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Category: Jen

Thursday, 24 September 2015

07:25 – I have a bone to pick with the US federal government. Why are they wasting the time of SEAL Team Six, Delta Force, and so on by sending them out to track down and kill minor annoyances like Osama bin Laden, when they could instead be sending them out to track down and kill phone and email spammers? I’m completely serious here. I get a dozen or more spam phone calls and thousands of spam emails every day, and I’m sure I’m not alone. (Yes, our phone number is on the DNC list; makes no difference as far as I can tell. What we need is a C/EMAD Call/Email Me And Die list.) We should be relentlessly hunting down and killing telemarketers and email spammers, wherever in the world they may be. And it’s a self-limiting problem. We’d probably have to blow away only 10,000 or 100,000 of them before the rest got the message. What do you call 10,000 dead phone/email spammers? A good start.

Email from Jen. She and her husband are considering improving their alternative electric power situation. They currently have a generator and a limited supply of fuel as well as a 14W portable solar charger. The former is fine until the fuel runs out, and latter is fine if all you need to do is keep a few AA and AAA cells charged. They’re thinking about a low-end off-grid solar installation. They don’t expect to run their AC or even their freezer or furnace, but they would like a bit more solar capacity.

Jen mentioned that they were thinking about buying and installing a Renogy 400W off grid kit and had a lot of questions about whether to go with the MPPT or PWM charge controller, what other items they’d need to buy, how much actual electric power they could expect a small system like this to produce, and so on.

I told her that I’m not an expert on solar power, but I’d be inclined to go with the MPPT charge controller. If they’re concerned about EMP or a solar flare they can stick everything in a Faraday cage and perhaps buy a spare PWM charge controller. Those cost only $35 or so. Under ideal conditions, which conditions never are in the real world, they could expect those four 100W panels to produce maybe 2 kW-hours per day. Real world, I wouldn’t count on much more than 1 to 1.25 KW-hour per day, or about as much as their generator will produce in ten minutes. Still, that’s roughly 25 times as much as their little 14W portable panel produces, and enough to keep all of their rechargeable cells and small devices charged.

They would also need several deep-cycle batteries (like golf-cart batteries), along with the cables to connect their solar charging system to their battery bank and a decent inverter to output 120VAC, ideally a true sine-wave model. A 35 amp-hour 12V deep-cycle battery runs about $75, so they could expect to spend $300+ on those batteries. In a pinch, I told Jen they could recharge standard 12V automobile batteries, although their plates are designed for very high current draws for short periods of time (running a car starter motor) rather than low current draw for long periods, and using car batteries to substitute for deep-cycle batteries would greatly reduce their useful lifetimes. The price of an inverter is determined by its output waveform–square-wave inverters are cheaper than sawtooth or modified sine-wave inverters, which in turn are cheaper than true sine-wave inverters–and its peak/sustained amp rating.

Although I didn’t suggest doing so, I told Jen that they could also get by with buying only the panels themselves and some batteries, doing without both the charge controller and the inverter. These panels output about 18V under ideal conditions, which means they actually output considerably less voltage under real world conditions. They could hook up panels in parallel to provide that same less-than-18V output and run it directly to their battery bank to charge the batteries. They’d have to keep a close eye on things to avoid over-charging or self-discharging but it could be done, although I’d recommend spending the $35 on a basic charge controller. Either way, they could keep a significant amount of energy stored in their battery bank, which they could use with a battery charger intended to operate on normal 12V vehicle power. They’d be able to keep a boatload of 1.2V NiMH cells charged, as well as small portable electronics like emergency lighting, radios, tablets, or notebooks.

Read the comments: 70 Comments

Saturday, 22 August 2015

08:07 – Barbara got home around 8:15 last night. Colin and I are delighted.

Email from Jen yesterday. She and her husband spent an evening with another couple who are good friends of theirs, and the subject of prepping came up. Jen’s group is made up of her husband and her, Jen’s brother, his wife, and their two teenagers. The other couple also has six in their group; the two of them, two sons in their early 20’s who still live at home, and a third, older, son and his wife, who live nearby. The other couple lives about 30 miles from Jen, in an area equally suitable to hunkering down, and are prepared at about the same level as Jen and her family, which is to say high.

