Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

A year or so ago I got one of the Kifaru Woobies as a birthday gift. I’d wanted something similar to a poncho liner but with a bit more insulative oomph than the standard GI liner. A few companies make variations on the poncho liner using Thinsulate but Id read some reviews of the Kifaru product, and Ive always liked their gear, so when I was asked what I wanted for my birthday thats what I went with. As I planned, the Woobie ties in to the standard GI poncho and gives you the versatility to configure your pocnho/liner combination as an impromptu sleeping bag, as well as a throw blanket. I know theres at least one kit on the market to allow you to cut a hole in the middle of a poncho liner so you can actually wear it under your poncho. As I was perusing Wiggy’s website yesterday, I spied this little number. Its a quilted, insulated poncho. Not a liner, necessarily, but a poncho. Im assuming it ties in to your regular GI poncho but allows you to wear them both at the same time. This seems to be more useful than the usual liners which do not permit you to wear them in conjunction with the poncho. I think Im going to have to get one of these and try it out. As expected, it isnt cheap but, interestingly, it’s cheaper than the Kifaru Woobie. I may need to get one of these and try it out. If it works well, and compresses nicely, it could wind up becoming a staple of my hunting/outdoor pack.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Its a wintery day here in western Montana. The snow is coming down thicker, heavier, and faster than I have seen it do in a while. The roads are rather treacherous…so much so that I have no intention of leaving the house. But..guess what? We have ample(!) amounts of beverages, food, fuel and entertainment so we can sit this out like it isnt even going on. Preparedness FTW!

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Another opportunistic adventure in evil yuppie survivalism. A coworker of the missus normally gets a 1/4 of a beef every year but this year she decided she still hadnt finished off last years bovine. She’d already committed to purchase it, so would we be interested in buying out her share? Well, thats a pretty big amount of dead animal but I called a fellow yuppie survivalist (and by yuppie survivalist, I mean he makes more than minimum wage) and he said he’d be interested in going halvsies. (Or halfsies, I guess.)

So we drove out to where the rendezvous point was…a parking lot near one of the interstate exits. Must have been about fifteen cars just sitting there with their engines idling. A few minutes later a big Ford dually pulls in towing a trailer. Everyone gets out of their cars and gathers ’round for the distribution…it was like some sort of beefy version of Catholic communion.

So we got about 207# of beef, some scraps for the battlepup, and went home to divvy it up. Half to us, half to my buddy. We got some awesome roasts that are about the size and thickness of a phonebook. Plenty of steaks and yet more ground beef. All the roasts and steaks were indivisually vacuum sealed so that saved a huge amount of time. I’ve filled the freezer. Unless there is some special cut that we need for a recipe down the line I think we’re pretty much done buying meat for 2011.

You know how some people have a policy about not letting the tank of their car go below half full? The policy Im instituting is that we dont go below 50# ea. of chicken and beef. As it stands right now theres easily 100# pounds of beef in the freezer and about another 70# of chicken. Careful management and menu planning could make that last a looooong time…without resorting to rice/beans and TVP.

So, Im crossing “fill freezer with meat” off of my list. I really do need to invest in a small generator to keep things on an even keel in case we get an extended power outage but in the 25 years Ive been here we’ve never had an outage that lasted more than eight or nine hours. Still, every good yuppie survivalist should have an EU2000 (or two) floating around. On the other hand, as all this meat freezes solid, the thermal mass should keep it quite safe and frozen for at least a day or two should the power cut out.

When the apocalypse gets here (or finishes getting here, depending on your point of view) we’re gonna be eating just fine.

Bonus: Unrelated picture of the battlepup starting his day. When you have a long day of chewing shoes and barking at strangerts in front of you, you want a double shot of that latte.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Today was the festival of meat. No, no..Im not talking about the wifeswap/swingers gathering at the strip joint across town (Thats on Thursdays anyway). Like all good stories, it requires a little backstory.

