The Ultimate Answer to Kings

I got my quota this morning, but won’t be much good for the rest of the day.

All told I took apart a dozen pallets this morning, including two really small ones and one eight-footer that used to be the woodshed floor. Mostly junk pine but they always include some nice dense hardwood that are a colossal pain to dismantle but sure are nice in the woodstove.

And at the end of the ordeal, that’s how much there is. We’ll see how much it contributes to the newest tier when I cut it all to stovelengths and stack it tomorrow morning. There’ll also be some substantial time spent knocking nails out.

Right now don’t want to think about firewood anymore. I’m tired and want my lunch.

The nerve!

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s senior Democrat, called Kavanaugh’s remarks unseemly for a judicial nominee.

“This was someone who was aggressive and belligerent. I have never seen someone who wants to be elevated to the highest court in the country behave in that manner.

Lady, I’d have broken your nose.

Makes for at least a few weeks of warm.

No more putting it off!

I make a standing offer to all my neighbors: If you have old eyesore pallets or trash lumber you want rid of, you let me know and I’ll show up with a trailer and haul it off for free. Once in a while somebody takes me up on it…

…and I take it to my woodpile. Over the past year the pile has slowly but gratifyingly grown, and now it’s time to knock it back down. The objective this morning was to cut all the loose lumber to stove lengths and get it stacked. Then I’d have some idea how many pallets I need to take apart.

Two and a half hours later… Continue reading →

I saw this myself, but I’m too traumatized to testify so I just leaked it to the dems.

I believe I mentioned in the last care package post that I was interested to learn whether the adhesive on those traction strips Terrapod sent me worked better than the adhesive on skateboard tape. And the answer is…

…yes. Until it gets wet. 🙂 We had a couple of good late-Monsoon soakings yesterday, and they all came loose. And that’s why I always keep roofing nails around.

I’m also working on a way to put a handrail on those stairs, which can get scary when things are slippery. Winter is coming.

Still haven’t worked it out, but this morning I did resolve one issue…

There’s the handrail. That flood a couple of months ago washed a bunch of seasoned not-juniper out of the canyons, which was probably killed in last year’s flood. I’ve had my eye open for something suitable, and saw it yesterday evening. Went back with the cordless saw this morning and brought it home. Now I just need to figure out how to secure it to uprights.

Access to your stuff isn’t anybody’s human right.

In other news, communist rhetoric has never created a single commodity, or ever rendered any existing commodity infinite in quantity.

Wendy phrases it better.

Friday at least one of the pullets had a little adventure…

I arrived for morning chicken chores to find that the hens had excavated all the straw and too much of the dirt out from under the door of the Big Chickenhouse. There was a pretty good gap under the door that hadn’t been there before. Also, one of the Leghorn pullets was running around outside, cheeping piteously and trying to teleport through the yard fence to get back to her flock. There actually were a couple of ways a highly motivated pullet might have squeezed through the fence, but the gap under the door seemed the best explanation. Continue reading →

On this morning, September 25 2018, I opened the last can of Trader Joe’s House Blend Coffee that the Secret Lair will ever see.

This is one of the two sent me by Generous Readers and I was more inclined to save it for six months or a year. But it’s already five months past its Best By date (which means something with dark oily roasts, because they really do have a limited shelf life.) Also it turns out it wasn’t properly sealed from the store so it truly is past its prime. Probably I have already drunk the best coffee I’ll ever drink in my whole life. 🙁

Takes me five weeks or so to empty one of these. I may ritually cremate the can. Still haven’t found a replacement I like as well.

My original concept was to live on the contents of this tub exclusively until it was gone, to see what would happen. That would have taken eight long days. I gave up that plan on the afternoon of the second day because of gastric distress: All the creamy stuff was causing me to spend too much quality time with the Ivory Throne, and I do have work to do. So I’m bringing this to an end with a description of the final entrée in the tub.

The third entrée in the Augason Farms tub is good old supercheap macaroni and cheese.

