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Category: science kits

Thursday, 9 March 2017

09:14 – It was 39F (4C) when when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, but it’s now warmed up to 57F (14C). Barbara and I are working all day at home on science kit stuff today.

When Lori delivered the mail and picked up a shipment yesterday morning, I asked her what she thought about the new TrumpCare proposal, which basically amounts to “if you like your ObamaCare you can keep your ObamaCare.” She thought I was kidding. When she realized Trump really didn’t intend to get rid of ObamaCare, she said that was the last straw and things were likely to get very bad very quickly. I agreed with her, of course, and asked how she was doing on prepping in general and food storage in particular.

She said she’d repackaged pasta, rice, etc. in Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, but that she had nowhere near enough stored. Of course, as she said, she also has many tons of beef on the hoof, “if I can hold onto it”. We talked in some detail about what she should do next, and I later sent her the following email to reiterate and expand upon some of what we talked about.

Hi, Lori

I know I ran a lot by you this morning, so I figured I’d summarize it in writing. Here’s what I’d recommend you buy, assuming you intend to feed two adults. This doesn’t include anything for your dogs. I store the same stuff for Colin as for us, figuring him at 70 pounds to be half an adult.

I don’t know what your long-term food storage totals are currently, but if you’re starting without much I’d suggest you target a one-month supply to start. Expand that to three months’ worth, then six, and eventually 12 or more.

Water – At least one gallon per person/day (shoot for 3 gallons/person/day)

You have a well, which is great as long as you have power, and a year-round spring, which is excellent. Still, water is critical, so it makes sense to store at least some water to give you a buffer. I’d recommend you start by storing enough bottled water to keep yourself, Casey, and your dogs for at least one week, at 3 gallons per day. That totals 42 gallons for you and Casey, plus whatever you need for the dogs. We buy Costco bottle water in gallons at $3.60/six-pack, so enough for you and Casey for week would cost about $25. And in a real emergency, you could stretch that to maybe two or three weeks.

Assuming your spring water is not contaminated by agricultural chemicals, you can count that as your second backup supply (assuming you can’t pump well water). Unless you’re completely sure that the spring water is not biologically-contaminated, you’ll need the means to micro-filter it (as with that Sawyer mini filter you have) or chemically treat it. Many sources recommend using unscented chlorine bleach to disinfect your drinking water, and it’s a good idea to keep an unopened gallon on hand for that. However, the problem with liquid chlorine bleach is that it’s inherently unstable. It breaks down even in a new, sealed bottle. After a year it’s noticeably weaker, and before you know it the concentration is down to nothing. A better alternative is to keep a bottle of dry calcium hypochlorite (pool shock or similar) on hand. If you keep it sealed and dry, it lasts indefinitely.

Carbohydrates – 30 pounds/person/month (360 pounds/person/year)

You can mix this up however you like, but I’d recommend the following per person-month as a starting point. Adjust as you see fit, as long as the total is about 30 pounds/person/month. All of these foods provide about 1,700 calories/pound.

10 pounds of pasta (macaroni, spaghetti, egg noodles, etc.)
8 pounds of white flour (for bread, biscuits, pancakes, etc.)
5 pounds of rice (white rice stores better, but brown rice is good for five years or more)
5 pounds of white sugar (or honey, pancake syrup, etc.)
1 pound of oats
1 pound of corn meal

Protein supplement – at least 5 pounds/person/month (60 pounds/person/year)

Although all of the carbohydrates listed except sugar contain significant amounts of protein, it’s not complete protein because it lacks essential amino acids. You can get these missing amino acids by adding beans, legumes, eggs, meats, etc. to your storage. Beans are the cheapest way to do this, but most people prefer meat, eggs, etc. Note that canned wet beans should be counted as one fifth their weight in dry beans, so while 5 pounds of dry beans suffices for a month, if you’re buying, say, Bush’s Best Baked beans, you’d need 25 one-pound cans of them to equal the five pounds of dry beans.

