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Month: January 2015

Sunday, 11 January 2015

09:05 – The low last night was in the mid- to upper-teens Fahrenheit (~ -8C). Not record-setting cold, but distinctly chilly for around here.

I got quite a few comments and email questions about my post yesterday, so I’ll try to deal with them here.

Q: How do you store all these dry staples? A: In clean 2-liter soft drink bottles, which can be stacked at least four or five high. The polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used for these bottles is by far the most impermeable to water vapor and oxygen of any common plastic. In the thickness used in bottles, it’s not as good as glass or metal, but it’s good enough for storing food for at least five to ten years. Some items, including the sugar and salt, don’t even need an oxygen absorber. For the others, one 300cc oxygen absorber per 2-liter bottle is sufficient to prevent oxygen damage.

Q: Why the emphasis on white flour instead of whole-wheat flour or wheat berries? A: White flour is far more stable in storage than whole-wheat flour. Wheat berries are more stable still, but require an expensive mill. Also, white flour is far more digestible, particularly for children, than whole-wheat flour or the flour you grind yourself from wheat berries. If you’re not used to a diet heavy in whole-wheat flour, you will regret a sudden shift to it.

Q: Why so much flour and beans instead of legumes and lentils like split peas, which are faster and easier to cook, particularly when fuel is in short supply? A: Again, digestibility and food preferences. Extended soaking greatly reduces the cooking needed for beans. White flour is extremely versatile. If you have any means of cooking/baking, it can be used for porridge/pottage, no-knead bread, pancakes, etc., etc.

Q: What’s the best way to get started on all this? A: Just go do it.

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Saturday, 10 January 2015

09:40 – Many preppers work on tight budgets, so I’m writing a large section right now in the Getting Started Chapter about Prepping on a Budget. It assumes a prepping budget of $50 per week, although that can be moved up or down according to individual circumstances.

The top priority is to begin accumulating empty 2 liter soft drink bottles from family, friends, and neighbors. These are used to store both water and food for the long term. The next priority is to get 60 of those bottles filled with water for each family member. That provides about 30 gallons of drinking water per person, or a month’s supply.

The next eight weeks is spent accumulating a basic food supply, which can be done in weekly $50 shopping trips or, more practically for most people, a monthly $200 Costco or Sam’s Club run. In fact, if you have an SUV or pickup, you could do one $400 run to Costco or Sam’s Club and get the whole eight weeks’ purchases all at once.

Week 1:

General purpose white wheat flour, Gold Medal, 50 lb.
Granulated white sugar, Domino’s, 50 lb.
Beans, dry, 10 lb.
Salt, iodized table, Morton’s, 12 lb.

Week 2:

Rice, white, 100 lb.
Bouillon, beef, Knorr, 2 lb.
Bouillon, chicken, Knorr, 2 lb.
Shortening, Crisco, butter flavor, 3 lb. can

Week 3:

Milk, instant non-fat dry, Carnation, 4.4 lb. (2 kilos)
Oil, olive, Kirkland, 3 liter bottle
Shortening, Crisco, butter flavor, 3 lb. can
Chili powder, 20 oz.
Yeast, Fleischmann’s Instant Dry, 1 lb. bag

Week 4:

Oats, Quaker Quick, 10 lb.
Cornstarch, Argo, 2 lb.
Pancake syrup, Mrs. Butterworth’s, gallon
Garlic powder, 20 oz.
Onion powder, 20 oz.
Cinnamon, ground, 20 oz.
Vanilla extract, pint
Pepper, black, ground, 20 oz.

Week 5:

General purpose white wheat flour, Gold Medal, 50 lb.
Granulated white sugar, Domino’s, 25 lb.
Rice, white, 50 lb.
Yeast, Fleischmann’s Instant Dry, 1 lb. bag

Week 6:

Milk, instant non-fat dry, Carnation, 4.4 lb. (2 kilos)
Milk, evaporated, Carnation, case of 24 12-ounce cans
Beans, dry, 10 lb.

Week 7:

Oil, olive, Kirkland, 3 liter bottle
Oats, Quaker Quick, 10 lb.
Beans, dry, 40 lb.

