9:26:53.58 – Happy π day.
It’s a chilly, drizzly day here. Barbara has some errands to run, and then we’ll be doing kit stuff. Once we get our current stock of empty bottles labeled and filled, I’ll be reordering so that we can get thousands and thousands more bottles labeled and ready to go for the summer rush.
I haven’t yet heard again from Jen. I’m assuming that she and her husband picked up their trailer load of supplies at Sam’s Club yesterday and are now sitting in their basement wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into. The canned stuff won’t be too bad; they can just stack cases. But they were planning ultimately to buy about 1.5 tons (1363 kilos) of rice, sugar, flour, and other dry staples in 50-pound bags. I’m not sure how much of that they came back with yesterday, but getting that stuff repackaged in 500 one-gallon Mylar bags is going to be a lot of work. I did warn her to get a hundred bags filled BEFORE she opens a 100-pack of oxygen absorbers, and THEN drop one into each bag and seal the bags as fast as possible. I did encourage her to buy a good impulse sealer rather than one of the $35 cheapies on Amazon.com, and to have a regular clothes iron in reserve just in case.
10:56 – One advantage I mentioned to Jen of packing your own dry staples in foil-laminate Mylar bags also holds true for home-canned goods: in a large scale emergency, the “authorities” are much less likely to confiscate them, as happens frequently in major emergencies. They want commercially-packaged products, and the food industry has spent a lot of money to brainwash people into believing that food past its best-by date has gone bad. You can make confiscation even less likely by labeling your home-packaged food properly. For example, the next time we repackage dry staples, instead of labeling them “Rice, 6 pounds, Packed March 2015”, I’ll label them “Rice, 6 pounds, Expires March 1985” and so on. Who would want food that “expired” 30 or more years ago?
14:27 – We just returned from a very quick visit to Sam’s Club. The only shelf-stable foods I picked up were three #10 cans of vegetables and two #10 cans of Bush’s Best Baked Beans. Call it 35 pounds of food.
Before we went to Sam’s, we ran over to pick up Mary’s and Paul’s mail and paper, thinking they weren’t due back from Iceland until late today. Turns out, they had just gotten home. As we turned onto their street, Barbara said their garage door had just gone down. I told her to pull into their drive, where I pushed the button and made it go up again. Paul said it made him jump. He and Mary hadn’t even made it out of the garage yet.
They enjoyed their trip, even though the main purpose was to see the Northern Lights and Iceland was clouded out the whole time they were there. That, and there were no Northern Lights anyway. As I said, at least the volcano didn’t choose this week to erupt and strand them there.
I mentioned that Barbara and I were watching Saving Grace, and both of them had nice things to say about it. I really put it in our queue for Barbara, since I had no desire to watch a series that co-stars an archangel. (Why is archangel pronounced as in ark, while archbishop et al. are pronounced as in arch?)
But Grace is a strong atheist who isn’t buying what the archangel is selling. I consider myself a pretty strong atheist–a 6 out of 7 on Dawkin’s scale–but even I would believe given the evidence that Grace sees. So I’m assuming that she must be a 7/7.
This is the first time either of us has seen Holly Hunter, who’s extraordinary. Hunter manages to make her character likable, despite the fact that Grace is a 50-ish dissolute cop who arrests people who’ve committed no crimes, drives drunk and killed someone while doing so, engages in frequent one-night stands, and has an ongoing affair with her married partner. Even Barbara likes her, which is saying something.