So this happened…………..
A tiny house, but not a Tiny House,
From what I read, a ‘tiny house’ does not usually exceed about 400-500 sq ft. I was in a cottage this weekend that might be considered a ‘tiny house’. I was so curious, in fact, I measured the thing out. The main room was 14×17, which translates to around 238 sq. ft. But, it also had an upstairs loft with the same footprint ( although the sloping sides of the ceiling limited the amount of usable space.) To my surprise….it was quite livable. It had most of the amenities…real toilet, real shower, etc. Deficiencies were that there was no room in the bathroom for a sink, so the ‘kitchen’ sink doubled as a bathroom sink. But otherwise….surprisingly livalble for one person.
I wouldn’t want to live there for five years, but as a weekend or vacation kind of refuge it would be rather nice. What really caught my attention was that if I wanted a small, unnoticed, little ‘lifeboat’ to retreat to if I had to beat feet somewhere, it would actually be a very serviceable situation.
Of course, I’d deck it out in a more survivalist theme….heavy on storage options and off-grid resources. But I could very much see a smallish place like that working out quite well for a backup location.
As I said, it had an upstairs sleeping loft but it had no basement. If it had a basement, that would probably have made it pretty much ideal….plenty of storage while still maintaining a fairly small footprint.
At some point, I’m going to get my 20-40 acres of Montana and when I do, a small, well-equipped and well-appointed place like that might be just the thing while I set aside the greenbacks to build a more substantial palace at a later date.
It was interesting to look at such a small place with a survivalist’s critical eye and think ‘how could I better make this place fit my needs’.
Now, I will say that, as I see it, this was a tiny house but not a ‘Tiny House’ if you get my understanding. This was a stick-built-on-a-foundation sort of building (albeit looking like a gingerbread cottage) rather than the tiny-house-on-wheels that most tiny houses seem to be. And this had genuine grid power and water/sewage. No composting toilets, no water tanks. Real deal house. And the whole thing could have fit into the living room of my present day house.
Not my first choice of a place to live, but if I needed to go to a secondary location and spend a winter there or however much time until things calmed down, or I got back on my feet….well…it would actually be pretty nice.
So, maybe I’ll do some research and draw up some ideas for that day I finally get that acreage in the Middle O’ Nowhere.
Achievement unlocked: BBQ gun
Remember this? Yeah. That happened.
Pics when it gets here.
Still gotta find some showy-yet-somewhat-practical grips.
Halloween
Real life has been fairly exhausting as of late and it means that at the end of the day, when its a choice between blog posting or climbing into bed…well…bed is often the winner.
I normally don’t go too far out of my way for Halloween but I admire people who do. I as in CostCo today and this effort just made my day:
But what really makes it baller…what really sells it….is he went and had a CostCo badge made up that says WASHINGTON. That, sir, is icing on the cake. Well done!
I love costumes like these, but the problem is that they seem a rather high investment for something that, really, you can only wear once. Doing the same costume year after year seems very not in the spirit of things.
Enjoy the candy sales tomorrow!
Just another ‘beware the coming bans’ post
Unless you’ve been under a rock the last week, you know some guy in Maine (of all places) went sideways and killed about twenty people before taking his own life. As usually happens after these events, the usual crowd wiped the blood onto their faces and began wailing about ‘commonsense’ and ‘reasonable’ restrictions on…well..whatever they think was at fault.
To be fair, the administration really has it’s hands full right now and is probably not interested in getting into a domestic policy quagmire while it’s in the midst of a couple foreign policy quagmires. But…I’ve been wrong before.
But if they do get some traction on their usual ban-dwagon, you don’t want to be caught unprepared. It’s been 19 years since the sunset of the much-despised ‘Assault Weapons Ban’. If you bought on pistol magazine and one rifle magazine each month (a very easy goal) since then, you’d have about 228 pistol mags and 228 rifle mags…an amount that almost everyone would agree is a comfortable amount to have.
And if you bought one ‘evil’ rifle every year, again not an outrageous or difficult goal, you’d have 19 AR’s in the safe.
But some people just will not learn. It seems like every time some whackjob shoots up a 7-11 and the media starts their campaign about ‘high capacity magazines’ there are people who sudenly think they need to buy. Dude…you should have had your magazine issues settled shortly after the ban expired. I encounter way to many people who think that “Oh, I have a dozen mags for my AR. Thats plenty.” That is wildly shortsighted thinking that fails to account for what perils the future holds. I’m not going to elaborate about that because I’ve covered it elsewhere on this blog more times than I can recall.
TL;DR for todays post: one of these days, these gun/mag bans will come back and you don’t want to be caught with your pants down. Stack it deep. And if you really want a positive habit to develop, buy one pistol mag per month, and one rifle mag per month. They are money in the bank. (Not that keeping your money in the bank is a good idea, but you get my meaning.)
Winter arrives
Well, after a lovely week of wonderful warm days and crisp fall nights, winter came in last night like the KoolAid man. Heavy blowing winds, light snow, and the thermometer making a run for the bottom.
