07:23 – Good for NC Governor Pat McCrory, who just vetoed the “religious freedom” bill. I’d have been all in favor of any bill that protected individuals’ and private companies’ right to discriminate against anything or anyone for any reason or for no reason at all, but this bill conflated the rights of individuals with the non-rights of government employees acting in their public capacities. It would, for example, have allowed public officials to refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. People have rights; governments do not.
Most of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff and the prepping book, but here’s what I did to prep this week:
- I read several prepping fiction books, including all three of William Allen’s Walking in the Rain series and the first in Steven Bird’s The New Homefront series. Both series are mediocre at best, about what I’d expect from newbie fiction authors, but both are readable. Both authors are obviously newbies, prone to “information dumps” in great amounts of detail, particularly about firearms, and military firearms at that. If I could give authors like these one piece of advice, it’d be to avoid TMI. I recall in one of Heinlein’s books he conveyed a tremendous amount of information in three words, “The door dilated.” These guys would go on for pages and pages about the dilating mechanism and a lot of other unnecessary detail. They obviously haven’t learned the first rule of writing, which someone famously summed up as, “I’d have made it shorter if I’d had more time.”
- I read the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.
- I read Tamara Price’s All Things Provident: Inspiring ideas to help use your food storage, manage your finances, and prepare for emergencies. She’s a member of the LDS Church, and there’s lots of church-related stuff in the book that won’t mean much to non-Mormon readers, but there’s still lots of useful information there. She does have an unfortunate tendency to write as though her freezer will still be working, but there are plenty of recipes that use only long-term storage items or items easily substituted for by shelf-stable items.
- I didn’t buy much, but I did a Walmart order for 17 28-ounce cans of Bush’s Best Baked Beans, 12 original recipe, 3 maple/bacon, and 2 onion. The price per ounce is lower than not just the regular 16.5-ounce cans but the larger sizes as well. I really like that Bush’s packages their products in four can sizes: the regular size 16.5-ounce cans (6.3 cents/ounce), the 28-ounce cans I ordered (5.4 cents/ounce), the 55-ounce cans (6.3 cents/ounce), and the 117-ounce #10 cans (5.8 cents/ounce).
- I also ordered one Bertolli Mushroom Alfredo Sauce to try, a can of Nestle Nido powdered whole milk, and (on Tamara Price’s recommendation) a bag of Krusteaz Family Size Buttermilk Pancake Mix.
All told, with only a few ounces of vegetable oil added, that order represents enough balanced nutrition to feed two people for a full week at 2,500 calories/day. Not that I’d want to eat baked beans and pancakes all day long every day for two weeks, but it’s still a nice addition to our stocks.
So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.
13:07 – Barbara and I are frequently amazed at what Colin will eat. He’s the most omnivorous dog we’ve had, and that’s saying something. One of our earlier Border Collies used to beg for lettuce, and loved celery. Just plain, you understand, not with salad dressing or other flavoring on it. I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised, given what all of our dogs have been willing to pick up and eat from the street.
Further confirming that Colin will eat almost anything, I was just filling some 2-liter bottles with bulk staples and spilled a tiny bit of bread flour. Colin swooped in and licked it up off the floor.
Speaking of which, just in case you find it useful for planning, a 2-liter Coke bottle filled to the very top will hold 1.50 kilos (3 pounds, 5 ounces) of Harvest (Con-Agra) bread flour or 1.90 kilos (4 pounds, 3 ounces) of Dixie white granulated sugar. For the flour in particular, that includes bumping the bottle vigorously to help settle the flour.
Since moving to TX I switched from Bisquik to Krusteaz. I buy the family size bag too. The pancakes and waffles are delicious. I do add one capful of vanilla extract (Kirkland brand) to each batch, and I reduce the on-bag recipe by half. Even without the vanilla, it tastes great. Don’t over mix it and you will have fluffy pancakes.
All the Krusteaz products I’ve tried have been first rate.
The rain and flooding cut short the amount of time I was able to spend prepping for the future, but it did provide a chance to practice collecting info on an ongoing local event.
I monitored the local Skywarn frequency (and contributed reports), had the Sheriffs and Constables up on the scanners. One trick to scanning is that you have to hear the report the 1st time. There is no recap when you come back from commercial. This is a different kind of listening than I am conditioned to by TV. Also, no one is in the Voice Over explaining what you are hearing. Anyway, it takes practice just like most things.
I also decided that you really need multiple physical scanners. It’s no good to have 1000 memories across 22 agencies. When scanning stops, you are on that agency until the TX ends, then on to the next channel, except when there is a lot of traffic. Then you never get to your other agencies, or you lose the thread of what is happening with your main agency. Pick one agency per radio in a metro area. It’s a full time job keeping up with 4 radios when it’s busy. You rural folks might have a different experience.
I was using my main trunk tracker to monitor the Toll Road authority (very good for flooding and accidents, road closures etc) and the Sheriffs and Constables. The SDR has a waterfall display that is very useful to see what freqs are in use and where the heavy traffic is so I was skipping around a bit, but mostly on the Sheriff’s dispatch freqs as they were the busiest. It doesn’t trunk track, so you get bits and pieces of conversations. In combination w/ the trunk tracker, it worked well to give an overview. Skywarn spotters gave the best sense of the weather events, which makes sense.
It’s also handy to be able to mute or turn down the volume on one scanner at a time when something interesting is happening on the other.
For a different type of event I might listen to different agencies (and it might change over time). I would definitely have the INTEROP channels up on UHF and VHF if the Feds or out of state agencies were involved, and I think I’d try for the TV station private channels during a civil disturbance. They have been assigned freqs to communicate between the studios and reporters in the field. I bet that might have some good stuff on there that never makes it to air.
