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Category: science kits

Saturday, 27 August 2016

09:14 – We had Jen’s Bean Gloppita recipe for dinner last night. I’m not much of a vegetarian, but it was pretty good. Barbara wasn’t able to find coriander at the supermarket yesterday, so we made it up without it. I tried to convince Barbara that bacon was a reasonable substitute for coriander, but she wanted to try the Gloppita as the original vegetarian recipe. We made up a half of the original recipe, which makes a very large pile of Gloppita. There was enough left that I’m having the left-overs for dinner tonight.

I was thinking about ordering some dry black beans and repackaging them for long-term storage, but I think instead I’ll just buy the canned version. The nice thing about the canned beans is that they’re ready to use right out of the can. Just open the can, drain them, rinse them, and they’re ready to go. Dry beans need pre-processing, which is time- and fuel-intensive. Even if you soak the beans overnight, you’re still supposed to boil them for an hour. In an emergency, that’s a significant amount of fuel. The downside of canned is that a one-pound can of the beans costs $0.60 to $1.50+, depending on brand and vendor, versus maybe $1.50/pound for dry black beans. And most of that can is water weight. I’m guessing that on a dry-weight basis, that can of beans probably costs $4 to $5/pound. On balance, I think I’ll store a few cases of the canned for regular use and maybe 30 pounds of the dry beans in foil-laminate bags that we’ll reserve for SPMF emergencies.

Barbara is cleaning house this morning and then heading over to volunteer at the historical museum this afternoon. We’ll wait and do more kit stuff tomorrow.

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Friday, 26 August 2016

09:21 – Barbara is off to the gym and supermarket, where she’s going to pick up a can of black beans, a jar of cumin, and a jar of coriander, the only items we didn’t have in our pantry for making up Jen’s Bean Gloppita recipe. (My name, not hers). Barbara mentioned the other night that she liked black beans and it would be fine with her to have black beans and rice for dinner one night. We’re going to have it for dinner tonight. We’ll follow Jen’s recipe exactly, other than halving it and cooking the rice in the microwave rather than on the stovetop. If it turns out well, I’ll pick up a couple cases of black beans at Costco or Sam’s, along with larger bottles of cumin and coriander, which we don’t normally use.

Speaking of which, we inventoried our supply of herbs and spices (henceforth “sperbs”) in the kitchen and in our downstairs LTS pantry. I need to get that sorted and consolidated so that I can make up a list of which sperbs we need to get on our next Sam’s visit. We’re in pretty good shape on most of those we use routinely, but there are several we’re short of or don’t have in stock at all.

I’m creating POs and ordering stuff that we’re running short of. Today, I need to get several chemicals on order, including ninhydrin crystals and synthetic blood for the forensic kits. I also need to re-order bottles of several types. And I just noticed that my bottle vendor sells 5-gallon pails with screw-on lids for $10 each. That’s a lot of money for a pail, but the real cost is in the screw-on lids, which typically cost $7 to $10 each just for the lid.

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Thursday, 25 August 2016

10:15 – I’ve about decided to give up on Firefox. With every release, it becomes buggier and slower, as well as taking more and more RAM and CPU. I’m already running Opera Mobile on my Fire, and I have the full Opera installed on my Linux desktop system. I often have to resort to it when Firefox just doesn’t work on a particular site. It’s much faster than Firefox 48.0 (48.0!), and it seems a lot less buggy.

The final straw came yesterday when I was trying to print ten postage labels for kits. The USPS Click-N-Ship website was moving slower than the proverbial molasses in January. I got tired of sitting watching a spinner for literally a minute every time I clicked to a new page. I finally bagged it and got Opera setup with my USPS account information. Response time dropped from a minute/page to a fraction of a second.

There’s a guy out in the yard right now marking the underground electric cable. The Internet cable guy marked that yesterday. If we do decide to put a garden plot out on that side of the property, I wanted to make sure to stay far away from buried cables.

Barbara is building more science kits at the moment. Later today, we’ll be labeling and filling bottles for still more.


