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 so many kids, grand-kids, and grand-dogs visiting this week, I didn’t accomplish a lot of prepping or self-sufficiency tasks, other than some candle-making and some informal target shooting. But the week was a lot of fun! With three dogs in the house (two visting), it was a bit of a muddy-pawed rodeo. Our cats took refuge on top of the hay pile in the barn for most of the duration of the dog visits. Our youngest son celebrated his birthday. Since he is nearing his college graduation and his clothes are almost identical to my size, I gave him two of my spare wool two-piece suits. He’ll certainly need them more than I will.
Now, Lily’s part of the report…
Avalanche Lily Reports:
Dear Readers,
We here at the Rawles Ranch hope and pray that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving day with friends, family or peacefully by yourselves. We are very Thankful for our family and loved ones and for all of you our faithful readers and supporters of this blog and this way of life.
The weather was very rainy and snowy all week until Friday when we had a bit of sunshine. We woke up to two inches of snow on Friday morning. The total precipitation for the week was 1.8 inches of rain. Temperatures ranged between a low of 31 to a high of 42 degrees Fahrenheit.
We had a very busy week of house cleaning, cooking, and enjoying the four Grandsons who came on Monday night and stayed with us all week. In between the work, we played many games together. They played many games without me, but I was able to play two games of Bird Memory, a game of Bible Trivia, a game of Wild Animal Trivia, and a Chess game with the eldest. The three older boys came and milked the cow with me for four days. They are beginning to get the hang of it.
BEESWAX CANDLES
On Wednesday, I stuffed dirty beeswax into doubled knee high nylon stockings and knotted them at the top. Next, we washed our dirty beeswax in nylon stockings, by soaking it in cold water with numerous changes of water to dissolve the remnant honey in the beeswax. Once it appeared that most of the honey was rinsed out of the wax, while still in the stockings, I put the stockings in a large oven roasting plastic bag in a pot and filled the plastic bag with water. I also put about two inches of water in the pot under the plastic bag. Then we put the was stuffed nylons into the water and heated it all day and all night on the wood heating stove to render it into melted liquid beeswax. Then, as the wax melted, it seeped out of the nylons into the water and floated to the top.
Once it seemed as though most or all of the wax had melted and had seeped out of the nylon stockings, I lifted the stockings and let the last of the hot wax drip out into the plastic bag. Then we threw away the stockings that still had all of the bits and pieces of bee parts, dirt, leaves, pine needles, etc. and put the pot out on the porch to cool off. By the next morning (Thanksgiving Day), we had a hard 3/4 inch plate of beeswax on top of the water. We removed it and threw out the water. Later in the day, I broke up the wax plate and opened a store-bought block of beeswax and put all of that into a #10 can and started to melt them on the wood stove in preparation to make beeswax candles after our Thanksgiving meal.
After we ate, the wax was not quite all melted so we put it in a double boiler on our propane stove and melted the wax faster. Then I found some wooden shish kebab sticks and tied ten-inch lengths of candle wicking to the middle of each stick. I took another cooking bag and put it in a bucket and filled it with cold water. Then I took an old plastic tablecloth and laid it on the kitchen floor. We didn’t have enough wax in the #10 can to make long candles, so Jim found an empty tall plastic water bottle. He cut off the top of it. We transferred the hot wax into that. Then the Grandsons commenced dipping their candlewicks into the wax, then into the cold water and back into the hot wax and then into the water, over and over again until they had dipped and created sizeable tapered beeswax candles.
When they finished, our adult children all took turns dipping and making their own set of candles. Everyone enjoyed this craft project and making their own set of candles. It was a sweet family project. After all the descendants finished, we remelted the leftover wax and poured it into four-ounce Mason jars. That made five more small candles for our use here at the Rawles Ranch.
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.