I was able to use some “preps” to help our local daycare recover from the flooding. I have the scare quotes on because I’m not sure I consider a shop vac a prep, although the commercial ventilator fan definitely is. If you are subject to flooding, you need the tools to recover, and pumps and fans will be in short supply. We used the shop vac in pump mode to drain 4 inches of water out of a low area in the daycare, and they’ve been running the ventilator fan 24-7. So I guess I’ll call it a prep, since I had what was needed without going looking for it. As an aside, if the stores and rental places are out of pumps or ventilator fans, or chainsaws and generators, head to the pawn shops. They are full of the type of items people buy when needed then get rid of after the need has passed. I haven’t checked the rental places but every pawn shop I was in yesterday had room dehydrators, chainsaws, generators, and several of them had commercial floor drying ventilators or other fans. Some even had trash pumps. Prices are not going to be great, but getting the tools you need to save your house would be worth it. And that is all the more reason to buy BEFORE you need them.
On the food front, the garden continues to grow albeit SSSLLLLOOWWWWLLYYY. I’m reading about people harvesting tomatoes beans and peppers, but I’m no where near that.
On storage food, I found another canned veg my wife will eat (by preference- anyone will eat anything if hungry enough.) It’s canned cabbage, and came from the more ‘colorful’ section of the grocery store. It’s aimed at a ‘down home southern’ buyer, not a Polish or Hungarian buyer. With some bacon crumbles added (Kirkland brand, shelf stable) it is really tasty. Bacon crumbles make almost anything taste better, including pancakes and waffles.
I think it is important to store foods with a wide variety of flavors to avoid food fatigue. I use the ethnic and imported aisle at the grocery store to expand my horizons. Strong flavors will also extend bulk foods like rice.
I also always look at the AS IS or clearance section of the grocery. Lots of items that are new to the market or ‘strange’ end up there when they don’t sell well. This is particularly true of sauces. They often have lots of time left on their sell by dates (which are BS anyway) and some of them are tasty or very high end. (High end products might not sell well in your store, if the neighborhood won’t support it. Then they get clearanced for pennies on the dollar.) I see exotic hot sauces all the time. Hot sauce is the soldier’s friend for getting unpalatable food down….
Only a couple of estate sales this weekend, and the weather will probably keep the yard sales down, so I’m not optimistic about finding a bunch of good preps. That’s probably why I’ve been hitting the pawn and thrift stores this last week, jonesing….
Well, it will give me a chance to catch up…
nick
Oh, the CERT enewsletter had this link to FEMA info on safe rooms.
https://www.fema.gov/safe-rooms
Some good info there, if you dig. Not as practical as links I’ve posted before.
nick
Yes, I haven’t had Krusteaz pancakes in probably 40 years, but I remember them being excellent. Not that pancake mix isn’t something I could easily make up from bulk staples, but it has a reasonable shelf life and it’s convenient.
I also make it a practice to visit the website of such vendors for their recipes. They have a vested interest in providing good, reliable recipes for their products. I just wish that King Arthur Flour, Bush’s Best Baked Beans, Krusteaz, et al. would combine those recipes into downloadable PDF files to make it easier to grab all of them at once.
Agreed about the bacon bits, although Augason bacon-flavored TVP is just about as useful. My problem is that Barbara has very strong food preferences and is extremely averse to any change, even if she likes all the substitute ingredients. For example, she likes popcorn and bacon. Last night she said she was going to make some popcorn, and I suggest sprinkling it with bacon bits. Her response was, “EWWWW! That’s disgusting.” Her default with regard to any food that’s new to her is to dislike it.
Incidentally, my food preps include some unusual stuff, including suspensions of Lactococcus lactis and Lactobacillus bulgaricus in phosphate-buffered saline. With that and milk, fresh or reconstituted, I can make my own buttermilk. I also maintain stabilized cultures of quite a few other useful microorganisms, including ABE bacteria.
Most prepping took a back seat here this past week due to ongoing house, tax and job issues, plus the usual VA appointments/meetings. What little prep I got done had to do with radios and firearms, natch, ’cause that was the only fun I got all week.
Here’s a question for y’all Firefox users:
It’s crashing at least once and sometimes twice a day; I believe I have the latest and “greatest,” but apparently I’m not sure and previous Help and About seem to be MIA. I normally have about a dozen tabs open at any time, but rarely more than that and often fewer. I was trying to wean myself off Chrome but am finding I need to have three or four choices of browser running so if one is screwed up, I have another to use.
Off shortly to the VA again and then back here for more outside work while the sun is shining and it ain’t raining, which it’s been doing for the past several days, mainly via showers and t-storms, which leaves everything soaked, muggy and buggy. Nothing to compare, however, with our friends’ situation down in the great Lone Star State.
I’m using FF 38.0.1 at the moment and it is fine. I have 2 windows open with multiple tabs in each. I occasionally have an issue where pages load with a black overlay, that only goes away when I scroll or move the mouse over the page. Restarting FF clears that up. I’m using it on vista ultimate, win 8.2 and on win7ultimate.
nick
the only add ons are adblocker and web your way, but I’ve got WYW disabled.
Yeah, restarting it works, until later or the next day. And thankfully it restores the previous pages, like Chrome has done for quite a while.
Windows 8.2?
Yep, FF 38.0.1 here also. On Windows 8.1 that’s been regularly updated.
38.0 on the Ubuntu Studio where it does not crash regularly.
I assume y’all have read the articles about Dennis Hastert? It’s a really odd situation:
– First, the feds are charging him with structuring, and with lying to federal agents. Both of which are utter bullshit charges – neither should be a crime, and both are just ways for the feds to get at someone that they can’t prove a crime against.
– Second, the guy was apparently being blackmailed by someone he knew back in the 1960s or 1970s. Yet the feds have made no move to charge that person with blackmail or extortion. Why not? I mean, no matter what Hastert did to open himself up to it, blackmail is still illegal.
– Lastly, the feds apparently know whatever it is that Hastert did back in the day, yet they haven’t said. That’s also pretty odd. If it was criminal, even if the statute of limitations has expired, why not name it? If it wasn’t criminal, why aren’t they nailing the blackmailer?
