Monthly Archives: April 2022

Propane

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For those of you who are local, or semi local, the place to get propane at the moment seems to be Bretzz RV on Reserve St by the interstate. If you’re a ‘member’ of their ‘propane fillup club’ or whatever the heck they call it you wind up at $0.99/gal. Which means you can fill your average barbecue bomb (which is about $30 new at CostCo just down the street) for $5.

I’d been there the last two weekends but for various reasons their filling station was closed. Not today, though. Five bucks and I’ve enough propane to keep me heated, fed, and illuminated for a few days worth of power outage. I’ve got about four or five of these tanks at the monet, I’ll probably make it an even six. I had refrained from getting anything larger because I didn’t want to incur the penalty to mobility. A 20# barbecue bomb is easy for anyone to handle…when they get bigger, not so much.

By the by, signing up at Bretz’ is free, and they don’t ask for ID, so just go down there, sign up as Heywood Jablowme, and save a few bucks on getting your tank filled.

And, just because if I don’t make a reference to ‘King Of The Hill’ in a propane post someone will feel obligated to do so in comments:

Nineteen years

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Well, its the anniversary of the blog. I started this thing back in 2003 and in that time we’ve had…hmmm…Bird Flu, SARs, 2012, Hurricane Katrina, Obama, inflation, Ebola, Zika, Wuhan Flu, and a few other interesting events. But..still here. And I haven’t had to use my AK… this was a good day.

If you’ve found the 19 years worth of brain droppings to be entertaining, or even informative, I welcome you to sign up for my Patron account. a buck or two a month goes a long way towards keeping the lights on, the domain registered, and the mindless ramblings of a weird gun nut in Montana flowing. And, lets not kid ourselves, gearing up for the apocalypse ain’t cheap.

What’s been the most interesting part of blogging over 19 years? Hmm. Looking back at old posts and seeing how my forecasts of the future did (sometimes) or did not (most of the time) turn out the way I thought they would. And, wow, I’m such a different person than I was when I started this blog. Not worse, not better, just…a different person.

But! Still a person with a keen interest in being prepared and having enhanced resilience.

On a much lighter note, I like to needle Friend Of The Blog ,Rawles from time to time about how I predate his blog by about two years, although he has managed the remarkable accomplishment of managing to post every single day whereas I usually average a post every three days.

When will enough be enough? A lot of blogs have come and gone in that nineteen years and one day there’ll be a time when this one goes dark as well. After all, it’s not easy saying the same thing over and over, in dozens of different ways, for almost two decades. And, considering that the ostensible mission of this blog was to chronicle my own adventures in preparedness, after almost twenty years I should be pretty much done in terms of getting my ducks in a row. But…no, it seems there’s always more to do, to learn, to buy, to pack away, etc.

Next year will be the twenty year anniversary. Maybe I’ll have a cake or something………….

Getting Paddled II

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According to the UPS tracking numbers, the PTR’s I sent to Bill Springfield arrived the other day. As I’ve mentioned several times before, the semi-auto HK91 platform really benefits from having the original mag release on it rather than the pushbutton release. So much so, in fact, that it is worth the $$$ to me to have it performed on my older guns.

If you decide to buy a new PTR or other G3 clone, hold out for one that has the paddle mag release already on it.

I am hoping to get my PTR’s back sometime next week (I hope) at which time I’ll be happy to report back on what I think of the job that was performed.  Stay tuned.

On tonights episode of “Will It Digest”….

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Cleaning out the freezer and…pork ribs from 2011. Ah, such carefree days….

Your ‘best by ‘ dates, I laugh at them. Ha! Ha, I say!

So, how’d they turn out? Well, unless something rather untoward happens in the next eight hours, just fine. Why wouldnt they? These were vacuum sealed, and have been sitting below zero for the last eleven years. The moral of the story here? If you package meat properly, and keep it consistently frozen, it should be just fine literally a decade later.

This is now officially the oldest meat I have eaten out of my freezer, wildly trouncing the five year old turkey I had a few years back.

Ah.the memories……..

Link – Why is there a shortage of canning jars and lids?

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A reader was thoughtful enough to send me this link and there’s some interesting details in it. Specifically:

What consumers didn’t know was that canning lids (around since 1884) and canning jars (around since 1858) are no longer being made by Ball and Kerr, the two big manufacturers of American canning supplies. A few years before the pandemic, these companies had sold out to a mega-corporation called Newell Brands.

….

Since Ball and Kerr were just two more of multiple brands bought out by this company, consumer demands for any one product are not a priority for the mega-corporation. When the 2020 pandemic created a huge demand for canning supplies, Newell Brands decided it would not try to sell Ball and Kerr products at every store handling canning supplies as in the past, but only through online giant Amazon and select major chains such as Walmart and Ace Hardware stores.

