09:46 – More kit work today. This time of year, the trick is to maintain sufficient finished goods inventory to allow us to ship in a timely manner, but not build up inventory so far that we end up with a lot of unsold kits in stock when the rush slacks off.
From some of the comments yesterday, I see that I need to write a brief explanation of chemical leavening agents. Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate, sodium hydrogen carbonate, or NaHCO3) is the basis of all common chemical leavening agents. In the presence of an acid or heat, baking soda evolves carbon dioxide gas, which forms the bubbles familiar to anyone who’s baked or made pancakes. In combination with a solid edible acid, baking soda becomes baking powder.
There are two types of baking powder, single-acting and double-acting. Single-acting baking powder contains a stoichiometric equivalent (or an excess) of the solid acid. When water is added to the dough, the baking soda and acid immediately react to form carbon dioxide bubbles. All of the baking soda is consumed in that process. Double-acting baking power contains an excess of baking soda. Part of that is consumed when water is added to the dough, forming bubbles, but part remains in the dough. When that remaining baking soda is exposed to heat in the oven, each two molecules of baking soda react to form one molecule of sodium carbonate, one molecule of water, and one molecule of carbon dioxide gas. That release of carbon dioxide because of oven heat is the second action of double-acting baking powder.
Almost any solid edible acid can be used to make baking powder. I mentioned citric acid because it’s as good as any other acid, it’s cheap (I paid about $2/pound for a five-pound bag of it), and as a very common food additive it’s very readily available in food-grade form. But you can use other solid edible acids such as cream of tartar, aluminum sulfates, and so on. The aluminum-based acids are popular in commercial baking powders, but concern about aluminum consumption has caused manufacturers to shift away from aluminum-based baking powders to those that use organic acids like cream of tartar or citric acid.
In fact, the acid doesn’t even have to be in powder form, which is why many recipes use only baking soda rather than baking powder. Liquid acids in the recipe–such as vinegar, sour cream, buttermilk, lemon juice, etc.–also react with baking soda to form carbon dioxide gas. If you use just enough baking soda to neutralize those liquid acids, you end up with the equivalent of single-acting baking powder, albeit partially liquid; if you use an excess of baking soda, you end up with the equivalent of double-acting baking powder.
We could segue right from this into sourdough baking.
We have a bright white sky today, looks like it could rain any minute. I have a bit of outside stuff to do and will probably skip today’s vets group meeting; I was just down in that building yesterday and it’s a long painful hike from the parking lot and through a long hallway to get there. And I gotta be careful how I move around or I get a nice sharp jolt to remind me.
Mrs. OFD is flying back to CONUS from Ireland on about three hours sleep, if that, so will undoubtedly be utterly exhausted later today. We’ll probably be just two useless old farts tonight and listen to the streaming radio and read books.
We’ll probably be just two useless old farts tonight and listen to the streaming radio and read books
Isn’t that your SOP, sir?
Sitting in MDW. SWA plane delay 2 hours. No free WiFi available so using my iPhone as a hotspot. Connected with iPad running ipVanish.
Thanks for the dissertation on baking powder, Dr. Bob. I gotta try some recipes
Speaking of sourdough bread, here’s a link to a quick bread recipe:
The method, which comes from baker Adam Leonti of Brooklyn Bread Lab, and it is one of the easiest, most elegant ways to get tangy, chewy bread that is pretty close to the real thing, without having to deal with wild yeasts or strict temperature management.
Mrs. OFD just called and is sitting in Newark for a two-hour layover but her flight up here will arrive earlier than we thought and she gets in at Burlap International Airport around 3 PM instead of 4-4:30. So I gotta hustle on a few things here and then head down to get her; she’s exhausted, of course. Probably take a nap until about midnight and then wake up for four hours reading with the light on. And than back to sleep until noon. I have to tip-toe around these capers as she is the working spouse and I’m just the janitor and gardener and security bozo.
I’ll try that recipe this weekend, MrAtoz, thanks, and have a good flight home to Lost Wages and try not to trip over the transvestite stripper zombies in the lobby.
Actually, you can do the same thing with that bread recipe I posted from King Arthur Flour. The longer you let it sit in the refrigerator, the more sourdough-like it becomes. After several days or a week, it tastes pretty much like sourdough.
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/no-knead-crusty-white-bread-recipe
Dadgum it, I hate Mickysoft. I prefer Office 2003 which used to work fine along with Office 2013 on my office PC. I deleted Office 2013 off my office PC since it kept on insisting on being the proper XLS file handler. Now the pulldown menus do not work on my Excel 2003. I have uninstalled Office 2003 and reinstalled it. I have repatched it up to Office 2003 SP3. My Excel 2003 pulldown menus do not work so this is some sort of a configuration error. And I hate Office 2013 with its ribbon menu and pastel colors.
@lynn – Have you ever looked at Corel WordPefect Office?
https://www.amazon.com/Corel-WordPerfect-Office-Home-Student/dp/B01EB06QUM/ref=sr_1_1
Personally, I have found it more compatible than any of the “open source” “Office Clones” out there, both for documents I am receiving from and sending to people who use M$ Office. It is also more like “old” M$ Office.
