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Category: Brittany

Monday, 12 September 2016

09:34 – Emails from Brittany and Jen. Both of them are Trump supporters, as I suspect most preppers are, and both are counting the days until the election, wondering what they’ve left undone.

I told them both pretty much the same thing. First, that I didn’t expect anything very bad to happen immediately following the election, particularly if Clinton wins. Second, that both of them are already reasonably well-prepared for any eventuality, and they’re entitled to rest on their laurels for a bit. They’re both prepared in terms of water, food, basic medical (more than basic, in Jen’s case), minimal power, and basic defense.

I suggested to both of them that they think about where their weaknesses are and take action to shore up those weaknesses. In Jen’s case, there really aren’t any glaring weaknesses. They’re well-supplied, and constantly adding more. Among them, they’re also well-covered in terms of skills, and they have backup to their backups in terms of equipment. Brittany’s family doesn’t have the budget that Jen’s does, but are nonetheless extremely well-prepared. Both families have the huge advantage of being located in small-town/rural areas, with lots of support from family and friends, and far from large cities. I suggested to both that it may be time to ramp down the purchasing a bit and focus instead on learning more skills, including cooking as much as possible from LTS foods to reduce their dependence on fresh/frozen foods.

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Saturday, 3 September 2016

09:50 – Robbie, Lori’s regular substitute, just showed up with the mail. Two boxes for us, one from Amazon and one from Walmart, all kit stuff. The back of Robbie’s vehicle was crammed full of boxes, nearly all Amazon.

Amazon really is taking over US retail, one step at a time. Robbie told me something this morning that I wasn’t aware of. Early every morning, an Amazon truck shows up at our local post office. I figured Amazon used FedEx or UPS to get boxes to local post offices. But, no. If Amazon is running a daily delivery truck to little Sparta, NC, you know they have to be doing the same for nearly all US post offices. Robbie said there were usually 200 or 300 packages on that Amazon truck, and that’s only going to increase as Amazon continues to stamp out their competition. I told Robbie that it wouldn’t surprise me if, a few years from now, Amazon went into direct competition with USPS, UPS, and FedEx by delivering directly to customers. The only difference is that they’ll be delivering only Amazon shipments, although it wouldn’t surprise me to see them go after UPS and FedEx customers, at least at first.

Our friends are supposed to arrive late this morning. They’ll be staying until Monday afternoon, so Colin is about to have a big weekend. More people to boss around and check on in the middle of the night, more food to beg, more of all the stuff he likes to do.

Since we moved up here last December, we’ve established a morning routine for Colin. When Barbara gets up, she gives him breakfast, immediately after which I put him on leash and take him out for his morning constitutional. We stay on our property the whole time. I just mentioned to Barbara the other day that I wanted to get Colin in the habit of going off-leash. The weather is fine right now, but before long we’ll have snow and ice on the ground, and the last thing I need is a 70-pound dog putting it in four-paw drive while I try to hold onto the leash without falling.

So this morning, I took Colin off-leash. Sure enough, he followed the same route we walk every morning. When we finished walking that route, I shouted, “In the house!” and he trotted up to the front door and waited to be let in. Good dog.

10:31 – Ruh-roh. Email from Jessica, who wants to contact Jen and Brittany directly via email. I emailed Brittany and Jen to ask their permission to share their email addresses, and I’m guessing they’ll agree.

I think of prepping as a sex-neutral activity, so I’m not sure why prepper girls apparently want to talk with each other privately, away from prepper guys. I mean, it’s not as if there are any sex-specific prepping issues, activities, or supplies, other than the obvious. Are there?


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Tuesday, 9 August 2016

10:00 – Barbara is down in Winston today for a follow-up appointment with her doctor and to run some errands. Colin and I are working on administrative stuff. Kit sales continue strong for early August, but we’re in pretty good shape on finished-goods inventory for now.

Jen and Brittany started CC’ing me on a private email discussion they’ve been having. I think they’ve been reading too many post-apocalyptic novels. In those, there’s often a trigger event that causes cities to empty out as urban residents seek the perceived safety of the surrounding rural areas. Those areas are overwhelmed by this “Golden Horde”, and gun battles between rural residents and these urban refugees ensue. I don’t think this is likely to happen, for several reasons.