Odd, all the way around. Makes you think that there’s some other reason they are going after this guy. Did he piss on Chelsea Clinton’s desk or something?
Oh, I also meant to mention: It’s well known that Google doesn’t much like ad-blocker apps, however, they apparently have nothing against ad-blocking browsers. As someone who really likes the Ghostery plug-in, I was happy to see that Ghostery now has a full-fledged browser for Android.
Figuring out how to make it block stuff was a trick – it comes with all blocks turned off, and turning them on one-by-one currently doesn’t work properly. But you can go into the general settings and turn them *all* on at once. Ah, much more peaceful. Dunno what browser engine they’re using, but whatever it is works just fine. Recommended!
Lastly, the feds apparently know whatever it is that Hastert did back in the day, yet they haven’t said.
One report says he has a love child.
Here’s another thumbs up for Krusteaz products. Besides tasting good I find that they seem to last the longest once opened.
Took a stroll down my local Walmart’s Augason Farms aisle and it looked like it had been hit by hoarders, very little on the shelf. Do you folks remember my warning about upcoming shortages of powdered eggs and chicken? Just coincidence the shelves were almost bare? Well I asked the Grocery Manager and his says that Augason Farms shipments have been short for the past couple of weeks and his status shows it is not about to change anytime soon.
I applaud @Greg Norton for fleeing the Left Coast of WA State. We are still pretty civil here in the Southeastern corner of the State, but Spokane is going downhill fast.
My Paternal Grandmother moved from Missouri to Bellingham about 45 years ago and her middle daughter and son-in-law followed a year later. Within 10 years they felt the insidious creep of leftists. My Grandmother became increasingly unhappy and soon passed away. Her Daughter and family moved to Idaho, let’s just say that they are into Guns, God, and… There’s a lot more to this story, but I won’t bore you folks with my verbosity today.
lying to federal agents
The best advice when talking with federal agents is to say absolutely nothing. Do not give your name, do not say “yes”, do not say “no”, don’t even grunt. Do not provide identification as doing so is not required by any authority unless you are driving a vehicle.
If in custody of federal agents do not take a drink from any bottle or vessel as they will capture your DNA (pour the water into your mouth holding the container with something over your hands or use a drinking fountain). Do not take anything they offer if it requires that you touch the item. Do not touch anything. Make them open any doors for you. Only use a toilet that you can physically see flushed. All you should say is “I want a lawyer”. Repeatedly if necessary.
BTW, the latest Costco mail order flyer has two prepper food items:
– Mountain House 1 person-year of food. 3986 servings in 220 #10 cans. 1900 kcal/day for $3999.99 delivered. ($500 off) All freeze-dried stuff. http://www.costco.com/3%2c986-Total-Servings-1-Year-1-Person-Food-Storage-Supply-by-Mountain-House-.product.100167991.html
– Shelf Reliance 1 person-year of food. 120 #10 cans. $1199.99 delivered ($300 off). Some grains and freeze dried stuff. Some has 3 year shelf life!
http://www.costco.com/9687-Total-Servings-1-Person-1-Year-Food-Storage.product.100003177.html
As fro my prepping activitites – we moved the hurricane kit from the storage unit to the house. After I reorg the garage, it goes on top of the generator.
@OFD, regarding Firefox, besides having the latest version check your Java and Flash plugins. Be sure you have the latest and do not have past versions lingering around.
I highly recommend Revo Uninstaller: http://www.revouninstaller.com/
The free version is real good, however I did buy the Pro version for my main computer, run the free version on all the others.
Also take a look at CCleaner: http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
Does a good job of safely getting rid of the detritus left by installs/updates/uninstalls.
Well, I wouldn’t worry about the DNA, because you’re already SOL. Ask any dog that knows how to trail: you leave a trail of DNA wherever you go. There was a case a while back where they cleaned a chair before the suspect sat on it, then swabbed it after he left, no problem.
The “don’t talk” advice is right, of course. Righter would be if this stuff weren’t criminal, because they just use it for entrapment: asking you a question that they already know the answer to, but asking in a way that they hope will provoke you to lie.
A love child? If true, hardly illegal, so again one wonders: why are they out to get this guy?
Yeah, there’s a chicken holocaust going on from bird flu. Entire farms with hundreds of thousands of chicken’s have been wiped out. IIRC, the total tally is something in the tens of millions of chickens dead naturally or destroyed to contain the infection. Egg price have literally doubled and tripled over the last three or four weeks.
OK, I have a decision to make today. I need to order another WD external hard drive for the office LAN backup. I will be setting the last 3 TB drive in backup rotation aside for perpetuity (or what passes for that in rotating hard drives) on June 30. So get a 4 TB, $139, or a 6 TB WD, $249, external? The LAN backup is 2.3 TB nowadays and growing at some 20 to 50 GB per month.
http://www.amazon.com/Book-USB-Hard-Drive-Backup/dp/B00E3RH61W/
@ech
Those x-person/y-year kits are a horrible idea, any way you look at them. Variety is always lacking, the choices of meals is nearly always bizarre, and there’s very little real meat. (The average American eats about 195 pounds of meat per year.)
Freeze-dried in general is almost always a hideously expensive choice. Costco currently has one of the BEST deals I’ve seen on freeze-dried meat, a $450 set of 12 cans of Thrive (formerly Shelf Reliance) freeze-dried hamburger.
http://www.costco.com/276-Total-Servings-of-Freeze-Dried-Ground-Beef-Food-Storage.product.11753126.html
Each can contains 26.7 ounces of product, which rehydrates to 4.39 pounds. So the total for the $450 set of 12 cans is 52.68 pounds of rehydrated ground beef at $8.54 per pound. Wow, only a little more than twice as much as Barbara pays at Costco for a pound of 90/10 fresh ground beef, which is the best available.
