““The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
That being the case, apparently I am the greater thing. I was supposed to do something important today and..I forgot. And then it was too late. Fortunately I managed to humble myself enough that I was given a reprieve and got it done on the ‘do over’. Moral of the story: you are usually your own worst enemy.
As it turns out, you are also your own worst looter as well. We all have lovely stockpiles of food and supplies, along with a gun or two to protect those hard-earned supplies from the locusts, right? And yet who winds up doing the looting? Yourself, naturally. (Or the folks you share the house with.) You take a few batteries out of storage and never replace them, you pull some MRE’s for a hunting trip and fail to make a note of it, you grab a bottle of mouthwash off the shelf and don’t think to subtract it from your List. Thats how 99% of us get looted without a single disaster being declared.
Self-discipline, obviously, is whats called for. But if you live in a household with other humans, it can also be hard to convince them that, yes, it actually is important that you make a note of something when you take it out of storage.
It seems like no matter how meticulous I am, when I do an inventory there is always something that is off on the count. And I know it’s my own fault…at some point I was in a hurry, grabbed something, and thought “I’ll take care of that later” and later turns into … never.
As 2020 continues it’s donkey punches to our ‘nads, keep in mind that with our increased supplies and the perceived higher risk of needing them, now is not the time to be your own worst looter.
Several weeks back I got an email from a fella asking me if I’d be interested in trying out a sharpening tool he was promoting. I love free stuff, so, ‘Sure!’.
Thus far, my hands down favorite knife sharpener has been from these guys. The one that I highly recommend has been this one. And while it’s been awesome for sharpening my pointy stuff, it doesn’t quite fit in the pouch on my knife sheath.
So, I received this stone and pouch in the mail the other week. It’s a pretty unassuming stone…a ceramic-ish looking stone that is rounded on one edge and beveled to a point on the other. Here’s the website, and there is a video on YouTube to explain it’s use:
Yes, its a pretty DIY video but production values don’t really have much to do with whether information is accurate or useful. It would have been nice to have some good close ups, but you get the gist if you watch it all the way through.
Anyway, I watched the video and decided I’d try it out on one of my hard-used knives…specifically my Glock knife that I use for hunting. Here’s what it looks like these days:
It had a small nick in the edge about 3/4 of the way down the blade and the video said that using the wedge/pointed shape of the stone would take care of that so….off we went. Three strokes each side using medium force, and repeated this a dozen or so times. Then, as the video says, I used the rounded side to sharpen things up. And…it worked. How sharp? Well, there’s always the ‘will it cut paper’ or ‘will it shave the hairs on your arm’ sort of tests which are kinda unquantifiable. Like everyone else, I test the edge with my thumb and pull the blade across my thumbnail. If the edge bites into the thumbnail , I know its really sharp and will cut. My unofficial test is to slice up some cardboard boxes…I try doing that, gauge the effort required, then sharpen and try cutting again. The subjective difference in effort required tells me what I want.
I did find that this stone did not work as effectively on thin, flexible blades. I suspect this is because as you move down the length of the blade, the force you exert cause the blade to bend away from you..throwing off the whole process. So, for a long thin-bladed slicing or fillet knife it might require you to do something to hold the blade in a rigid, unflexing manner. For my Glock knife, which has absolutely zero flex in it, not a problem. For pretty much any knife that isn’t a fillet knife, there shouldn’t be any issues.
Did an outstanding job on my Glock knife, and, interestingly, a prety admirable performance on my good kitchen Henckel knives.
What I’m most interested in is whether the stone would fit in the knife sheath I like to use. (The SpecOps sheath) As it turns out, the stone is about the size of a couple sticks of chewing gum…so not only does it fit in the pouch, you could actually fit more than one in there. So if you have a knife like the USAF ‘survival knife’ or a Randall with those pouches on the sheath, this thing should fit in it just fine.
So, what’s the final word? It seemed to do what was promised and it did something the Worksharp did not do, which is fit into the pouch on the sheath. I think, for me, the greatest use for this is for an in-the-field sharpener. Gut your elk, break a few joints, touch it up on the stone, cut some more, break it up some more, touch it up on the stone…that sort of thing. It also did a really nice job taking a nick out of the blade, which kinda surprised me
Durability? Can’t say. I did drop it once on my kitchen floor and it didnt break or shatte, but that’s strictly anecdotal. However, it’s small size and mass means that it probably would survive being dropped more than a larger, heavier stone would. .
I’d like to get a couple more of these for my other knives and kits. I can see where I might, when at the house, do my sharpening on something larger like a Lansky sharpener system or a series of Smith stones, but as a field sharpener this thing has some nice merit – it works, seems to not require much attention to angles, and fits in a tiny space – all big pluses when you don’t want to carry more weight than you have too.
