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Category: WuFlu

Fri. Jan. 28, 2022 – madness is….. one step beyond

Cool and damp again.  Yeah, whoddathunkit?  Got into the low 60s yesterday.  There was part sun in various places in town but predominately overcast.

Spent the morning watching various auction lots for beds and mattresses for the lakehouse.  Didn’t win any.  Then I got my pickup done.  Dropped some stuff off at my secondary, and swung by Goodwill’s Outlet store.

There are things we will need for the lakehouse.  And because of the way my life works, in one of the bins was a box for a cell phone booster.   There were actually two different ones in the bin, so I scooped up all those pieces.  I’ll know later today if all the pieces are there, and if they will work now that 3G sunsetted.  I also picked up two pieces that will pay for the rest of my full cart.  They are the rarest of vintage audio gear– black face components that are worth something on ebay.  Kenwood GE-76 and the tuner from the same line.  No power amp though I did find the instruction book for it.  You never know what you’ll  find.

Today will be a meeting with one of my auctioneers, and pickup of some medical stuff.  I’ll have to go spend some time at my storage unit, and at my secondary.   I got another two pallets ready for the pallet lot auction, but I’ve got to get at least a couple more with some more valuable stuff to fill out this first auction with them.

The purchase of the lakehouse is proceeding.   The seller kept having ‘trouble’ with her email, claiming she didn’t get our signed contract, and we thought she might be entertaining other offers without telling us.  I now think she was actually having net issues, because she’s told us that she finally has the doc and is proceeding with the escrow company, etc.  Or maybe the offers weren’t sweet enough to overcome us being first through the door…  we’re still set to close on the 21st.   The first quote for insurance was pretty freaking expensive.  I’ll have to take a few minutes and talk to them about changes and maybe we can get it down into the reasonable range.

I’m really looking forward to finally having a Bug Out Location.  It was a pretty big gap in our preps to not have anywhere specific to go if we needed to leave town.   Fixing it up, stocking it, and actually using it for weekends is going to be a ton of work, but will be satisfying too.

Should generate some blogfodder too.

Now I can stack even more things.  And you can too!

nick

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Thur. Jan. 27, 2022 – making progress, and yet falling behind…

Cold again, with more damp.  Maybe getting to the low 60s like yesterday.  We had occasional sun, but mostly overcast, and I expect the same today.

Spent the morning doing email and phone calls.  Actual talking to people.  I know, how strange.  Had to call the insurance people and get a quote for the new house.  NOT cheap as it turns out.  Also spoke with them about the work on my Ranger (I can still get it done if I can find the time) and the burglary at my storage unit.    Then I spent some time on the phone with the county clerk in Houston County.  She was able to pull the deed history for my new properties, and the boundary descriptions.   It’s pretty cool to go back  to the original land grant, Ramon De La Garza in this case.  Only took a couple of steps.  And I confirmed that the mineral rights were separated from the land rights before it became a subdivision.  Most of the area was in timber production prior to the ’70s, and there is still a lot of timber in the area.  She printed old scans to a pdf, emailed them to me, and I was good to go.  She was apologetic that it cost $1/page.  The $5 is the smallest bill I’ll pay in this process, I’m pretty sure.

So I made some progress on something.   We completed the sales contract and got it back to the seller, and hope to close on the 21st of Feb.

Didn’t make any progress on getting more stuff to auction.  I’ll have to email the newest auctioneer and try to get some stuff placed with him.  I need to get some bins filled from the burgled unit too.   Today I’ll do something, so I don’t fall farther behind.

Girl Scout cookies arrive next week and the house needs to be clear for that.

I did get some needful things and some good stuff for the house and the new place too.

The seed display had a LOT of good veggies and tons of flowers in it.  I think I’ll scatter a bunch of the flowers at the new place.  Most of the veg were varieties I haven’t tried and failed with yet, so I’ll give them a try too.   The seeds sold 4 packets for a dollar.  I never saw any that cheap before, and the label says they have the same number of seeds as the other guys… wonder if they’ll germinate and what the rate will be.  It’ll be ‘science-y’ content for sure 🙂

That’s that for today, I better actually get some stuff done.