First, people are likely to leave their urban and suburban homes only as an absolutely last resort. In a catastrophic emergency, government aid will focus on large population concentrations. Food and other critical supplies will go to large urban concentrations, and to rural areas last, if at all. The same is true of things like restoring electric power, water and sewer services, and medical and emergency services. Most residents of high population-density areas will (correctly) think that they’re better off where they are.

Second, even if a mass exodus from cities occurred, the mess would be awesome. Look what a simple snow storm did in Atlanta a couple years ago, and there was only an inch or so accumulation. Interstates became parking lots, literally. Not even emergency vehicles could move. In a SHTF scenario, it would be orders of magnitude worse. I mentioned some time ago the concept of tenth-value distances, the number of miles that would cut the number of people getting that far to 10% of the number who’d originally set out. That TV distance varies depending on a lot of factors. For us in Sparta, I estimate it at 10 miles. That is, if 100,000 people set out from Winston-Salem heading northwest, by the time you get 10 miles outside the city limits that number would be down to 10,000 people because of wrecks, disabled cars, road blockages, fights with local residents at roadblocks, and so on. By the time you get 20 miles outside Winston, the number would be down to 10% of that, or 1,000. At 30 miles, it’d be down to 100, at 40 miles down to 10, and at 50 miles down to 1. By the time you extend the ring to 60 miles, which is Sparta’s distance from Winston, you’re down to a tenth of a person. Call it an arm wiggling in the middle of the road.

Obviously, this is a SWAG on my part. The true tenth-value distance may be more than 10 miles, but it also could be much less. The point is, it’s non-trivial to get to Sparta even under normal circumstances. Lots of curvy two-lane mountain roads. In a catastrophic emergency, the difficulty would increase by orders of magnitude. Just a few big trees dropped across the roads at strategic points would suffice to stymie most refugees. So, although I don’t expect the cities to empty out and Golden Hordes go looting and pillaging through the countryside, if that did happen I don’t think Sparta is likely to see many invaders. And there are more than enough well-armed local Good Old Boys to mop up any that did make it this far. I told Jen and Brittany that they’re both far enough from major populations centers that I don’t think they need to worry, either.



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Monday, 8 August 2016

09:32 – I’m back up and running after losing several hours to a computer problem yesterday. Barbara got four dozen more small parts bags for chemistry kits built yesterday, among other things. We now have five dozen chemistry small parts bags and two dozen SPB’s for biology, so the next step is to build regulated and unregulated chemical bags for both and then get more kits built. That and related tasks will occupy us the rest of this week.

Email from Brittany overnight. They did a Marathon repackaging session over the weekend, and now have more than a year’s worth of bulk staples packaged for long-term storage, as well as a boatload of canned vegetables, meats, sauces, and so on, plenty of herbs and spices, and a bunch of Augason Farms dehydrated stuff. Brittany says that after they finish building the shelving and getting everything organized and put away, they’re going to take a break from prepping. And who can blame them? Like Jen, Brittany went from a pitiful state of preparedness to pretty much fully prepared in a matter of a few weeks. She’s planning to prepare a decent-size garden plot this autumn for planting next spring. She’s also considering getting set up to do pressure canning for preserving garden produce. I suggested she instead look into dehydrating. I’m not a big fan of home canning. It’s expensive to get set up, in terms of equipment and consumables as well as time and effort. For the same money, one can buy a ton of canned fruits and vegetables, literally, and the safety and shelf life of commercially-canned products is significantly better than that of home-canned products.






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Tuesday, 2 August 2016

09:14 – Barbara called last night to let me know she was doing fine and looking forward to coming home this morning. I didn’t want to call her for fear I’d wake her up. Al is going to pick her up at the hospital and bring her home this morning.

I just closed out July, which was our best July ever by about 15% for kit sales revenues. Unfortunately, January and June of this year sucked month-on-month, so we’re still down about 11% on YTD revenues this year versus last year. Still, August is starting out well–there are seven kits sitting awaiting pickup this morning–so I suspect things will even out before year-end.

Email from Brittany. She and her husband had a Marathon repackaging session over the weekend, and they now have a huge pile of LDS foil-laminate Mylar bags filled with bulk staples and sealed. Britanny says her feeling of relief is immense when she looks at all that LTS food, knowing that no matter what happens she’ll be able to feed her family.

