Sticker shock

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It’s bad enough that at CostCo, cheapest gas in town, I was still forking out almost $4.70 per gallon (I’d happily put up with mean tweets for $2 gas), but then I decided to ease my agitated soul with some fast food. Nothing fancy, mind you…a double cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke. Nothing fancy. That’ll e $10.69 please. Are you kidding me? You could cover that meal combo with hookers and cocaine and it wouldn’t be worth ten bucks.

I feel sorry for the people on fixed incomes. It’s going to be some severe belt tightening and, for some, a major life change as mortgages that were previously affordable become less so as prices of everything else go up and start eating into the budget.

Fortunately, I’ve been somewhat ready for this for a while. I keep expenses low, multiple revenue streams, and no debt. Paying ten bucks for a cheeseburger still annoys me greatly, but at least I can still afford to do it. In fact, I still have enough margin that I can pick up some gold and silver, which I did this week. I told my metals guy that if he gets in any gold that he wants to sell at spot, let me know. Why would  he do that? Sometimes stuff comes in that is unattractive to a potential buyer…a $5 gold coin that someone drilled a hole in, an oddball weight of gold, a bent-in-half 1/10th, whatever. He buys it below spot and I’ll pay him spot for it. Why not? A tenth ounce of gold is still a tenth ounce of gold even if it is bent, tarnished, or whatever…as long as it’s really gold and weighs what it’s supposed to, I don’t care.

And in other news, while manhandling a box of bullets that weighted 70 pounds, I managed to crack a rib. Ow. Actually heard it go when it happened. So…moving a little slow this week.

And finally, Dopey Joe is stirring up the winds of ban in regards to gun control, which has now rebranded itself as ‘gun safety’. I bought another case of Pmags two weeks ago an was on the fence about whether it was a good idea. Now I feel better about it. Maybe a ban is coming, maybe not. But even if not, I’m still going to be ahead in terms of inflation.

It’s getting to be an even weirder world out there, kids. Let’s be careful out there.

New normals

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Just another day here in the interesting world that is America 2022. Sometimes I feel like a war photographer trying to chronicle battles and their aftermath so that future generations will know what happened. It seems like when I grocery shopping I spend about a third of my time examining the pricing and availability of items from the previous week so I can get some metrics.

There’s that old joke: “How did I go broke? Gradually and then all at once.” I suspect that will be the story of how the next Great Depression or World War or Black Plague starts…..gradually, and then all at once.

Not much I can do about it….I’m a flea on the back of a mammoth – I don’t steer it, I just ride it. As I’ve said before, there’s a point at which I stop working the pumps and instead start heading for the lifeboats. As of late, in the last couple years, I’ve narrowed my focus down to what I need to take care of myself and those I care about. My neighbors, distant family, and the total strangers around me…who make more money than me and have more resources…have had plenty of time to get to their lifeboats. I’m not setting a seat aside in my lifeboat for them. They saw the signs, same as me. They could have prepared, same as me. They’re going to have to live with their choices, same as me.

What does that mean, exactly? Am I envisioning starving neighbors begging for food in some Holodomor-like famine? No, I’m not. I’m of the opinion that it’s virtually impossible to starve in this country if you are reasonably intelligent and in generally good health. What I see happening to the unprepared and the head-in-the-sand-crowd is financial impacts that will destroy dreams of retirement, force the sale of homes and vehicles, put plans on hold, reduce a standard of living, and perhaps even drive people into homelessness or a wave of perpetual ‘couch surfing’. There will be a lot less Trader Joes and Whole Foods, and a lot more WalMart in some peoples lives.

Society is going to be remade over everything in the last couple years, and everything thats coming in the next few years. Much like how after 9/11 there was a ‘new normal’, I think by the time this current administration and its epic failures have run it’s course we will have a ‘new normal’. I like to think that the result will be a lot of people ‘coming over to our side’ but it’s entirely possible it may go in the other direction. Sure, the Great Depression set a generation of Americans on a path of being better prepared, but it also created a generation of Americans who believed that government entitlements were a solution.

I can’t really know whats going to happen. But, I’ve always known what could potentially happen, and as a result I tried to give myself some advantages that would improve my resilience. Paid for house and vehicle, heavy emergency fund, etc, etc. So far I haven’t had to use the .50 BMG but I have had to use the $50 bills.

So, I continue to live my life as close to what I’m used to. I’ve always kind of lived like it could fall apart at any moment so there’s not much change for me. But sometimes, like when I saw chicken jump sixty cents overnight, the hair on the back of my neck stands up and I wonder if maybe I’ve been right all along. Guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, I’ll continue to observe and note the interesting ‘signs of the times’ that seem to be all around us these days and that we will look back upon later and marvel at.