We keep about 100 pounds of dry beans and lentils in stock for the 4.5 of us, but most of our supplementary protein is in the form of canned meats. Cans of chicken from Costco or Sam’s, Keystone Meats canned ground beef, beef chunks, pork, chicken, turkey, etc. You can order Keystone canned meats from Walmart on-line. A 28-ounce can of most of them costs just over $6. We order them in cases of 12 at a time. They also have 14.5-ounce cans, although they cost more per ounce. They might be better for you if you’re planning to feed only the two of you. The actual shelf life of canned meats, like other canned foods, is indefinite assuming the can is undamaged. Keystone, for example, rates their canned meats at a 5-year shelf life, but in fact they will remain safe and nutritious for much, much longer.

Oils and Fats – at least 1 quart/liter or 2 pounds/person/month (12 quarts/liters/person/year)

Oils and fats do gradually become rancid, but stored in their original bottles and kept in a cool, dark place they last for years without noticeably rancidity. Saturated fats (lard, shortening, etc.) store better than than unsaturated fats. Poly-unsaturated fats have the shortest shelf life.

We store a combination of liquid vegetable and olive oils, lard, shortening, etc. We also keep anything up to 40 pounds of butter in our large freezer. In a long term power outage, we’d clarify that by heating it and separating the butter solids from the clear butter, and then can the clear butter to preserve it.

Dairy – at least 1.5 pounds/person/month (18 pounds/person/year) of dry milk or equivalent

This amount is all for cooking/baking. If you want to drink milk, have it on cereal, etc. you’ll need more. You can buy non-fat dry milk already in #10 cans, or buy it in cardboard boxes from Walmart and repack it yourself. (There’s also a full-fat dry milk called Nestle Nido that’s sold in #10 cans and has a real-world shelf-life of at least a couple of years and probably much longer.) Another alternative is evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk. For drinking or use on cereal, consider a milk substitute like Augason Farms Morning Moos (dumb name, but by all reports it’s the closest thing to real fresh milk). It comes in #10 cans and has a very long shelf life. It’s mostly non-fat dry milk, but with sugar and other ingredients that make the reconstituted stuff taste close to real milk.

Salt – at least 12 ounces/person/month (9 pounds/person/year)

Buy iodized salt. Sam’s sells 4-pound boxes of Morton’s iodized table salt for about a buck each, so a one-person-year supply is about $2 worth. The shelf life is infinite, so buy a lot. Repackage it in 1- or 2-liter soft drink bottles, canning jars, Mylar bags, or other moisture-proof containers. (You don’t need an oxygen absorber.) After extended storage, the salt may take on a very pale yellow cast. That’s normal. It’s caused by the potassium iodide used to iodize the salt oxidizing to elemental iodine. That’s harmless, does not affect the taste, and still provides the daily requirement of iodine (which the soil around here is very poor in).

Meal Extenders/Cooking Essentials (varies according to your situation)

You can survive on just beans, rice, oil, and salt, but the meals you can make with just those foods will get old after about one day. You should also store items that add flavor and variety to your stored bulk foods. (I consider meat a seasoning, but that’s just me…)

Herbs and spices – buy large Costco/Sam’s jars of the half-dozen or dozen herbs/spices (sperbs?) you like best. In sealed glass/plastic jars they maintain full flavor for many years. Your preferences probably differ from ours, but at a minimum I’d suggest: onion and garlic flakes/powder, cinnamon, thyme, parsley, dill, mustard, rosemary, pepper, cumin, etc.

Sauces and condiments – store your favorite sauces/condiments (or the ingredients to make them). We store spaghetti sauce, alfredo sauce, canned soups, ketchup, mustard, pancake syrup, etc. in quantity. Rather than storing barbecue sauce, we store bulk amounts of the ingredients to make it up on the fly. (See http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2017/03/04/saturday-4-march-2017/)

Which brings up another issue. You need to plan your meals and figure out how much of what you’ll need to make them. For example, we intend to have a dinner based on that barbecue sauce once every three weeks, or 17 times a year. The recipe makes up a quart or so of sauce, which with a 28-ounce can of Keystone beef chunks or pork or chicken is enough to feed the 4.5 of us. (The buns are just part of our flour storage.) To know how much we’ll need to store to do that for a year in the absence of outside resupply, we just multiply everything by 17.

