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Month: April 2015

Friday, 10 April 2015

07:52 – I got a couple dozen chemistry and forensic kits built yesterday, just in time to fill overnight orders. I’m working on more biology kits today.

This week was consumed by taxes and kit stuff, so I didn’t get much done in terms of prepping. Here’s what I did to prep this week:

I almost gave up on it early, which would have been a mistake. Here’s an email I sent to the author yesterday (which includes minor spoilers):

Hi, Steven

As a prepper for more than 40 years, I downloaded your Jakarta Pandemic a few days ago when Amazon had it for free. (I’m giving away my age group when I tell you that my first reaction to the title was that you’d misspelled Djakarta…)

I really wasn’t expecting much. I’ve seen so many post-apocalyptic and prepping novels by self-published wannabe authors that I’ve come to expect them to be mediocre at best and usually just about unreadable. I was surprised to see that you’re actually a pretty talented writer.

I’ll admit that my first reaction to many of the points that “Gunny” raised in an early one-star review of the book was complete agreement. I liked Charlie Thornton as soon as you introduced the character and your initial representation of him as loony-toons nearly turned me off reading the rest of the book. I’m glad I continued. Gunny’s other points about Alex breaking his own quarantine rules and so on seemed valid until I realized that most people think they know what they’d do in a given situation but when faced with that situation may in fact take completely different actions. People are nothing if not unpredictable.

Same deal when Alex faces down Manson and his goblins. I agreed with Gunny that Alex would have to be nucking futs to go into that situation voluntarily with an empty shotgun. I’d go into it with my shotgun in Condition One. Hell, Condition Zero.

But as I read and thought about what you wrote I realized that you had in fact thought all of this through and were writing Alex as a nuanced character, as subject to doubt and inconsistencies as any real human. That’s when I realized that you were a real writer, so I immediately bought the first book in the Perseid Collapse series, just to make sure it was queued up and waiting when I finished the first book.

After reading the Perseid Collapse, I went over to your website and downloaded book two in that series and then turned around and bought book three. Now I feel guilty because I have four of your books and got two of those for free.

Incidentally, if I have one criticism of Jakarta, it’s that I found a lot of stuff that the proofer should have caught, from simple typos to sentence fragments. This was particularly evident in the last half of that book.

As someone who’s been writing professionally for 20 years, I can’t imagine not using a “kitchen cabinet” to catch stuff like that. I’ve used volunteer proofers/editors for every book I’ve written, and they’re very good at catching stuff before the publisher’s copy editor sees the manuscript. And not just typos and barbarisms, either. I’m currently writing a non-fiction prepping book, which I’ll self-publish in print with Amazon CreateSpace, and I have quite a few volunteers who make substantive comments on the content itself. They’ve made me rethink in several cases.

At any rate, congratulations on your prepping novels. Any more in the works?

Best regards.

Bob

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

Read the comments: 77 Comments

Thursday, 9 April 2015

07:59 – The federal and state taxes are finished and ready to go in the mail, so the top priority for today and tomorrow is to build more science kits. We’re down to exactly two left in stock, both biology kits. I’ll make up two or three dozen biology, chemistry, and forensics kits today and tomorrow, which’ll get us back up to reasonable inventory levels for this time of year.

Incredibly, some people are defending the actions of that murderous South Carolina cop, even after they’ve seen the video. Idiots who defend thuggish cops like Slager are as bad as the rabble-rousers who incite violence and racial hatred when cops are forced to shoot thuggish punks like Michael Brown.

Read the comments: 24 Comments

Wednesday, 8 April 2015

08:30 – The federal taxes are finished except for printing out the forms and writing the check. Our state income tax is based on the federal return, so doing it is a simple matter of transferring data from the federal 1040 and then plugging in some state-specific stuff.

Another police-involved shooting, this one in Charleston, SC. I don’t expect any social unrest to result from this one. It was a white cop shooting a black man, but in this case they’ve arrested the cop and charged him with murder. If the early reports–which seem fully supported by video shot by a bystander–are accurate, this cop deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. The cop pulled the guy for having a taillight out. He used his Taser on the guy, who then started running. The cop apparently fired eight rounds at the guy, who appears to have been hit only once or perhaps twice. I wonder where the other bullets ended up.

Tomorrow is crunch day for Greece, the first of many crunch days scheduled for the near future. It’s unclear at this point whether Greece will (or can) repay the monies owed to the IMF. If they don’t repay the IMF, very bad things are going to start happening quickly. Technically, Greece won’t be in immediate default, because there’s a 30-day grace period. That’s unlikely to matter to the markets, of course. If Greece doesn’t make the payment, the markets will hammer not just Greek bonds, but all bonds from the Southern Tier. Merkel desperately wants Greece to remain in the euro and EU, but her voters, the German taxpayers, have had more than enough. They perceive Greeks as deadbeats, and aren’t willing to pay the bills for Greece. This is a fraught situation, with Greece believing that Germany is bluffing, and vice versa. They’re both wrong. Neither is bluffing. So there’s a very real chance that a “Grexit” will result from a “Grexident”. Bond markets haven’t priced in the effect of a Greek exit from the euro, so if Greece does crash out of the euro the bond markets will go crazy.

