Month: November 2016

Sunday, 20 November 2016

11:51 – We had a blizzard last night, except for the snow part. The low was about 23F (-5C), with winds gusting to 60 MPH (100 KPH). That made the wind chill not far above absolute zero.

We’d run out of homemade bread, so we decided to bake a couple of large loaves yesterday. Since we were messing up the kitchen and heating the oven anyway, we decided also to make a chocolate cake. As usual, my go-to source for any recipe involving flour and baking is King Arthur Flour. We decided on this recipe. Originally, I planned to make the optional icing as well, but Barbara suggested we try it without the icing first. I’m glad she mentioned that, because as it turned out the cake was fine without frosting.

Here are the ingredients we used, all from long-term storage:

□ Flour, 1.5 cups (6.25 oz., 177 grams)
□ Sugar, 1 cup (7 oz., 198 g)
□ Cocoa powder, 0.25 cup (0.75 oz., 21 g)
□ Salt, 0.5 tsp
□ Baking soda, 1 tsp
□ Vanilla extract, 1 tsp
□ Vinegar, 1 Tbsp (0.5 oz., 14 g)
□ Vegetable oil, 0.33 cup (2.625 oz., 74 g)
□ Water, 1 cup (8 oz., 227 g)

Making it up takes only a few minutes. Here’s what we did:

0. Preheat oven to 350F and grease an 8″ square baking pan that’s at least 2″ deep.

1. Combine the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, salt, and baking soda in a medium bowl and mix thoroughly.

2. Combine the vanilla extract, vinegar, vegetable oil, and water in a small bowl and mix thoroughly.

3. Add the liquid to the dry ingredients and stir to mix thoroughly. Immediately pour the batter into the greased 8″ baking pan and place the pan in the 350F preheated oven. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes.

The original recipe used all-purpose flour. We used bread flour, which is the only kind we store. I was initially surprised by how little cocoa was called for. When we mixed the dry powders, the result was a light tan color rather than the dark brown of a typical chocolate cake. But when it came out of the oven, it had turned dark brown as expected, and had plenty of chocolate flavor.

I’d also wondered about using bread flour, which is much higher in protein (gluten) than all-purpose, let alone low-protein pastry flour. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the cake had turned out brick-like, but it was just as good as the one Barbara had bought at the supermarket a couple of days ago.

We had four 24-ounce (680 g) cannisters of cocoa powder in LTS. Looking at them, I figured we might get a half dozen chocolate cakes out of each. As it turns out, each cannister is enough for 32 of these pan cakes, so we have enough for 128 of them. Well, 127 now.


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Saturday, 19 November 2016

09:59 – Several people sent me mugshots, so herewith the rogues’ gallery:

MrAtoz, AKA David Kickbusch

MrAtoz, AKA David Kickbusch

DadCooks

DadCooks, AKA Eric Comben

CowboySlim, AKA Stu Nicol

CowboySlim, AKA Stu Nicol

Terry Losansky

Terry Losansky

Ray Thompson (on the right)

Ray Thompson (on the right)


12:12 – And a couple of more:

Miles Teg, AKA Greg Ede

Miles Teg, AKA Greg Ede

SteveF, AKA Steve Furlong, and his 9-year old, Ann Selene

SteveF, AKA Steve Furlong, and his 9-year old, Ann Selene

I have that exact flannel shirt. Also, I’m wondering how a guy as ugly as SteveF ended up with such a beautiful daughter. His wife must be gorgeous.

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Friday, 18 November 2016

08:08 – Barbara just left to drive over to West Jefferson, where she’ll spend the day with Frances, Al, and their friend Marcy. It’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me today.

Barbara and I drove over to Blue Ridge Co-op around lunchtime yesterday and signed up to have a propane tank installed. Lowes is supposed to deliver our gas cooktop on, bizarrely enough, Thanksgiving Day, so we told Blue Ridge Co-op to schedule installation of the propane tank for the first week of December.

