Month: September 2017

09:08 – It was 46.4F (8C) when I took Colin out at 0645, clear and calm.

Happy Anniversary to us! Barbara and I have been married 34 years today.

The latest Irma forecasts have it tracking further left, aimed at Memphis, which should limit the effects here. The local forecast now calls for 1 to 4 inches (2.5 to 10 cm) of rain and sustained winds of 20 to 30 MPH (30 to 50 KPH). Barbara has already brought in most of the outdoor items that are subject to blowing away, and will get the rest indoor this afternoon.

The leftward shift is also good news for several of the Prepper Girls, most of whom are located in extreme western North Carolina and Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. I haven’t heard from any of them recently, so presumably they’re busy preparing for Irma. Of course, my email generally has been extremely light. I’m not even getting much spam. I think between Harvey and Irma, people have had better things to do with their time.

We’re working around the house today. First up is installing more shelving in the food room downstairs. That’ll be adjustable track shelving, so we don’t need to worry about vertical spacing. I plan to use these shelves mostly for #10 cans, which are relatively light, so I’ll probably install tracks only every other stud. We should end up with enough additional shelf space for maybe 200 more #10 cans.

At Barbara’s suggestion, we’re leaving the wall space under the chair rail free of shelves. We’ll stack stuff like 5-gallon buckets, plastic bins, and so on there.

08:43 – It was 46.4F (8C) when I took Colin out at 0620, partly cloudy and breezy. The sun wasn’t up yet, and it was still dark enough that the nearly full moon cast a distinct shadow as I walked out to the mailbox to pick up the newspaper. Barbara is headed for the gym and supermarket this morning, after which we’ll be doing science kit stuff.

Barbara spent most of yesterday working out in the garage, cleaning up, organizing, and discarding stuff. She hauled most of a Trooper load of old cardboard boxes to the dump.

She also grabbed an old D-cell fluorescent lantern to take to Alleghany Cares, our local equivalent of Goodwill. It doesn’t eat batteries nearly as badly as an incandescent lantern, and someone may have a use for it. We’re 100% LED now when it comes to battery-powered lanterns, flashlights, and other lights, and probably 75% or more on lights powered by mains electricity.

As a matter of fact, Barbara mentioned a couple of days ago that she’d like to replace all the exterior coach lights on the house. We have seven of them, five on the front porch and at the garage doors, and two on the back deck. When we do eventually replace them, I want to install LED versions. While we’re at it, I want to replace the flood lights with LEDs as well.

It’s time to get started on the shelving project. That’s actually four separate projects.

First, we have a now-cleared wall in the downstairs food storage room, wide enough to install some 10-foot shelves. We’re going to install track-mount shelving brackets on that wall. The track screws into the wall, and the shelf supports snap into the track. There’s a chair rail on that wall, but it wouldn’t prevent installing floor-to-ceiling shelving just by mounting two lengths of bracket, one above and one below the chair rail. That’s what I originally intended to do, but Barbara suggested leaving the area below the chair rail free of shelves. That way, we can stack plastic bins, cases of #10 cans, buckets of rice, etc. on the floor below the actual shelves. Good idea.

Second, I want to put two or three 10” or 12” shelves the length of one side of the guest-bedroom closet—what Barbara calls the water closet—and perhaps on the end wall as well. Again, we’ll leave the floor under the shelves clear for three or four vertical feet to allow us to stack cases of bottled water. We don’t need adjustable shelves in the closet, so I’ll just use cheap steel shelf brackets screwed into the studs.

Third, we have some unused wall space in the utility/laundry room upstairs. I want to install shelving there, again leaving some free vertical space below it. We don’t need adjustable shelves there, either, so we’ll use cheap steel shelf brackets screwed into the studs.

Finally, I want to install more shelving in the unfinished basement lab/work area. One of the first things we did when we moved into the house was install a woodstove in that area. There are already built-in wooden floor to ceiling shelves on part of that wall. To the left of the stove area is shelving 8+ feet wide by 18 inches deep, with 4+ feet of empty wall space between the shelving and the woodstove. The right corner of that wall has a 2.5-foot corner area occupied by the well pressure tank, then built-in shelving about 5 feet wide by 18 inches deep, and then roughly 6+ feet of empty wall space between the shelving and the woodstove.

I ordered a pair of these 48″W x 24″D x 72″H 5-Shelf steel shelving units from Walmart. Incredibly, although the shipping weight of each shelving unit is more than 100 pounds, Walmart ships them for free.