11:21 – Boy, I just had a scare. I did a first “eyeball” pass on our state income taxes, and found that they have quintupled over last year’s. That’s not a typo. Our total state income taxes for 2014 will be literally five times what they were for 2013.

That’s because North Carolina has “simplified” state income taxes. I knew when I read about them simplifying state taxes that we were going to get screwed big-time, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this bad. So that’s four big checks that I’ll be writing: federal income taxes due, state income taxes due, federal estimated tax, and state estimated tax. And all of them have way too many zeros.

Fortunately, we won’t owe any penalties or interest on the state income taxes because Barbara’s state tax withholding and my state tax estimated taxes total about three times the total state taxes last year. But since our state income tax has quintupled, we’ll still have to write a big check.

Read the comments: 22 Comments

Monday, 6 April 2015

08:27 – I just started reading Steven Konkoly’s The Jakarta Pandemic, which is currently a free download on Amazon.com. I made it though the first 24% of the book last night. I liked that well enough that I bought the first book in his follow-on series, The Perseid Collapse. That’s currently selling for $2.99 versus the usual $4.99.

I’m still working on taxes.

Read the comments: 7 Comments

Sunday, 5 April 2015

09:34 – I’m still working on taxes. I’m doing the hard part right now, collating and organizing data. Actually filling in the forms will be easy.

We’ll finish series eight of Murdoch Mysteries tonight. It’s a period piece, set in the late 19th century in earlier seasons and in 1902 as of series eight. It’s supposedly based on early forensics, but the supposed forensic science is pretty bogus. This season, the emphasis seems to be on using UV light to make bloodstains fluoresce. Ironically, blood is actually one of the very few body fluids that doesn’t fluoresce under UV light.

I rated the series one-star until I realized that it’s supposed to be a farce. Or at least I hope it’s supposed to be a farce. If they’re serious, it’s just bad. Nonsensical plots, hokey writing, over-the-top acting, and so on. At least I get to shout “AHA!” frequently. And at least there are some cuties to watch, which is ultimately my yardstick for any TV series. Well, that and good dresses.

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Saturday, 4 April 2015

09:31 – I’m working on taxes today, and in particular on my business stuff. Revenues are easy enough to total.They’re all either transactions via PayPal or checks from colleges and universities, school systems, and so on. It’s expenses that are difficult and time-consuming to get a figure for. The straight purchase orders are easy enough. I can just use my corporate check register to total purchases from each of the vendors we use trade credit for. Some of the credit-card stuff is easy enough. For example, any credit card transaction with the vendor from whom we buy bottles is straightforward. It’s the mixed stuff that’s a pain in the begonia. For example, on a typical Sam’s Club run most of what we purchased was for personal use, but I also purchased stuff like T-shirt/Thank-you bags that we use in the kits, a gallon of 91% isopropanol that we use in the kits, and so on. So all that stuff has to be broken out.

Then there’s stuff I purchased as research materials and examples for the prepping book, which is all deductible. Some of that is in single orders, but a lot of it is also mixed with personal purchases, so it all has to be sorted out.

I want to get the state and federal taxes finished and in the mail in the next week or so. After that, Barbara and I may take a day trip or two up toward the mountains to check out various small towns that we might relocate to.

Read the comments: 38 Comments

Friday, 3 April 2015

07:36 – This can’t be good. With less than one week to go until it crashes out of the euro, Greece is on the edge of the precipice. Greece draws up drachma plans, prepares to miss IMF payment