So I can stack some other things that will help more.

n

 

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Wed. Jan. 26, 2022 – brain is empty, todo list is full…

Cool and wet. And yes, I’m getting tired of that.  I think it got up into the low 60s yesterday, it sure was damp and threatened rain all day.

Did my pickups.  Got stuff for my non-prep hobby.  Got stuff for the kids.  Got household stuff like cleaning supplies.  (that stuff adds up, saving half or more on each bottle or spray can can really save some money)

Today I’ll be doing a couple more pickups (the gub accessories, some other stuff) and maybe making some arrangements for dropping off sale stuff.    I’ve got the quarterly swap meet for my non-prep hobby coming up in Feb, and I’ve been finding stuff to add to the ‘sale’ pile for that.

It’s time for another Costco run too, but IDK if I’ll find the time this week.  Got kid stuff most nights (basketball or dog training) and my sibling is in town and wants to get together for dinner.

I need to take over driving the repairs here at this house too.  My wife is very frustrated with contractors who don’t return calls.  I’ve been letting her try to arrange the HVAC and plumbing upgrades/installs.   She’s been very “see, it isn’t hard, you just call them, meet with them, and it will get done, no problem.”  Yeah.   Except.   Then they never call back.  They don’t answer emails either.   Welcome to MY world, where it isn’t as easy as you think.   Now she’s shepherding the lake house purchase, so it’s my job to get the other stuff done all of a sudden.  Ah life, so full of chances to do stuff wrong.

So I better get busy clearing my decks, so I can do the other stuff.   I need to get back to being as productive as I was when I was working.  I’ve somehow moved so far away from that that I hardly recognize where I am.

I’m stacking up….. tasks.  And the pile gets bigger.

I prefer to stack STUFF.

n

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Tues. Jan. 25, 2022 – knowing when to pull the trigger…

Cool and wet.  Damp at a minimum.  Misty rain most of yesterday with occasional downpours depending on where you were.  Where I was it rained pretty much non-stop, just slacking for short periods.

Spent the day getting ready then driving north to look at a property.   It’s pretty much what we expected, and we’re making an offer on it.  It’ll be another house that sold “before it was ever listed.”   We only learned about it through a friend.  Meatspace and tribe came through.

I expect there will be a LOT of things to share about the process and the work.  This is intended to be a ‘weekend’ or vacation home, but will also function as a retreat if we need it.  I hate to think ‘bug out location’ because you don’t get much use from a bug out place if things go well.   It does give us somewhere to go if we need to go, and that has been a major prep that was missing from our capabilities.

It’s also supposed to be a financial move to get something real instead of a rapidly inflating currency.  Our timeline is long.  If the world somehow manages to not go to helI in the next year or two, it will be a fun place to go on summer weekends and lakefront property always finds buyers, if there are any buyers at all.

Which brings me around to the title of the post (which most of the time is an opportunity to sneak in a joke or quick hit commentary,  or is totally unrelated to the post, which is a tiny little joke in itself) and relates to CommanderZero’s post today.   How do you know when it’s time to pull the cord and bail?  ESPECIALLY when that moment hasn’t come despite looking like it was imminent any number of times, and when the consequences for NOT going can be dire.  I’ve mentioned in other contexts that ‘if you think it’s time to leave, it’s probably too late…”  And I’ve mentioned that it helps to set trigger points so that you don’t have to second guess yourself.

But specifically, how the heck can I be willing to spend the money on this place after a day, and seeing it for only a couple of hours?  Weeeeelllllll……  because we’ve done lots of thinking about it before hand.   We have been looking at lake properties for three years.   We feel like we’ve got a pretty good understanding of the current pricing and current demand.  We’ve been looking at houses for a lot longer than that, and have a lot of confidence we can evaluate the condition and potential of the property.  We had the money in place, and although we had to revisit that, another year of putting money aside for the purpose made the pot big enough, as it turned out.   It’s still a stretch, but my wife agrees that time is getting short, the money we had saved was losing value every day, and we’re not getting younger, and the kids aren’t either.

