Month: November 2015

11:29 – We’re still busy packing stuff up. We head up to Sparta tomorrow to close on the house, and want to make sure we have everything we need to spend the night at the new house. Then it’s back down here Tuesday morning to do more packing to get ready for the moving truck to arrive Friday morning.

08:59 – Colin appears to be fully recovered. We’ll continue the metronidazole for the full five days, but it’s already knocked down the infection. He should be good to go by Monday for the trip up to Sparta to close on the house. We already have the Trooper packed up with stuff we’ll haul up there to drop off at the new house. Other than that, we’ll be here until moving day on Friday the 4th, getting stuff packed up for the movers.

I needed to do some calculations for propane versus electricity costs. Our primary heat is a heat pump, so when the outside temperature gets down around freezing we’ll be using pure resistive heating, at about 3,412 BTU per KW/h. Propane yields about 91,500 BTU per gallon, so one gallon of propane is the equivalent of about 26.82 KW/h. Blue Ridge Electric Co-Op charges $2.25/gallon for propane, so I need to find out what they charge for electricity to do the comparison. We’re having a small unvented propane heater installed. It provides 25,000 BTU/hr, which means it’ll run for 366 hours on the 100 gallon tank they suggested. That’s 15.25 days running around the clock, or roughly a month running it about half of the time. That 25,000 BTU/hr heater should be sufficient to keep the pipes from freezing if the power fails, as well as keeping the downstairs at a livable temperature and the upstairs above freezing.

They’ll install a 250 gallon or larger tank if we tell them to, but the deal is that we have to use a full tank every year or we have to pay tank rental charges, which aren’t cheap. I’ll talk more with them, but I think we’ll probably end up going with the 100 gallon tank they suggested.

We’ll then use that propane heater as our secondary heat source, but I’m uncomfortable depending on just propane. Barbara didn’t want a wood stove because it’s messy, requires stored wood, and so on, but I want to have a wood stove even if we don’t normally use it. So I’m going to start checking into wood stoves and get at least a small one for the unfinished basement area. That’ll give us probably 50,000+ BTUs of backup heat that uses a renewable fuel source.

11:58 – The open-pollinated seed kits are boxed up and ready to for pickup this afternoon. They’re going via USPS Priority Mail. If you ordered a seed kit, you should receive it Monday or Tuesday.

Rather than sealing the individual seed bags in Mylar bags, we’re shipping the seed bags separately, grouped into a plastic t-shirt bag. We also include two one-gallon Mylar bags and one sheet of two half-page labels that list the contents. You can repackage the seeds yourself into the Mylar bags and seal them once you’re ready to do so. To seal them, pack them with the individual seed bags, place the open end on wood or another impervious surface, and use a clothes iron or curling iron set on hot (wool or cotton) to run across the open end of the bag and melt it closed. Just a slow pass should suffice, call it a couple seconds of contact time. We did it this way because we highly recommend pulling at least a few seeds from each bag and planting them in foam cups to get a little bit of experience with them. (It’s not even obvious, for example, which sprouting plant is produced by each type of seed.)

The herbs in particular are very slow to germinate and many have very low germination rates. That’s normal, and it’s a good idea to start some of each herb seed indoors in pots at least two or three months before the last spring frost. We didn’t include the planting guide because I haven’t had time to finish writing it. I’ll email a copy to everyone once it’s complete.

08:35 – Colin still had the squirties yesterday, so Barbara called our vet. We hauled him out there for a checkup late yesterday afternoon. She put him on metronidazole BID for five days and recommended (as Jenny had earlier in the comments) giving him two tablespoons of canned pumpkin twice a day for soluble fiber. We stopped at Lowe’s on the way home and Barbara grabbed several cans of 100% pumpkin. As it turns out, Colin loves the stuff, so we’ll keep it in stock. Barbara is going to start using it instead of lunch meat to give him his pills every morning.