Here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I ordered another case of 12-count 28-ounce cans (21 pounds total) of Keystone Meats canned ground beef. Including shipping, it costs less than $5/pound, versus $4/pound for fresh ground beef at Costco. That’s not much of a premium for shelf-stable meat. Keystone gives a best-by date five years out, but as usual that’s a gross understatement. We don’t like it as well as fresh ground Costco beef, which is probably a higher grade of meat and definitely contains less fat, but the canned stuff is fine for spaghetti and casseroles.
  • I ordered a case of 24-count 11-ounce cans (16.5 pounds total) of Crider Chicken Bologna, which is basically ground white-meat chicken with some spices added. It can be sliced as lunch meat or diced for use in chicken casseroles and other recipes. I wanted to order one case to try. If Barbara and I both like it, great. We’ll order more. If she doesn’t, I’ll eat it with crackers for lunch. At $32/case, it’s not much of a risk. The best-by date is listed as two years out, but again that’s completely imaginary.
  • I ordered more Augason Farms dehydrated foods, including two more #10 cans each of Chicken Bouillon Powdered Extract, Cheese Blend Powder, Butter Powder, and Dehydrated Diced Red and Green Bell Peppers Mix. I would also have ordered two or three more #10 cans of Egg Powder, but they were out of stock. Note that all of these are “meal extenders”, things that can be used to make bulk dry staples like rice, flour, and instant mashed potatoes palatable.
  • I added about 20 liters (5 gallons) of Costco bottled water, which is about a 5 person-day emergency supply, and another 20 liters in recycled bottles.
  • I put in another couple days’ work on the non-fiction prepping book. I’m up to about 400 manuscript pages and I’m nowhere near finished. I’ve already decided to make it two volumes, with the first covering through the end of one year and the second covering long-term preparation. I wish I could put in more time on it, but doing taxes will occupy a lot of my time for the next couple weeks and keeping the kit business running and getting ready for the summer/autumn rush is already a full-time job.

At this point, I’m reasonably comfortable with our level of preparedness. We can keep the five of us–Barbara, me, Frances, Al, and Colin–in food and water for several months, and would be able to help friends and neighbors in a shorter term emergency. From this point on, it’ll be replacing what we’ve consumed and making incremental additions to our longer-term stores. With the weather getting better, we’ll also spend some time making day trips to several small towns to the northwest of us to see what they’re like.

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

Read the comments: 29 Comments

Thursday, 2 April 2015

09:52 – Yesterday I started on taxes, which get more outrageous by the year. I’m sure we’ll have to write big checks for both federal and state taxes. We always do.

We finished series eight of Heartland last night. Amy married Ty after only eight years of dithering. I expect next season will be all about the newly married couple, and probably about them having a baby. One commenter on the CBC website said he’d just happened across the first five seasons on Netflix streaming and hoped to be watching Amy become a grandmother in 25 years or so. That’d be 33 seasons, which the series has the potential to do assuming that it continues to be funded and assuming that people are still making TV series 25 years from now.

I got email from Jen, who’s wisely decided to try cooking and baking at least once or twice a week using only her long-term shelf-stable stuff. The first problem she ran into, of course, was that most of her recipes call for fresh products like dairy and eggs. So she says she’s “cheating” on those items, but asked for suggestions. I told her to visit the WalMart website and order #10 cans of Augason Farms powdered eggs, butter powder, and cheese sauce powder and work those into her recipes. Two dozen #10 cans of each will cost them less than $1,200, or under $200 for each of the six people she’s planning a one-year food supply for, and will go a long way toward making the bulk dry staples she’s storing into palatable meals. I told her to start by ordering one can of each and trying them out. All of them are “best by” for one year after you open them, and a lot longer if you stick the open cans in the freezer.

Read the comments: 32 Comments

Wednesday, 1 April 2015

07:47 – New Scientist ran an interesting article yesterday, Anglo-Saxon remedy kills hospital superbug MRSA. Researchers recreated a medicine from instructions written down by a monk 1,000 years ago, and it worked. It killed everything it touched, including MRSA.

That’s not a big deal, really. MRSA is easy to kill on the skin surface. What is a big deal is that they don’t know WHY it killed MRSA. Something in that witch’s brew is lethal to bacteria. Once they figure out exactly what was created in that brew and HOW it kills MRSA, they may have something that can be developed into a new class of antibiotic that kills MRSA internally, which would be a big deal.

Jasmine started her new job on Monday, but resigned Tuesday morning. She did the right thing. The company had completely misrepresented the job. Monday morning, she found out that the job they expected her to do was completely different from the job they’d hired her for. They provided zero training and expected her to figure it out for herself, although of course she’d be responsible for her work product. They stuck her in a cubicle with another girl who’d been working there for about a month and is apparently one of the employees who’s been there the longest. The girl told her that they’d have to work into the evening just about every day, but wouldn’t be paid overtime. So Jas went back in yesterday morning and resigned, effective immediately.

Jas, of course, is completely crushed despite the fact that none of this is her fault. She went in in good faith, but the company completely misrepresented everything about the job. As Barbara said, the company is obviously hiring freely in the hope that some of the people they hire will be desperate enough to stick around. The good news is that Jas will be out today, visiting another prospective employer.

Barbara said the Keystone canned ground beef was okay, but she prefers the fresh stuff she buys at Costco. She didn’t like the Keystone stuff as well for beef Stroganoff, but said it’d be fine with spaghetti sauce or in a casserole. I asked her if I should order more. She said it was fine to keep on hand for emergencies, but said I should order only one more 12-count case of 28-ounce cans, so I ordered that last night.

Read the comments: 36 Comments
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