09:22 – OMGWO inventory strikes again. I was attempting to build a batch of chemistry kits yesterday but I couldn’t find the wire gauzes that go in each kit. My inventory records claimed I had 302 of the things in stock, but that was last updated in September. I’m pretty sure I haven’t built that many chemistry kits since September, so I should have at least some of them still around somewhere. I’ll keep looking, but I cut a PO yesterday for 300 more, along with a bunch of other stuff. I do have a few of them, so I should be able to build enough kits to hold us until I find the others or the new order arrives. Meanwhile, I’ll go ahead and build the batch and label the ones that are missing the gauze.
I’m running low on pipe tobacco. Back in mid-November I’d placed my usual order for five pounds, which usually lasts me three months or so at roughly an ounce a day. The same stuff I ordered three months ago is now 50% more expensive, which seems a bit extreme. I told Barbara that if the price keeps going up I’ll start growing and curing my own.
The same stuff I ordered three months ago is now 50% more expensive
There must be a mistake. The government says that inflation is minimal.
Rick in Portland
I figured there was a new tax on tobacco, but as it turns out the supplier told the vendor that bad crops of some of the specialty tobaccos included in the blend had caused their prices to skyrocket.
Still, I think I may order some heirloom tobacco seeds and try planting a few. It’s not like I’m not in North Carolina, after all. Just about any variety should grow well here. When I first started buying pipe tobacco 25 years or so ago, I was paying $8/pound for what’s $40/pound now. And it’s perfectly legal to grow your own. So far.
I am seeing massive inflation on a lot of consumer products. Paper, food, housing, etc. The only thing going down in price is gasoline and diesel.
I am seeing a lot of people downgrade their purchases and buying house brands, etc to save money.
I’ve recently found that some of the house brands actually taste better than the premium-cost stuff.
But we won’t be growing tobacco up here anytime soon; and pot is out ’cause Our Nanny the Almighty State is playing games with it now and jockeying for total control. It’ll be a challenge for us to get a decent veggie garden going here.
It appears that southern Nova Anglia got the brunt of the 48-hour storm; we got half of what the weather liars had predicted. Now waiting to see if I have to drive Princess back up to Montreal today…wife apparently was able to fly out to Minnesota yesterday.
Hey Bob, here is a business opportunity. Start selling a kit to convert solar energy, atmospheric CO2 and water to gasoline. The costs for the catalysts may be horribly expensive though.
I’ve recently found that some of the house brands actually taste better than the premium-cost stuff.
We do not like Del Monte green beans. Too many stems in the mix. Of course, for some people that is just roughage. To me, Green Giant is the best canned vegetable brand out there.
You actually can grow tobacco in Vermont. Many varieties grow quite well up to about 50N latitude. Think Calgary, Alberta.
As to house brands, we’ve found that nearly all of Costco’s Kirkland branded products are at least equivalent to name brands, and often better. That goes for everything from alkaline cells and toilet paper to bacon and canned chicken to laundry detergent to OTC drugs. The only thing we’ve tried that wasn’t any good was Kirkland’s yellow clone of Dawn dishwashing liquid.
My rule is never to buy a branded product if there’s a generic alternative.
Good point; another good reason to visit this blog often. I should check to see if our Costco “Executive” membership is still active; we only have one up here, and it’s down in Colchester, near Burlington. I also hope to do a trip down to MA later this month or next to visit family and will be sliding by the LDS facility in Woostuh, which is very near where two family factions live right now. I have a fair amount of cargo space in the Toyota (RAV4) when I knock the back seats down, plus space under the cargo bay.
We should make a Costco run here in the meantime…been a long time.
