For those times when ‘my house’ needs to become ‘Pavlov’s house’
Trends in contemporary home makeovers
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Author Archives: Commander Zero
Guns? Sure. But food…ah, thats another story
Re-organizing my stuff, especially the long-term food, has me musing about the classic have vs. have-not conflict that we will see when the wheels fly off society…and that, to some degree, we are seeing now.
The apocalypse is going to come in several different flavors…civil war/disturbance, economic depression, huge natural disaster, pandemic, stray nukes…and it will, no doubt, at some point require that you be ready to maintain the safety and security of your loved ones and your home. But you know what happens far more often than the need to point a gun at someone? The need to eat.
I’m an old-school survivalist – being armed is right up there at the top of the list of things to be ready for. But I also have dang near thirtyfive years of being that old school survivalist behind me. In all that time, I have needed to eat far more times than I’ve needed to point a gun at someone. Not saying it wont happen…simply saying that, statistically, youll be more likely to be patting yourself on the back over your food stash than your gun and ammo stash.
In addition to keeping you from, y’know, dying, food has an excellent moral and motivational (Motivatory? Motivary?) effect – as the graphic on the MRE entree says: food is a force multiplier. Well-fed people are going to perform better than starving people. And starving people are desperate people who do desperate things..and doing desperate things is a great way to become someone who doesn’t need food at all…forever. So dont be a starving person who takes crazy risks out of desperation, and don’t be around starving people who are unpredictable and dangerous.
Having that resource of food also makes you a target. Truly desperate people…people who are cold, who are hungry, who are hopeless, who are watching their loved ones miss meals…are dangerous and unpredictable. Don’t be one of them and don’t let them know you’re there.
Right now we live in a world where people will literally kill you because they want your sneakers, think you cut them off in traffic, or simply want your cellphone. And thats in a world with 911, electricity, cops, and a somewhat-functioning society. Now imagine what it’ll be like when the only mechanism to keep the foot on the brake pedal of social chaos is whatever you’ve got in your holster or slung over your shoulder.
In a situation like that the person who can sit at home, safe and secure, and not have to venture out into the chaos looking for food and supplies has a tremendous advantage. Exponentially so if he’s there with his equally well-fed and well-armed family and friends.
It used to be that people first getting into preparedness/survivalism started off with a wild binge of gun and ammo buying, and everything that came after was done with far less rigor and enthusiasm. I have encountered quite a few people who had guns and ammo aplenty but put virtually no thought into food. A bunch of 2-liter pop bottles filled with rice and beans is better than starving…I guess. But you really should aspire for better than that.
And for the love of Crom, stock up on ‘regular’ food….the canned fruits, the jarred sauces and soups, the bags of pasta and rice, etc, etc. Expensive freeze drieds are awesome but when I suffer a small-scale EOTWAWKI like a job loss or 48-hour power failure, I’m going to be really reluctant to break into the $30 can of Mountain House Chicken and Rice and more likely to grab a $2 jar of spaghetti sauce and a $3 bag of pasta off the shelf.
Guns and radios and fuel and all the other sexy stuff is important, no doubt, but water and food are always going to get more use and demand than pretty much anything else you can store. It’s absolutely worth thinking about what youre stocking up on, how much of it you’re putting away, and how youre going to use it. Certainly thats where my mind is these days.
Diversification – a diversity plan I can support
Ugh…the market is tanking like a Kamala Harris campaign. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, I’m taking about half my dividends and putting them somewhere else other than re-investing them for the foreseeable future. (In times like this when the market is down, it also means that stocks are on sale.) My original plan was to pick up a few tubes of silver rounds. That was the plan. The reality changed when, out of the blue, my buddy at the coin shop texted….
So, when my buddy at the gold shop sent me a text asking if I wanted some Swiss 20-francs at spot, I said …yes.
Can’t eat it, can’t shoot it, can’t burn it as fuel…but it seems to do a fabulous job as money, even if no one knows why.
Missed it by THIS much
I was thiiiiiiiiiis close. And someone snaked it out from under me about a half hour before I called the gun shop to say “Hey, do you still have this?”. What was it? Why, a 4″ Ruger GP-100 .357.
