As Barbara said previously that she wouldn’t be updating today, I’ll open with this post.
Her last update had Bob sitting up in a chair, and sounded like forward progress, which is good news. It’s also becoming very clear that this was a near thing, and Bob is not clear yet. It will be a longer recovery than any of us hoped for. Hang in there Bob, and Barbara, lots of folks are here rooting for you.
In other really good news, we’ve heard from OFD AKA Dave Hardy. He has had some setbacks with his recovery but is continuing his time on this earth 🙂 We were really starting to get worried that something very serious had happened. Hang in there Dave, and drop in once in a while. I’ll extend the same offer to Mrs OFD and Dave, if there is anything we can do, don’t hesitate to ask. There is a large pool of talent and resources here.
Speaking of which, Bob has built a nice community here, and it’s clear that it might be a while until things are back to normal for him. In the mean time, I’ll try to keep the fires burning, or at least keep the coals banked… clearly I’m not him, but I can open a thread, and post some links. If you are in the habit of checking here, please continue to do so. If there is something you’d like to talk about please comment.
Any of you stealth preppers who are used to passing your story through Bob, please consider relaying through me. Those of you actually living the life always have valuable contributions, especially wrt the most mundane aspects. Anyone can do gear reviews or pontificate on the best bushcraft skills to have, but who has practical experience dealing with the <i>ahem</i> ‘output’ of a dozen human beings in a grid down exercise? My email is my last name at aol dot com. I don’t check it often, so there might be a delay if you don’t point me to it in a comment.
That all said, it was mid-40s this am when I let the dog out, and cool with a mostly clear sky as I sent the family off to start their day. Beautiful pink and orange in the sky. Take a moment to notice the world around you, and the beauty in everyday life. You won’t regret it.
nick
Continued thoughts & prayers for Bob, OFD, and others.
WRT output, this is something from 25+ years ago, when Uncle & I were working together. We were in a sandy place, with the local version of Job-Johnnys that were constructed of plywood and screen, and accumulated output in 1/3 of a steel drum. Duty-day (see what I did there?) involved dragging the drums downwind, dumping in kerosene (JP8), then lighting them on fire and burning it off before dumping what was left in a pit. I didn’t ask at the time, but I would suspect it had to do with killing off pathogens.
I think the takeaway of all that crap (ahem) is that you really want to kill the pathogens, regardless of anything else you might need to do. Pathogens in human waste are more dangerous to us (in general) than other manure you might use as fertilizer.
That is some nasty business….
n
Thanks for posting Mr. Nick and my best to Bob, Barbara, Mr. & Mrs. OFD.
Speaking of poop, during my first tour in Korea, we still dug latrines out in the field. Layered with lye, the whole works. My poop is still out in some farmers backyard to this day. My second tour, everything was porta-potties. The SST (shit suckin’ truck) came around every day to suck ‘em dry. Thus ended my days of pooping in the woods.
Yep. Long gone are the days you could take a dump on the neighbors driveway to get even for their dog’s choice of location.
On the subject of prepping: stealth victories. I convinced my wife a few months ago to keep some wholesale packages of staples in the basement. Not much, 10kg of flour, 10kg of sugar, etc. It’s also a place to store all of the jams and preserves that she likes to make.
This has now become the new normal. We’re looking at a major house reorganization (for various reasons, not just this). Part of this will free up the room next to the kitchen, which has lots of shelves. Much more convenient to the kitchen, and plenty of space just inviting expanded quantities of things to be stored.
It’s not that my wife has anything against prepping, per se. It’s just a psychological thing. She’s used to shopping every day, or every two days at least. It’s understandable: who doesn’t enjoy fresh salad, as opposed to wilted stuff from last week? And since the supermarket is just _there_, well, why not buy everything last minute. So it’s mostly a psychological shift, and one that seems to be working. No one cares if your flour, or your deep-frying oil was bought yesterday or last month.
Again, best wishes for RBT’s recovery.
In the spirit of keeping things going here, A Personal Prepping fail: I have a Mr. Heater, which runs on the 1# canisters. I’d bought an adaptor hose some time ago to use with the 20# tanks. I finally had occasion to use the hose a couple of days ago – and discovered it was the wrong hose, with the fitting on the supply side being incorrect. Since the high desert night time temperature was in the high teens this was….inconvenient.
