Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

As I mentioned, one of our local sporting goods stores is shuttering up after several decades in the biz. Soooooo….I went and looked for bargains.

Platypus 1.0 liter bottle – Was $7, marked down to $3.50…bought all they had
Platypus Big Zip SL – Was $25, marked down to $12.50…bought four
Platypus Hoser 1.0L – Was $16, marked down to $8…got a half dozen

I have a few Camelbaks and use them often when out in the boonies, but they arent cheap. When I was up in Alaska a couple years ago one of the guides at the glacier had the 1.0L bottle and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. You couuld squeeze out the air so it wouldnt slosh and make noise, and when it was empty you could roll it up to fit in a pocket of your bag. I immediately purchased one, tried it out, read the reviews, and became convinced this seemed like a good product. So, when its on sale at 50% off wouldnt you buy a bunch too? Priced cheaply enough that they’d be excellent candidates for secondary-location caches and everyday usage.

I’ll probably pick up a few extras to hand out as gifts this year. At that price I could probably afford to do some destructive testing but I’m already pretty convinced theyre what Im looking for. For now, I’ll inspect them, repack them, and tuck them away in the bunker. I do believe I am utterly finished with anything having to do with personal hydration….I’ve got a couple dozen surplus Swiss water bottles with NBC adapters, CamelBaks, Nalgene bottles and now these. Yeah, I’m done.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Feb. 13, 2009 is the post where I listed some of the Glock parts I ordered for spares, if anyone is interested.

As I said, the two parts Ive personally seen are the recoil spring assembly and the trigger return spring. So, naturally, I have a half dozen of each,

I’d get spares of every spring, every part small enough to be lost, a couple extra sights, and maybe one barrel and extractor for every two or three guns. Those last two parts will be the most expensive.

In addition to the parts, buy the book. The Complete Glock Reference Guide is the best book I’ve seen. The amusing, but unecessary, torture tests at the back of the book are worth the price of admission.

For our needs, we shoot the 9mm Glocks and all three sizes (full, compact and mini) take, mostly, the same parts. Some parts do interchange between the carious calibers but when you do that youre looking at two different size frames (9/40 and 10/45) which will have many parts that wont swap between large-frame and small-frame.

I appreciate people asking my opinion on the spare parts but I cant really give a detailed list because no one is going to agree with it….its sort of a personal thing. But, as I said, I went with a an extra of every spring, recoil assemblies, extra sights, mag release, a couple slide releases and that sort of thing. Contact the guys at Lone Wolf and get their opinion, they probably have more experience on this topic than a lot of people.

So youre in the kitchen, minding your own business, and a couple of ‘yutes’ sneak into your yard and try to break into your shed. You yell at them and wave your kitchen knife at them. No big deal, right? Ah, but when the cops show up they admonish you and tell you that youve no right to do such things even in your own home. Amazing, innit? Fortunately there are at least some folks who think that, darn it, maybe being able to smack a burglar with a baseball bat isnt a bad thing after all.

At issue is the notion of ‘proportionate’ versus ‘disproportionate’ response to the threat.
:::sigh:::
Self-defense and protection of property isnt a sporting event where you want a level playing field for the sake of a fine, challenging contest. When someone kicks in the door at 3am I want all the disproportionate force available to me that the law allows, which in the case of this household stops just short of crew-served weapons.

Now, Im of the mind that someone running down the street with my computer doesnt deserve to get shot in the back. Thats just not worth a human life to me, no matter how much an utter waste of skin the bad guy in question might be. But, the minute I reasonably believe theres bodily harm headed in my direction, all bets are off. The distinction?
Come home and see guy jump out window and run down street with laptop = don’t shoot.
Enter home and bad guy jumps out, brandishes knife and says “Gimme the goods or else” = bullet party.

The notion, however, that even in your own home you can’t rough up a bad guy is just contrary to everything I believe in. I mean, its your home for crying out loud. If I find someone I don’t know in my house and I have no good reason to think theyre supposed to be there its absolutely time for difficult questions, commanding voice, and the words “…where I can see them!”.

