09:07 – The AC is fixed. It turned out to be a blown capacitor. Living without AC from late Sunday night to yesterday afternoon was unpleasant, but no worse than that. I don’t know if this heat wave has been an all-time record for Sparta, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it had been. It very seldom gets up to 90F in Sparta, so a run of several days over 90F is unusual to say the least. At least we weren’t in Winston, where the heat-chill numbers have been near or over 100F during the same period.
I was a bit concerned that the power would fail, with everyone running their AC flat-out. We had numerous flickers, but no outages. Blue Ridge Electric Co-op did an excellent job of coping with the heavy demand. We haven’t had even a momentary outage since we moved into the new house in early December of last year.
Today, we’re working on science kit stuff, some of it in our work area out in the warmish garage, but most of it in the house where the temperatures are normal. Once we get this batch of biology kits boxed up and stacked in the house, it’ll be back to labeling and filling bottles for more kits.
Email from Brittany. She and her husband have been out buying more sacks of bulk staples in preparation for another packaging party this coming weekend. They’ve also bulked way up on their canned goods. I said earlier that I suspected they’d be up to a six-month supply of LTS food by the end of this month and a one-year supply by the end of August, but it looks like they’ll hit one year’s worth by the end of this month.
In reality, they’ll be well over a one-year supply, because they’re aiming at 1.25 million calories per person, or just over 3,400 calories per person per day. That’d be generous for four adults, let alone for their family of two adults and two young children.
They’re repackaging all of their dry bulk staples in 7-mil foil-laminate Mylar bags from the LDS online store. Those are great for long-term food storage, except that they’re not rodent-proof. Although they don’t have rodents in their basement, Britanny and her husband talked about alternatives to protect their bagged food against a future rodent problem. They decided against using steel garbage cans to store the bags. Instead, Brittany’s husband is surrounding the shelves he’s building with heavy steel mesh, which should do the job.