I’m a terrible shopper, this is typical for me, I’ll research the heck out of something, then foul up in buying…
“What is HAMR and How Does It Enable the High-Capacity Needs of the Future?”
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hamr-hard-drives/
“During Q4, Backblaze deployed 100 petabytes worth of Seagate hard drives to our data centers. The newly deployed Seagate 10 and 12 TB drives are doing well and will help us meet our near term storage needs, but we know we’re going to need more drives — with higher capacities. That’s why the success of new hard drive technologies like Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) from Seagate are very relevant to us here at Backblaze and to the storage industry in general. In today’s guest post we are pleased to have Mark Re, CTO at Seagate, give us an insider’s look behind the hard drive curtain to tell us how Seagate engineers are developing the HAMR technology and making it market ready starting in late 2018.”
Wow, 20 TB in a single hard drive.
Congrats to Brad! My wife is mostly on board, since we live in hurricane country and see sees the benefits weekly if not daily, but she still gets weird about some things. She told me we needed to eat/clean out the deep freezer… so we could use it to freeze more food. It’s full of food. Which it would be after eating and restocking. The same food.
One thing that can help, find out something that she will likely need and stock it in advance. NOT feminine products. You need VERY CLEAR direction on which brand, style, color, packaging, etc. to be stocking those. Just copying what she has in the cabinet is not enough. You can get a couple of boxes or just one extra to match, but she may have bought that box for a lot of reasons that she would not like MORE of that box…. heed the voice of experience on this. (although something is better than nothing………..)
And congrats to Mr Ed, not for the fail, but for eliminating a problem with his preps. So many of the simple, no brainer things turn out to be anything but. Use your preps! Use your gear!
n
“Las Vegas massacre survivors 2 months later: ‘We’re in the dark’ ”
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/14/us/las-vegas-shooting-2-months-questions/index.html
My son, the conspiracy theorist, says that this was cover for a assassination attempt on the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who was in the hotel on the floor above. They missed the prince since he had slipped his guards and was gambling downstairs. My son says that there were several other gun battles at the hotel and the airport that no one is talking about.
BTW, the Crown Prince now has arrested over two hundred of his cousins and is slowly forcing them to turn over their worldwide holdings to the kingdom. He has reputedly killed several of them now.
One thing that can help, find out something that she will likely need and stock it in advance. NOT feminine products. You need VERY CLEAR direction on which brand, style, color, packaging, etc. to be stocking those. Just copying what she has in the cabinet is not enough. You can get a couple of boxes or just one extra to match, but she may have bought that box for a lot of reasons that she would not like MORE of that box…. heed the voice of experience on this. (although something is better than nothing………..)
Hey, those midnight runs to Walgreens to get a special something for the wife’s or daughter’s immediate needs are soul building.
I bit the bullet and clicked the Refresh Firefox button. First try of printing to PDF didn’t work. Tried the laser, that worked. Tried PDF again, now it works.
At least until I re-boot or the next FF update. Meanwhile, I need to re-install a few add-ons and rebuild my toolbars.
Opening about:config and typing in print… looks good. The Xerox Laser is gone. The HP inkjet (that has been gone eight years) is gone. There’s just the Lexmark CX410 and PDFCreator.
My son says that there were several other gun battles at the hotel and the airport that no one is talking about.
More conspiracy fuel — flights carrying employees to/from Area 51 go through that airport.
I am lucky to have a wife who is more gung-ho about prepping than I and that’s saying a lot. We spent happy evenings repackaging rice and beans and such with oxygen absorbers. This year she asked if I wanted a new gun for Christmas. I told her I thought I was good and didn’t need anything else. She then asked if we had a deer rifle. I told her that the ,22s and ARs were a little light for deer and the old Winchester 30-30 was a brush gun and short range. She asked what caliber would be good and I said something in the 308 or 7mm range should work. She has now told me to stock up on 7.62 ammo. Wonder what I’ll find under the tree?
“More conspiracy fuel — flights carrying employees to/from Area 51 go through that airport.”
10-4, 4WD friends and I drove CCW around Area 51. Had lunch at the Little A’Le’Inn. Did not attempt to enter base. Stayed overnight at the Tonopah Station Hotel and Casino, great saloon with country music.
You’ll put your eye out kid!
You need something for hogs, a truck gun, riot gun, edc, 22 target pistol, black powder rifle, how can you ever have enough?