( I recall the time I came home, found a fella standing in my living room who said he was the electrician and my girlfriend was nowhere in sight. I told him I hoped for all our sakes he could tell me the difference between an amp and a volt. And, yeah, he was legit.)
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The local PD is having a Glock armorers course and, oddly, it has been made available to the non-cops. No idea why. If I had to guess, Id say that there was a requirement for ‘x’ amount of paying students and the number of cops going was short that. But that’s just a guess. Regardless, I need to investigate this and see if it’s something I can go to. Quite honestly, if you get The Complete Glock Reference Guide I suspect you will be just about as qualified as if you took any course…the book is that good. However, the guys who do this for a living may have some tricks up their sleeves and I’m always up for learning new tricks. Additionally, it may provide a tangible credential tha can come in handy at a later date.

The Glocks, in my experience, are just about the easiest things in the world to maintain and repair. Really, you don’t even repair them..you just swap parts. I haven’t encountered anything that required fitting and most parts are $5 or less. No barrel links to polish, no lugs to mate, no bushings to hone, no parts to stake…just get your part and swap-n-drop. While the Glocks are stone cold reliable out of the box I have encountered (very, very rarely) broken parts. In those experiences, though, the parts breakage was such that the gun would still function. A very extensive spare parts kit for the Glock can be put together for less than $150.

I like to think I know my way around the guts of a Glock pretty well. (And truth be told, there aint that much guts to wade through…it has a lot less parts than most other pistols.) However, you don’t know how much you don’t know until you take a course. Be nice if they had an AR armorers course as well.
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A longtime local sporting goods store is calling it quits after around 45 years. Theyre having a big sale and everything has gotta go. This place was easily the most expensive place in town so knocking 20% off everything takes the prices to what everyone else normally charges. However, there are a few things that aren’t priced outrageously. I’m picking up some Lodge cast iron cookware (I am developing a new respect for cast iron, although I like the LeCreuset stuff better but, good grief, the prices) and some Platypus accessories to go with the Platypus water carriers I’ve come to like. Also, they carry all the spare parts for Coleman lanterns and stoves so I’ll pick up some extra mantles, generators, etc, etc.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere and I think it is that although the economy is cutting down businesses with a broad swath, there is opportunity in there as well. Im sure I don’t need to tell you that the circle of life involves a lot of death and as long as that death isn’t your own…..

In short, now is a good time to get thingsyouve been wanting at bargain prices if you can find a seller who is closing up. On first blush, it smacks of opportunism or even grave-robbing but it isn’t. Fortunately for me, I didn’t particularly like the business in question or its owner so even if I normally would have felt weird taking advantage of this sale, I’m not.
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I don’t know if I mentioned it, but the missus was kind enough to download season 1 of ‘Jericho’ for me and I have it on the computer at the shop. (Season one just barely fits onto a USB drive.) So, when its quiet and I feel like a little entertainment I wind up watching a few favorite episodes. Kind of a shame they cancelled the show, I think it had promise after the first season. The rushed second season was obviously written the way it was to wrap up everything in a short time span…if they knew they were going to have a full second (and even third) season I think they would have done things quite differently. A lot of folks whined about it being unrealistic but why is that a surprise? It’s a tv show…it has to appeal to an audience or no one is going to watch it and sponsors won’t pony up towards it. So, yeah, youre not gonna see cholera, dysentery, gang rapes, rickets, starving children, people eating dogs, radiation induced diarrhea, gangrenous stumps, rats chewing on corpses, and the other scenarios that one might expect after a solid nuking.

But, still, I enjoyed watching the show and am sorry it got such short shrift.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

This week shall be the big purchase of chicken from CostCo. I was going through the deepfreeze and although theres still plenty of meat in there, it’s a little light on chicken and, well, me likes my chicken. So, I’ll head up to CostCo and get a case. For my needs, chicken is pretty much the most versatile meat..I make rice and chicken, broiled chicken, fried chicken, chicken parmesan, chicken soup, chicken with ginger, etc, etc. Plus, and this makes no sense, I think Im going to feel much more at ease when I see the freezer stocked up. Go figure.
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Speaking of chicken, I need to cook up a huge pot of the wife’s favorite soup. I could freeze the soup and store it that way but I like the satisfaction (and practice) of using the pressure canner. Its nice to think that I can take food that I prepare, can it, and it can sit quietly on a shelf for a year and still be good to eat. Freezing the soup really does make more sense from a labor standpoint, but it does, naturally, mean in case of power failure we’re going to have problems.

If you haven’t tried home canning, I do recommend it. It’s a useful skill and , assuming you follow directions, pretty safe. I’ve made several posts in the past on this subject, with recommendations on books and equipment. If yore interested you might want to read the older posts.