Week 8:

Milk, instant non-fat dry, Carnation, 8.8 lb. (4 kilos)
Shortening, Crisco, butter flavor, three 3 lb. cans

The interesting thing is that after eight weeks and $400.25 you have a full one year supply of food for one adult. Not very interesting food, it’s true, but all of the nutrition necessary–calories, carbohydrates, protein, and lipids. No fruits, vegetables, or meats, but those can be added incrementally once you have the iron rations taken care of.

Read the comments: 37 Comments

Friday, 9 January 2015

07:54 – As it turns out, our official low the other night was 6F, tying the record from 1970. We finally replaced the roll-around humidifier we’d been using for several years. We got that one when the one built into the furnace failed and would have cost $1,000 to replace. The furnace guy recommended the roll-around unit and said it was what he used at home. It put about 2.5 gallons (10 liters) of water into the air per day, but required filter replacements a couple times a year that cost $30 or so.

Barbara wanted to replace it with an ultrasonic unit that didn’t require filters, so we checked Consumer Reports and ended up buying this one. Consumer Reports classifies it as a small, single-room unit, but rates it to put out 2.1 gallons per day, which is nearly as much as our old roll-around unit. So we decided to give it a try. So far, so good. The reservoir holds 3.0 liters and on high lasts about seven hours, so the actual output is about 10 liters or 2.7 gallons per day. It’s kept the relative humidity in the house at 43% or higher even during the frigid weather the other night. At under $30, if it lasts even one full season it’ll cost no more than replacing filters in the old unit, so we’ll see how it does.

We continued watching The Great War Diaries on Netflix streaming last night. So far, it’s one of the best WWI docudramas I’ve seen, second only to Black Adder Goes Forth. As always, I find myself wondering how the UK ended up allied with France and Russia instead of its natural ally, Germany. The world would have been a very different place. The UK and Germany would have won the war, the Bolsheviks would have been wiped out and the Romanovs reinstated if indeed they’d ever been overthrown, the US would have remained neutral, Hitler would have remained an obscure laborer, WWII would never have happened, and nuclear weapons would probably never have been developed.

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Thursday, 8 January 2015

08:03 – Our low last night was 7F (-14C) or, as my grandmother would have called it, 25 degrees of frost. Our furnace ran pretty much constantly, but was able to maintain 68F (20C) in the house.

Barbara and I started watching The Great War Diaries on Netflix streaming last night, a reminder of just how quickly things can go from normal to catastrophically bad with little or no warning. Almost no one who woke up that morning at the end of June 1914 and read the newspaper headlines about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in an obscure town in an obscure Balkan country believed much would come of it. And yet within a month essentially all of Europe and Russia was mobilized and armies were on the march. The four years of slaughter that followed would change all of their lives.

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Wednesday, 7 January 2015

08:39 – My beta copy of the Foldscope showed up yesterday. These $1 microscopes are not toys; far from it. They’re intended for educational use and also for diagnostic use in the field. They come in several variants, including brightfield, darkfield, and polarizing, and in different fixed magnifications up to 1,200X.

The Foldscope beta project distributed 10,000 of these microscopes, including one to me. Their initial goal is to get a bunch of these into people’s hands and assemble documentation from contributed articles about various aspects of using the scopes. I plan to contribute a section or two myself anonymously and in the public domain. Once the scopes are available for sale commercially, we’ll probably start including one in every biology kit we ship. Maybe every kit, period.

I’m making up chemicals for chemistry and biology kits today, and may have time to get started on bottling them as well.

Read the comments: 37 Comments

Tuesday, 6 January 2015

07:45 – Kit sales are starting slowly this year. We’ve sold only half a dozen so far, which is actually fortunate. Our current inventory on the CK01A chemistry kits is down to -1 and we have only half a dozen of the BK01 biology kits in stock. So I’m building another batch of the chemistry kits today and will then get started on another batch of biology kits.

Our component inventory system failed again yesterday, but this time in a good way. Many of our kits include wide-range pH test paper. We used to include a vial in the kits, but last year the price more than doubled. So I decided to start packaging the stuff ourselves, ordering the paper in sheets with separate color key cards, and making it up in coin envelopes. That was actually cheaper for us, even counting labor to make them up, and it provides more than three times as much test paper per kit. A win-win.

