08:24 – More filling and labeling of bottles today. Barbara is leaving after dinner to drive down to Winston and spend the night at her sister’s house because she has an early doctor appointment tomorrow. Wild women and parties for Colin and me tonight.
I always walk Colin down around back in the morning, because he likes to see the cows. This morning, there were two young calves off by themselves not far from the fence. Instead of ambling away from the Fearsome Predator, they actually started to approach us. Colin watched them slowly approach, looking at him the entire time, until they got about 20 feet (6 meters) away. Then he couldn’t take it any more, so he did one of his bounce growls to let them know that he was cowiverous. They immediately fled toward the adult cows standing a couple hundred yards/meters away. I’m sure they’ll be telling the other calves about their narrow escape.
I’ve invited two of my most frequent commenters to join this blog as guest contributers. OFD has accepted. I haven’t heard back from Nick yet. I figured that since they were posting a lot of long comments, which Google doesn’t index, it’d make more sense for them to post that information as articles rather than comments. Legally, nothing changes. Just as before, each retains the copyright to his own words, and each grants me nonexclusive permission to reproduce those words. I hope Nick decides to come on board as well. He already posts as much or more text each day as I do, and it’s a shame to have it buried in the comments where it’s difficult to find and doesn’t turn up on a Google search.
I’m placing no constraints on either of them, other than not posting anything that would piss off Dreamhost enough to have them suspend my account. They’re free to post prepping-related information, links to other sites, personal stuff, and so on.
Welcome aboard, OFD and prospectively nick.
Shouldn’t be a problem, so long as Dreamhost isn’t taken over by SJWs to the extent that it overwhelms their desire to make a profit. “He wasn’t sufficiently laudatory of Obama the God-King! Drop that account at once!”
Grr. That change makes a small amount of sense, but has pissed off quite a few people.
I applaud your decision to invite OFD and Nick to be guest contributors. When I’m a bit too busy to read all the comments, I quite frequently look for theirs. I think I mentioned this before, but both would also make excellent coauthors for the prepping book, or at least they’d be the best reviewers for the book. I also hope Nick will take you up on your offer.
Nick seems to be off the air at the moment. Probably out scavenging estate sales for prepping gear.
Incidentally, I didn’t suggest it in my emails to them, but I certainly wouldn’t object if they wanted to go back and extra earlier comments and turn them into articles.
I also invited Jen to post articles, but she was horrified at the idea.
I’ve often tried to find comments and links from years ago, a bit hit and miss. Did Google change something?
Anyone heard from Chuck lately?
I’d really like a Guns category that gathers together people’s recomendations. Not that it’s much practical use to me, I doubt if I could legally buy a water pistol here.
Yeah, a few years ago, Google stopped indexing blog comments.
Yes, within the past year.
-blink- We’re not that bad, are we? I mean, yah, Miles_Teg goes on and on about boinking sheep and Hillary Clinton, but aside from that we’re all model citizens.
Jen is horrified at the idea of anyone knowing she’s a prepper.
That’s why they invented aliases. If she can write, she could do it with a pseudonym and actively help others without anyone being the wiser.
That what pseudonyms are for. “The Probably Not Around-the-Bend Prepper Lady” has a nice ring to it.
EDIT: Right. What JimL said.
That reminds me of the time I sent Bob an email asking a prepping question, and he very thoughtfully changed my first name to keep me anonymous. I had a good hearty chuckle, because quite accidentally, he changed my first name to my middle name.
I’m not particularly concerned about protecting my name, because at one point there were three of us in the same zip code, and two of us voted in the same precinct. There is another guy with my first and last name in Facebook who lives less than an hour away and is about my age, and our cars are the same color, but three years apart in age, and the most obvious difference is one car has a rear spoiler and one doesn’t.
