Hot and humid. Probably overcast with a chance of storms. I guess we’ll see.
Yesterday was hot and humid. Not as terrible as Saturday but still unpleasant in the garage and outdoors. Wife and kids spent the whole day inside. I did some outdoors stuff and worked in the garage. I’m pretty much going to have to make time to put the A/C into the garage. Otherwise, I won’t get much use during most of the year. I will tell myself it’s better for my food storage too.
Projects. I got ’em.
Did get some small progress done yesterday. Found some more stuff for the auction. Sold a speaker on ebay. Bought a bunch of stuff in the housewares amazon returns auction. Watching those bids took a lot of time in 15 minute slices. Did some small cleanup in the garage. Fixed a fan. Read a few chapters of a book. I was a bit wiped out after Saturday.
Dinner was brats and fixin’s. Brats were fresh from the last Costco supply drop, onions and potatoes from the one before that. Corn and ice cream were from the HEB grocery drop. I’ve said it before, but it’s a damn peculiar zombie apocalypse when you can have food delivered to your door.
Another peculiar thing was transitioning from “prepping” to “using”. After a while, I realized I need to go back to buying stuff to replace stores as they are used. I don’t NEED to get toilet paper right now, but if I don’t there will come a time when I’ve run out. Hoping to resupply at some future date is not a prudent or practical plan. So far, we’ve been mostly eating out of current shopping with additions from the long term stockpile. I’d like to build up some extra protein storage, and adjust some of my long term canned food. I’m heavy on canned corn, just as an example, and I’ve only used up one case so far. It’s going to be more expensive to replace the stuff I’ve used, as I bought it only when it was on sale, and there are few sales at the moment. I’ll call it ‘dollar cost averaging’ for food and stuff instead of investments.
On the plus side, being well prepared for something that was nowhere on my wife’s radar has built up a nice store of goodwill toward prepping and some of my more ‘out there’ preps. Having the stuff and having it at hand has made a big difference. When you hit on a long shot, some of your other long shots look a little more reasonable. I’ve also gotten a nice bump in tolerance for auctions now that she’s figured out that I can buy the stuff SHE wants… now, if I can get my sales up, I’ll be golden.
I’m going to advise accepting that this is the beginning of how things are going to be for a while, and that we’re probably not going back to “the way things were.” The sooner you accept that as reality, and start adjusting to it, the better off you’ll be. A lot of the lost jobs aren’t coming back anytime soon. There is a glut of autos on the market, I’ve seen a local dealer using the dead mall parking lot as storage. He hasn’t even bothered to fence it in. I’m sure there are other areas of oversupply too. Air travel capacity comes to mind. Shopping malls. Theaters. Fitness centers. Party rental places. Foreign workers. *
Start focusing on the basics. You’ll be ahead of the curve and the pack.
Keep stacking.
nick
*notice how quickly the furor over the H1B visas has died down?