To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug-out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those — or excerpts thereof — in the Odds ‘n Sods Column or in the Snippets column. Let’s keep busy and be ready!
Jim Reports:
With the recent foul weather, I made myself useful with a few small indoor projects. One of them was making a protective storage tube for our kitchen glass candy thermometer. It had heretofore been stored loose in our kitchen knife drawer. To my actuarial mind, that had a future “unfortunate accident” written all over it. I had been planning to construct a cardboard or wooden box for it. But then I settled on just using a scrap length of 1″ diameter white Schedule 40 PVC pipe, taped at one end. Wrapping the candy thermometer in 1.5 turns of paper towel and sliding it into the tube worked perfectly. That sure beats the potential risk of breathing mercury vapors for the rest of my life.
I helped Lily sort through the last of the storage apples, from our orchard’s fall harvest. A few were starting to go bad. Some of the marginal ones went out to our horses, for winter treats. After Lily sorted through and processed all of the bins, the remainder fit in the two bins at the bottom of our refrigerator. Once those are used up — probably by late February — we will shift to relying on dried apples, dried apple & cashew bars, frozen applesauce, and canned applesauce.
I assembled several new wire rack shelves in the hall that leads to our master bedroom. That hall doubles as storage space, primarily for large cooking utensils, pantry items, and extra canning jars. It is gratifying to finally get that hall organized and to see that space fully optimized. (Lilly will discuss that project, in detail.)
I caught up on cataloging some antique cartridge guns and some modern blackpowder percussion guns in the Elk Creek Company online catalog. Notably, the latter included four blackpowder deer hunting rifles that I acquired by bidding on an estate collection. One of these is a .45 caliber full-stocked rifle made by Jukar, in Spain. All of the rest are .50 caliber, and mostly made in Italy. Two of them are half-stocked Hawken-style rifles, but one is a scarce original Doc White inline-capped .504-caliber scoped deer and elk rifle. That rifle was made by White’s in Utah, back in the late 1990s. All four of these rifles are in great condition and quite reasonably priced. Take a look!
Now, Lily’s part of the weekly report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
The weather has once again been mostly rainy with some snow showers, mostly in the low to mid-thirties for lows and high temperatures. We do have a dusting of snow on the ground right now. It is a warmish winter here thus far. I don’t expect us to see too many cold days even with that Polar Vortex coming. We might just be on the edge of it. We shall see.
This week I was busy for two days with Jim reorganizing the new shelving units in the Pantry Hallway and in the kitchen. I moved a lot of my food preservation items, such as the juicer, meat grinders, food savers, milking paraphernalia, Pressure Canner, water bath Canners, 4, canning lids, mason jar assorted lids, a bag of fermenting lids and followers, cheese press and molds, out there. Some of these items had been on an extra large metal shelving unit in the kitchen. We emptied that unit and Jim moved it out to the shop. He assembled a smaller shelving unit that we put back in the kitchen for quick access to all of my cast iron pots, and pans. I emptied out two large rolling drawer-type shelves in a cupboard and moved out most of my large bowls and pitchers and some other things to the Pantry Hallway. I also put my Revere stainless steel pots on one of those large rolling type shelves along with my Vitamix blender. Now that is much closer to the usual workstation.
Well, I have to say it, Ya know all of those YouTube videos of “show the world your well-stocked pantry”? Well, NOW our hallway looks a little bit like that. Before it had been a stacked up, jumbled mess. Now it is orderly, and pleasing to look at, but still not quite finished being organized. I have some fine-tuning yet, to do. Of course, I have to confess that this original disorganization in the Pantry hallway does not reflect the orderliness of our larger Cold Cellar room, located elsewhere on the ranch. That is well stocked with dry foods and organized, and nearly picture perfect. But the house Hallway Pantry wasn’t. But now it is.
In the Hallway Pantry we store some of our wet-packed canned goods as well as all of the food preservation supplies and foods and goods that I use regularly but not often enough to be in the kitchen. Now the kitchen is very minimalistic with only the stuff that I use on a very regular basis and everything else is located just around the corner in the Pantry hallway.
It feels really good to have this done. We also had a small dictionary table at the end of the kitchen counter that held our base phone and my kitchen cookbooks/food preservation books, stationery, and phone books. It was too crowded and stuffed and I had more books that I wanted to put in that area, so Jim built another smaller wire rack with four shelves for that section and we retired the old wooden sloped dictionary table. Now it looks very neat and clean and all of my books that I want there, fit nicely with the phone on top. It is looking quite modern, clean-edged, and uncluttered.
A Special Request: Too Much Inventory
In light of all the reorganization that is taking place in our Pantry hallway and kitchen, we would also like to reorganize our Office/Bedroom. Presently, it looks like a warehouse with all of Jim’s Elk Creek Company antique long gun inventory lining one wall. We are overstocked. I have been extremely patient over the years. I would appreciate it if you would please consider buying one or more of them, so that we can have a more proper bedroom. Thank you for considering my heartfelt request.
