Monthly Archives: October 2018

Halloween

Posted on by

Living in a college town during Halloween means you get to sample heavily the best part about Halloween: college girls in slutty costumes. Naughty nurse, wicked catwoman, adulterous county attorney, hot teacher, etc. I don’t know why these chicks feel like they can’t dress like that the rest of the year. Who’d complain? Not me.

But, over at the post office, where they have to keep a modicum of decency, there’s a guy who, every year, goes the step further to really put in some effort at his costumes. This year? ’70s Disco Man:To be frank, could be Disco Man, could be John Holmes…..tough to tell without getting a lot closer than i care to. But, I salute the effort. The interesting part? He already had all these clothes. Thats the really scary part.

I don’t have the foresight to plan ahead for a good costume, but perhaps one of the years…. For now, when people ask where my costume is, I give them that famous reply from Wednesday Addams:

TacTool

Posted on by

One of the things in the Bag Of Tricks? This monster:

It’s really just a sharpened crowbar with a handle. I have it expressly for the purpose of cutting, chipping, prying, hacking, hammering my way out of or through whatever is between me and safety. Prying open doors, busting windows out of frames, hinge pins out of doors, and all that sort of thing. I have a more ‘regular’ knife or two in my bag as well, but this is the big kahuna for when something needs to be destroyed.

It’s made by Becker Knife & Tool which is now a part of Ka-Bar. Made in the USA although the sheath is made overseas. I’ve been a fan of he BK&T products for years…they have a brute ruggedness that meshes nicely with my ideas about the qualities I look for in just-in-case-the-world-ends gear. Not cheap, and you could probably get similar results with something cheaper… but I like BK&T and I don’t mind paying a bit extra for something that I might someday need in a very, very bad way.

This thing sits in its scabbard at the bottom of my bag, and it’s my first choice for deconstruction of my surroundings. Of course, it also can cut things but it’s main function, as I said, is for breaking things. Never know when you’re going to need to break down a door or window for a quick getaway, y’know?

Article – Suspicious packages spotlight vast postal surveillance system

Posted on by

The U.S. Postal Service regularly photographs the front and back of every piece of U.S. mail, or about 150 billion parcels, envelopes, and postcards every year. A longstanding practice known as the “mail cover” program enables law enforcement to obtain address information and images of the outsides of mail as part of an investigation without the need for a warrant through the Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Postal Service’s policing arm.

Kinda makes you all warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? They may(!) not be reading your mail, but they’re logging where it came from and where it went.

These clowns can scan over a billion packages a year but they can’t get my Priority Mail packages across town in three days. :::eyeroll:::

Whats really annoying is that The Powers That Be will point to the recent bombing suspect’s arrest and use that to validate what is, to any reasonable standard, a rather intrusive policy that  kicks the spirit of the right to privacy right in the sac.

The dream is always the same

Posted on by

Pizza before bed. What was I thinking?

In the dream I was away from my house, and trying to get back to it. For some reason I didn’t have my vehicle and, for an equally unexplained reason, my Bag O’ Tricks was in that missing vehicle. So..there I am…trying to walk back to my house which, in this dream, is a good distance away and requires me to walk through a city.

In the dream, people are kicking in doors to other peoples houses to steal food, nowhere is safe, and there’s a general feeling of ‘every man for himself’. There’s one particularly nailbiting scene where I have to traverse a tunnel under a river as people drive through it at hellish speed, hauling trailers of belongings, and swerving all over the place.

The whole time I’m thinking that if I can get back to the house I’ll have everything I need. But…I have to get there first. I also recall thinking “why didnt I hide a gun and ammo somewhere out here?”

I finally get to a roadblock manned by someone I know. They let me pass, and then I wake up.

This is the first dream like this I’ve had in a while. But, it follows the trend of how these things usually go. I’m not inclined to believe that dreams are prescient , but I do believe that our unconscious mind can observe details in our day-to-day that our conscious mind doesn’t pick up and puts them together….thus giving us that ‘funny feeling’ we have about something.

So, first thing, I need to go through my Bag Of Tricks and make sure everything is cool. It would be a bit of a stretch to call it a GHB or something equally corny. It’s basically just a buncha gear that would come in handy in pretty much any unpleasant circumstance….everything from zip ties and batteries to multitool and Glock. It’s just something to tilt the odds back in my favor a little bit. But, it has come in handy a time or two.

No idea what the particular apocalypse was that kicked off the dream…there was one scene where a local power plant exploded in a cloud of black smoke and dust so I’m guessing it was something a little man-made but , really, it doesn’t matter.

Whats interesting is that, being a dream, the same emotions are instilled in you because you think whats happening is real. (Dreams are, after all, the first virtual reality environment ever made.) So if you wonder what that frantic, panicked feeling as you realize its The End will feel like…well, there you go.

