Patient without patience II

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So my doctors appointment was mostly uneventful. They didn’t really tell me anything I couldn’t already guess. (Exercise, lose some poundage, stop eating crap. Real surprise, right? That’ll be $450 please.)

Apparently they are screening for domestic violence or some such. I forgot to mention this gem from the new patient intake process:

Them: “Is there anyone who makes you feel unsafe at home?”

Me: “Well, the last time someone made me feel unsafe in my home, I killed them.”

Them: <pause> “Ok, the doctor will be with you shortly”

I understand that an argument could be made that the doctor needs to look at certain environmental considerations in order to get a full, well-rounded picture of your health. What you do for a living, what your living situation is, etc. You may have a rash on your skin that no one can explain…until the doctor discovers that you work in a plutonium processing plant, at which point the penny drops. So, yes, I can understand some of the questioning. But at the same time, I’m just here for some bloodwork…not to trade life stories with some assistant.

However, some doctor/patient interactions are interesting stories. I had an elderly customer come into the shop once with a beautifully preserved old Smith .32 revolver. I asked the customer, who was a doctor, how he had come into such a lovely and well-preserved pre-war Smith. Turned out his dad was a stereotypical country doctor …taking payment in chickens, that sort of thing…back during the Depression. One day dad and the sheriff had to go quarantine a family. This was back in the day where they would nail a notice of quarantine on the house and everyone would keep away and isolate the residents. So the doctor and the sheriff go up on the porch and start tacking this notice up on the door. A gunshot rings out and the deputy tumbles backwards with a bullet where his beltplate should have been, the bullet coming right through the door the deputy had been tacking the notice onto. The doctor, demonstrating the better part of valor, rockets of the porch and into a ditch by the road. He then runs down the road to a house with a phone and calls the sheriff. Sheriff comes out and they drag the guy out of the house and haul him to jail. As the sheriff is winding things down, he walks up to the doc, tosses him the pistol the bad guy used, and says “Here. Souvenir.” And his dad kept that pistol for the rest of his life and it wound up going to my customer. He had no intention of selling it, but liked telling the story.

I bet that country doctor never asked anyone about their preferred pronouns, what their ‘assigned’ sex at birth was, or if anyone in the house made them feel unsafe. Different, and in some ways better, times.

The year is 7.67% done and so far I have only bought __1__ gun

Patient with no patience

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I have a doctors appointment tomorrow. In addition to asking me on the forms what my preferred pronouns are and what my “gender assigned at birth” is, they also asked if I had guns in the house. Thats when the Woke exhausted my patience:

I’ll be curious to see if they choose to pursue it further.

You can imagine how it’ll go when they start asking me about my Kung Flu vaccination status.

Article – California Resident Credited With Creating Homemade Water Pump That Saved Home from L.A. Fire

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I haven’t posted anything about the fires in California for a couple reasons –

a) Its California
2) I’m not there, I’m not an expert, and my opinion is worth all of what you pay for it
III) I doubt theres anyone reading this who, in that locale and environment, wouldnt have taken steps to increase their resilience against fire

But not all Californians are clueless volunteer/victims.

But Palisades Highlands father and son, Gene and Patrick Golling, credit the survival of their house—when most in the neighborhood perished—to a homemade water pump and their swimming pool.

Before evacuating, the pair used the water pump they’d bought last summer and directed 20,000-gallons of water from their swimming pool on to their home and the surrounding hillside.

Its an article about a couple guys who bought some homestead fire-fighting equipment and basically hosed their place down for several hours and came back to…their house.

Seems like every place worth livingi n out in California has a swimming pool. Why not transfer all that water to the roof of your house and the grounds around it?

There is no shortage of outfits online selling firefighting equipment for the DIY’er. And while fighting a forest fire on your own with no training is a recipe (extra crispy recipe, actually) for disaster I will completely understand the man who does in order to protect his home.

And, yes, when the sheriff shows up and tells you to evacuate or else … there may not be much you can do, but you can at least leave the hoses running and the pumps pumping like some sort of hydro-sentry-gun.

I’ve investigated this sort of stuff here and there over the years as I daydreamed moving to a nice quiet place in the sticks. Make no mistake…metal roofing, some type of reservoir, and a well designed network of hose connection points is definitely in the cards.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more articles about people either beating the fires by tactical house construction design or water-projection defenses. Surely there’s gotta be a bunch of people, even in California, who saw the writing on the wall and invested in concrete shingles and water pumps. Perhaps the media doesnt want to encourage people to rely on something other than .gov for their safety. Or maybe no one noticed. Or maybe no one thinks it’s newsworthy. But, if it were me, I’d have had my pool plumbed to me eaves-mounted sprinkler system within the first week of building the place. But, easy to say since I’m not there.

