17:01 – We were under a severe thunderstorm warning yesterday afternoon. About 1600, the storm blew through, with about 1.5″ (3.75 cm) of rain in less than 10 minutes and winds gusting to probably 50 to 60+ MPH (80 to 100 KPH). We had no damage to speak of to our home and yard, but a lot of big trees went down around the neighborhood. Our power went off when the storm hit and remained off until about 0120 this morning. Our cable TV/phone/broadband service just came back up, a bit more than 24 hours after it went down.
Saturday, 28 July 2012
16 Comments and discussion on "Saturday, 28 July 2012"
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So…seven hours with zero power at all and 24 without phone, TV or internet. Not too good.
Now imagine a week. OK, not so hard. We have had long blizzards, ice storms, floods, etc. that knock out all our stuff for a week. We manage. It sucks, but we manage.
Now picture a month. Or six months. Or a year. With bitter cold and snowy winters.
I happen to think these power outages will happen more frequently, as the infrastructure continues to crumble and not get maintained or fixed, and as our lords temporal play games, testing various scenarios, as it appears they have been doing for a while now anyway. I’d say get stocked up on what can get us through a three-to-twelve-month period with no power, no heat and nothing on the store shelves. If nothing happens and everything stays groovy, well, no huge loss.
ref Emergency Preps forum
I prep, to the extent that I can given finances and the opposition of my wife. Not only does she manage to spend everything we earn (and bitch at me about not earning more), but she raids the supplies I set aside. I really don’t understand it: she grew up in Maoist PRC, with famines and shortages and all the rest. You’d think that she’d be on board with stockpiling food and medical supplies and whatever, but her attitude is that a) God will take care of us if He wants us to live, and b) We can’t stockpile enough carry us through twenty years, so we shouldn’t even try. So I’ll build a lockable storeroom in the basement and set aside what I can.
The LDS folks write the best books on the subject. And you can get dried, packaged, and powdered food from those in that group who specialize in manufacturing such stuff.
I had the opposite problem to SteveF. My wife stockpiled stuff everywhere; so much so, that when we moved to Germany, we had to give months of food away. In fact, when my dad passed on 3 years later, I found they were still working down the stocks we gave them.
Personally, I believe if there were to be a catastrophe of the proportions you guys talk about, there would not be any way to avoid certain death, if one lives as we do now—basically in detached houses. It would be an effort of impossibility to possess the 24/7/365 vigilance necessary to keep the hungry people coming from everywhere, to kill you and take your food while you slept. Aside from the fact that—having had many, many conversations about this with my survivalist father from the time I was in about the 7th grade—my own researched and educated guesstimate, forced by our continual arguments on the issue, of the possibility a complete and total anarchical breakdown of society into general barbarism, is far less than 1%.
Government breakdowns? Yeah, bring it on. Those are what has occurred throughout history, but—with few exceptions—the people keep moving, buying, selling, living, and progressing, pretty much the same as before the collapse. The USSR is a modern-day example of what is more likely to occur than anarchy and barbarism.
Btw, my Russian friends in East Germany, laugh their heads off when I describe how their lives were portrayed to us in school: waiting in lines to get bread and food. One guy about my age, who grew up in Russia, and managed to move to East Germany just before the wall came down, told me that there were seldom shortages of anything, and if there were, it was usually because of temporary mechanical breakdowns with replacement parts having to be hand manufactured.
Some things were just not available to the population—period,—like caviar, which brought so much money as an export that it was never offered to the general populace. He never heard of shortages of bread. “If there was one thing available in Russia, it was lots and lots of bread.”
“If there was one thing available in Russia, it was lots and lots of bread.”
I could live on bread. Love the stuff. One of my favorite parts about visiting Germany is the trip to the local bakery each morning. Wish I could get that in the states.
Panera? 🙂
“One of my favorite parts about visiting Germany is the trip to the local bakery each morning.”
Mmmm…German bakeries. It’s something I, at least, had never heard of. German beer, sausage, whatever – but their bread is the absolute best!
Chuck is probably right; our breakdown here won’t likely make it to “Mad Max” status; more like Europe between the wars, or maybe back to circa 1900, before mass availability of electricity and indoor plumbing. Not a bad idea, then, to get at least a few months, enough to get through a winter, of necessary stuff. But it will be a whole new ballgame for most people in this era and I still wouldn’t wanna be anywhere near the cities.
Talking about the LDS, they used to have their records backed up on Cybers deep in a mountain somewhere, well above the water table. Their installation wasn’t Cheyenne Mountain, probably wouldn’t have survived a direct hit from the Sovs, but it showed they were serious about keeping their data secure.
OFD wrote:
“…our breakdown here won’t likely make it to “Mad Max” status…”
Bust a deal and face the Wheel… 🙂
Chad questions: Panera?
Not even close to what you get in Germany in my opinion.
The “bust a deal and face the Wheel” quote is from “Thunderdome.” But I guess “Mad Max status” covers the whole franchise by now. I won’t mind living like an underground rat if Tina Turner shows up at bedtime most nights.
OFD fantasized: “I won’t mind living like an underground rat if Tina Turner shows up at bedtime most nights.”
Sorry Davy, but her showing up at bedtime is one of the things I consider a sign of the Apocalypse.
Ahh, the once lovely Tina. First heard of her singing Nutbush City Limits, my last fond memory was the Mad Max flick “Thunderdome”, and the wonderful Rugby League ad “Simply The Best”.
Yeah, the Mad Max franchise went down hill after Mad Max II, but it wasn’t Tina’s fault.
“…once lovely Tina…”???
Not bad for 72. Scroll down, Oz-Boy:
http://www.parenthoodandkids.com/top-10-chic-looking-celebrity-grandmothers/
Oprah and Tina have had some, uh, adjustments over the years. Both of them actually look better as they get older than when they first appeared on the public scene. Why isn’t Oprah on that grandmother list? There are others on it who have no grandchildren.
Yeah, Panera is not even close. There is no place I know in the US that makes bread like the Germans. Most of their bread is very robust (some might call it heavy, but it really isn’t) and has a slight vinegar tinge to it, which is addictive and something I really miss. If you want some real German bread, Aldi occasionally has this little package of rye, sunflower seed, and a couple other varieties of very thin-sliced bread that lots of people use to make their lunch sandwiches with. In my store, it is not usually with the other breads, but rather with some collected import stuff.
There is no such thing as white bread like US Wonder bread in Germany. Even the lightest bread is brown.
I gag on the so-called “dinner rolls” we have here. Germans have this thing called “Brötchen”, which is a roll that is mostly used for sandwiches. A good German breakfast always has Brötchen with very thin-sliced cheeses and what they call salami, or what we call lunchmeats. They are wafer-thin slices—usually round—and you butter your sliced Brötchen, and build a little sandwich with the meats and cheese for breakfast. Mmm. When is breakfast?
I have a recipe for homemade rolls that I think are a lot like Brötchen. Going to have to dig that out, and try it in the bread machine. Toasters in Germany come with a warming rack on top, specifically to heat rolls.
http://www.testberichte.de/p/rowenta-tests/tp-045-testbericht.html
That is the toaster we had in the kitchen. Impossible to find such a thing in the US.
Chuck, you can get an add-on warming rack and some toasters come with them. Just search for “toaster with warming rack”. However, I suspect the reason they’re not commonly found in stores is because many Americans have toaster ovens and don’t need them.