While we’re on the subject of food, I am still not quite 100% where I want to be on the stuff I’ve picked up from thos fun-lovin’ Mormons at the cannery. See, the boxes hold six cans per box so ideally I want a quantity of item that is divisible by six…that way every box is full of the same item. At the moment, I have some odd numbers that I need to add to in order to make a complete box. So, I need to head out there and see if I can fill out the gaps in those boxes.

The folks at the cannery also have a portable canner that they loan out. You buy a bunch of #10 cans and lids, fill them with whatever you want, and seal them up with the canner. This is nice because the cannery only lets you can items that they have on premises. If you showed up with, say, a 50# bag of dried corn you couldn’t use their facility to can it. Rules are rules. However, you can buy some cans, lids and take the canner home. I need to investigate that since theres some dried corn, pasta, and other dried goodies that I’d like to have in #10 cans. If youre the sneaky Secret Squirrel type you could also drop a baby Glock, a holster, some ammo and a cleaning kit in one, seal it up, pull the label off a can of tomatoes and make a very convincing and unsuspecting hiding place for your boomtoy.
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Although the book was utterly bleak , depressing and (in my opinion) a bit murky in terms of purpose, I am still looking forward to seeing “The Road”. Problem is, nearest theater showing it is around 150 miles from here. It seems like this movie isn’t getting quite the distribution that Ive come to expect from most movies. Sure, I expect it to be bleak and pointless, like the book, but I’d still like to get to see it. Maybe over the next few weeks it’ll turn up here but if not…well, it wont be long before theres a decent copy to be downloaded, Im sure.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Seems most folks are posting about their New years resolutions. I figure if something is a good enough idea that you want to incorporate it into your life, or come to think that changing some aspect of your life is important, why wait until the begining of the year? Sure, it looks neater on paper but if its really a good idea, just get going with it already.

To stay on topic, if theres anything regarding preparedness that I want to be different in 2010 than 2009 its probably pretty simple stuff..,more time in the boonies, make more money, pick up a few odds and ends. Nothing major. Mostly because Im fairly content with where things are now in terms of our level of preparedness. There’s always room for improvement, sure….but overall I think that if the zombies showed up tomorrow, I would be your king in pretty short order.
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I see the TSA (”Making America safer one stripsearched grandmother at a time”) has gotten their nuts in the wringer again. I hated flying back when this was a free country, I hate it even more now. If it has gotten to the stage that I cant read a book or listen to my iPod while on a flight then I’m pretty much going to give up flying and just drive. At least, until they start the internal passport system.

Folks’ll squawk and there’ll be all sortsa complaints but in the end the ‘if it saves just one life’ crowd will win and we’ll all be flying naked, strapped down and shackled like a planeload of Guantanamo recruits.

The notion of giving up a little essential liberty for temporary safety is truly getting out of hand. It’s a dangerous world out there and I realize that but I’m willing to accept certain risks. I dont want to live in a world made of Nerf and I certainly dont want .gov asking “Your papers, please” in the name of ’safety’. Someone might say “If you had a loved one who died in the 9/11 attacks you would feel different”. Actually, no. I do not have a single friend who would want their deaths to result in the encroaching police state. I can tolerate metal detectors and showing ID at the airport…barely. I’ll go along with that. But if someone passes through a metal detector, an explosives detector, is x-rayed, has his luggage rifled through, and is ‘behaviorally profiled’ and is allowed onto the plane then what the heck difference does it make if he keeps his paperback in his lap during the last hour of the flight? Heck, why wouldnt they just do their dirty deed during the first hour of the flight instead?

I could rant against the TSA for hours, flecks of floam spraying from my mouth, hands clenching and unclenching….real berserker stuff. But what good will that do me? Instead, I choose to just not have anything to do with them. If one walked into my shop and wanted to buy something I’d tell him to leave. He gets a different job where he’s not part of a thuggish .gov agency, he’s welcome to come by. I might call an ambulance if I saw one having a heart attack on the pavement, and I might even help him because, despite his hideous career choice he’s still a human being, but when he gets out of the hospital and asks if he can buy me a beer I’ll tell him that Id rather he rethink his line of work.

Anyway, part of me is slightly pleased to see TSA looking bad these days.
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When its ten degrees out and everything is frozen its an excellent time to order seeds for the spring planting. These are the guys I’ve been ordering from lately: Victory Seeds. I was quite please with the tomato and pepper seeds I got from them and planted last year. This year will be more of the same, although I think Ill start them indoors a little earlier this year.