And they’ve “improved” this product. It used to be 100% beef. Now the contents list includes:
Ingredients: freeze-dried beef, salt, spices, flavorings, hydrolyzed corn protein, grill flavor (maltodextrin, flavor [from corn oil], modified corn starch, corn syrup solids).
I’d much rather buy Keystone Meats canned ground beef. It’s pure beef, and a case of twelve 28-ounce cans costs $80 plus shipping, assuming that your local Walmart doesn’t carry it. If it does, it’ll cost something like $6.25/can with no shipping. The shelf life is nominally 5 years, but when I talked to the company, the woman said she’d personally eaten from cans that were 10+ years old and she couldn’t tell any difference. I believe her. I’d bet money that the stuff would be essentially unchanged after longer than the rated shelf life on the freeze-dried stuff. Canned food basically doesn’t age.
– First, the feds are charging him with structuring, and with lying to federal agents. Both of which are utter bull**** charges – neither should be a crime, and both are just ways for the feds to get at someone that they can’t prove a crime against.
Never, never, never talk to a federal agent. I made that mistake a little over a decade ago and that got me a visit from the CIA. Whom, I proceeded to boot out of my office after a couple of hours that I will never get back.
Basically, there are so many laws nowadays that the feddies can charge you with breathing. That structuring law is bogus and the feddies know it.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/15/attorneys-feds-will-give-nc-man-his-seized-107gs-back/
I bought another 15 #10 cans of Augason Farms from Walmart. Tried to buy more eggs but they are out, out, out. Bought mostly bread products this time. Have no idea how that we will cook bread if the electricity is off.
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Whole-Eggs-Dried-Egg-Product-33-oz/21777161
@Lynn – I don’t have a specific place to point you, but in all my daily tech reading the WD 4TB drives are considered the best and the sweet spot. I use several of their “green” drives, but would use the “black” if the budget allowed. In any case, even though I am a data point of one, my circle of gray-beard peers are still biased toward WD.
Happy shopping.
I have seven WD external drives in my backup drive rotation. I write one drive per week so we have a six week backup. I replace one drive and archive it twice per year. So, any drive that I purchase needs to last 3.5 years. That to me says buy the biggest drive that I can find due to LAN usage growth. The problem is, I am frugal and cannot stand to pay the extra $100.
I also have three 4 TB internal drives spinning on our LAN that are updated daily backups. They are all WD green drives. We just rebuilt our source code file server with two drives, a Intel 530 240 GB SSD with all of our source code, etc, and a WD 4 TB black drive for the “other” stuff such as benchmark backups, source code backups, etc.
Also, we are now a Windows 7 x64 shop for all of our daily usage PCs, including the two file servers. We still have a Windows XP box for testing and our demo laptop is a Windows 8.1 box.
Wow. Frugal is great, but it seems to me that backups are just about the last place I’d want to be frugal, after maybe your parachute.
Reminds me of an ad I once saw: “Body Armor. Cheap!”
This week I added a bunch of dried fruits to my supply. Mostly I put them in there to increase variety. An apple or peach pie can go a long way to cheering up a crowd when everything seems bleak. I also received a few of the Baofeng UV-82 radios. I just put them on the shelf, no time to play with them right now.
Once I started preparing I also started looking at the world through a prepper’s eyes. Recently I visited a colleagues home and my first thought was “very defensible”.
Yesterday my morning commute was an hour longer than usual due to a rolled over truck. I realized that this is how every road will be after a SHTF event.
If things go bad in a very short time frame while I’m at work, could I get home? Work to home distance is 28 miles. I decided I need to refine what I carry in my car so I can get home even if I have to abandon the car and start walking. I’m thinking that along with water, energy bars, knife, etc I need to keep a good pair of sneakers or boots in the trunk.
Yep, that’s why I said that I’m terrified when Barbara travels. Realistically, she’s not going to be able to walk any great distance, let alone defend herself from the two-legged rats that proliferate any time there’s an emergency.
You have a very long walk. Even during normal times, that would take an average person 10 to 12 hours to walk. In an emergency, with the likely need to skirt trouble, you’re probably looking at spending the night outdoors, so I’d also carry supplies for that eventuality.
I would also want a firearm if at all possible. One thing I’ve not heard mentioned is taking it down to individual parts and concealing them around the inside of your vehicle. You could even go to such lengths as sealing a pistol frame in plastic, wrapping and taping padding around it, and the putting it inside a camping pillow that you sew up after you replace the fill.
Well, there’s frugal and there’s frugal. There’s no real quality diff between the 4GB and the 6TB (if there is, it probably favors the 4TB). It’s just a matter of when it gets full.
That said, if you’re a software shop, and not doing piles of multimedia stuff – what the devil do you have that fills up 4TB? Even if it’s uncompressed, that’s a lot. If you don’t compress your backups, that’s an obvious answer.
If you do compress, and have 4TB, maybe it would be worth seeing how much of that data is really necessary. For example, at one point I realized that our database server makes daily backups, and I was making regular backups of the entire directory of months’ worth of daily backups – talk about needless data multiplication!
My plan if things go bad fast while I’m at work is to hightail it toward home ASAP. I know the back roads well and would stick to those until gridlock set in. No need to be polite, drive across lawns if necessary. If I can drive the first 10 or 15 miles I’m in a much better position when I start walking. Plus so many mundanes in the world will not hit the road immediately, they will sit waiting for the “the government” to come and take care of them. That might give me a little extra window to get home.
I’ll pass on the Limburger/Fluck controversy, as although I’m far from a ditto-head and long considered his show entry-level “conservatism” for those who’d never encountered it before, I think he’s more right about her motives than her testimony indicated. Whatever. I guess even Roman Catholic hospitals should underwrite the med insurance for birth-control pills for radical fembot activist lawyers and suchlike. And she’s married now, so maybe she gets hubby to pay for that stuff.