I had a similar situation with my replacement truck.  By the time this one came up, I’d looked at a lot of trucks, knew a good price when I saw it, and knew I needed to act swiftly.  The house we live in took only a few minutes to convince us this was the house for us, mainly because we’d looked at more than 60 and rejected them.

And in the case of my truck, along with our previous ALMOST purchase of the prepper retreat, we were ready to change our minds if the information or our needs changed.  The first truck I almost bought, I didn’t understand the warranty situation.  Once I did, we bailed on the deal.   With the great looking property with all the animal protein, and smokehouse, and artesian well… once we understood where the flood line was, and that the property was unbuildable for the most part, and that we wouldn’t ever be able to sit on a dock watching the sunset, we bailed.

Be ready to move when the opportunity presents itself.  But be ready to stop moving if things change, or you change.

Finally, in answer to CommanderZero’s question, when do you head for the hills and burn the bridges and boats behind you?  I’ve got a rule that none of my prepping can be irrevocable. Even if I decide to head for the hills I’m going to do my best to not burn the bridges behind me.  Because I make mistakes.  Lots of them and all the time.  And I believe that “there is ALWAYS another way.”  Searching for and finding that way made my career.    Those two things make me strongly biased against the dramatic exit…  and so far it’s worked for me.

 

The other thing that works for me is stacking up the preps, because it gives me choices.  Give yourself some, and stack up your own preps.  You know you wanna….

 

nick

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Mon. Jan. 24, 2022 – busy day today, and a lot of driving.

Cold and clear, but maybe not as cold as it has been the last few days.  Cold enough Sunday that I wore a coat while grilling dinner…

Cleaned the house, welcomed the pack members home, poked at computers and moved some stuff around.  Not particularly productive weekend.

Today I’ll do some pickups of household stuff, or I might push it off til tomorrow.  I’ve got pickups in opposite directions so it would be nice to do some today, some tomorrow.  But.  We are driving up to look at a house on a lake in the afternoon, leaving around noon.  I don’t want to be late for that departure.

I’m hoping to add some redundancy to my living situation,  to get somewhere to ‘bug out’ to if needed.  It will be a big stretch, but it looks like that is the ante at this point.  While the “covid rush” to get somewhere outside of cities seems to be slowing, if things go further downhill, there will be an even wider rush to get out of cities, and prices (and inflation) will move up even more.  That’s my current thinking anyway.

So you will be left to your own devices this afternoon, and possibly this morning as well.  Enjoy!

Don’t burn the place down, use that manic energy to stack some things 🙂

n

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Sun. Jan. 23, 2022 – 01232022 – silly, I know.

Cold and clear.  Was 34F when I went to bed.  Didn’t get very warm during the day, probably won’t today either. Pretty sure we froze at some point, but I’ve got the citrus indoors, and I’m hoping nothing is negatively affected.

Did some more cleanup on the old family pc.  I’d previously upgraded it with an SSD and it breathed new life, along with making the RAM and adding a second drive for data… but the main reason for retiring it (technically anyway, the real reason was the newer $8 pc I picked up) was that the SSD was full and it’s a pain to manage where stuff goes on it.

Well.  I killed more than half the drive’s capacity which was taken up with LOG FILES from failed updates.  150GB of pure crap was filling the drive.  And windows ‘drive cleanup’ tool doesn’t even look for the files.  WinDirStat identified the biggest files, and where they were, and I deleted them.  Just like that the PC is usable again.   I went looking because windows update was failing with useless error messages.  It sure looked to me like the updates were failing when they tried to make a restore point, because the drive was full.

After making space, update found 23 more updates to apply under ‘safety and security’, so I did those and it updated without an issue.  Freaking windows storing cr@p and failing with useless errors.

Now I’ve got to look for the same sorts of things on this, my primary desktop.  I bet it’s full of cruft too.

— spent the evening watching Bukaroo Bonsai with D1.  She laughed and enjoyed it.