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Monday, 22 August 2016

09:40 – We picked up only two 36-roll packs of toilet paper at Costco yesterday, both because our cart was already getting full and there wasn’t a coupon for it this month. Barbara said all 72 rolls fit under the cabinet in the master bathroom. According to industry figures, Americans use an average of one roll of toilet paper per week. Women use more, for obvious reasons, but on average a year’s supply for two people is 100 rolls. I’m planning for four people, so I’d like to get up to at least 200 rolls. I’ve spoken to preppers who have 500+ rolls stored per person. They obviously REALLY don’t want to run out of toilet paper. No matter how much you decide to store–assuming you’re not at the 500 rolls/person level–it’s a good idea to have personal cloths and bleach or HTH powder stored against the day you eventually run out. It sounds gross, but it’s what most of the world uses, at least those who aren’t using a handful of leaves. In any emergency, the first things to disappear from store shelves are bread, milk, and eggs. After that, toilet paper.

I want to be as prepared as possible by election day. No matter which candidate “wins”, I suspect supporters of the other candidate will cry foul and assume their candidate lost because of election fraud. Who knows? They’ll probably all be right. If Clinton is declared the winner, I don’t really expect Trump supporters to be rioting in the streets, looting, and burning down buildings. If Trump wins, I wouldn’t be surprised to see many Clinton supporters doing all of those things, not to mention shooting cops of all colors and white people in general. BLM supporters are gangsters and terrorists. They’ve already made it clear that they consider cops and white people to be fair game. If their candidate loses, I don’t think it would surprise anyone to see widespread violent civil unrest in the cities.

So my advice to anyone is to hope for the best come election day, but expect the worst and be prepared for it. If you don’t have at least a couple weeks’ worth of water and shelf-stable food stored, now would be a good time to address that lack.


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Saturday, 20 August 2016

09:42 – Our main BK01A biology and CK01A chemistry kits are our biggest sellers by far. Between the two of them, they probably outsell all other kits combined by a ratio of 10:1 or better. But the other kits do sell, and we build them in smaller numbers to make sure they’re fresh. The dangers of that are, first, that we can get a bulk order for one of the smaller selling kits, and second, that with these kits shipping gradually, I may not notice that it’s time to build more. That’s the case right now with our FK01A forensic kits and our CK01B smaller chemistry kits, of which we’re down to only half a dozen each. The CK01B kits aren’t a problem, because they’re a subset of the full CK01A kits. We always have bottled chemicals in stock for chemistry kits, so it’s just a matter of making up CK01B chemical bags. The FKK01A forensic kits are more of a problem because they have a large number of chemicals in them, most of which are specific to the kit. So I need to make up solutions for and bottle a lot of these chemicals for the next batch. We’ll work on that this week.

My Fire HD7 is usable again. The problem was that both the Amazon Silk browser and Firefox were essentially unusable on it. Last night, I decided to install Opera mobile, which installs and runs without a problem. It’s now setup to let me browse my favorite websites and check my mail, which is all I use the Fire for. I waited so long to install Opera because it’s not my favorite browser, because I expected getting an adblocker running on it would be problematic, and because it got rotten reviews in the Amazon appstore. As it turns out, it solves all my problems with the Fire and I can now continue using it. Opera Mobile even has a built-in adblocker. It’s not nearly as good as uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus running on my desktop systems, but it’s decent for a mobile adblocker.

I need to work on a detailed shopping list before we make our next trip down to Winston for a Costco run. I agree with Barbara’s general plan, which is to continue buying stuff we actually eat that whenever possible is also suitable for long-term storage. We’ll still buy fresh and frozen foods like meats, butter, and so on, but other than that we’ll focus on canned goods, dry staples, etc. That, and non-food items, like boosting our toilet paper stores to a one-year supply.


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Friday, 19 August 2016

09:56 – Barbara is off to the gym and supermarket. Colin and I are doing kit stuff.

If you’ve been meaning to stock up on whole egg powder, you might want to visit the Augason Farms website. Today and tomorrow only, they’re having a 30% off sale on 18-pound buckets of whole egg powder. Regularly $248.99, on sale for $174.29. That 6-gallon bucket is the equivalent of just under nine of their 33-ounce #10 cans at $20/can, and is sufficient to provide a dozen eggs per week for a year. I’m not ordering a bucket because I already have quite a bit of AF powdered eggs in #10 cans and because I expect the price of powdered eggs to drop further any time now, but then I’ve been expecting that for months.

