09:15 – The first day of summer, and it’s coming in around here like a ferocious panda. Highs for the next week or two are forecast to be in the mid- to upper-90’s F. I blame global warming. Either that, or it’s just hot.
With it being so miserable outside, Barbara and I spent yesterday working indoors on kit stuff. We’ll do the same today, after she finishes cleaning house and I finish the laundry.
09:54 – Thanks to OFD for this link to an article about a common thread in mass killings over the last couple decades. The killers had been on psychoactive drugs such as Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft.
Yesterday afternoon, Barbara took Colin to see our vet, Sue Stephens. He got his rabies booster, heartworm check, and so on. They ended up having to put a snout protector on Colin because he snapped at Sue while she was working on him. It wasn’t a serious attempt to bite her, just a warning not to hurt him. Colin has always been a timid dog, although he has a truly fearsome threat display. But he didn’t pull his fake Cujo routine with Sue, nor even show his fangs. He just snapped at her.
We’ll be spending as little time as possible outside over the next couple of weeks. The highs recently have been up near body temperature, and the next couple of weeks are to be the same. It’s even been hot up in Jefferson, although usually 10F or so cooler than it’s been here.
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:
So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.
08:42 – I thought local newspapers were concentrating on local news as a matter of survival, but the whole first section of our paper today was pretty much devoted to the Charleston, SC church shooting and Brian Williams being demoted from the major leagues to Pop Warner. News from the past. Surely there can’t be anyone in Winston-Salem who hadn’t already seen the coverage all over the Internet and TV yesterday.
The shooter was apparently an avowed white separatist or supremacist. A friend of his commented, “He said blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to do something about it for the white race,” Meek said, adding that the friends were getting drunk on vodka. “He said he wanted segregation between whites and blacks.”
So why shoot up a church full of ordinary black people who were, like anyone else, just trying to get by? Why not go after Sharpton, Jackson, or one of the other racist rabble-rousers who make a living by stirring up hatred between the races? For that matter, why not go after gang-bangers? This guy reminds me of a beginning chess player who delights in taking pawns because they’re so easy to get. It’s not brave to slaughter unarmed civilians. It’s pathetic. Had this guy decided to go after racist pot-stirrers or gang members, I might have had at least a bit of respect for him. But going after defenseless ordinary people is a cowardly act that deserves only contempt. I hope they burn him.
09:55 – Is it just me, or should the EU be working flat-out to build its military forces in the face of the Russian threat? Current European military forces are pathetic. If the US draws down US military forces in Europe, as it should until they reach zero, Europe will be defenseless against Russia invading former Eastern Bloc countries, including the former East Germany. If I were Merkel and the Germans, I’d be building and training Panzer divisions as fast as I could. It’s decades past time when Europe should be paying the full costs of its own defense.
07:52 – Front page article in the paper this morning about a former girls’ basketball coach at a local high school who faces prison for impregnating a student. She was 18 years old at the time, two years past the age of consent and legally an adult, but North Carolina’s bizarre laws make it a felony for a teacher to have sex with a student if the teacher is more than four years older than the student. The way the law is written, a 65 year old teacher would face felony charges for having sex with a 60 year old student.
Greece has officially announced that it will default as of 30 June unless the EU, ECB, and IMF gives Greece the money to pay the EU, ECB, and IMF. Nothing new there. Greece already defaulted for the umpteenth time earlier this month when it stiffed the IMF. Greece hasn’t actually made payments on its debts in living memory, unless you count making payments with the proceeds of additional loans from those same creditors. What’s wrong with that picture? A German spokesman called the Greek leadership a bunch of “clowns”, which is an insult to clowns.
08:15 – I see that asshole Obama now intends to remake America’s neighborhoods, making sure that every middle-class neighborhood will have plenty of poor people and gangbangers and other undesirables. For 50 years now, I’ve been saying that government is the enemy. More and more people are coming to understand that I’ve been right all along.
Decent people don’t want the underclass in our midst, and we keep taking steps to get away from them. Obama thinks we’ve been too successful, so his answer is to start distributing the underclass scum into nice areas, with the goal of turning those nice areas into underclass hellholes, spreading the misery as widely as possible instead of doing as he should and concentrating it into as few areas as possible. We used to call them ghettos.
If that asshole Obama could get away with it, I’m sure he’d like to put a gangbanger or other underclass scum in every spare bedroom in middle-class America. But he can’t get away with that, yet, so he’s going to do the best he can by using federal powers to mandate housing for underclass scum in nice areas. I don’t want underclass scum living near me. I don’t want underclass scum living, period.
So, what’s to be done?
07:44 – All signs are that yet another Greek default is imminent, perhaps as soon as the end of the month. When or if that happens, Greece crashing out of the euro is almost inevitable. The follow-on effects on the European and world economies are unpredictable at this point, but they won’t be good, to put it mildly. Best case, eurozone taxpayers are left holding the bag and are likely to vent their fury on EU politicians and mainstream political parties, with unpredictable consequences and likely regime changes. Worst case, we’re looking at a catastrophe unfolding over the coming months and years that will make Lehman look minor and will spread to affect the rest of the G7. In any case, Greece is toast.