We make up 400 sets at a time. A couple weeks ago, I noticed that we were getting low. It didn’t seem that we should have gone through 400 sets that quickly, but I went ahead and re-ordered enough of the test paper sheets and color key cards for another 400 sets. That order arrived yesterday, just as I found 200 sets already made up that I’d misplaced. Oh, well. We’ll use 600 sets up quickly enough.

12:44 – I see that DISH is now offering live TV streaming, including ESPN and ESPN2. The price is a rip-off, $20/month/user for channels that are ad-supported. A tenth that price would still have been too much, but I suspect a lot of sports fans will now be dropping their cable TV service in favor of 100% streaming, perhaps supplemented with an antenna for local broadcasts. For $5/month additional, DISH will offer an add-on group of sports channels, which should be more than enough for anyone.

A lot of people subscribe to cable TV service only because that’s been the only way they could get live sports. Crappy though the deal is, this should result in a lot of them bagging cable TV completely. This is the first crack in the dike, and I expect we’ll see it widening over the next year or so. Just as there’s no longer any need for local broadcast TV channels, there’s no longer any need for cable TV service. Broadband Internet does it all, as it should.

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Monday, 5 January 2015

09:06 – Barbara and I have started watching The Killing on Netflix streaming. It’s about–surprise, surprise–the murder of a teenage girl. It seems that many of the series we watch involve the murders of teenage girls and young women, and I’m getting sick of it. Most of them are very well done, but I simply don’t like the subject matter. I know it happens, much too often, in real life, but watching fictional representations makes me cringe. To a lesser extent, the same is true of medical and legal dramas.

That’s why I’d just as soon watch series like Heartland over and over again. They have real writers who can spin interesting stories without using life-and-death issues as a crutch. I could happily re-watch stuff from our current Netflix queue and DVD library without ever adding anything new. Series like Heartland, Everwood, All Creatures Great and Small, Lark Rise to Candleford, and many others. I don’t even object to murder mysteries, as long as they’re cozies. What I can’t stand is this hard-boiled stuff.

I’m still cranking away on the prepping book. At the moment, I’m working on the Section I chapter on power, lighting, and communications. (Section I covers dealing with emergencies during the first month; section II up to one year; and section III with the long term.)

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Sunday, 4 January 2015

10:10 – Is it just me, or is the new CNN website just about unusable? In the past, I’ve visited that site to keep an eye on what the leftie/progressive statists are up to, just as I visit the Foxnews site to keep an eye on what the religious-right statists are up to. But CNN is now so cluttered that I suspect they’ll see a huge drop-off in traffic, not that that’d be a bad thing. Turner’s news operations have been going downhill ever since the good old days when Bill Tush read the “news” with a paper bag over his head.

It’s supposed to get a bit chilly here by mid-week, with forecast lows about 10F (-12C). That’s dangerously cold around here, where many people don’t own suitable coats and the furnaces in many homes are insufficient to cope. I’m sure the new homeless shelter downtown will be packed to capacity, as will the churches that also take in homeless people during very cold weather.

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Saturday, 3 January 2015

09:27 – I see that Senator Harry Reid (Communist-NV) fell and hurt himself. Unfortunately, the injuries were not serious.

Today I’m doing laundry and Barbara is deep-cleaning the library/living room and dining room. Colin and I will stay well clear of her to avoid being accidentally vacuumed.

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Friday, 2 January 2015

11:29 – I guess I need to pay more attention. When I saw that headline that Mario Cuomo had died at age 84, my first thought was that, from recent images I’d seen, New York’s governor didn’t look that old. Reading further, I finally realized that there are two of the bastards, father and son. Geez. Wasn’t one enough?

The White Tornado struck yesterday. Barbara has declared herself satisfied with the state of the den and kitchen. Tomorrow, she starts on the library/living room and dining room. She’s also gently hinting that my office needs to be cleaned up, as in “Your office is a disaster area and Superfund site all rolled into one.” And then there’s the inventory/work room, which I plan to put some time in on today.

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