On La Coulter, yeah, she’s a bitch on wheels personally, as conservatives I know who’ve worked with her at various events around the country had told me, but she is also far more right than wrong on most issues, like Mexican immigration, for instance:
http://takimag.com/article/adios_ann_coulter_gavin_mcinnes/print
http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/good-eats/14-series/flat-is-beautiful-v.html
Baking Soda and Baking Powder supposedly go bad quickly. Is that due to oxidation? That is, would putting oxygen absorbers in baking soda/powder extend their life indefinitely?
“Last night she said she was going to make some popcorn, and I suggest sprinkling it with bacon bits. Her response was, “EWWWW! That’s disgusting.” Her default with regard to any food that’s new to her is to dislike it.”
Cadbury’s has come up with Vegemite flavoured chocolate bars. I was convinced it was a hoax at first, that someone had hacked their website, but I’ve seen it in the local supermarket. Chocolate is nice, Vegemite is the food of heaven, but together? No thanks!
https://www.cadbury.com.au/Products/Blocks-of-Chocolate/Cadbury-Dairy-Milk-Vegemite-Block.aspx
@Chad
Someone misinformed you. Baking soda (AKA sodium bicarbonate, sodium hydrogen carbonate, or NaHCO3) is stable at room temperature. At elevated temperatures two molecules of sodium bicarbonate break down into one molecule of sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) and one molecule of CO2 gas.
Baking powder, on the other hand, is an inherently unstable mixture. It’s a mixture of baking soda and one or more acid salts. Single-acting (old-style) baking powder uses an acid salt that reacts with the baking soda in the presence of moisture. Double-acting baking powder contains at least two acid salts, one that reacts with moisture to cause initial rising, and a second that reacts with oven temperature heat to release a second batch of carbon dioxide.
I have seen shelf life for baking powder specified as 10 years or more when in a sealed can, but the truth is that any baking powder is suspect after only a few months to at most a year or two. I don’t store baking powder because of this instability. Even if it’s not exposed to moisture, the two dry salts in close contact can react slowly to release the carbon dioxide gas. When people baked a lot more than they do now, it wasn’t uncommon to find an exploded can of baking powder in the pantry. The gas pressure would build up until the can couldn’t take it any more and then blam. That’s probably why baking powder has for decades been packaged in cardboard “cans”, even back when metal cans were the norm.
Incidentally, you can substitute vinegar or another food acid and baking soda for single-acting baking powder. I have components on hand to make my own double-acting, but that’s probably getting too far into things for most preppers.
Actually, I store a couple liters of food-grade glacial (100%) acetic acid rather than vinegar. Distilled white vinegar is simply 5% acetic acid, and is usually made by diluting glacial acid. In the space taken up by one 1-liter bottle, I can store the equivalent of 5+ gallons of vinegar, which I’ll dilute as necessary.
One word: Sourdough.
Best damn bread in the world. Conjure it from the air.
On the FF front: I double-checked updates and all that and after it crashed repeatedly today, like four or five times, I gave up on it; exported all my bookmarks to an .html file on the desktop and have now imported them to Sea Monkey. I’ll do it again for Chrome, Opera and Safari. Also IE, for laughs, see how often that crashes.
Have no idea how that we will cook bread if the electricity is off.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/good-eats/14-series/flat-is-beautiful-v.html
That was cool!
Here are the bread #10 cans that I bought this week:
Augason Farms Emergency Food Buttermilk Biscuit Mix, 46 oz
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Buttermilk-Biscuit-Mix-46-oz/22985138
Augason Farms Emergency Food Buttermilk Pancake Mix, 54 oz
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Buttermilk-Pancake-Mix-54-oz/22985153
Augason Farms Emergency Food Honey White Bread & Roll Mix, 58 oz
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Honey-White-Bread-Roll-Mix-58-oz/22985152
Augason Farms Emergency Food Blueberry Muffin Mix, 56 oz
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Blueberry-Muffin-Mix-56-oz/22985134
Augason Farms Emergency Food Blueberry Pancake Mix, 55 oz
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Blueberry-Pancake-Mix-55-oz/22985154
When I get these, I need to sit down and inventory what we have and fill in the holes.
On the FF front: I double-checked updates and all that and after it crashed repeatedly today, like four or five times
Probably a bug in your video driver. FF seems to sit right on top of the video driver and expects some things to work in a certain way. See if the problem still happens when you turn off Hardware Acceleration.
Dutch Oven? (yes the cast iron cookware)
Absolutely.
Cast iron cookware rocks; we have Lodge pots and pans, plus the enameled iron made by Le Creuset, which we got on sale or as seconds or passed down to us.
A lovely sunny day up here with blue skies and temp in the 70s and a nice breeze off the lake; mowed the lawn when I got back; more do-list chores tomorrow. Doing the whole lawn in one fell swoop kinda wastes me for much more grunt stuff for a while, a few hours anyway. As a kid mowing lawns for money I used to do four or five a day, often in sweltering heat and humidity without even breaking for water. All summer, while working a p.t. gig nights at the local cinemas or supermarket or department store.
Then I went home and read books, watched some crap on the tee-vee with the siblings, and built model ships, tanks and planes. Then blew them up. Also ate like a horse; breakfast, snacks, lunch, snacks, supper, snacks, and that continued right into the mil-spec service; from a 165-pound rail in high skool to 185 in boot camp and police training, and finally 215 in my prime, hiking up and down Kalifornia mountains at 19.
Starting a basic P.T. program Monday; cardio plus old-skool chit with push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, etc. Free weights later. Gotta get rid of the gut and get back some flexibility and see if I can rehab the creaky knees and lower back. Goal is the flexibility and dropping from 245 to 225 and from 38 waist to 34.
[snip] with lying to federal agents. [snip]
My younger sister spent 15 years as a public defender. Her advice, for when being questioned by Agents of the State, was as follows: Be Quiet. Don’t Say Anything. And SHUT THE FUCK UP!!! As an addendum, she once suggested bringing your own recording device to any questioning. Federal agents, in particular, react like vampires to sunshine.
