10:00 – It was warmer this morning, 14F (-10C). Colin is not a fan of cold weather. He spends as little time as possible outside. Part of that is no doubt due to the fact that he’s now a middle-aged dog, six next month, and has the aches and pains that begin in middle age. Just like a person, cold weather makes things worse.
Yesterday we got another 40 pounds of macaroni repackaged in 2-liter bottles. We have another 100 pounds or so left to repackage, some of which we’ll get done today. The limiting factor is clean, dry 2-liter bottles. We have several yard-waste bags full of empty 2-liter bottles, but they still need to be washed out and dried. The best way I’ve found to do that is to run a sink full of sudsy water, rinse the bottles thoroughly in it, and then, without rinsing out the sudsy water, put them mouth-down in a plastic bin to drain and dry. The amount of dishwashing detergent that remains in them after draining is trivial, probably a milligram or less. Doing it this way, the bottles generally dry overnight. If instead one rinses them with non-sudsy water before draining, they take days or even weeks to dry completely.
One common meme on prepping sites is that skills are as important as stuff, if not more so. That’s completely bogus. Stuff is the critical thing. Skills one can learn if, as, and when they’re needed, if only from books or by figuring it out on-the-fly. You can, for example, be an expert at cooking with long term storage, but if you don’t have the LTS food stored, or if you don’t have water stored, or if you don’t have an alternative means of off-grid cooking stored, you’re SOL. Planning ahead and stocking up on the items you need is the important part, even if you just buy them and stick them on the shelf in anticipation of needing them.
So, for example, one of the very first things we did when we moved into our new (all-electric) house in December of 2015 was buy a Buck wood stove and have it delivered and installed, soon followed by building a firewood rack under the back deck and having a load of firewood delivered. For more than a year, that stove sat unused. Yesterday, we fired it up for the first time. I hadn’t built a fire in a stove for probably 40 years, and Barbara had never done so. Oh, noes! We lacked a critical skill. But as it turned out, of course, building a fire in the stove was pretty much a no-brainer: open the damper at the top rear of the stove, open the flue damper, twist up a couple sheets of newspaper and put them on the bottom of the stove, put some kindling on top of that, light the newspaper, wait until the kindling caught, add a couple small logs on top of the burning kindling, and voila! We had a fire, which burned for 90 minutes or so until we let it burn down. No point to using firewood when we don’t need to.
It was much easier to get the fire going without skills or experience than it would have been if we had lots of experience but didn’t have the wood stove or any firewood. And the same is true of just about every aspect of prepping. Even the best physician can’t do much without equipment, drugs, and supplies. Much better to have those things even if they’ll be used by a person without medical qualifications.
Those of you who have been following Franklin Horton’s Borrowed World series don’t have much longer to wait until Book Four is available. I’m part of Franklin’s “kitchen cabinet” of a dozen or so sanity-check readers, and he sent me the draft of Book Four last night. I got through the first 10% or so of the book last night, and it looks extremely clean. I’m in copy-editor mode, so I’m not focusing on the story, but on individual words and sentences. Once I’ve done an editing pass, I’ll have to go back into reader mode and re-read it for the story itself. From what Franklin said, I expect the book to hit Amazon later this month.
It may be that people are feeling a ‘pause’ where they can ‘catch up’ or take a break. I’m betting that a ton of people scrambled to pile up a bunch of stuff in the run up to the election, and now are taking the opportunity to ‘digest’ the pile.
I know I posted in a comment a few days ago that that was my plan. Now that I’ve GOT the stuff, I need to integrate some of it, and I can focus on skills a bit more than shopping. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop stacking, just the sense of urgency is backed down a notch. (Whether this is smart or not is debate-able, but it’s hard to maintain a high level of attention all the time. Sometimes you need to change focus for a while.)
I totally agree, and have made the argument before, that it’s better to have stuff you don’t know how to personally use, but that might be critical later, rather than just having stuff to suit your current level of knowledge. I especially feel that way about medical preps.
Part of it is the way I acquire preps too. I get stuff when I see it cheap or available. I might end up buying out of sequence, or long before I have the need.
If someone feels comfortable with the level of ‘stuff’ they’ve stacked, I think it’s perfectly fine to adjust the balance between ‘getting’ and ‘doing’ and ‘learning’. There’s likely going to be a lot of variation in the balance anyway as time and money resources change.
nick
Certainly, and I’m not minimizing the importance of knowledge/skills, only pointing out that if you have to have only one or the other, you’re far better off having the stuff stacked and having to figure out later what to do with it.
I’ve had similar thoughts over the last few weeks. During Christmas break, I looked at what I had in both food supplies and hardware capabilities. Now it’s time to update my strategies/plans and work on the gaps over the next year. Will assess again in the summer as a progress check. Rinse, repeat…Provides me a sense of not only accomplishment, but of stability in keeping my family safe and healthy for most future emergencies.
