Category: science kits

09:34 – We have a bunch of science kit stuff to get done this weekend, along with several tasks around the house. I need to replace the mechanism in the foyer toilet, so we’re heading over to Blevins sometime today to pick up a replacement flapper assembly, along with a pack or two of water sediment filters for our whole-house filter and another pack of Rid-X septic tank treatment. I also want to stop at the Dr. Grabow factory store, which is just down the road from us, and look at their pipes.

We went out to run some local errands yesterday. The first stop was the Blue Ridge Electric Co-op, where we talked to a nice young woman about getting propane installed. I told her we were thinking about fueling three appliances with propane: a cooktop in the kitchen, a radiant heater for upstairs, and eventually our generator. She said she’d have their installer call us to set up an appointment to give us a quote on running lines and so on. The smallest tank they carry is 120 gallons, which they fill to 100 gallons. The next size up is 250 gallons, which they fill to 200 gallons. I’m inclined to go for the latter. Anything much larger becomes a major hassle because it has to be buried. The deal is that there’s an annual tank rental fee, but they waive it if you use at least one tank’s worth per year. If we’re running only a cooktop, even the 120 gallon tank would easily be a year’s worth, so we’d probably end up paying tank rental on the larger tank.

Especially since we may not have the space heater installed. Compared to the electric heat pump, propane is very costly. We pay about ten cents per kWh of electricity to drive our heat pump. To heat with propane, it would have to sell for about $0.72 per gallon. It’s three times that much, so it makes sense for us to use propane only for the cooktop and perhaps the generator and just pay the tank rental if we don’t use enough propane to have the rental fee waived.

Propane yields about 91,600 BTU/gallon, versus roughly 135,000 BTU/gallon for fuel oild. But a gallon of propane weighs only about 4.2 pounds, versus about 8.2 pounds for fuel oil. In other words, for equal heat yield, propane would have to sell for just over half as much per gallon as fuel oil. But propane actually sells for more per gallon than fuel oil, so it’s a very expensive source of heat. For that reason, I’d prefer to have a big fuel oil tank installed, but fuel oil doesn’t burn nearly as cleanly as propane and you can’t run a cooktop with it. So we’ll probably end up with propane.

I just read an interesting article a couple weeks ago about the reliability of our electric power grid, or lack thereof. The powers that be define a major power outage as one that affects 20,000 or more homes. A dozen or so years ago, the US as a whole experienced less than one such outage per week, something like 45 major outages in 2004. Since then, the frequency has increased every year. In 2015, the US as a whole experienced nearly one major outage per DAY. That is not a good trend line. Our electric power infrastructure is obviously being degraded every year.

Our next stop was Southern States, which is basically a hardware/seed/feed store that caters to farmers. We just wanted to look the place over. While we were there, we met some of the staff. One of them introduced himself as Jerry Edwards. I asked him if he was the Jerry Edwards who used to live on Macedonia Church Road. He said he was, and I introduced myself and Barbara as the people who’d bought the house he used to own. I took the opportunity to ask him about details on the well (it was already there when they built the house), the location of the septic tank and drain field, and so on. He seemed like a nice enough guy.

Our final stops were the two dollar stores in town. Neither Barbara nor I found them at all impressive. They’re basically a combination of a small supermarket and a chain drugstore. Their prices weren’t all that good, either. But I wanted to check them out because, at age 63, I’d never been inside one before. That’s another thing I can check off my list, and now I know that there’s no point to going into one again.

09:22 – When Barbara read my post yesterday, she asked me not to buy any more canned meat. I thought she meant any at all, including chicken. But then she clarified that canned chicken was fine, and that the Keystone Meats canned ground beef was also acceptable for casseroles and so on. She just doesn’t like the Keystone beef chunks or pulled pork. She also hates tuna. She said salmon would be okay, but she’d just as soon have all chicken, which is also fine with me. Oddly, when I hit the Costco web site to order another case or two of their canned chicken, it wasn’t listed. It still isn’t as of just now. Apparently, Costco.com has run out of chicken.

So I hit the Walmart website, which has the Keystone Meats canned hamburger and chicken. But having ordered Keystone Meats products from Walmart on-line before, I won’t do so again. They do such a poor job of packing that the cans invariably arrive badly dented. Their packing consists of tossing the cans into a box much too big for them and then adding a piece of two of twisted paper. The cans bang into each other in transit and arrive badly dented. Fortunately, some Walmarts stock the products, including the one up in Galax, Virginia, which is 30 miles or so from here. Unfortunately, they don’t stock many. The last time we were up there, they had about ten assorted cans of Keystone Meats. I grabbed the ones I wanted, which was only four or so. What I may do is use Walmart’s free pickup option to have the product delivered to the Walmart store in Galax or Elkin, NC and just pick it up from there.

Colin is pushing. This morning when the mail arrived, Colin went out the front door without permission. Then, as Barbara was putting him out on the back deck so that she could vacuum the floors without him attacking the vacuum, she turned to come in the door and he nipped her hand. She grabbed him and yelled and shook him to tell him that was completely unacceptable. He knows what it means to be called a Bad Dog.

More science kit stuff today, mostly filling bottles.

09:38 – As she was making a skillet dinner last night, Barbara commented that everything she was using was from long-term storage. A can of Costco chicken, a pound of Barilla rigatoni, a pint of Bertolli Alfredo sauce, and a cup of chicken bouillon makes a tasty meal sufficient to feed four at about 600 calories each. For dessert we had fresh peaches, although we could have had canned peaches instead.

I’m trying to get us to the point where we’re eating at least one or two dinners a week entirely from LTS. What we’re finding is that we don’t give up much, if anything, in terms of taste by using LTS food exclusively. We still eat a lot of fresh and frozen foods, but if necessary we could easily make the shift to using only LTS foods. There’s no need for hideously expensive freeze-dried foods, either. Canned and dehydrated foods are a completely acceptable and much cheaper alternative. We have zero freeze-dried foods in our pantry, and I have no intention of changing that.

My next food storage goals are to build up our stocks of bulk staples, add more canned meats, add more supplemental stuff from Augason Farms (cheese, butter, and egg powder, TVP bouillon, and so on), and replace a lot of stuff like spaghetti sauce and applesauce that we’ve been using for the past year without replacing. Although I wouldn’t say that Barbara is 100% on-board with my food goals, I think she’s coming around to my point of view. She’s as aware of the news as anyone else, and understands that things could get very bad very quickly. And, of course, the stuff we’re buying is stuff we’d eventually use anyway. By stocking up now, we’re just buying what we’d buy anyway but at a lower price.

So on our next Costco trip, I intend to buy a lot of bulk staples like sugar, flour, oatmeal, and rice, in addition to restocking our canned goods and replenishing our supply of toilet paper and other non-food consumables. I’ll order what I can from Costco and Walmart on-line. It costs no more to do it that way, and we don’t have to haul it back home.

Work continues on building science kits and subassemblies. We now have over 100 finished kits of all types in stock, but this is the time of year when they start disappearing like dreams.

We’re starting to run out of good stuff to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming. I suggested the other day that we start re-watching Heartland. I was kind of surprised that Barbara didn’t object. It used to be that she wouldn’t re-watch anything, even if it had been 30 years since we’d seen it. My argument has always been that I’d rather re-watch something that was really good instead of watching something new just because it was new. And anyway we don’t remember much about stuff we watched even five or ten years ago, so in effect it’s new to us.