The link I provide is for a home/student edition (the one I use), but down on the page is a comparison chart for all versions. If you watch Amazon’s Lightning Deals you can often get the home/student edition for $40.
I second Dad Cooks recommendation, started there in DOS and have never seen a reason to change.
Dadgum it, I hate Mickysoft.
I noticed some odd behavior with new installs of Office 2007 on Windows 7 as of late.
Office 2007 installs and runs just fine on Windows 8 and 10, but when I do a clean install on a clean Windows 7, PowerPoint will crash as soon as I start the program and attempt to create a new presentation.
This is an issue because two Core 2 Duo Mac Book Pros at our house are about to be obsoleted with the new OS release from Apple (and you thought Mickysoft was bad), and Windows drivers for the SKUs stop at Windows 7.
To answer questions in advance — Linux is not an option on the one I use due to odd BIOS problems, and my wife must have Office on her machine.
@lynn – Have you ever looked at Corel WordPefect Office?
https://www.amazon.com/Corel-WordPerfect-Office-Home-Student/dp/B01EB06QUM/ref=sr_1_1
My customers use Microsoft Excel so I have to stay there. Our software that we sell has a bidirectional interface with Excel that works from Excel 1997 to Excel 2013. I have yet to try Excel 2016 but it may be time.
In actuality, Excel is our number one competitor. Many engineers assume that the world is linear and perform small simulations in there. I cannot tell you the number of times that I have been compared to their results generated via Excel and asked to explain the difference. My answer is always, “pressure”. Pressure has a huge effect on two, three, or four phase mixtures.
“FEC commissioner warns Dems are gunning for conservative media”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/charge-dems-to-change-first-amendment-to-silence-tea-party-conservative-media/article/2601220
“A key Federal Election Commission Republican warned Wednesday that liberals are moving aggressively to “amend the First Amendment” so that conservatives are silenced and businesses are chased “out of the democracy.””
The first thing that the NAZIs do is silence the opposition. Then they will grab the guns.
And burn the books.
“To answer questions in advance — Linux is not an option on the one I use due to odd BIOS problems, and my wife must have Office on her machine.”
Same deal here, Mr. Greg; dunno what your BIOS problems are but they might possibly be rectified somehow, or one would hope. On the second issue; I have Linux Mint 18 installed here now (having dumped Windows 8.1 for good) and am using Crossover, which allows us to also have Office 2010 Home and Student on it, which is all my wife needs. Shows up as “Windows Applications” in the Menu and then the individual apps within that. Works like a charm so far.
My one remaining problem now is getting Mint’s “Simple Scan” or “Xsane” to “connect” to the Brother printer/scanner; oddly enough it prints stuff OK (and I had to tweak some stuff to get that done) but won’t scan. And I distinctly remember older Linux distros immediately “seeing” whatever connected printer and Simple Scan worked immediately, too. I wonder if it’s because the later and contemporary distros now have more code and gimcracks, gimmicks and geegaws running than before.
Anyone else on Linux run into this? Print but won’t scan? Still googling so I may come up with something sooner or later, but I have about two+ weeks to get a solution, because wife has to scan all her receipts and suchlike into the pooter and send them in with her invoices. Or the alternative might be to find a dedicated scanner that works well with Linux.
And to note: Silverlight and Netflix have now made it the OFD Shit List.
While moviego.cc, unseen.is, and Perfect Privacy are on the OFD “White List.”
wife has to scan all her receipts and suchlike into the pooter
Consider taking photographs of the receipts and using that rather than a scanner. A smartphone camera works well for taking such images.
Silverlight and Netflix have now made it the OFD Shit List
Add Adobe Flash.
wife has to scan all her receipts and suchlike into the pooter
Like Mr. Ray says. There are plenty of cheap smartypants phone apps that will scan, OCR, and upload to your cloud service of choice. I do that when traveling and have a lot of receipts to deal with.
And there is at least one free one that will turn it into a pdf and email it back to you.
I hated trying to get sane to work in linux. Friggin scanners never worked.
Our HP combo unit has an option to ‘scan to memory card’ which I used to scan receipts, and then sneakernetted to my lappy.
Always a work around….
n
Double-acting baking power contains an excess of baking soda.
Commercial double acting baking powders have an acid that activates at higher temperatures to react with the baking soda. It’s not heat breakdown of baking soda that creates the second rise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baking_powder#Single_vs_double_acting_baking_powders
And we are down to $1,800 and we have more pictures …
http://houston.craigslist.org/cto/5772819144.html
You’re talking about a pyrophosphate or one of the other salts that doesn’t react with baking soda at room temperature, even in the presence of water. That’s one way to do it, but a simple excess of baking soda works just as well.
I like this biscuit recipe:
1 cup flour
1/2 tbsp baking powder [or substitute?]
3/8 cup water
1/8 cup oil (simple vegetable oil)
The trick I came up with is to shake up (emulsify) the
water and oil in a little jar, stir pretty gently into the
dry ingredients, and plop (drop?) biscuits (or one big
one) onto a lightly oiled pan.
425F 9 minutes
Usually too crumbly for sandwich type purposes, note.
Does WordPerfect still have the “reveal codes” feature?