Nonetheless, it is worth a trip through the internet to see whats available for when you do need to be your own basement-flooding, hose-dragging, ladder-monkey. 😉

ConSci twenty years on

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As I may have mentioned before, I’ve been doing some major cleaning and re-organization in my basement. Since I’ve been squirreling away stuff down there for the last thirt years, there’s gonna be a rather interesting collection of stuff down there. And some of it is goes back those full thirty years. Thing is, things change over thirty years… Technology, manufacturing, etc, all changes to some degree. So, what artifact from the the pre-Y2K days do we have today? Why, it’s the ConSci Power Pack:

Very simply and succinctly, this is a manufactured version of the classic battery-in-a-box

The ConSci power pack is a 12v battery (and associated electronics) encased in a .50-cal ammo can to keep everything protected and water tight. It featured a pair of female 12v ‘cigarette lighter’ sockets to allow use of common 12v items of the era. Here’s what it looks like:

This thing has been sitting in my basement, plugged in and charging, for over twenty years. So, I decided to see how well it would work. Remember this lamp from my how-long-will-it-run experiment? The answer to the question of how long the ConSci would run the lamp is two-and-a-half-days of continuous use. Thats about a week of use if you used it for eight hours per day. This is less than what results were when I performed this experiment with the battery jump pack I purchased at CostCo.

The battery in the ConSci is smaller and less capacious than the one in the battery jump pack, so I suppose it isnt a truly fair comparison. And thats fine. What is important is that after twenty years this thing will still perform admirably for most emergencies.

The ConSci was discontinued a long time ago. But the whole battery-in-a-box concept has been done to death on the internet. There are all sorts of websites that give you an Amazin shopping list of everything you need to build your own version. Or, as I’ve done, pick up one (or two) of those battery jump packs and leave them plugged in and ready to go. The newer ones have built in inverters and USB ports. I’d take one of those over the ConSci for its capacity and greater versatility.

Nice to see, though, that this thing still work and the battery hasnt cooked itself after being left on the charger for twenty years.

MH – 25 years later

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There used to be a gun/outdoor store in this town that did a ”sidewalk sale’ every year. They would set up tents in the parking lot, put tons of merchandise out there, and have a sale. Problem was, when the store closed at night you couldnt just leave all that stuff out in the parking lot unprotected. Thats where I came in. I would sit out there all night in a lawn chair keeping an eye on the stuff in exchange for store credit. I then took that store credit and cleaned them out of some of their leftover Y2K Mountain House inventory. Mind you, this was all around 2000-2001.

So, I have a bunch of MH in #10 cans that I have been sitting on for about 25 years. In the time I’ve added to my MH stash quite considerably, so it’s not a hardship to pull out one of those cans, crack it open, and see how it fared.

I am not the first guy to do that. Friend Of The Blog(tm) [And friend of Gun Jesus] Joel, over at his blog, cracked open some old MH and had mixed-but-generally-good experiences.

I’ve no doubt that this stuff is going to be just fine but I have a chance here to do a little empirical data-gathering so why not? Lets go!

The sales tag on it indicates that it was put out for sale sometime in 1999, which makes sense since it was part of that stores attempt to cash in on the Y2K thing. The date stamping on the bottom of the can confirms that, yes, this stuff is a quarter century old.

Grabbing a can opener and removing the lid shows….ghostly white pasta. The pasta, being larger than the other components of this meal, sit on the top of the can and the smaller components have migrated to the bottom.

So, lets dump the whole can into a bowl and stir it up.

The contents of the can appeared just fine and smelled unremarkable. The powdered cheese and tomatoe mix had caked a bit at the bottom of the can but it broke up easily.

The instructions call for 3/4 cup of boiling water to one cup of food, and then letting it sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Okay, lets do that.

The final result, after five minutes, was this. I really should have let it sit for ten minutes but I figured I’d follow the instructions at their minimum.

The big question: how was it? It was fine. It wasn’t as spicy as the modern spaghett-with-meat-sauce that MH has out these days. It had a very faint ‘tinny’ aftertaste but I think thats actually the normal flavor. Was it edible? Yeah, as best I can tell. I mean, I guess I’ll have to report back in 12 hours. The taste was about what I expected… pretty much on par with your average Chef Boyardee product. After a long day of hanging looters, manning the roadblocks, and digging out of the rubble, this would be a fine meal.