I was in the shop and had, sadly, finished the last Coke in the fridge. So I figured I’d head over to Albertson’s, grab a 12-pack and as long as Im there I would hit the meat counter and see if there was any remaindered meat to be had. I get to the meat counter and they’ve got 85/15 ground beef marked down to $1.99/#. Not great, but good enough to warrant parting with a $20 for 10# of the stuff. (Normally its something like $2.79 or $2.99 a pound.) I ask the girl why its on sale…after all, it wasnt mentioned in the sales circular at the front of the store. She said that they had ordered too much of the stuff and needed to get rid of it. Ah, she had me at “get rid of it”. Casually, I ask “So…you got any room to move on the price if I take more? Like 20# or so?” She says she’ll have to go ask her manager. She comes back and says if I take at least 25# they’ll knock it back to:

Buck and a half a pound? Yes, please!

Well, at that point the wheels started spinning in my head. Sure, I can get protein from beans and rice like a large part of the Third World, but why subject yourself to that if you dont have to? I’ll take 50# please. I get on the cellphone and call the wife. Tell her to gear up, we’ve got a date at Albertsons. Pick her up (the meat folks needed somet ime to package all that beed) and we head to the counter to pick it up. As we’re at the checkout line I anticipate the question from the checkout girl about why we have a case of Coke, a case of Mountain Dew and 50# of raw meat. Sure enough…”Wow. What are you going to do with all that meat?” and my wife, who has up to this point in our relationship been, shall we say, comedically challenged, deadpans “Atkins diet.” The checkout girl nods her head sagely saying something about having some relatives who were on that plan. Who knew?

So, back to base with our beef. (Not to be confused with beef base, which is a whole other thing.) Clear off the kitchen counter and grab the camera for a trophy picture:

Can *not* be reassembled to make a small cow.

Because Im an evil yuppie survivalist I happen to have an evil yuppie survivalist luxury/toy – a freezer. So all this meat is going to wind up in the freezer to be kept, used, and hoarded against…well, whatever it is that we’re expecting to rock our world. Trouble is, you take that meat, as packaged, and drop it into the freezer and youre going to have a buncha freezer burned cowflesh in very short order. It’ll be edible, but it wont be attractive. Plus, it really needs to be broken down into smaller portions to facilitate storage.

If youre like me (and, really, I hope you arent because, frankly, you can do better) you probably have a drawer or cabinet in your kitchen that is full of mismatched Tupperware-style food containers. I cleaned ours out last week of mismatched containers but saved one that seemed useful for the task before me. I discovered that if I use it as a mold, I can make bricks of ground beef that weigh about 1.5# each. A good size for my uses and, most importantly, it allows me to stack them in the freezer more efficiently. So, I grabbed a box of wax paper, my brick o’ meat mold, and a roll of vacuum sealer material and got busy.

Get comfortable…youre gonna be here a while.

So for the next several hours it was fill mold, empty mold onto sheet of wax paper, wrap meat in wax paper (to facilitate sliding it into the bag), slide it into the vacuum sealer bag, seal it, stuff it in the freezer behind me, repeat….

This would be the ultimate Wendy’s hamburger at 24 oz. ea.

It was a tedious job and when it was all done there were about 34 bricks of beef to be shuttled from the kitchen to the deep freeze in the basement. Once they firm up in the freezer I’ll take a marker to them and label them (“85/15″) and write the date on them for reference. They should last several years. Heres an idea of what the finished product looks like. Stacks neatly and ready for a trip to the freezer.

Bricks o’ beef, ready for the deep sleep in the freezer.

Coupled with the last few trips to the bargain meat bin, theres about 70# of just ground beef down there right now. Versatile enough for taco filling, spaghetti sauce, hamburgers, meatloaf, or any other yummy dish that springs to mind.

Was it expensive to do this? Not really. We had about $50 left over from this months grocery budget and advanced the rest from next months budget…which is good because it means that ground beef is off the list for next months shopping. I bought my deep freeze in 1992 and actually split the cost with someone so I’ve gotten about 18 years of freezer usage for $150. Honestly, though, you can find used freezers all day long in Craigslist….theyre really quite affordable. The vacuum sealer has been a staple in my kitchen for almost as long and it has paid for itself many times over by allowing me to take advantage of deals like the one today. On paper, we saved about $75 on meat…and we would not have been able to take advantage of that without the freezer or the vacuum sealer. So, that $75 that was saved could be applied against their initial cost if you needed to justify their purchase.