17 – 28-ounce cans of Keystone canned beef, pork, or chicken
25.5 cups (11+ pounds) of white sugar
25.5 Tbsp (12.75 fluid ounces) of molasses
25.5 cups (204 fluid ounces) of ketchup
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of prepared mustard
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of vinegar
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of water
17 Tbsp (8.5 fluid ounces) of Worcestershire sauce
17 Tbsp (8.5 fluid ounces) of liquid smoke hickory sauce
34 tsp (77 grams or 2.7 ounces) of paprika
34 tsp (194 grams or 6.8 ounces) of salt
25.5 tsp (59 grams or 2.1 ounces) of black pepper

Cooking/Baking Essentials – varies according to your preferences

You’ll almost certainly want to bake bread, biscuits, etc., so keep at least a couple pounds of instant yeast (we use SAF). On the shelf, it’s good for at least a year. In the freezer, indefinitely. You’ll also want baking soda, baking powder, unsweetened cocoa powder, vinegar, lemon juice, vanilla extract—all of which keep indefinitely in their original sealed containers—and possibly things like chocolate chips, raisins and other dried fruits, jams and jellies, etc.

Multi-vitamin tablets/capsules – one per person/day

Contrary to popular opinion, fruits and vegetables aren’t necessary for a nutritious, balanced diet. Still, most people will want to keep a good supply of them. As usual for canned goods, canned fruits and vegetables last a long, long time. We buy cases of a dozen cans each at Costco or Sam’s of corn, green beans, peas, tomatoes, mixed fruit, pineapples, oranges, etc. (Note that pop-top aluminum cans are problematic. Where a traditional steel can will keep foods good indefinitely, the pop-top cans don’t seem to do as good a job. I recommend you stick to traditional cans, and of course that you have at least two manual can openers.)

Give me a call if you need to talk about any of this.

 

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Wednesday, 8 March 2017

09:30 – It was 37F (3C) when when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, with a stiff breeze. Barbara is off to volunteer at the bookstore from mid-morning to mid-afternoon.

I spent some time yesterday making up solutions for science kits, including 4 liters each of hydrochloric acid and Lugol’s iodine and lesser amounts of a dozen or more others. I have more solutions to make up today, and then we’ll spend tomorrow filling bottles.

As expected, TrumpCare as proposed by the House and endorsed by Trump is just ObamaCare under a different name. This will not end well.

Barbara and I have been re-watching Everwood, which along with Heartland and Jericho is the only series I’ve rated five stars on Netflix. We just finished watching the season three story arc with Anne Heche. I’d forgotten what an excellent actress she is. Barbara agrees. I’m going to get the two seasons of Men in Trees, in which she had the leading role, and which sounds a lot like Northern Exposure. I may also get Aftermath, a 13-episode Canadian series that ran late last year.

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Tuesday, 28 February 2017

09:16 – It was 41F (5C) when I took Colin out this morning around 0700. It’s currently up to 52F (11C), with today’s high forecast in the mid-60’s. Tomorrow evening, a blizzard moves in, with a light dusting of snow in the forecast. Barbara is volunteering at the Friends of the Library bookstore this afternoon, but the rest of the week we’ll be working on science kit stuff.

Several comments recently about anniversaries. I’d be interested in seeing a comparison of the marriage habits of deplorables versus progs. My impression is that deplorables tend to marry when they’re 18 to 30 years old, and stay married for a long, long time, while progs tend either to not marry or to marry and then soon divorce. That’s a gross generalization, of course, but in my experience it tends to be true. Not that there aren’t deplorables who are divorced, particularly some who married young and divorced soon after. But many of those later remarried and stayed married.

Last night, Barbara mentioned a conversation with a friend whose soon-to-be-16-year-old son is giving her fits. The other night, he climbed out his bedroom window and was gone all night, out with friends. They didn’t do any really bad stuff, except they decided to go street racing. As she was telling me the tale, I thought “boys will be boys”. Turns out, the friend’s husband had exactly the same reaction. He’d done the same kind of stuff as a teenager (as had I), and he said every guy he knew had done the same kind of stuff. It’s just being a boy growing into a man, but women don’t really understand.

It’s what boys do and have done throughout history and across cultures. It’s what happens when pubescent boys are exposed for the first time to a flood of testosterone. It makes them grow faster, taller, bigger, stronger, and much more aggressive. They become young warriors, in other words. That’s a couple million years of evolution in action, and there’s nothing societal pressure can do to change their behavior.