Apparently, the discussion went from the general to the specific pretty quickly. Jen’s husband mentioned that they’d considered and rejected the idea of buying a place up at the lake, just in case they needed a refuge other than their home. The other couple also intends to hunker down at home, but has concerns about what they’ll do if they do need to evacuate. They eventually came to the obvious conclusion; that each family could serve as the evacuation destination for the other. They all know and like each other, and both families have homes large enough to easily accommodate another half dozen people in an emergency.

Which raised the issue of supplies. Enough food to keep six people fed for a year is enough to keep 12 people fed for only six months. Obviously, if one or the other family needed to evacuate they’d try to haul as much of their supplies and gear along as possible, but there are no guarantees. So both families decided that it made sense to boost their long-term food storage by adding enough bulk staples to support additional people. They both have the storage space available, and the relatively small cost of a couple grand for six person-years of flour, sugar, beans, oil, etc. isn’t a big issue for either. And, as Jen said, even if neither family needs to evacuate that just means they’ll both have what they need to feed themselves for another year, which is no bad thing.

I also had an interesting conversation with Linda, whose daughter and her husband live next door. We stood there talking for half an hour or so. Linda and Danny are maybe five or eight years older than Barbara and me. They’re just regular country people who’ve worked all their lives to get by, and Linda says she’s really worried and disgusted by what’s happening. She volunteered that she and Danny own only one firearm, a .22 that she bought for Danny soon after they were married, and that she thinks they need more guns. Things have really gotten bad when there are nice 60-something church ladies like Linda contemplating shooting people to defend themselves.

11:45 – Yet another email from Jen. Her brother, Jim, and his wife Claire visit Jen frequently, and about half the time they make a Sam’s Club or Costco run on their way over. Jen says the four of them start the visit by hauling stuff from Jim and Claire’s SUV down to the basement, where they stack it to deal with it later. Jen never knows what they’ll bring along. Last time, it was a couple 50 pound bags of flour, 50 more pounds of pasta, a dozen #10 cans of assorted fruit, vegetables, and baked beans, two dozen cans of chicken, and four cases of water. Jen says quite a bit of stuff has accumulated, enough that they need to have another weekend repackaging party, but she needs to order more Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers from LDS on-line before they can do that.

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Tuesday, 11 August 2015

07:34 – I see that authorities in Ferguson, Missouri have declared a state of emergency. Apparently, the underclass scum there are marking the anniversary of what’s-his-name’s suicide-by-cop by rioting, looting, burning, and shooting at cops. I suggest a new campaign name: Underclass Scum Lives Don’t Matter!

Because they don’t. I hope they all line up and the cops shoot them. It’d reduce the burden on the taxpayers. Haul the bodies out in garbage trucks and dump them in the landfill. Let the underclass areas burn to the ground. It’s a cheap form of urban renewal.

I don’t expect the violence to spread widely this year or even next year, but it could happen. If it does come to Winston-Salem while we’re still living here, we’ll be ready for it.

More work on science kit stuff today.

14:46 – We just matched our total kit sales for all last month. That isn’t bad for August 11th, which is still in the slower half of the month. I just took a break from building more kits. I’m always paranoid at this time of year that we’re going to run out of kits. With Barbara away on a trip next Sunday through the following Friday, we need to be as ready as possible for whatever happens while she’s gone.

At current run rates, we have about 10 days’ worth of kits in stock, assuming a normal mix of orders, with more a-building. What scares me is that we get unpredictable bulk orders, particularly at this time of year. A bulk order for 30 or 50 of one type of kit knocks all my plans askew. The best we can do is make sure that we have enough components and subassemblies available that we’d be able to build a big batch if necessary.

Email from Jen. She and her husband were thinking about going camping with Jen’s brother and his family last weekend, but they all decided to run another readiness exercise instead. They did completely without utilities, other than Jen’s husband keeping his cell phone on in case there was an emergency at his veterinary practice. They ate only from their long-term food stores, and instead of drinking stored water they used one of their water filters to treat the water from the rear of their property. No glitches this time. Everything went as expected.

Jen said her husband and brother actually seemed to enjoy the weekend. She and Claire enjoyed all but having to use primitive toilet facilities and doing without air conditioning. Still, Jen said that after doing it for a couple of days, she and Claire agreed that they could do it for a couple of months or even a year if they needed to, although it’d get kind of old. They decided to have their next readiness exercise late this year, when staying warm will be an issue.

