10:04 – I should be able to finish up the taxes today and be able to get back to kit stuff.
We finished watching Heartland S9 last night, along with the first two episodes of Murdoch Mysteries S9. Heartland S10 starts shooting in about a month. Given that Amy, the character, announced her pregnancy in the final episode of Heartland S9, I have a pretty good idea of what S10 will be about. Like a lot of other fans, I suspect that Amber, the actress, is either pregnant or considering it.
I get a lot of email from preppers who are in various stages of preparing. One recent email was from a guy who’s very well equipped with LTS staples. He has literally tons of rice, flour, pasta, oats, beans, and so on in #10 cans, Mylar bags, and pails. Enough to feed him, his family, and several close friends for more than two years, at least from a nutritional viewpoint. What he lacks, in common with a lot of preppers, are the herbs, spices, bouillon, etc. needed to make all that bulk food appealing. His total of that stuff is half a dozen large Costco jars of assorted herbs and spices. That won’t go very far toward making tons of bulk staples worth eating. I suggested that his next Costco run should be devoted exclusively to stocking up on things that will add flavor to all those LTS staples. The PET jars that Costco supplies herbs and spices in are decent LTS containers. No matter what the best-by dates say, those PET jars will keep their contents usable for years. If he wants to improve on that, he can repackage them in foil-laminate Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers.
He also mentioned that his next project was building Faraday cages to store backups of his sensitive small electronics like radios, battery chargers, solar panels, charge controllers, and inverters. I suggested that until he has time to build formal Faraday cages, he simply keep those items in their original cardboard boxes and wrap them completely in heavy-duty aluminum foil, which makes a pretty decent Faraday cage. Also, putting those foil-wrapped boxes in plastic bags and then adding a second layer of aluminum foil improves the level of protection significantly.