Time to transfer the winter gear to the truck, make sure the winter module is in my Bag O’ Tricks, and drive much more carefully.
And, you know, part of driving carefully means knowing when not to drive at all. Is picking up a couple frozen pizzas at Winco when the roads are icy really worth a trip to the ER and buying a new truck? Probably not. Thats one of the reasons we stockpile food to begin with – to eliminate risk.
Not sure what this winter is going to look like. (And, really, no one does…the notion that you can forecast how severe a winter will be seems akin to telling the future by squeezing the goat’s scrotum or something.) But you usually can’t be too wrong with “cold and snowy”. Really, the only variable is the quantity.
With all the stuff going on (and about to go on) in the Middle East, perhaps stocking up on fuel for heating mightnot be a bad idea this winter.
Article – Man Buys Abandoned Doomsday Shelter, Discovers ’20 Tons’ Of Supplies Stashed From The 1980s
But the man who sold him the house left Anderson something extra. A big extra.
If you think thats cool, imagine what it must be like for the fella that bought the old CUT (Church Universal Triumphant) bunkers from the 80’s.
There’s alot of these kinds of places still out there.
Memes that never seem dated
I swear, Mr Thompson will be remembered for this one moment in Red October more than just about anything else. But, when youre right, youre right.
Article – How to found a new town
Thought for the day: “A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.” ―
It’s a trope of virtually every post apocalyptic story: The townies come together to battle an outside force of bad guys. Its in virtually every. Single. Story.
So, if youre going to rally the townies, you’d want those townies to be like-minded individuals who are all on the same page. What are the odds of that? Well, you can stack the odds by stocking the town: start your own town:
Montana is a little tricky. The joke used to be that all you needed to b a town here was a bar and a Napa dealership. In actuality, it appears you need 300 like-minded voters and some sort of postal presence (which ,as I read, can be a Mailbox etc or UPS store that offers mailboxes).
Just to carry the mental exercise further, if you were to make your own town, I wonder if you could then create your own police force, automatically deputize every citizen, and thereby give them legal access to affordable post-dealer LE-only machineguns and heavier weapons. You know, a couple MAG58’s at the town entrance, MP5’s for everybody, maybe a quad-50 on a city gun truck for quick deployment.
If you start your own town, let me know. I could use a little pied-à-terre in such a place.
Unofficial Bring Your Gun To Work Day
My boss is a fella from Tennessee. He’s all about college football and southern cooking. He carries a Sig P365SAS in his briefcase. I got him some 9mm for his birthday last month. He knows I like to shoot and am a gun guy. We get along.
He’s strolling through the office the other day and most of us are standing in the hallway outside our offices jawboning about nothing important. He says, “People, this thing in the Mideast has me worried. I know we’re not gonna see anything here in our little chunk of Montana but if you see someone weird out in the parking lot waving an AK, please notify someone.”
The next day, as I was getting him to sign some checks, he told me that he assumes I carry or have a gun at work (I do, but I don’t let anyone know…and I did not confirm or deny his assertion.) He said that he’s going to start carrying his pistol in his pocket rather than his briefcase because he “doesn’t like the way things are looking.”
And that’s, oddly, the sentiment that seems to be going around these days in my circles. Most people I know keep a pistol in the console of their vehicle. Maybe a bolt action rifle behind the seat. To a man, all of them have upgraded to something a little less Fudd and a lot more Dredd.
Oh, sure, this little quiet pocket of Montana isn’t exactly known for its Middle Eastern community, although being a college town you do get people from all over, but it is orders of magnitude unlikely that anything more dramatic than some graffiti on a synagogue (yeah, we have a couple) will occur.
Do I genuinely believe that some wanna-be jihadist will run through WalMart with an AK trying to buy himself some cred? I do not. Do I believe that some stupid hipster college kid who has spent too much time on Democratic Underground wiil throw a molotov cocktail at the local power transformers in the name of oppressed people somewhere? Eh…possibly, but unlikely. Do I believe that there will be the possibility of some homeless wastrel with a head full of bad wiring and a grudge might get belligerent when one of the girls in the office shoos him away from the garbage cans? Absolutely.
But whether its wanna-be jihadists with Ak’s or homeless crazy people with steak knives, there’s a definite vibe going on these days…and if my boss feels that his employees being discreetly armed is a good thing, who am I to judge?
Now, obviously there’s more to this than just wink-and-a-nod when the boss asks if I’m carrying a gun. As the president of the company it is a liability nightmare for him to condone, let alone encourage, employees to have Bring Your Gun To Work Day. But, he can publish something in the employee handbook clearly stating that we have an official ‘no weapons’ policy, and we can discreetly ignore it with tacit, unstated, unwritten approval. Dont ask, dont tell. Works for me.
Today he mentioned getting together with me, his 2nd in command, and my direct boss to form a ‘Security Committee’ to look at installing new locks and establishing protocols for evacuation and things like that. I like where his head is at. The trick will be to be helpful without tipping my hat too much about my sooper secret squirrel life as Commander Zero.