Does any other word processor provide this?
It has been a long time since I have needed to do major
document generation, so I guess it’s no longer a big deal
for me.
Does WordPerfect still have the “reveal codes” feature?
Yes, it does.
Here’s one example
http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/46904/making-baking-powder-substitute-with-baking-soda-and-powdered-citric-acid
In the early days of office computer usage (early in the offices in which I worked, at least) the secretaries (remember those, in this context?) used Microsoft Word and I usually had to suggest that they just delete a section of text when the formatting somehow got all weird.
What was it, Ctrl-F6? I’d usually suggest they just hit that to sort things out, just for fun.
I had WordPerfect, even legal to bring a copy from home.
Hmm, looking it up, looks like F11… It has been a long time…
“Add Adobe Flash”
Yup. And their “Creative Cloud” chicanery and profit-sucking scam.
Thanks to Mr. Ray and Mr. Atoz for the camera suggestions via the smartypants phones; I might have thought of that a long while back but had since forgotten it, as we both got used to using the printer for scanning.
WordPerfect is no longer available or supported for Linux, unless you wanna get an older copy of it and then tweak a whole bunch of stuff and packages and dependencies across multiple directories for a very long night or a month of Sundays. It had been the word processor choice for state gummint up here and lawyers, and boy did they scream when everyone else decided to standardize on Word. Some absolutely refused. And that Reveal Codes was a huge part of their bitching. Or the lack thereof in Word.
I’m happy with LibreOffice and wife is happy with Microslop Orifice running via Crossover on here. Thus mote it be.
I submitted my little support question to the Brother site and we’ll see what kind of response I get; meanwhile will plan on possibly advising wife of the phone options if the printer itself can’t scan stuff. Or looking into another multi-function unit that is solidly and reliably OK to use on Linux. It kills me, though, that YEARS ago I had Linux distros routinely recognizing printers and scanning from them with Simple Scan.
Wife tried to stay up till her usual bedtime but couldn’t do it; crashed around 8 PM. They had a grand old time in Ye Old Country (Ireland) where everyone looks like them and the wunnerful times with Princess were balanced nicely by the horrible times, when they were “screaming at each other.” Princess loves to argue and just won’t stop or give up but nag you to death. Until you blow up, which was the object of the exercise, and here she is 24 and been doing this for the 20 years I’ve known her. I don’t fall for that and she knows better than to try it on me long since. Just gives up and goes away, lol.
Back to whatever outside chit I can manage tomorrow and the weekend while the weather is still good, and then more time spent on prep stuff in the cellar and attic work space.
“”It had been the word processor choice for state gummint up here and lawyers, and boy did they scream when everyone else decided to standardize on Word. Some absolutely refused. And that Reveal Codes was a huge part of their bitching. Or the lack thereof in Word.””
My document output was subject to lawyer issues, but in them days everything was passed around on paper only.
The typos and such that secretaries generated from hand-scribbled original writings were typically big problems, but that was nothing compared to the fits generated when I printed documents that were ready to mail, with a rare scan of the letterhead graphic, even, bypassing the secretaries.
Edit… Some of the secretaries and such were real professionals and good cooperative co-workers. All these years later I feel a need to speak kindly of them.
Food info, kinda handy charts, too:
https://georgepatton325.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/surviving-for-90-days-part-2-b-how-much-food-do-you-need/
And other nooz sources outside of our own lousy mess here in the West:
https://georgepatton325.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/reading-list/
Look into powdered buttermilk (Saco brand, or Bob’s Red Mill)
for baking purposes.
Baking soda and citric acid sound like the better long term storage
option, obviously.
From the Continuing Bad News Department:
http://blog.jim.com/war/there-will-be-war-2/
From the Corruption and Derangement Department:
https://straightlinelogic.com/2016/09/07/corrupt-and-deranged-by-robert-gore/
More in this vein:
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=8504
https://georgepatton325.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/surviving-for-90-days-part-2-b-how-much-food-do-you-need/”
OR…… I know it’s not sexy math-y and all, but you could just say, by golly, a meal for my family is 2 sides and a main, so 2 cans veg, or one can veg, one starch, and one can meat or meat equiv per meal per day. And then stack it. You could even organize it in, say, 30 meal units, and see at a glance what you’ve got stacked.
I mean, you plan your normal meals around units like a can or a piece of beef, not x grams of protein and y grams of carbs… plan your storage around the same units you use to cook.
I’ll repeat my belief that for a normal family, #10 cans are too big, you’ll waste food without refrigeration before you finish the can.
I will acknowledge that my method is harder with bulk LTS foods. In that case you need to do some math, but more like “how many cups of flour will I use per day if I’m making bread every day?” “how much rice per day if we will eat as a side or base meal twice a day?” Then you get something like “we use 3 cups flour, one cup sugar, and 2 cups of rice a day.” Add one can of veg and one can of meat/ day to flavor the rice. Stack that.
If you aren’t living that life now, it’s very difficult to really know what your rate of consumption will be, but how quickly you will actually use the food, in units of cooking meals per day, seems to be a better real world guide than total calories in your larder.
