08:11 – It was 56.4F (12.5C) when I took Colin out at 0650, mostly cloudy and damp. Barbara is off this morning to Winston to run errands, returning this afternoon.
Walmart is getting better about packing shipments. FedEx showed up yesterday with my eight #10 cans of Augason dehydrated potato slices, and all eight cans were completely undented. Let’s hope the same is true for the two steel shelving units that are on the FedEx truck for delivery today.
Yesterday, I mentioned to Lori, our USPS carrier, that these two shelving units should be showing up soon, and asked her if she’d mind doing a small welding project for me. Like all of these steel shelving units, instead of including four 6-foot angle-iron corner verticals, they include eight 3-foot units with four steel sleeves. You have to pound one of the sleeves onto the bottom half of each vertical and then pound the top half of the vertical into the sleeve. So I asked Lori if she could weld them together instead. She said she’d be happy to take a look at them, and do the welding if she could. She even refused to accept any payment for doing it, although I’ll insist.
I just started re-reading an SF series that seldom appears on lists of prepper/PA titles, but definitely belongs in the top rank of prepper fiction. It’s Eric Flint’s 1632 series, which I first read soon after the first title was released. It’s since become almost its own ecosystem, with dozens of titles ranging from full-length novels to short-story collections, written by dozens of authors, many of whom any SF reader will recognize.
The only reason this series is usually categorized as SF rather than prepper/PA fiction is that the Event involves a chunk of West Virginia being displaced in space-time and ending up in medieval Europe. Flint’s paints his canvas on a gigantic scale, with the Thirty Years’ War raging, and historical characters like Gustavus Adolphus and the kings of England, France, and Spain playing major roles. The series is fundamentally about an ordinary group of contemporary Deplorables finding themselves in a literal TEOTWAWKI situation and then going about rebuilding a modern society. Flint and his collaborators write well, and the series is definitely worth checking out.