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Month: January 2017

Wednesday, 11 January 2017

09:19 – Things are warming up. It was 37.4F (3C) when I took Colin out this morning. The driveway was about 25% covered in ice with standing water on it. Most of that should be gone by tomorrow.

Barbara just left to head down to Winston. She has an eye doctor appointment this morning, lunch with a friend, errands this afternoon, and then she’s spending the night at her sister’s house. Errands again tomorrow morning and then she’ll head back up to Sparta, stopping at Costco on the way out of town. Costco has a $3 off sale on 2-packs of 48-ounce peanut butter, so I added two 2-packs to her list. Twelve pounds of peanut butter to go into LTS food storage. The open jar in the kitchen has a best-by date of May 2015, and neither of us can tell any difference between it and fresh. If we just stuck the four new jars on the shelf and forgot about them, they’d still be perfectly fine for at least another five years, and probably longer.

When I checked the thermometer in the garage this morning, it read 44.3F (7C), so I think we’re past any danger of stuff freezing out there, at least until the next extremely cold spell. It’s still a bit chilly for us to work out there, but we did pick up a small 1,500W (5,100 BTU/hr) radiant space heater that we can use for localized heating if we do want to work out there.

We’ve had a flurry of science kit orders over the last couple of days. With about 33% of the month gone, we’re at about 53% of January 2015 revenue, so we’re likely to be on track or better for the month.

I see that Obama, that asshole, broke down in tears while giving his final speech as president. Only fitting, considering that his actions as president have had most of us Normals in tears for the last eight years. I hope that over the next couple weeks Obama suffers an incredibly painful illness, communicates it to all of his family and staff and the Congress, and that they all die in agony just as Trump is inaugurated. I guess that’s too much to hope for, but hope springs eternal. The only Good progressive is a Dead progressive. Of course, what no one ever admits is that Trump, too, is a progressive.

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Tuesday, 10 January 2017

09:49 – It was warmer again this morning, a whole 17F (-8C). What it hasn’t done is warm up enough to melt the snow. The main roads are in pretty good shape. Secondary roads like ours have been plowed but still have lots of frozen stuff on them. Very few of the vehicles that pass our house are going anything near the 35 MPH speed limit, and most are creeping along at 15 or 20. On a normal day, most of them are doing at least 40 MPH when they pass our house, and quite a few maniacs are doing 60 MPH or more.

Barbara is going to the gym this morning, but later than usual. She has a noon meeting of the golf group that runs an annual fundraiser for the Wellness Center, where the gym is located. She’ll head from there to the Friends of the Library bookstore to work this afternoon until 1700. She leaves for Winston-Salem tomorrow morning for an appointment with her eye doctor and to run errands. She’s going to stay overnight at Frances’ and Al’s place and drive back up to Sparta Thursday morning. As usual, it’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me while she’s gone.

Our garage is pretty well insulated. Even with an extended period of temperatures down in the teens and single digits Fahrenheit, it hasn’t gotten down to freezing in there. The lowest it’s gotten is 35.5F (2C), or a bit lower than the temperature inside a standard refrigerator. Still, just to be safe, I moved the liquid chemicals we had stored out there into the house until the weather warms up.

Science kit sales are running at about the same rate as last January, and we’re getting to low-stock levels on all of the kits. We’ll need to build more kits over the next couple of weeks. Until things warm up a bit, rather than building kits in the garage, we’ll do so in the unfinished area downstairs.

Never say the progressives don’t do anything useful. I followed a link yesterday to this site, which lists retailers that the site’s authors suggest be boycotted because they support Trump as well as another useful list of retailers they regard as desirable because they don’t support Trump. So of course their lists work just as well for us Normals. We simply need to patronize their boycotted list and boycott their recommended list. So, for example, instead of shopping at the “100% Trump-free” Target, we can all shop at nasty old Trump-supporting Walmart. Thanks for the tips, progs. There’s battle lines being drawn…

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Monday, 9 January 2017

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.

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Sunday, 8 January 2017

09:50 – It was 2.7F (-16.3C) when I let Colin out this morning. He ran out, peed on the bird feeder pole and well casing, and ran back in. I’m not sure what the new-fangled, politically-correct official wind chill is out there, but I’d estimate the actual wind chill at around -40F (-40C).

Ordinarily, I take Colin out for his morning constitutional, but yesterday and today Barbara did that. With as much snow and ice as we have on the ground and my balance issues, even if I took Colin off-leash, it’s very likely I’d fall.

Actually, it turns out that falling is an issue for Colin. When Barbara took him out, he plopped down on the snow. At first, we both thought he was telling her he wanted to play, but it soon became obvious that he had actually fallen and was having trouble getting up or standing. She lifted him by his tail, which we’ve done with all our dogs as they’ve gotten older. Colin turns six years old in about a month, and it seems that he’s developing a minor problem with his hips. So we’ll be very careful with him, particularly when there’s snow or ice on the ground.