The problem, of course, is that those changes are also responsible for the very high number of accidental deaths among teenage boys. Teenage boys feel immortal, which again is just part of preparing them for their role as young warriors. If you’re going to face a man with a sword or spear who’s intent on hacking you to pieces, you damned well better feel immortal or you’re going to turn and run. So teenage boys are programmed not to turn and run, even when that’s the rational course of action.

For the last hundred years or so, teenage boys have been proving themselves to themselves and their friends by driving like maniacs. The problem is, they really are as good as they think they are, almost. Their vision is the best it will ever be, as are their motor skills and reaction times. What they utterly lack is experience, and that’s what kills a lot of them. And it’s also why every parent of a teenage boy is terrified at the thought of them out there driving like a maniac.

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Monday, 27 February 2017

09:49 – I forgot to check the temperature when I took Colin out this morning. It’s currently 50F (10C).

I finished up the federal taxes this morning. Now to get the state taxes finished. They’re pretty straightforward. The federal 1040 and supporting forms are about 98% of the actual work. This year was worse than usual because of the move. For the first half of 2016, we owned two homes, and had the sale of a house to take into account. We also had two personal checking accounts, two corporate checking accounts, doctors and dentists both in Winston and Sparta, two different Obamacare policies, and Costco changing from AmEx to Visa. All told, it was a paperwork nightmare. But it’s done, other than state.

Fortunately, kit sales have dropped way off, which is usual sometime in February. It was just later this February than it’s been in past Februaries. And we did manage to do about 180% of kit sales revenue this month that we did in February of last year.

But the upshot is that we’re getting very low on finished goods inventory, so we need to build more of everything. Barbara built three dozen shipping boxes yesterday, and we’ll get to work today on getting those turned into finished kits.

Dinner tonight is completely from long-term storage. A skillet meal of Keystone Meats beef chunks, Bertolli alfredo sauce, canned mushroom soup, and pasta. Kind of a beef stroganoff with our own twist.

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Thursday, 23 February 2017

09:37 – It was 46.5F (8C) when I took Colin out this morning. Today I’ll be working on taxes again and Barbara will be working on kit stuff.

My most recent Walmart order was supposed to arrive yesterday. The first box actually arrived Tuesday, with 12 cans of Keystone Beef Chunks and a 26.7-oz box of Walmart instant mashed potatoes I wanted to try. Interestingly, the Walmart mashed potatoes list the ingredients as essentially 100% dehydrated potatoes, with minor amounts of citric acid and other preservatives. I compared that with the Idahoan ingredients list, which was a long paragraph with lots of non-potato ingredients.

That shipment was fine, but the box that arrived yesterday had two problems. First, a big rip in the bag of Krusteaz buttermilk pancake mix had spilled enough of it to make a mess. There was probably 9.9 pounds of the nominal 10 pounds still left in the bag, so we transferred it to PET bottles.

The second issue was just annoying. I’d ordered a 29-oz #10 can of Augason Farms non-fat dry milk to try. What they actually shipped me was an 8-oz #2.5 can. This despite the fact that it explicitly said on the order confirmation and the packing list that it was a 29-oz can.

This isn’t the first time they’ve shipped a smaller container than I ordered and paid for. For example, I ordered four 10-oz cans of Rumford baking powder and they instead shipped me four 8-oz cans. I ordered a 3-pack of cannisters of Hershey’s Cocoa powder and they shipped me just one cannister. On that order, I just gave up because they made it impossible to apply for a credit. They wanted me to drive to Walmart  to return the product. This time, at least they offered to send me a return postage label so that I could have USPS pick it up. I requested a replacement rather than a refund, so we’ll see if they actually ship me the #10 can I ordered or another #2.5 can. I’m kind of expecting the latter.

Barbara always says she doesn’t understand why I keep ordering stuff from Walmart since their fulfillment and packaging sucks rocks.  My answer is that it’s because they usually get it right and Amazon prices on items I order is often 50% to literally 300% or 400% higher than Walmart charges. So I’ll keep ordering from Walmart and just put up with the occasional aggravation.

With regard to kit sales, 2017 is starting out better than 2016. As of today, we’ve matched kit unit sales and revenues through the end of March 2016.

