09:56 – Barbara is off to the gym and supermarket. Colin and I are doing kit stuff.
If you’ve been meaning to stock up on whole egg powder, you might want to visit the Augason Farms website. Today and tomorrow only, they’re having a 30% off sale on 18-pound buckets of whole egg powder. Regularly $248.99, on sale for $174.29. That 6-gallon bucket is the equivalent of just under nine of their 33-ounce #10 cans at $20/can, and is sufficient to provide a dozen eggs per week for a year. I’m not ordering a bucket because I already have quite a bit of AF powdered eggs in #10 cans and because I expect the price of powdered eggs to drop further any time now, but then I’ve been expecting that for months.
When we lived down in Winston, Kevin, our regular USPS carrier, would have someone riding along with him maybe every six months. That person was evaluating his route to make sure that it required about the same amount of time and work as all the other routes served by that post office. Lori, our carrier here, has mentioned more than once that the increase in volume from Amazon.com is killing her and the other carriers in the Sparta post office. They haven’t had anyone ride their routes with them since Amazon’s volume started ramping up big-time. As Lori says, that means they essentially end up delivering Amazon packages for free. The post office gets paid, of course, but the carriers are having to deliver much, much higher volume. That takes them more time and more work, and they don’t get paid any more for it.
USPS also treats in-town carriers and rural-route carriers differently. In-town carriers are provided with vehicles. Rural-route carriers, including ones that are actual USPS employees rather than contractors, have to buy their own vehicles. They’re paid mileage, but even so it’s a hassle that in-town carriers don’t have to deal with. Lori is still driving the RHD Jeep Wrangler she’s been driving for years. I actually emailed the postmaster general a month or so ago, and suggested he give Lori one of the new vans that USPS is starting to deploy. I haven’t heard back from him yet.
I’ve been so busy with science kit stuff lately that I haven’t had time to do any prepping to speak of. We do plan to make a big Costco run in the next couple weeks to restock on stuff we’ve used over the last few months and add more flour, sugar, oats, and other bulk staples.
“” I actually emailed the postmaster general a month or so ago, and suggested he give Lori one of the new vans that USPS is starting to deploy. I haven’t heard back from him yet.””
In my brief (but seemingly endless) retail career, I asked customers who said good things about me please NOT to say anything to the bosses, since that would mean that at least three bad things would have to be dreamed up to counteract the good comment.
An honest personal compliment from a customer is about the only reward that most public-contact personnel ever receive.
WRT USPS:
You’re lucky you apparently have a conscientious and competent USPS Carrier. In our area carriers rotate routes so it can be any one of three carriers who deliver on any particular day and there appears to be no routine schedule. Only one of the three carriers is conscientious and competent. We have a “community” mailbox that serves 20 homes in my area. The two dip-wads consider just getting the mail in the box is good enough, it doesn’t have to go in the correct slot. Packages are crammed into the box (back is bigger than the door in the front) so the package has to ripped apart to get it out. The two dip-wads don’t deliver all the mail as I can tell when the good one is on the route our mail volume is at least triple. In the interest of brevity I’ll not rant further.
BTW, the local Postmaster’s attitude is “so what’s the problems?”.
Our UPS and FedEx folks are outstanding.
Preps this week
Went to the shelves for some donations to the LA flooding survivors. Wife says “nothing expired.” Couldn’t find much in case quantity….. (I have more cases at my secondary location that I know are not expired.)
This is one of the problems with bulk purchasing or a panic buy. You have a bunch of stuff that expires at the same time. I know, we’ve discussed expiration dates before, but I’ve also described my storage conditions. I do have product get too old. and the food bank won’t accept it. So, prepper fail.
I have to keep a better eye on my deep backup and rotate it a bit better.
In other news:
I got some more electronic test equipment, which is useful in my ongoing learning about repair.
Picked up some camping stuff.
Got a couple of reference books.
Week went by in a smeared blur….
n
Lori knows I like her. She’s been referring to Barbara and me as “friends” rather than customers since soon after we moved here. But I really do add to her workload. I’m one of the higher volume USPS shippers in the county, although the most boxes I’ve ever handed to Lori in a day is maybe 10 or 11.
I told her the other day that I’ve been thinking about increasing our volume. I could easily double to quadruple it, but I told Lori not to worry. Barbara and I don’t want to be working flat-out on science kits seven days a week, which is what quadrupling our volume would mean. I suppose I could rent space and hire employees, but I’m happy being a micro-business. The problem with increasing our volume is that once that genie is out of the bottle there’s no going back.