They’re in pretty good shape now, not just in terms of having a year’s food but in terms of water, shelter, heat, power, defense, and so on. Brittany says they’re going to take a short break from prepping, but not because they’re out of money or time. They used all 250 of the foil-laminate Mylar bags from LDS as well as all their oxygen absorbers. She’s going to re-order those supplies and keep going. Her family and in-laws are all local. None of them are into prepping, at least no more than most rural families are, so Brittany and her husband are going to extend their preps to cover their families as well, at least to the extent they can afford to do so and that they have space to store the stuff. As her husband said, this stuff is cheap now and may be invaluable later. It lasts essentially forever and he’d rather have it safely at home than sitting in a warehouse if things ever get really bad.

With everything else that’s been going on, I haven’t had much time to prep lately. FedEx did show up the other day with several #10 cans of Augason Farms stuff and a 4-pound plastic bucket of lard. This is the first time that Walmart has actually shipped me the AF products rather than having them drop-shipped direct from AF. Once things settle down a bit, we’ll make a Costco run and stock up on bulk staples as well as restock the canned and bottled goods we’ve been using for the last several months without replacing them.

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Thursday, 28 July 2016

09:07 – The AC is fixed. It turned out to be a blown capacitor. Living without AC from late Sunday night to yesterday afternoon was unpleasant, but no worse than that. I don’t know if this heat wave has been an all-time record for Sparta, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it had been. It very seldom gets up to 90F in Sparta, so a run of several days over 90F is unusual to say the least. At least we weren’t in Winston, where the heat-chill numbers have been near or over 100F during the same period.

I was a bit concerned that the power would fail, with everyone running their AC flat-out. We had numerous flickers, but no outages. Blue Ridge Electric Co-op did an excellent job of coping with the heavy demand. We haven’t had even a momentary outage since we moved into the new house in early December of last year.

Today, we’re working on science kit stuff, some of it in our work area out in the warmish garage, but most of it in the house where the temperatures are normal. Once we get this batch of biology kits boxed up and stacked in the house, it’ll be back to labeling and filling bottles for more kits.

Email from Brittany. She and her husband have been out buying more sacks of bulk staples in preparation for another packaging party this coming weekend. They’ve also bulked way up on their canned goods. I said earlier that I suspected they’d be up to a six-month supply of LTS food by the end of this month and a one-year supply by the end of August, but it looks like they’ll hit one year’s worth by the end of this month.

In reality, they’ll be well over a one-year supply, because they’re aiming at 1.25 million calories per person, or just over 3,400 calories per person per day. That’d be generous for four adults, let alone for their family of two adults and two young children.

They’re repackaging all of their dry bulk staples in 7-mil foil-laminate Mylar bags from the LDS online store. Those are great for long-term food storage, except that they’re not rodent-proof. Although they don’t have rodents in their basement, Britanny and her husband talked about alternatives to protect their bagged food against a future rodent problem. They decided against using steel garbage cans to store the bags. Instead, Brittany’s husband is surrounding the shelves he’s building with heavy steel mesh, which should do the job.

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Monday, 25 July 2016

09:05 – Barbara just left to head down to Winston to run errands. As usual, Colin deeply resents being left at home with me. He’s going to help me build a bunch of boxes for biology kits and burn the DVDs that go into them.

Email from Brittany. They had a food repackaging party over the weekend. They didn’t finish everything, but they got a lot done: they filled, sealed, and labeled about 100 of the LDS 1-gallon foil/Mylar bags with bulk staples, about 500 pounds total. Her husband hadn’t finished building the shelves in the basement, so they have stacks of filled bags all over the place for now.

Brittany said there’s a real learning curve involved. When they filled their first bag, for example, they quickly realized that they had no way to seal it because if they laid it on its side to seal it most of the food would spill out of the open end. They quickly solved that problem by building a stack of bricks high enough to lean the filled bags against while they folded the tops of the bags over a steel ruler and used an old clothes iron set on high to seal all but the last inch or so of the top, leaving space to stick an oxygen absorber in before sealing the final small gap.

It wasn’t until they’d filled several bags with beans that they realized that the filled bags were going to be kind of lumpy, so it might be better to label the bags before they filled them. So they ran enough half-page labels to label enough bags for the rest of the beans and used them to pre-label bean bags before filling them. They ended up with a partial bag’s worth of beans left over, which Brittany put in a labeled ziplock bag for immediate use.