All in all a productive day for food security.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Morale patch for the bioweapons vest arrived today. The missus takes him out in the hills so he can get some exercise (and burn off some energy that would otherwise be spent tearing my house apart) and when he’s out running in the sticks I dont want him ‘mistaken’ for a coyote or other nuisance. So…reflective orange vest for puppy. We sent a picture of him wearing it to the manufacturer and they sent us another free vest and said they’d put his pic up on their website. Yes, my dog is doing endorsements. I think that, for all intents and purposes, puppytime is over and we should probably start getting more serious about his training. He’s a decent companion, when we’re not pulling shoes and socks out of his mouth, but I didnt sign on to this ride to have someone to talk to.

Speaking of things he eats, he ate half of one of my wool mittens yesterday. Fortunately I have about 20 more pairs but I was still a bit pissed off.
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Its going to be time to start this years seeds soon. I didnt start them last year until around March and I think that might have been a little late. I think next week I’ll dig out the gear and get things set up. Last years efforts at growing in buckets was a resounding success … so much so that I think Im pretty much done digging holes in my yard. The buckets were easier to keep watered, to move around as lighting requirements demanded, and were just easier to deal with all around. This year, I think I’ll get a little more complex in how I do things. Someone sent me this link about using a pair of nested buckets. Looks interesting. Last years peppers did pretty well, although the tomatoes were hit-n-miss. I think a smaller bush-type tomato will be called for this year. Last year I didnt do very much with herbs so I think this year I’ll correct that.
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A couple weeks back a fella from one of the neighboring businesses came by and chatted me up regarding preparedness. I gave him a few books and told him to read them. He came by today to say hello and we chitchatted some more. He said that I was a ’strange duck’, no doubt because of my own interests, but that he always learns something from me. I suppose Im not exactly ‘average’. In alot of ways I’m below average and in even more ways I’m neither above nor below average, just ‘different’. But, and this is improtant, I usually dont care. To paraphrase Popeye, I am what I am. You dont like it, thats cool..youre entitled to your opinion. You dont have to like me and I dont have to like you. Nothing wrong with that. I stopped caring about what people think about me a long time ago. I care what certain people, the people Im close to, think about me but theyve known me long enough, I hope, to figure that I’m generally an okay guy. Anyway, I gave the fella some more books and told him to come back to me when he was done with them and id be happy to talk end-of-the-world with him. He seems to be on track for becoming an ‘economics’ survivalist. That is to say, he sees economic issues and problems being more likely than a Mad Max we’re-all-eating-our-children future.
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Egypt apparently activated their ‘internet kill switch’ to isolate itself from the internet. Dissension needing to be muzzled and all that. Note that the Obama folks have been wanting an internet kill switch as of late. Not sure I see any reason for such a thing. At least, no reason that sits right with me, anyway.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Oh yeah, they want the Saiga and they want it bad……….

Note that they say, quite candidly, that IPSC and ‘practical’ shooting sports, if construed to be a ‘legitimate sport’, would make certain firearms exempt under the ’suitable for sporting use’ clause…..so they are refusing to say that IPSC and related events are actual sports.

That whistling sound you hear is the price of Saiga’s going up, up and away…………

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Well, if you thought there was a bit of panic buying going on after that Arizona shooting you should expect it to increase now that it’s official: Obama is gonna dust off the gun control agenda.

Expect the usual suspects – VPC, HCI, Chuckie Schumer, Feinstein, Boxer, and the other useful idiots – to start jockeying to become the face of the new initiative. Especially Chuckie Schumer, who can be mighty dangerous if you come between him and a camera.

I expect the usual price increases, from the usual vendors, on the usual items. Of course, youve already got all the stuff you need…right? Right? Bueller? Bueller?