When I lived in Cali, our postman would get high and just toss mail toward the boxes. I’d commonly find mail in the gutter by the box.
n
My local carrier (who uses one of the ancient Chevy S-10 based trucks)
is excellent. When I know I have a package, I try to find something to
do in the front yard to wait for her (usually at a pretty consistent time)
and save her from having to haul the box to the porch or try to get it
into the box. Meanwhile, I consider her a friend, and I try to come up
with something entertaining to say when I see her, make her laugh if
I can…
Substitute carriers are, of course, less effective.
RE: Solar Storm Effects – not what you might think.
I recently came across an excellent paper created by LLoyds of London for the insurance industry giving broad outlines and risk assessments for damage due to solar storms up to the intensity of the 1859 Carrington Event. Much of the data comes from analysis of Solar Storm damage to Canadian power grid in 1989 Quebec storm and computer simulations. The good news is that even a Carrington level hit wouldn’t take out all power distribution. The bad news is that it would be most destructive on both US coasts where the majority of the population is housed. So while not everyone would loose power, the grid entire would likely be knocked down for some time and areas with high population density on the coasts would remain powerless for many months or more. One bit of good news is that newer large transformers are built with much higher resistance to failure than older ones.
https://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk%20reports/solar%20storm%20risk%20to%20the%20north%20american%20electric%20grid.pdf
We’ve been lucky in our USPS carriers, I guess. Lori and before her Kevin and before him Danny have all been excellent, competent and friendly. Interestingly, all of them have been preppers to some extent. Kevin and Danny were former military, and Lori is a farmess, so I suppose that makes sense. They all figured out what I was doing, just by how many deliveries I got and the fact that some of them were externally labeled as to contents.
Being a small town, smaller than RBT’s town, the mail carriers are local folk who have kids in school, you see them at the grocery store, see them at local ball games, and see them in church. So they basically know who you are and you know who they are. You could send a letter to my name with the city name and the mail would get to me without difficulty. We are also considered a rural route so you could put a letter in the mailbox with a dollar bill, the letter mailed, change in your mailbox the next day.
Same with the local UPS drivers. I have had packages that needed a signature (rare that UPS requires here even when stated on the package) and I was not at home. The UPS driver knows my wife subs and took the package to the school which is part of her route.
Yeah, I read that Lloyds report, along with everything else I could find on EMP/CME that wasn’t classified.
My opinion is that no one can accurately estimate the likely damage from such an event because there are simply too many variables. I used to be reasonably competent at operations research and n-dimensional multivariate analysis, but that’s way beyond my abilities even at their peak. It’s not just the incredible number of inter-related variables; it’s that there aren’t good values for many/most of them, making the error bars larger than the ranges.
I am still amazed at one delivery USPS made when I was living in North Royalton, Ohio back in the late 70’s. The name on the letter was wrong, the street address was wrong, the city was wrong, the state was wrong, and the zipcode was wrong. I opened the envelope without looking at it, and the letter inside was for me. Cue woo-woo music.
The state was actually OH, but on the envelope it was OK. The first digit of the zipcode was wrong. North Royalton was 44133, but the envelope had 74133, which is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I still can’t figure out how the envelope got to me.
I have generally had good service from UPS and FedEx, with one notable
exception.
UPS driver claimed some address problem and didn’t leave the package,
even though my street number is displayed in at least three very visible
places. Worst, he obviously laid the package on the hood of my car and
dragged it off, making scratches and other marks, presumably while he
was standing between the various address markers, entering the lie about
incorrect address into his hand-held.
This is a good context to add to the prep advantage of cameras!
Financial loss from vehicle damage (and, by the way, parts for that
vehicle’s repair being held up) is a significant threat to my survival.
I still can’t figure out how the envelope got to me
They opened the letter and sent to the correct address. There was probably a bar code on the envelope that was used by the machines to route to the correct address. I think that they had bar codes in the late 70’s. If not that, did you check the return address to see if it was your address?
I have generally had good service from UPS and FedEx, with one notable
exception
I have to with one odd exception that really was not UPS’ fault.
Found a large package on our front porch. The name on the box was not us (chap across the street we found out later) but the address was us. The package was from Amazon. So we called Amazon to find out what to do with the package. Used every number we could find on the outside of the box for Amazon to look up the package. Amazon could find no information (yes the package was sent from Amazon).