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Friday, 31 July 2015

08:48 – I got email yesterday from another woman who wants to remain anonymous. I’ll call her Jen II, so that I can just use the Jen category. Besides which, she reminds me a lot of original Jen. They’re both determined and decisive.

Jen II isn’t LDS, but she’s prepping for her family of five and has jumped into the Mormon “Big Four” long-term food storage with both feet: 1,500 pounds of flour, oats, pasta, instant potatoes, and rice; 300 pounds of beans; 300 pounds of sugar/honey; 72 pounds of milk powder; 50 liters of vegetable oil; 50 pounds of salt; and various other dry staples. They bought most of that in a couple of runs to their nearest LDS Home Storage Center in #10 cans and foil-laminate bags, hauled it home in their pickup, and stacked it in the basement.

She’s now set for a year of feeding five people on iron rations, and could probably stretch that to 18 months with other regular foods she has stocked. Their basement is now stacked with cases of #10 cans, but she knows this is just the basic staples. She needs to (a) add lots of supplemental dried and canned foods–meats, fruits, vegetables, powdered eggs and cheese, sauces, spices, and so on, (b) get it all organized, and (c) figure out exactly what to do with it if/when worse comes to horrible. Her goal is to have what she needs to feed her own immediate family plus some other family and friends for a year or more. Fortunately, her husband is fully on board with all of this, and is happy to leave the decisions to her. Money isn’t much of issue, nor is storage space.

She and her husband are both retired professionals. They live in a small town that sounds ideal. The rest of her family consists of their adult daughter, their son-in-law, and their early-teens grandson.

My first suggestion to her was to pick up a good cookbook oriented toward cooking from long-term storage, such as MD Creekmore’s , and the freely-downloadable Shelf Storage Recipes, both of which are collections of recipes contributed by people who routinely cook from long-term storage. Then to go through those, pick out some recipes to try and figure out which ones she likes, and order whatever supplemental foods are needed from Augason Farms via Walmart on-line.

My time this week was occupied almost exclusively on science kits, but I did spend some time in the evenings doing prepping research.

  • I spent a lot of time researching relocation issues. We’re still looking at homes, and have decided to look at some that are farther out into the county. One or two of them are located not far from the oddly-named hamlet of Meat Camp, NC.
  • I was able to get an hour or so in on the prepping book, again mostly just jotting down notes about stuff I want to write about in detail.

So, what precisely did you do to prep this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

Read the comments: 69 Comments

Thursday, 23 July 2015

08:37 – The Greek parliament has once again voted in favor of complying with the Troika’s new “austerity” terms, which amounts to committing national economic suicide in aid of being allowed to remain in the eurozone. And it’s all for nothing. The Greek people seem to believe that staying in the euro guarantees that they will continue to receive the huge subsidies they’ve been receiving for a decade or more, allowing them to maintain a much higher standard of living than they earn. It doesn’t. Greeks will never see a cent of the additional money that the Troika may “lend” to Greece. Those funds will be used to benefit Greece’s creditors, and only the creditors. Meanwhile, Greece will continue going deeper and deeper into debt until it all finally collapses. Greece would be far, far better off departing the euro, defaulting on everything it owes, and returning to the drachma. Yes, that would mean that Greece would be unable to borrow money on the open market for at least a decade and probably two and that Greeks would suffer deep poverty for that same period, but that’s actually the best they can hope for.

On Jen’s recommendation, I started reading Ken Benton’s SurviRal last night. She said it wasn’t a great book, but it was worlds better than most of the recent PA fiction. She’s right. The guy writes competently, and the book is reasonably well edited. It’s a bit odd in that the protagonists are a married couple of anti-prepping clueless Denver suburbanites who are religious but not obnoxiously so, but have a well-prepared brother down in the sticks a hundred miles or so south of them. This is the first recent PA novel I’ve read that I haven’t wanted to start marking up with a red pen, put a circled D or F on the front page, and add a note to try again and get it right before submitting it.

More work on science kits today.

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Monday, 13 July 2015

09:17 – This guy gets it: On Second Thought, Stick to Your Guns He understands that US supporters of the 2nd Amendment are going to keep our guns. They’re not for hunting. They’re not for recreational shooting. They’re for the reason that the 2nd Amendment was written in the first place: to keep the government in line.

And here’s a story about a Customer service shocker. Having dealt with this company frequently for years, it’s not shocking to me. What’s shocking is that it’s not the norm. It used to be.