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Sad case in the local paper today. An old guy disappeared after dropping off someone at the airport. A few days later they found him. Specualtion is that he took a few wrong turns, wound up in the sticks, got his GMC stuck in the snow and when he exited the vehicle, presumably to check his situation, the doors locked behind him and he died of hypothermia. Rough story. Im guessing he either didnt appreciate the severity of his situation or he didnt have the strength necessary to bust one of the windows and get back in the vehicle. I’d feel like an idiot driving back to town with a broken window and having to fork out a couple hundred bucks for repair, but its cheaper than a funeral.

Of course, thats just the preliminary take on things. The guy was on oxygen and had a few other infirmities as well so perhaps those factored in as well. If theres a lesson to be learned here it is that if youve got a vehicle that aoutomatically locks the doors when you leave, you might wanna have a Plan B. Im a fan of a spare hidden key but your mileage may vary.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Here’s an article from Time’s website:
The Myth of Homegrown Islamic Terrorism in the U.S.
A lovely little hit piece that says the bigger problem in America isn’t homegrown jihadists, but rather the easy availability of guns.
One little gem is this line:

Though acts of violent extremism by U.S. Muslims appear to have grown, their potency has not.

Or, to rephrase it, yes we have more incidents of violent extremism but thats okay because theyre largely ineffectual. Doesnt it seem to you that that is not the same as homegrown Islamic terrorism being a myth? This is like saying domestic violence isnt really on the upswing because even though we’re getting slapped around more its leaving less bruising.
The true threat, as the last paragraph tells us, is…well…you and me:

The U.S. faces far bigger and immediate challenges to the welfare and security of its citizens, not least from the ease with which unstable individuals can legally obtain and use deadly firearms. Addressing that danger will do more to protect Americans than obsessing about the phantom threat of homegrown terrorism ever will.

Amazing stuff, isn’t it? Theres a smoking crater in downtown Manhattan and for ten years we’ve had people running around third-world deserts but what we should have been doing, apparently, is worrying about whackjobs buying guns.

Theres a myth in that article but it isnt about terrorists.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Theres a little bit of discussion swirling around the blogosphere about Mountain House and the availability of #10 cans. This has been, as of late, pretty cyclical. About every year and a half some announcement goes up that MH is ‘restricting’ sales of their #10 cans of freeze drieds and all sortsa theories start flying around. Most of them revolve around the company’s entire production being bought up by the government (ours or someone elses) and it is thus a sign of the Great Impending Doom(tm).

Mountain House is s division of Oregon Freeze Drieds (OFD). OFD makes freeze dried (FD) food and sells it under several names, one of them being Mountain House. In addition, OFD also sells freeze dried ingredients to other manufacturers. The chicken in that little cup o’ soup packet? The apples in your instant oatmeal? The strawberries in your breakfast cereal? The blueberries in your granola mix? Yeah, its like that.

They do sell, of course, to the government as well. Probably guys like you and me, preparedness folks, are the smallest portion of the customer base. When production capacity becomes tight who do you think is going to be the guy who gets put on the waiting list? The company that buys $300,000 in freeze dried strawberries every year or the guy who buys $300 of camping food?

This is a bit similar to the magazine situation, though. I can count at least three similar bottlenecks from MH in the last several years. The lesson to be learned? Once the bottleneck is gone, buy what you need so that youre not standing in line with everyone else. I genuinely think about 40% of the people who are complaining about this current bottleneck are people who didnt decide to buy the stuff until they read about the delays. A case of “Huh..I better buy it now since its becoming hard to get” which is definitely not the time to go shopping…for anything.

FD’s may be disparaged as ‘yuppie survivalist food’ but it’s a lot more appetizing most of the time than ramen or rice/beans. Of course, the smart person would buy a little bit of everything and have a mix of FD, retort pouch, rice/bean/grain, and canned foods. Although you could certainly buy a years supply of food that was exclusively FD you’d be laying out a staggering amount of coin. However, if you can afford it, go for it. Canned tomatoes, FD vegetables, retort chicken, stored rice and youd have an excellent meal that covers the major food storage subgroups. Its all about infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Previous posts on the subject:
3/11/2010 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=1429#more-1429
6/26/2009 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=1033#more-1033
9/12/2008 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=622
11/20/2007 – http://commanderzero.com/?p=78#more-78