08:10 – Happy Guy Fawkes Eve. Too bad we don’t have someone to plant explosives under our House of Lords.
Barbara is out for most of the day running errands. I’m working on the prepping book.
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08:10 – Happy Guy Fawkes Eve. Too bad we don’t have someone to plant explosives under our House of Lords.
Barbara is out for most of the day running errands. I’m working on the prepping book.
08:35 – Barbara is off on a day trip with her friend Marcy, Frances and Al. Colin and I are on our own until this evening. Barbara reminded me to walk Colin about 17:00 and then keep the lights off to avoid invasion by little looters. No doubt Colin will get plenty of barking in this evening.
I’m doing laundry, but otherwise devoting the day to work on the prepping book.
10:45 – Reading Ross’s Unintended Consequences last night, I realized something. He had a kid back in the 50’s buying .22LR ammunition. A box of 50 sold for $0.78, which is about the same as I paid as a teenager in the 60’s. Bricks of 500 cost a bit less per round, call it $0.015/round. I remember walking to the gun store downtown and paying $6 or $7 for a brick. That was about 50 years ago, although even as recently as a decade ago WalMart sold bricks for $11 or $12, and often $8 or $9 on sale. But there’s no reason that .22LR ammo should be immune to inflation. When I was paying $6/brick in the mid-60’s, one could buy a decent new car for $2,500 or $3,000. That would be ten times as much today, about $0.15/round, but a brick of .22LR doesn’t cost $60 or $70. As a matter of fact, a month ago I bought a bucket of 1,400 rounds for $80, or about $0.057/round. I doubt we’ll ever see .22LR at a lower price/round.
Once we get relocated and make sure our finances are straight, I think I’ll buy a bunch more buckets. Kept dry, the stuff lasts forever. I’ve fired thousands of rounds of .22LR that was 30 years old or more, and had no problems with it. (It does degrade quickly if you don’t keep it sealed against moisture, but those buckets provide an excellent moisture seal.) It’s easy to sell any time, and it retains/increases its value versus the dollar. In my opinion, it’s a much better value store than precious metals. Not nearly as volatile, and there’s no danger of buying in at a high. Just eyeballing it, it seems to me that .22LR is now selling for not much over actual cost of brass, powder, and lead. There’s no room for the price to fall.
10:20 – Work on packaging seeds continues. We got half a dozen species packaged yesterday, with more on the schedule for today. We’re sold out of the first batch, but continuing to take orders from readers at the discounted price. I’ll also have Barbara working this week on more science kits.
Among all the other tasks, I’m trying to get in some heads-down work on the prepping book. It’s progressing, although more slowly than I’d like.
09:18 – Work on science kits continues, as does work on the prepping book, AKA The Book That Wouldn’t Die. I’m still jumping around in the book, writing a section here and a paragraph there as I think of things to add.
One of the reasons I look forward to Barbara retiring is that she’ll be able to do much of the work on science kits that I have to do now. I’ll still do things like designing new kits, making up reagents, and so on, but she’ll be able to do the repetitive things that take up my time now. Things like filling chemical bottles, building subassemblies, assembling finished kits, keeping inventory and cutting purchase orders, shipping kits, and all of the other stuff that eats my time. She’s good at this kind of stuff, and I’m not. Freeing up my time will allow me to do more of the stuff that requires my knowledge and abilities. Not that I plan to work Barbara to death by any means. She can do part-time what takes me nearly full time, and she’ll have the other half of her time free to do personal stuff. Including travel, although I’m very nervous when she’s far from home.
10:29 – The US Postal Service and Swiss Post have really outdone themselves. On Saturday the 23rd at 4:12 p.m., the USPS picked up a kit here that was destined for Switzerland. I just got an email update telling me that the kit has arrived at the local post office in Switzerland. I believe that’s the fastest any of our international shipments has arrived, including kits shipped to Canada.
