07:22 – We’re still hard at work on building science kit inventory. Sales are still slowish, at around one kit per calendar day, but that’s starting to pick up as we get later into July. In August and into September, we’ll start having days when we’ll be processing orders for anything from five or eight kits a day to two or three dozen a day, which is why we’re building finished-goods stock now. Some days in August, we won’t have time to do anything except ship kits.
Part of my prepping is researching relocation issues. One of the things that I looked at yesterday was shooting ranges in the Jefferson area. I found one, the Ashe County Wildlife Club. It sounded great, until I looked at the membership application. One of the required fields in the form was my NRA membership number. I’ve never been an NRA member, because I consider the NRA to be far too soft on gun-control issues. They accept, tacitly and sometimes explicitly, such outrages as the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA), the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the restrictions on concealed weapons in the North Carolina Constitution and those of other states. They’re even okay with prohibiting convicted criminals from possessing firearms, which is a gaping hole that the government can easily use to restrict the right of all citizens to keep and bear arms.
But I could live with that if I had to. I’d bite my tongue and join the NRA, or perhaps Barbara could join and I could shoot as her guest. What really annoyed me was their requirements for members. Stuff like helping to maintain the property is fine and reasonable. But they also want me to pledge to “promote and support” “The Pledge of Allegiance and open, Public Prayer as they relate to our Club Meetings and Events.” Seriously? I have big-time problems with that. I’ll happily pledge allegiance to the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, both as written, but not to their flag and certainly not to the delusion that the United States are “one nation, under god”. That’s the equivalent of asking an observant Jew to eat pork as a condition of membership.
Fortunately, the Ashe County ham radio club has no such policies, and is quite active in ARES and similar emergency radio service groups. I suspect a lot of the folks in the ham radio club are also involved with emergency management at the county and local level, and would be people I want to get to know anyway.
I really want to do a complete inventory of our stored food, but I just don’t have time right now. My guess is that it’ll have to wait until we relocate. Putting all this stuff back on shelves in our new home will be a convenient time to count everything. Someone suggested bar-coding, but that’s overkill even for me.
I’ve been reading a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction lately, from probably 40 or 50 new-to-me authors. One lesson I’ve learned is that most of them are junk–written by author wannabes who don’t have even basic grammatical skills. Seriously, many of them need to repeat elementary school English. And even those who do write with at least basic competence are usually hopeless when it comes to details like plot, dialog, and so on. Some months ago I read One Second After and criticized the author for his lack of skill. Since then, I’ve found that his skills are, while still pathetic, head and shoulders above those of most PA novelists.
Another lesson I’ve learned. It used to be that when I read the first of a series and liked it, I’d go grab the rest of the series all at once. No more. A high percentage of these PA authors who manage to do a reasonably good job on their first books–and this is incredible to me–actually go downhill on later books. For example, the first book in the 299 Days series was just okay, but showed promise. I assumed the author would get better in his second and subsequent books. Not even close. They get worse, and the more he writes the worse he gets. So now, I read the first book and grab the second if the first is passable. Literally half a dozen or more times already I’ve found the the second book is worse than the first.
None of these guys even approach the good PA novels from the 80’s and earlier, but there are still a few who show some promise, notably Steve Konkoly, Angery American, and (so far; I’m 50% in to his first book) Thomas Sherry. Like almost all of their competitors, these guys still get hung up on equipment, going into great detail. Instead of saying, “He picked up his rifle,” they’ll go on for paragraphs (or even pages, literally) filled with details about the make and model, the brand, capacity, and construction material of the magazine, the type of red-dot sight installed, the type of ammunition including bullet weight, and on and on. Like good science, good writing should be parsimonious. These guys are anything but.
16:24 – We just got back from West Jefferson. We found a house that suits both of us and told our agent to put in an offer for it. We’re offering about 75% of the asking price, but the asking price is far above market, so our offer is reasonable.
