10:06 – Barbara is tied up this week with the charity golf tournament. That tournament is the major annual fundraiser for the non-profit NGO Wellness Center, which is where Barbara goes to the gym. She mentioned yesterday that a lot of local businesses hadn’t even “bought a hole”, which is an inexpensive way to sponsor the tournament. She said that she’d like to buy a hole next year, which is fine by me. She said a hole sponsorship is $100, but I’d imagine that’s for a cheap hole. Better holes probably cost more, and the best may cost much more. Or at least I hope so. If they’re really charging a flat $100 per hole, they’re leaving money on the table. If I were they, I’d auction the final hole. Whichever it is, we’ll buy the hole in our corporation’s name and write it off as an advertising expense.
After some discussion, we decided not to install propane, at least for now. The electric cooktop works normally, and the oven preheated properly when we tested it with two hanger thermometers yesterday. From my point of view, it’d be nice to have 200 or 300 gallons of propane stored on site, with connections to the cooktop, oven, and generator, but we can live without it for now. As Barbara pointed out, we can run the generator long enough every day to run the well pump on about 5 gallons of gasoline a month, and we have more than half a dozen ways to cook/bake, from a woodstove to the propane grill to the propane and dual-fuel Coleman camping stoves, to a couple of Coghlan’s Folding Stoves (which happily run on twigs), to an ad hoc solar oven to an ad hoc rocket stove that we could build in about two minutes from concrete blocks.
The house in Winston is supposed to close a week from today, so our next trip down to Winston will be the first we’ve made while not owning a house there. I want to make a big Costco run on our next trip down. For months, we’ve been eating a lot of our LTS stuff without replacing much of it. Stuff like canned chicken, soups, spaghetti sauces, applesauce, canned vegetables, and bulk stuff like sugar, flour, oats, pasta, oil, and so on. Some of that I can order from Costco and Walmart on-line, which avoids the need for us hauling it back up here.
We’re still in decent shape on LTS food relative to the general population, but the shelves are starting to look a bit bare for my comfort level. As I keep saying, I don’t really expect a catastrophic event, but food is cheaper now than it’ll be next month, let alone next year, so there’s no downside to buying it now. And I confess that I am a bit concerned about the run-up to the election and its aftermath. In terms of civil unrest, things are nowhere near as bad as they were in the late 60’s, but the potential exists.
Speaking of which, there’s been a call to action for a latter-day Days of Rage in 37 large cities this Friday afternoon and evening. This would be a very good time to avoid large cities and any concentration of large numbers of people. It’s pretty likely that there will be violence at at least one of these protests. Even if the BLM folks avoid violence, large groups of people are magnets for musloid terrorists. If you live outside one of these cities, avoid being in town on Friday afternoon or evening. If you live inside one of these cities, Friday would be a good time to visit family or friends who are well outside these areas.