With the Costco only 15 miles from you and the LDS store more like 200, you might be better off just buying stuff at Costco and repackaging it yourself. It’ll cost half as much as buying from the LDS store (which itself is a half to a quarter the price of commercial shelf-stable staples in #10 cans). Pick up 50 pound bags each of white general-purpose flour, white rice, and granulated sugar, 20 pounds or so of iodized salt, and a bunch of canned goods. Repackage the dry staples in empty 2-liter soda bottles that you’ve rinsed with water and dilute chlorine bleach solution and allowed to drain and dry. You don’t need oxygen absorbers for the sugar. Use them for rice, flour, oatmeal, grains, etc. Store them in the dark at anything up to room temperature, and make sure they’re where gnawing rodents can’t get to them. Sugar, salt, and so on are good for decades stored this way, as are wheat berries if you like to grind your own. Flour, oatmeal, etc. should be good for 5+ years, and probably a lot more. While you’re at it, buy large jars of onion and garlic powder and assorted herbs and spices.
For protein, we buy mostly canned meats and Bush’s Best Baked Beans, but you can store dry beans instead. The #10 cans of Showboat baked beans sold at WalMart/Sam’s are pre-cooked and pretty cheap.
For Mylar foil-laminate bags and oxygen absorbers, the LDS on-line store has top-notch products at very good prices. The only downside is that their smallest SKU for bags is 250 1-gallon bags for about $100.
Incidentally, the only reason I bought 28 cases of six each #10 cans at the LDS store (about 700 pounds of food total) was that I wanted something I could just stick on the shelf and forget about it.
Incidentally, carbohydrates like flour, rice, and sugar have about 1,700 calories per pound, so that 150 pounds of dry carbohydrates total about 250,000 calories. Assuming a 2500 cal/day diet with half your calories from carbohydrates and the remainder from proteins and fats, that 250,000 calories is a 200-day supply for one person. Of course, those foods also contain some protein and fats, so it’s not that simple, but it’ll do as a rule of thumb.
Speaking of fats, while you’re at Costco, I’d recommend grabbing maybe four 3-pound cans of Crisco shortening and two or three 3-liter bottles of olive oil. The Crisco should stay good on the shelf for at least five years, as should the olive oil. Again, stored in a cool, dark place.
We do not like Del Monte green beans.
At one of the places my aunt and uncle lived (after I had left the big ranch), Del Monte leased the field of about 30 acres next to their place. Del Monte was growing corn in the large field and told my aunt and uncle they could take what they wanted for their own use.
The day before Del Monte harvested the field we got some of the corn off the stalk and cooked it for dinner. Some of the best corn on the cob I have ever eaten. Only way it could have been fresher would be to build a fire in the field and dip the corn stalk into the boiling water.
The next day Del Monte showed up and started harvesting, several machines and vehicles. I asked the person in charge how long the time elapsed between harvesting and the cans were sealed. He said it was less than an two hours from the field to the can including transit time.
With all the machines they had the entire field was completely cleared in under four hours. They started at 6:00A and were done by 10:00A which meant the last bit of produce from the field was sealed in cans by 12:00 noon. They had another field close by that they had to harvest that same day. Del Monte used staggered planting so that fields did not come ripe all at once.
I did manage to snag some more corn from some stalks before they got harvested. Had them for dinner again that night. Really good stuff.
One of my friends in college was a biology professor who was also a prepper, although no one called it that back then. He lived on some acreage and grew a lot of their food, cut wood on his property for their woodstove, and so on. He claimed that corn wouldn’t last more than one minute from the time it was pulled from the stalk until it went into the boiling water. His wife would bring a pot of water to a boil while Al stood up in his corn field waiting. When she shouted that it was boiling, he’d come toward the house at a run, pulling and shucking as he went. I have to admit that that was the best corn on the cob that I’ve ever eaten, but I think the one-minute thing was a bit extreme.
At one point, I proposed a scientific study, with two pots of water boiling to test one-minute corn against ten-minute corn, but we never did that.
Thanks for the Costco tips; now to drive Princess back to Montreal. Later to check on our Costco membership status.