When we lived down in Winston, Kevin, our regular USPS carrier, would have someone riding along with him maybe every six months. That person was evaluating his route to make sure that it required about the same amount of time and work as all the other routes served by that post office. Lori, our carrier here, has mentioned more than once that the increase in volume from Amazon.com is killing her and the other carriers in the Sparta post office. They haven’t had anyone ride their routes with them since Amazon’s volume started ramping up big-time. As Lori says, that means they essentially end up delivering Amazon packages for free. The post office gets paid, of course, but the carriers are having to deliver much, much higher volume. That takes them more time and more work, and they don’t get paid any more for it.

USPS also treats in-town carriers and rural-route carriers differently. In-town carriers are provided with vehicles. Rural-route carriers, including ones that are actual USPS employees rather than contractors, have to buy their own vehicles. They’re paid mileage, but even so it’s a hassle that in-town carriers don’t have to deal with. Lori is still driving the RHD Jeep Wrangler she’s been driving for years. I actually emailed the postmaster general a month or so ago, and suggested he give Lori one of the new vans that USPS is starting to deploy. I haven’t heard back from him yet.

I’ve been so busy with science kit stuff lately that I haven’t had time to do any prepping to speak of. We do plan to make a big Costco run in the next couple weeks to restock on stuff we’ve used over the last few months and add more flour, sugar, oats, and other bulk staples.


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Wednesday, 17 August 2016

10:19 – Barbara is heading down to Winston this morning to run errands and meet friends for lunch and then dinner. She won’t be back until mid-evening, so it’s wild women and parties for Colin and me today.

We got another batch of biology kits built yesterday, so we’re in pretty good shape for the next couple or three weeks unless we get a large bulk order for something. Starting today I’ll be making up more chemical solutions to fill still more bottles.

One preparedness category that’s often overlooked is having the means to prepare food during a long power outage. You may find yourself having to cook over a fire. You could use your current pots and pans, of course, but unless your everyday pots and pans are cast iron using them over a fire will probably damage or destroy them. I found that out by experience back before I met Barbara, when I tried to cook over a campfire using standard thin metal aluminum and stainless steel cookware. It just doesn’t stand up very well to flames.

With the latest delivery from Walmart.com, we now have what I consider the essential minimum cast-iron cookware: a Lodge 3-Quart Combo Cooker–which is a standard skillet and a deep skillet, either of which can be used as a lid for the other–and a Lodge 8 Quart Cast Iron Deep Camp Dutch Oven, whose legs and flat top optimize it for use over a charcoal or wood fire. The Combo Cooker can be used on a standard gas or electric cooktop, but the Camp Dutch Oven is really not suitable for use on a standard cooktop, gas or electric. We unboxed the Dutch oven to check it, but then reboxed it and stored it downstairs. The Combo Cooker lives upstairs in the kitchen, and we’re starting to use it routinely. At some point, I’ll probably add a larger skillet or two and perhaps a standard Dutch Oven for use in the kitchen.

I’m really at the point where I’m ready to blow away the Fire OS on my Fire HD7 and replace it with vanilla Android. Amazon has really butchered Fire OS, all in the interest of locking people into their walled garden and preventing them from using ad blocking software. I’ve had it. I’ll wait a couple months, until the next major release of Android, because the current version has a serious vulnerability that won’t be addressed until then. If I end up bricking my Fire, so be it.




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Tuesday, 16 August 2016

09:03 – We’re building and shipping science kits today, as usual. Before we get started on that this morning, we’re going to make up another batch of bread dough so we can bake bread this afternoon.

One of the new crops I intend to plant next spring is heirloom tobacco. Not just to smoke, although I’ll try that, but as a companion crop and as a source of organic pesticide. Most bugs hate tobacco and steer well clear of it. They may have only bug-size brains, but even they’re smart enough to realize that nicotine is very bad news for bugs.

I also intend to grow several more culinary herbs, but this year we’ll get them started indoors six months or so before the last spring freeze. Call it somewhere in the Thanksgiving to Christmas time frame. That’ll give them a chance to get well started before it’s time to put them in the ground. We’ll start them in pots so that we can set them out on the deck on nice days and bring them indoors when we have cold nights.