Well, Jen is not her real name, her husband’s name isn’t Dave, her brother’s isn’t Jim, and her sister-in-law’s isn’t Claire. But Jen has a healthy respect for data mining, not to say a fear of it. In retrospect, she’s afraid that she’s already given too much away, such as the fact that her husband is a veterinarian, that her brother and his family live in a smallish town x miles from her, that that town has a Sam’s club, that they live about y miles from a lake with cabins, etc. etc.
She approved what I posted about her, but I offered to remove it. She said not to bother because it had already been cached all over the planet. She doesn’t blame me or even herself, but she’s being a lot more cautious about what she’s willing to make public.
OFD is “on the air” intermittently today, in between the usual chores, errands and wasting-of-time sinkholes.
Among the chores, etc., as regards anything relating to prepping, will be acquiring more bins for storage, weed control on the raised beds and containers (tomatoes are doing even better at this stage than last year, we think due to use of our homemade COMPOST, which we find takes about a year to “mature.”), and a discussion with Mrs. OFD concerning firearms and training.
“Jen” and her family seem to be substantially ahead of most of us here in terms of prepping and actually conducting exercises and scenarios; if she doesn’t want to post herself, maybe she can continue writing to RBT and he can summarize the latest info and intel. I certainly respect her wish to maintain OPSEC and appreciate what she has contributed so far.
I used to be paranoid about what I gave away about myself online, to the point that one of my in-your-face friends joked about it. He’s now come around to my point of view. Too late for him, because his stuff is cached for 25+ years.
I don’t care that much about privacy for myself, I don’t have any guns and not enough prepping stuff to make a raid that worthwhile.
“I don’t have any guns…”
Sure, sure, buddy; me, neither.
It used to be that I didn’t even know how many guns I had, but I keep accidentally dropping them into deep water. Now I’m down to none.
—decloaking—
Well, I was busy with family stuff yesterday, and just scanned the tabs in my browser this am before heading out to drop off the kids and actually do some WORK today… when I became aware of RBTs kind offer.
I’m in!
Now I have to resist the temptation to fall down an internet rabbit hole today.
Geez.
@”jen”- Please consider posting yourself. You are ACTUALLY DOING STUFF which seems to be unfortunately rare among preppers. The lessons learned from actually doing stuff are incredibly valuable, and worth 100 ‘what if’ exercises. You might think you are making newbie mistakes, that no one else would ever make, but it’s likely that EVERYONE would make that mistake or overlook that item. You could be literally saving lives. (Passing it thru RBT means it’s filtered at least twice, potentially leaving out the little details that are critical lessons learned, even if they don’t appear that way at the time.)
WRT data mining- I’ll continue as Nick. I was a frequent commentor on another forum under a nickname that easily googled to my physical life, and it limited what I could talk about. One example is gun safes for your vehicle. Another is ham radio installation for a vehicle. No way I want someone to know with certainty that I have a gun and expensive radio hidden in my vehicle if they can find my address with no effort. I’m not worried about .gov, they already know with a few keystrokes, who I am. I’m worried about swatting, internet vigilantes, and the modern version of the stazi. I think it would actually be nice to discover that a neighbor reads this blog, or knows my comments over at another prepper site, but I don’t want CPS knocking on the door because someone in Australia saw a post about target shooting with my 7 yo., or my daughter’s principal (who is NOT my pal) leaping to conclusions about what I may or may not have in my pocket.
Anyway, lots of actual work to do today so little commenting.
nick
“I’m worried about swatting, internet vigilantes, and the modern version of the stazi.”
Indeed. I may have posted this little anecdote on here before but here goes: back in the late 80s I was droning away as a sys admin at DEC down in Marlborough, MA, and frequently during “downtime” was on DEC’s intranet BB, known as “EasyNet.” I was active on several forums, including one on the “Troubles” in Ireland, and around the time that one of the Kennedy litter was over there stirring up chit in Northern Ireland and two British Army guys had been basically crucified by a mob at a funeral, I put up some relevant comments. Well, a fellow DEC employee over in Ireland with whom I had been friendly online complained about me to my manager and she read me the riot act; to top it off, another one of my co-workers and a drinking buddy had attended a meeting of IRA fellow travelers over the border in NH and they’d pointedly asked about ME. Then one night I left the building to find two of the tires on my car had been spiked through the sidewalls. So after that I left off posting stuff on that forum; one thing to involve me; another to endanger family members, who these cowardly scum would have no problem attacking.