The headlines are shouting that the Greek crisis is over. Not even close. All that that Marathon 17-hour session accomplished was Greece agreeing to even more stringent terms ahead of any discussions about a further bailout, in exchange for the EU providing a trickle of additional funding. Chances are there won’t be any future bailout, because that would require unanimous approval by all of the EU nations. The probability of that happening is close to zero. Even if Germany could somehow be persuaded to agree, there’s still Finland, Netherlands, Slovenia, Slovakia, and all three Baltic states, all of which are very strongly opposed to “lending” any more of their money to Greece.

10:33 – Email from Jen. She and her husband have been discussing buying a cabin up at the lake, about an hour’s drive from their home, at least under normal conditions. Interestingly, Jen, who is the strongly pro-prepping member of that couple, is opposed, while her husband is in favor.

Jen argues that it’s too far away, too expensive, might be impossible to get to if things really turn bad, and is a distraction from things they should be doing at home. I told Jen that I agree with her. Their home is already reasonably remote from the underclass. They have infrastructure already in place there, and a supportive group of friends and neighbors. If they were near a large city, that’d be one thing. Barbara and I are relocating in part because we’re currently inside the Winston-Salem city limits, entirely too close to large numbers of underclass scum. Jen and her husband are already located in an excellent location, so it makes sense to me that they should focus their efforts (and money) on improving where they are rather than looking for somewhere else to go. I could be wrong, but events are unpredictable, and as Frederick the Great said, “he who defends everything, defends nothing.”

15:22 – As if we needed more evidence, the Greeks are not the only lying weasels in this mess. The eurocrats are a bunch of lying liars as well. EU demands Britain joins Greek rescue fund

The UK needs to withdraw from the EU immediately. The EFTA (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein), none of whom are EU members, has been encouraging the UK to withdraw from the EU and join them. That would make particular sense for the UK, which was one of the founding members of the EFTA. By doing so, the UK would get what it really wants–free trade with the EU–without any of the political or economic entanglements that are part of EU membership.

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Friday, 10 July 2015

07:46 – For some reason, there’s been a flood of orders for forensic science kits. Our inventory of them is now -1, with (so far) one outstanding order for a kit that I don’t have available to ship. So today I’m building another batch of forensic kits.

Most of my time this week was devoted to working on science kit stuff, as will be true for the next month to six weeks, but here’s what I did to prep this week:

  • I spent a lot of time on relocation issues. We’re gradually getting all our ducks lined up. We’ll probably end up making at least a couple more trips up to look at homes, but it’s very possible we could find a suitable one on our next trip. If so, we’ll need to make the decision to make an offer versus keep looking. Actually, we may do both pending acceptance of our offer. Even though we plan to pay cash for the house, it’ll probably take 45 days or so from getting a house under contract to actually closing on it. I also need to find a good attorney up there, ideally one who can do the closing and also handle our business needs.
  • I read the first book in Glen Tate’s 299 Days series, The Preparation. Tate, like Bracken and Konkoly and unlike most other so-called authors in the PA genre, is a reasonably competent writer. Yeah, he needs an editor, as all of them do, and there are occasional howlers (repel down a cliff), but at least the first volume is readable. Tate is unabashedly conservative/libertarian, which drives the prog reviewers on Amazon to froth at the mouth. The real downside is that the price of these books is outrageous. There are ten in the series, and most of them are priced at $9.95 for the Kindle. I suspect a lot of people just torrent them.
  • I read 100-day Pantry: 100 Quick and Easy Gourmet Meals. “Gourmet” is a gross exaggeration. This book is a collection of recipes that use only shelf-stable foods–mostly canned soups, pasta, canned meats and vegetables, a basic set of spices, and so on–to assemble edible meals as quickly and easily as possible, with minimal actual cooking. If you’re not already experienced at cooking from scratch this is an excellent resource for using the stuff you’ve stored.

So, what precisely did you do to prepare this week? Tell me about it in the comments.

08:55 – Another email from Jen. When her husband got home from work yesterday, he told her about a conversation he’d had over lunch with a guy they shoot sporting clays with. It’s spreading. The other guy remarked that he and his wife were becoming very concerned about social unrest in the cities, and thought maybe it’d be a good idea to keep a bit of extra food and other supplies on hand. Jen’s husband said that he and Jen were also worried, and suggested that the other guy not put it off, but make a Costco run or two to get stocked up on canned foods and other supplies. He also invited the guy and his wife over to their place for a cookout next weekend, where he plans to feel them out to see how serious they are about prepping.