I dont regret these kinds of dreams, they usually serve as a swift kick in the khakis to get me off my butt on preparedness things I may have been putting off. In fact, that may be why I had the dream…my subconscious may have been worrying about my lack of activity in that regard.

Any moral of the story for me to be aware of? Hmm..probably that if I think my Bag Of Tricks is useful enough to keep nearby it’s probably useful enough to clone and keep at an offsite location on one of my major travel pathways. I’ll have to think about that, but that really just falls into what another blogger would call ‘an operational cache’… which might be worth thinking about.

Also, no pizza after 9pm.

Complacency and motivation

Posted on by

I’ve mentioned it before, but, man, that complacency thing….it’s tough to get past sometimes. You let your foot off the gas, you feel less of a sense of urgency, and then -wham- something happens that makes you wish you had stuck with things.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve sort of shifted my preparedness efforts towards getting the finances squared away now that 90% of everything else is within an acceptable level of readiness. But that financial stuff…thats the hardest to keep on track with. I mean, when you’re working on your food storage you can see those shelves getting fuller and fuller, you can see the gun safe getting fuller and fuller, that sort of thing. But getting your financial preparedness taken care of? Numbers on paper. You don’t really feel it because there’s no real visual metric other than numbers on a statement.

Of course, just because you don’t feel your financial preps getting squared away like you do your physical ones…well…thats no excuse no to do it, right?

My motivation has been focusing on the opportunities that will be afforded to me once I get things like the house paid off. Thats a rather large chunk of money every month that can now go to…whatever I want it to. Silver? Gold? Ammo? Roth? Vehicle? Land? Savings? Six hours with Jennifer Lawrence?  Anything I want. But…to do that, I gotta get these stupid financial obligations taken care of.

The unsexy parts of survivalism suck, but they tend to be the most practical ones, it seems.

Hunting

Posted on by

Hunting season opens this weekend. I just don’t have the time or resources to go. As much as I would love to spend the day tromping around in the woods, the practical side of me knows, with utter certainty, that the opportunity cost and the expenses involved make just going to Diamond Bar Meats and buying half a steer a much more economic option.

But, honestly, I don’t hunt for the meat… I hunt because I like the experience. The meat is just the bonus part. Its been a long time since I needed to hunt. I suppose I could say one of the reasons my basement looks like a Walmart grocery center is so that I don’t have to worry about hunting.

Still, I do miss the experience but I have to be practical – there are things to do and as a grownup you sometimes have to do the unfun things.

But, for those of you going out this weekend, I wish you luck! Tell Bambi I said hi!

 

Today

Posted on by

So Trump was in town today. He pointedly did not invite any Democrat politicians, which I thought was a nice touch, and he had nice things to say about Gianforte roughing up a reporter. Sounds like a good time. There was the usual protesting from the college lefties…I guess they were protesting lower taxes, high employment numbers, or something….

Anyway, I listened to the police scanner off and on throughout the day and it was, to my surprise, far less disruptive than I was expecting. Which is good. The last thing I want is to have to sit in traffic because some road-blocking patchouli-scented waste of skin thinks his right to protest somehow includes the right to inhibit my ability to travel freely.

In other news, it was a great day for it…… the weather was absolutely beautiful. Cold nights, warm days….nice fall weather. Gotta enjoy it while it lasts because, y’know, winter is coming.

Adventures in food storage

Posted on by

Todays “Lets See What Happens” episode is a six year old can of corned beef hash. Nominal ‘best by’ date was three years ago. So….how is it?

Fine. Of course.

Properly canned food lasts pretty much indefinitely. This can features the pre-scored ‘pop top’ feature that don’t really like in canned goods. If you drop the can or pressure is applied against the pre-scored region the can will fail more often than if it were not pre-scored. But, unfortauntely, these small single-serve cans were not available without the pop-top features. But…they held up just fine.

Storage conditions? Just sitting in the back of my kitchen cabinet for six years. Nothing special.

And that’s sort of the point. While I fully appreciate the nitrogen sealed, ceramic lined #10 cans filled with freeeze dried meats that will last longer than I will…..I also appreciate that modern food canning processes, by first world companies, do an awesome job of creating a product that will last a long time. Sometimes there is a need for a $40 can of freeze-dried pork chops, but sometimes you’ll get along just fine with a case of Kirkland canned pulled pork. It just depends on a few other things like if you plan to transport it, what the storage conditions will be, etc. I love me some long-term food but, really, you can put together a very reasonably long-term food supply without breaking the bank on ‘survival food’.