We opted for a 250-gallon tank rather than the 120-gallon tank. The 250-gallon is the largest they’re allowed to install above-ground, and we didn’t want to get involved with the cost and hassles of a buried tank. The 250-gallon tank holds about 230 gallons when full. That should last three or four years if we use it only for cooking, even if we’re cooking for more than just the two of us. They’ll also install a quick-disconnect fitting at the back door, which we can hook up to our generator if necessary. Propane costs about three times as much as electricity per BTU, but that’s not a major concern if we’re using the propane only for cooking or in an emergency for electric power.

The gas cooktop we ordered comes standard with a propane adapter kit. It has an electric igniter, but specifically says in the specs that it can be ignited manually if the power is down.

Email from Cassie, who’s been reading what I posted recently about canning. She’s never pressure-canned anything, but they have only the small freezer in their refrigerator and she’d like to can meats that she buys on sale, particularly dark-meat chicken and bacon, as well as game that her husband brings home from hunting. But the thought of botulism scares her to death, and rightly so. She has no canning equipment or supplies, and asked me what I thought about it.

I told her that I’m no expert on pressure canning. The few times I did it I was helping someone else who was an experienced canner, and the last time I even watched was 40 years ago. That said, I told her that credible authorities, including the USDA and Ball, say that canning meats is safe if one follows directions exactly, but that just to be extra safe one should always cook canned meats thoroughly before eating them.

I suggested that she carefully consider the costs of commercially-canned meats versus DIY pressure-canned meats. She’ll need a canner. All American canners are the top of the line, but they cost $225 to $300+ depending on capacity. The 23-quart Presto canner I bought costs under $80, and does the job just as well as the more expensive canner. I suggested she also pick up a set of canning tools and a copy of Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

She’ll also need canning jars, lids, and bands. I suggested Walmart as a good source for those. She needs to decide between quart jars, which hold about two pounds of meat, versus pint jars, which hold about one pound. The trade-off is that the jars cost about the same for either size, but that with just the two of them she may not want to have her meat stored two pounds per jar with no easy way to preserve it after opening a jar other perhaps than maintaining a constantly-simmering pot of pottage. If she does opt for pint jars, I recommended that she buy a second canning rack so that she can process twice as many jars per run. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to buy spares for the gasket, pressure gauge, and pressure valve.


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Thursday, 17 November 2016

10:02 – I know it’s trivial, but I love to watch what oxygen absorbers do to containers. Yesterday afternoon, I added an oxygen absorber to each of the 21 bottles of pinto beans we’d repackaged in 2-liter soda bottles. A couple of hours later, I looked at the bottles, all of which were by then dented in, indicating both a good seal and that the oxygen absorbers were doing their jobs.

Incidentally, if you need oxygen absorbers, buy them from the LDS store. A pack of a hundred 300cc absorbers costs only $12, versus typically twice that or more from commercial resellers. In the original package, they remain good for years. If you have any left over from a pack, store them in the smallest glass jar you can find that has a metal lid. Wide-mouth canning jars work well. If you’re ever in doubt about whether oxygen absorbers are still good, just bend one between your fingers. A good one is soft and flexible; one that’s exhausted hardens and loses flexibility.

More email from Cassie, the newbie prepper I mentioned a couple days ago. They’re rural enough that their nearest Walmart Super Center is an hour’s drive one-way, and the nearest Sam’s or Costco is farther still. So she plans to stock up from Amazon and Walmart on-line for stuff she can’t get at her local supermarket, where she works as a checker. They live in her husband’s parents’ house and her husband has his own plumbing business, so their combined income is solidly middle-class and they have much lower expenses than a typical young married couple.

They’re focusing on food first. They’re on well water, but they have a year-round spring on their property, so Cassie figures they’re in good shape for water. Her husband hunts, and they have a couple of rifles and a couple of shotguns, which they figure is enough for now. They’ll add some more ammunition, first-aid supplies, and so on, but otherwise the concentration will be on food, food, food. Yesterday, Cassie came home from work with two five-pound bags of sugar, two ten-pound bags of flour, several one-pound bags of pasta, a jug of cooking oil, two boxes of iodized salt, several jars of pasta sauce, and two cases of soup. She intends to do the same thing two or three times a week until they’re stocked at a level they’re comfortable with.