I’d forgotten to mention that I’d gotten email from Jen about the ten-day readiness exercise they ran from before Christmas to New Year’s Day. She didn’t have much to report, because everything went pretty much without a hitch. Although this was their longest exercise to date, it’s the fourth or fifth one they’ve run and, as Jen says, they’ve pretty much got all the kinks worked out by now. They heated with wood, pumped well water with solar power, and cooked and baked LTS food and heated water with propane. As Jen said, although they had only a few snow flurries, it was pretty much like a snowed-in weekend with the family all present.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the other day Barbara’s comments about grocery shopping. Ordinarily, she makes a weekly supermarket run on Fridays on her way home from the gym. Because of the winter storm forecast, she decided to head to Lowe’s on Thursday to do her weekly grocery shopping. In Winston, it would have been a madhouse, crammed with people stocking up for the emergency, and the shelves empty of bread, milk, and eggs. Here in Sparta, it was just like an ordinary supermarket trip. No more shoppers than usual, and the shelves fully stocked. For people who live up in the mountains, a winter storm warning is just normal for this time of year. People don’t need to rush out and stock up because they’re already stocked up.

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Saturday, 7 January 2017

10:29 – We’re snowed in, more or less. Oh, we could get out with the 4X4 if we had to, but only in a real emergency. When we got up this morning, it was 16F (-9C), and it’s since dropped to 15F. There was about 8″ (20 cm) of snow accumulation, and there’s been another inch or so since. It’s still snowing.

USPS is trying to run, but chances are they won’t make it out to us today. They haven’t even gotten their delivery from Greensboro this morning. We have a Priority Mail package awaiting pickup, but if it doesn’t get picked up until Monday that’s no big deal. There’s no point to the carriers risking their lives trying to deliver mail in these conditions.

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Friday, 6 January 2017

09:52 – The cold weather is moving in. We’re expecting 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 cm) of snow over the next couple of days, with the low temperature Sunday evening to be 8F (-13C). And, as nearly always, a stiff breeze and gusty winds.

In accidental prepping this week, I doubled our PV solar capacity. Back in early November, I ordered a Renogy 400 Watt 12 Volt Monocrystalline Solar Starter Kit with Wanderer. When we were de-cluttering the garage Tuesday, we finally opened that package, which was a box about 2×4 feet plus and a foot or so thick, weighing close to 90 pounds. Inside that outer box, we found two slip-fit thinner boxes, apparently identical, each of which obviously held two of the four solar panels. We opened one, and indeed found two solar panels and nothing else. I assumed, foolishly as it turned out, that the second internal box was identical to the first and that therefore we were missing the other components (charge controller, cables, connectors, etc.) that were supposed to come with the starter kit.

So Wednesday I called Amazon Business tech support and spoke to a very helpful woman named Diana. Based on shipping weights, she agreed with me that there must have been a second box, and couldn’t figure out what had happened to it. So she shipped me a replacement solar starter kit and said just to have UPS pick up the initial partial shipment. Amazon shipped it that day. Then yesterday as we continued cleaning up and organizing the garage, we opened the second internal box from the initial shipment, which (like the first box) looked large enough to contain only the two solar panels. But in fact it also included the rest of the components. placed against the back of one of the solar panels.

I talked to Barbara about it, and said that I’d intended to order a second kit this year, so why not just keep the second kit. She agreed, and I emailed Diana to confess my mistake and tell her just to charge our credit card for the replacement shipment as though it were a new order. That order is to arrive today, so we’ll now have 800W worth of PV solar panels, two Renogy Wanderer PWM charge controllers, and associated cabling and connectors.

The Wanderer charge controller supports four panels feeding a 12VDC battery bank, or eight feeding a 24VDC battery bank. I haven’t decided yet whether to configure it as a dual 12V system or a single 24V system. There are advantages either way, and of course I could if necessary reconfigure it on-the-fly.

But what really matters is that 400W of PV panels was marginal for our emergency needs, while 800W should more than suffice. Renogy claims that “ideal output” of the four-panel setup is 2,000 Wh/day, which obviously assumes five hours/day of full sunlight with a non-tracking mount. Taking into account cloudy days, losses in cabling and the inverter, and so on, it’s much safer to assume actual output at 1,200 Wh/day. With eight panels, that gives us 2.4 kWh/day, which will suffice to let us use our well pump normally, provide minimal LED lighting, communications, etc.

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Thursday, 5 January 2017

10:00 – Barbara is taking the Trooper in to B&T Tire today to have them change the oil, flush the radiator, and so on. There’s some valve tick, but overall the Trooper is doing pretty well for a 24-year-old vehicle.

Along with building more science kits, I need to make it a high priority to get stuff organized and stored out of the way. We just received 15 large boxes yesterday, which are sitting in the middle of the garage floor. I’ll have Barbara in charge of that, because I tend to squirrel stuff away and then forget I have it. A lot of the stuff doesn’t need to be readily accessible. Among the items in this shipment were two cases of 15 mL bottles, two cases each of 15 mL and 50 mL centrifuge tubes, and similar items that replicate things we already have stored accessibly as working inventory. None of them are temperature-sensitive, so my attitude is that we can move half a dozen or more of these large boxes up to the attic over the garage, to be retrieved as needed. But I’ll let Barbara make that call, since she’s in charge of organizing supply inventory.

