Category: weekly prepping

09:58 – Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month.

Barbara and I drove down to Winston yesterday to meet our realtor and get the house listed and ready to go on the market. It should be on the market today or tomorrow. That’s a big thing out of the way.

On our way home, we made a two-cart Costco run, which is unusual for us. Barbara filled her cart with $340 of mostly meat. I filled mine with mostly heavy, bulky stuff, which came to $130.

Not much prepping related stuff this week. We’ve been too busy doing kit stuff. I did pick up three 6-gallon packs of water at Costco, along with a couple large cans of Country Time lemonade, a 3-pound can of coffee, half a gallon of soy sauce, a bottle of vanilla extract, a cannister of cinnamon, and a 500-foot roll of Kirkland/Reynolds heavy-duty 18″ wide aluminum foil. Oh, and a 50-pound bag of sugar, which we’ll repackage today into PET bottles. In the past, we’ve repackaged our working supply of sugar into those Costco PET wide-mouth nut jars, which we keep in the kitchen cabinets. I suggested to Barbara this morning that we should re-purpose some of those nut jars to store baking soda. Those 12- or 13-pound bags it comes in are awkward to use, particularly since we normally use baking soda a tablespoon or two at a time. If we don’t have enough nut jars remaining to repackage the whole 50 pounds of sugar, we’ll just use 2-liter bottles. Or perhaps we’ll use clean, dry jars that formerly held applesauce to hold the baking soda. Either way should work better than those retort bags it come in.

10:08 – Barbara is working out in the front yard, spreading mulch. Colin was standing at the front door watching her work, and just let out a ferocious bark. Barbara came in the door and said that a deer had just come around the far end of the house on a dead run and passed her, heading for the neighbors’ property. We don’t see deer very often during the day, and certainly not that close. But we have a significant deer population, and I’m sure they’re out in our yard every night.

The plumbers came yesterday to switch out our sediment filter and show me what needs to be done periodically. He said the filters I’d picked up at Blevin’s yesterday were extremely fine and may need to be swapped out more frequently than the package recommends. It says they last for 8,000 gallons or two months. That’s 133 gallons a day, and I doubt we use that much water. The price at Blevin’s was $8.99 for a two-pack, or $0.80 cheaper than Amazon Prime.

I told him that the electrician said we had a 120VAC well pump. He refused to believe it wasn’t 240VAC until he looked at the main breaker panel. Then he said he wanted to take a look at it, so he went out in the front yard and pulled the concrete cap off the well-casing shelter and pulled out all the fiberglass insulation. We expected there to be a plaque in there with the name of the drilling company and details about the depth and well head, but there wasn’t one to be found. We’re going to have to check county records to find out what company drilled the well and hope they have the details on record.

Not much prepping this week. I ordered some monthly PetArmor Plus flea/tick treatments from Walmart. That ran only about $25, so I needed another $25 to qualify for free shipping. So I ordered ten more jars of Bertolli Alfredo sauce, which has gone up from $2.14 the last time I ordered to $2.23, a pack of Walmart house-brand egg noodles just to try, and some 15.9-ounce jars of Knorr beef bouillon. Walmart had those on sale, at $2.99 for a 12-pack, or about $0.25/jar. I thought it must be a typo, but they confirmed the order and shipped it. If they really ship me 12 jars, I guess I’ll be giving free jars to family, friends, and neighbors. The stuff keeps for a long, long time, but not long enough for us to use 12 jars.

Oh, and I read Surviving Abe. This has to be the strangest prepping novel I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something. The author is a leftie/prog climatista eco-greenie true-believer. His event is a continent-wide storm, which the Weather Channel dubs Abe. It kills millions, but that’s the least of it. A sub-thread running through the book is that organized eco-greenie terrorists have been waiting for just such an event so that they can pile on by destroying infrastructure like the electric grid, water purification plants and so on. Their goal, which the author apparently approves, is to cause a mass die-off of humanity, reducing the world’s population from 7 billion to 2 billion in order to make things “sustainable”. The author is real big on sustainable, and apparently approves of mass murder as the way to get there. Geez. Don’t bother reading it. To add insult to injury, the book ends in the middle of the story and there is no sequel, nor apparently will there be.

10:47 – Barbara is off to the gym, library, and supermarket. I wouldn’t say she’s completely happy with the state of the house, but I think she’s satisfied with the progress we’ve made. Upstairs is relatively organized and uncluttered, as is the downstairs finished area and lab area. The garage needs more work, but we’re getting there.

Yesterday, we got another 50 pounds of bread flour transferred to empty one-gallon Costco water bottles. I need to get those labeled and moved downstairs today. Flour is a really cheap way to store calories, albeit not nutritionally complete calories. A 50-pound bag costs only $13 and contains about 85,000 calories, or about six person-weeks’ worth. Supplemented with eight pounds or so of dry beans, a liter of cooking oil, and half a pound of salt, that provides complete nutrition, albeit not particularly tasty nutrition. As our 90 year old neighbor Bonnie says about her own food stockpile of potatoes, beans, and other long-term staples, “I may not like the flavor much, but I won’t starve.”

I also started rinsing out 2-liter Coke bottles. We’ll fill those with well water treated with dilute bleach, so they will be safe to use for drinking and cooking. But their real purpose is for flushing the toilets if we have a mid- to long-term power outage. We’ll fill them to 1.9 liters in case they freeze. Three of those bottles, 5.7 liters, is sufficient for one flush, so 300 of them will suffice for about 100 flushes, which in an emergency would be sufficient to last a month or so, assuming we have two to four people staying here. And 300 bottles really doesn’t take up that much space/volume, assuming we stack them in out-of-the-way places.

I started reading Fuel, Book 1 in the Best Laid Plans series, last night. It has lots of jarring flaws, such as the protagonist checking a pistol to see if there’s “a chamber in the round”, but overall so far it seems a lot better than most self-published PA novels. Assuming it holds up, I’ll read the others in the series, all of which are available free with Kindle Unlimited.

07:51 – We’re back to doing science kit stuff and getting things organized around here. I’ll have to devote several hours today or tomorrow to getting my new desktop system set up, so Barbara will probably just shelve books and do other stuff on her list.

I got a little bit done this week on the prepping front. Here’s what I managed to do:

• We managed to get about 300 pounds of white sugar, oats, cornmeal, and flour repackaged for long-term storage.

• I read another bunch of PA novels, most of which sucked. Ellisa Barr’s series, which I mentioned earlier this week, wasn’t too bad, and Franklin Horton’s Borrowed World series was actually decent. I read these PA novels mainly for ideas, and it’s gotten to the point where if I get one decent idea from a book or even a series, I consider it a win.

• I started to outline and write character bios for my own PA novel. I haven’t done much, but enough that I can see some real possibilities here. Just as a point of reference, Franklin Horton’s web page mentions that the first volume of his series sold about 2,600 copies on Kindle in its first month. If I can get this book stubbed out, I may talk to Pournelle to see if he’d be interested in co-authoring it. Jerry’s already co-authored one PA novel set in the California mountains. Perhaps he’d like to co-author another set in the Blue Ridge mountains.

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