And this was nearly THIRTY years ago!
I was droning away…
You’re getting me exited with all the “drone” talk, sir. I have mentioned you are my blogging hero Mr. OFD? May I call you SIR from now on? Just kidding. At least you worked for a living in a previous life. I did enjoy my quiche eating aviator days, though.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming contributions of @nick and @OFD (Dave Hardy?, like your avatar). I too hope that @Jen reconsiders.
BTW, I have using DadCooks for more than 20 years. My domain (dadcooks.com) is “parked” so don’t go looking for any excitement there. Why “DadCooks”? Well among my many other careers and hobbies I have been a Private Chef.
It’s way past time that the military live up to the oath they took.
http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/30/senator-navy-evaluates-commanders-based-on-climate-change-views/
Maybe it’s time for us Veterans to start meeting at the tavern for something more than a pint, wings, and sports.
“I did enjoy my quiche eating aviator days, though.”
In my lousy short-timer’s four years of active experience, I found pilots and aircrew guys to be mostly squared-away and pretty good. Unlike most other officers.
“…@OFD (Dave Hardy?, like your avatar)”
Yep, me and Elmer. We dangerous mofos.
“…among my many other careers and hobbies I have been a Private Chef.”
Outstanding. I figured you might have been in that field of endeavor.
“Maybe it’s time for us Veterans to start meeting at the tavern for something more than a pint, wings, and sports.”
A time-honored pastime, and was such during colonial days in Ye Olden Commonwealth of Maffachufetts; taverns were notorious meeting sites for revolutionary plotting and conspiracies. And there are various oathkeepers, and promisekeepers and the Return of Kings group, but none of them float my boat, so to speak. Everything is becoming local, despite what the globalist elites wish for us, and meatspace is gonna be the thing. Grid and net are wunnerful but if they’re not around for a while, or anymore, then it behooves us to actually step outside, leave the pixels behind and get to know other human beings in one’s AO.
Just back a short while ago from retrieving Mrs. OFD from where her nifty yellow Saab 900 convertible died, 75 minutes each way, on her drive back from MA this afternoon; probably a deceased alternator. The shop better fix it gratis after the $ we recently gave them for repairs.
Back to the grind here tomorrow, mainly the back porch, main bedroom, and cellar. Also get ready for Bay Day here in the village on Saturday, as roughly 3,000 derps arrive and muck up the ‘hood for twelve hours or so, with live music, feurwerken off the pier, etc. I’ll take various pics and vids with the iPhone and Kindle and see what happens.
Congrats to Messrs OFD & Nick also.. All posts here are of value, but yours are always interesting.
Cool and sunny today 20C (68F) @ 2:51pm..
“… probably a deceased alternator. The shop better fix it gratis after the $ we recently gave them for repairs. ”
Good luck with that, unless the alternator was replaced as part of the recent service.
[snip] Also get ready for Bay Day here in the village on Saturday, as roughly 3,000 derps arrive and muck up the ‘hood for twelve hours or so, [snip]
Ha! We’ll have 150,000+ tourists here for the extended weekend, clogging up everything but without whom we wouldn’t even have a town.
Yawn,
Sitting outside of the Omni Hotel ballroom in Dallas, Tejas, waiting to sell MrsAtoz’s books. The conference is for the Texas Association of School Board Administrators. They treat you well. Paid for flight to/from, accomodations, hire car to drive us to/from DFW and $6K speaking fee. Plus a table and WiFi for book sales. Most conference derps only pay a speaking fee. Plus they came direct to us instead of shelling out $10K through a Speakers Agency. Back to Vegas late tonight to a lonely wiener dog, 91 year old Mom and two 21 year old Twins. The Twins turned 21 on the 14th and we took them out for bingo and brews, lol. Gotta indoctrinate them to the Vegas lifestyle.
