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Month: April 2015

Monday, 20 April 2015

10:21 – We decided to make a quick Costco run yesterday morning. The only prepping supplies I picked up were a couple large cans of Country Time lemonade ($6.79 each), 10 pounds of oats ($8.29), and an empty 20-pound propane cannister ($26.69). Well, that and two pairs of Kirkland jeans ($13.99 each).

I grabbed the 10 pound box of Quaker Oats right as Barbara was picking up two large boxes of cereal. She told me not to buy the oats. She doesn’t like oatmeal, and I almost never eat breakfast. Oddly, she likes oat bars and oatmeal cookies. Perhaps I’ll make her a batch of oatmeal cookies and/or oat bars with whatever is left after I transfer the bulk of the oats into 2-liter bottles. Even without an oxygen absorber, they’ll stay good in 2-liter bottles for at least five years if not ten. With oxygen absorbers, their shelf life is essentially unlimited.

What about Plodia interpunctella (pantry moths, weevils)? Not really a problem. They lay eggs in flour and other grain products that are stored in paper sacks or containers otherwise subject to access by the adult bugs. Using an oxygen absorber in a foil-laminate Mylar bag or a PET or glass bottle is a definitive solution. It suffocates the eggs or immature insects. But transferring the Quaker Oats from a sealed bag directly to clean 2-liter bottles also works pretty well. It’s not like a passing pantry moth is going to have much chance to land on the oats and lay eggs.

Some sources recommend putting the bottles in the freezer for a week or two to kill insect eggs. The only problem with that method is that it doesn’t work. It reminds me of that old joke about the guy tearing off strips of paper and tossing them out the train window in Vermont to keep elephants away. That works for the same reason freezing works. They both keep away the pests, elephants or weevils, because there weren’t any there in the first place. And a long line of scientists ending with Pasteur and Tyndall in the 19th century finally definitively falsified the concept of spontaneous generation, despite the millennium-long insistence by the Roman Catholic Church that spontaneous generation was the source of life.

I need to ship overnight kit orders and build more kits.

12:08 – It seems that Amazon is clearing inventory of their Fire HD7 tablets. Not the HDX7, but its predecessor. They have them on sale, today only, for $79 in the ad-supported version. I just ordered one for myself, along with a $12 folding case. The original HD7 is more than good enough for what I use a tablet for, which is mostly quick checks of email and web sites.

I got an HDX7 for Barbara, but I use it as much as she does. So much, in fact, that she’s started calling her Kindle Fire my Kindle Fire. Not good. So, once this HD7 shows up, her Kindle Fire goes back to being her Kindle Fire and I’ll have my own.

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Sunday, 19 April 2015

08:36 – Heavy rain in the forecast, so we’re doing inside stuff today.

Colin made a break for it yesterday while Barbara was outside working in the yard. He was there one moment and gone the next. We went off walking around the neighborhood looking for him, Barbara in one direction and me in another. He was nowhere to be seen, so we returned to the house to make sure he hadn’t been accidentally shut into the basement or something. While we were there, I grabbed a pair of FRS/GMRS radios that were sitting on the charger in the kitchen. We used those to communicate as we continued the search, me on foot and Barbara driving around the neighborhood. They worked fine. I found Colin and got him on leash and walked him home. I stuck one of the radios in each of our vehicles when we got back. Colin got a stern talking to.

09:55 – Here’s an item of prepping gear that most people forget to buy: a bulk propane cannister adapter hose.

Most portable propane appliances–stoves, lanterns, and so on–are designed to accept disposable 1-pound propane cylinders. These adapter hoses let you run those appliances from a bulk 20-pound cannister. It’s not so much a matter of cost. A full 20-pound cannister costs only a bit less than 20 1-pound cylinders. But many people keep a propane cannister or two for their gas grills, while few people would want to store two or three dozen of the small cylinders. In a typical neighborhood, most of the stored propane will be in 20-pound cannisters. Also, if you know an emergency is imminent, it’s a lot easier to grab two or three extra cannisters at a Blue Rhino stall than to get the equivalent in cylinders at a Home Depot or Lowes. (Just remember that the cannisters at those exchange stalls are typically underfilled, to perhaps 15 or 16 pounds, and plan accordingly.)

Note that there are two types of adapter hoses, high- and low-pressure. The one you want is a high-pressure adapter hose, which has no regulator built in. Devices designed for cylinders have built-in regulators. The low-pressure adapter hoses with regulators are designed to be used with specific models of propane appliances that have no built-in regulators.