I don’t remember exactly what the flavor of apocalypse it was, but I had another end of the world dream last night. My own fault…Kung Pao at midnight was pretty much an ‘E’ ticket to this sort of thing.
Then I wake up, read the news, see the media trumpeting an inevitable Biden victory and realize that perhaps it wasn’t so much a dream as it was foreshadowing.
No matter who wins, this election is going to be forever tainted and considered illegitimate by whichever side simply because of the preponderance of mail-in voting. Add in the usual political chicanery of missing ballots, found ballots, absentee ballots, and the classic Chicago-style dead voter ballots, and you get a recipe for an election result that one side is going to decry as obvious Third World style vote rigging.I am also forecasting that, no matter who wins, the stock market will drop like a roller coaster the first week of November. A Trump victory will bring enough chaos and ‘unrest’ that the market will get spooked and drop, and a Biden victory will bring enough fear of economic turmoil that the market will get spooked and drop. I also think that metals will drop alongside the market as people sell their metals to raise cash to either buy into the market at the bottom, to cover calls, or to just ‘get cash’. As all that metal hits the market, the price goes down.We saw this in March.
Right now, I’m trying to wrangle as much cash on hand as possible so that when the market (and PMs) crap the bed I can jump in and buy. If I’m wrong (and I am completely willing to accept that I might be) then all thats happened is I have a buncha cash laying around that I otherwise would have invested a month earlier.But, this is 2020…the year where fortune took off the gloves and started bare-knuckling it. Anything can happen. Fortunately, as a paranoid survivalist, I’ve kinda been preparing for anything.
As I tell my friends, the great thing about being a pessimist is that the worst thing that can happen is that things go just the way you planned for.
Don’t kid yourself….the need has always been there.
When Y2K fizzled into a nothingburger there was speculation that yard sales that spring would be a treasure trove of NIB generators, storage food, etc. Personally, I never saw it (at least not until years later) but it seems likely.
I wonder if in a year or two we’ll see a surge of pumpguns and 9mm pistols on the market as people get rid of that thing they bought in 2020, never used, and ‘just want it out of the house’. Buying opportunities may be coming.
Personally, I’m at the stage where an unfortunate rifle squad that lost their gear in a boating accident could completely re-arm themselves from me.
S&W M&P-15, new in box (And, indeed, the bolt face and inside of the receiver supports that)
Magpul BUIS
360 rounds of assorted ammo..some steel, some brass, some match
(4) 30-rd Pmags and a cute 40-rd Pmag
and…..no paperwork. A free-range AR.
The punchline? $650. In the current market I’m factoring the ammo at $0.40/rd and the mags at $10. So $194 for the accessories That makes my allocated basis for the gun about $450~… but the no paperwork part? That has an intangible value. This ias pretty much the exact sort of deal a paranoid survivalist like myself wants – new guun, reasonable manufacturer, accessories, ammo, decent price, no paper trail. 10/10.
And, since TPIWWP….
Do not be lonely, little AR….your brethren are coming soon……very soon….
About three years ago, I picked up some AGM batteries off Craigslist. My original intent was that I wanted to rewire a common house lamp to use 12v LED lighting. The idea being, naturally, that in a power outage I would have a ‘normal’-looking source of light, rather than the stark and brutal harsh lighting that we get from just standing a battery lantern on top of the refrigerator or something.
First thing was to cut off the existing plug, determine where + and – were (you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right on the first try), and attaching some method of connecting to the battery. Bare wires work, but if you can make things neater, why not?
Next step was the bulb. Here you can see the previous bulb, and the bayonet adapter, that I had used. It worked, yes…but it didn’t put out enough light to seem like the lamp was ‘normal’ in its output. The other bulb is a Made-in-China (just like Covid!) bulb ‘designed’ for low voltage 12v systems. A somewhat more elegant solution than a bayonet adaptor and odd-attachment bulbs. All this required is a) bulb and b) changing the plug on the wire.
I’m sure we’re all pretty smart about these things, but I’ll go ahead and put it out there anyway……
With the crazy demand for guns right now, there are scammers out there taking advantage of it. There was a NIB PTR-91 GI model on ArmsList for $700 this morning. Sure, I’ll do that. Email the guy. Oooops! Turns out that even though his ad says he’s in Montana, and that he won’t ship the gun, he’s actually in OR and will be happy to ship me the gun. All I have to do is PayPal him the money.
:::facepalm:::
So, I copied the image location of the image in his Armslist ad, threw the address into Google image search, and it turned up a hit…for a Gunbroker auction that already had 14 bids on it and closed in a few hours.
