Monthly Archives: November 2024

Still looking

Posted on by
16

I’ve mentioned a few times that I dabble in ‘the market’. A bunch of those investments spat out some dividends Friday and about half of that amount gets funneled into the Land Purchase fund, and the rest gets reinvested. So, as a result, I’ve got a little bit more money to put towards getting a chunk of nowhere.

Unfortunately, this late in the year, it is unlikely I’ll be able to actually go walk any potential acquisitions. I cannot imagine that buying a piece of property that you viewed when it was under a foot of snow is a good idea. It does, however, give you some information on how accessible that place is in the winter, but I need more info than that before plunking down a hundred grand.

While I like western Montana for its mountains, and disdain eastern Montana for it’s flat-as-a-cookie-sheetness ( you can watch your dog run away for three days over there, its so flat) there is lots land between those two extremes. I’ve seen quite a few listings just west of Great Falls in the Cascade area that look interesting, and even some up near Choteau and Augusta, but nothing that ticks off enough boxes on my want list to make a trip there to look. Closer to home, the Helmville and Drummond area have some stuff but now youre up in the 5000′ foot range and snow is a bit of an issue at those higher altitudes, along with a shorter growing time.

I did see a very nice chunk up north of here but it was, unfortunately, on the reservation and I am not touching that with a ten-foot pole. Regular local politics is a clown show, tribal politics (and its racial overtones) are just pure anarchy.

Ii don’t mind waiting until spring to get ‘more serious’ about a purchase. It gives me more time to put together more money, and it also gives me time to explore more possibilities online. However, I’m getting older and I don’t want to be too old to enjoy a piece of land when I finally get it. I really hope that next year is the year I take this step and then can get started on the headache of infrastructure.

Speaking of, I did see a piece of property that was almost a contender. It was in an area that a fire had gone though and wiped out. The trees had started to comeback, and the property already had a well and septic on it, as well as a couple foundations where the buildings used to be. I passed on it for reasons, but here it is if anyone is curious…

Before you say anything, I fully recognize that it is unlikely (but not impossible) that I’ll find a piece of property that is 100% of what I want, and I’m okay with that. I can live with 90-95%. Or if theres an outstanding feature that makes up for a lack of another, I might even be okay with 85%. But I can only really afford to do this once, so I’d like to get as much of what I want as I can on the first go round. So..the hunt continues.

Nationalism as marketing

Posted on by
21

You guys may remember a few months back the ‘commercial’ for the Flux Raider that I posted. I enjoyed the whole goes-up-to11 level of ubernationalism. And its always fun to portray the British as foppish sissies. A much shorter, but just as tongue-in-cheek commercial dropped for Black Rifle Coffee.

I genuinely cannot think of any nation that engages in this sort of self-aggrandizement… I think it’s a uniquely American trait. At least, to this all-in-good-fun extent.

And the “1776” brass knucks are a nice touch.

Yup, totally not preparedness related but if it made me laugh I’m pretty sure it’ll make you laugh, and who couldn’t use a chuckle these days, hm?

h/t to the guy playing the redcoat…his inflection and mannerisms belie some actual acting skill.

ETA: While we’re at it….

Canned beef

Posted on by
10

I home canned some beef a year or two ago and its been sitting in my kitchen cabinets since. Its good for stews and soups, but theres gotta be more to it than that, right? I mix it with rice and and onions from time to time, but what else can we do?

I went out to breakfast the other day and had a ‘breakfast skillet’ of cubed potatoes, peppers, onions, melted cheese, bacon, ham, and sausage. Man, was it good.

No reason I can’t do that at home, I decided. I threw some bacon grease into my wok pan, cubed up some potatoes, onions, peppers, and went to work. When the potatoes were soft I threw in the peppers and onions, a couple grinds of salt and pepper, a generous bunch of butter, and dumped in the canned roast beef. Broke the beef up a little with my spatula, covered the pan, and let the heat and steam do the work. After a few minutes I threw some Mexican cheese blend on there, covered to melt., and then threw a couple eggs on top. One pepper, one onion, one potato, two eggs, one pint of meat made a lot of food.

About three bucks of ingredients, less the meat. And the beauty of using the home canned meat is that just about any cheap cut of meat, once hit with enough heat and pressure during the canning process, becomes fork tender morsels.

A home run, if I do say so myself.