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10:24 – It seems that the mainstream media blames Trump for everything, but I have an item that they’ve somehow overlooked to add to their list. Donald Trump is responsible for SPAM. Since his inauguration, the amount of SPAM I’m getting has at least doubled and possibly tripled or more. I check my email and empty the SPAM folder. Literally 10 minutes later, I check my email again and find another 25 or 30 messages in my SPAM folder. So, Donald Trump is obviously responsible for this increase in SPAM, and should be impeached.

 

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Wednesday, 22 February 2017

09:32 – It was 45F (7C) and raining when I took Colin out this morning, with no wind. Today I’ll be working on taxes again and Barbara will be working on kit stuff.

While Barbara was working at the bookstore yesterday afternoon, James stopped by to pick up a load of brush. James is about our age and lives half a mile or so down the road from us. He’s been mowing our yard since we moved up here. Like most people around here, he’s a Deplorable. He’s lived here all his life, and his ancestors have been living around here for at least 200 years, if not before the Revolution.  He’s also part of the 1.25% or so of the county population who’s black.

James loves to talk, and we stood there by the brush pile for half an hour or so talking. He’s very religious, politically and socially conservative, and hard working. In other words, a Deplorable. As we were standing there talking, a girl zoomed past in her little red car. The speed limit is 35 MPH, but as usual she was going about 60. That got us going on the “these kids today” thing.

She lives several houses down the road from James. She’s about 20 years old and has been driving like a maniac since she got her license. James has called the sheriff about her several times, but there’s apparently nothing they can do. Her grandfather set up a trust for her and the other grandchildren, from which she is now drawing $100K per year. She doesn’t have a job, and spends her time drinking, doing drugs, and driving around like a maniac. Every time she gets busted, her grandmother buys her way out of trouble. James and I agree that one day she’s going to kill someone, and that we just hope it’s herself instead of some innocent bystander.

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And here’s another guest post from Jen:

Readiness Exercises

by “Jen”

RBT said: “I’d really like to see an article or articles from Jen on planning and running a readiness exercise and talking about the issues they encountered and how they dealt with them. Jen did send me relatively short emails to report after each of their exercises, but I’d like to see a lot more detail.”

Fair enough. Here are some random thoughts based on what we’ve learned doing several weekend readiness exercises and one 10 day exercise from Christmas 2016 through New Years Day 2017.

The first thing I learned wasn’t during a formal exercise, it was when we shifted from cooking mostly with fresh and frozen foods to using lots of LTS food. My first attempt to make no-knead bread was pretty bad, the loaf was so damp that it almost dripped. Then there was the night I decided to make hamburgers from a can of Keystone ground beef. Guess what. It’s already cooked and you can’t form it into burgers. I ended up mixing it with cornmeal and making a meatloaf. There were several other similar fails and we found out pretty quickly that the lesson is to cook from your LTS food BEFORE you need to. Collect recipes that sound good and TRY them. Bob has posted several books and webpages that cover using LTS food. Buy them or download and print them. Do it NOW and then start trying them.

The next thing to think about is privacy. David and I are used to rattling around in our big house, just the two of us. The first time we had Jim, Claire and their boys for a weekend exercise it wasn’t too bad. Our house is big enough that each of the couples had a bedroom and the boys shared one. We didn’t get in each others way. When we did a larger exercise that included our prepper friends that made 12 of us in a house that was big for two, okay for six, but too small for 12, eight of which were married couples. David and I almost never argue but we had two loud “discussions” that weekend and things were also tense at times between two of the other married couples. We talked about this issue and agreed that the key was to consciously give everyone else as much “space” as possible and to think very hard before making any critical remark.

Another thing to think about is pets. We have a dog and the other prepper family that stays with us also has one. The dogs had met at cookouts and stuff where they seemed to get along, but this was the first time they’d both been in a house. Our dog considers this his territory and wasn’t happy about sharing it with a visitor. There wasn’t an actual fight thank god but there was a lot of snarling and raised hackles. The lesson here is to make sure that not only the people in your group get along but also the pets.

