09:42 – It was 62.7F (17C) when I took Colin out around 0620 this morning, partly cloudy and calm. Barbara is off to the gym this morning and then spending the rest of the day making up subassemblies for science kits.
Barbara is binge-watching CSI: NY on Netflix streaming. They have all nine seasons available, but for some strange reason they’re dropping the first eight seasons as of June 29th. She’s about half-way through season 2 now, so there’s no way she’ll make it through all of them before the end of the month. I don’t watch it, but it doesn’t bother me to be in the den reading or browsing the web while she watches it. The writing is pretty bad, and the forensic science is ridiculous but it’s not offensive. About the only good thing I can say about it is that they use The Who’s Baba O’Riley as the theme music.
Email overnight from the woman I mentioned last Friday, who wanted to prep quickly. I’ll call her Lisa. It sounds like she’s been spending too much time reading Zero Hedge. She’s convinced there’s a good chance the economy will collapse this summer and that with the hot weather we’ll see a return to the Days of Rage. I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, but I’ve been wrong before.
Lisa’s initial goal was to be prepared for her family of six for a period of three months. She spent last weekend making multiple runs to Costco and placing orders on Amazon.com and Walmart.com, and estimates she’s progressed from about 2% prepared as of last Friday to maybe 90% prepared as of now. She hasn’t had time yet to get everything organized and stowed away, so it’s all still sitting in piles in her basement, where they still need to install shelving for everything.
She said that as long as they’re installing shelves she intends to put in a lot more than they need. Her intention is to continue accumulating supplies until they reach at least a year’s worth for the six of them. As she said, the stuff she’s bought is all foods they eat anyway, other than dry beans, so there’s no real downside to having it sitting in their basement instead of on store shelves. And the beans are a good cheap source of protein that keeps a long, long time, so she has no problem with it taking up some shelf space.
I encouraged Lisa to start actually using the bulk food for cooking meals and grow her storage by buying two or three or four more each time she uses one. Move a case of soup from long-term storage to the kitchen pantry, buy two more cases for your long-term storage, and so on.
Lisa is still concerned about best-by dates, although I told her that for almost all products they really are imaginary. She’s decided to install stand-alone steel shelving rather than shelves accessible only from one side. That way, she can add new stuff to one side of the shelf units and pull older stuff from the other side. I told her to go for it if it makes her feel better, but it’s going to involve a lot of shifting stuff around after every supply run. And since she intends to maintain only a one-year supply of LTS food, there’s really nothing to worry about anyway. The “old” stuff she pulls off the shelves will still be only a year or so old and probably still well within its best-by dates.