CostCo solar ‘generator’

Posted on by
27

Here’s a pet peeve of mine. I was up at CostCo and beheld this:
It is what is being marketed, wildly inaccurately in my opinion, as a ‘solar generator’. What is this thing, you ask? It’s a battery and some solar panels to recharge it. If anything here is a ‘generator’ it is the solar panels themselves. The battery part of this thing doesnt generate electricity…it stores it. The battery part is no more a ‘generator’ than a 55 gallon blue barrel of water is a ‘portable well’. Not sure why, but this misuse of terminology really grates my grapes.

Ignoring the inaccurate advertising, is this thing worth having? Maybe. Honestly, I’m more interested in the batter/inverter unit itself than I am the panels. In addition to being able to be charged by the panels at what I am guessing is a fairly slow rate, it has plug-ins to allow recharging from household (or generator) current.

Something like this probably has some merit for a very low-draw scenario…running LED lights or maybe powering a radio. While I’m sure the battery is up to more demanding tasks when fully charged, its the ability to recharge completely and in a timely manner off the kinda small panels that I’m curious about.

There are no shortage of ‘battery in a box’ products out there. While I love a turn-key solution as much as the next guy I think that I’d prefer to fab up my own with premium components for longevity and increased function. But…interesting to see this at CostCo. First freeze driers, now these. Someone at CostCo purchasing is wearing some of our brand of tinfoil, methinks.

 

Delayed

Posted on by
29

I was cruising around the internet and saw a meme that said “You didnt save their life….you just delayed their death.” Technically true. If you save someone’s life it is functionally and literally equivalent to delaying their death.

This got me ruminating about the recent election…Harris’ defeat / Trumps victory didn’t save us from the upcoming bad times, it just delayed them.

It’s all very subjective, but my belief is that no one…Trump or even Teddy Roosevelt…can have 100% of my trust to not do something that I believe is against my best interests. I’m glad Trump won, absolutely…but I see his victory as, at best, a stall giving me more time to get myself squared away against the uncertain future and it’s certain bad times.

While I’m okay with my current level of preparedness, I still have a little ways to go before maxing out. I’d like to think that Trump’s victory buys be a little bit more time to get there. We’ll see.

Resilience against political change

Posted on by
25

Self-interest is the dominant trait in humans. It kind of has to be or else we’d have died out generations ago. Intellectually we may think we are putting our self-interest aside when we act ‘for the greater good’ but when it’s time to bail out of the plane and theres only one parachute between you and a total stranger…well…that self-interest thing comes roaring to the surface and the knives come out.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people look at political results from an ‘is this good for me’ angle rather than an ‘is this good for the country’ perspective. You could argue that if something is good for you, then it’s good for the country (or vice versa), I suppose. Most people, I think, will vote their own self-interest. Whether I agree with it or not, I can at least understand it.

And while you may think you can ignore politics, I can assure you that politics will not ignore you. Sometimes that looks like an extra bite in your paycheck to pay ‘your fair share’, and sometimes it looks like a Bearcat in your driveway to enforce a ‘reasonable and commonsense’ law.

In preparedness there’s a tendency to, after an election where the ‘right’ candidate wins, get complacent and think that a bullet has been dodged and things will be ‘better’ for the next four years. Personally, I think thats a wildly foolish attitude to take – no matter who wins, there are no guarantees. Likelihoods, the odds, may change, sure…but they are never 100% against.

I suppose the trick, if there is one, is to increase your resilience to the point that a change in government will affect you as little as possible no matter who wins. You can’t be 100% proofed against the .gov but you can certainly increase your level of preparedness to the point where you are impacted far less than Joe Blow is when the political wind changes.

I guess political sea change is one of those things to add to the list of scenarios to be prepared against. What does that look like? I’d imagine it looks alot like being in a situation where you can comfortably keep your head down and your profile low when the powers that be decide to start hammering down the nails that stick up.

But…my point is this: if, when elections roll around, you think “I hope my candidate wins because if they dont this bad thing will happen that will affect me” then perhaps its worth investigating being prepared against that bad thing so you’re not vulnerable to the fickle political winds.

Get that Hawaiian shirt out

Posted on by
11

“If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for … but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

 

JetBoil Stash

Posted on by
16

Whenever I go hunting or otherwise tromping through the boonies, one of the things I take with me is an Esbit stove and a bunch of fuel tabs. This is so that I can boil up some water to use to make meal out of some freeze drieds while I’m out hunting. I don’t drink coffee or tea, so my need for super hot water in the field is usually just limited to rehydrating something. Certainly, I can make a cup of hot beverage if I want, I’m just saying that I normally don’t.