07:55 – Here’s some cheering news. Our kids are losing interest in participating in team sports. From 2000 through 2013, kids’ participation in baseball plummeted from 8.8 million annually to 5.3 million. But it’s not just baseball. Basketball, softball, and soccer showed similar declines. I hope this hemorrhaging means the impending death of team sports, both in sports leagues and schools. Sports teams are nothing but organized gangs. If we must have kids participating in sports, let it be individual sports: tennis, track and field, weightlifting, wrestling, swimming, martial arts, shooting, archery, and so on. And let’s get sports out of our schools entirely. If schools want to have competitions, let them compete academically in things like science and math, chess, bridge, and so on. The focus should be on individual excellence. Individuals matter. Groups don’t.
I got tired of working on kit stuff yesterday, so I knocked off around noon and started working on the prepping book. I may do the same today.
07:57 – We got a fair amount of science kit stuff done yesterday. More today, along with laundry and other normal Saturday tasks. I also spent some time yesterday working on the prepping book, and plan to do more today.
One thing on my to-do list is to contact one of the freelance layout/design people that O’Reilly has used on our books to take the raw manuscript of this book and turn it into something professional looking. As Dirty Harry said, “a man’s go to know his limitations,” and I know that I’m not a layout/design person.
11:00 – Embarrassing prepper moment. I just emptied a 2 L bottle of Coke and ran downstairs to bring up another 4-pack. We’re out. Not a single bottle of Coke in the house. I thought I had a case of #10 cans of dehydrated Coke in stock, but apparently not. Oh, well. I’ll just make it up right here in the sink. I prefer my own blend, anyway, because it uses sucrose instead of high-fructose corn syrup.
08:56 – Why More Men Are Sitting Down to Pee In my case, it was training by women, starting while I was in college. One girlfriend dumped me after about the third time she got up to pee in the middle of the night and sat on bare porcelain. Well, actually, it was worse than that. She got wet. It took years for me to retrain myself to sit as the default option.
I fell back into “power reading” mode last night and blasted through two of the novels I’d gotten from Kindle Unlimited–510 pages worth–as well as about half of a non-fiction title. Call it 700 pages total. For decades, that was pretty routine for me, maybe 400 to 500 pages of fiction a day. Some weekends I’d go through a dozen novels or more. But for the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve been spending a significant fraction of my reading time on the web and averaging only maybe a couple hundred pages of fiction per evening, or even less. And a lot of that is repetitive because there just isn’t that much new fiction that I want to read. Much better to re-read something I liked.
Kit stuff today. I need to get a dozen or two biology kits built and get started on more chemistry kits, which are starting to run low. One weekend soon we also need to get a bunch of components shifted from their shipping boxes to the inventory shelves and get solid inventory numbers on them.
I also have some longer-term stuff to work on. I’d like to ship at least one new type of kit this autumn, and ideally two. That requires groundwork and time. And of course I’m still putting in serious time on the prepping book.
12:23 – I continue to be impressed with these Ultrafire Cree flashlights. They’re focusable by sliding the front barrel in or out. At tightest focus, the beam becomes square rather than round, as the lens is actually focusing the LED. Walking Colin last night, I pointed the light on tight-beam at the house across the street, which is 50 yards away. The beam at that distance was smaller than the pattern of a 12-gauge shotgun with an 18-inch open cylinder barrel, and it was bright enough to read by. Too bright, in fact, to be comfortable for reading. So I turned it toward a house down the street that’s about 150 meters distant. At that range, the tight-focus beam was still far more than bright enough to aim by, and I suspect it would have been sufficient out to 200 meters or more. I think I’ll clamp one to Barbara’s Ruger Mini-14. The only modification I’d make is to tape the focusing collar in place to keep it from sliding under recoil.
08:47 – I’ll mail the taxes today and this hassle will be over for one more year. I just wish I didn’t have to write checks with five numbers before the decimal point.