The MOST common causes for you to use your preps will have you making meals from your pantry for a week or two, maybe 4. You won’t be in the flour and salt in a month unless those make up a significant portion of your current consumption.
Reality from our normal use is that one pound of salt lasts us about a year in cooking and as a flavoring agent. Unless we bake for the holidays, 5 pounds of flour lasts most of the year, and 2 pounds of sugar covers us. The prepared food in my storage and in my pantry, and access to fresh, means we rarely make bread from scratch even with the bread machine. We use mixes for breakfast foods (pancakes, etc).
Any scenario that has us using our bulk storage food has us making significant changes to our daily diet.
I store bulk now, as a supplement to the prepared foods and insurance against a sudden and widespread collapse, or a long slow deterioration in conditions. I store it for a Venezuela scenario, or Great Depression II(tm). RBT stores bulk against 2 years of widespread famine. This is different from my goals, and likely different from yours.
Like all preps, it comes down to ‘why are you doing this particular thing, and what is your goal?’ In the case of storing food, I think people get too hung up on calories and bulk, and would be better off thinking in terms of normal meals.
Gotta get to bed, hopefully this makes sense, but if not, why not? What is your mental math?
nick
Some of the secretaries and such were real professionals
I also started on WP on DOS but migrated to Word when it started with version 1.0 on Window 3.0. Never had a problem with wonky formatting problems.
Many of the secretaries I dealt with treated their computers as a typewriter. When they got to the end of a line they would use the return key rather than let the system wrap. Double space between a paragraph was always two returns. None could understand the concept of a paragraph with no line breaks.
Indents at the beginning of a paragraph was done using the space bar rather than hanging indents. Pages numbers were assigned manually on each page. Tables were done using a mono spaced font and the space bar. Aligning numbers was done the same way. Lines on a page were done by multiple underline characters. Using tabs was almost unheard of.
Thus if you ever changed the margin the document was really messed up and almost unreadable.
Some would also type too fast and hit an odd combination of keys which would cause WP to do some strange formatting. The reveal codes enabled me to solve most problems. Doing that would really freak out the secretaries as they thought the document was destroyed with all the extra stuff.
Most of the problems could be attributed to ignorance and stupidity. Most did not want to learn new ways, some just could not understand the concept. A typewriter was good enough for years, why change?
“”… hit an odd combination of keys which would cause WP to do some strange formatting. The reveal codes enabled me to solve most problems. “”
Our secretaries only used MS Word, so such an error was very difficult to fix.
Worse, at least one of them would type up a (legally binding) document or letter, from hand-written (or even WordPerf) draft, and print it out. Hand it back to her with corrections marked and she’d re-type it from scratch, with a new set of errors!
This problem person was also the one who got all bent when I printed up my own letter that first time, with letterhead and all (had to scan the logo in; she would not let go of any letterhead paper), got my boss’s approval, and presented it for mailing (and of course she had the envelopes and stamps). Took a while for that feud to settle down some.
@Ray, you bring back years of unpleasant memories with your descriptions of how secretaries (now have to be called administrative assistants) could not grasp using a word processing program.
When we first starting deploying computers to the secretaries we were already standardized on Word Perfect for the engineers who had no trouble (relatively) grasping word processing on a computer. The secretaries were getting ticked off that the engineers no longer needed them so we had to bring them into the computer age. Big problem was as you described; like line returns on every line, spaces for indents, irrelevant codes all over the place. Without Word Perfect’s Reveal Codes we would have been sunk.
And I kid you not, one day I caught a secretary applying white-out to her computer screen and not understanding why her correction was not showing through. There was another secretary that complained that her computer was “eating” her floppy disks. Our old IBMs had two floppy drives and there was a space in between them where this secretary where this secretary shoved her floppies because she did not like the necessary step of flipping that little lever to “open” and “close” the floppy drive.
To this day I still work in Word Perfect in Reveal Codes. Old habits die hard.
BTW, I started with Easy Writer and then went to Word Star. Word Star’s bazillion key combinations meant your hands never left the keyboard. When I started with Word Perfect I got real adept at creating macros that saved me countless hours when producing technical documentation.
“RBT stores bulk against 2 years of widespread famine. This is different from my goals, and likely different from yours.”
Everyone’s goals are different. Mine is not so much to store bulk against a 2-year famine as to accumulate as much bulk as I can, which is to say as much as Barbara will put up with. My first goal is to have sufficient to feed six people + Colin for a year, with as few changes as possible to a normal diet. Yes, we store a lot of bulk flour, rice, pasta, sugar, salt, oil, and so on, but those are to provide bulk calories. We also store a lot of canned meats, sauces, powdered butter, cheese, and eggs, etc. The latter is the expensive part, but the former is much more important. If need be, we could get away with just dry staples, along with herbs and spices. I wouldn’t mind having about 50 person-years of dry staples on hand, but Barbara would freak. So I just do what I can and hope it’ll be enough if push comes to shove.
You bring up a good point about calculating quantities based on very different conditions before versus after. Right now, we probably go through a loaf or two of bread a week between the two of us. In a SHTF scenario with six people plus Colin, we’d probably be going through maybe three loaves per DAY, and I need to calculate bulk quantities based on that rather than on current consumption.