I’m wondering why bother repackaging? Why not just repackage one bag at a time when the SHTF?
It was warmer this morning, 14F (-10C). Colin is not a fan of cold weather. He spends as little time as possible outside. Part of that is no doubt due to the fact that he’s now a middle-aged dog, six next month, and has the aches and pains that begin in middle age. Just like a person, cold weather makes things worse.
My British Cocker Spaniel, Lady, just hit 14 last month. She is falling a lot now, especially when she runs on the wood floors in the house and tries to turn the corner at full speed. She is totally deaf now and cannot hear whistles, the 130 lb Akita barking next door, or anything. She sleeps a LOT. And her weight has dropped from 38 lbs to 30 lbs.
But, we still go for two mile walks each night. And she is still willing to eat her treats. And yours.
Those of you who have been following Franklin Horton’s Borrowed World series don’t have much longer to wait until Book Four is available.
Yup, his first three books in the series were excellent. I would like to see him start a new series as it is difficult to keep a series interesting past the trilogy point.
And the nice thing about self publishing is that books get on Big River quicker than a publishing house. The bad thing about self publishing is that marketing is dadgum hard to do, it is an art, not a science. I know this fact all too well as we do our own marketing and sales.
Regarding paws and slipping.
Try Mushers Secret or similar product to give paws a bit more traction.
Also kep toe nails quite short. If you can hear their nails clicking they are too long and inhibiting the traction they would otherwise enjoy from the pads of their paws.
Weight in older dogs – consider adding raw protein in the form of frozen raw turkey necks. You never want a fat dog, but with our older guys a few extra ounces can help them weather any short illnesses a little better. Old dogs that are running a little skinny can wind up in big trouble if they get hit with a mild illness that causes them to lose their appetite. They don’t have the physical resources to tolerated the additional weight loss and a simple problem gets complicated and sometimes fatal.
Our old boy used to run about 35 lbs with good muscling in his youth. Wasp waist and nice tummy tuck. Ribs not visible but easily felt. Now that he’s 12 I keep him with much less tummy tuck, more filled out waist, and ribs with light pressure. Weight is about the same or maybe 8 oz heavier, because he has lost muscle mass in his senior years.
My two cents.
Most skills you can learn on the fly. Learning chemistry on the fly, though, is better not tried.
During my Mom’s illness and passing, I had to put my drone hobby (and others) on the sidelines. I took out my biggest drone yesterday to find that all three batteries were dead and would not charge. Some innertube searching found some solutions. Apparently LiPo batteries will go into “deep cycle discharge” mode after several months. I found a slightly dangerous procedure to reset them. LiPo’s can explode/burn and the procedure bypasses the charge controller.
Yay! I got one working, but the other two blinked an error message “too cold to charge”. I redid the reset on one and let it warm up, reconnected the internal charge controller and it is happily charging on the recharge system. Next up, the final battery to see if I can recover it. They cost about $150 a pop.
“Behold the Fearsome Glory of a Full-Auto DIY Crossbow”
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a24661/joerg-sprave-full-auto-slingshot-crossbow/
Just ignore the battery driven drill.
“Mexican Ford Plant Workers Blame Trump for Dashed Dreams”
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/01/06/world/americas/ap-lt-mexico-ford.html
I don’t know where to start.
“I don’t know where to start.”
Don’t even bother. We all know what’s going on.
And then we have this person and her ilk:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/254006/
From two ends of the economic spectrum: both groups would like us to accommodate them according to their demands and alleged needs. In the rainbows-and-unicorns reality they inhabit, the preferred solution would be if we Normals and gringos could just disappear or die.
I don’t know where to start.
Many of the Indian students in my grad program spent October surfing the website immigration-law.com. If Congress and Trump close the Masters degree loophole in the H1B law, most of them will be headed home in May.
I won’t be sad to see them go.
“Bob’s Big Picture technology predictions for 2017”
http://www.cringely.com/2017/01/09/15395/
I was beginning to wonder if he was going to skip this year.
“Last year I predicted the beginning of the end for engineering workstations. My rationale was that virtualization was going to move a lot of this work into the cloud, technical software companies would be converting their products into services, and that it would all be enabled by the addition of GPUs to cloud servers. This is going a little slower than I had thought but is definitely happening. It’s good, though, that I only claimed it was the beginning of the end. I’ll claim this as correct and I’ll even have more to say about it for this year.”
“I predicted the Internet of Things would become a security nightmare and that definitely happened when home routers began to turn into zombies. It’s only going to get worse, though I’ll hold off on predicting specific remedies until a year from now because it will take that long (or longer) for the pain to become large enough to help the smoke clear. This will be a major prediction area for me in 2018.”
“Finally I predicted that Intel would start to become irrelevant, which is definitely the case. What processor is in your PC? You don’t know, do you?”