Then we opened the box to examine the contents. Used numbers on the inside of the box to allow Amazon to locate the information. Amazon could find nothing. We did not know what to do with the package so we gave it away.
A week later the chap across the street comes and asks about the package. His friend had sent him the package. He, or the friend, were able to have Amazon lookup the information (why the hell was Amazon unable to find the information for me?) and determined the package had been sent to my address. I told him what we had done to locate the package and had given it away.
He then called Amazon and told them what happened. Amazon just sent a new package. Not UPS’s fault but certainly strange. With foreign exchange students we often got packages addressed to our address with a different name.
Not long ago I got a package (can’t recall, USPS or UPS) correctly
addressed to a neighbor, about a foot in front of the 2″ street number
on my front door.
And don’t get me started on the several times that a certain car rental
outfit could not pick me up because their people could not follow
simple directions.
“”Water- purification storage transportation and use
Food- storage, preparation, replenishment, preservation
shelter- heat, light, clothes
security- guns/ammo, alternate defensive tools, tripwires, cams, etc
wellbeing- medical, educational, social, comms””
… Just to repeat that simple and rather complete List !
Good job, Nick!
I’m gonna print it out and tack it up around here in a few places,
until it becomes pretty much a mantra.
Imagine, if you will, a small town in the northern part of Vermont…a tiny rural post office with a different zip code than the one used for the “city” three miles to the east. Further, imagine that the U.S. Postal Service does not deliver mail to the residences in the village of Saint Albans Bay. But UPS and FedEx DO. One must pick up one’s regular mail at the tiny rural post office and use that address when, say, ordering stuff online. It then has the possibility of arriving at the “city” post office three miles up the road, the tiny post office here, OR, via UPS or FedEx right at the house. Your guess is as good as mine.
They were leaving us yellow cards in our mail boxes for packages or certified mail to pick up and then they tried the common box config of a dozen locked boxes in a corner of the lobby, leaving you the key to whichever box to retrieve the package yourself. Now they seem to have gone back to the yellow cards. At one point a couple of years ago it was up in the air whether they would just close up shop. Enough local residents indicated they wanted to keep it, so here we are.
Sunny with blue skies, temps in the high 70s and low 80s, slight breeze. Off for a couple of errands and then back to enhanced security ops on the outside premises.
post office with a different zip code than the one used for the “city”
Not if you use ZIP+4.
Has she filed a grievance with the benevolent APWU? 🙂
Latest bumf from the Bay:
Found my car windshield cracked via impact/vandalism this morning. Notified PD and they sent a car out to take the report and give me a case number for the insurance company. I provided all associated intel accordingly and will be filing a sworn and notarized statement to them, the insurance company and the local newspaper.
And Mrs. OFD is now on board with seeing about organizing a “neighborhood watch” operation, in conjunction with the PD if they’re interested, but we’ll at least let them know and ask for input/ideas. I’ll start spreading the word among the neighbors accordingly and also put up a notice on the P.O. bulletin board and the Shell station board if they have one. Meatspace.
We think this is a good step to take on several levels, not least being that we’d like to nip this chit in the bud before local goblins start getting more ambitious.
Also picked up some nice fake electrical fence accessories cheaply to string along the regular four-foot wire fence and some additional wire for whatever purposes I might dream up.
And Mrs. OFD is now on board with seeing about organizing a “neighborhood watch” operation, in conjunction with the PD if they’re interested
You should call your group The Z-Force.* Make up some cool arm patches.
*Zimmerman Force, lol!
I am reluctant to mention a social media platform, but here I go against my better judgement. From Next Door I got some local area intel that I would not otherwise have. It seems that someone broke into a truck in our subdivision and stole some tools. Also one of the gas pumps the next town toward the big city may have a credit card skimmer installed on the pump that the cashier has the hardest time seeing.
I am in a suburban area that borders on being small town/rural. The 100 to 200 home subdivision is right next to a hospital and backs up to a corn field. I know crimes happen in our town, but I didn’t think they happened this close to home.
A doorbell transformer hooked up backwards might be a good deterrent.
I’m reminded of the story about a neighbor dog that kept knocking over a person’s metal garbage cans, after leaving it’s ‘mark’. He wired up a doorbell transformer to the garbage can.