Heating water is expensive. We didn’t think about that because like most people it was just part of our electricity or natural gas bill. In our early weekend drills we had no way to heat water except on the woodstove or in an old Coleman solar shower bag that was part of our camping gear. That was just barely workable for washing dishes and what David calls Navy Showers (get in, turn on the water long enough to get wet, turn off the water, soap down, and turn the water back on just long enough to rinse off.) We found we could get two quick showers out of one five gallon solar bag but it had to sit for at least a couple hours in the sun to get hot enough. I’d almost rather take sponge baths with water heated on the stove.

Just before our long readiness exercise at the end of last year we got a propane tank installed and had it piped to our downstairs kitchen where we installed a propane cooktop and a 30 gallon water heater. As it turns out the cooktop and water heater both use a fair amount of propane. The biggest burner on the cooktop is 15,000 BTU, so we can run it for about six hours on a gallon of propane. That same gallon of propane will heat about 200 gallons of well water up to 110 degrees. If there is a long term catastrophe we’ll minimize propane use by turning off the water heater and limiting propane to cooking and cleanup. With careful use we probably have enough to last a year even using the water heater carefully and turning off the propane to it between runs. If things seem like they are likely to go on longer than that we can always go back to heating water with wood and taking solar showers.

Maybe the biggest thing we learned was not to make assumptions. The first time we tried to start the generator it wouldn’t start. We didn’t have any of that ether starter fluid and we never could get it started so for that session we were limited to battery lights and stored water for everything including toilet flushing. We knew we were supposed to test run the gennie once a month but that was one of those things that just kept getting put off. Now we do test run it once a month rain or shine. We also have a bunch of ether spray starter fluid just in case.

On a related issue, as it turned out we actually did have two cans of ether starter spray stored. David swore he’d bought them but we couldn’t find them anywhere. I guess the lesson here is to organize the hell out of everything. If you don’t remember you have it or if you can’t find it you might as well not have it at all. List everything you have and exactly where it is. Not just “big basement storeroom”, but “BBS Shelf E rear side towards right middle”. We’ve been working on such detailed inventory lists. We’re not perfect yet, but that’s what we’re shooting for.

One last big thing. I figured out doing drills no matter how realistic we tried to make them they weren’t even close to real. On Monday morning we’d all be going back to our regular lives. We knew we weren’t really going to be attacked by looters and that all the stuff we’d turned off for the duration would be back on again as soon as we declared the exercise was ended. We didn’t have to worry about the outside world turning nasty or what had happened to friends living in the big cities. In short the stress level was nowhere near what it would really be if SHTF. Pretending David had been badly wounded in a firefight didn’t even begin to approach the reality of that happening. During that exercise, I sat with him sometimes but I mainly just did the things I would have been doing anyway. If that really happened I’d surely be a basket case useless for anything. So if you do run an exercise keep that in mind.

Not that I think running readiness exercises is a waste of time because I don’t. I think it was Mark Twain who commented on the lack of similarity between lightning and a lightning bug. Readiness exercises are just a lightning bug. SHTF is real lightning.

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Sunday, 19 February 2017

09:32 – It was 45F (7C) again when I took Colin out this morning, but with a stiff breeze and gusts to 30+MPH (48+ KPH). Today I’ll be working on taxes and Barbara will be labeling bottles again. She labeled several hundred yesterday and will do the same today. She labels while she’s sitting watching videos using headphones, so it’s not really work. [Edit: I posted that last sentence in a fit of temporary insanity. Labeling bottles IS work, and Barbara works her ass off in the business. RBT]

One weird thing happened when I installed the Netgear router. Everything I’ve tried works normally on all our connected devices except that Google no longer works on my Fire HD7. It works fine on Barbara’s Fire HDX7, so I’m not sure what’s going on. The difference may be the ad blocker I have installed on my Fire, but Google worked with it before I replaced the router, so it must be related to the new router.

I see that Trump plans to get rid of PBS/NPR/NEA and other government boondoggles that are related to the arts. It’s about time. If there was ever any good reason for subsidizing these services with taxpayer money, it disappeared at least 20 years ago with the introduction of DVDs and the rise of Internet video, MP3 audio, and other content-delivery mechanisms. I’m sure the government news/entertainment services will be hauling out Big Bird again to convince ordinary citizens that they should be allowed to continue feeding at the taxpayer trough. But enough is enough, and too much. If they can’t compete in a free market, they deserve to be relegated to history.