The house is smaller than our current house, 3 bedrooms and 2 full baths with just under 1,900 square feet of living space on one floor. There’s also a basement of the same size that’s fully below grade. Barbara says that’s mine, and it provides plenty of room for the business, long-term food storage, and other stuff. The stairs to the basement are the widest I’ve ever seen in a residence. They must be five feet wide. The house sits on about 1.2 reasonably flat acres with two outbuildings.
The only downside is that it has an oil-heated boiler with hot water heat and no air conditioning, but there’s room in the basement if we want to install duct work for a heat pump. Interestingly, there’s what appears to be a cut-over switch for a generator, although there’s no pad. There are also hundreds of empty, clean canning jars on shelves in the basement. There’s also a large ducted firebox in the basement that has one duct running to either end of the house to provide heat through floor grills. It looks to me as if the former residents believed in being prepared for bad winter weather.
The house is actually pretty close to downtown West Jefferson, but it’s in the midst of agricultural land. In fact, the back property line abuts an active farm that has cows grazing. I wonder if they moo in the morning like roosters crow.
Have you read the George Hill books yet?
http://www.amazon.com/Uprising-USA-George-Hill/dp/1618080156
They are PA zombie books. He’s a pro writer and it shows.
It’s my understanding that the first book “Uprising USA” started as a sort of group story on a forum, and grew from there. It comes to mind because it takes the idea you’re complaining about, and pushes it for fun. Like the ‘men’s crime’ novels, the hero has his favorite weapons, and they are a character in the book. Because he’s a pro, about the time it gets tired, he backs it way down. (It never plods on for paragraphs or pages.)
The overall story plotting starts to wander as the recovery continues thru the second book, and he sort of paints himself into a corner. It reminded me of the Zelazny Amber books, in that there were too many threads to explore, and he gets distracted by the shiny thing.
He never finished the series. Don’t know why. Couldn’t find any reasons on his blog.
nick
“I really want to do a complete inventory of our stored food, but I just don’t have time right now. My guess is that it’ll have to wait until we relocate. Putting all this stuff back on shelves in our new home will be a convenient time to count everything. ”
I’ve tried doing stuff like this. It’s really hard to keep it accurate.
I’ve notice that about independent authors in general: the first book they’ve written carefully, but later books they may get in a hurry. I just read an SF series like that The first book was excellent, the second and third just fine, and the fourth book was actually just a couple of decent chapters, plumped up with totally hokey nonsense.
I expect it has to do with a lack of an editor. An editor would have asked for improvements on books 2 and 3, and told the author to throw book 4 away and try again. No quality control for indies, except self-imposed. Fair enough, but it does make things more hit-and-miss.
That a first book might be better does not surprise me. It might have been gestating in the back of the author’s mind for years. The next book might have only started after the first was finished.
The new layout is about a finger-width too wide to fit on my standard browser window, not that you should care. The right side just about splits Saturday on the calendar. Meanwhile the width of the box I am typing in is not expandable into the white space to the right, though it is expandable downward.
Well, if I were going to write a PA series, I’d plan to do five to eight books, each of 150,000 words give or take. And I’d finish at least two or three of the titles before I published the first one, “Finish” as in written, re-written and polished, and edited, with pro covers done. And then I’d self-publish them on Amazon at $2.99 each.
Writing fiction is a lot faster than writing non-fiction. My guess is that, heads-down, I could average 3,000 words a day, so each book would take about 50 days of writing time. I’d really like to do this, but I don’t have the time to spare.
“Why a handgun should be your first SHTF weapon purchase for self-defense”
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/weawhy-a-handgun-should-be-your-first-shtf-weapon-purchase-for-self-defensepon-for-self-defense/
I agree. That is why I own a few handguns. And want more, something like a small 38 revolver to throw in the front pants pocket.
I wonder if they moo in the morning like roosters crow.