Barbara gave me a hard time about ordering them from Walmart, because stuff tends to get damaged in shipping. As I told her, several of the bad reviews of this product on the Walmart site mentioned damaged product even when they were picked up at the store, but I don’t really care. The shelves are particle board, which is pretty useless for shelving because it has so little strength. If one or more of the shelves have the corners crunched, I don’t really care. Worst case, I’ll replace them with actual plywood but they’ll probably be fine as-is for what I plan to do with them. These shelves will hold bins of bottled chemicals, which aren’t very heavy. We have a couple hundred SKUs of bottled chemicals, most of which we keep in rectangular plastic bins ranging in size from 1.5 gallons (5.7 L) to twice that.

I’ll keep heavier stuff (e.g., 20-kilo buckets of sodium hydroxide, gallon/4L jugs of made-up chemical solutions, etc.) on the bottom shelf, bottled chemical bins on the middle shelves, and light stuff like cases of toilet paper and paper towels on the top shelf. The shelf structure is rated to support 800 pounds per shelf, 4,000 pounds total, and I doubt we’d have even 20% that much weight on them.

09:15 – It was 57.1F (14C) when I took Colin out at 0655, overcast and raining. We had about a third of an inch (8mm) overnight. Barbara is headed for the gym this morning, after which we’ll be working on science kit stuff.

Barbara spent the afternoon yesterday volunteering, so I took a couple of hours off to watch some Youtube videos on the Roku. One of their recommended videos was from another homesteading channel, called Guildbrook Farm, operated by a 30-something couple named Jaime and Jeremy. Their homestead is in Davidson, NC, about 85 miles down the road from us, on the northern edge of Mecklenburg County, about 20 miles north of Charlotte.

They’re homesteaders and serious preppers, although none of their videos I watched had any political content. And they make a lot of videos. Jeremy formerly produced videos professionally, so they’re well-done technically even though they’ve sold all their professional equipment and are shooting the videos on their smartphones.

I didn’t get the full story, but it seems that the government is trying to force them out of the county, presumably because they don’t want people homesteading and keeping livestock inside the county limits. So they’re in the process of relocating to somewhere that’s friendlier to the homesteading lifestyle.

They’re typical back-to-the-landers, and are into stuff like “organic” food and homeopathic “medicine”, but they’re likable people regardless. The first video I watched was about their deep pantry, and was pretty interesting. But the next of their videos that came up was unintentionally scary. Jaime was canning meat, using recycled single-use canning jar lids. Ugh.

09:16 – It was 60.7F (16C) when I took Colin out at 0635, mostly clear and breezy.

That link I posted the other day listed several prepping sites I’d never heard of. It’s always interesting to get a different point of view, so I took a quick look at several of the new-to-me sites. Most of them were nothing special, but I did find one that held my interest enough that I jumped around the site looking at different articles.

That site, More Than Just Surviving, is run by a young married couple, Elise and Thomas Xavier. They’re Millennials–she was born in 1989–and they’ve been preppers the entire five years or so that they’ve been together. She comes by it honestly. Her parents and grandparents were serious preppers, so she’s been immersed in prepping as long as she can remember.

At first, I assumed they were US-based, but then I noticed that one of the pictures she’d posted of their LTS pantry had canned goods from Waitrose. UK then. But not just UK. She’s actually from the Toronto, Canada area, where she and Thomas lived until a couple years ago. He’s originally from the UK.

They decided to do a major relocation. I’d have expected them to move west, out to Alberta or BC. Instead, they moved east, to the UK, where they bought a flat in Bournemouth. Talk about frying pan/fire.

They’ve been prepping for years, but I’d still consider them newbies. For example, in one article she reports on how they lived through a major power failure while they were still living in Canada. Electric power was down for five days and four nights, with outside temperatures well below freezing. At one point, it was 25F inside their house.

They were pretty much unprepared for such an event, which seems an odd thing not to be prepared for, given where they were living. They ended up spending days in their neighbors’ garage, which was equipped with a woodstove. At night, they returned to their sub-freezing home to sleep, which again seems odd.

But I’ve read quite a few of their articles, many of which are interesting. The site is worth a visit.

Here’s yet another cheap prepping item you might want to stock: Epsom Salts, at $5.43 for an 8-pound bag.

In a prepping sense, it’s primarily useful as a gentle saline laxative. That 8-pound bag is about 250 doses, at about two cents per dose.

We keep a lot of this in stock because we use it in large amounts in science kits. But, like a lot of the stuff we stock in quantity for science kits (iodine, potassium iodide, antibiotics, etc. etc.) it’s also a very useful prepping item.