08:20 – I got email from Jen, letting me know that she’s ordered egg powder, Morning Moo’s, butter powder, and cheese blend powder from Augason Farms via Walmart. Thirty cans of powdered eggs, 24 cans of Morning Moo’s, and 18 cans each of butter powder and cheese blend powder. That’s 90 total #10 cans for four adults and two teenagers. This woman doesn’t mess around. Her UPS guy is going to hate her. Again.
As I told her early in our exchange of emails, it makes me nervous when people order huge amounts of stuff based on my lists rather than thinking things through and deciding what specific items are best for them. But she raised an excellent point. I’m writing a prepping book, tentatively titled The Book That Will Not Die, and many readers are going to do exactly what she’s done, ordering specific items that I recommend. Not because they’re mindless drones, but because they want to get at least the basics in place as quickly as possible. Even if their purchases aren’t optimum for them, they’ll be a hell of a lot better prepared than if they sat there analyzing things to death and never actually getting around to stocking up.
Jen recommended a site run by a woman named Brandy Simper, who writes as The Prudent Homemaker. Jen recommended I start with About The Prudent Homemaker and Living on Our Food Storage. Both are well worth your time to read if only as more evidence that there doesn’t have to be an asteroid strike or pandemic or EMP to make long-term storage worth the time, effort, and cost. All it takes is a routine event like job loss, which happens thousands of times every day. This woman fed herself, her husband, and their seven children for two years from her stored food when the Las Vegas housing market collapsed and her husband, who’s a real estate agent, found his income cut to a small fraction of what it had been.
13:58 – I just shipped a kit to Switzerland, which isn’t a new country for me but is still kind of cool. I remember how cool it was when I finished, in amateur radio terminology, WAS (worked all states) by *finally* shipping a kit to Hawaii. And then how cool it was to reach WACEA (worked all continents except Antarctica). I seriously doubt we’ll ever reach the WAC milestone, if only because there are countries I wouldn’t ship to on a bet, but it’s pretty cool to have shipped kits to as many countries as we have. Things must be pretty dismal outside the US if people are willing to order science kits from us and pay heavy shipping surcharges to get them shipped internationally. I know that’s true of several countries, including Canada, because I’ve had several Canadian buyers tell me that it wasn’t a matter of them thinking our kits were better than local products; it was a matter of there not being any local products.