Just shoveled the driveway…again…luckily it was once again mostly powder. If I’d bought the snowblower it wouldn’t have snowed at all; since I didn’t, we’re getting hit, but not like MA and RI.
All this talk of food must have made the Mooch hungry.
It doesn’t get more Imperial than this:
First lady Michelle Obama is “confident” that controversial changes to school lunch programs undertaken after her lobbying will “eventually be embraced by kids.”
More Imperial directives from OdooshNozzle:
The Homeland Security Department has set up hotlines for illegal immigrants who believe their rights under President Obama’s amnesty policy have been violated.
“We’re really thinking about the kids who are kindergartners today,” Obama said. “If all they know are whole grains and vegetables, by the time they’re graduating from high school, this will be their norm; they won’t know anything different.”
And those kids will be bent, wizened gnomes, beset by rickets, beriberi, and kwashiorkor and with brains underdeveloped from malnutrition, with spindly legs so weak as to be barely strong enough to carry their prematurely aged bodies forward in the school chow line to receive their half-cup of brown rice and single, wrinkled carrot, but still with the strength to pull the voting-booth lever [1] for the glorious lefty-prog candidate of their era.
[1] The voting age having been lowered to five years because, inexplicably, most of the potential adult voters don’t survive past middle school.
Middle school anthem in 2020:
“Give me Kale or give me Death!”
And those kids will be bent, wizened gnomes, beset by rickets, beriberi, and kwashiorkor and with brains underdeveloped from malnutrition, with spindly legs so weak as to be barely strong enough to carry their prematurely aged bodies forward in the school chow line to receive their half-cup of brown rice and single, wrinkled carrot, but still with the strength to pull the voting-booth lever [1] for the glorious lefty-prog candidate of their era.
Hey, you read Glenn Beck’s “Agenda 21” book!
http://www.amazon.com/Agenda-21-Glenn-Beck/dp/147671701X/
Hi
You might want to look at software called Parts and Vendors. I have used it when I was in small companies. You can keep inventories and BOM’s and PO’s. When you build a kit it will pull items from your inventory.
http://www.trilogydesign.com/
it was cheap also.
Andy
As regards:
“For Mylar foil-laminate bags and oxygen absorbers, the LDS on-line store has top-notch products at very good prices. The only downside is that their smallest SKU for bags is 250 1-gallon bags for about $100.”
For even larger quantities and even better prices, there’s the Associated Bag company website, where you can order a thousand 6×8 aluminized Mylar bags for $138:
http://www.associatedbag.com/ShowProduct.aspx?ProductID=1976&CategoryID=129
Hey, thanks for the boffo laffs, guys; I needed those tonight; today sucked. Between the Princess hijinks today, snow shoveling, internet down, bills to pay, and yet another job reject, I’m beat, and need mindless effin entertainment, so I’ll be on Netflix watching the second episode of “Peaky Blinders,” pretty good so fah; set in 1919 Birmingham, England, rough-ass street gang led by a Great War vet with obvious major PTSD, just barely under control
You training Princess to use the snow shovel?
… and yet another job reject, …
You let them down easy, of course.
No one but me does the snow shoveling. I’ll buy a snowblower this year, and the backup one will be an electric snowblower that our son is handing over to us when they move to the SF Bay area in June. He’s also handing us their Toyota whatever, which I intend to trade in for a Tundra later this year.
My next younger brothers blower conked out on him so he’s been doing all the snow shoveling down in MA, which has been getting three times the snow we get here. Next younger brother after him has a big-ass snowblower so he’s good.
Princess rides her bike to take harp lessons and is now studying Gaelic on top of the other seven or eight languages she already knows. She was going back and forth today with the Quebecois customs/border patrol harpy who was questioning the expired U.S. passport (rapid-fire French); Princess is a dual U.S./Canadian citizen so it shouldn’t matter for shit. I have an “Enhanced” VT operator’s license and they just wave my ass through, both ways. The Visigoth Death Stare also helps, and if they say anything, I tell them I know Mr. SteveF and they wet their pants and weep a little and beg for my forgiveness.
