13:08 – I just started doing an initial inventory on the food we have stored in the basement. Until now, I’ve just been buying stuff and sticking it on the shelves in the basement, without any attempt to organize or inventory it. My goal was to get us, as quickly as possible, to a one-year supply of food for Barbara and me. (Or more likely, as I’ve said, a 3-month supply for the two of us and six relatives/friends, or a one-month supply for the two of us and 22 relatives/friends/neighbors.)
With roughly 1,200 pounds of stored food, we’re at the point now where the two of us could eat reasonably well for a year. The mix needs to be tweaked somewhat. For example, we need more spaghetti sauce, fruits, meats, and several other items, as well as more dehydrated/freeze-dried stuff like butter powder, cheese powder, and so on. And I’m going to add more staples–various types of flour, white rice, brown rice, egg noodles, white sugar, confectioner’s sugar, brown sugar, corn meal, etc.–but those we’ll pack ourselves in gallon foil-laminate Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers. Doing it that way is cheap–about half the price of buying the stuff in #10 cans at the LDS Home Storage Center, which is itself much cheaper than any other source for staples in #10 cans–and the staples will remain usable indefinitely.
Following up on the article posted here about that prepper who found his ideal hideout turning into a nightmare, he is not the only one experiencing hard times. The tune-in, turn-on, drop-out folks near the once hippie haven of San Fran Bay are finding it’s impossible to live off the land these days.
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/29/local/la-me-north-coast-pot-20120930
It was similar here in the Northeast over the past few decades; what were once rolling hills of farmland and woods are now strip malls and developments where they’ve bulldozed all the trees, graded it flat, even over wetlands, and built a bunch of cookie-cutter split-level dumps and MacMansions. I remember visiting friends in Humboldt County when I was stationed in Marin County and the big industries then (1973) were lumber, forestry and forest products, and pot farming. But now it’s gone crazy, and of course the newcomers are rolling in to plunder the landscape, make their bundles and then leave. Scum.
So be careful where you locate your prepper retreat is the lesson here.
Hey Bob, are you going to talk about prepper speculative fiction in your book? If so, I have several suggestions for your book starting off with “Lucifer’s Hammer”.
In case you were wondering, most flags of the world have either red or blue in them.
https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/534128279163138049/photo/1
So be careful where you locate your prepper retreat is the lesson here.
My cousin’s zombie book, “Feed”, by Mira Grant, aka Seanan Lynn McGuire, has Alaska totally overrun with zombies and incommunicado. So, just moving to the boonies is not good enough. For certain types of apocalypse that can backfire on you.
http://www.amazon.com/Feed-Newsflesh-Book-Mira-Grant/dp/0316081051/
BTW, her book was nominated for a Hugo in 2011 along with it’s two sequels in 2012 and 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel#Winners_and_nominees
And the Great State of Texas is up to 100 people per square mile. Alaska is just one person per square mile.
A prepper retreat for the right sort of person could actually be located deep in the bowels of an inner city.
Or way out in the howling wilderness.
All depends on how adept and slick said prepper is, and experienced.
I tend to think the smaht thing is to have it located in a rural small town near plenty of forest and farm country, with good potable wottuh supply nearby and accessible. Also smaht to be hooked up with like-minded family, friends and neighbors. Five miles or better from any interstate highway, rail line, aircraft flight path, and well away from dangerous substance manufacturing/producers/storage. Ditto military bases.
We had to compromise a bit here; working on family, friends and neighbors, but less than five miles from highway and rail and near a whole buncha mil-spec, cop and Fed organizations/buildings. But that could also work in our favor, depending on the particular circumstances.
In OFD IT nooz: phone interview tomorrow afternoon for a network/rack monkey gig; gonna double down on Linux and forget about Winblows jobs; I’ll never work a Winblows help desk gig again. Screw that. Switching the Mint desktop over to either CentOS 7 or RHEL 7. Updating the ancient Toshiba laptop (15 years and 1GB RAM) with the latest CrunchBang. Updating the Lenovo IdeaPad with the latest Santoku. Doubling the RAM on the HP laptop and installing PC-BSD with all the other BSD’s as vm’s. Updating the Ubuntu Studio desktop and moving it upstairs to attic workshop, plus new monitor and sound system. Working on multiple certs and devil take the hindmost. Somebody will want a Linux/network/security guy at some point around here. And meanwhile ramping up the alternative making–a-living-gig.
Mrs. OFD safely landed in Pittsburgh after very bumpy flight from Newark. She has a week there and her next gig is next month, somewhere near Philadelphia.
Our son and DIL may be moving with our grandchildren to the SF Bay area; wife is on board with it but me and Great-Granny not so much. I tend to think it’s rapidly becoming a Third World shit-hole and/or sliding into the Pacific. Plus cost of living, and cost of flights back and forth; I already have two nieces in college out there; one of whom will be graduating soon and starting work with Price-Waterhouse.
But I suppose my own parents weren’t real happy about their eldest son doing two tours in SEA during the wars, either. OTOH, they seemed kinda surprised I made it back alive…hmmmmm….
But I suppose my own parents weren’t real happy about their eldest son doing two tours in SEA during the wars, either. OTOH, they seemed kinda surprised I made it back alive…hmmmmm….
I cannot tell you how much relief we had watching our USMC get off the bus from March AFB to 29 Palms. We were there for the arrival of the entire battalion (1,500 men) both times he came back. Four or five 747’s full of men, one 747 a day each.
I’ll bet your parents were relieved, much relieved, each time you came back to them.
Both times I came back I was missing a couple of pieces of myself, but they never found that out. They got a whiff of the early-onset PTSD, though.
If your son has any issues along those lines, please get him to talk to somebody who can help, preferably other combat vets, and Dr. Bob has my email; he can always write to me any old time.
His PTSD is getting better, way better. He emptied an entire magazine from a Beretta 9mm into a traitorous Iraqi soldier who had just killed his hoochmate with an AK. The Iraqi soldier lived somehow and was taken in for questioning so I doubt he lived much longer.
He stopped smoking a pack a day about two years ago and is now fighting the bulge. I was glad to see him stop smoking though as his mother’s side is riddled with lung cancer.
I doubt that he will ever like fireworks again. He got mortared in a FOB in Hit, Iraq from Syria. He was unhurt but fireworks, especially the mortars, freak him out.
Sell and buy something out in the middle of nowhere. Sucks that you have to move to Oregon or Washington to do that, but you can get a larger chunk of land with your money. When I was in college in Flint, Michigan, people actually complained about the demand for housing for college students driving up real estate prices. Sell at the higher price and buy something nicer farther away from college.
“His PTSD is getting better, way better.”
Very glad to hear it.
Be advised, however, it can hide masked for a very long time and then kick up again decades later; we’ve seen WWII vets in their 80s and 90s who’ve never had any symptoms now getting hit with it, from events that happened 70 years ago. I did a good job of suppressing mine with various substances for 15 years and then the first Gulf War lit things up for me nicely even though I wasn’t there. Suppressed again for another 20 years and then all Hell broke loose.