 

 

 

SafeCrate

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You know, if I were the president of a country that is in the midst of record inflation, shortages of basic foods and medicines, simmering with political and racial division, and on the verge of civil unrest….I’d probably be pushing for disarming the populace too. It’s about protecting themselves, not kids.
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Was up at Murdoch’s the other day looking for a 15-gallon blue  barrel to store another 100# of wheat in, when I noticed that they had a rather extensive amount of canning supplies on the shelf. Unsurprisingly, no lids. But, I did see these:

“SafeCrate” protective containers for canning jars. I’ve seen similar products but hadn’t seen them available locally before. Oddly, I figured some Made In China product would be all over Amazon. Nope. Didn’t see them there. Looks like the only online offering is off their website.

Regardless, this seemed like something I may have to pick up a few of. Once you go through the hassle and headache of canning a bunch of stuff, the last thing you want is unprotected jars rattling against each other as you transport them in an empty copier paper box.

Overnight price increase

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One nice thing about blogging is that it gives me some benchmarks to work with. Apparently, at the beginning of the year, boneless skinless chicken breast was $1.98/# at Winco. A bit later in January it jumped to $2.18/#…and increase of almost 10%. Today at Winco I was met with this:

Thats right, kids…it jumped sixty cents a pound in one swoop. Thats’s an overnight increase of 28%. Or, if you start with January, a 40% increase in chicken in six months. Put another way, if you spent the same amount of money as you did in January to buy 30 days worth of chicken, you’d only get about 21 says worth of chicken now.

So, unless you got a 40% raise in the last six months, you are gonna be at a net loss chicken-wise.

It must have been a very recent price increase because there were still a few lower-priced trays left:

Other than gas prices, this has been the most in-your-face thing I’ve seen. And this will be happening on everything.

25 years since The Postman

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It occurs to me that this year is the 25th anniversary of Kevin Costner’s second-worst movie – The Postman. (His first worst was, of course, the other post-apocalyptic movie Waterworld which was basically Mad Max with jetskis. Although Jeanne Tripplehorn makes the experience worth it.)

The short version is that after the apocalypse, a traveling actor masquerades as a postman from a distant restored federal government to garner himself protection and sustenance. However, he inadvertently inspires a movement to overthrow a warlord and actually restore the government.

The book, by David Brin, was a good bit darker with quite a few changes. Most notably, the book portrays civilization being held back from recovery by fanatical survivalists who adopt a heavily Darwinian (or Malthusian, I suppose) attitude. Survivalists are portrayed as madmen who are glad society has collapsed, embrace the every-man-for-himself world, and will fight to prevent the establishment of any type of restorative process. Also, the nature of and role of men and women is prominent in the book, as one character recruits her own army of women to subvert and manipulate the men, through feminine means, towards the shared goal of her and the postman.

The book also featured more of the day-to-day scrounging and hard-scrabble living that the postman has to go through before he stumbles onto his deceptive new career. There’s a scene in the book where he discovers a cache of high-value items (tooth powder, antibiotics, an AR7, etc.) and is forced to abandon it as bad guys approach. The book describes his anguish as he sees those items get taken by the bad guys when they would have made his life so much better. Good stuff. There are smaller, similar scenes throughout the story that remind you that this is a world where something as simple as a tooth infection can and will kill you.

The book is much less happy ending than the movie but both are still, in my opinion enjoyable. The movie is rather long at almost three hours, but Im cool with that since I’m a sucker for this genre of movie. There are humourous touches in the movie that are absent from the book, and, bizarrely, now-dead rocker Tom Petty appears as himself playing the mayor of a small town of survivors.

The movie still has the theme of townies-vs-warlords that was in the book but the strident and vehement attitude about evil ‘survivalists’ is absent in the movie. The bad guys are not really referred to as ‘survivalists’ but rather as just a rather large organized group of thugs, in the book they are quite clearly called ‘survivalists’ and are portrayed as ear-cutting killing-machines who are one-man armies.

Is it a good movie? No, not really? Is it a fun movie? Well, if your idea of fun is post-apocalyptic living, sure. Is it entertaining? Yes, if you enjoy this genre. I’d watch it if it came up for free on Amazon Prime or I saw it while flipping channels. Would I actually rent it? No. But I would buy the book. Not as great as Alas Babylon or Lucifers Hammer, but still an entertaining read with a little bit of food for thought here and there.

Oh, and according to the book, the events in The Postman take place in the near-future of…2013. I must have missed it.

LARPing the Weimar

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Y’know, just because I’m a survivalist with a closet full of guns, a basement full of food, and a winners attitude doesn’t mean that I actually want the Bad Things to happen.

I’m really curious to see how all this…mess…shakes out. I can’t see a way where any of these nagging things like inflation, ‘supply chain issues’, threats of war, pandemic, etc, come to a close any time soon. A year? Maybe. Two years? Maybe. Three months? Not gonna happen. But…I’ve been wrong before.

