07:59 – We finished watching season three of Longmire on Netflix streaming last night. It wasn’t nearly as good as the earlier seasons. I’m not surprised that A&E canceled it, given the precipitous drop in ratings from seasons one and two. Netflix has picked it up for season four. I hope they hire better writers.
More science kit stuff today, as usual.
09:04 – When Barbara read yesterday that I was out of Coke she suggested making a Sam’s Club run, but I told her this morning that’s not necessary. I’ll just drink her sweet iced tea instead of Coke. Of course, that means making a lot more sweet iced tea. I go through roughly 2 liters of Coke a day, which means a gallon pitcher of iced tea is two days’ worth for me. With what she drinks, that means we’ll have to make a fresh pitcher every 36 hours or so.
I see that Norway has just repealed its long-standing blasphemy law. Good for the Norwegians. It used to be that insulting or ridiculing any religion could land you in jail. With the repeal, Norwegians are now free to say whatever they want to about islam or any other so-called religion. Good. How could any decent person not insult and ridicule islam?
07:57 – We got a fair amount of science kit stuff done yesterday. More today, along with laundry and other normal Saturday tasks. I also spent some time yesterday working on the prepping book, and plan to do more today.
One thing on my to-do list is to contact one of the freelance layout/design people that O’Reilly has used on our books to take the raw manuscript of this book and turn it into something professional looking. As Dirty Harry said, “a man’s go to know his limitations,” and I know that I’m not a layout/design person.
11:00 – Embarrassing prepper moment. I just emptied a 2 L bottle of Coke and ran downstairs to bring up another 4-pack. We’re out. Not a single bottle of Coke in the house. I thought I had a case of #10 cans of dehydrated Coke in stock, but apparently not. Oh, well. I’ll just make it up right here in the sink. I prefer my own blend, anyway, because it uses sucrose instead of high-fructose corn syrup.
08:00 – More science kit stuff today.
Most of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, but here’s what I did to prep this week:
Incidentally, Walmart usually has the best prices on Augason Farms stuff, even at their regular prices, but their sale (rollback) prices are better still. For example, in April they were selling the #10 cans of Augason powdered eggs at $17/can. They’re now back up to $21/can, which is still better than other vendors. If you’re stocking up, it makes sense to wait for them to put the items you want on sale. You can find which Augason Farms products are on sale at any given time at this link.
So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.
08:51 – Barbara took today and tomorrow off work. She’s headed out on a day trip to North Wilkesboro with Bonnie Richardson. They probably won’t be back in time for dinner, so Colin and I will share roast beast sandwiches.
More kit stuff today.
10:12 – Barbara wants to move quickly on relocating, which means we need to schedule a couple more day trips up to Jefferson for research and reconnoitering, followed eventually by a week-long trip as a final check before we make the jump. And I have to plan and stage everything to minimize disruption to the kit business, which is going to mean building and transporting a large number of kits so that we can ship from either location until we finish the move.
That also means I need to replace my 22-year-old Trooper with a 4×4 pickup truck with a trailer hitch. We’ll hire a moving company to move the furniture, but we’ll move a lot of our stuff ourselves as we gradually transition from completely here to completely there.
For the time being, I’ll also stop adding to our stored food. We’re at 2+ person years as it is, and the last thing we’ll need is more stuff to move. Once we’re up there, I’ll make a couple of more big Costco/Sam’s Club/LDS Home Storage Center runs with a trailer to finish stocking up. After that, we can depend on local supermarkets, the Walmart Super Center, the farmers’ market, and so on.
More kit stuff today.
08:42 – I wasn’t feeling very well yesterday, so I took the afternoon off. Among other things, I decided to watch Supervolcano with Shaun Johnston (Grandpa Jack from Heartland) on Netflix streaming. I was expecting it to be pretty cheesy, but it was surprisingly well done. I’m not a geologist, let alone a volcanologist, but there weren’t any big scientific clangers that I noticed. Unusually for such a film, it looks like they tried hard to get the science right, or at least right enough not to be intrusive.