Excellent points on food storage here from Mr. nick and RBT. I’m not very big on the calorie charts myself and would prefer nick’s method. And for now we’re just looking at 90 days, to be expanded later, of course.
I also plead guilty, though never a secretary, to typing in word processors like I’m using a typewriter; I learned to type using all my fingers and thumbs back in high skool as the only boy in the class, taught by Mrs. Merrick. I can do 51 WPM, no errors. A good sec can do twice that or more. This little skill came in handy to get time off the streets during the cop jobs; no one else could type or, for that matter, use basic correct English, so Yours Truly got the job, mostly just doing guys’ reports.
Calorie count is a useful proxy when you’re calculating just how much you have. For example, my most recent bulk purchase was 100 pounds each of flour and sugar and 50 pounds each of rice and pasta. That’s 300 pounds of carbohydrates. Ignoring for a moment things like protein, fats, balanced nutrition, etc., that tells me that I just added 300 pounds at 1,700+ calories per pound, for a total of 500,000+ calories. That’s a year’s worth of calories for one person at about 1,400 calories/day. Adding 50 pounds of dry beans and 12 liters of oil would provide balanced nutrition for one person-year at about 1,900 calories/day total.
@rbt, as I’m coming late to the bulk food storage, and I’ve learned to be skeptical of the ‘standard recommendation’ thru hard experience before coming to it, I think I have a different perspective. [may be an F’d up perspective]
The thing that really got me to take a new look at the ‘recommended’ solutions was that damn one gallon per person per day water recommendation. It is absolutely inadequate for LIVING in a disaster. After a few days of post-hurricane, essentially off grid living, I was in the beginning stages of panic that I NEEDED MORE WATER. Everyone notes that 1/1/1 is a minimum, but they don’t say why, or what is likely to happen if you only stock the minimum, or what a typical reality for getting on with your life might be.
SO MANY of the recco’s (which I believe is a British construction) are based on survival level, lifeboat type scenarios. NO FREAKIN’ way can you be physically active, involved in defense and reconstruction, or simply living, after a disaster, eating only the bare minimum of calories and drinking only the bare minimum of water that have become so much of the ‘lore’ of prepping. SO MANY of the recco’s are based on simple survival, ie. just keeping the body alive while you await rescue, and where there is any science involved it seems to be based on fit young men (soldiers.) Many prepping scenarios are specifically about when THERE WILL BE NO RESCUE. You must prep for more than just keeping the body alive. You have to be able to FUNCTION thru the crisis.
The same is true for trauma care- try to find a packaged tourniquet that fits a 10 yo or a petite woman. They are designed for soldiers, because that was the most likely person to NEED a tourniquet. Now I think there is a much wider market and I think very little has been done to address it.
You see something similar in nutrition science. When it comes to actual verifiable science, what we REALLY know is how to feed elite athletes, using close monitoring, and piles of data. (The whole, hopefully debunked ‘carb loading’ thing, forex DOESN’T APPLY TO NORMAL FOLKS!)
The army knows pretty well how to sustain soldiers under adverse conditions and LOOK at the nutrition in an MRE. MANY times the calories, fat, salt, etc of civilian prepper food. Think the army is paying for all those calories ‘cuz they like PFC Snuffy soft and cuddly? No way, that’s what it takes to survive active living out of doors. You can bet that post disaster, your physical activity level will increase dramatically, and your personal environment will likely degrade significantly from what you enjoy at the moment. You will spend a LOT of time outdoors.
Even in my comfortable suburban home, post IKE I was raking leaves for hours, cutting limbs, helping neighbors clear downed trees, and biking around the ‘hood. Post collapse, you’ll burn a ton of calories turning over the soil for your garden, digging fence post holes, digging graves and slit trenches for latrines, moving material for defensive purposes, stacking sandbags, OR walking to market, carrying home whatever you get at the distribution point, working with others to clear or improve aspects of your neighborhood,[chopping firewood, scavenging in the ruins] etc. Even boarding up windows takes a great deal of strength and effort- plywood is HEAVY. Ripping all the wet drywall and flooring out of your house after the flood is EXHAUSTING but you’ve got to do it, and promptly, or the mold starts and you lose the whole structure.
In other words, I’m pretty sure post-disaster your caloric needs will increase dramatically. Just staying warm will burn more calories than you are accustomed to. You’ll drink a ton of water (because of your increased activity), and need lots more than you think for cooking and sanitation. The reality of continuing to live in those conditions calls for much higher levels of storage than just ‘surviving’ them while waiting for rescue would do.
nick
(and I’m basically lazy. Adding up whole meals is a lot simpler for me than doing all the other math.) (and that’s another argument for storing smaller, single meal sized cans- makes the math easier)
I learned to type using all my fingers and thumbs back in high skool
So did I. I hit 60wpm but about 5 errors. A very useful class later in life. I still touch type. I’ve seen plenty of programmers when I was doing ORSA and sims that hunt and pecked everything. They dreaded getting the “create a user manual” task.
BTW, I agree that gross calories are a useful tool to estimate food requirements. But they are a very loose tool, and easy to misapply.