Problem solved.
We don’t have a doorbell and I bet none of the immediate neighbors do, either. I hesitate with stuff like that in light of a minor or anyone getting a boo-boo and then suing us. But I am taking steps accordingly; got half the rear perimeter fence done and I should be able to finish it tomorrow.
“From Next Door I got some local area intel that I would not otherwise have.”
Thanks for the link; they eventually found my tricky address here but it’s not clear how to sign up because I get looped back to “find yer neighborhood.” But Mrs. OFD just did a mini-tour of the ‘hood and visited the Shell store where one of our neighbors apparently works now; she said these yoots pounded on her door late the other night, too, plus, “they better not break in ’cause my husband’s got guns…etc.” Yeah, me, too, and probably the next-door guy. For all I know the ‘hood is full of a potential infantry platoon. All were appreciative of the additional intel.
I’m gonna see how the weekend goes and then Monday I’m visiting the town hall and contacting the PD and local paper. Then I’ll take it from there. We see here evidence of the old “broken window syndrome,” and I’d like to shut it down before it escalates, while also building meatspace relationships.
Further down the road, I’ll have firearms instructor certs and can offer some basic training chit for all these fummamuckers around here who have guns. And maybe pick up some sales leads, estate appraisals, cleaning and basic repair chit, and customizations. More fun than screwing around with server racks inside a corporate data center run by absentee assholes who are working overtime to shitcan my job.
Also more contacts for possible IT projects that peeps need help with. Under-the-table, cash or trade only.
“You should call your group The Z-Force.* Make up some cool arm patches.”
Oh yeah, with some nifty brown uniforms and jackboots. We’ll have a black “Z” on a white circle inside a red armband. That’s get the SJWs in an uproar; you’ll see us on CNN and Faux Nooz Network.
Maybe just our usual plaid flannel shirts, work pants, hiking boots and we’ll get some Z-Force hats made, with crossed pistols and a corpse chalk outline coat-of-arms.
That Next Door site has some potential. There are several around me. So I have started a “neighborhood” and invited some neighbors I know to get it started. We’ll see what happens
NextDoor has recently been in the news. They made it much harder to report some things. It seems that people were issuing notices whenever someone was seen walking thru the neighborhood that didn’t look like they belonged there. Since most of these ‘keep an eye on this guy’ sightings were of BLACK MEN, someone cried RACISSSTTT! and Nextdoor changed their reporting policy.
Most neighborhoods have a FB group, my wife gets tons of local info off it, including armed robbery, and the petty crime. Also a great resource if the power goes out (thru the phone.)
nick
OFD’s “meatspace” comments apply here.
A significant portion of my ‘hood’s upstanding gentlemen
are in fact black men… I have known them for years,
same as most of the rest of the neighbors.
There’s probably social media crap going on, but I’m
not in that game.
We are overdue some face time, of course, especially
something like everybody together, but if something
weird goes down, I bet I can hustle up a gang with a
variety of skills in pretty short order.
Start a campfire, knock on doors… Hey, guys…
Time for a community meeting.
Better to have a more casual gathering, before some
crisis, but still…
If Next Door has gone PC, then I’m not interested. Because “profiling” is, in fact, done all the time by all of us and it behooves us to know who doesn’t “belong” in our ‘hood. You can bet your sweet bippy that if I, for example, decide to stroll through Southie or Charlestown any given night, the word will go out immediately and someone will want to know my biz there. Ditto if it was certain areas of Detroit, Roxbury or Bed-Sty.
I won’t do FaceCrack, period. For reasons I’ve long since posted here.
We may be more on actual Face-time, phones and email as a result hereabouts.
….and if the pixels go down or disappear for a while, or maybe a very long while, we’ll mos def be on Face-Time, pencil-and-paper, manual typewriters, and QRP radios, often or always running Morse.
Commo may not be one of the top basic human needs but it ties in with intel and is thus crucial anyway.
Once I get some major projects outta the way in the main house and out in the yard, and once I’ve got my attic work space configured, I’ve got a SLEW of projects I wanna work on.
Yep, I let the wife handle the social media aspects, basically lurking, keeping just enough involvement to be credible. It’s a bit like using credit cards to build your credit…
I have a ton of work piled up for this weekend, including real paying work. That’s been eating time this week too.