I’d also like to get some of our LTS food restowed in a less accessible area, which would free up a closet that’s currently packed solid with it. I’m thinking we could put a lot of the cased LDS #10 cans under the bed in the downstairs guest room. And so on.

But Barbara’s right. I’m covering us up with stuff, and she wants to de-clutter. So I’ll let her decide what goes where.

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Wednesday, 4 January 2017

09:56 – Barbara is off to the gym. She volunteers at the Friends of the Library bookstore again this afternoon. Her regular afternoon for FoL is Tuesday, but she may be volunteering two afternoons a week for a while. The woman who works Wednesday afternoons is undergoing cancer treatments, and Barbara wants to be there with her in case she needs to take a break. The weather forecast over the next few days is for wind, temperatures down in the single-digits F later this week, and some form of precipitation, whether rain, freezing rain, or snow. At 43F (6C) we reached our forecast high for the next few days this morning. It’s all downhill from here.

While Barbara was working at the FoL bookstore yesterday afternoon, her friend Joanne stopped by with her daughter, Kelsey. Kelsey just finished the first semester of her freshman year at a private college up in Pennsylvania as a biology major. She wants to become a veterinarian. She had a hellish semester academically, which is understandable given that she had an undiagnosed case of Lyme Disease and wasn’t able to sleep or concentrate on anything. It was finally diagnosed, but too late to allow her to salvage the semester. I asked Kelsey if she was still on doxycycline, and was surprised when she said that they’d prescribed only a three-week course of it, which she’d completed.

She ended up failing Chemistry I. That’s a problem because they won’t let her take Chem II until she’s passed Chem I, so she’ll end up doing general chemistry as a sophomore, when she should be doing Organic Chemistry. Her college won’t accept credits from another institution, so doing general chemistry as a summer course this year won’t get her back on track. So we talked about alternatives for a while. I suggested that Joanne talk to the dean and the chairman of the chemistry department and convince them that this was an anomaly caused by the undiagnosed Lyme Disease and that they should make an exception by allowing Kelsey to take a general chemistry course this summer and accept that as the prerequisite for starting organic chemistry in the autumn. That’d get her back on schedule and eliminate the need for a fifth year. I also asked Barbara to email my phone number and email address to Joanne and have her give them to Kelsey so she could contact me any time I could help her, with chemistry or anything else.

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Tuesday, 3 January 2017

09:45 – Barbara is off getting the oil changed in her car. She volunteers at the Friends of the Library bookstore this afternoon. The weather remains warmish, drizzly, and foggy. The colder weather is supposed to move in tomorrow afternoon.

We got our first two kit orders of the new year yesterday. They’re sitting waiting to be picked up by USPS. This week, we have to fill more chemical bottles, bag chemicals, and build more science kits.

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Monday, 2 January 2017

10:37 – Barbara continues with her annual White Tornado house cleaning. Colin and I have to keep moving constantly to make sure we’re not dusted, cleaned, and polished because we’re mistaken for furniture.

Our weather is going to be gray, drizzly, and warmish for the next couple of days. Starting Wednesday evening, a cold front is to move in. By Friday we’re to have lows in the mid-teens F (~ -10C), with snow and freezing rain.

Dave commented on yesterday’s post:

It’s a shame that there isn’t a more cost effective battery available than the ones Bob mentioned. I’m looking at the same batteries if I get a solar setup. The only difference is I would be getting them from Menard’s instead of Home Depot. This battery on Amazon has more useful capacity than two of the batteries that Bob is looking at. Sadly it costs 50% more. If you drain conventional deep cycle batteries below half of their maximum capacity, their life is dramatically shortened. AGM batteries can put out 80% of their maximum capacity without a shortened life.

That’s a good battery, but in fact one of them is nowhere close to the capacity of two of the Exide Nautilus 31 batteries I mentioned. One of the SLR155 batteries has an Amp-hour rating of 155 Ah (at a 20 hour discharge rate), versus 230 Ah for two of the Exides; a reserve capacity of 350 minutes (at 25 Amps draw, or a total of 145 Amp-hours), versus 410 minutes (total of 171 Amp-hours) for two of the Exides; and a weight of 90 pounds, versus 124 pounds for two of the Exide Nautilus 31 batteries. And one SLR155 costs $310, versus $198 for two of the Nautilus 31s. Dollar for dollar, I could get three of the Nautilus 31s for a bit less than one SLR155, which would give me 345 Ah (versus 155 Ah for the single SLR155), 615 minutes of reserve capacity, or about 255 Ah (versus 145 Ah for one SLR155), and 186 pounds (versus 90 pounds for one SLR155).

As to battery type, AGM (absorbent glass mat) does in fact have some advantages, but it also has disadvantages. I strongly prefer FLA (flooded lead-acid). Yes, FLA requires maintenance, including regular topping off with distilled water and using a hydrometer regularly to keep an eye on battery health, but FLA has enough advantages that I think I’ll stick with it. Barbara is headed down to Winston in the next week or two to run errands, so I think I’ll ask her to pick up a couple of the Nautilus 31s.

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