A 20-pound propane cannister contains a lot of heat energy. We have an old Coleman 5029 catalytic propane heater, since discontinued, that produces 3,000 BTUs and runs for eight hours on a one-pound cylinder. It’ll run continuously for about a week on a 20-pound cylinder. It’s safe to use indoors, as long as you keep a window cracked for ventilation, and 3,000 BTUs is sufficient to keep a small room reasonably warm even when it’s below zero outside. Similar catalytic propane heaters are available new on Amazon and elsewhere for under $100.

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Saturday, 18 April 2015

10:07 – We’re doing the usual Saturday stuff. I’m just getting ready to start the laundry. Barbara is out running errands. She’ll be doing yard work later, but she has to wait for the grass to dry.

I’ll call this guy Tim. It’s not his real name, but then Jen isn’t her real name either. I’d written a complete response that totaled about 800 words, but WordPress ate my text when I tried to publish. So I’m just going to send Tim a copy of the draft chapter on emergency kits.

I realize you’re busy, and if you don’t have the time for a specific reply that’s fine. Feel free to quote this message, but please do not identify me.

I’m going to be doing as much as I can to be more prepared without drawing too much attention. I may buy a trunk full of stuff from Sam’s Club every Saturday morning instead of renting a trailer like Jen did.

The reason I’m trying to be low key is my wife’s sister and her husband that I previously mentioned as poorly prepared have given more thought to the subject than anyone else in my wife’s family. I’m sure they already think I’m a bit eccentric, so that’s not the issue. There are lots of people around me who are too busy not planning for the “normal” future to consider being prepared for unanticipated events. I don’t want to freak them out too much. If I brought home an AR-15, they’d get weird. So when the time comes that the next thing on the list is to get an AR-15, it will just show up next to the shotgun in the gun safe. Which reminds me that I need a shotgun and a gun safe. Both are higher on the list than an AR-15 though.

One of my wife’s high school friends and her husband are preppers, who told my wife they have an emergency kit in their car and my wife should too. I guess I’m going to have to “give in” to their suggestion.

I know you have talked about some of the stuff in your in car and bugout kits before. Have you posted an actual inventory yet? It would be a good starting point for my assembling in car and grab and go kits.

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Friday, 17 April 2015

07:41 – Most of the news in the local paper is unpleasant, but every once in a great while I see an article that actually cheers me up. There was one of those this morning, about a Wake Forest student volunteering with local middle-school girls to help them get started doing real science. I love seeing young people getting involved in science, but what really made me happy was reading that this Wake Forest student is doing a double major in Biology and Physics with a minor in Chemistry. The world needs more students like this young woman.

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I ordered a dozen more #10 cans of Augason Farms dehydrated foods, including two more cans each of Egg Powder, Butter Powder, Honey-Coated Banana Slices, Brown Sugar, and Lentils, and one can each of Cheese Blend Powder and Granola.
  • I read half a dozen PA novels, including the rest of Steve Konkoly’s Perseid Collapse series, and a couple of non-fiction prepping books, including Joseph Alton’s Survival Medicine Handbook. I also used Kindle Unlimited to check out another dozen or so books. None of those were worth taking the time to read in full. In general, books of this class range from mediocre to abysmal, but there are a few bright spots. What’s interesting is the sheer volume of books available. Prepping has obviously become a serious concern for a lot of people and has become a big business. Sam’s Club and Costco both feature emergency food on their web sites and in their monthly promo flyers, which they wouldn’t be doing if they weren’t making lots of money at it.
  • I put in another couple days’ work on the non-fiction prepping book.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

12:20 – I got email from Jen, the woman who contacted me a month or so ago about how to get started prepping. Her list this week is about ten times the size of mine. Talk about a Whirling Dervish. She’s gone from basically unprepared a month ago to being better prepared now than literally 99.99% of the population. She and her husband have also started to socialize with the prepper couple next door, who were formerly just friendly neighbors. Both couples are pleased, not least because their critical skillsets don’t overlap much.

But Jen has run into the same problem that nearly all couples do at some point when it comes to prepping. She’s reasonably comfortable at this point, but thinks they still need to do a lot more. Her husband is completely comfortable with their level of preparation as it is. He’s not yet voiced strong opposition to doing more, but as I told Jen, that day will probably come. Her brother’s family is similarly split, but this time it’s he who wants to do more and his wife who thinks they’ve done enough.

I’m in the same situation with Barbara, who believes in being well prepared but thinks we’ve already done enough. Except, of course, that she really wants to relocate to a small town away from the city. I’m reasonably comfortable with where we stand, and we have all of the major purchases out of the way. But I would like to extend our food supply further by purchasing more cheap bulk staples for dry packing as well as additional stuff like fruits and vegetables in #10 cans. At this point, I don’t think it’s the cost that concerns Barbara as much as the space and clutter. I’m going to try to do something about those over the coming weekends.