“Prediction #1 — A Cloud Arms Race”
“Prediction #2 — The End of Bufferbloat”
“Prediction #3 — The Beginning of the End for U.S. Broadcast (and cable!!) Television”
“Prediction #4 — Intel spins-off its fab”
“Prediction #5 — Apple makes a huge (for Apple) acquisition”
“Prediction #6 — Come-to-Jesus time for IBM”
Our old boy used to run about 35 lbs with good muscling in his youth. Wasp waist and nice tummy tuck. Ribs not visible but easily felt. Now that he’s 12 I keep him with much less tummy tuck, more filled out waist, and ribs with light pressure. Weight is about the same or maybe 8 oz heavier, because he has lost muscle mass in his senior years.
Lady’s ribs are showing. And we give her treats all the time. And “gravy” (soup, chili, etc) on her kibble at least once per day. Sometimes twice. I tell my wife that 14 is about 88 in dog years.
I would have to muzzle her to put on that Mushers Secret stuff. She does not like to have her feet or legs touched. In fact, we get about 2 to 3 pounds of her hair cut off (her coat grows about an inch per month) every quarter and they have to sedate her because she bit the groomer several years ago. She has never had her nails clipped but that two mile daily walk keeps them short.
From the Last Week’s Insanity Department:
http://takimag.com/article/the_week_that_perished_takimag_january_8_2017/print#axzz4VIyYVcje
And from the Kids Make Stupid Decisions Department:
http://takimag.com/article/kids_make_stupid_decisions_jim_goad/print#axzz4VIyYVcje
I don’t need “people of color” to be afraid of me; I just need them be reasonable and try to get along with us, seeing as how we still vastly outnumber them here and are armed to the teeth. Why not a little civility and respect??
Why not a little civility and respect??
LOL!!!!!!
I was beginning to wonder if he was going to skip this year.
Mark/Bob has cataract issues which seem to limit his enthusiasm for writing as of late.
I’ll sell what’s left of my Apple stock if they buy Tesla.
Just got my new WD 8 TB external USB3 drive. It was formatted EXFAT. It is now formatted NTFS. I am now running a full LAN backup to it.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-External-Drive-WDBBGB0080HBK-NESN/dp/B01LQQHLGC/
Just got my new WD 8 TB external USB3 drive.
We just bought the 4 TB for the kids’ WiiU to store downloaded games.
I spent the better part of the holiday break rebuilding the hardware and software of the obsolete Macbook Pro I use for Windows 7. Out of curiosity, I installed a “Firecuda” 1 TB SSHD as the internal storage.
Us dirt peeps need to be more welcoming and less bigoted and waycisssssss…
http://christianmerc.blogspot.com/2017/01/racist-bigoted-and-ignorant.html
And from the No Ammo in National Guard Weapons? Department:
http://weaponsman.com/?p=38197
I guess we’ll find out if things get sporty on Inauguration Day.
What? No M1A1 axe handles. Maybe the’ll at least have bayonets. Nah, might cut some snowflake protester.
Our local press says that we had -29 C (-20 F) last night in Sibiu, the lowest since 1961. Now, at 11 AM, it is -20 C (-4 F). It is a sunny day. It’s warming up, and in three days it will be 0 C ( 32 F).
The lowest temp in the whole country was -32 C (-25 F), last night. It is estimated that we have reached an all time record on consumption of natural gas.
We have also plenty of snow. That happened during the last weekend. Here in Transylvania, we are somehow protected by the Carpathian Mountains, and we got about 8-9 inches of snow (from zero), with no serious problems.
But in the South-Eastern part of the country, when the blizzard had no obstacles, the snow measured even 3 feets. Many roads and the highway there, were closed. Over the weekend, about 5000 people (firemens, army, other State employees) and their vehicles, provided assistance to the needed persons, especially in villages covered by snow. Some lost electricity for 48 hours. Overall, no tragedy happened, as people there are familiar with that blizzard that comes every winter, with similar effects. Now, the blizzard have stopped, the roads are opened again, but we still have this cold frost (hard freeze ?) that will last a few more days.
Added: it seems that the East will still get a couple of days of new blizzard conditions.
Very sad…
http://dailycaller.com/2017/01/08/there-are-no-jobs-obama-loyalists-scramble-to-find-work/?utm_campaign=atdailycaller&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social
WRT @Miles_Teg’s link:
Elections have consequences. The Patronage Train is no longer operating. Even my crocodile can’t work up a tear over these losers. I like the sound of that, LOSERS. You LOSERS are now reaping what you have sown. Working for the Berry Obuttwadd Administration is not the resume enhancement they had hoped for. How’s that Hoax and Chains working out for you, LOSERS.
I just got a fragile snowflake popup 😉 that said I have used LOSERS too many times in this post so I need go now. But I have to say LOSERS one more time.
With a deep breath. You can’t have a proper belly laugh without plenty of air.