There’s some time left, but now would be a good time to get stocked up, if you haven’t done already.
13:17 – Email from Jen, saying that she’d ordered one can each of the Keystone canned chicken and pork to see how she and her family liked them. She commented that at $4.44 for a 14.5-ounce can the Keystone chicken was more expensive than the Costco Kirkland-branded chicken at $2.30 for a 12.5-ounce can, but that she wanted to try them side by side to see if the Keystone was enough better to justify the higher cost. Actually, the Costco product is more expensive because that 12.5-ounce can is “packed in water” and contains only 7 ounces of actual chicken. The Keystone product is “no water or broth added” and contains the full 14.5 ounces of actual chicken. On a per-ounce basis, the Costco canned chicken is just under $0.33, or about $5.25/lb., while the Keystone is about $0.306, or about $4.90/lb.
Keystone is even a better deal in the 28-ounce cans, which shouldn’t be a problem given how many people Jen plans to feed. The chicken in 28-ounce cans is $7.34, or $0.262/ounce or $4.19/lb. The 28-ounce cans of ground beef, pork, and turkey are less expensive than the chicken, at $6.28 each, or $0.224/ounce, or $3.59/lb.
07:47 – In the past, I’d filled bottles myself, but yesterday we tried working together, with me filling while Barbara capped. The two of us working together can fill about 2.5 times as many bottles per hour as I can do on my own, so that’s the way we’ll do it from now on. This week, I’ll make up the solutions we need to fill bottles this weekend.
I ordered a 24″ 1080P IP-TV from Costco yesterday. I’ll set it up on the table we use for filling bottles so we can watch Netflix/Amazon streaming video while we’re filling. The TV can also serve as a decent spare computer display.
10:44 – Barbara just finished cutting my hair and cleaning house. I hate getting my hair cut because I always feel so weak afterward. We’ll do kit stuff the rest of the day.
Good news for preppers. Walmart has just started offering Keystone Meats products on its web site, which has free shipping on $50+ orders. Their prices are noticeably lower than those on the Keystone website, which charges shipping. Unfortunately, Walmart is showing out-of-stock on nearly all the products, and low-stock on others. I guess they must have been surprised by a flood of orders from preppers.
11:34 – What goes around comes around. I was just out with Colin and ran into our neighbors two houses down carrying in groceries. Their son is 12 years old, very bright, and interested in science.
O’Reilly/MAKE just sent me a comp copy of a new science book they’ve just published, which is actually a home science book from the 60’s, updated to reflect availability of items and to get rid of or modify some of the stuff we used to do back then without a second thought but which is now considered hideously dangerous. I gave the book to Shane, whom I suspect will be doing a lot of this stuff over the summer. As he walked away with the book, I had a flashback to 50 years ago, when I was his age and guys the age I am now gave me neat science stuff to encourage my interest.
08:50 – Saturday the 13th falls on a Saturday this month.
How can this be controversial? It’s basic biology. NHS chief warns women not to wait until 30 to have baby as country faces a fertility timebomb
Fertility in female humans peaks between about ages 18 and 28, after which it plummets. The old ways are based in biology. Women should marry at age 14 or 15 to a man chosen by their parents. Parents back then helped a young person get started in life by setting them up with what they needed to get started right. Arranged marriages were by most accounts more successful than the modern method of letting no-nothing kids choose their own mates. Young women had children early, as nature intended. There’s no reason not to make that the norm today. Getting kids started right nowadays might include helping the young families by providing child care and supporting the young women through college and perhaps grad school. There’s no reason a young woman can’t have it all: a husband, children, education, and a career. But they need to get started young.
12:15 – We’re just back from a small Costco run. I think the total was $251, most of which was in meat and OTC drugs. While we were back in the drinks section picking up some 4-packs of 2-liter Coke, I mentioned to Barbara that she was going through a lot of the half-liter bottled water, so we should replace what she was using. We’d put two 40-packs in our cart when I noticed that our Costco now carries their store-brand bottled water in 6-packs of one-gallon bottles. So Barbara handed one of the 40-packs to a tiny little Asian woman who was having trouble getting one off the stack, and we added two 6-packs of the gallons to our cart. I’d have grabbed more, but the cart was already up to the acceleration and stopping distance of a freight train.
I covet those bottles. Not only are they one-gallon PET bottles, but the mouth looks wider than that of a 2-liter bottle. They will be excellent for home-packing dry staples. I’m just about to print a big sign for Barbara: “DRINK MORE WATER!”
08:12 – After dinner yesterday, Barbara commented that it was still 92F (33C) outside. I checked the temperature in West Jefferson, which was 73F (23C). That’s pretty much the norm. When it’s very hot down here in the flatlands, it’s usually 10 to 20F cooler up in the mountains. According to the real estate agent, many homes there don’t have central air conditioning because it’s not really needed. Winter temperatures are lower up there as well, but usually not all that much lower. It gets below freezing more often up there, and there is more snow, but the difference isn’t great enough to be a problem.
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:
So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.