And FF 37.02 seems fairly stable when paired with Open Suse 13.1
FF has been OK on all the Linux machines and only seems to crash with Winblows. Sea Monkey has been fine so far.
The STFU advice goes for all other “law enforcement” types, not just Feds. Speak the absolute minimum and request a lawyer ASAP. On routine traffic stops, also say the minimum, produce the documentation required in your state, and STFU. Do not engage in friendly chit-chat or banter. If they escalate to removing you from the vehicle and/conducting a search, move to the lawyer step forthwith. And STFU.
But don’t call Saul.
@Bob, are you going to address feeding your neighbors in your book? I figure a month into the nightmare, your starving neighbors will smell your cooking food and come over for a handout XXXXX handup. I guess that the major question will be how much and how often to feed them? Too much and you will become a soup kitchen or food bank.
@nick had a great idea of a container with an old coleman stove, propane, and some rice??? to hand out.
Regarding Dennis Hastert…
I just looked at his Wikipedia article. He was a teacher in the Sixties and may have sexually abused a student. Not sure if it says male or female, and I can’t be bothered going back to look.
No mention of a love child.
Charity is a very tricky subject. Many electrons have been spent in debate.
If you feel compelled to, try to do it anonymously thru a 3rd party.
If the ravening hordes find out you have something they want they will take it all. There are always more mouths to feed than food.
Which means using stealth when cooking. (no open fires)
In less than Mad Max situations:
Ferfal suggests going to food distribution points and standing in line with everyone else. You don’t want the neighbors wondering why you don’t.
Short term events, you can organize or contribute to ‘stone soup’ nights. You will have to decide how much to contribute. This was my plan for a regional disaster, and used to be the only reason I stored any bulk food. If you know your stores will outlast the return to normal, it’s easier to share.
Earthquake stories out of Cali always have a shared meal between neighbors as freezers defrost and food ‘would just go to waste’ if not eaten. Help is never far away however. Many preppers have plans to convert frozen to longer term storage options in the event there are significant power issues.
During the prior great depression, farmers often fed hobos in exchange for work, real or token. Some didn’t. Some were undoubtedly abused for their kindness, some abused for refusing.
Bottom line is it is dangerous to be seen as a “have” when there are a lot of pissed off and desperate “have nots”.
nick
BTW, my kitchen packs are to help friends who I would like as fellow survivors, not strangers. Although thinking about it, it makes sense to have one for the soup kitchen.
Well, there’s frugal and there’s frugal. There’s no real quality diff between the 4GB and the 6TB (if there is, it probably favors the 4TB). It’s just a matter of when it gets full.
I ordered the WD 6 TB. Bob is right, that is the wrong place to be frugal.
http://www.amazon.com/Book-6TB-Hard-Drive-Backup/dp/B00KU686HI/
That said, if you’re a software shop, and not doing piles of multimedia stuff – what the devil do you have that fills up 4TB? Even if it’s uncompressed, that’s a lot. If you don’t compress your backups, that’s an obvious answer.
I do not compress backups as I feel that is dangerous. I like to make mirror images of all the drives on the LAN that are readily accessible on any device without any special software. My PC is ok so my C:\ directory on all the backup drives is \ok_c\.
I am fairly paranoid so I archive the complete sandbox of our software development directory for each release, about 12 GB. That really mounts up after a while. Plus I do have the daily backups of our CRM going back several years with once backup per month plus all the backups for the last 90 days. Yup, I am a packrat.
The wife and I are regular contributors to the Second Mile Mission in Missouri City. A friend of mine was one of the founders back in 1990. Our church is very involved with Second Mission also. Second Mile is not just a food pantry but also tries to help people with medical and dental issues.
http://www.secondmile.org/
Some were undoubtedly abused for their kindness, some abused for refusing.
Were you here for the great New Orleans migration after Katrina? An older lady picked up some people and took them home. They rewarded her by robbing and killing her.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/10/31/evacuees.killing/index.html
I know that is the exception, not the rule. But, I do not want to be an exception.
“During the prior great depression, farmers often fed hobos in exchange for work, real or token. Some didn’t. Some were undoubtedly abused for their kindness, some abused for refusing.”
Story of my grandfather. He was a rancher, but also ran “Sutton Corner”, which was a food store, barbershop, etc.. He sold food to everyone in the neighborhood. Those who couldn’t pay, could take it on credit, because he couldn’t turn them away hungry. Of course, most couldn’t pay back their credit, so Sutton Corner went under.
He had other stories to tell. The feds decided that deflation was the bigger problem, and they wanted to drive up food prices. So they came and shot a bunch of his cattle, paid him $5 per head, and then stayed around to make sure that he let the corpses rot in the fields.
– – – – –
“she once suggested bringing your own recording device to any questioning. Federal agents, in particular, react like vampires to sunshine.”
Dunno what the rules are now, but back in the Martha Stewart days the feds would not allow any recording devices. The only record of an interview was their hand-written notes. Makes it easier to fudge what was said, and if you contradicted their notes, then that was yet another lie you were telling, for which you could be prosecuted.
– – – – –
All stories with the same moral: They’re from the government, and they’re here to…um…help you. On another subject entirely, someone should tap the founding fathers for power, as they spin in their graves.
Were you here for the great New Orleans migration after Katrina?
My MIL helped at the former Kelly AFB when many of the Katrina people were sent there. She helped fix bologna sandwiches. The people told her that they did not eat bologna and refused the sandwiches. Those type of people you let starve.
Dunno what the rules are now, but back in the Martha Stewart days the feds would not allow any recording devices.
I think that has changed and the FEDS now records all conversations. I think you are also allowed to bring your own recording device.