The at bedtime we had a long philosophical discussion.   Kid’s smart but since we’re not religious, she doesn’t  have a framework she can fit the more mystical workings of the universe into…  And old movies give us plenty to discuss regarding PC language, wokeness, and changing times.  She’s anti-wokeness.  The kids are starting to back lash against it.  They’re tired of saying the opposite of what their eyes tell them.  Interesting times.

Took some stuff to my secondary, and spent some time stacking stuff on a pallet for auction.   Monday I’ll be talking to another auction company about consigning a truck full of stuff with them.  They definitely do ‘estate sale’ type stuff, and it sells, if not always for highest dollar.   They just moved to a bigger, and empty warehouse space so the time to strike is now.

Ordered some powdered cream for the stacks.   It was finally back in stock.   The powdered cream, butter, and cheese all do age out.  They get hard and lumpy, and get an ‘old’ flavor, so I need to rotate them, even if it means wasting them.  I won a ‘seed display’ in one auction too.  It looks like it’s about half flowers, half veg.  We’ll see if it was worth the money when I pick it up.  Seeds aren’t cheap.

Don’t forget to stack up  the little things that make all the other things better, like butter and cream.   Stack the things.

 

nick

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Sat. Jan. 22, 2022, or 01222022 or fun with completely meaningless numbers

Why yes, on this cold winter’s night I am easily amused.   And it was cold, 33F at 1:30am.   Don’t know what today will bring, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say “cold and damp, with clear sky”.

Did some indoor stuff yesterday morning, and early afternoon.  I was watching an auction for household stuff including a desk for D2 to go under her new lofted bed.   Won it, and some other stuff.   I was alternating that with stripping stuff off the family All In One PC, preparatory to either selling it or repurposing it as my “radio” pc.  Not sure yet what I’ll do but I have to get it depersonalized and ready to sell, so I can get it out of the house.   Didn’t get much else done.  Did test some audio gear for resale, so there is that.

Today should be occupied with pickups and cleanup.   Unless I drive 2 hours north to look at a property one of our friends clued us into last night.  Sounds nice and it’s on the lake we want to be on.  In fact it’s near our friend’s lake house.  Nice to have friends…  It’s not the rural retreat that first one we looked at was, but it’s better than most and near people we know, and on a good sized lot.   Given the way inflation has been going, I would like to get some cash turned into real estate.  The asking price seems pretty good too.

We’ll see how quickly we need to jump.

If this is the one, I’ll have a whole new place to stack stuff…..

Stack some of your own!

n

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Fri. Jan. 21, 2022 – or 01212022 – another week slid by, yet this month is really long…

Cold, but I don’t know yet how cold it will get, or how cold it got.  It was 35F when I went to bed.  It is supposed to be clear today anyway, and tomorrow as well.

Mostly spent yesterday poking at things.  I did get to the grocery store, and noted in comments that  there were big gaps in the shelves in several areas.   Cat food and cold and flu OTC meds being the most prominent.

Today should be more auction and ebay stuff. If the weather stays clear I’ll go to my storage unit and clean and sort.  If not, I’ll do some more ebay stuff here at the house.  I’ve got stuff to test and clean and list.   Last night I had stuff sell in the auction by the guy who changed his mind about taking all of my stuff.   I think I did well with LPs and with books, of all things.  There were a couple of collectibles that didn’t do badly, and there was some stuff that sold for $1, but  at least it’s gone.

I hope he’ll be happy and take another load right away.

This afternoon and evening, my wife and D2 will be joined by the rest of her troop and they’ll be off to GS camp for a Gymkana, whatever that is.   The hope is sports on horseback, and related to horses.  Hard to be sure from the GS description.  Friday and Saturday night away, home Sunday afternoon.  That leaves me with D1 and a bunch of work to do.  We’ll see how that goes.  Cookie season is in a week or two, so the last bits have to be out of the house to make way.  Of course that was supposed to have already happened, but …  plans vs reality.