I didn’t know that. Did you? I’ve not verified the information on my own, but if true it would mean that domestic production of canning supplies is all under one company which may or may not care about how available those items are.

There are, of course, offshore options. When theres a void in the market you can usually rely on the Chinese to swoop in, create a knockoff version thats 1/10th the quality at 1/2 the price, and then flood the market with it under several different names. Everything I read says that the Chinese canning lids are 50/50 in terms of efficacy.

Clearly canning lids have sort of migrated into the Uncertain Goods category. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stock up on a healthy amount of them, albeit much later than I should have.

 

Article – Abandoned Russian Tank Tagged With ‘Wolverines’ in Shout-Out to 1984’s ‘Red Dawn’ (Photo)

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Red Dawn,” the cult classic Cold War film about a group of teens who must defend America against a fictional attack by the Soviet Union, has resurfaced in the very real war taking place in Ukraine.

NPR Politics correspondent Scott Detrow tweeted Thursday that he drove past “a destroyed Russian tank with WOLVERINES spraypainted across it” in Ukraine.

I was going to say ‘life imitates art’ but Red Dawn wasn’t exactly art. It was a heavy-handed nod to the Reagan era (and nothing wrong with that), but I wouldn’t call it art.

Nice to see that someone over there….maybe a foreign journalist, maybe a Ukrainian with a grasp of English, A can of spraypaint, and a Netflix account…….appreciated the situation.

Getting paddled

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I have…a bunch…of PTR91 rifles. Many of them were manufactured before PTR started offering the paddle magazine release that was standard on original G3 rifles. For stupid ATF reasons, semi-auto G3 copies (HK91, etc.) couldn’t have the paddle release because the infrastructure of the release allowed the use of full-auto parts in the gun. Long story short: if you want the paddle release you have to install it in a way that prevents the use of full-auto parts. Most manufactures said ;screw it’ and simply omitted the paddle since the design also incorporated a magazine push-button release.

TOP: no paddle, BOTTOM: paddle. (Not to be confused with getting your bottom paddled.)

 

But….that release button is awkwardly  located. The paddle release is the way to go. PTR finally made the paddle release a standard item on their guns and it is wonderful. Now, what about the guns that pre-date that? Well, there is a small(!) aftermarket of people who will mod your non-paddle gun to have the paddle. First in the field: Bill Springfield.

I’d been reading about his work for a few years. I contacted him and asked if he had a quantity discount. And….I just sent off a buncha PTRs for him to modify. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The conversion is normally around $200. Since a new PTR with the paddle is around $1050-1100, and most of my PTR’s were acquired in the $600 range, it makes more economical sense to have the conversion done.

The G3 platform suffered from a couple issues that keep it from being an awesome platform, but all those issues can be mitigated nowadays.

Mill

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Finally decided to pull the trigger and purchase the wildly expensive, but well regarded, Country Living Grain mill. No sooner had I ordered it than the price went up a half hour later. I suppose demand must be high, but geez…it went up something like $70 not long after I ordered it. Fortunately, I beat the increase.

I purchased it because I’m finally at a point in my life where I can afford such things, and also because I’m expanding my cooking repertoire and I’d like to grind my own cornmeal. This, naturally, means I need to start stocking dried corn. I already have a small (<50#) amount of wheat sitting in storage (thank you LDS cannery), but given my enjoyment of things like pasta it makes sense to have the materials to start making it from scratch. Sure, I store flour…and it stores well enough…but not as well or as long as the wheat itself. So…grain mill. I figure between wheat, corn, and rice I’ll be pretty well covered for making things like flour, porridge, polenta, etc.

And, because I’m a suspender-and-a-belt kind of guy I ordered the spare parts kit and a few other accessories as well.

I’m rather looking forward to experimenting. I haven’t baked bread in quite a while and I’m wondering how much of a difference in flavor will be noticed between freshly ground flour and store-bought. There’s a bakery three blocks from where I live and once in a rare while I’ll get some bread there and, dang it, it’s good. So good that just a thick slice of it and some soft, creamy butter is practically a meal all by itself. But, in addition to bread, I also wanna take a swing at making my own fresh pasta and that sort of thing. Also, I’ve found a recipe for a cornmeal porridge that I really, really like and would like to try with fresh cornmeal. So..I guess it was time to spend the money and get the grain mill.

Now I need to head out to the places that sell bulk grains and start seeing whats available. Nice thing is, even without an end-of-the-world it’ll still be nice to have fresh bread and that sort of thing.