When a FBI agent showed up at work two years ago (I knew he was coming) to interview me about a friend that was getting a super secret job at the nuclear facilities in the area I brought my own recording device. The agent said it was OK to use the device. Granted that was not a criminal investigation and in such cases the rules may be different.
Complete nutrition for one person can be bought now for less than $1/day. Call it one pound of rice or other starch, three ounces of beans, an ounce of vegetable oil, and a couple grams of herbs/spices. That means it costs less than $20 to feed 20 neighbors for a day, or less than $600 for a month. That seems like pretty cheap insurance to me. And of course, most of them will have at least some food stored themselves. It may be only a week’s worth, but that’s a start.
I’d package that in 20 CARE packages, each with 30 pounds of rice and other grains, five pounds of canned beans, a liter of vegetable oil, and small packages of spices. If and when it became obvious that food shortages were going to persist, I’d distribute those to the 20 neighbors I’d decided to help, and get them organized to defend the neighborhood. I’d also tell them up-front that this was all we could spare.
I’d want a core group of at least eight well-armed adults that I’d be prepared to feed for at least one year, and ideally two or three. I would have plenty of spare rifles and shotguns with ammunition to arm family and friends, but I certainly would not distribute any weapons to neighbors who were not friends. I would NOT stand in line to get food distributions. I understand the “OPSEC” issues, but that would be taking food we did not need from people who do need it.
I’ll say again that I’m not expecting things to get bad as in One Second After bad. I am expecting civil unrest and a slide into dystopia.
brad wrote:
“Dunno what the rules are now, but back in the Martha Stewart days the feds would not allow any recording devices. The only record of an interview was their hand-written notes. Makes it easier to fudge what was said, and if you contradicted their notes, then that was yet another lie you were telling, for which you could be prosecuted.”
In the late Fifties in South Australia an Aboriginal guy was charged with rape and murder of a 10 year old girl. I think he was almost certainly guilty but the cops muddied the water by trying to frame him. Stuart allegedly dictated a confession in polished English that the cops said were his own words, verbatim. Trouble was he was almost illiterate in English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Stuart
the cops muddied the water by trying to frame him
Cops lie? Surely that cannot happen in any modern country.
It still stands and is worth repeating. Do not say anything to the police when you are questioned. Stay silent. Do not give them your name. Do not say yes, do not say no, do not nod your head. The only words out of your mouth should be “I want a lawyer”. If the police attempt to search you you should say “I do not consent to being searched”, over and over. Police can only do a cursory search for weapons if you are not being charged. Rifling through a wallet or purse is not allowed until you are charged.
When pulled over for a traffic violation only answer direct questions. Say no more. If the police ask you to get out of your vehicle take the keys with you and lock the doors. Do not unlock the doors even if demanded. The police are not allowed to search your vehicle unless they see something illegal in the vehicle.
Of course they will probably call the sniffing dogs and it is almost guaranteed the dogs will alert (on command from the handler). Thus the police are then allowed to search the vehicle. Some departments I would not be surprised if each officer carries a “drug kit” that they can plant in the car while searching.
A chap in my town who had experienced a few run ins with police got trapped. He was taking some empty wine bottles to the recycling center when he was pulled over for a minor violation of a cracked tail light. The officer saw the empty wine bottles and searched the vehicle. Nothing was found but the empty bottles. The officer charged him with illegal transportation of alcohol (he crossed the county line that runs through the city) and violation of the open container law. He spent a few days in jail.
Keep a passcode on your phone. Do not give the passcode to the police and do not access the device while in the presence of police. Keep that phone locked at all times. Make certain the device will permanently lock after three failed attempts. On current iPhones the data on the phone is encrypted and thus cannot be retrieved. If a judge orders you to unlock the phone enter the passcode incorrectly three times thus permanently disabling the phone. Failed memory is a valid defense.
“Failed memory is a valid defense.”
At my age sad but true… 🙁
Re Ray’s ideas about passcodes and disabling devices, I found it interesting how they got into Ross Ulbricht’s computer: An accomplice contacted him and asked a question that caused him to log into Silk Road. Then two FBI agents staged a distraction, getting him to glance away from his computer long enough for an agent to shove it away from him across the table to another agent.
The point being: all the best encryption in the world doesn’t change the fact that you, yourself, have to be able to use your data. And when you do, you have opened up the encryption, and at that point your data will always be vulnerable. It may be – like in this case – that someone takes your computer. Or they have a camera pointed at your screen. Or they have malware inside the computer, waiting for this moment to access your data or mirror your screen. Or any of a hundred other ways.
I have mixed feelings about the whole Silk Road affair. On the one hand, this was a young, stupid, arrogant guy running a lucrative black market dealing in all sorts of unpleasant stuff. He deserves whatever he gets. On the other hand, it is pretty much a poster child for just how draconian drug laws have become.
Similar mixed feeling for the current FIFA situation. On the one hand, FIFA is a pretty despicable organization, and I’m happy to see something finally happening to some of their corrupt officials. On the other hand, the justification for claiming US jurisdiction is pretty scary: At least some of the people were arrested because money (from outside the US) was transferred to their accounts (outside the US), but the transaction happened to flow through a server within the US. That implies that the US could claim jurisdiction over anything that violates American law, anywhere in the world, if even a single data packet happens to flow through an Internet connection on US territory. Absolutely nuts, but that’s the precedent being set in this case.
“Failed memory is a valid defense.”
At my age sad but true… 🙁
If it were only memory ……..
the justification for claiming US jurisdiction is pretty scary
One of my first thoughts when I saw the news story about FIFA is why is the US involved. FIFA is not in the US so why do any US laws apply?
The US would be livid if Russia charged a US organization because some network connection happen to traverse through a Russian router. The US would tell Russia to pound sand. FIFA needs to do the same, tell the US to pound sand and expel the US from FIFA.
Same goes for the US demanding that foreign banks comply with US laws on reporting funds in accounts. What happens in a completely foreign bank is none of the concern of US banking laws and regulators. Foreign banks with branches in the US, Deutsche Bank for example, are a different matter. If the bank is wholly contained outside the borders of the US the bank, and the country, should tell the US to pound sand.