I keep seeing articles in the MSM saying that Trump has no chance. I think they’re whistling past the graveyard. I think Trump has at least as good a chance of winning the election as Clinton does. The main point against Trump is that he speaks his mind, saying things that the MSM finds deeply offensive. So what? A huge number of people in this country find Trump’s statements refreshing. He’s actually saying what they’re thinking. The MSM is also trying to present Trump as a loose cannon who’s likely to start a war. That’s rich, considering that Clinton has never met a war she doesn’t like. At any rate, we may not know what we’ll get if Trump is elected, but that’s acceptable to a lot of people, who know exactly what we’ll get if Clinton is elected. As to the Libertarian candidates, why bother? Neither of them is any more libertarian than Trump or Clinton, which is to say not at all. If we vote in the presidential election, it’ll be for Trump, simply because he’s Not Clinton.






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Saturday, 13 August 2016

10:31 – Barbara is off to the wellness center to volunteer for a day-long event for the library reading program. She’s picking up take-out for dinner on her way home.

We made an apple crisp yesterday for our dessert/snack, using apples from the tree in our back yard. We kind of combined two or three different recipes, and it turned out well.

I read Locker Nine: A Novel of Societal Collapse, Franklin Horton’s latest, last night. Unlike most self-published PA novels, Horton’s are well-written and well-edited. He does a professional job all around. This book follows his three-part Borrowed World series, which is also excellent. Amazingly, he writes these things on his lunch hour at his regular job. He’s smart enough to pay for professional editing, layout/formatting, and covers. It shows. His books are indistinguishable from traditionally published books. Of course, none of that would matter if the content wasn’t also professionally done, which it is. This boy can write.

Email overnight from another newbie prepper. I’ll call this one Jason. He’s 33 and his wife, Jessica, is 31. They have a toddler, and another child on the way. They both work, and have a decent middle-class income. They bought a house five years ago, just before his wife found out she was pregnant with their first child. They have a mortgage, two car payments, child-care expenses, and all the other financial commitments typical for a young married couple, but they live within their means. Their home is in a nice suburb of a mid-size city in a metro area of just over 100,000 population. Like most people, they follow the news, and they’re both getting extremely concerned about what’s going on in this country.

A couple weeks ago, they decided to start getting prepared for whatever is coming down the road. They made a Sam’s Club run and stocked up on cases of canned goods and lots of bottled water. Jason and Jessica have both been spending a lot of time browsing prepping sites, and are overwhelmed by the amount of stuff they need to think about, buy, and do, and the decisions they need to make. Jason said his top priority at the moment was to buy a gun because they have no means of defending themselves. Neither of them have any experience with guns, and Jason wanted my advice about what to buy.

As is my habit, I answered his direct question first. Since they’re prepping on a budget, I told him that the best and most economical choice for him (and his wife, if he wants a gun for her as well) was a short-barreled pump-action tactical shotgun. For anyone large enough to stand the significant recoil, I said the Best-Buy award in my opinion went to the Mossberg Maverick 88 tactical shotgun in 12 gauge, which can be purchased for under $200. Jason said Jess is “five-foot nothing and 95 pounds dripping wet.” I told him in that case a 12 gauge with heavy buckshot loads is much too much gun for her. The alternatives would be to buy a 20-gauge Remington 870 or Mossberg 500/590 for Jess (or both of them) or to buy reduced power 12-gauge buckshot loads for the Maverick 88. The advantage to both of them using 20 gauge is ammunition commonality. The disadvantage of the Remington 870 or Mossberg 500/590 is that they cost $150 to $250 more than the Maverick 88.

I suggested to Jason that no matter how many and which shotguns they buy, they should buy 100 to 250 rounds of mixed buckshot and rifled slugs for them, along with a bunch of #7-1/2 birdshot rounds that they can use at their local sporting clays range to achieve basic competence with a shotgun. I also suggested that they fire at least a dozen or so rounds of the serious stuff to get accustomed to the difference in recoil between light birdshot rounds and serious defensive rounds.