The only time I was invited to speak at a conference, to present a paper I’d written, all the conference offered was free admission to the conference, including a ticket for my wife, who wouldn’t have been interested. Air fare to Hawaii and hotel and everything else would have been up to me to pay or to find my own sponsors. Hoo-doggies. (Yes, I am somewhat aware of the economics of putting on conferences. Don’t care. I’d be providing a benefit for others and getting essentially nothing in exchange.)
Still, I might have done it, just because my wife was not entirely uninterested in a few days in Hawaii in the middle of winter, but my employer said the only way they’d let me take time off was if I worked a lot of overtime in advance to make up the time, and used my accumulated vacation time, and paid for the trip myself, and clearly identified them as my employer and sponsor. If I could remember the partners’ names, I’d gladly slam them here, but all I sorta remember is that one of them might have been named Jeff. He was a big guy, probably because no one smaller could have been so full of shit.
Two problems with old cars. One, the alternators have little spare capacity, especially foreign models. Second, as cars get older, the wiring rubs against the frame and develops shorts. The resulting over stresses the alternators and they fail often.
I had a 1973 Volvo with paper tape on the connections instead of wire nuts and electrical tape. It regularly went through alternators every 5,000 miles.
paper tape on the connections instead of wire nuts
Car electrical splices should be soldered and then covered with heat shrink tubing that has been filled with dielectric grease. Wire nuts never be used for connecting wires. Better is with the wire is run point to point, terminated and then placed in a socket designed for the connection.
“…but my employer said the only way they’d let me take time off was if I worked a lot of overtime in advance to make up the time, and used my accumulated vacation time, and paid for the trip myself, and clearly identified them as my employer and sponsor.”
Big ol’ softy liberals, I guess; they didn’t demand your first-born son and a lifetime indentured servitude contract.
paper tape on the connections instead of wire nuts
Car electrical splices should be soldered and then covered with heat shrink tubing that has been filled with dielectric grease. Wire nuts never be used for connecting wires. Better is with the wire is run point to point, terminated and then placed in a socket designed for the connection.
Actually, I prefer quick connects for car wiring. Those only fail 1% (SWAG) of the time. The heat here in south Texas ages everything quickly.
Not quite as bad as Phoenix though.
Phoenix will crack your dash, fade your carpet and seats, and kill even a good battery in less than 2 years.
n
See, dat’s what I mean; heat is bad for ya. Excessive climate heat like dat found in TX and AZ and NM and FL, etc., etc. Bad for ya. And yer cah. Only way to get cool is to jump in a pool that has ice in it and/or have an a-c unit running all the time. Ways to get warm include sitting by the fire and/or cutting, hauling and stacking the wood that heats dat fire, plus shoveling snow and chopping ice. And wearing LAYERS. I admit, excessive cold will sometimes cause cah batteries to go dead but they can be JUMPED.
No t-storm here so fah; maybe later, but looks doubtful. Instead we have the local yokels and bumpkins and orcs lighting off feurwerken, but they’ve been doing that for weeks now.
Just got one of the office a/c units fixed. Been down for 24+ hours. It was the south side unit which got the south side hallway up to 78 F. The south side offices were another 3 to 4 F above that. The upstairs was horrible.
The north side of the office was a comfy 72 F that rose to 75 F as the single unit struggled to keep 5,300 ft2 cool by itself.
The problem was that the fan motor for the south side a/c system burned up. I love having two a/c units! They are 3.5 tons each. That was a quick $455 for the new fan motor and technician to swap it out.
No pool here at the office. We do have showers though. And well water with E Coli in it. NOTE to self: run that dadgum well water test!