I’d argue, for the sake of simplicity, that anyone eating a western diet knows what a meal that will provide adequate long term nutrition looks like. Veg, starch, protein, and some fruit. Or main dish and some sides. (or spread that out over the day) [or put it all in one pot] Which is basically the way we’ve been eating since the dawn of agriculture, but especially since industrialization and modern transportation (assuming those foods were available.)
What and how much do you eat now? Count on that as a guide, while making adjustments based on limited availability or limited variety of storables. (like me planning to eat rice and tortillas, while minimizing them in my normal life- I know I can eat them from stored bulk LTS, even if I wouldn’t eat them every day now.)
Some multivitamins will add back any traces you need and don’t get from your food. Everyone should be stocking multivitamins.
nick
Oh, and depending on the disaster, fuel, energy (all forms), and time could all be in short supply. If you are counting on turning your flour into bread, what oven will you use? (or alternative) How will you fuel it? How long does it take? Will you have time? Baking was a VERY time and labor intensive activity. So was laundry for that matter (because it’s very similar to cooking.) Think about alternatives to risen bread that were traditional in societies with low fuel, and little time for cooking. Stuff like flat breads, tortillas, pasta all take less effort, time, and fuel.
n
Everyone will say I’m wrong, but I’m not worried about how many meals we have on hand yet. We probably have about 200 pounds of dry food on hand. I’m not saying that’s good enough, because it isn’t. We still need more food, and I plan on accumulating more food. We are now at the point where other prepping concerns worry me more than our lack of food.
Here are the areas where we are less prepared than we are with food:
1. Water
2. Firearms
3. Firewood
4. Generator or solar power for electricity
I just bought a Sawyer Mini water filter, and I am signed up for the NRA Basic Shotgun class in two weeks. I need to get someone to take a look at our chimney and build a firewood rack and get some firewood.
Well, as I’ve said, what I actually count as a person-year is 1.2 million calories, or 3,000 calories per person-day. The problem with your method is that you have no real idea how much food you have. As you say, a pre-SHTF meal does not equal a post-SHTF meal. If you have 90 days’ pre-meals, how does that translate to post-meals? 60 days? 45 days? Less?
“I deleted Office 2013 off my office PC since it kept on insisting on being the proper XLS file handler. ”
I always run ccleaner registry clean until it detects no errors when I remove a program before I install a replacement. Usually takes 4-6 runs to clean out all of the registry dependencies. YMMV.
Well, I look at it two ways, (call it an upper and lower bound if that sounds more science-y).
If there is a major widespread disaster/collapse/ depression, I’m gonna be as conservative as I can, reducing my consumption if possible, looking to stretch my “pre-SHTF” meals. I can do that with bulk, just adding a cup or two of rice to every meal, or only eating 2 meals a day, or going to “rice plus some stuff” meals…stews, or porridges. Hard work will come with changed lifestyle. Everything is up for grabs, including eating. I imagine we’ll get lean and mean.
If the disaster is local, regional, or short to medium term, and recovery is a reasonable estimated time away, and I need to work hard, I’ll be supplementing my ‘pre-SHTF’ meals with additional volume or ingredients. Again, add rice and beans, heartier breakfast, etc. I can afford to use more stores to feed myself, and restock after the crisis passes.
If the disaster is an “ordinary” disaster like a hurricane, we’ll just continue to eat normally. If I’m hungry, I’ll eat more. If we’re hiding from the heat, we’ll eat less. That has been what we’ve done in the past. In most cases, we never even got past our normal pantry and fridge/freezer food.
I guess what that means is I have a “normal” meal as a baseline, and I can adjust that depending on the circumstances. I can add my ‘medium term’ storage food, canned beans, dehydrated potatoes, instant or pouch rice, to bulk up the meals, or I can stretch by using the canned meat and veg as ingredients in more economical (but different from what we normally eat) meals like rice based dishes using LTS bulk. Or I add tortillas or pasta made from bulk flour, oil, eggs, etc.
If I have 90 days of ‘normal’ meals for my family, with additional medium and long term storage food, I can add to it and burn more in a shorter time, or stretch it to last a longer time. If ten pounds of rice is 100 adult servings, 30 pounds should feed my family for 1-2 months, when added to the ‘normal’ meals. 100 pounds supplements my ‘normal’ meals for heavy work for 90 days, or stretches for MUCH longer if we can stay at ‘normal’ or reduced levels of activity. That doesn’t count the potatoes, bulk meat that is not sorted by meals, or wheat flour.
Like I’ve said, I’m coming to LTS food late. I’ve been thru several ‘normal’ disasters without ever really thinking about it too much. Ebola and the need to stay indoors for up to 45 days caused me to up my ‘normal food’ storage. The possibility of long term collapse, major widespread disaster, or extended economic problems caused me to start storing actual bulk ingredients, instead of prepared food. So far, my approach to bulk is that it supplements and stretches my prepared ‘normal food’ and isn’t a replacement for it.
I consider that to be the NEXT step, having LTS to provide the sole source of food for a year or more (or really any amount of time). That would be a BIG DEAL ™ for my spouse to accept the possibility of living thru a period where NO other food was available.
nick
(consider what the world looks like with NO FOOD except what you’ve stored. No fuel. No cities. No transportation. Inverse decimation of the population ie. 1 in ten left. How did we get there? Was it long enough that everything got eaten first? Or sudden so there is food left for the taking (once it’s safe to move around)?)