So, yeah, it seemed to hold up just fine. The can had sat on a shelf in my basement since Y2K. The temperature down there was fairly consistent…never getting below freezing in the winter, and never getting over 70 in the summer. It was, pretty much, kept in the classic “cool dark place”.

The tag on the can indicates that it was about $32 for this can back in ’99. I’m an MH dealer, so I can see that todays dealer price for this same product is currently $29.50 per can. Amazon shows it for about $53, which is pretty close the 100% markup on MSRP for Mountain House cans. If you want to amortize it, it comes out to about $1.28 per year to have it sit there all this time.

What was i expecting? Actually, pretty much this. I’ve read reports from people opening even older cans of MH and finding it just fine. It really does appear that the 30-year shelf life on these products is pretty much spot on.

I’ve added more recent production MH into my supplies over the last few years so I have no probem ‘wasting’ this, one of my oldest cans of food. Its quite worth it to me to confirm what I’ve believed all along about the longevity of the MH products.

So, there you go, guys. Buy the cans and you can be pretty certain of at least 25 years of life…although I have no doubt that it’d be just fine for at least another five or ten years on top of that.

Bag O’ Tricks(tm) – Wordage on cordage

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I don’t think there’s anyone who could argue that paracord isn’t a handy item to have. People use it to replace their shoelaces, weave it into bracelets and belts, or just keep big hanks of it in their gear, in order to always have some handy.

True paracaord is made of multiple strands of smaller cordage, usually seven strands, and those strands are usuall made of three smaller strands. (Don’t quote me on those numbers.) The cheap Chinese knock off cordage is just a nylon sleeve with some sort of poly fiber core. Avoid that crap. Spend the money, get the good stuff. Take a deep breath, tense up your core, and pay the money for a giant spool of the stuff. There’s no point in doing things halfway and buying, say, 100′ of the stuff and thinking “that’ll do it.” There’s just so much to do with paracord.

For me, the reason I carry it in the Bag O’ Tricks is to tie doors open, tie doors shut, hoist things up to places, secure things closed, hold things open, create lanyards for gear, etc, etc. Dude, there are hundreds of reasons to have a generous amount of this stuff in your gear. But the problem is, how the heck do you store it neatly? I mean, you want it to be stored in such a manner that it doesn’t turn into a rats nest that leaves you standing there with a Gordian knot of paracord.

Originally, I simply rolled all my paracord into ball, like yarn, and then wrapped it in a couple cut-inner-tube-rubber-bands to keep it from unspooling itself. But, there were a couple problems… Most of the time it worked out just fine, but more than a few times the rough-n-tumble of tossing my bag around would sometimes overcome my efforts and things would get all tangle-y. The other problem was that for the amount of paracord I wanted to keep in my bag (the more, the better) the ball of cord was fairly substantial and not a very efficient use of space in my bag.

Originally, I figured the simple solution was to simply wind the cord around something to keep it one place. I tried several different ways of dong it but everything seemed to fall short. First, I chucked a length of dowel into a power drill and wound a bunch of cord on that. It worked, kinda, but still unwound itself at times. Then I tried something with a flatter profile… I cut a butterfly-shaped wedge of thick cardboard and wound it around that. That worked pretty well but eventually with all the banging around the cardboard got bent and lost its rigidity (hey, it happens to us all, right?)… back to square one.

Surely I can’t be the only person with this desire to have an organized way of carrying around a buncha paracord, right? What does the free market come up with?  Handiest I found was this –  a simple piece of plastic with a built in razor cutter and a pocket to hold the cigarette lighter used for melting the ends of the cord. To keep things even more organized, I keep it in a snug ziploc bag…this way if it does start to unravel (which, so far, it hasn’t) it all stays in one place.

One other item I found interesting was this geegaw. Its a belt-mountable dispenser that lets you pull off a length of cord and cut it – all one handed. Its 50′ worth of cord, which is useful, though I prefer to have a lot more than just 50′ worth. Where it shines is that this is about the size of a pair of tape measures side-by-side, keeps it self free from snagging and tangles, is refillable, and is just generally pretty well thought out. If you don’t mind it being only 50′ this is a pretty nice one-stop-shopping solution.

I really can’t overemphasize the utility of paracord. It really is one of those products that is ‘only limited by your imagination’.. But my experience has been that there are a lot of times, even without the world coming to an end, where having this stuff is amazingly useful. I really think you’d be foolish not to make this stuff a ‘must have’ in your emergency gear or everyday carry bag.

As an aside, it is also worth mentioning that this type of paracord is also available in a variety of colors….ODG for those military and subtle needs, and blaze orange for the ‘needs to be visible’ applications. And pretty much every color in between.