The movers came yesterday to give us an estimate for the move. It’s based on weight and distance. Up to about 11,000 pounds, it’s $22.50 per hundred pounds, which’d run us about $2,000 for the weight he estimated. The price per hundred pounds drops after 11,000 pounds, so it might go up to about $3,000 maximum if we have them haul a lot of our extra heavy stuff like canned food. I can haul 1,000 pounds at a time in the Trooper, or about $225 worth per trip, and Al can haul 1,600 pounds at a time in his pickup, or $360 worth, so we’ll haul a lot of the stuff that’s heavy but easy to fit in one of vehicles. In other words, we’ll have them haul up furniture and light but bulky stuff, while we’ll haul stuff like LTS food and water bottles. It doesn’t make sense to have them haul, say, cases of bottled water. They cost only about $3.50 per 50-pound case, and they’d charge $11.25 in haulage fees.

We close on the house this coming Monday, the 30th, for which we have a house-sitter lined up to stay at the old house. Moving day is Friday of next week, so as of Friday 12/4 we’ll officially be living in Sparta. We’ll still be down to Winston-Salem frequently, both to get the house ready to go on the market and to haul up stuff that we don’t have the movers haul for us. I’m not too worried about security at the old house. After 12/4, the only stuff left here will be low-value items that aren’t worth stealing.

07:48 – Ooh Rah! We’ve finished packing up the stuff we need to take along to the closing next Monday, and gotten it loaded into our vehicles. Other than last-minute stuff, that’s it for this phase. Now we return to packing up stuff for the next trips up: clothing, LTS food, Christmas stuff, and so on. Barbara’s goal is to be completely moved up to Sparta in time to have Christmas there. I think that may be optimistic, but we’ll see. The movers are coming tomorrow to give us an estimate, and we have no idea when they’ll be able to move the furniture. But that really doesn’t matter much. We can certainly be living in Sparta by Christmas, but we may still be using the air mattress, folding tables and chairs, and so on.

I’m counting on Barbara to keep us organized. Time was when I could keep everything in my head, including detailed to-do lists. I can’t do that any more, so Barbara’s organizing skills are critical. That also means she can’t yell at me if I forget something.

Incidentally, my apologies for not being very responsive to comments. We just have so much going on at the moment that I don’t really have the time to keep up with them. I hope that’ll change once we’ve closed on the house and pretty much moved up there.

Back to packing.

08:17 – We’re still packing up for the move. There are boxes stacked all over the place, and more yet to be packed. We’ve segregated the items we’ll need to take up to the closing next Monday afternoon so that we can stay at the new house Monday night. Those items are all going into Barbara’s car and my SUV, which makes it hard to use them for anything else in the interim. Fortunately, we don’t have anywhere we need to go between now and then. Last in will be trash bags full of empty 2L and one-gallon PET bottles. I’ll fill those once we get up there to give us an emergency water supply. I want to have at least 30 liters per day stored for Barbara, Colin, and me, which means we’ll need a couple hundred of those bottles for a two-week supply.

I have a NIB TV I got from Costco. It’s a smart TV, which is supposed to be able to get Netflix and Amazon streaming over a Wi-Fi connection without using a Roku or other external adapter. Just in case, I’m packing up our old Roku 2 adapter, which we kept as a spare when we got the Roku 3. I’m also taking along my notebook, which I have to get set up to use for processing kit orders and printing labels, a laser printer and a supply of paper and labels, a NIB Wi-Fi router, and assorted cables. I have another box with a charger for our cell-phones, a Kindle Fire fast charger, and assorted other minor gear. And lots of AA, AAA, C, and 9V alkalines to power various stuff.

Barbara is also clearing the steel shelving unit we use to store our long-term supply of canned and bottled foods. Most of those are already in cardboard or shrink-wrapped cases, so they won’t need further packaging. Some are individual cans, which she’ll transfer to boxes or flats. All the LDS store stuff is in cases of six #10 cans each, so it’s ready to go. We won’t have room in the vehicles to transfer much of it on our first trip up to the closing, but it’s a high priority to get it up to Sparta as soon as possible thereafter. I’ll expand our inventory of long-term dry staples once we’re up there, either by getting more stuff from the LDS HSC or just by repackaging stuff like flour, beans, sugar, and rice from 50-pound bags into gallon Mylar foil-laminate bags. We’re already in pretty good shape in terms of meal extenders like powdered eggs, cheese and butter powder, bouillon, canned meats, and so on, but I want to expand our inventory of bulk dry staples significantly. They’re cheap, compact, last forever, and it makes sense to have a large amount of them on hand.

Back to packing.