@dave,
get your water storage started, and get a smallish generator (3500-4500watts)
Having the gennie will mean refrigeration, and you won’t lose your freezer (you have a chest freezer, right?)
Then increase your water storage. Even just barrels and heavy trash bags for rainwater collection will help, or a kiddie pool, or one of those inflatable backyard pools, they’re cheap and you have the filter already. You can get thru in a pinch with a couple of 5 gal buckets, a neighbor with a pool, and the filter. There are problems with pool water, and times when rainwater collection would be contraindicated, so you need stored water, but like I said, in a pinch.
Get a chest freezer. This allows buying in bulk and freezing which will save you money and help you prep. I’ve saved the cost of the freezer many times over, just by buying ‘family packs’ of meat and cutting it myself, or vac sealing individual portions, and by buying on sale. It will let you stock up and ‘shop from your freezer’ saving time and money and ensuring you always have something to cook for dinner (which further saves over getting fast food when you haven’t been to the grocery store, or are just strapped for time.)
The chest freezer, and increasing the amount of normal food in your pantry will be enough food to get you thru most of the likely and common local disasters.
One disaster that many people forget about, but that you often hear preppers who are very thankful for their preps later, is prolonged unemployment or illness. These two personal disasters will be greatly mitigated if you and your family aren’t wondering where your next meal will come from.
Get some store water!
Get a freezer (they’re cheap, and have a huge day to day benefit.)
Get a gennie ($600 should do it) (and get gas, gas cans, and extension cords)
Get a firearm, or 2. ($600 for a couple of shotguns, or one rifle, or one pistol)
Start stacking.
nick
We really don’t know what’s gonna happen and it could range from the effects of a big ice storm knocking out the power for a couple of weeks to riots and looting and martial law to a nuke strike or a comet smacking into the Atlantic Ocean. Or anywhere along that continuum.
I’m planning for now just to get to the point we have 90 days of food and water here; we’ve got the shelter, heat, comms, and defense more or less covered now. I agree 100% w/Mr. nick that the one-gallon-per-day wotta thing is survival-minimum; during a period when we gotta function and haul ass it’s gonna be five times that, easy. Which concerns me, because right now without the well working we have only enough stored water in gallon jugs for, at most, a week. Plus whatever we could drain from the water heater or haul up in buckets from the lake and boil.
The other major hurdle for us here, with the horrific tax situation, is to be able to save 90 days of basic living expenses in cash, on-site, no banks.
But if we’re down to a survivor level of one in ten peeps in North Murka, that presupposes a humongous disaster, and frankly, at that level, and with nearly zero law and order and any kind of energy or food production, I don’t give much for our chances at our age. We’d certainly give it a good ol’ college try but the reality is that one of us has zero military, cop or even athletic experience, other than riding and dealing with horses, which could, of course be quite valuable at some point. And the other of us is forty years out of that world and not in top-shelf physical condition right now.
“I deleted Office 2013 off my office PC since it kept on insisting on being the proper XLS file handler. ”
I always run ccleaner registry clean until it detects no errors when I remove a program before I install a replacement. Usually takes 4-6 runs to clean out all of the registry dependencies. YMMV.
Thanks. Bummer, did not help.
@lynn ….
the googles say:
Most problems with Word can be fixed by resetting it:
Close Microsoft Word.
Click the Start button (Windows XP users should then click Run).
Type regedit and press Enter.
Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Office -> 14 -> Word.
(The number 14 could be different depending on your version of Office)
Double click on the Word folder.
Right click on the Data folder and click Delete.
Close the Registry Editor.
Try using Microsoft Word again.
Close Microsoft Word.
Click the Start button (Windows XP users should then click Run).
Type regedit and press Enter.
Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Microsoft -> Office -> 14 -> Word.
(The number 14 could be different depending on your version of Office)
Double click on the Word folder.
Right click on the Data folder and click Delete.
Close the Registry Editor.
Try using Microsoft Word again.
Thanks but I am running Office 2003 which is version 11.0. And my problem is with Excel, not Word. I still checked for that sub-directory in regedit and it was not there.
I think that I am going to use an old Pournelle habit and nuke Office 2003 from orbit.
@lynn
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/108830-Starting-fresh-(Excel-2003)
or http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-excel/how-do-i-reset-the-options-back-to-original/a199d091-48c0-4991-a67b-5500591e785e?auth=1
There’s a long and short answer there (2nd and 3rd answers)
Or go into the setup program and use Repair (from Control Panel/Programs).
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/108830-Starting-fresh-(Excel-2003)
Tried that. Now my Excel menus work. But many of the items on the menus are inactive. Such as my File / Exit. I am lining up the nuke in orbit right now.
And I repaired, uninstalled, reinstalled and such already.
Same deal here, Mr. Greg; dunno what your BIOS problems are but they might possibly be rectified somehow, or one would hope.