Other than that, I suggested that their top priority should be securing a reliable long-term supply of water, getting their food stocks built up (including powdered baby formula) and the means to cook that food, and making some provision for staying warm in winter. Jason has been following this blog for several months and Jessica has started reading it, so I’m sure they’ll pick up a lot by osmosis.

Back to science kit stuff. I’m going to make up solutions while Barbara is gone today.

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Wednesday, 10 August 2016

09:56 – More work on science kits today.

Dave Hardy posted this query in yesterday’s comments, and I thought I’d answer it here.

The latest Woodpile Report:

http://www.woodpilereport.com/html/index-438.htm

Chock-full of good stuff, as usual. He first mentions using his FoodSaver and storing a bunch of stuff in quart Mason jars. Anyone else here do this and/or recommend it? How long does the process take to, say, fill a dozen jars with whatever, flour or baking mix, for instance?

One of the selling points he brought up was how much space is saved once it’s all outta the boxes and bags.

Far be it from me to second-guess any prepper, but I don’t think this is a good solution for most people. To the plus, canning jars are rodent-proof. But the minuses far outweigh the pluses for almost anyone. As it happens, I just had two dozen quart wide-mouth Ball jars delivered from Walmart yesterday. I bought them at the best price around, and they were still $0.75 each. One pound, give or take, will fit in each quart jar. That’s pretty expensive storage for bulk staples. Compare that to recycled PET bottles at $0.00 per pound, or even the one-gallon 7-mil foil-laminate Mylar bags from LDS on-line at about $0.40 each. A one-gallon bag stores at least four pounds and often five or six pounds of a bulk staples. That translates to $0.10 per pound or less.

As to using storage space more efficiently, I’m not sure how he arrived at that conclusion. I just measured a case of 12 one-quart Ball jars. It’s 16.5″x12.5″x7.5″, or about 0.9 cubic feet. Call it 6.7 gallons. So, 12 quart jars, three gallons’ worth, occupies more than twice that amount of cubic. If he’s storing 10 cases, that’s 67 gallons of cubic to store 30 gallons of product. In that same 67 gallons of cubic, I’m sure I could fit 60 gallons of product in Mylar bags. I’m sure the problem is that the Mason jars are round, which wastes cubic. So perhaps he’s talking about a lot of stuff that was originally packed in even more cubic-wasteful containers.

On my most recent walmart.com order, I received a #10 can of Augason Farms potato shreds. It cost $8.24, and includes 23 ounces of the product, which comes to $5.73 per pound. That’s a lot for potatoes, but remember they’re dehydrated. I’m going to test them by rehydrating 100 grams of the product in the refrigerator overnight and then weighing the rehydrated result. My guess is that the 100 grams of dehydrated product will rehydrate to 400 or 500 grams. Call it a pound. If so, that 23 ounces would reconstitute to about 6.5 pounds of raw potatoes, at about $0.88 per pound. That compares favorably with products like Ore-Ida frozen hashbrowns, at about $1.50 per pound.

I also pulled a can of Augason Farms Cheese Blend Powder out of the freezer and put it in the kitchen with the potato shreds. At $16.57 for a 52-ounce (1.47 kilo) can, its price also compares pretty favorably with similar processed cheese products like Cheez-Whiz, at $4.00 for a 15-ounce jar. The 10.75 cups of powder in that #10 can reconstitute to about 14 cups of cheese dip, roughly equivalent to seven 15-ounce jars of Cheez-Whiz. Using less of the powder, you can instead make about 21.5 cups of cheese sauce for casseroles, pasta, and so on.

I got an interesting email yesterday from someone who thought it was stupid that, if things got really bad, I planned to share our stored food with Colin. Apparently, this guy had read One Second After, where the protagonist lets his dog starve to death, and thought this was a fine idea. The guy also pointed out that every pound of food we fed to our dog would be one less pound we’d have for ourselves, and asked if I’d really let starving children die while giving food to a dog.

I told the guy he was a speciesist, and that dogs had as much right to eat as people do, which is to say none. But we feed ourselves and family first, and Colin is part of our family. If nothing else, he’s an essential part of our planning. So we plan to feed the three of us, Barbara’s sister and brother-in-law if they show up, and my brother and sister-in-law if they show up. Some random starving child doesn’t affect our priorities. There may be lots of those, and we can’t feed them all.

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