We have a 1,000 acre cow pasture about 1,000 ft away from the house. I hear the cows mooing when it is quiet, such as 10 pm to 2 am. But outside only, double pane windows really limit sound transfer to the inside of the house.
I could really hear the cows one night when a coyote pack was attacking them while I was out walking my 2 miles at 9 pm. Made me want to carry a small .38 real bad. And then the second coyote pack started yipping at about a 90 degree angle to the first pack.
Nice house and nice view (if I am looking at the right house). I wonder if you can get natural gas piped into the house? Are the roads around there difficult to climb when they are snowy or icey?
I’d want something bigger than a “small .38” during my nocturnal strolls near coyote packs, compadre. At LEAST .357, and preferably .41, .44, or .45. Actually if it was me humping the two miles at night there, I’d be slinging a rifle AND packing the handgun heat.
Not only coyote packs be-bopping around at night but also, esp. in your area, narcotrafficantes, M13 types, and the random loose nut. Up here we just have local riff-raff but that’s likely to change a bit as the regime keeps taking in tens of millions of illegal immigrants and releasing scads of prisoners into the society from our industrial prison empire.
Meanwhile they’re evidently planning to prohibit not only ex-felons from owning firearms, but also people on SSDI and I would imagine, veterans getting various types of treatment or on disability themselves.
So, like the U.K., Canada, Australia, etc., our rulers wish to disarm us and leave us defenseless while turning criminals and terrorist scum loose on us at the same time. If we defend ourselves and fight back, in the absence of “protect-and-serve” law enforcement, said LE will then arrest and prosecute US, probably for whatever violations they can nail us with and try to tack on hate crime, too.
We are approaching national insanity at a very fast clip now.
“The stairs to the basement are the widest I’ve ever seen in a residence. They must be five feet wide.”
Nice. Ours seem to be about a foot wide when us giants have to go up and down them carrying stuff.
“…the back property line abuts an active farm that has cows grazing…”
It’s active NOW. Be careful. What if the farmer decides to retire and his kids don’t wanna farm any more and he sells off lots for development and next thing ya know, ya got a bunch of cookie-cutter houses sitting back there, after they bulldoze any trees, of course? We’ve seen that a lot here in New England and I remember it going on down in NJ, too, when I was living there. Or an industrial park with truck traffic. Or a nice strip mall.
Unless my eyes deceive me. the font is now more readable and the paragraph width narrower. Like!
However, for some reason no cursor appears for me in the name field of the Leave a Reply section. I have to leave a comment with a blank name field and then fill it in when the software detects the “error”.
The new font is beautiful. Legible and visible also.
I can now pinch zoom the site with iOS.
Red brick rancher? On a road named for a stinging weed?
Looks nice, great view. Lowe’s and groceries not too far away. and a McDonalds.
nick
Yep, that’s the one.
Robert: Looks like the googles know where you want to live. Hope you get the house you want.
The house search sites show several other good possibilities, though, although that’s not as good as on-site visits. When we did our search in WA/Olympic Penninsula, we had a list of about 40 houses that we found on Zillow, but a good realtor taking us around to our initial choices plus some of his helped us find the right one for us.
Robert has kindly let me tweak his site a bit. The minor changes of font/font color/line spacing/content width are improvements, IMHO. Working on a few other minor tweaks.
Not sure why the name input field in comment box is not showing the cursor on ‘focus’. Did notice that the email field cursor shows OK. If you click there, then shift-tab, that will move focus back to the Name field, so you can fill that in.
I suspect the plugin that lets you edit your comment. Digging into that issue.
But glad the ‘gang’ here seems to like the tweaks.
Yeah, good job, Mr. Rick; were/are those WP tweaks and/or HTML/CSS stuff?
The new layout is about a finger-width too wide to fit on my standard browser window, not that you should care. The right side just about splits Saturday on the calendar.
Update: now less than a finger width of scrolling, and can see about 3/4 of Saturday in calendar (but not Sunday).