The US is trying to get involved in too much that is none of their concern.
There’s something more to the FIFA investigation that is apparent. Dunno what, but I wonder: did the Swiss ask the US for help? It’s an open secret that FIFA is corrupt, but actually proving this has proven very difficult. I could well believe that there is some close cooperation here.
The way they have framed the indictment is also interesting: They charged the arrested officials with a criminal conspiracy: FIFA is not the conspiracy, but the defrauded victim of the conspiracy. Fascinating stuff, because it indicates that they don’t have enough to go after the whole organization, but only a few of its tentacles. Also: importantly, it means that FIFA has every reason to throw these people to the wolves – any attempt to defend their actions might cause that indictment to be rewritten…
A nice quote today from the Maoists at Salon online:
“Not talking about how climate change plays into Texas’ floods is tantamount to denial”
Got that? Denial, as in Holocaust. They go from that cute linkage to demands for punishment of “deniers.” Including execution. This is the state of political debate in the West today; the Left wishes to execute “extreme right-wing bikers,” climate change “deniers,” and pretty much all straight white men and boys.
Also, Dear Leader informs us that climate change is our biggest national security threat; someone posted a Tube video of three Arab news commentators discussing this and it was with English subtitles and a riot. Probably a parody but still fun; I just looked for it and can’t find it again.
There’s something more to the FIFA investigation that is apparent.
I believe you are correct. Something else is going on. The charges I have seen relate to some type of sexual abuse that was a few dozen years in the past. Some may claim that people’s memory of such events gets lost after years but I can tell you from my experience of being abused sexually and physically the memory never fades.
Someone is gunning for the organization. Someone may be ticked off because of the choice of hosting companies. Someone may be ticked off because they got lousy seats at the last World Cup match.
FIFA is corrupt. As is the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, NASCAR and any major sports organization. Anytime there is that much money involved with betting, TV rights, locations, facilities you can bet there is a lot of shady dealings. The US DA should be going after organizations at home and let the other countries in which FIFA is located deal with FIFA.
I would like to see FIFA expel the US from FIFA and the World Cup. Doubt that will happen because as you indicated some country associated with FIFA asked the US for help.
RayT
Written on my Surface Pro 3 keyboard. Not a great keyboard but actually quite usable. As good as most full laptop keyboards and certainly better than my iPad.
I would not be surprised if at least part of the motivation for the FIFA investigation is the awarding of the 2022 Cup to Qatar. The heads of the US delegation were Bill Clinton and Eric Holder. Clinton was supposedly so mad that when he got back to the hotel he tossed off a drink and threw the glass into a mirror, smashing it.
It’s also possible that US based companies were getting squeezed out of deals with FIFA since they can’t pay bribes. They complained and DOJ acted.
@Brad
Come on, Brad. You know the US federal government is in charge of everything, everywhere, including not just the surface of the planet but all airspace and everything outside the atmosphere. How dare anyone oppose them? Like they’re going to pay any attention to the wishes of dinky little countries like Russia and China, let alone barely noticeable ones like any of those in Europe or South America or Africa. We’re in charge.
Incidentally, in all fairness, the EU seems to think it should be able to control Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, and other US companies even if they don’t have a presence but merely if EU subjects use their products. I always thought Microsoft should tell the EU to get screwed and remotely disable all Microsoft products being used in the EU. That’d make the EU back off so fast they’d leave skidmarks.
The U.S. gummint will be in charge of everything until it isn’t anymore, like when the money runs out and they’ve finally killed off the middle-class goose that’s been laying the golden eggs. They’re sorta in the position of Lucifer, the best and brightest angel, as he was getting cocky and too big for his britches, er, wings, and took that fall, like the much later Icarus.
Pride goeth before a fall, etc.
Beautiful day on the bay today so far and very breezy. Out to do yard and porch stuff until whatever t-storms hit us later, probably.
OK, I found that Tube vid of the three Arab nooz guys, probably a parody, but still very funny to read the subtitles and they’re clearly having a good laff over something or other; better to have them laughing than angry and bitter, is my feeling, haha.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXodRLLkth4
“Come on, Brad. You know the US federal government is in charge of everything, everywhere”
Ok, I laughed. It’s just too true, and also your poke at European governments. Let’s just simplify and say that governments are in charge of everything, everywhere. Next time I run out of toilet paper at a critical moment, I’ll know who to call…
I would not be surprised if at least part of the motivation for the FIFA investigation is the awarding of the 2022 Cup to Qatar.
You may be correct. I also think the charges are retaliation for something that FIFA did that ticked off some official in Mordor. They did not get there way so they sick the FBI on FIFA like a spoiled child takes his toy and goes home.
Complete nutrition for one person can be bought now for less than $1/day. Call it one pound of rice or other starch, three ounces of beans, an ounce of vegetable oil, and a couple grams of herbs/spices. That means it costs less than $20 to feed 20 neighbors for a day, or less than $600 for a month. That seems like pretty cheap insurance to me. And of course, most of them will have at least some food stored themselves. It may be only a week’s worth, but that’s a start.
I’d package that in 20 CARE packages, each with 30 pounds of rice and other grains, five pounds of canned beans, a liter of vegetable oil, and small packages of spices. If and when it became obvious that food shortages were going to persist, I’d distribute those to the 20 neighbors I’d decided to help, and get them organized to defend the neighborhood. I’d also tell them up-front that this was all we could spare.
In my area, I suspect that most everyone has two family-weeks of food in their home. Some may have four family-weeks of food. I was wondering about what to do after the first month because people will smell the food cooking. Things may get dicey after that.
And, do those CARE packages need to be kept in a temperature range? I suspect that my garage gets 120 F in the summer. Maybe not this summer the way that things are going with all this rain (yes, it is raining again).