09:14 – Barbara called last night to let me know she was doing fine and looking forward to coming home this morning. I didn’t want to call her for fear I’d wake her up. Al is going to pick her up at the hospital and bring her home this morning.
I just closed out July, which was our best July ever by about 15% for kit sales revenues. Unfortunately, January and June of this year sucked month-on-month, so we’re still down about 11% on YTD revenues this year versus last year. Still, August is starting out well–there are seven kits sitting awaiting pickup this morning–so I suspect things will even out before year-end.
Email from Brittany. She and her husband had a Marathon repackaging session over the weekend, and they now have a huge pile of LDS foil-laminate Mylar bags filled with bulk staples and sealed. Britanny says her feeling of relief is immense when she looks at all that LTS food, knowing that no matter what happens she’ll be able to feed her family.
They’re in pretty good shape now, not just in terms of having a year’s food but in terms of water, shelter, heat, power, defense, and so on. Brittany says they’re going to take a short break from prepping, but not because they’re out of money or time. They used all 250 of the foil-laminate Mylar bags from LDS as well as all their oxygen absorbers. She’s going to re-order those supplies and keep going. Her family and in-laws are all local. None of them are into prepping, at least no more than most rural families are, so Brittany and her husband are going to extend their preps to cover their families as well, at least to the extent they can afford to do so and that they have space to store the stuff. As her husband said, this stuff is cheap now and may be invaluable later. It lasts essentially forever and he’d rather have it safely at home than sitting in a warehouse if things ever get really bad.
With everything else that’s been going on, I haven’t had much time to prep lately. FedEx did show up the other day with several #10 cans of Augason Farms stuff and a 4-pound plastic bucket of lard. This is the first time that Walmart has actually shipped me the AF products rather than having them drop-shipped direct from AF. Once things settle down a bit, we’ll make a Costco run and stock up on bulk staples as well as restock the canned and bottled goods we’ve been using for the last several months without replacing them.