09:24 – I got email from Jen overnight. She and her husband had been talking about the idea of converting some of their paper assets to hard assets. She and her husband decided to kill a whole flock of birds with one stone. Her husband is a veterinarian who has a mixed small- and large-animal practice. Until now, he’s been reordering supplies the first of every month, keeping only a small month-to-month reserve. As of the first of June, he started boosting his inventory levels, particularly of items that are also suitable for human use in an emergency. For items that don’t expire or have very long expiration dates, like bandages, he’ll shoot for a one-year stock initially, and then continue reordering monthly to cover current usage. For drugs, he’ll adjust stocking levels according to their expiration dates because it would be unethical to use expired drugs in his practice, even if they’d been kept frozen. But it’s perfectly ethical to use drugs that are near their expiration dates, which will allow him to keep a greatly increased inventory of antibiotics and other drugs that are equally suited to human use in an emergency. If he misjudges and ends up with drugs that have expired, he’ll simply continue to store them frozen as emergency supplies. I told Jen that sounded like an excellent plan to me. In any long-term emergency, antibiotics and other essential drugs will be better than gold. And a veterinarian will be the next best thing to an MD. Humans are, after all, large animals.