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Saturday, 4 February 2017

09:35 – It was a lot chillier when I took Colin out this morning, 17.5F (-8C). It’s supposed to warm up a bit over the next few days.

FedEx showed up yesterday with my order from LDS online, a case of six #10 cans of dehydrated onions and two 100-packs of oxygen absorbers. The box was emblazoned with the LDS logo and its contents, so now the FedEx guy also knows I’m a prepper. Not that that matters much. Preppers are pretty thick on the ground around here. As is true of any rural area, it’s more common for people around here to have deep pantries than not.

With only the first 10% of February gone, we’re at 33% of last February’s kit revenues. We’re getting low stock on all of our science kits, so we spent some time yesterday making up chemical bags for chemistry kits. Next up is forensics kits. A multiple order late yesterday took us down to just one of those in stock, so we’ll get another batch made up. After that, biology kits, which we’re down to only half a dozen of. And amongst all this, I have to work on taxes. Grrrr.

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Wednesday, 1 February 2017

10:29 – It was 39.3F (4C) when I took Colin out this morning, but with not much wind. The snow is all gone, but we have colder temperatures and precipitation in the forecast for now through the weekend, so we may have more before the weekend. Barbara is off to the gym this morning and then volunteering at the Friends of the Library bookstore this afternoon.

If you’ve tried to order antibiotics from aquabiotics.com recently, you noticed that their site no longer lists any products. You can still order frm them, though, but you’ll have to pay with a check or money order. Their credit-card processors, originally PayPal and more lately WePay, find out that they’re shipping “prescription drugs” and refuse to continue to process payments, even though those drugs are for ornamental fish only and therefore completely legal to ship. I paid by check when I ordered last time, and they shipped what they were supposed to ship and in a timely manner. I got email Monday from Dave Folsom at aquabiotics.net.

Wepay has terminated merchant service, so we are now reduced to checks/money order payments. I have removed all items from the website, but left the site up as a point of contact. If you need anything, please use the table below, or the attached spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will allow you to enter your discount percentage(as a decimal) and calculate your total. Discounts are 5% for orders $35.00+, 10% for orders $150.00+, and 15% for all rescue/humanitarian groups on any size order. If you take the rescue discount, please give me the rescue name as our benefactor will pick up a portion of your discount.

I apologize for what has been 13 months of chaos, and in advance for what might be 100 months in the future.

The headlines yesterday said that Walmart was declaring war on Amazon, which is more than a slight exaggeration. All Walmart has done is announce that, as of yesterday morning, they are now selling many products with free 2-day shipping with a minimum order of $35. They’re very careful to point out that it’s literally 2-day shipping, as in two days’ transit time after they actually get around to shipping the order. It’s not going to arrive two days after you order it, because Walmart takes at least a day and often two or three to get the product to the shipper.

Even so, many people expect this to have a severe impact on Amazon Prime, which charges $99/year for unlimited two-day shipping. And Amazon’s actually is two-day from order to delivery at least 50% to 75% of the time.

I’ve been a member of Amazon since their very early days, and a member of Prime since soon after they started offering it. I’ve never particularly liked Amazon, starting when they patented their so-called one-click ordering. Bezos is also a big-time progressive, who now owns WaPo. He supported Obama and Clinton, and has apparently never seen a progressive cause he doesn’t support.

But the real reason I’m considering dropping my Prime membership is that their pricing is often no longer competitive. As in 50% to more than 100% more for exactly the same product I can get elsewhere. I also don’t like their pricing games. If I log on to Amazon and check a price, and then check that same product’s price in a separate browser without logging on, I often find that the logged-in price is noticeably higher than the anonymous price. Obviously, Amazon is punishing current customers because it assumes they’re willing to pay more.

I’ve already started to shift purchases away from Amazon. If they carry something at a better price than is available elsewhere, I can still get free shipping with a $50 minimum order, which is never a problem. That means the only Prime benefit is really their streaming video, but looking back over the last year we really didn’t watch much on Prime Streaming.

So I’ll talk about it with Barbara, but unless she makes a serious objection to dropping Prime, that’s what I’m going to do.