Apple BIOS won’t let Linux run on Santa Rosa class Mac Book Pro easily with EFI disk. For the most part, Apple is just fancy packaging of stock Intel chipsets, but they would prefer the machines to die after about five years or so — I doubt that I will see any BIOS updates.
I have an old Dell laptop purchased at the school surplus sale for $50. The machine dual boots Fedora 24 and Linux Mint 18. Wireless driver issues force me to use Fedora 24, but I check “apt update” about once a week in the hope that Linux Mint 18 fixed WiFi.
I think I’m going to have to wait for 18.1 or possibly Linux Mint 19.
Fedora 24 is okay, but the C++ compiler is brain dead, spinning off into the weeds and sucking down all available memory when templates get moderately complex.
Aha, I get it; I didn’t realize it was an Apple machine. Which is odd, kinda, because it’s running OSX. You probably won’t see any updates.
And interesting that Fedora wireless works but not Mint. You’d think the guys who develop this stuff would test it first, oh wait, they probably do, but they’re on different machines than you and I, and every damn machine’s hw is persnickety about the o.s. and BIOS and drivers. Combine that with wireless chips, printers, webcams, etc., and it’s amazing we can get anything to work at all.
Meanwhile my Brother scanner issue remains unresolved; the Brother tech guy started out fast from the paddock but has since disappeared. He had me run a couple of commands and send him the screenshot, which I did. Not too worried; it’d be nice if the friggin’ thing scanned as well as printed but if not, no biggie; we’ll use the phones or I’ll just get a dedicated scanner that’ll run on Linux or a whole other MF printer that will, and move this one upstairs to the attic and see if it’ll run on Ubuntu Studio, CentOS 7.2 or OpenBSD, lol.
“I just wonder if the Libertarians will draw enough votes to prevent either Trump or Clinton from gaining a majority.”
I saw an interview yesterday and he was asked about Aleppo and his first response was: “What is Aleppo?”. That is a very sad response for a US presidential candidate.
@Lynn:
I also prefer Office 2003. If you are still struggling with Excel menus and it was originally a problem with not showing the full items, the selection for that is “hidden” in Tools\Customize instead of Tools\Options. I have had to spend some time on that every time I have installed it. The only problem I have with 2003 is that Outlook is no longer compatible with Hotmail. 🙁
I suspect they could have asked Clinton, “What is Syria?” and she’d have had no idea. These progs are STUPID. Obama, that asshole, thinks the US has 57 states. He obviously confuses the US with ketchup.
As to Johnson and Aleppo, why should he know or care? Libertarians are non-interventionist or even isolationist.
“That is a very sad response for a US presidential candidate.”
Agreed, but pah for the course for a long time now; most Murkans can’t even locate Syria on a world map or globe. Asking about a city there is way above their pay grades, OTOH, he could have turned the tables and asked Matty Boy or whoever the interviewer was, hard questions, too. It’s like going to an IT interview and I know what I know but them other techie boyz will ask me something I can’t answer, and I can do the same to them. But I’m the bozo looking for the job so it’s on me. Ironically Cankles probably does know, as she probably has funds coming from there or she’s sending weapons there or ducking under some musloid burkhas for some fur pie there.
“Obama, that asshole, thinks the US has 57 states. He obviously confuses the US with ketchup.”
C’mon, don’t be so hard on the guy; he was probably half-remembering some late night chat he had with Liveshot Kerry, you know, the ketchup heir.
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread.php/108830-Starting-fresh-(Excel-2003)
Tried that. Now my Excel menus work. But many of the items on the menus are inactive. Such as my File / Exit. I am lining up the nuke in orbit right now.
And I repaired, uninstalled, reinstalled and such already.
And I hard rebooted (power off for ten seconds). And the next time I ran Excel I got a weird message that an addin “TeamFoundation” failed, do I want to kill it ? I killed it the second time and all of my problems went away. And TeamFoundation is an Adobe Acrobat app ??? Looks like Adobe got me.
Thanks!
“I just wonder if the Libertarians will draw enough votes to prevent either Trump or Clinton from gaining a majority.”
I saw an interview yesterday and he was asked about Aleppo and his first response was: “What is Aleppo?”. That is a very sad response for a US presidential candidate.
They should have asked Johnson about Global Warming. Obola and that ketchup guy say that is the most important problem in the world XXXXX solar system XXXXXX galazy XXXXXXX universe.
Agreed.
In theory. In practice, “libertarians” seem to be about legalizing drugs and otherwise are all over the board.
My response to that question would have been along the lines of “Aleppo is a city in Syria where bad things are happening to the civilian population. However, that is of concern to me only as a human being. As a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, my sole interest is for the concerns of the people of the United States. The suffering of the people of Aleppo, grievous though it may be, is not a threat to the security or well-being of the people of the United States.”
And then I’d ask the stage hands for a towel, because I’m sure the “impartial” interviewer’s head would have exploded by that point.
If even one quarter of the things in the anti-johnson video are true, he’s as big a tool as any of them, and a social prog in L clothing.
n
Mr. SteveF’s hypothetical answer is perfectly rational and makes absolute sense and would be what I would say myself, only in probably harsher terms.
SteveF: 2016!
Sorry, Dave, but I’m not qualified to be Prez. I’m only a borderline psychopath.