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Wednesday, 16 November 2016

10:21 – Yesterday we got 80 pounds (36+ kilos) of pinto beans repackaged into 21 two-liter soft drink bottles, at just under 4 pounds per bottle. That’s sufficient to fill out the amino acid profile for about 500 pounds of rice/pasta/oats, in combination yielding complete protein.

Barbara volunteers with the Friends of the Library. They had a Quiz Bowl event last night, and Barbara had volunteered to be one of the judges. When the lady from the library called Barbara yesterday afternoon to verify that she’d be there, I asked Barbara what it involved. She said there’d be teams of high school kids competing against teams of adults. I told Barbara I’d be happy to help out if they needed more adults. She checked with the librarian, who said they could always use more people.

So we had an early dinner and headed over to the library about 6:00. I ended up sitting at the back of the room with several of the other other adult volunteers. I was between Tom Smith, who’s the Chairman of the County Commissioners, and Bryan Edwards, who’s the Sparta Town Manager. We got along great, making whispered remarks about what was going on up on stage. Tom’s a funny guy, and at one point I remarked to him, “You know, that’s the fourth time that you said something just as I was thinking it.” He replied that the two of us were going to get along fine. Bryan is also a funny guy, and between the two of them they made me feel like part of their group instead of a newcomer to the area.

Few or none of the adults had ever done a Quiz Bowl event before, so they started with two teams of the high school students facing off so that we could see how it was done. The winner of that round then faced another team of students to determine which team of students would face the adult team in the final. We had two teams of adults, so we had another round to determine which adult team would be in the final round with the winning student team. The adults, of course, crushed the student team in the final round.

Barbara commented on our drive home that experience had won the day, and that 20 or 30 years from now those kids would have experience and would probably beat a student team handily. I told her that I didn’t think that was true. The adults are from a generation when the public schools still actually taught. These kids are unfortunately in public school at a time when teaching is no longer the priority. They’re in at least the second full generation of people who’ve grown up attending school but not being educated. Still, I take comfort in the fact that there were a lot of bright kids there, and bright kids learn despite all attempts to keep them from doing so.

I just wish there had been a team of home-schooled kids there. They’d have probably kicked adult ass. Which is why Barbara and I do what we do. Home schooled kids are the future of this country, now that the public schools have been destroyed.


Uncle Remus, as usual, has a post worth reading up on Woodpile Report. FTA

After action report. This is where I disagree with Trump. He asks us to put ill will behind us and work together for the good of the country. He says we’re all in this together. No, we’re not. Sure they’re our fellow Americans, but so are Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson. We’re all in this together in the sense we coexist with termites.

Ayup. I, in common with most Normals, used to tolerate progs, if only grudgingly. No more. In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, “You realize, this means war.”

The leftists aren’t merely wrong, they’re dishonest and malevolent. They still hold us, our values and our heritage in contempt. They still mean to destroy the reputations and careers of dissenters. They still adore illegal aliens, jihadists, dindu thugs and the perverts du jour. They still insult and demean us and teach our kids to despise America, us and themselves. They still mean to trash what remains of the Constitution.

The progs don’t understand that we Normals are by nature polite and conciliatory, but when our anger is aroused it’s a truly fearsome thing. We are the children and grandchildren of those Normals who bombed Germany into rubble and nuked Japan. Like those warriors, we can be pushed only so far before we respond devastatingly. And I’m afraid we’ve reached that point already. And we’ll be opposed by a bunch of effete, unarmed, tofu-eating metrosexuals, very few of whom have even been in a schoolyard fight.

And finally the bottom line:

Gambling with the tipping point, Market Ticker – Urban centers consume roughly 90% of the energy and food in this country yet they comprise 5-10% of the land mass. What if the people who peacefully conceded the result of two elections over the last eight years despite vehemently opposing the outcome decide that if the “blue” folks can riot, loot, beat people who vote the “wrong way” and similar they will not accept any further election result that doesn’t go their way, and instead of rioting or burning things they will simply shut off the flow of food and energy to said “blue” areas? After all, you don’t value them at all—you consider them subhuman, racist, xenophobic, deplorable and irredeemable—all at once. If you keep it up, that at some point, given that you’re utterly reliant on those you’re abusing for the basics of life—the loaf of bread, the gallon of gasoline, the electricity that powers your lights—they decide they’ve had enough. That day your supply of cellophane-wrapped meat and plastic bag full of bread disappears.