They then opened a bag of oxygen absorbers, went back and squeezed as much of the air as possible out of the filled bean bags, dropped an oxygen absorber in each, and sealed the final small gap. They then squeezed each bag to make sure it was sealed completely, put the unused oxygen absorbers in a half-pint Mason jar, and set the sealed bags aside. When they looked at them several hours later, Brittany was surprised to see that the oxygen absorbers had already had a visible effect on the bags, which were now all shrunken in on themselves and lumpy. Thinking ahead, they’d sealed the bags at the very top edge. As Brittany says, by opening them carefully, they’ll be able to re-use the empty bags for more beans, albeit not quite as many in each succeeding pass as they got into the bags on the first pass.

After beans, they repeated the process to bag rice, oats, cornmeal, pasta, salt, and (finally) flour. All except the flour went well, because all of those other foods are reasonably granular. But, like most people who’ve bagged bulk staples, Brittany quickly came to hate repackaging flour. As a light, fluffy powder, flour tends to go everywhere but where you want it. Brittany’s kitchen ended up with a light dusting of flour on the counters, cabinet doors, floors, and every other surface. Her husband grabbed a new tack cloth from his workbench, which they used to remove flour dust from the mouths of the flour bags before they heat-sealed them.

They ended up with about 150 of the LDS foil/Mylar bags unused from the original case of 250, and several sacks of bulk staples that they hadn’t had time to transfer. They intend to buy more sacks of bulk staples this week, and fill foil/Mylar bags again this coming weekend.

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Saturday, 23 July 2016

09:13 – We closed on the house in Winston yesterday, so we’re back to owning only one home. The next major project is to get our gravel driveway paved. I’ll call to get quotes Monday.

Email from Brittany, whose prepping is proceeding apace. Her foil-Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers have arrived, and they have a repackaging party scheduled for this weekend. They also picked up another two 50-pound bags of sugar, four 50-pound bags of flour, four 25-pound bags of beans, four 25-pound bags of white rice, about 50 pounds of pasta, 50 pounds of oatmeal, and 25 pounds of cornmeal, so with what they already had there’s a lot of repackaging to be done. Brittany happily notes that they now have enough to feed the four of them for six months, mostly in bulk staples, but with a reasonable amount of canned meats, sauces, and other foods as well. They also have a large order of Augason Farms stuff in #10 cans on the way from Walmart. And her husband is busy building shelves in the basement to store all this stuff once it’s repackaged. Brittany says that just looking at the piles of stuff is enough to make her feel much more secure, which is a common reaction of new preppers who’ve started to accumulate reasonable amounts of supplies.

We built another 28 chemistry kits yesterday, which takes our finished goods inventory on those to about four dozen. We’ll get started today on another batch of biology kits. Once we get those complete, it’ll be lather, rinse, and repeat though August and into September. In prior years, there’ve been weeks when I was so busy shipping kits that I didn’t have time to build more. I think our all-time record was 34 kits in one day. With Barbara available full-time this year, keeping up shouldn’t be a problem.

09:25 – Science is never “settled”, as any real scientist understands. How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology


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Monday, 18 July 2016

09:37 – Lots of interesting responses to the preparedness level thought experiment I posed yesterday, both in the comments here and via email. The typical level was about what I expected, somewhere between a couple weeks and a couple months. Some longer. Some much longer. The limiting items crossed all categories, from water to food to shelter to power. Interestingly, very few people answered my question about how comfortable they were with their level of preparedness and what, if anything, they were actually going to do about it. If you haven’t answered or would like to amplify your answer, leave a comment or send me an email.

Two of my shiest readers, Jen and Brittany, were among those who replied via email. As I expected, Jen’s answer was that her family of six is prepared pretty much across the board for one year plus, with backups to their backups. Brittany says her family of four is good at this point for probably two or three months, with food the limiting factor. They haven’t received the foil-laminate gallon bags from the LDS on-line store yet, so they have lots of bulk staples sitting in bags awaiting repackaging, and plan to buy still more of those this week, along with a lot of canned goods. Her guess is that they’ll be up to six months by the end of July and a year by the end of August.