Incidentally, I suggested to Jen that she should start posting here herself, because I think she could make some useful contributions, but she wants to remain as low-profile as possible, so she’ll just keep emailing me when she has something to say. I asked her about quoting her emails anonymously, but she prefers not.

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Thursday, 16 April 2015

08:15 – We’re supposed to have another cool wet day, pretty much like yesterday, with the high never making it above the mid-50’s (13C). And the rest of the week is to be similar, if a bit warmer.

The rain patterns around here are why I don’t worry too much about emergency water supplies. If necessary, we can harvest rainwater just by putting containers under each downspout. It’s a very rare month around here when we don’t get at least 3 inches (7.6 cm) of rain, and 4 or 5 inches is common. A typical 30×60 foot ranch house has 1800 square feet of roof, so three inches of rain is 450 cubic feet of water, or better than 3,000 gallons. Call it 100 gallons per day on average. That’s about what we normally use for all purposes, including drinking, cooking, showering, laundry, washing cars, watering the lawn, etc.

Storing it wouldn’t be a problem. We have three 96-gallon rolling bins–one each for recycling, garbage, and yard waste–that could easily be washed out and sterilized with bleach. We also have 30+ plastic storage bins that average about 12 gallons each, and a bunch of 5-gallon pails that could be used to transfer water in manageable quantities among larger containers. And I have what we need to build a pre-filter that can handle thousands of gallons a month as well as a high-volume 0.02 micron filter (which stops even viruses) and chlorine bleach and other chemicals needed to treat the water to better than municipal standards. And, should we need to do so, I can do commercial grade coliform testing. It’d be a lot of work, but we certainly wouldn’t have a problem keeping ourselves in safe water.

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Wednesday, 15 April 2015

08:56 – Why More Men Are Sitting Down to Pee In my case, it was training by women, starting while I was in college. One girlfriend dumped me after about the third time she got up to pee in the middle of the night and sat on bare porcelain. Well, actually, it was worse than that. She got wet. It took years for me to retrain myself to sit as the default option.

I fell back into “power reading” mode last night and blasted through two of the novels I’d gotten from Kindle Unlimited–510 pages worth–as well as about half of a non-fiction title. Call it 700 pages total. For decades, that was pretty routine for me, maybe 400 to 500 pages of fiction a day. Some weekends I’d go through a dozen novels or more. But for the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve been spending a significant fraction of my reading time on the web and averaging only maybe a couple hundred pages of fiction per evening, or even less. And a lot of that is repetitive because there just isn’t that much new fiction that I want to read. Much better to re-read something I liked.

Kit stuff today. I need to get a dozen or two biology kits built and get started on more chemistry kits, which are starting to run low. One weekend soon we also need to get a bunch of components shifted from their shipping boxes to the inventory shelves and get solid inventory numbers on them.

I also have some longer-term stuff to work on. I’d like to ship at least one new type of kit this autumn, and ideally two. That requires groundwork and time. And of course I’m still putting in serious time on the prepping book.

12:23 – I continue to be impressed with these Ultrafire Cree flashlights. They’re focusable by sliding the front barrel in or out. At tightest focus, the beam becomes square rather than round, as the lens is actually focusing the LED. Walking Colin last night, I pointed the light on tight-beam at the house across the street, which is 50 yards away. The beam at that distance was smaller than the pattern of a 12-gauge shotgun with an 18-inch open cylinder barrel, and it was bright enough to read by. Too bright, in fact, to be comfortable for reading. So I turned it toward a house down the street that’s about 150 meters distant. At that range, the tight-focus beam was still far more than bright enough to aim by, and I suspect it would have been sufficient out to 200 meters or more. I think I’ll clamp one to Barbara’s Ruger Mini-14. The only modification I’d make is to tape the focusing collar in place to keep it from sliding under recoil.

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Tuesday, 14 April 2015

08:47 – I’ll mail the taxes today and this hassle will be over for one more year. I just wish I didn’t have to write checks with five numbers before the decimal point.

Barbara said last night that she wanted to look at Sparta, NC first as a potential relocation site rather than visit Dobson, NC. That’s fine with me. Dobson is a bit closer to Winston-Salem than I’d like, and it’s also only a couple miles from I-77. There are also chicken factories near Dobson that produce tens of millions of birds a year. Of course, there are also huge chicken factories in the Sparta area.