Plus side: It’s actually pretty okay mac&cheese. I’ve had way worse. and there’s more here than four normal people would want to eat in a single meal. (that first picture shows half the available macaroni.) And there’s a ton of cheese powder, which works pretty well.

Minus side: It’s macaroni and cheese. You could buy cases of mac&cheese for what this tub cost. (Okay, I just fact-checked that statement and apparently you can buy a case of mac&cheese for roughly the same price as an Augason Farms tub. Man – you used to could buy a case of the stuff for like $3.) And I got over eating a lot of mac&cheese before I was out of my teens.

The bottom line here, since I’m not going to do this particular test any more, is that the Augason Farms Emergency Food Supply tub would be better than nothing in an actual emergency as long as you hadn’t lost any of your food prep infrastructure. You could never take it on the run with you unless you’re also bringing your stovetop and gas. You should (seriously) stay away from it if you’re lactose intolerant. Pre-packaged long-term storage food is a simple, logical and comforting way to stock food against the chance that supply chains will be cut in some undefinable future crisis. If you want to go that way, Regular Commenter Kentucky has pointed out that there are lots of similar products on the market, lots of information available concerning them, and there are probably better alternatives than this particular product.

The one thing I’m sure we can all agree on is that this is a subject that rates a lot of serious thought. Plenty of preppers out there settle for minimums, or get caught up in tacticool gear or wild scenarios, but shelves of securely stored long-shelf-life food are never a bad idea. The super-secure America with all the answers that I was born in, where the stores are always open and always take your money and always have stuff to buy, seems more an illusion with every passing year. Preparing to tide yourself and your people through an insecure future just makes sense.

Personally I like shelves and shelves of canned and jarred food of the sort I’m used to eating. But I’m an old one-legged guy who has pretty much already bugged the hell out. Barring a housefire I’m not going anywhere, and even then not far. I don’t need portability. I do keep my food stocks in multiple places, one of them pretty much absolutely fireproof. Frankly my need for sealed tubs of “emergency food supply” is limited. But in other scenarios I could see this sort of thing – not necessarily this particular version, with which I’m not especially impressed, but something like it – filling a pretty good niche.

The people nobody should listen to are the ones who pooh-pooh the whole idea of emergency preparation. Alas, those people tend to rise up in one’s own family, and overcoming their objections can involve drama. I’m not sure why, but it does seem common. Just keep telling yourself that nobody ever went wrong by being overprepared for bad things.

Second Woman Makes Accusation Against Kavanaugh

Over something that supposedly happened at Yale. Several decades ago. May or may not have happened at all, may or may not have been Kavanaugh, certainly not something that could ever possibly make it to a criminal or even civil court, but hey! If the accusation is “credible,” clearly we should send in the FB_frickin’I.

Deborah Ramirez, who studied sociology and psychology at Yale with Kavanaugh, outlined her accusations to The New Yorker after the left-wing publication contacted her, acting on a tip about a possible incident.

Ramirez said that she was not politically motivated to come forward but that she “works toward human rights, social justice, and social change.”

“In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty,” The New Yorker reports. “After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.”

The New Yorker notes that Ramirez’s lawyer, Stanley Garnett, is “a former Democratic district attorney in Boulder.”

And I’m sure we’ll learn that she’s been terribly traumatized by it for all these many horrid years. Oh, the flashbacks! Pay, Kavanaugh! Pay with your very life!

Remember the “false memories” of satanically abused day care kids back in the eighties? People were arrested and dragged through courts for years over that hysteria, as I recall. One guy spent years in jail. Sensible people stopped wanting to work in day care centers. All started by one mentally ill woman who died of alcoholism before the trials ever started.

Bend over, here it comes again. Now it’s going to be impossible for a man of the momentarily-wrong party to work in public life. Or maybe it’ll be impossible to be a man at all for a while, I guess we’ll see.