I have the worst record at the predicting the future, but I just cannot fathom a scenario where prices do not continue to rise, driven by higher fuel prices, absurd spending, and organic/manufactured logisitics issues. Heck, I just bought a set of tires the other day that I really didn’t want to buy because I knew, with the same level of certainty I know the sun will rise tomorrow, that they would just cost more later assuming they were even available. Sometimes it feels like LARPing the Weimar Germany days.

One thing I’m not doing these days is buying guns and ammo (although I may have just bought another case of Pmags). I settled the gun and ammo thing quite a while back. Which means right now my focus is on pretty much everything else because I think it’s a fait accompli that everything is only going to get more expensive and decrease in availability.

Like what? Geez, man,…everything. What am I buying more of? Every consumable I can think of…soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, socks, shoes, q-tips, sponges, dish soap, batteries, etc, etc. Im actually reviewing the Preponomicon to see if maybe I should bump up my ‘ideal amount’ on a few things. And I was hoping that I was past the expensive part of tings, but nope. And, couple that with Bidenflation, and it’s an even harder kick to the fiscal jimmies.

But…I am at a level of resilience that makes me feel more confident….not about the future, but rather my ability to get through better than most.

$4.40 a gallon. And there’s no sign of stopping

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I wish the stock market was going to the moon like gas prices were…then maybe I could afford gas.

Is there anyone in the world who hasn’t figured out yet that if the fuel that runs the trucks that delivers your food goes up in price, everything delivered by those trucks will also go up?

I fill my truck up even when its only down to 3/4 of a tank. Why? Because if I wait until I’m at 1/4 tank, the gas prices will be higher. So I constantly keep filling the tank to remain ahead of the price increases. Who does that???? Zimbabweans. Venezuelans.

And the worst is yet to come: government ‘relief’. Price controls? Nationalizations? Subsidies and rebates? Who knows? But there is no problem that cannot be made worse by government intervention.

Me…I’ll at least be able to eat, even though I’ll have to ride my bike everywhere.

Literally, there have been revolutions and coups that started over this sort of thing.

Say what you will about Trump, but I remember a glorious moment of sub-$2 gasoline.

Mill arrival

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Almost five weeks after I ordered it, the grain mill I ordered finally arrived. NGL, I was starting to think it wasn’t going to ship at all. And, in the intervening time, the price rose almost 25% as availability shrank. But..it’s here.

Impressions? Definitely a product that is built to last. But…I ordered the spare parts nonetheless. My biggest problem was that I simply don’t have the counter space, nor the sturdiness of construction, that this thing will require. So, I gave it some thought and came up with something that seems to work.

First consideration was space. I cant just go buy or build a sturdy little bench and bolt this thing to it. I just don’t have room for that. Secondly, whatever I bolt it to has to be able to resist the forces exerted on the mill. In other word, if I start really leaning into this thing I need the mill and its mounting surface to not walk around or wobble.

Solution? Black and Decker Workmate WM225.

I mounted the mill to some scrap lumber, and then c-clamp that to the bench. The bench folds flat like a folding chair when not in use, so the footprint is minimal. And, thanks to physics, if I stand on the bench’s step while turning the mill handle I cannot lift the mill or the bench….for the same reason you cant stand in a bucket and lift yourself up in it. So…that works.

The mill itself looks like it’ll last a lifetime. I tried grinding up some hard white wheat and the result was a very fine flour. Changed out a few parts, threw in a handful of dried corn, and experimented with several different grades of fineness.

I will say that I can see why some people motorize these things. But, I picked up the extension handle for it so the extra leverage makes a big difference.

I haven’t done much, if any, baking in a while so I’ll have to see how the taste of fresh ground flour and cornmeal compares to what I’m used to.

Also, I can see where it might make sense for me to go pick up another 16-gallon ‘blue barrel’ and dump another hundred pounds of wheat or corn into it… just in case. A couple hundred pounds of each should last for quite a while.

Yeah, the mill was a major hit to the wallet but over the rest of my anticipated life span that knocks it down to something like a dime a day for a tool that will last forever and help keep me and the people I care about fed.

 

Randy Weaver passes

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SPOKANE, Wash — Randy Weaver, patriarch of a family that was involved in an 11-day Idaho standoff with federal agents 30 years ago that left three people dead and helped spark the growth of anti-government extremists, has died at the age of 74.

I met Randy Weaver back in the late ’90s. Seemed like a nice enough guy…quiet, didnt say much. But, I guess having your unarmed wife shot by a .gov sniper will take the wind out of your sails.

This guy was one of several focal points for the ‘militia movement’ back in the ’90s. I think after Ruby Ridge, he just wanted to be left alone to take care of his kids and move on with what was left of his life. Raw deal all around.