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Tuesday, 15 November 2016

09:15 – The progressive attacks on Trump continue and accelerate on all fronts, as expected. Their problem is that Trump is not a member of the progressive team, so he has to be stopped at all costs. Ironic, considering that Trump is what would have been considered a moderate-to-liberal Democrat not all that long ago. Right now, the progs are pushing “cooperation”, which of course means convincing Trump to do things their way.

Email overnight from another newbie prepper, who’s concerned that Trump’s election means an increased likelihood of sustained violent civil unrest. I’ll call her Cassie, and she may well be right. Cassie reminds me a lot of Jen and Brittany, when they were just getting started. Cassie and her husband live in a rural area. They’re both in their mid- to late-20’s, and don’t have children or family living locally. She’s from out of the area. He’s an only child and his parents have retired to Florida. Cassie’s main focus at this point is food. They already have a 30-day supply of canned goods and dry staples, and Cassie would like to expand that significantly.

I suggested that Cassie follow the LDS recommendations for LTS food. Not the current ones, which were greatly reduced about 15 years ago, but the ones that the LDS Church revised greatly downward in 2002. The current recommendations provide only about 1,700 or 1,800 cal/day, which is enough to keep someone alive but constantly hungry. So I recommended the following amounts per person-month:

Grains – 30 pounds of pasta, rice, oats, cornmeal, etc. This provides roughly 50,000 calories, or about 1667 cal/day.

Beans – 5 pounds of dry beans. This provides another 8,000+ calories, or about 275 cal/day.

Oil – 2 pounds, or one quart/liter of vegetable oil, a small can of shortening, a jar of peanut butter, etc. This provides another 8,000+ calories, or about 275 cal/day.

Salt – about 12 ounces of iodized salt. No calories, but essential to life.

Multivitamins – 30 capsules, to replace vitamin deficiencies in LTS food, particularly after long storage.

All of this costs very little, and provides about 2,200 cal/day of complete nutrition. Once she’s accumulated as many person-months as she feels comfortable with, I recommended that Cassie begin adding cooking essentials (herbs and spices, bouillon, baking soda, baking powder, yeast, canned and/or dry milk, powdered eggs, butter, and cheese, etc.) as well as meal extenders (things to turn plain grains and beans into tasty meals; canned soups, stews, vegetables, etc.) Finally, I suggested she add as much canned meat as possible, which will be the most expensive part of her acquisitions.


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Monday, 14 November 2016

09:20 – We got enough chemical bags made up yesterday to build another 15 or 18 each of the biology kits and chemistry kits. With what we have in stock, that takes us to a comfortable finished goods inventory level for this time of year. Sales will be slow for the rest of this month, and then pick up again through December and for the first half of January. Then they’ll slow down again through about tax day.

Anti-Trump rioting continued for a fifth night in many large cities and a few smaller ones, although it seems relatively restrained compared to what it might have been. It almost seems like the only people rioting are those paid by Soros to do so, and they’re having a hard time getting unpaid people to help them riot.

As expected, Trump is already backing off from many of his campaign promises, notably his plan to expel illegal aliens. He now says he’ll focus on expelling only the worst two or three million of them and worry about the rest later. He’s also said he has no problem with same-sex marriage, considering it settled by the Supreme Court decision. No doubt that’ll upset a lot of social conservatives. My advice to Trump on this issue is to repeat what I’ve said before. Trump needs to get the federal government completely out of the marriage issue. He can do that by directing the IRS to eliminate any reference to marriage in tax regulations. Everyone should file their federal income taxes as either single or married filing separately. And the tax rates for the latter should be the same as for the former. A married couple with $40,000 of taxable income should pay the same amount each as a single person does on $20,000. Marriage status should become a personal and contract issue, not a tax issue.