The Esbit stove works pretty well for what it is. It’s main advantages, to me, are the compactness and portability combined with the light weight and durability of the fuel – fuel tabs about the size of a piece of bubble gum. The drawback is that these fuel tabs don’t put out as much heat as other fuel sources, but there is always a tradeoff in things. The end result is that it can take a little bit more time to boil some water than it would using other fuel sources.

The supermegawesome gadget for making hot water in the field is the JetBoil line of products. Theyre basically an isobutane cartridge, same as found on a lot of backpacking stoves, and a cooking vessel with a heat exchanger. I was always reluctant to pick one up because, up to this point, my needs had ben adequately met with the Esbit stove and I regarded the tall Jetboil vessels, about the size of a large travel mug, to be rather bulky and overkill for my needs…after all, I only need about 12-16 oz of water for a freezedried meal.

Additionally, for my ‘crisis cooking’ at home in the event of some sort of disaster I have a kerosene stove, a Coleman stove, and an Omnifuel stove that will literally burn any liquid fuel. A JetBoil would be a quadriary level of redundancy…maybe even deeper than that.

But…I was killing some time the other day and wandered into REI and saw that JetBoil had a smaller, much more compact version called the Stash. The attraction was that everything needed nested into the small-enough -to-be-handy-but-large-enough-to-be-useful cooking pot. I already carry a titanium cooking cup to use with the Esbit stove, and this stove and fuel container would easily fit inside that…so it fits within a footprint that I am already using.

Curiosity got ahold of me and I wondered how long it would take to actually bring a goodly amount of water to a rolling boil. The most water-intensive of my freezedrieds calls for 16 oz. of water. I figured I’d throw caution to the wind and poured 20 oz. into the vessel, put the lid on, cranked the flame, and started the timer. Two and a half minutes later it was boiling mightily. That’s pretty sweet. It takes significantly longer to achieve that same result with the Esbit stove.

The most obvious drawback is that this stove, and others like it, run on isobutane cartridges. The reasonable question is where do you get additional cartridges in a crisis? The same place you get gasoline, kerosene, white gas, and propane – you don’t. You either have a stash of it, or you scrounge it from somewhere. But, as I said, I already have cooking options for cooking with gasoline, kerosene, white gas, propane, and alcohol. I’ll lay in a case or two of cartridges for this thing and that’ll be that. I really only plan on using it for hunting and boonie humping purposes.

So..a new piece of gear to play with.I’m being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century but at I’m getting there.

 

Two structures I rather like

Posted on by
52

Still looking for a piece of property that fits 85-90% (or better) of what I’m looking for. Actually found a piece that was hitting all the checkboxes…even has a developed year round spring on it. Sounds awesome, right? Problem is, there are nice neighboring properties that have documented access to use that spring as well. So, my choice is either buy it and have nine neighbors tromping through my property to use the spring, or buy nine neighboring pieces of property, remove the easements, and then sell those nine properties. That’s a bit of a stretch. So..still looking.

But I was thinking about what kind of structure I’d like to put in. I rather like a multistory tower-like structure. My first thought was something along the fire tower or blockhouse design. Here’s some examples:

I liked the idea of a relatively easily securable lower level and the ability to take advantage of the views offered by the presumably remote location. But as I was scrolling through, of all things, Pinterest to see ideas for small cabin-like dwellings I found another family of small, elevated, easily securable buildings – railroad switch/signal buildings:

They are, essentially, the same structure but without the overhanging deck. Again, though, we are back to a strong, easily secured first level while providing a non-bunker-like second level. Most of the ones I’ve been looking at are older, brick designs but they are all just a concrete rectangle with a stick-built structure on top. I would think that creating a windowless concrete rectangle out of ICF would be a great deal easier, in just about every way, than using brick.

Either way, I’m liking the idea of these two types of structures. Their common denominator is that they were built to satisfy the need of observation of the area around them. The fire tower for obvious reasons, and the signal/switch stations to see the rail traffic.

Im sure they have their own logistic or structural downsides, but at the moment I’m rather taken with both of these designs. I’m not saying that anything I’d build would be a copy of these…just the the ideas behind them would probably be a large influence on what I’m thinking of. Inspiration, if you will, for a design that may go in a different direction but still give me the features about these structures that I like.