This sort of senatorial circus was inevitable, of course, the moment the Supreme Court became all about counting chairs – which for all I know may have come before Marbury v. Madison. After the Bork circus – the outcome of which I wasn’t that unhappy about at the time, I’m still not a Bork fan – and then of course the Clarence Thomas debacle, a ritual witch hunt was an inevitable waypoint in the downward trajectory of political appointments. Like when the spoils system got out of hand near the turn of the 20^th century, it’ll be come up with something entirely different or despair of ever getting anything done in the capital ever again.

Here’s hoping it takes them a good long while. As long as I can choke down my gag reflex and view this horror show as free entertainment. It’s hard, though. The Supreme Court is far too powerful, and the days when every goofy “progressive” notion that could be shoved through it would be shoved through it were not good days. Gridlock is good.

Hardly a day goes by I don’t thank the theoretical god or gods that I’m a hermit. Good luck out there.

Alas, this isn’t going to go eight days, or anything like eight days. For my sins I spent most of the afternoon fearful of moving too far from a toilet.

My undoing was one of the tub’s principal entrées, Creamy Chicken Rice.

Curiously, this package was also marked “8 portions,” which means the lunch and dinner entrées are consistently twice as big as the breakfasts. Sounds racist.

Let it be said that Augason Farms Creamy Chicken Rice is damned near terrible. Also, “creamy rice” is not a good emergency food for a number of practical reasons. First: When you cook creamy soup you leave the pot open and stir frequently. When you cook rice, you cover the pot and let it simmer for upwards of half an hour. When you cook creamy rice, you leave the pot open and stir constantly for upwards of half an hour while occasionally adding water to keep the whole thing from setting up like plaster. Bad enough on a beautiful stress-free Sunday afternoon. You want to try it during a hurricane or a sharknado or the end of the world as we know it or whatever drove you to pull the seal off the tub?

Second, any Mountain House mix I ever effortlessly rehydrated tastes better than this shit.

Third, as mentioned above, toilet. Lots of toilet. The creamy potato soup had me a bit rumbly yesterday but didn’t set me off. The creamy rice did the trick.

And I’m still not in any mood for supper, which would have been mac and cheese.

We’ll do the mac and cheese tomorrow. But then I think we’ll be drawing our eight-day trial to a close in two and a half days, with a round-up post.

Okay: So on my very first day, I cheated on my “emergency food only” diet…

…so I didn’t even do the third meal yesterday. I did do lunch, though…

…Creamy potato soup. Once again, as is I suppose going to be the protocol for this whole review, I divided the packet contents into four portions because the tub is for four people and I’m not four people. Continue reading →

Well okay then. I guess I’ll just drop what I’m doing, go back to the Lair, fire up the laptop, download all those photos currently floating around in Data Pergatory somewhere, and write that food review post I tried to write some hours ago except the server was down AGAIN and I couldn’t. Since I emailed all those photos to myself and when the TUAK server is down my email doesn’t work either.

Since I’m getting all this stuff for free I’m not really complaining. Free is good. But I am venting a bit because frustration. Running what amounts to a small business on infrastructure other people are essentially giving you for free isn’t a foolproof business model. But I like it most of the time, because free.

Anyway a post is imminent if the blankety-blank server doesn’t prevent it.

Okay, so this morning we opened the tub.

And immediately encountered our first snag. The tub bills itself as 48 hours of food for four people, and that’s the way it’s packaged. Not 192 hours of food for one person.

Tub contents are sealed packages of dried food-like substance, quantities as follows:

1 Cheese Powder
2 Elbow Macaroni
1 Creamy Potato Soup
2 Creamy Chicken Rice
1 Maple Brown Sugar Oatmeal
1 Buttermilk Pancakes

The instructions on each packet aren’t conducive to my original plan. Each packet is expected to produce at most a single meal – for four people. So there are two meals of chicken rice, one meal of potato soup, one of pancakes, one of oatmeal, and one of macaroni and cheese. Three group meals a day for two days. Makes sense, unless you live alone and without refrigeration. Not convinced I’ll be able to comfortably eke this out for eight days.