Got any more funny questions, Mr. Greg? That one had me ROTFLMAO.
“You let them down easy, of course.”
Fuck them. Like Mrs. OFD said on the phone earlier. Another site whose nabobs want IT slaves who know all their giant list of acronyms so they can pay them shit to do the work of three former slaves and pretend to like their “open” and “transparent” (read very noisy and full of constant distractions) work space there, and probably married to the Agile Framework, “lean management” and Scrum bullshit that so many phony hipster places are into nowadays. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Onward and upward, to web site development/design, YouTube vid productions and the FFL. No more dreary, thankless sys/net/security/dba gigs for OFD! I learned my lesson finally.
Fuck them.
From your lips to God’s ears.
No more dreary, thankless sys/net/security/dba gigs for OFD!
Make it so!
@Andrew Bushnell
Thanks, but my problem isn’t the software. It’s that I pull stuff from inventory and forget to update the inventory records.
Thanks, but these aren’t even remotely comparable to what the LDS online store sells. These are 2.5 mil bags that are “metalized” by vapor deposition. The LDS store sells gallon 7.5 mil foil-laminate bags. That is, there are three physical layers, a sheet of aluminum foil sandwiched between a PET layer and a PE layer.
Snow blower? What the hell is that? I’m looking for a new battery powered weedeater. Spring has sprung here.
I’m looking for a new battery powered weedeater.
http://egopowerplus.com/products/12-string-trimmer
You can also get a blower that runs of the same battery system. I have it and it last long enough, with enough power, to do my entire driveway. If the battery does run down it only takes about an hour to get a significant charge which is enough time to enjoy a cold frosty one.
Well, the bags I pointed to are likewise three-layer, with aluminum sandwiched between two layers of plastic (described as “polyester and linear low-density polyethylene”), which is the same sort of description I see on the LDS site for their bags. The thickness is much lower, true, but that’s appropriate for smaller bags — and at any rate, I have some of these, and they’re not fragile to where it’d be a concern for food storage. (I presume a rat could chew through them, but that probably goes for any other bag one might buy, too.)
That leaves the thickness of the aluminum, which definitely could be improved in the bags I linked to: the aluminum is thin enough that you can faintly see through it, if you’re looking at something luminous. (I’d guess it blocks about 99% of the light.) The LDS website doesn’t seem to give any details as regards the thickness of the aluminium on theirs, though. But I see another site saying that their bags are made with “a complete middle aluminum foil layer (.00035)”, not mere aluminizing, and are completely opaque; so some are obviously made that way.
Whether this actually makes much difference is another question. I have an article in my archives from the guy who invented the aluminized mylar balloon (Gerald Hurst), saying that their aluminizing is “1-4 millionths of an inch”, and that that forms “a helium barrier”. Now, those balloons don’t have to last all that long, but on the other hand that’s helium, well known for its unrivaled ability to sneak through diffusion barriers. If you’re just trying to keep oxygen (a much larger molecule) out, it might not matter if the aluminum is thin enough to see through, especially if you have an oxygen absorber inside that will sop up leakage.
But maybe you have some good numbers on all this, rather than just speculation.
A not-too-expensive lash-up that may work is to dictate into a voice recorder what you’re pulling as you pull it. Some versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking (I think the “Premium”) can take input from a recorder.* You could then get a written version which you could use to update your inventory system. This is more work than directly updating the inventory program as you pull items, but less interruption at the moment, which I assume is the problem.
* You’d think you could use the regular version of Naturally Speaking and plug the recorder into the computer’s microphone jack instead of a microphone that you speak into live, but I couldn’t get that working. It’s possible some fiddling would have gotten it going; I didn’t put much time into it.
With that software you would have a BOM say for a chemistry kit. When you ship a kit you tell the software you shipped the kit and it deducts from your inventory.