Category: Jen

09:52 – Yesterday I started on taxes, which get more outrageous by the year. I’m sure we’ll have to write big checks for both federal and state taxes. We always do.

We finished series eight of Heartland last night. Amy married Ty after only eight years of dithering. I expect next season will be all about the newly married couple, and probably about them having a baby. One commenter on the CBC website said he’d just happened across the first five seasons on Netflix streaming and hoped to be watching Amy become a grandmother in 25 years or so. That’d be 33 seasons, which the series has the potential to do assuming that it continues to be funded and assuming that people are still making TV series 25 years from now.

I got email from Jen, who’s wisely decided to try cooking and baking at least once or twice a week using only her long-term shelf-stable stuff. The first problem she ran into, of course, was that most of her recipes call for fresh products like dairy and eggs. So she says she’s “cheating” on those items, but asked for suggestions. I told her to visit the WalMart website and order #10 cans of Augason Farms powdered eggs, butter powder, and cheese sauce powder and work those into her recipes. Two dozen #10 cans of each will cost them less than $1,200, or under $200 for each of the six people she’s planning a one-year food supply for, and will go a long way toward making the bulk dry staples she’s storing into palatable meals. I told her to start by ordering one can of each and trying them out. All of them are “best by” for one year after you open them, and a lot longer if you stick the open cans in the freezer.

08:03 – I got email from Jen overnight. She and her husband ended up making two more trips to Sam’s Club with the trailer. Their basement is now populated with hundreds of #10 cans in cases of six, stacked eight cases high along one wall, atop 2×6 runners on 2×4 spacers to keep them off the floor. That, and hundreds more standard-size cans of soups, meats, etc., dozens of cases of bottled water, and a bunch of 50 pound bags of rice, flour, and sugar queued up to be repackaged later.

Kim was excited yesterday. Jasmine got a real job, one with benefits and a career path. She’d been working at Babies-R-Us as a sales clerk. She starts her real job the first of next month. Kim has already paid off as much of Jasmine’s outstanding student loan balance as she can afford, leaving Jas owing only a couple grand. I hope Jas appreciates just how big a favor Kim has done for her. Jas now gets to start life better off than about 99% of her contemporaries, with a real job and no student loans to worry about.

The more we watch of Saving Grace, the better we like it. Excellent writing. Excellent cast. It’s by far the best cop show I’ve ever seen, and that includes ones like The Shield. Holly Hunter is a genius. She not only stars in the series, she produced it. If I owned a TV production company, I’d give this woman money and tell her to go make me a TV series. Anything she wanted to make, and I wouldn’t interfere with whatever she wanted to do. She’s a lot like Joss Whedon.

9:26:53.58 – Happy π day.

It’s a chilly, drizzly day here. Barbara has some errands to run, and then we’ll be doing kit stuff. Once we get our current stock of empty bottles labeled and filled, I’ll be reordering so that we can get thousands and thousands more bottles labeled and ready to go for the summer rush.

I haven’t yet heard again from Jen. I’m assuming that she and her husband picked up their trailer load of supplies at Sam’s Club yesterday and are now sitting in their basement wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into. The canned stuff won’t be too bad; they can just stack cases. But they were planning ultimately to buy about 1.5 tons (1363 kilos) of rice, sugar, flour, and other dry staples in 50-pound bags. I’m not sure how much of that they came back with yesterday, but getting that stuff repackaged in 500 one-gallon Mylar bags is going to be a lot of work. I did warn her to get a hundred bags filled BEFORE she opens a 100-pack of oxygen absorbers, and THEN drop one into each bag and seal the bags as fast as possible. I did encourage her to buy a good impulse sealer rather than one of the $35 cheapies on Amazon.com, and to have a regular clothes iron in reserve just in case.

10:56 – One advantage I mentioned to Jen of packing your own dry staples in foil-laminate Mylar bags also holds true for home-canned goods: in a large scale emergency, the “authorities” are much less likely to confiscate them, as happens frequently in major emergencies. They want commercially-packaged products, and the food industry has spent a lot of money to brainwash people into believing that food past its best-by date has gone bad. You can make confiscation even less likely by labeling your home-packaged food properly. For example, the next time we repackage dry staples, instead of labeling them “Rice, 6 pounds, Packed March 2015”, I’ll label them “Rice, 6 pounds, Expires March 1985” and so on. Who would want food that “expired” 30 or more years ago?

14:27 – We just returned from a very quick visit to Sam’s Club. The only shelf-stable foods I picked up were three #10 cans of vegetables and two #10 cans of Bush’s Best Baked Beans. Call it 35 pounds of food.

Before we went to Sam’s, we ran over to pick up Mary’s and Paul’s mail and paper, thinking they weren’t due back from Iceland until late today. Turns out, they had just gotten home. As we turned onto their street, Barbara said their garage door had just gone down. I told her to pull into their drive, where I pushed the button and made it go up again. Paul said it made him jump. He and Mary hadn’t even made it out of the garage yet.

They enjoyed their trip, even though the main purpose was to see the Northern Lights and Iceland was clouded out the whole time they were there. That, and there were no Northern Lights anyway. As I said, at least the volcano didn’t choose this week to erupt and strand them there.

I mentioned that Barbara and I were watching Saving Grace, and both of them had nice things to say about it. I really put it in our queue for Barbara, since I had no desire to watch a series that co-stars an archangel. (Why is archangel pronounced as in ark, while archbishop et al. are pronounced as in arch?)

But Grace is a strong atheist who isn’t buying what the archangel is selling. I consider myself a pretty strong atheist–a 6 out of 7 on Dawkin’s scale–but even I would believe given the evidence that Grace sees. So I’m assuming that she must be a 7/7.

This is the first time either of us has seen Holly Hunter, who’s extraordinary. Hunter manages to make her character likable, despite the fact that Grace is a 50-ish dissolute cop who arrests people who’ve committed no crimes, drives drunk and killed someone while doing so, engages in frequent one-night stands, and has an ongoing affair with her married partner. Even Barbara likes her, which is saying something.