front door rarely, except for putting up seasonal decorations or having dinner guests or sumthin, again, rare. OTOH, if Barbara can hoist heavy bookshelves around like Mrs. OFD and her 86-year-old mom can move furniture (while I whimper and moan and suffer sharp and crippling pain if I turn the wrong way), then maybe just keep the bat. Have her practice home-run swings. Also jabs. And work out with a dummy, maybe a local lawyer or politician; practice on target points, like knees, ribs, side of head, etc.
We have surprisingly fast internet now, not thanks to Fairpoint, which was supposed to “activate” it for us two days ago (again) and have now postponed it (again) to the 22nd, but thanks to Mrs. OFD’s iPhone 5, used as a wireless hotspot. Just gotta keep it charged; our local town hall wireless basically bit the dust the other day, useless, so we’ve been using the phones for email. She just remembered she can tether hers and bingo, Bob’s yer uncle.
Or maybe not uncle, just that eccentric cuss down the road who never leaves the house but has large orders of chemicals and other packages arriving almost hourly, and strange odors and smoke trails…etc. Better notify the EPA and the Feebies ASAP.
So many jokes come to mind…
No doubt.
I guess I wasn’t thinking how I phrased that. Maybe we’re too literal up here.
I just checked statistics and found that the prepping book is now 123 pages and about 46,000 words. It’s still full of gaping holes and nowhere near ready to have anyone see, but my impression is that I’m about 30% of the way through the first draft.
150K words, nice! I will be able to use the book as a weapon of last resort also.
At the moment, I’m writing about why it’s a terrible idea to buy one of those X-person/Y-year emergency food kits
It looks good, but at 1,300 cal/day, it doesn’t even meet BMR for females. You’d have to double it to just maintain yourself watching TV all day.
Just doing chit around here and commuting to and from work and actually working at work unlike many, I gotta have several thousand calories per day. But if I gotta hump a backpack and weapons and ammo across a winter landscape for any distance, I think I’d have to double or triple those.
We had some light snow flurries this afternoon here but that was it; finally hit 32. Back to the fotties on Sunday, the weather liars say. Tomorrow will be ate up with helping MIL clear some stuff outta the house she’s sold down in Montpeculiar, dump run, errands, etc. Same old, same old weekend chit.
Lots of yard and porch stuff to do this coming week while Mrs. OFD is in Pittsburgh. Princess can’t make it here for T-Day ’cause Canadian universities like to deliberately schedule exams for that day, thus payback to Murkans, I guess; the missus sez they did it to her there back in the day and they’ve done it to son and daughter now repeatedly. So she’ll be here the day after, Black Friday, and I’ll do a vegan stuffing and grilled wild salmon for her and the usual for the rest of us; we don’t care if our T-Day dinnuh is a day late here, no big thang.
Should end up being many, many thousands of calories.
Fairpoint was ‘sposed to fire up our internet the other day; we have been told that an “appointment was missed” and it’s been re-scheduled/postponed until the 22nd. At that point I’d had enuff and called ComCast; they’re gonna come out Thursday the 20th and lay fiber underground here and give us wicked fast net: 150 Mbps download, 50 upload. I had said we just want the net, but wife now sez go ahead and get the phone and tee-vee on it, too. Off we go, into Murkan Land, I guess. In actual fact, we’d watch the tee-vee about twice a month, and more often during NFL season. But the intro package looks pretty good. Now I can call Fairpoint and tell ’em to go pound sand and/or piss up a rope. I get it that they’re on strike, got manglers and temps working, and have had several weather crises in Maine plus a fire over there. But five weeks for net outage is just not acceptable; wife has a biz and I gotta get one going.
Which seven books would YOU recommend for rebuilding civilization?
http://readynutrition.com/resources/seven-essential-books-for-rebuilding-civilization_10112014/
I have one of these and would get a couple more of them just for the current civilization, such as it is.
No brainer: The Way Things Work, volumes one and two
http://www.amazon.com/Way-Things-Work-Illustrated-Encyclopedia/dp/B000GP0CT8
http://www.amazon.com/Way-Things-Work-Two/dp/B000HW2YQE
And mucho gracias for these links, too.
Damned cold here in the Heartland. Forced into long underwear today. I have been wearing jeans almost everywhere ever since I found out about them at age 10 (no thanks to my parents, who always called them ‘work clothes’ and refused to buy them, so I had to buy them myself), and jeans just are not warm. This is probably the last year I can get use out of this long underwear, which is from Germany. In the US, when you want long underwear, everyone who markets them thinks you are going to be out in -10 F overnight, and so sells only the super-insulated kind. What they wear in northern Europe is just like my regular cotton underwear, only long, not the heavy-duty stuff that makes you sweat if it is over 50 F. Maybe I can get something from Amazon.de and get it sent over here. I see they still have my old Strausberg address in their address list.
Tonight will be 16 F. Better bring my brass monkey inside.
After one too many visits to a gay bar in Burlington, ODD wrote thus:
‘…it’s the back door that gets almost all the usage, esp. in rural areas and small towns like this one. Front door rarely…”
Too much information Dave… 🙂
Don’t know about rebuilding western civ, but this queer old volume might make surviving an apocalypse easier:
http://www.amazon.com/Wrinkle-Book-Archibald-1871-1934-Williams/dp/B00DJBQMI6
“…and jeans just are not warm.”
Try flannel-lined jeans, available at L.L. Bean, among other places, with a good selection of colors and sizes.
“After one too many visits to a gay bar in Burlington…”
Frankly, I dunno if there even are gay bars in Burlap. No ideer. I’m sure there must be, ’cause the local Stalinist nooz rag is constantly advertising drag shows, drag contests, and how wunnerful the gay lifestyle is, etc., etc. But where, I dunno. In fact, I haven’t been in any kind of bah for years now.
Anyway, I guess I better clarify for the filthy disgusting minds that are apparently out there: back doors here refer to just that, back doors of houses. Peeps in rural areas and small towns use them almost exclusively, and that’s how deliveries are made and where visitors visit. Front doors quite often inaccessible in wintuh ’cause of the five feet of snow out there in front of the house and no attempt to clear a path to that door.
I will be clearing a path here, though, if for no other reason than safety, and another path for the meter reader and oil delivery guys.
Which reminds me; I better staht looking at snowblowers…
Anyone else here living in the north country got any recommendations?
Keep your eye on Ego. Rumor has it that they will have a battery-operated snowblower before long. Unfortunately, you have to bridge the gap until they release it for sale.
http://egopowerplus.com/
Re: back door
One of my favorite unintentionally funny signs, ever.
http://www.nickscipio.com/pod/2006/10/11/national-healthcare-at-its-finest/
RBT, you might want to move the 12 gauge a little further from the door. When someone forces the door you will want to be able to retreat and then arm up- assuming you don’t answer the door holding it.
nick
I’ve actually considered the traditional approach used in Italy for luparas. A pair of hooks over the door. But I don’t think Barbara will go for that.
Also, just about anywhere in the house that I happen to be, there’s a heavy-caliber handgun, a shotgun, or a rifle within each reach. And then there’s Colin. I have no doubt that he’d attack an intruder, which’ll at least slow them down.