I’m always amused by people who think they’re preparing for such an event. A VEI 8 or 9? Give me a break. In the first place, the probability of such an event is probably less than 0.00001 in any given year. In the second place, how does one go about preparing for an extinction event? The last such event, about 73,000 years ago, almost wiped out H. sapiens. By some credible estimates, the surviving human population was only a few thousand in Iberian caves. A VEI 8 or 9 occurring today would kill billions of people in the first year after the eruption. Even a VEI 7 event like Tambora 200 years ago would kill hundreds of millions of people from starvation resulting from crop failures.
More science kit stuff today.
07:57 – Forty-five years ago today. Four dead in Ohio. Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer. Kids minding their own business. Murdered by the government. Never forget.
Barbara mentioned yesterday that she prefers Jefferson/West Jefferson to Sparta. I agree, so that’s where we’ll focus our attention. It’s 83 miles and about 1.5 hours from our house in Winston-Salem, which is about as isolated from big-city troubles as one can get on the East Coast. The nearest towns of any size are Sparta, about 30 miles ENE, and Boone, NC, about 25 miles SW.
More science kit stuff today.
09:42 – I see there was more rioting and looting in Seattle. Not surprising, considering that it’s one of the more “progressive” (i.e., suicidal) cities in the country. After the DA in Baltimore filed felony criminal charges against six cops on evidence barely adequate for misdemeanor civil charges, I’m surprised the Seattle cops bothered to respond at all. We’re at the point now where an awful lot of big-city cops are retiring if they’re eligible and looking elsewhere if they’re not. If they keep handcuffing their cops, sometimes literally, those big cities are toast.
We need to return to the old arrangement: the cops leave middle-class people alone and spend their time beating and shooting underclass people. Whatever it takes to keep them in their own areas and away from normal people. In return the middle-class people make sure the cops aren’t prosecuted for doing what it takes to keep the scum in their place. That’s how it’s been for more than a century, and that’s how it needs to be again. Of course, that’s not going to happen, which is why the big cities are toast, with the medium cities not far behind.
More science kit stuff today.
10:03 – Barbara and I spent the day yesterday scouting out potential relocation areas. We left at 9:35 a.m. and headed for Sparta, NC, which is about 70 miles and 90 minutes from Winston-Salem, most of it by 2-lane road. We picked up a lot of brochures at the welcome center/Chamber of Commerce, and then spent an hour or so walking around town and then driving around some of the residential areas. The people were universally friendly and there wasn’t an underclass person to be seen. Barbara and I both liked the place and thought it was a suitable place for us to live.
After having lunch at a nice little restaurant, we headed for Jefferson/West Jefferson, which is another 20 miles or so down a two-lane, further away from Winston-Salem, but nearer Boone, NC. We liked that area as well. It’s about twice the size of Sparta, and not quite so “mountain-y”.
Both areas have chain businesses like supermarkets, auto parts stores, drugstores, and so on, but Jefferson/West Jefferson has more of them than Sparta. J/WJ also has natural gas service to many areas, fiber-optic broadband in and immediately outside town, and other amenities that Sparta doesn’t offer. Both have decent medical care, and neither has any significant underclass population.
One thing that surprised me was the amount of agriculture. I was expecting Christmas tree farms, chicken factories, fruit orchards, wineries, and not much else, but there’s a great deal of general agriculture. Just driving along main roads, we saw hundreds of dairy and beef cattle and huge fields of general crops. West Jefferson even has a roofed structure set aside for a farmers’ market, which runs every Saturday April through November. Despite being in the mountains, this area can obviously feed itself, if worse ever comes to horrible.
Basically, these areas, particularly J/WJ, provide amenities and resources similar to Winston-Salem, but on a smaller scale. I think these areas suit both Barbara and me. I’ll do a great deal more exploration on line, and I’m sure we’ll be making more trips up to check things out further. We want this to be our last move, so we need to be sure before we jump. At some point, we’ll probably take a week off and rent a place up there as a final check. When we’re sure, we’ll buy a home and some property and move up there.