After I get the taxes off, I’ll be working on kit stuff. Our inventory on a lot of bottled chemicals is very low, so I need to make up new batches of a couple of dozen of them. I make up the ones that we use in the largest volume in batches of 8 to 12 liters at a time, assuming they’re stable. I make up others that we use in smaller volumes or that are less stable once mixed in batches of 1 or 2 liters at a time. Once mixed, they all need to be filtered and then bottled in kit-size containers.

I’m working on a bunch of different sections in the prepping book. Right now, I’m working on the section on providing minimal electric power in a long-term grid-down situation. Essentially, that means being able to recharge enough AA/AAA NiMH cells to keep stuff like flashlights/lanterns, and radios, as well as ebook readers, tablets, and other small electronic gear running. The easiest and cheapest way to do that is with a small solar installation charging lead-acid storage batteries. All you need to do that is one or more solar panels and a $12 to $30 PWM charge controller, and in a pinch you can get by without the charge controller. In a formal solar installation, you’d use deep-cycle batteries to store the charge, but in an emergency you can use ordinary vehicle batteries, which would be readily available in large numbers. Vehicle batteries are optimized for providing very high current for very short times, which means they don’t last nearly as long if you use them in low-draw/long-time environments, but that’s a minor issue.

15:02 – I just joined Kindle Unlimited for the free 30-day trial. Someone asked, so here’s the deal: when you’re looking at the book’s page you see the Buy icon with the usual drop-down list, which in my case includes three physical Kindles, the Kindle-reader app, and the option to download the file for transfer via USB. If you click on the Read for Free with Kindle Unlimited option, you can still pick the download for transfer via USB option, but it doesn’t actually work.Instead, the usual next screen comes up and asks you to pick the device to transfer the file to, which in my case is set to default to my own Kindle.

So I now have ten books queued up for delivery by Wi-Fi to my Kindle. The problem with that, as I’ve mentioned before, is that my Kindle frequently crashes when I let it access Wi-Fi. Sometimes, the crash is so bad that I end up having to do a hard reset, deleting all of the books from the Kindle. Fortunately, Amazon allows you to manage your KU titles, and one of the options on that page is to transfer the book by USB. So I downloaded all ten of the titles to my hard drive, dropped them into Calibre to strip the DRM, and then transferred them by USB to my Kindle. They all work fine, but seven of the ten aren’t worth reading. I hate to be harsh but my reading time is too limited as it is, and I don’t have time to read books that are mediocre or worse.

Four of those seven are by Steven Konkoly, whose The Jakarta Pandemic was an excellent PA novel, particularly for a first-time author. The four in question are all non-fiction prepping books he’s written with a co-author with whom I’m not familiar, but as it turns out they appear to be one actual book. The first in the series is listed as 246 pages, with the second, third, and forth volumes roughly 60 or 70 pages each. Unfortunately, unless I’m missing something, those latter volumes appear to be simple chunks of the full book. The whole work might be of some use to a complete newbie prepper, but there’s very little specific information there. For example, in discussing firearms, Konkoly makes no specific recommendations other than to say that one married couple of his acquaintance intended to wait things out on their boat. Konkoly recommended either a pump-action shotgun or a .308 rifle (unspecified as to brand or action). The wife was concerned about her ability to handle either, so Konkoly fired the .308 with her close at hand. It was too loud for her, so she ended up with the shotgun. I read maybe 20 pages of the full volume and found only more of the same. No specific recommendations anywhere to be found. So those four titles are going back immediately to free up slots for me to download more. (With KU, you’re limited to having 10 titles “checked out” at a time. If you want to get an eleventh title, you have to “return” one of the ten you have out.) I did a quick scan on the remaining six titles, and three of them are garbage. The other three I’ll have to check further to see if I want to devote the time to actually read them. The good news is that there are thousands of cozy mysteries available under KU, including many series that Barbara may be interested in.

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Monday, 13 April 2015

08:58 – Thanks to everyone who made suggestions about finding books that are available under Kindle Unlimited. This link allows you to search only books that are available under that program. It wasn’t an option the last time I looked. Either that, or Amazon had it so well hidden that I couldn’t find it. I’ll probably sign up for the KU 30-day free trial later this week and give it a try.

More of the same today, building and shipping science kits. We’re trying to get ahead of things now. April is the worst month for sales, but summer is approaching fast. Sales volume will start to increase next month, climb further in June, and start going crazy in July. In all likelihood, there will be days in July and August when we ship more kits than we do in the whole month of April, so we have to be ready to meet that demand. That means not just building subassemblies and full kits, but getting purchase orders staged to get stuff ordered in time to arrive here when we need it, including allowances for stuff that’s backordered.

