10:44 – We just hauled 100 pounds each of flour and sugar and 50 pounds of rice up from the basement, all in 50-pound bags. We’ll be repackaging that this weekend. We could have repackaged it down in the downstairs unfinished area, but I prefer to repackage food in the kitchen. That means hauling up the bags and then hauling down the bottles, but that’s okay.
That totals 250 pounds, which is basically eight or nine person-months of food. Not balanced nutrition, certainly. It’s very heavy on carbohydrates, light on protein (which is also not balanced), and very light on lipids. That’s fine, though. This stuff is LTS bulk calories. We have meats and oils/fats stored that make it complete nutrition.
Lori, our USPS carrier, mentioned yesterday that she intended to make a Sam’s Club run this weekend to stock up on bulk LTS foods. She asked about repackaging for LTS, and said that she was using 2-liter bottles without oxygen absorbers. I told her that was fine, assuming rodents can’t get to them, and that that food should be perfectly usable for many years. She also mentioned that she doesn’t drink soft drinks, so she was depending on her brother to save his 2-liter bottles for her. I told her that I hadn’t thrown away an empty PET bottle in years, and that we had garbage bags full of them in the basement. I said Barbara would be delighted to get rid of some of them. Barbara said just to have Lori back her Jeep up to the garage and we’d fill it up with 2-liter bottles.
I also told Lori that filling 2-liter bottles with flour or other fluffy stuff was a PITA because of their narrow mouths and that she’d need a funnel with the largest stem diameter that would fit into the mouth of a 2-liter bottle. We have three soft silicone funnels, and I offered to lend her one. Alternatively, she can use the top half of a 2-liter bottle as a funnel, and a 2.5″ or 3″-wide piece of Velcro to wrap and align the two 2-liter bottle mouths together while she fills.