I may have scored in that estate auction I mentioned. Prices got high near the end, so it wasn’t the steal-fest I was hoping for, but I did get a couple of GI load bearing vests, or maybe just a chest harness or two, and there may be some soft armor there too. I saw at least 2 groin flaps and a couple of neck pieces. I have to go thru it, but for $25 I got a couple of chest rigs, several mag pouches, a dump pouch, and some bits and pieces that I’m sure of. All in desert camo.
I got some other stuff too, mostly for resale. Digesting that and last week’s stuff will take tomorrow (what’s left after work and family time) and then some.
So many projects.
nick
“… I got a couple of chest rigs, several mag pouches, a dump pouch, and some bits and pieces that I’m sure of. All in desert camo.”
Brand names?
Yeah, desert camo, for some odd reason. The other big one nowadays is Army digital. If I was out and about in the landscape doing SUT stuff up here, I’d have one outfit in Woodland for the warm months and another in ‘broken’ winter, mostly white. But at my age I doubt I’ll be doing that so will stick with what fits in around this AO and retain the semi-rural working stiff attire, no camo or obvious mil-spec stuff.
I am thinking, however, a chest rig w/4-6 mag pouches might be handy to have in the gym bag with the vehicle rifle. For something like that I don’t much care if it’s camo or not.
Actual GI issue, got the milspec labels and tags, and the soldier’s name in marker…
gotta go thru the bag and match up bits, see what is really there.
n
Aha. Say, any of them old-timey army-navy surplus stores down in y’all’s AO? There was one downtown in the burg I lived in as a kid and there was one, dunno if it’s still there, down in Barre, VT….yup, still there:
https://vtarmynavy.com/
I wonder, though, if the prices are any better than anywhere else and/or if they have stuff you can’t find somewhere else. It’s a good 75 miles southeast of here.
In my experience, AN surplus stores 30 or 40 years ago mostly sold actual AN surplus stuff, but around then they started buying Chinese junk and selling it as surplus rather than listing it honestly as new-production Chinese junk.
Been my experience too. Not enough actual surplus, so they bought crap to fill the store.
Haven’t tried the 2 or 4 here, they are way to small looking to have much surplus.
n
We had a true Military Surplus Store when we moved here 37 years ago: Sgt. Bub’s, and yes he really was retired Army, Supply Corps. He hung in until the sources and supply of real Military Surplus dried up as has been mentioned above.
Now instead of bringing home our equipment we just leave it over there for the Islamists to re-arm.
“Now instead of bringing home our equipment we just leave it over there for the Islamists to re-arm.”
We also left a chit-ton of stuff back in SEA. Hey, money’s no problem, Murkan taxpayer pockets are friggin’ bottomless!
Even 40-45 years ago I saw firsthand the colossal waste of our armed forces, and now it turns out that DOD has TRILLIONS that is apparently MIA. No wonder our economy and finances are so fucked.
But let’s gin up another proxy war somewhere to distract the populace from the ongoing collapse here at home; so far it’s us, the Russians, Turks, Iranians, ISIL and now the Chicoms rolling the incendiary dice in Syria. Field Marshal Rodham can’t wait to start pushing buttons and jazzing herself over how many people she can murder.
Dave Hardy wrote:
“You can bet your sweet bippy…”
Showing your age Dave… 🙂
Hey, I’m just glad I made it THIS fah! Dozens of acid trips, three wars, street cop gigs, forty years of boozing, and the icing on the cake was the four years of grad skool study in English Lit and Medieval Chit. It’s a wonder I’m still here, praise the Lord and whatever long-suffering guardian angels who by now must have surely been promoted many times.
That shit will rot your brain, man. All those dead white males? You need to enroll in a lesbian womyn of color seminar ASAP.
“… four years of grad skool study in English Lit and Medieval Chit.”
Did you get a masters or PhD out of that?
What they used to call, and I dunno if they still do, ’cause I been out of it now for nearly a quarter-century, ABD; i.e., all but dissertation for the PhD in Medieval Studies. That would have meant another several years of dead-language studies, probably in Europe, and writing a book. While my first marriage was disintegrating and my dad was dying in MA of early-onset Alzheimer’s and I was still a drunk and dealing, unbeknownst to me at the time, with PTSD. Which had been re-triggered by the first Gulf War around that time. So typical grad skool epic fail.
“All those dead white males? You need to enroll in a lesbian womyn of color seminar ASAP.”