I bet the folks in whats left of Florida would be happy to have some hash and eggs for breakfast after a long evening of clearing debris and unblocking roads. A case of this stuff, a #10 can of powdered eggs, a case of instant oatmeal, a case of fruit cocktail cups, a jar of Tang, instant coffee, some hash browns, and you’ve pretty much got a breakfast that’ll last five-ten years.

As I’ve mentioned, around this house the food storage paradigm is short-, mid-, and long-term storage. This stuff counts as ‘mid-term’ storage….it’ll be good for more than a year or two but probably not out at the twenty year mark. I wish I had written the price down, I’d be curious to see where the price went.

Minor ramblings

Posted on by

A couple weeks back, my local Albertsons had a sale on pasta and, in the typical fashion, I picked up a small quantity. Yesterday was the day to pick up a commensurate amount of jarred pasta sauce. While I was at it, I stopped off at the restaurant supply store and picked up a couple 5# ‘logs’ of Italian sausage. With nothing better to do, I made up a huge batch of spaghetti sauce with sausage, distributed it into styrofoam containers, and loaded up the freezer.

The apocalypse may come, the economy may sour, the world may burn, but Crom as my witness there will always be a baked ziti in this house.
=======================

After a somewhat successful 12-year run, my beloved mountain bike tried to kill me the other day. I was pedaling furiously to get to an exam and -bam- one of the welds on the frame came apart like a Clinton alibi. Broke a toe, maybe two, in the process. So, I’m now having to shop for another mountain bike. Given that winter is going to be here in short order, it probably makes more sense to wait until spring to buy one rather than tie up that money now. From a survivalist standpoint, though, a good mountain bike really should be on the list of ‘must haves’.
========================

Fall is definitely here in Montana….65-70 degree days and nights in the low 30’s. Thats how we roll here in the climatic lab experiment that is the great state of Montana. Fall is my favorite season…you go outside and theres that smell in the air that activates some part of the brain that says ‘get your crap together….the cold and dark is coming.’ Of course, there’s also the impetus of hunting season.
=========================

And, finally, elections are just a  few weeks away. In typical fashion, Montana politics boils down to where someone is from. Not the issues, not the promises, nothing of real substance….the deciding issue is usually ‘were they born in Montana’. A sad way to decide your vote considering that some of the lefty-ist idiots to run for office are homegrown. Heck we even have a Californian, educated at Berkely, who is running with a pledge to ‘do something’ about assault weapons ‘for the children’, and she’s trying to run as a “Pro 2nd Amendment” candidate..complete with the usual picture-with-a-shotgun-and0orange-vest. Somehow, in the minds of these leftists, hunting somehow has something to do with the second amendment. Go figure.

Choate Mini-14 stock

Posted on by

As you may recall, I picked up a Mini-14GB last month. Fine gun, nothing wrong with it. (The magazine was a different issue.) But…that wooden stock…..

An email to the fine like-minded individuals at Choate for a replacement stock revealed that not only did they have the stock I wanted, it was available in something other than the ubiquitous black – a nice shade of green. Yes please! Arrived today. Thus:For my anticipated needs, I really like rifle furniture that is something other than black. Black just jumps out at you since large pitch black objects are not something you normally see everyday and when you do, well, isn’t your attention drawn to them? This is the reason I went with the green laminate on my Scout rifle and the green laminate on my .22….. I think they blend in with my environment much better than black.

Why get rid of the wood stock? Well, Im not getting rid of it as such…I’ll keep it for some tinkering projects, but if the time comes when leaving the house every morning includes throwing a rifle into the back of the vehicle or slinging it into a scabbard on a motorcycle, getting rained on, dropped, banged around, and generally abused….well, the Choate products are, literally, pretty tough to beat.

The stock itself is deliciously rugged, it took all of a couple minutes to transfer the hardware from the wooden stock to the Choate stock, nothing needed fitting, and although I havent checked it yet, I think it might be a tad lighter.

When I buy gear for the sake of increasing my odds of survival and comfort in the uncertain future, one of the rubrics is durability and survivability – in short, I need things that can withstand abuse or neglect and still perform all or some their function. This is why I’m a huge fan of the Choate replacement stocks for my shotguns. A Mossberg 500 that was buried in mud after Katrina will probably be rusted and need a couple parts replaced, but you could hose off that Choate forend and stock and you’d never know they spent a month under a mountain of wet sewage and sludge. Thats the sort of property that I want my gear to have… I try to take care of my gear, I try not to abuse it, but if the time comes where I have to neglect it and let the chips fall where they may..well..it’s nice to know they’ll hold up juuuuuuuust fine.

Other than a couple factory mags, this concludes my financial expenditures into this gun. I have enough ARs and PTR’s that it would be a strange circumstance indeed that this gun becomes my go-to carbine. But…it is an uncertain world, after all.