09:04 – It was 61.6F (16.5C) when I took Colin out at 0645, partly cloudy. Colin vomited a couple more times yesterday, but he’s behaving normally otherwise and doesn’t appear to be in any distress. He has his usual amount of energy, which is to say a lot, and constantly wants to play, so I don’t think anything is really wrong with him. As James Herriot used to say, if he couldn’t catch his patients, he knew there was nothing very wrong with them.
Barbara is cleaning house this morning, after which we’ll go back to work on building science kits and getting the downstairs LTS food room cleaned up and organized. We got a lot done on that yesterday. Barbara proclaimed that she was pleased. I’m trying to get similar stuff shelved together. All the oils and fats in one place, all the meats together, all the pasta together, etc.
I was also pleased, because the counts confirmed that we’re in pretty good shape on everything. We have, for example, roughly 340 cans of meat of various sizes and types, totaling about 360 pounds. That’s about 3.6 ounces of meat per day for the 4.5 of us for a year, and doesn’t count what’s in the vertical freezer upstairs. In a long-term power-out emergency, we could of course pressure-can that as well.
We’re also in good shape on oils/fats. Again not counting butter and other oils in the big freezer upstairs, we have about 25 gallons of assorted oils/fats shelved downstairs. Even not counting the fats in canned meats, that’s sufficient lipids for the 4.5 of us for at least a year. We’re in similarly good shape on other categories like rice/flour/pasta, herbs/spices, cooking/baking essentials, canned powdered eggs/butter/cheese, etc. The only thing we’re short on at this point is vegetables.
The only exception I’m making to keeping like with like is our stock of #10 cans of LTS food from the LDS Home Storage Center and miscellaneous stuff from Augason Farms. There are roughly 240 cans (40 cases) of that, kept together in or near the LTS food room closet.
And I uncovered a science experiment at the back of the storage shelves. It’s a box of UHT half-and-half creamer packages that has a best-by date four years ago. When Barbara picked it up, she said, “EWWWW!” and carried it over to the trash can to discard. I rescued it and took it upstairs, because I intend to try it. If it sniff-tests okay, I’ll taste it, but my guess is that it’ll fail the sniff test.