N
What if Stephen was the assassination target? He was someone’s asset, and they burned him good. Sends a message. Fits known facts
better than the official story.
N
Although the Saudi thing works part way
What if Stephen was the assassination target?
Too much work. Much easier to make it look like his car broke and he died from the desert heat.
Annnd after rebooting, printing to PDF doesn’t work. To the Lexmark, no problem. Ok, uninstalled PDFCreator. Rebooted. Uninstalled another PDF printer that did nothing. Rebooted. Re-installed the driver for my Dymo 450 Turbo. Tried FoxitReader again and it still didn’t work.
Installed CuteWriter. So far, it works. Sumatra PDF seems to work well to read PDF files.
The crazy (to me part) is it all worked until Firefox updated to the 64 bit version.
The crazy (to me part) is it all worked until Firefox updated to the 64 bit version.
The only other thing that I’ve got is to turn off the Hardware Acceleration. But that should affect the view only, not the printing.
What O/S are you running ?
“Much easier to make it look like his car broke and he died from the desert heat.”
If your point is, “we OWN you and look what we can do” dying in the desert doesn’t get the point across. They identified the asset, took it out, and did so in a very public and splashy way that demonstrates competence and will. Probably serves another agenda as well as a bonus.
n
In other really good news, we’ve heard from OFD AKA Dave Hardy.
Merciful Xenu be praised!
Sooner or later, that will get the appropriate response from OFD.
Those are some weird printing problems. When stuff like that used to happen to me at work, I was pretty sure some update overwrote a shared DLL and broke what used to work. Seems like that shouldn’t happen anymore though, and I saw it with video not printing.
n
Installed CuteWriter. So far, it works. Sumatra PDF seems to work well to read PDF files.
One of the few practical skills I picked up in CS grad school was LaTeX. The learning curve is steep, but the system offers excellent tools for consolidating and organizing separate PDFs into a single document, complete with table of contents.
My son says that there were several other gun battles at the hotel and the airport that no one is talking about.
Given today’s presence of cell phones with cameras everywhere, there is no way this could be secret.
More conspiracy fuel — flights carrying employees to/from Area 51 go through that airport.
Somewhere in all my stuff in storage, I have a book that LockMart gave all the employees about the F-117 and Area 51, including the base they built there for the F-117 squadrons, the deception methods used when transporting them, and the extreme secrecy that the entire F-117 program operated under, including the flights in and out of McCarran in LV.
For your enjoyment, from another thread, the Shrine of the Mall Ninja. Was it real, was it trolling, was it the fevered dreams of a wannabe? You decide. From the article:
https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/
When four of Santa’s elves got sick, the trainee elves did not produce toys as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feel the Pre-Christmas pressure.
Then Mrs. Claus told Santa her Mother was coming to visit, which stressed Santa even more.
When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about to give birth and two others had jumped the fence and were out, Heaven knows where.
Then when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboards cracked, the toy bag fell to the ground and all the toys were scattered.
Frustrated, Santa went in the house for a cup of apple cider and a shot of rum.
When he went to the cupboard, he discovered the elves had drunk all the cider and hidden the liquor.. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the cider jug, and it broke into hundreds of little glass pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to get the broom and found the mice had eaten all the straw off the end of the broom.
Just then the doorbell rang, and an irritated Santa marched to the door, yanked it open, and there stood a little angel with a great big Christmas tree.
The angel said very cheerfully, ‘Merry Christmas, Santa. Isn’t this a lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Where would you like me to stick it?’
And so began the tradition of the little angel on top of the Christmas tree.
@ Ech, now I know where Mike Z Williamson got his Mall Ninja characters in his book about the security contractors. He’d have been on the forum at the time and his characters fit those two clowns to a T.
n
Not really shocking, vid shows conditions in rural areas of PR.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-14/shocking-video-shows-what-everyday-life-puerto-rico-now
Filth and debris everywhere. People just sitting or standing around.
And lies about Jones Act.
Still, worth a look. How are your preps for food, fuel, and water at +50 days?
n
Great story @Ray. Bulletin board worthy.
You never heard that joke before, DadCooks? My, what a sheltered life you must have led.
O/S is Windows 7 Home Premium. With service pack 1. I’m almost up to date… another roll-up for .NET and the monthly roll-up for December are waiting.