Barbara said last night that she wanted to look at Sparta, NC first as a potential relocation site rather than visit Dobson, NC. That’s fine with me. Dobson is a bit closer to Winston-Salem than I’d like, and it’s also only a couple miles from I-77. There are also chicken factories near Dobson that produce tens of millions of birds a year. Of course, there are also huge chicken factories in the Sparta area.
After I get the taxes off, I’ll be working on kit stuff. Our inventory on a lot of bottled chemicals is very low, so I need to make up new batches of a couple of dozen of them. I make up the ones that we use in the largest volume in batches of 8 to 12 liters at a time, assuming they’re stable. I make up others that we use in smaller volumes or that are less stable once mixed in batches of 1 or 2 liters at a time. Once mixed, they all need to be filtered and then bottled in kit-size containers.
I’m working on a bunch of different sections in the prepping book. Right now, I’m working on the section on providing minimal electric power in a long-term grid-down situation. Essentially, that means being able to recharge enough AA/AAA NiMH cells to keep stuff like flashlights/lanterns, and radios, as well as ebook readers, tablets, and other small electronic gear running. The easiest and cheapest way to do that is with a small solar installation charging lead-acid storage batteries. All you need to do that is one or more solar panels and a $12 to $30 PWM charge controller, and in a pinch you can get by without the charge controller. In a formal solar installation, you’d use deep-cycle batteries to store the charge, but in an emergency you can use ordinary vehicle batteries, which would be readily available in large numbers. Vehicle batteries are optimized for providing very high current for very short times, which means they don’t last nearly as long if you use them in low-draw/long-time environments, but that’s a minor issue.
15:02 – I just joined Kindle Unlimited for the free 30-day trial. Someone asked, so here’s the deal: when you’re looking at the book’s page you see the Buy icon with the usual drop-down list, which in my case includes three physical Kindles, the Kindle-reader app, and the option to download the file for transfer via USB. If you click on the Read for Free with Kindle Unlimited option, you can still pick the download for transfer via USB option, but it doesn’t actually work.Instead, the usual next screen comes up and asks you to pick the device to transfer the file to, which in my case is set to default to my own Kindle.
So I now have ten books queued up for delivery by Wi-Fi to my Kindle. The problem with that, as I’ve mentioned before, is that my Kindle frequently crashes when I let it access Wi-Fi. Sometimes, the crash is so bad that I end up having to do a hard reset, deleting all of the books from the Kindle. Fortunately, Amazon allows you to manage your KU titles, and one of the options on that page is to transfer the book by USB. So I downloaded all ten of the titles to my hard drive, dropped them into Calibre to strip the DRM, and then transferred them by USB to my Kindle. They all work fine, but seven of the ten aren’t worth reading. I hate to be harsh but my reading time is too limited as it is, and I don’t have time to read books that are mediocre or worse.
Four of those seven are by Steven Konkoly, whose The Jakarta Pandemic was an excellent PA novel, particularly for a first-time author. The four in question are all non-fiction prepping books he’s written with a co-author with whom I’m not familiar, but as it turns out they appear to be one actual book. The first in the series is listed as 246 pages, with the second, third, and forth volumes roughly 60 or 70 pages each. Unfortunately, unless I’m missing something, those latter volumes appear to be simple chunks of the full book. The whole work might be of some use to a complete newbie prepper, but there’s very little specific information there. For example, in discussing firearms, Konkoly makes no specific recommendations other than to say that one married couple of his acquaintance intended to wait things out on their boat. Konkoly recommended either a pump-action shotgun or a .308 rifle (unspecified as to brand or action). The wife was concerned about her ability to handle either, so Konkoly fired the .308 with her close at hand. It was too loud for her, so she ended up with the shotgun. I read maybe 20 pages of the full volume and found only more of the same. No specific recommendations anywhere to be found. So those four titles are going back immediately to free up slots for me to download more. (With KU, you’re limited to having 10 titles “checked out” at a time. If you want to get an eleventh title, you have to “return” one of the ten you have out.) I did a quick scan on the remaining six titles, and three of them are garbage. The other three I’ll have to check further to see if I want to devote the time to actually read them. The good news is that there are thousands of cozy mysteries available under KU, including many series that Barbara may be interested in.