We had a decent January. Kit revenue was up 33% from January of 2016, although still 20% or so lower than an average January. Of course, we’re now into the deadest period of the year. In an average February, we might ship only three kits per week and have total revenues of only two or three grand.

Email overnight from Jen, who wants to get started home canning, and what she wants to can is bacon. She’s concerned because the instructions for doing so are all over the map. Some sites give detailed instructions, while many others say that canning bacon is dangerous. She doesn’t want to take a chance on botulism, obviously, and asked me what I thought.

The truth is that the USDA officially recommends NOT canning bacon, simply because they’ve never done the detailed testing required to determine how to do so safely. But millions of people have been home-canning bacon for a hundred years. Before pressure canning, our ancestors preserved bacon simply by layering the raw meat in barrels, pouring hot lard on top of each layer, and storing the barrel in the kitchen or on the porch. When they wanted some bacon, they’d scrape off the top, rancid layer of lard and eat the bacon beneath it, which was perfectly safe.

The worrisome aspect is our old friend Clostridium botulinum, an anaerobic bacterium that produces deadly botulinum toxin. But it’s safe to eat foods that are contaminated with C. botulinum bacteria, a very common soil bacterium, as long as they’re cooked properly. Boiling destroys both the bacteria and the toxin, although not the spores. Eating the spores is safe for anyone except infants, which is why it’s unsafe to give honey to infants: honey is always contaminated with C. botulinum spores.

I intend to pressure can bacon in the future. I’ll do so by cooking it until it’s soft and slimy, transferring those strips to a canning jar, filling the jar with a brine solution, and pressure canning the hell out of it. For canning bear, beef, lamb, pork, veal, or venison in strips, cubes, or chunks in quart jars, the USDA recommends:

Hot pack – Precook meat until rare by roasting, stewing, or browning in a small amount of fat. Add 1 teaspoons of salt per quart to the jar, if desired. Fill jars with pieces and add boiling broth, meat drippings, water, or tomato juice, especially with wild game), leaving 1-inch headspace.

They recommend different pressures depending on the type of pressure gauge on your canner and your altitude, but the top numbers they recommend are 15 PSI for 90 minutes. I intend to use 15 PSI (or higher if my canner allows it) for 120 minutes, which should kill the shit out of anything in there.

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Friday, 20 January 2017

09:35 – It was 43F (6C) and drizzling when I took Colin out this morning. The next few days are to be more of the same.

Barbara and I got quite a bit of kit stuff done yesterday, with more today and over the weekend. We’re in pretty good shape right now on finished goods inventory for this time of year. As we build subassemblies and kits, we’re doing an eyeball inventory, noting down stuff we’re short of. I need to get some of that stuff on order.

Trump’s coronation is today. Frankly, I’m kind of surprised that he’s still alive. Enemies of the powers that be have a habit of dying unexpectedly. It’ll be interesting to see what Trump actually does during his first week as king. He promised a lot, almost none of which he’ll be able to deliver even if he has the complete cooperation of Congress and Supreme Court, which he won’t.

His three major promises–to eliminate ObamaCare, to expel illegal aliens, and to bring back the jobs that have been lost–are all impossible to fulfill. The first because the public, including his supporters, will not accept what it will take to eliminate ACA, most particularly allowing health insurance companies to exclude pre-existing conditions; you can’t buy fire insurance if your house is already on fire. The second because the public simply will not accept what it would take to secure our borders and expel those who are already here illegally. And the third, as I’ve said repeatedly for years, because we are now in the early stages of a jobless economy. The vast majority of ordinary people have no skills that are worth paying much for, and with increasing automation that’s not going to change.

Trump is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis on all of these issues and more. Even with the best of intentions, which I don’t concede he has, and with the complete support of the rest of the government, which he doesn’t have, there’s not much he can do. People are going to be dissatisfied with Trump’s results, and not just the progs. Trump’s base will be just as upset with what he does and doesn’t do. Trump has put himself in a position where no one will accept excuses for his failures, which will be legion.

He talks a good game, but ultimately money talks and bullshit walks. I wish him the best, but I’ll be very surprised if he accomplishes any of his stated goals. So I’ll pick up my guitar and play.

As the theme music for the TV series Justified says, “Long Hard Times To Come”. Keep prepping.

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