I strung this goober along for a little bit and then finally told him I’d pay him an extra $200 for shipping because I was in a hurry. He gave me his (supposed) PayPal address. I emailed PayPal with a copy of the emails and, since using PayPal for firearms transactions is a no-no, maybe they’ll freeze his account. ALthough it’s probably someone elses hacked account.
Anyway, be careful out there guys. Do just a modicum of due diligence or you can get burned in this crazy market.
Don’t kid yourself. There’s violence after every election. Don’t believe me? Go ask a cop what happens at Thanksgiving every four years when someone has had too many beers and starts talking politics.
But it’s a different kind of violence they are suggesting this time around. I suppose that if you live in a place like California, Chicago, NYC, Atlanta, etc, there may be some localized violence but nothing that “sweeps the nation” as “armed militias storm polling places” or anything like that. Loud and obnoxious groups of people screaming at each other, throwing rocks, carrying baseball bats, setting fires, and the like? Probably. In Kansas? No. In Utah? No. In North Dakota? No. In Maine? No. Contrary to what they’d have you believe, when something happens in California and NYC at the same time that does not equate to ‘nationwide’.
I live in a college town..a bastion of liberal Democrats in a state that is otherwise rather Republican…and my ‘upgraded’ plans for being prepared for election day are the same as for any other Tuesday. I lock my doors to my house, I park where the security cameras can record, I carry a pistol in my pocket, and I keep my eyes open. Same as every other day.
I’m not saying there’s not going to be violence after the election. What I’m saying is there isn’t going to be violence after the election that violently affects me. And this notion that we’re going to have an actual armband-wearing, black-flag waving, up-against-the-wall revolution is, in my opinion, pure fantasy. If we have a ‘revolution’ it’ll be an engineered political one rather than a spontaneous shooting one.
So why am I stockpiling ammo, AR’s, food, and that sort of thing? Because you don’t have to have a civil war to have the wheels fly offa civilization. Angry mobs burning down LA or NYC may not constitute a civil war, but it does constitute a giant inconvenient pain in the ass to the people who live there. I live peacefully in flyover country but, as we know, crap rolls downhill, right? Well, it also radiates outward like ripples in a pond. So…I keep the freezer, gas tank, and magazines topped off.
I was looking at the ammo shelf in a local store yesterday and it was, naturally, picked over pretty hard. Of the ammo that was left it was a box of this, three boxes of that, two boxes of the other….nothing left in any quantity. As for what was missing….that pretty much tells the story.
Hit any preparedness forum and you’ll see the endless posts about “What calibers should survivalists standardize on” and you get the usual list. But, simple observation of the shelves shows that this nation runs on 9mm and .223. QED.
One of my guilty pleasures is that the local restaurant supply place sells frozen dumplings by the case. I toss em, frozen solid, into my steamer and in 15 minutes I have delicious, hot, Chinese(ish) dumplings. No muss, no fuss. Splash some tamari soy sauce on ’em and eat. About as labor-unintensive a meal as you can get.
Except, when I opened the cupboard I found my bottle of soy sauce with but a few dribbles in it. Solution? Trek to the basement, locate the five other bottles on the shelf, pull out the one with the oldest date, return to the kitchen, make a note to purchase more on my next grocery trip, and then have dinner.
I went to Wallywolrd the other day, picked up another couple bottles, wrote the purchase date on them with a Sharpie, and stuck ’em back in storage.
Thats what food rotation looks like. Nothing magical, mysterious, or tinfoil-hat about it. It’s that easy. And it is bloody convenient to not have to halt your meal plans because you need to run to the grocery for something. And it’s especially convenient to not have to run to the grocery when the streets are littered with bodies of the BLM/Antifa/ProudBoy/redneck battles that, I am told, we are all heading for as the looming second Civil War approaches. (Yeah, thats sarcasm….I’m wrong on a lot of things but I’m willing to bet that this time next year the lights are on, the water is running, the shelves are stocked, and it’s not Bosnia out there.)
In other interesting news, when I was at CostCo the other day I noticed that the limits had been removed from some items (notably the torpedo-shaped “chubs” of ground beef I’ve been purchasing) and reinstituted on others (toilet paper). Doesn’t really matter to me, though…I’ve gotten into the habit of buying certain items every weekend, religiously, so a limit of ‘one per trip’ doesn’t slow my roll. Matter of fact, I may have to dial it back a bit because the freezer is way full. Buying another freezer might make sense but for my household, one freezer full of meat is plenty for a good long while. Also, it seems that freezers are a bit hard to come by in some parts these days. Restless natives…….