My main concern about Trump at this point is that he’s being disturbingly conciliatory towards the progressives, the GOPe, and so on. Perhaps that will change once he’s actually in office. I hope so. I think Trump’s main priority should be to complete the destruction of the Progressive/Democrat/Republican establishment, leaving them nowhere to run.

This week, we’ll build more science kits, wash and dry a bunch of 2-liter bottles, and fill 20 of them with pinto beans and oxygen absorbers. We also have a bunch of pasta to be repackaged, and more on order. That’s not time-critical, as even in their original plastic bags their best-by dates are 18 months to two years out.


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Sunday, 13 November 2016

09:39 – I see that Trump has some hesitation about living in the White House as President, and who could blame him? Just because he’s been elected President doesn’t mean he and his family should have to take such a big step down in living accommodations. There’d be some other advantages to him living in his NYC penthouse, including the fact that he’d be far away from DC. He could, of course, use the White House for ceremonial events like withdrawing the US from so-called climate-change accords.

Anti-Trump rioting continued for a fourth night, although the MSM, including FoxNews, describes it as “protests”. I hope that local authorities understand that with Obama and his justice department on the way out, their hands are no longer tied when dealing with rioters. Peaceful protests are fine, and in fact should be encouraged. But when protesters cross the line by blocking streets, assaulting cops and civilians, and burning things down, they are no longer protesters. They are rioters, and should be met with lethal force.

I expect things to get worse before they get better, if they ever do. I have a sneaking suspicion that the prog establishment is secretly happy that Trump was elected. That way, when things get worse, they can blame everything on Trump. And things are going to get worse. Decades of prog rule have literally bankrupted the country, and the crash, when it comes, is not going to be pretty.

We’re about as well-prepared here as we can be, although we continue to make minor adds and tweaks as I think of weaknesses that need to be shored up. As always, I want to make sure that we have water, food, heating/cooking, power and communications, sanitation, medical, and defense needs covered. We’re actually in pretty good shape now on most of those. I do plan to put in another Walmart order for bulk staples and some miscellaneous stuff, but that’ll be it for LTS food for at least a while.


For future reference: A 2-liter soft drink bottle holds 3 pounds 14 ounces of pinto beans, which are free-flowing through a suitable funnel into the 2-liter bottle mouth.

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Saturday, 12 November 2016

09:17 – Email from Jen. The anti-Trump protests have arrived in her area. Well, kind of. The small town where her brother and his family live, about half an hour from Jen and David, had an anti-Trump protest Thursday. It didn’t amount to much; fewer than ten people gathering in front of the courthouse carrying not-my-president signs. They stood around for half an hour or so and then dispersed. Everyone else pretty much ignored them.

Jen’s first thought, of course, was to check her inventory in case she needed to head out to buy some stuff. But she and her group decided they were about as well-prepared as they needed to be, and a minor protest didn’t warrant taking any additional action. She and David filled their gas tanks, but that was it.

Brittany weighed in to say that the general attitude in her area was happiness that Clinton had been crushed and Trump was our next president. Their family is even more rural than Jen’s, with the nearest city of any size several hours’ drive from them.

It’s pretty much the same situation here in Sparta, although we do have Winston-Salem 60 miles away. This county went about 75:25 Trump:Clinton, and if there are any dissatisfied Clinton supporters, they’re keeping very quiet about it.

And, speaking of dissatisfied Clinton supporters, I see that the Tampa police had to protect a huge group of them who were about to confront a group of US Marines who’d gathered to celebrate the Corps’ birthday and raise money for the Wounded Warrior project. It’s almost a shame that the cops got in the way. It would have been interesting to see what happens when a group of special snowflakes attacks a group of pissed off Marines. My guess is that the final score would be Marines – 1,000+, Snowflakes – 0.

And I see increasing calls from the progs for conciliation. What they mean, of course, is that we Normals may have won the elections, but it’s up to us to adopt the progs’ agenda. Yeah, right. I’m not interested in their feelings, and I suspect no other Normals are, either. I’d as soon shoot them as look at them.


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