Well, sometimes it’s hard to find something to be hankful for, but if you think about, as craptacular as your life may be, it  could always be worse.

So..there’s that.

Don’t forget, day after Thanksgiving:

Friday Of Color sales – save your pennies and go nuts on Friday. Now is the time to hedge your bets after a close election. Black Fridays Matter!

Turkey sales – Day after T-Day is the day to lay back a flock of turkeys if your freezer can handle it. Turkey is dang good anytime if the year. Who doesn’t love them some turkey sandwiches???

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, my local Albertson’s grocery (and many other groceries as well) have a little bin in the meat department where the put the stuff that is about to expire and mark it down for a quick sale. I call it ‘Remaindered Meat’. It’s perfectly good, you just have to either use it or freeze it within the next day or so. A few months back, I discovered what I have come to call The Meat Tray:

They take four trays of remaindered meat, bundle it together, and drop the price to a flat twenty bucks per. usually its steak, chicken, pork and then some other random meat. In the image above, the random meat is a package of precooked BBQ ribs. This is pretty much a weeks worth of dinner meat if you plan properly. I usually break the package in half – one half into vacuum sealed bags for the long cryo nap, and the other half goes in my kitchen freezer for immediate usage. Hey, for twenty bucks how can you go wrong?

Check your local grocery store next time youre there…chances are good they do something similar. You may find it all the way at the end of the display case, or you may find it mixed in with the ‘regular’ meats…but it’s worth the effort to find those remaindered meats.

When the apocalypse gets here, I am NOT eating TVP.

It’s mentioned a time or two in the past, but I thought it might be timely to post a reminder about Sparks31 blog. Pretty much everything you want to know about ‘grid down’ communications, and even some “What to buy if you don’t want a lecture on radio theory and just want a shopping list”.  A guy who is on the same page as most of us in terms of mindset, and the technological experience and know-how to be an excellent resource. Go check him out.

And, in case he happens to check his logs to see where his referrals are coming from – Dude! Email me sometime and say hi.

Was playing with some old money today. Notice anything interesting (other than the obvious) about these?

Well, lets look a tad closer:

The $1000 bill was printed after Roosevelt’s little stunt. Notice that the newer bills says nothing about redeeming for gold..only ‘lawful money’. Oh, those crazy liberals!

Anyway, it was interesting to see that little reminder of some weird times. The Metals Pimp tells me that there are still plenty of customers who only buy their gold in ‘colectible’ form because they think that if this sort of thing happens again, Uncle Same will , for some strange reason, use the exact same wording of the orginal Act and exempt collector coins. Really? Does that make any sense at all? I didn’t think so.

Speaking of the Metals Pimp, he dropped off a nice shiny Silver Eagle that he said one of his customers asked him to pass on to me. So, generous benefactor, when the zombies are roaming and the apocalypse is nigh I will be purchasing my lapdances with silver and raise a toast of home-distilled brain-eraser to your generosity. Salut!

One of the staple topics that gets beaten to death regularly on survival forums is the “guns to keep caches at your [BOL/BOV/cabin/cache].” The post usually starts of with someone saying how their normal end of the world gear is a nice Rock River AR, a tweaked out Springfield 1911 and maybe a nicely appointed 870. Then they’ll start talking about the guns they have hidden away ‘just in case’…and it’s an SKS, Mosin Nagant, and maybe a HiPoint or two.

How does this make sense? Yes, anything you store off site is going to be at risk for loss and you want to keep potential losses low. BUT…think about it: if you have to resort to the guns at your cache or family hunting cabin then you’re life has hit a point where you want the best you can get, right? I mean, if those guns are good enough for your offsite stash then shouldnt they be good enough to be your primary guns?

I bring this up because I love the notion of disposable gear but with a high quality to price ratio. On a good day I can buy a used Glock for $300 but thats still more than I want to risk losing on a ‘truck gun’ or ‘stash gun’. At the same time, I am not going into Katrinaville with a HiPoint pistol. But…there is a gun out there that is high quality, reliable, and cheap enough that if you lose it you don’t really cry….and is far more confidence inspiring than any Bersa, Taurus, or HiPoint.

This is a Ruger P95. It is supremely rugged, and I’ve yet to pay more than $200 for a used one. It’s a gun I am perfectly comfortable leaving under a car seat or in an ammo can under the porch with no real concern if it gets stolen, at the same time it is a gun I’d feel totally comfortable facing hordes of zombies with. These guns are ridiculously cheap on the used market, are built like tanks, have as few parts as the Glock, are lightweight, and run about as reliably as anything costing three times as much.

While I tote the Glock around day to day, I’d have no reservation carrying the Ruger. Although Ruger orphaned the P-series pistols two generations ago (the Ruger SR and Ruger American are Rugers latest failures at capturing the police/military market) they are still plentiful because they were inexpensive. Need proof? Go look at photos from ‘gun buybacks’….there’ll always be a P-series in there somewhere.

This one rolled across my desk when someone said I could have it for $200. It’s an outstanding choice for a gun you don’t care what happens to but it still worthy of carrying through an episode of The Walking Dead.

So, before you spend money on a HiPoint or Bersa, go look around and see if you can’t find one of these.

Remember that old headline?

The paper was so certain that Truman would lose they went ahead and set the type and printed the paper….assuming it was a done deal.

Behold:

So certain was I of a Clinton victory, I ordered these at the last minute. But..since Trump won does that mean this was a bad purchase? Nope, not in the least. They will cost more later. And someday they will be unavailable. All Im losing here is opportunity cost.