10:08 – Barbara is working out in the front yard, spreading mulch. Colin was standing at the front door watching her work, and just let out a ferocious bark. Barbara came in the door and said that a deer had just come around the far end of the house on a dead run and passed her, heading for the neighbors’ property. We don’t see deer very often during the day, and certainly not that close. But we have a significant deer population, and I’m sure they’re out in our yard every night.
The plumbers came yesterday to switch out our sediment filter and show me what needs to be done periodically. He said the filters I’d picked up at Blevin’s yesterday were extremely fine and may need to be swapped out more frequently than the package recommends. It says they last for 8,000 gallons or two months. That’s 133 gallons a day, and I doubt we use that much water. The price at Blevin’s was $8.99 for a two-pack, or $0.80 cheaper than Amazon Prime.
I told him that the electrician said we had a 120VAC well pump. He refused to believe it wasn’t 240VAC until he looked at the main breaker panel. Then he said he wanted to take a look at it, so he went out in the front yard and pulled the concrete cap off the well-casing shelter and pulled out all the fiberglass insulation. We expected there to be a plaque in there with the name of the drilling company and details about the depth and well head, but there wasn’t one to be found. We’re going to have to check county records to find out what company drilled the well and hope they have the details on record.
Not much prepping this week. I ordered some monthly PetArmor Plus flea/tick treatments from Walmart. That ran only about $25, so I needed another $25 to qualify for free shipping. So I ordered ten more jars of Bertolli Alfredo sauce, which has gone up from $2.14 the last time I ordered to $2.23, a pack of Walmart house-brand egg noodles just to try, and some 15.9-ounce jars of Knorr beef bouillon. Walmart had those on sale, at $2.99 for a 12-pack, or about $0.25/jar. I thought it must be a typo, but they confirmed the order and shipped it. If they really ship me 12 jars, I guess I’ll be giving free jars to family, friends, and neighbors. The stuff keeps for a long, long time, but not long enough for us to use 12 jars.
Oh, and I read Surviving Abe. This has to be the strangest prepping novel I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. The author is a leftie/prog climatista eco-greenie true-believer. His event is a continent-wide storm, which the Weather Channel dubs Abe. It kills millions, but that’s the least of it. A sub-thread running through the book is that organized eco-greenie terrorists have been waiting for just such an event so that they can pile on by destroying infrastructure like the electric grid, water purification plants and so on. Their goal, which the author apparently approves, is to cause a mass die-off of humanity, reducing the world’s population from 7 billion to 2 billion in order to make things “sustainable”. The author is real big on sustainable, and apparently approves of mass murder as the way to get there. Geez. Don’t bother reading it. To add insult to injury, the book ends in the middle of the story and there is no sequel, nor apparently will there be.