Meanwhile the width of the box I am typing in is not expandable into the white space to the right, though it is expandable downward.
Comment box expands to the left, up to the left margin. Still lots of wasted space to the right. I wonder if it will remember the resized box? some such boxes, on some sites, do remember the change. Nope, it does not remember.
@Rick Hellewell – I appreciate the work you are doing on RBT’s DNJ. I only read this on my laptop, for that it is working fine so I have nothing to complain about. Thanks.
Thanks for the nice comments on the tweaks. Currently, tweaks are limited to changes to settings available in the Mantra theme, plus some additional CSS added.
The latest tweak is to fix the width of the textarea (comment area). It’s a bit wider now (at least, on my laptop at full screen). Expanding the size down makes the left side move left also. That is built into the theme code, and would require some coding changes. Should be better now.
There is still some white area to the right. Part of that is the right-side column (the ‘widget area’). So you can’t expand into that widget area width.
Regarding Roy’s problem with the width on his display cutting off the calendar; that’s because of the ‘responsive break’ areas, that determine when to adjust for smaller width devices. Assume that Roy has his browser window full width, but his devices’ display is between the ‘responsive breaks’.
I did just adjust another setting that sets the week to start on a Sunday (WP defaults to a Monday-start). Not sure why the do that, but it’s something I usually change when setting up a new site.
Which may all be too technical for most to care about, but tweaking things keeps me amused….
Monday is the ISO standard for the start of the week.
We are approaching national insanity at a very fast clip now.
Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database
Thanks, Mr. medium; one of my brothers just sent me that link, too; they’re ramping up now in Obola’s last? term and things may be getting sporty sooner than we think.
Just got my first “happy b-day,” from the great folks at Kali Linux. I have Kali on a Thinkpad and it rocks. Pen testing galore! With Ice-Weasel as the FF-type browser.
62 in about twelve hours, but otherwise don’t feel any different. I’ll be sure to pay the ten bucks for lifetime National Parks access this week, though, when I hit Valley Forge. And wife got me a telescope at a yard sale.
@RBT, there were several nice looking houses that were a close match. I didn’t realize that Stone Mountain State park is there. Is that the one the revisionists want to dynamite? I thought that one was in GA somewhere….
It looks like the farm is above you, so even if they sold it as a subdivision, it wouldn’t screw up your view. It would mess up a bunch of stuff though.
I don’t see too many tall privacy fences. It doesn’t look like you’d have much privacy in the yard. Is that an issue?
nick
Sure is pretty. Wide open to the wind in the winter though.
nick
Many of the homes we looked at were suitable other than the fact that they had water in basement. In one case, more than an inch deep.
” Is that the one the revisionists want to dynamite?”
Yeah, we got us our own Taliban and ISIS right here in the good ol’ freedumb and liberty -lovin’ U.S.A. Them previous guys also liked to blow shit up that they dint like.
I heard sumthin bout some city gonna dig up General Forrest and his wife? I was afraid to look into it any further for fear of that same ol’ boiling-over rage I’ve felt before in my life. Can’t have it, not anymore. If they go ahead with that, I hope to God there’s some folks down there that will then do the right thing.
Umm, water in the basement is no bueno.
nick
“Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database”
http://nypost.com/2015/07/18/obama-has-been-collecting-personal-data-for-a-secret-race-database/
Looks like the national employment act for lawyers to me. I am sure that they will sue many businesses and many cities into bankruptcy. That should be good for the economy.
Do I detect micro-aggressive sarcasm there, Mr. Lynn? Possibly rayciss, too? Damn, son, you in a heap o’ trouble with that line of talk.
Now y’all may or may not recall; OFD done tole y’all this futhamucka would do as much damage as he could (at the direction of his bosses, of course) during his “lame-duck” term. Here’s another prediction for y’all: whichever ass-hat comes in after him? He or she will double down on it in their very FIRST term.