09:19 – It now appears that that German airliner was intentionally crashed by a suicidal/homicidal maniac co-pilot who had locked the pilot out of the cockpit. No word yet on whether the co-pilot was a muslim nutcase or just an ordinary nutcase.
Barbara and I need something new to watch, so I’m burning DVDs of series eight of Heartland. The final episode doesn’t officially run until Sunday, but I have the first 17 episodes, which’ll hold us until I can get the final episode. They’re running a preview streaming of the final episode today in Canada, so it’ll probably be available via torrent tomorrow. I’ll probably burn these to DVD+RW discs rather than DVD+R because the official boxed set will be available for purchase by September or October. I’ve bought the official boxed sets for all seven available seasons as they’re released, and will continue doing so as long as the series continues.
Today I’ll be working on kit stuff and the prepping book. I have to make up 8 L of one solution for the biology kits and bottle it, which is the last thing I need to make up a bunch more biology kits.
The doorbell rang at 0643 yesterday. It was Hasani, one of the neighborhood kids, asking if he could borrow a cane for a school project. Barbara’s alarm is set for 0645. When it goes off, she showers and I take Colin out the front and get the paper. I see Hasani most mornings, so he knew we’d be up when he rang the bell.
Yesterday afternoon, I was talking to Mary, Kim’s mom, and she mentioned that they’d had a scare that morning. She said that someone rang their doorbell in the middle of the night and that she and Kim had called the police. At first Mary said it had been at 4 or 5 that morning, but when I mentioned Hasani ringing our bell at 0643 she said it might have been around then. I said I’d ask Hasana when he brought the cane back after school and Mary asked me not to say anything. She’s in her 80’s and is sometimes a bit vague, especially when she’d just woken up. I think she was worried that people would think she was foolish. I reassured her that she’d done exactly the right thing, which is also what the cops told her.
Of course, I asked Hasani if it had been him. He’s in middle school but he’s a really big boy, about as tall as I am. I told him that Mary and Kim had been scared when he rang their bell while it was still dark out. I didn’t want to make the kid think he’d done anything wrong, but told him that he needed to remember that women living on their own tend to be nervous about unexpected visitors when it’s dark out. I ignored Mary’s request because I wanted to make sure that it had been him and not a potential intruder. I’ll talk to Kim today and let her know that she doesn’t need to worry about the person who rang her doorbell.
10:41 – I need to spend this week mostly doing science kit stuff. We’re in reasonably good shape on chemistry kits, but I just shipped the last forensic kit this morning and we’re down to half a dozen biology kits. I’ll be making up and bottling chemicals, building subassemblies, and building kits most of this week.
I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the prepping book and I need a break from it. Thinking and writing constantly about disasters gets depressing, particularly the types of disasters that are essentially impossible to prepare for. As I’ve said many times, unlike some of my readers I don’t really expect an apocalyptic end of all things. What I expect is a gradual slide into dystopia, with increasing poverty, social unrest, and government intrusion into our lives. That’s why I want to get away from the city, and that’s why I’m storing foods, guns, and other supplies and developing more useful skills. But in a true catastrophe like a long-term grid-down situation or a nightmare pandemic, there’s no real way for anyone to be prepared. The simple fact is that we have too many people who are entirely dependent on a complex, interlocking network. If something catastrophic enough to break even part of that network occurs, there will be a mass die-off in the US and there won’t be anything anyone can do to stop it. The most that Barbara and I can do is relocate to thinly-populated farming country, stock up, and hope that when the crunch comes we’re prepared to ride out the worst of it with our family and friends.