Of course this week, I did lots of dishes, vacuuming, floor washing, laundry, and cooking. I made a quiche for multiple breakfasts for Jim and Miss Violet. I made lots of greens and fruit smoothies this week.
I cleaned the Hen house twice this week.
I started another batch of chicken eggs in the incubator.
I cleaned out the cow stalls and reworked the trench to drain the water pooling in the cow stall doorway. But it didn’t drain as well this time. The front stall got dirty and very wet during the past rain this week. We need a freeze for all of our animal’s health sakes.
I also continued to clean the edges of the loafing area right where the horses and bull are fed. I carted away yet, another five wheelbarrow loads of wet manure and hay..
At this point, I have decided to allow hay packs to develop in the sheep sheds of flock Number 1 and the shed for the new dairy sheep flock. So I won’t clean them until at least after the polar vortexes go through. I’ll leave them long as their packs stay dry — and thusfar they are — and they don’t smell.
I started onion seeds in early July, last summer. They grew into very small bulbs and I had them overwintering in the outside greenhouse. I brought them into the winter greenhouse bedroom this week so they could get on with their growing so I could plant them as much bigger bulbs this coming spring. I planted another bussing tray with lettuces in the greenhouse bedroom.
Early in the week, just I went downhill night skiing with the son and three older grandsons, at Schweitzer Mountain. We had another blast. This time, we warmed up with three runs down the beginner slopes, twice down Happy Trails and once down Enchanted Forest. Then we all of us got on the Basin Express Quad lift and went up to the top, to the Midway Trail. For me, it was the very first time up there. The older boys had been up there once before with some friends.
Whew, the Basin Express quad lift was super swift the moment one sat down on it. It whisked you away up the mountain. The lift was a thrill in itself. The Midway Trail was very steep. I’m from the northeast, and I’m going to say this: The west’s blue trails are the east’s black trails. I did it. Though, it was super steep for me. I prefer idyllic skiing, gentle slopes, like a walk in the park/touring with some speed, but not constantly braking for your life. I was constantly braking and going long across the slope before turning. I also tried to do short runs across the slope with many quick turns. But it was too fast and steep. Anyhow, we did three runs before my thighs were absolutely screaming at me and threatening to seize up.
At the bottom after the third run, I casually asked the two older boys, who I was mostly skiing with — their dad was skiing with their younger brother who was slower at this point — if they were up for another run down Midway. Surprisingly and thankfully for me, they said they wanted to do some more runs down Happy Trails. Yeah! I was so glad and relieved to hear that. I wasn’t sure if my thighs could’ve survived another Midway run. Happy Trails is nice and gentle and easy and fun to go down, and to practice technique on, so we did that three more times. Then the lifts stopped and night skiing was over.
Oof! The next two days every time I had to squat down or go down our few stairs in the Pantry Hallway, or down the porch stairs, or climb up and over a tubular panel to get grain and alfalfa pellets for the cow or kelp granules for the sheep in the barn stall — no gate there — I yelped from muscle pain in one calf and my thighs. Also the very next day, I did a lot of heavy shoveling of wet manured hay which also caused my back muscles to be a bit sore so that added to the yelp of pain. By the third day, the pain felt “good”, meaning that I was healing and feeling much stronger. It reminded me of my cross-country running days after hard workouts when my leg muscles would hurt for a few days. Good memory! 😉
I do want to go up to the top of Schweitzer Mountain someday during a sunny day and go all over the mountain on the long blue trails to “tour and explore”. I think that would be a blast. I have yet to do their outback section and I want to see the views from the top. Plus if I go a few more times in sooner intervals, then my thigh muscles will strengthen and be able to handle more of the steep slopes…
We are again looking out for our neighbor’s property until spring. Jim and I walked to their place this week to check up on it. All is in order.
We picked up an Azure Standard order this week. We are stocking up again, for the rest of the winter. I bought some produce to freeze, and some garden fertilizer, and other things. We are hearing threatenings of soon-coming Lockdowns from bird flu and other virus possibilities, so just in case, we’re making sure we are set to sit it out, here, if we must. Trust me, I don’t have nice words for describing those in “control”.
I did spend one afternoon lying around, napping and resting. I needed to have a relaxed break from everything we have been doing, a recuperation time.
I continued writing out Deuteronomy. I am in Chapter 11. This week I listened through the Mamre website to Chapters 1-2 being read out loud in the Hebrew language and followed along reading both Hebrew and English texts while listening to the Hebrew. I also read in Hebrew the first 18 verses of Chapter 11.
May You All Remain Safe, Blessed, and Hidden in Christ Jesus,
– Avalanche Lily, Rawles
o o o
As always, please share and send e-mails of your own successes and hard-earned wisdom and we will post them in the “Snippets” column this coming week. We want to hear from you.