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Thursday, 9 July 2015

07:51 – I laughed this morning when I read a page two article with the headline Tom Selleck accused of stealing water for California ranch. Until I read the article, I assumed that he was accused of taking more than his allotted share from a stream or river. No, as it turns out. Apparently, he has an avocado farm and is accused of pulling a tanker truck up to a fire hydrant, filling the truck, and driving off. Not just once, but regularly over the past two years. I’m guessing he may be forced to resign in disgrace as the police commissioner of New York City.

When the alarm went off as usual at 0645 this morning, I realized that that won’t be happening for much longer. Barbara’s last day at work is 30 September, and after that we’ll have no need for an alarm clock. It’ll be nice to sleep until we wake up naturally. Of course, Colin counts as part of “naturally”. Like all of our Border Collies, he decides when we’ve slept enough. I call them Border Roosters.

More kits to ship today, and I need to build a new batch of forensic science kits, which means I need to put together subassemblies today.

12:58 – Email from Jen. She’d mentioned before that she and her brother both wanted to devote additional resources to prepping, but both of their spouses were comfortable with what they’d already done. Jen’s husband said last evening that the more he read news articles, the more concerned he was getting about where things are heading. He asked her if she thought it’d be a good idea to spend some of the cash in their bank account on more tangible items, particularly firearms and ammunition and more particularly on tactical rifles for everyone. I replied that of course I thought that was a good idea, because hard assets are better than electronic assets in a bank account. It’s not like the price of guns and ammo is going down anytime soon. I recommend entry-level tactical rifles like the Ruger AR-556, along with a dozen spare OEM magazines and 1,000+ rounds for each. What do you folks think?

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Sunday, 28 June 2015

08:25 – Interesting article in the paper this morning about the top ten causes of death in Forsyth County in 2014 versus 1914. The death rate is unchanged, at one per person, but the causes differ dramatically. In 1914, the top two killers were tuberculosis and diarrhea, and pellagra (niacin deficiency) was also in the top ten. None of those are on the current top ten list, of course. Cancer, the top killer in Forsyth County since 2004, when it took over #1 from heart disease, killed only 67 people in 1914. Alzheimer’s Disease was also in the Top Ten for 2014, although I wouldn’t have thought that Alzheimer’s ever actually killed anyone. Heart disease, infectious diseases, accidents, and murder are perennially in or near the Top Ten, but that’s been true since record-keeping began back in Classical Roman times.

Email from Jen, who said she was embarrassed to report that they hadn’t done anything to prep last week. I told her that was fine, in my opinion. They’re already pretty well set, so any additions they make will be incremental. If they want to take a week or a month off and just focus on living their lives, that’s their business. We’re doing pretty much the same right now pending the move, so I’m in no position to be a pot calling the kettle black. Or is that a micro-aggression?


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Monday, 22 June 2015

07:24 – Email from Jen, who happened to look out one of her windows Saturday and noticed a scruffy person trespassing in their yard. Jen went outside, carrying although not pointing her shotgun, and challenged the person. He told her he was looking for some people whom Jen had never heard of. She told him that he was on private property and to clear out. He left without incident, but Jen said she was still shaken when she phoned her husband at his office and the sheriff, in that order.

They already have an alarm system, and Jen is well armed and a competent shooter, but now she’s feeling vulnerable. She’s aware that if the guy was intending to break the law, his intent was probably nothing more than stealing something easy to carry off and resell, but as she said she doesn’t know for sure. He might have been a serial rapist or murderer.

So now she and her husband are talking about possible ways to secure their property. They talked about fencing the perimeter of their property, but doing so would be extremely expensive. And, as I pointed out, a perimeter fence provides no real security against intrusion unless it blocks the entire perimeter, including the drive, and is under constant watch. I suggested that a large male dog or two would do more to discourage intruders than spending tens of thousands of dollars on a fence.

I told her that if they want to limit access to their property, a living fence, AKA hedge, is much cheaper and much, much more effective than any affordable fence. Something like trifoliate orange or pyracantha, planted close together in a double or triple row, will stop just about anything, including vehicles. The only real downside is that it takes a while to get established and grow to a useful size.

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