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Sunday, 12 April 2015

10:11 – I briefly considered joining Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program yesterday, but I decided it’s not worth the hassle. Like the Kindle Lending Library that allows any Prime member to “borrow” one book per month without additional charge, Amazon has intentionally made Kindle Unlimited as difficult as possible to use. They obviously want to discourage anyone from borrowing books under either program. Otherwise, whenever you search Amazon’s books there’d be checkboxes to refine the search by selecting “Show only Kindle Unlimited titles” and “Show only Kindle Lending Library titles”. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to choose a specific book and then figure out if it’s available under one or the other program, both, or neither. Amazon makes both programs such a hassle to use that I’m not going to bother using KLL and I sure won’t pay them $10/month for KU.

Or perhaps I’ll sign up for their free 30-day Kindle Unlimited trial to explore further. I’m not optimistic. The main issue is that KU doesn’t include titles from the Big Five (formerly the Big Six) publishers, and many of the books Barbara wants are from those publishers. The other issue is that Amazon keeps track by communicating with your Kindle(s) behind the scenes. The authors get paid if you get a book under either program and read at least the first 10% of the book. That means that Amazon is watching what we do, and I don’t like that. In fact, I’m going to disable WiFi access on both Barbara’s and my mono Kindles, leaving only her Fire able to access Amazon and vice versa. Not that disabling WiFi access on our mono Kindles loses us anything. Every time I try to connect with one of them, the Kindle crashes and I have to do a hard reset, losing everything that was on the Kindle.

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Saturday, 11 April 2015

11:34 – We’re doing the usual Saturday stuff. I’m doing laundry and Barbara if off running errands, having lunch with a friend, and visiting her sister. We took some time this morning to make up a batch of the non-regulated chemical bags for biology kits, which was the last subassembly I needed to build a new batch of those kits.

Speaking of which, I need to get some purchase orders issued for kit components. Yesterday, I ordered a bunch of bottles and caps. That was the first time I’d ordered caps by the case of 10,000 rather than by the box of 1,440. They’re 20% cheaper by the case, and we’ll use them eventually, so it made sense to order by the case. I’m just wondering how big a case will be. A box of 1,440 is medium-size, so at roughly seven times as many caps, the case will be a pretty large box.

I’m running out of Zippo lighter fluid. I have a couple of 4-ounce (118 mL) cans in our car emergency kits, but I won’t touch those. (I know they’ll store well because a few months ago I opened a can that had been made in 1979 and it was full and worked fine.) The two 12-ounce cans I keep on my desk and end table in the den are empty or nearly so. I’m going to refill them with VM&P naphtha, which works as well as the official stuff and at about $15/gallon (3.79 L) at Lowe’s is a lot cheaper than paying $8 per 12-ounce can for the Zippo-branded fluid.

I’ve been reading a lot of prepper fiction lately, and almost invariably it has the protagonists bugging out with backpacks across devastated urban landscapes. Also almost invariably these protagonists are in their 20’s or 30’s, with equipment, skills, and physical conditioning that would be routine for SEALs, Green Berets, or Delta Force but are anything but the norm for regular people, including those in their 20’s and 30’s.

Now, when I was in my late teens through mid-20’s, I could run with those guys, and shoot with them, for that matter. I thought nothing of playing serve-and-volley tennis all day long in the August heat. My eyesight was better than 20/10. I hunted. I backpacked. I shot frequently on ranges and in funhouses for everything from combat pistol to clays to rifles out to 1,000 yards. I was in shape and as ready as anyone could be.

But I turn 62 years old in June. The state requires me to wear glasses to drive. My BMI is well down in the so-called normal range, and I think I’m in pretty decent physical condition for my age. But I’m a very pale shadow of what I was 40 years ago. Barbara is also in pretty good physical condition. She goes to the gym twice a week and is physically active day to day. But she’s had both knees replaced. In short, in a serious emergency, I can’t see either one of us being able to hike out carrying heavy packs. It’s just not on. Oh, we have what we need in terms of gear and so on, and the spirit may be willing but the bodies are weak. If we were faced with the need to evacuate on foot, we’d give it our best, but we’d almost certainly die trying.

That’s why my focus is on hunkering down in our home. In nearly any type of emergency, staying put will be the optimum decision for us. And for almost anyone else. Sure, a man of 27 might be a good candidate for SEAL Team Six, but what about his wife, his child, his mother and dad, his sister, and so on? None of them are going to be hiking cross-country carrying 80-pound packs. Nor would any of them be your first choice in a firefight. What they can do is function as what amounts to garrison troops to help defend your home, if it ever comes to that. Let’s all hope it never does.

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