That shit was just getting going good during my two years of MA study; foul and nasty fembats on the rampage constantly. Worse down in NJ. I finally gave it all up as a very bad job.
Even assuming I’d finished it up and got my doctorate, I would never have found a decent university teaching position under those circumstances. As it is, the tiny handful of “conservative” straight white males with humanities PhD’s and teaching currently are like unto the Jews in central Europe during the 1930s. One step more and they’ll be in the boxcars.
I thought 3-4 years was enough for a PhD.
Not in “medieval studies,” at least not back then. My MA thesis adviser had done ten years at the University of Chicago PLUS more years in Europe. You were expected to know at least two modern foreign languages and two or three others, including mandatory fluency in Latin. I had studied in classical and medieval Latin, Old and Middle English, Old French, medieval Italian, and Old Norse. But like much else, if you don’t use it, you lose it, so that is mostly all gone now. My working MA thesis was on “representations of fatherhood in Dante and Virgil” and I gave a little talk on it at Yale in April of 1990. Then my first wife finished law skool and decided to take a clerkship in NJ so we moved down there and I transferred into a PhD program and I’ve kicked myself ever since for not accepting the offers I had at Drew and Lehigh. At the former, I would have studied with one of the last surviving Inklings, and now he’s gone, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inklings
I would have liked to do a PhD in medieval studies. I would have had to get on top of Latin, of course, and C13 English and/or French and/or Italian and/or Icelandic – all offered at ANU back then. I’m too old and worn out for that now but I’d like to reaquaint myself with my classical and medieval Latin and ancient Greek texts and get on top of ancient Greek and Roman history. I was also interested in the Crusades and church history. I did a unit in 1987 called The Medieval Church which is my all time favourite course.
There are a number of pretty decent DVDs, books and web sites devoted to classical Latin and Greek.
For ancient Greek and Roman history I’d go with the primary sources first, like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus and then move on to the really stellar “modern” historians like Gibbon and Peter Green.
I studied ancient and medieval in high skool, Roman-occupied Palestine/Judea as an undergraduate, and medieval philosophy, history and theology as a grad student and teaching assistant. All just dust in the wind now, but I still read a lot of it and I’m re-learning Latin and attempting Greek eventually.
I avoid like the plague any contemporary “historians” of any era of human history and especially any PC and lefty interpretations of the Crusades and Inquisition. But they’ve got their toxic mitts in everywhere these days, and to hear them tell it Western civilization and Christianity are the source of all evil, suffering and pain. So they can just go and have brutal and savage sexual intercourse with themselves.
When I started Latin in 1988 we used this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Latin-Peter-V-Jones/dp/0521286239
The purists didn’t like it because it deliberately doctored the texts to make them easier. I really got hooked on Cicero’s attacks on Gaius Verres (Chapter 4) and Lucius Sergius Catilina (Chapter 5).
Did a year of NT Greek in 1993. My tutor, a retired Anglican canon, said I’d need to do another year of it to be able to read the Greek NT fluently. I’ll have to get around to that… He taught me NT grammar but C20 pronunciation, said it would be useful if I ever visited Greece. Also studied the Roman empire in the east, a subject I’d never really thought of before.
All hail Marcus Tullius Cicero!
“There are a number of pretty decent DVDs, books and web sites devoted to classical Latin and Greek. ”
If you could post links to good websites on Latin, Greek (and Icelandic and French) I’d appreciate it…
Basic and refresher Latin:
https://www.sophia.org/tutorials/latin-i-learning-the-basics
Late medieval and early modern Latin:
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/Latin/beginners/
Nice explanatory site:
https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/latol/00
Classical Greek:
http://atticgreek.org/
Explanatory site again, on Greek:
https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/grkol/00
Tons of info here:!!!
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
For books:
The Wheelock’s Latin series and workbook.
“Learn to Read Greek,” by Keller and Russell, plus workbooks
THESE GUYS:!!!
http://www.bolchazy.com/
Old Norse/Icelandic:
https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/norol/00
https://notendur.hi.is/haukurth/norse/
French:
http://www.uni.edu/becker/french31.html
Since French is a modern living language, your best bet is to hang out with or live among French speakers, but I kinda doubt there are any near you, amirite?
Correct. Knew a very cute French born girl in high school, unfortunately I didn’t know here *that* well. In my first job I got to know another cute French born girl, but unfortunately she was already taken. Sigh.
Thanks for all the links.