BUT….make sure you’re getting the multiple-strand stuff. Not the cheapo Made In China ‘mil-type’ crap. Lowering your gear from the rooftop of a flooded WalMart into a waiting rowboat is no time to discover that saving $15 by buying the ‘almost as good’ product was  a bad idea. Don’t cheap out on gear that might turn out to be very mission-critical someday.

And while we’re on the subject, for Crom’s sake, learn to tie some knots. Without getting into boffin country, there are an amazing amount of knots out there that have qualities that make them very much worth knowing. Grab five feet of paracord, go jump on YouTube, and learn some useful knots. Seriously.

The year is 1.9% over and I still haven’t bought any guns.

I have gone __7__ days without buying a gun this year.

Steyr calling

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Well, the year is approximately 0.8219% over and I haven’t bought a gun yet, so that’s progress.

However…..

My final gun of 2024 showed up today. The conversation at work went like this:

Me: Ok, I’m outta here for lunch. I need to go hunt down FedEx.

Boss: Picking up a gun?

Me: Yup. Want me to bring it by and show it off to you?

Boss: Absolutely!

And that how this monster wound up sitting on the table in the conference room.

It’s a Steyr HS50M1. A five-shot .50 BMG bolt action.

I suppose you’re asking “Hey Zed, don’t you already have a .50?” Yes I do. The Barrett is a long-recoil action, much like a Browning A5 shotgun or Rem Model 8/81 rifle…the whole barrel recoils back and forth with each shot. This is not a recipe for accuracy. But, for what the Barrett was designed for, anti-materiel, it’s just fine. You don’t need a huge degree of accuracy to hit a parked plane, a fuel bladder, a microwave dish, or pipeline manifold…the sort of targets anti-materiel guns are designed for. But if you do want precision in a .50, you’re probably going to have to lean towards a bolt action. My first choice was a Barrett M95 since I already had the 82A1, but finding one was a stretch. Plenty of M99’s out there for about $3500-4000, but I wanted a repeater.

I almost bought the first version of the HS50 when it was still a single-shot gun. Was about $3000 at the time and I just couldn’t swing the deal. Different story nowadays.

This is yet another five-foot gun thats gonna be expensive to top off with glass. But, if I can keep myself from buying any more guns for a while, maybe I can afford the glass something like this deserves…thats gonna be a research project all on its own.

And…I still have to buy the reloading gear.

Another smart question would be why get a .50 ‘long range’ rifle when the .338 Lapua will have similar range and be logistically easier to feed? Well, three reasons. The first is that I just like the idea of having something that .gov doesn’t like people having. Or, in other words, “Because I Can!”.  Second, it’s just dang cool. And third, the .50 has something that the .338 does not – comparatively better availability of AP, API, APIT, Tracer, and Raufoss ammo. And while I will happily go to my grave without ever needing AP, API, APIT, Tracer, and Raufoss ammo, they are all a hoot to shoot at the range at steel. And you never know what the future will bring. When Skynet starts cranking out T-800’s, a little API could be handy.

I have gone __3__ days without buying a gun this year.

The closing of the year

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Ah 2024….we hardly knew ye.

Well, 2024 in revue..lets hit it.

World didn’t come to an end. Didn’t have to use my AK. Or Glock. Thats a victory.

Election went better than I had hoped, but its just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. Still have a job and even snagged a little raise. The people I care about are doing well. Still have a house. Did well in the market this year, especially in November, so I’m positioned to buy property far better than I was positioned at the beginning of the year…just gotta keep my eyes open.

About the only thing I can really complain about is that I didn’t find the property I want yet. Other than that, I really have nothing to complain about.

Forecast for ’25: Ukraine winds up having to come to the table as war fatigue sets in. Inflation is above 2% but nothing like what it was under Biden. Bidenistas become the Japanese hold outs of the political world, staying behind in government to crap in Trumps punch bowl every chance they get. At least one more assassination attempt is made/thwarted. Gas prices drop to lowest prices in four years. Markets are shaky, but ultimately trend upward. Wall does not get built. China continues to be the biggest threat to…everything. Alec Baldwin does not move to France. Cubs don’t win Series.

I want to think 2025 will be a better time under a better administration, but with the level of political balkanization out there…well, even the most well-intentioned executive will have trouble getting meaningful things done. Years that are divisible by five have always been rough ones for me so I’m going into this new year with my eyes open.

But, 2024 leaves, 2025 arrives, and I’m still here. Calling that a win. Good luck.