Brittany brought up powdered eggs, which are kind of an odd situation. Back when I bought our initial supply (about 84 dozen worth), I paid about $17 per 33-ounce #10 can for Augason Farms whole egg powder from Walmart. With the chicken plague last year, that price shot up to ridiculous levels, over $50/can for a while. Meanwhile, the chicken population has recovered to the extent that eggs are a drug on the market. From a high of nearly $3/dozen wholesale last year, the price bottomed out at $0.55/dozen wholesale a couple months ago. It’s now recovered to just under $1/dozen, but that should still make powdered eggs pretty cheap. When I looked several days ago, Walmart was still charging over $30/can for Augason Farms eggs, when they should be about half that. (It’s not Walmart; the retail price on the AF site is still very high.) Brittany asked about Walton/Rainy Day powdered eggs. Their #10 cans hold 48 ounces rather than 33, which is pretty odd in itself, and their retail price is about $30/can. Resellers list it at $22/can or so, which is actually cheaper per ounce than I paid at Walmart before the chicken plague. But both the Rainy Day website and reseller websites list it as out of stock. Not sure why that is, unless preppers are stocking up in bulk. And I note that the Rainy Days website lists a 10-pack of #10 cans of powdered eggs at $150, or $15 per three pound can. Also out of stock, of course.

Brittany is also concerned about cooking/baking in a long-term emergency, so she was considering ordering a solar oven. There are several popular models out there, most of which sell in the $250 to $400 range. I told Brittany that in my opinion that’s a lot of money for not much product, and I thought she’d be better off making her own. She can make a functional solar oven from cardboard boxes, shredded newspaper, and a sheet of glass or plastic. If she wants a more durable solar oven and is willing to spend a little money on it, she can get her husband to knock something together with some boards, plywood, black spray paint, and aluminum foil.

In my research on solar ovens, I learned something I’d never considered. I always thought a solar oven used a transparent cover made of glass or Plexiglas, but many solar ovens just use simple plastic sheeting (like a disposable drop cloth). I recently ordered a 10-pack of True Liberty Goose Bags. They’re US-made, 18×24 inches (46×61 cm), food-safe, and rated for use up to 400F. The double layer of plastic with an air gap provides excellent insulation, and should allow a box oven with reflectors to get up over 200F even in cold weather. The Goose Bags are large enough to make a good size solar oven, cost under a buck apiece, and I’d rather use them in an emergency than be pulling windows off the house.

One of our upcoming minor projects will be to knock together a solar oven from boards and Masonite that I can use to test temperatures. I’m told that one can even bake bread in a solar oven, although it may take several hours and may not brown well. A solar oven also gets hot enough to kill microorganisms in water, so it’s a good option for water purification.

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Saturday, 16 July 2016

09:57 – Brittany emailed to thank me for the advice, but as it turned out it wasn’t necessary. When she showed my recommendations to her husband, he said he agreed with them completely. No surprise, considering he told Brittany that he already had a tactical barrel for the 870, a couple hundred rounds of buckshot for it, and spare magazines for their 10/22. I wasn’t particularly surprised. From what Brittany’s said about him, it sounds like her husband is on the ball. He also told her that as far as he was concerned they’d be better off spending $1,000 on more shelf-stable food than an AR-15.

Brittany also said she wasn’t sure exactly what they were preparing for. She’s worried mainly about civil unrest and a breakdown in supply chains, but reads about other potential emergencies like the power grid going down or a deadly pandemic. They already deal with the occasional severe winter storm and infrequent tornadoes in the area, but they don’t live in an area subject to hurricanes or earthquakes.

I suggested that the best strategy was to prepare for any eventuality rather than a specific threat or threats, focusing heavily on water, food, staying warm in winter, basic defense, basic medical, and meeting minimal power needs. All of those are necessary to prepare for any emergency, and sufficient for dealing with most. The Mormons have been doing this for more than a century, and they have it pretty much right.

One area where I do disagree with the LDS Church is their recommendation to accumulate a 3-month supply of ordinary canned foods first and only then focus on a year’s supply of bulk staples. If I wanted to be prepared for a year, I’d focus first on getting a year’s supply of bulk staples. That way, you know that you and your family can eat for a year. After that, you can start filling in gaps with canned/pouched goods, animal protein, and so on. You can live without the canned goods; you can’t live without the bulk carbohydrates, protein, oils/fats, and salt.

More work on science kits today.


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