While I was at the grocery, I did add a flat of canned peas to the stacks,  6 pounds of bacon, and some pork chops and loin.  Beef was in short supply and none was on sale.  A little voice keeps poking me to add alternatives to fresh milk.  I have a bunch of Lido powdered full fat, and we don’t use as  much as we did a year ago, but I think I’ll add more.   It keeps fairly well.   I should open an old can and see how it’s doing.  For science or something.   But seriously, when I get little pokes from the universe like I’ve been getting about the milk, I ignore it at my peril.   YMMV but I’ll be checking the old and adding some new.

Anyone else getting weird vibes or feel short of something?

If you do, stack it up.

nick

 

BTW, I’ve now been doing this officially for 4 years ( a bit longer if you count the days I was just filling in for Bob while he was sick), without missing a day that I can remember.  Some days the end product was pretty weak, but at least the lights were on and the door unlocked.  All y’all are the reason I do it, to keep this unique thing that Bob built alive.  Thanks for sticking around and making this place somewhere I enjoy spending my time.  And thank you Barbara for letting us, and Rick for making it all work.  We’ve got a rocky road ahead, but we’re all better prepared for it than we were, and we will get through it.

n

 

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Wed. Jan. 19, 2022 – coming up on an unhappy anniversary…

Cool but not cold? Still probably damp, and we might be on the edge of some rain… but we usually don’t get any when the national forecast shows us on the edge. 63F when I went to bed last night.

Did mostly pickups yesterday. Got cleaning supplies, and stuff for the house. Picked up another portable room A/C. Like heat up north, A/C is a prep for hurricane season down here. Having a couple of extras can be a good thing both for redundancy and for helping out a neighbor. Meatspace, remember? And they are MUCH cheaper in the middle of winter than in the middle of summer. Funny that the same can be said for Mr Heater propane heaters, only with the seasons reversed.

Good advice to buy at a discount in the off season. Works for a lot of things that will last. Fruit, not so much. Knowing what to buy and when can really save some money. Google the best time to buy appliances, etc. and if you have flexibility, you can save. That is also kind of the essence of prepping, to have choices and flexibility.

Buying stuff should be on your radar. It might be a while, but we’ll eventually end up like Soviet Russia, where you got in line for whatever was available, and hoped you could trade it for what you needed later. That’s the path anyway. Who knows, something might happen to take us off it, aliens could reveal themselves and hand out matter transformers… but that’s pretty far down my scenario list. (and it would be disruptive as hell anyway)

Take a look at what you didn’t buy this past year, and see if you need to buy it now. How’s the elastic in your underwear holding up? Socks getting thin? Got some spare ‘cheater’ glasses in the drawer? Need some new work boots? Figure it out and get stacking.

nick

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Tues. Jan. 18, 2022 – let’s get this week started…

Cool, windy, clear. 60s? Monday was all those things, getting a bit warmer in the afternoon.

Which mattered not a whit to me, as I was inside all day. Mostly I worked on modeling different remodeling options for this house. There are some that kinda make sense. I’m not sure the “move out for a year while we turn the attic into additional living space” makes sense, but for now, I’m working with it.

Lots of stuff going on in the wide world. Russia, China, and I’m sure someone else are all getting frisky. They see weakness and want to advance their own plans while they can. I think that the ‘someone else’ might be the trigger for whatever comes. Unless it’s just the continued inexorable movement toward war that finally gets there.

Pestilence, famine, war. What does Meatloaf say? “Two outta three ain’t bad.” They ain’t good either.

The need to get ready is always in tension with the inability to ‘time the market’ and be sure of WHEN you need to peak, and the need to live your life KNOWING you won’t get the timing right. Tomorrow is pretty much like today, and yesterday, most of the time, and until it isn’t. Then it’s pretty different in some really important ways, but some things will remain.

You will need to eat, drink, and keep yourself healthy. You will need to defend yourself and your stuff, probably more actively than you do now. You will still need to raise your kids, care for family members, and make a future for yourself and them. You will need to participate in whatever economy and society there is. You will probably need to do things you wouldn’t normally do. You will need to recognize when the old rules stop applying, but remember that eventually they will apply again.

One year? Two years? Five years, or ten. I don’t know, but the world will be a very different place, and not at all like yesterday, after one of those.

Stack it up. For (x+1) values of x.

n

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