Fortunately I have plastic snack bags. Let’s see what happens if I divide one of these packets into four portions. Since it’s morning, we’ll start with the oatmeal… Continue reading →

Look what Big Brother sent me…

Two tubs of this Augason Farms emergency storage food, promising 48 hours worth of food for four people – or eight days for one person?

We Shall See. Tomorrow morning the tub gets unsealed. I will suffer for my art but I won’t collect scars for it if I don’t have to, so I don’t promise to go the whole eight days if the contents are just inedibly horrible. But if they’re not, Uncle Joel is going on an eight-day diet consisting of nothing but that stuff. Starting tomorrow, since today got off to a very weird start and the weirdness hasn’t actually slacked off much yet. I’m having chicken issues this morning.

Here’s something that will prove very useful and possibly career-saving…

Generous Reader Terrapod sent eight of these adhesive traction strips for the boardwalk below the porch, which recently dumped me on my ass when it was wet and slippery. I stuck one to a stair tread just to see if the adhesive works better than that on my usual skateboard tape…

…and – perhaps unfortunately – it really does. Now I have to get it off somehow because I really wanted it on the boardwalk. Or maybe there’s enough for both, I guess we’ll see. With the skateboard tape I usually just use roofing nails because that adhesive doesn’t work well on weathered 2X4s.

Landlady found a terrific sale on pork at Costco, already sliced into porkchop-like bricks. So we’re officially in winter prep mode!

And also in bedroom-decorating mode, it seems. Last month Ian gave me all four in his set of “Secret Weapons of WWI” posters, and this month I forked over the money for two frames.

I always enjoy Care Package Day. There’s rarely any telling what’s coming out of those boxes in the back of Landlady’s car.

Under socialism, no matter how bad things might get due to the machinations of the Looters and Wreckers and External Enemies^tm, our beloved masters will still be okay. They’ll do great, in fact. And that’s good, right? Because they’re so selfless and we love them so very very much.

Yes. It was 5:30 in the blessed AM and I was baking bread.

Why, you ask? What sane person would be doing that at such a time, when all good little boys and girls should be warm in their beds? Well, it had something to do with…

…this little shithead, who was apparently wide awake (at 4:30 in the blessed AM) and waiting for me to show the slightest sign of consciousness so he could climb as far onto the bed as possible given his physical abnormalities and share with me the joys of his night terrors or whatever the hell was going on in his tiny dysfunctional brain. He was frantic, whatever the reason.

In his defense, he did have to pee. But don’t we all first thing in the morning, and he doesn’t usually need to wake me at omigod:thirty to deal with the problem.

I dunno – maybe he just had a big drink of water before I closed the bedroom door for the night. We’re still getting used to each other. But this clamor first time I stir in the morning is going to get old. He’s liable to find himself exiled from the bedroom if it becomes a regular thing.

ETA: Okay, so not all bad. 7:45 and the bread’s done and the dishes are washed, and all before breakfast. Good boy, Laddie.

ETA Again: 8:05 and Dharma came to visit. Laddie likes Dharma – actually safe to say Laddie adores Dharma, quite past the point of forgetting that I or any of my wishes exist – but only on neutral ground. In HIS lair, he devotes himself to keeping her away from his stuff, which absolutely includes me.

Yeah, okay, the host has been having big server problems for some time, obviously. I’m told they’re on it, and also to expect more outages until the issue is resolved. Kind of figured that last bit out for myself and I’m not even a computer guy. Boy, I need to record that big asterisk on this month’s pageview stats.

I actually do have a couple of posts going but they require my turning the laptop on and sitting down to do them and I’m baking bread right now. Also I will get halfway through composing the first one just as the server takes another dump, and that will be time-consuming and frustrating.

So bear with us: we’re not gone, just experiencing technical difficulties.