What is so special about that, you might ask? After all, aren’t there scads of 4″ GP-100s out there? Well, yes but…
I have long thought that an ideal ‘combat’ revolver, if a revolver can be said to be ideal for the rough and tumble of irregular warfare, would be a sturdy fixed-sight, full-underlug, stainless .357 Magnum. It would have no adjustable sights to get damaged, have a full lug to protect the ejector rod and give some weight at the front, be in everything-resistant stainless steel, be built on a large enough frame to handle a steady diet of .357 but not too heavy to inhibit fast handling, be in the powerful and versatile .357 and still have the option to be fed with .38’s if thats all that was available. The only major manufacturer who made something like that was Smith and Wesson with their 681 series of revolvers built on their L-frame*. An excellent gun it has been out of manufacturer since the 90’s. Ruger, though, once in a while, drops a fixed-sight variant of their GP-100 and thats what your buddy Zero is looking for. The 3″ variants are easy enough to find, and there are some 4″ DAO re-imports that century brought in a while back, but the full-lug versions are scarce.
One of my ‘Grail guns’. Still looking.
I came across an auction last week for a half-lug version and I’d take that over nothing. But…I missed the auction deadline and the store that had it for auction sold it shortly before I called. Dang it.
I would much rather run through the apocalypse with a Glock or HiPower, but if I were to carry a revolver, and I were expecting trouble from things that had language skills, this guy would be a top contender.
*= Yes, Smith ran of some oddball, very-limited-run .357’s with fixed sights on their N frame. (Most notably, the 520.) But the numbers are small enough that they may as well be non-existent. Also, the 520 was blued. There was, I think, a fixed sight variant of the 627 out there but N-frame is bigger than the handier L-frame and I don’t believe it had the full underlug.
The Gun-A-Month program
In an effort to dial back my insane gun buying addiction, I am trying to limit myself to one gun a month. I was actually doing pretty well this month until I made he mistake of walking into a local shop and looking at their suppressor display case. Sitting in it was a lonely stripped Anderson (Poverty Pony! Thrift Thoroughbred! Frugal Filly!) lower that had been SBR’d.
Hmmm….
I have a JAKL ‘pistol’ that really needs a genuine stock and not some sort of ‘wrist brace’ aberration. Since the JAKL uses bog-standard AR lowers (with the exception of a slightly modified bolt release) I can finish the lower, put a Midwest Industries folding AR-180 stock, and drop the JAKL pistol upper on it and make myself a nice compact .223.
Or I can just build up the lower with an AR parts kit, and go find ‘pistol’ AR upper.
So, technically, this counts as my gun for March…which may not have been a great purchase because there is a gun on Gunbroker I’m probably going to buy that is a rare version of something I’ve been looking for for a couple years now. Im not gonna spoil the ending, but I’ll tell you about it when the auction is over.
Link – Duck and Cover
Friend Of The Blog (TM), Tam, over at View From The Porch, has a post up noting that today is the anniversary of the much maligned “Duck And Cover” program from those crazy days of the Atomic/Cold War age.
When I was a kid in grade school we had two kinds of drills – fire drills and shelter drills. Any idiot knows what a fire drill is for, but as a kid it never occurred to me to ask what a shelter drill was for. All I knew is that we pulled the blinds in the classroom, filed into the hallways, and sat along the interior hallways with our backs to the wall. It never occurred to me that this was some sort of program to protect ourselves in case of nuclear attack. Same way it never occurred to me what those pink and blue ‘occupancy certificates’ in each classroom with the CD logo were about.
As the years rolled by, the nattering nabobs of negativism loudly proclaimed that anyone even remotely thinking a nuclear attack was survivable was some sort of stooge or idiot. There will be no survivors, they proclaimed. Never mind that there were quite a few survivors at both cities that were nuked last time someone opened up a can of sunshine. In fact, there were a couple folks who rolled snake eyes twice and got bombed at Hiroshima, transported to Nagasaki for medical treatment, and got nuked again. And lived.
Part of this mindset, I think, comes from the semantic problem of people conflating a fallout shelter and a blast shelter. Would the crowded citydwellers be safe from the devastation of their cities by cowering in the basement of the local fallout shelter? Maybe. Maybe not. But then again, a fallout shelter is for sheltering from…fallout. Whereas a blast or bomb shelter is to protect you from……
If youre sitting at ground zero when someone airbursts a new sun over your head, yeah, its not looking good…although, again, people have survived that. But if you survive the blast, which is likelier the further you are from the center of it, then something like a fallout shelter does make a difference. Which means it in, in fact, survivable.
However, the Soviet-backed and -funded ‘nuclear disarmament’ groups, who interestingly never seemed to bother the Soviets too much about disarming, were quick to hammer home the idea that there simply was no surviving a nuclear exchange and we should pack up those Minuteman silos and trust that the nobler heads will refrain from pushing any buttons.