The fix is in: destruction of the country and its bitter clingers.
Y’all have a great evening around the world; OFD will next invade this space from the Kindle Fire from somewhere in the great Keystone State.
Not necessarily. It could be an indoor swimming pool in progress. Or a terrarium, or a home-based mold-growing business. Sheesh, nick, try not to be so conventional. Think outside of the box!
Only room for one car in the garage? Also, seems kinda small given your storage requirements.
Does it have town water as well as the well? How high are you above that creek?
Only an oversized one-car garage, but that’s no big deal. We can add on a second garage bay eventually if we want to, but we’ll probably just park the old Trooper in the gravel area behind and use a truck cover. I hardly ever drive it anyway. There’s plenty of room for us. The basement is 1800+ SF, which is plenty of room for the business as well as long-term storage.
It’s well water and septic, but neither should be a problem. Eventually, I’ll have enough PV panels on the roof and an inverter big enough to run the well pump. In the interim, we have a 7KW generator that’s more than enough to run the well pump.
I hope they accept our offer, but I’m not counting on it. They bought the house at the peak of the housing market, and it’s worth less now than what they paid for it. If we don’t get that house, there are plenty of others.
Only room for one car in the garage? Also, seems kinda small given your storage requirements.
I thought about that also and realized that Barbara is retiring so they may cut back to one vehicle. If not, I do love having my vehicles inside. They do have enough room to add another garage if so desired.
Is a 1,900 ft2 basement not enough storage room and prep area? I would love to have that man cave. I do not see a entrance from the basement to the outside though so all the stuff to be shipped will have to be moved upstairs.
BTW, another alternate for heating is buying an electric storage “furnace”. One of my partners has one of these in Colorado at 8500 ft. Works like a champ. He buys electricity at 12 am to 5 am for 4 cents/kwh and the bricks are heated to 3,000+ F. Then the heating air blows across the bricks all day.
http://www.steffes.com/off-peak-heating/ets.html
http://www.cmpco.com/ETS/faq.html
Lots of lightening and thunder last night, plus some of that mysterious wet stuff that falls out of the sky.
I’m pretty content with oil heat. Oil is cheap right now, and I don’t see it getting too much higher anytime soon. Also, of course, fuel oil is diesel, and it’s not a bad idea to have a tank of diesel fuel stored. Finally, I’m looking at wood/coal heat not as primary but as a good backup.
Hey guys, someone (OFD?) recommended a particular version of the Book of Common Prayer.
Search for the site turns up no results.
Anyone remember off the top of their heads??
I found a copy with the Certificate of John Wallace Suter, Custodian, 1945
nick
There are a couple of things I’d worry about with oil heat. One, is the tank underground, and if so, is it leaking? Cleanup costs can be ridiculous if you ever have to pay them. Two, does the house have any insulation in the walls? Strictly speaking that doesn’t have anything to do with oil heat, but somehow poor insulation and oil heat seem to go together in practice.
Interesting about the shooting range. If I were buying a house now or if I should unexpectedly win the lottery, one of my major yes/no criteria would be for it to come with enough land and few enough neighbours for me to have my own private range. I’d want at least 300m in length (for rifles) plus a spot or two to shoot clay pigeons as well. If I could shoot from the veranda of the house, that would be a bonus.
Interesting idea.
“Hey guys, someone (OFD?) recommended a particular version of the Book of Common Prayer.”
I grew up with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer of the “Protestant Episcopal Church of the U.S.A.” Basically a late 19th- and early 20th-C American version but with the KJV language. I’ve since grown to love and use the older Elizabethan edition of 1559. Though a traditionalist Roman Catholic convert from High Church Anglican (not a stretch), I still use my 1611 KJV Bible and 1559 Elizabethan Prayer Book alongside my daily and Sunday Missals and the Catechism.
YMMV.
It’s alive!
-insert mad laughter amidst the thunderclaps-