Dude, I live about three hours from a bed of nuclear missile silos. I have zero interest in being around when an old SS-18 with out-of-date targeting data lands in Great Falls and sends a cloud of debris in my direction. But…I also know its not an ‘On The Beach’ scenario where all you can do is wait for the sunrise and your horrible death.
The ‘Duck And Cover’ drills are laughable in some ways, but in others they were a good idea. They kept people aware of the risks and problems of the Cold War, and certainly lent an air of credibility and purpose to the various local Civil Defense programs and organizations.
Nuclear war is no walk through a meadow…..understatement of the year, there. But it isn’t necessarily the death knell for the entire planet either. No more than Dresden or Hiroshima was.
Video – The Weird History of Milk
This rolled across my feed this morning, which is rather serendipitous. As I mentioned, there’s some evolutionary/maturity reasoning behind why we drink cow milk and why many of us can’t.
Its an interesting history and, like the history of many foods, has a lot more depth and complexity than you might think.
Nonetheless, I’m still not a fan of milk although I have a slightly better understanding now of why humans consume it.
Shelf-stable at CostCo
Was up at CostCo the other day and saw this:
This is simply tetra-packed UHT milk. And…you can find UHT milk in the cooler at pretty much any supermarket. So, really, this isn’t necessarily a real find.
I have a love-hate relationship with milk – I hate it and love drinking anything else. Also, there are some questions I have about drinking cow milk. First off, I’m a human, not a cow. Would it not make more sense for me to drink the milk of my own species, which is by its nature, specifically designed for my particular organic makeup? And even then, once humans get past a certain age, milk doesnt provide the same benefits than what it provides when the human is newly minted and still developing. In short, I’m not a cow…how is drinking cow milk a good idea?
However….nothing is better on a bowl of cornflakes. Problem is, if I open a quart of milk there is no way I wind up using it all up before it goes bad. So, for me, the small bottles of UHT milk that last about six months in the fridge, unopened, make more sense.
Anyway, if you hate running out of milk, this is a possible way around that…buy a case, stick it in the fridge (or on a shelf) and youre covered. But…you could also just stroll down to WinCo, find the smaller bottles of UHT milk, stuff ’em in the back of your fridge, and have the same result as this stuff at CostCo.
But, still, its nice to see at CostCo.
Time flies
Canned roast beef from 2014
On todays episode of ‘Will It Digest’ – an 11-year-old can of Kirkland Beef.
Not gonna lie, I was actually thinking of just dropping these at an animal shelter or homeless shelter (surprisingly interchangeable) and replacing it with some more recent stuff. But…this is a good chance for a little empirical data gathering, don’t you think?
I should have taken the pic before I opened the can. Didn’t plan ahead.
As always, it smelled exactly the way canned meat always smells – like cat food. Its hideous. But even recently made stuff smells like that. It’s just the nature of canned meats. As usual, once you put the heat to the meat the smell is replaced with a more appetizing smell. Figured I’d do a Green Pepper Beef sorta rice bowl. If youre curious: 1tbsp of hosin sauce and oyster sauce, 2 tbsp garlic, 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/2 cup chicken stock, pinch of sugar, some red pepper flakes, sliced up pepper, sliced up onion. And make up some rice while youre at it.’
How was it? Delicious. I guess I’ll have a more definitive answer in about eight hours, but it seems just fine. I’m not surprised, most canned food will last a bloody long time. As long as the cans retain their integrity, and are stored in the classic ‘cool dry place’, they’ll last for decades. There are some caveats to that of course….highly acidic foods (tomatoes, pineapples, etc) will not last near that long, regardless of how well you store the cans. But low-acid stuff (which is what meat is) will keep quite a while.
I was reminded how darn good that Kirkland roast beef is last night. It really is an unsung hero of the long-term pantry. And, as shown above, a handy item for making a quick and hearty meal.
While I’m on the subject, a good question would be “Have I ever actually had any problems with canned food?” Actually, yes. I learned the hard way a long time ago that canned tomato products were best used up within a couple years and not much longer than that.
I had a can of enchilada sauce that, when I opened the can, was filled with nothing but water. Also had several cans of roasted red peppers start bulging in a disturbing manner. Those last two were from non-USA sources. I try to stick exclusively to US made/packaged foods when possible. Maybe the canned corned beef from Argentina is tasty but I trust the US food environment far more than I do something in South America….Upton Sinclair not withstanding.
