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(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article.)

Rain Gauge – Once you fall in love with those metric grams, go ahead and toss that $1.95 plastic rain gauge which has an error factor of +/- 92%, and switch to a five-gallon bucket so you can weigh the precipitation instead. Use your Sharpie to write the grams-to-inches conversion number right on the bucket so you can record rainfall in hundredths of inches such as 1.89”. This rainfall info will help you to more accurately calculate how much you receive each month, which months are the dry months, and how large of a rain-catchment system you’ll need after that EMP blasts us back to 1753 and the grid goes down forever. And that teeny-weenie little 2032 disc battery the scale uses which you have to tilt just right in the light after retrieving your reading glasses so you can read the number? Use your Sharpie to write “2032” right on the little battery door so a guy with stage 3 cataracts can read it by moonlight from ten paces.

Mason Jar Lids – Since frugal preppers are already reusing their mason jar lids and the spendthrifts will be reusing them after the Crunch which should occur sometime during the Harris administration, continue to write on your lids with a Sharpie but in a different way than you’re doing now. We can tell by the visual aspects that this is tomato sauce and those are potatoes so there’s really no need to write that all out. When you write “St. Funogas Totally Awesome Blackberry Jam” on each lid, your friends and family are going to want to know who the heck St. Funogas is, and secondly, it’s going to be a real pain to get all that off when you reuse the lid on your Totally Fantabulous Green Tomato/Apple Chutney. When it’s obvious what the contents are, I use a small coded letter beneath the brand name of the lid to help conceal it. The letters are A-J and represent the year that product was canned. A = 1 (2021), B = 2, etc. and J = 0. This not only makes it easier to know the age of the contents, but if you leave it in place when you write the next year’s letter, you’ll know how many times the lid has been used which will give you certain bragging rights at your local post-TEOTWAWKI Canning Club meetings.

Appliance Wattage – You spent $32 on that awesome Kill-A-Watt meter or the less expensive $21 Poniie PN1500 to see how much power each of your electrical apparati are using in a month. Instead of writing that info on a 3 x 5 card which will be illegible after the pants pocket you leave it in goes through the wash, get out your Sharpie and write it right on the appliance in a discrete location. My refrigerator usage (19½ kWh/month) is written on that little metal plate inside the fridge which has all the electrical information. This individual appliance info will help when planning your move to off-grid so you can know how many kW hours you’ll be saving when you toss the electric coffee grinder or how much it will take to run your motorized grain mill. It will also let you estimate how many hours that new marine battery will keep the 88-watt blower on your woodstove running during the next ice storm which knocks the power out for four days.

Freeze Alarm Setting – My well-house freeze alarm works like a charm but when I put in fresh batteries and activate it each October, I can never reset all the numbers without finding the manual first. Sharpie to the rescue. A few key words written on the back of the alarm remind me how to set it up quickly without having to use any of my special helper words.Continue reading“Surviving Seniorhood With Sharpies – Part 4, by St. Funogas”

(Continued from Part 2.)

Chain Saw – I shouldn’t mention this one for fear of revealing just how far my LOMR has progressed but next to the bar-oil cap of your chainsaw write “OIL” and “GAS” next to the gas cap. Once I reach Stage 4 LOMR I’ll no doubt be running the saw with bar oil and gas in the wrong tanks instead of catching my mistake like I do now, dumping them out, going to the house for a fresh cup of coffee, and then returning to try to get it right the second or third time. If you pump the bar oil button and smell gasoline right before the bar bursts into flame, this is a sure confirmation you’re well into stage 4 LOMR and are on the fast track to stage 5 and beyond. If you smell smoke but fail to notice the bar conflagration or that the flames from your chaps are getting uncomfortably close to your unmentionables, this is a good indication that, while your olfactory senses are top-notch, the rest of your brain has atrophied to a solid stage 6. At stage 6 they do a frontal lobotomy to keep you and the rest of the citizenry safe. After the grid goes down, they do the lobotomy with a rusty serrated steak knife and sew you back up using dental floss, generally leaving an extra 24” hanging down in front of your left ear so you never again have a credible excuse for not flossing.

Plumbing – You built that solar water heater to save some bucks and put the extra dough towards getting your mortgage paid off early. It’s hard to know which way those unions turn when taking your heater offline since you have two options depending on how you attached them. So go ahead and write some arrows on the part facing you. While you’re at it label “Main Shut-Off Valve” on your main plumbing line. Simple helps like these generally increase the resale value of your home if it ever goes on the market. Be sure to point the arrows out to the real estate appraiser but not the county assessor. For you former Big City apartment dwellers who have just arrived in the American Redoubt, the arrow concept also works on garden hoses. If you make arrows on that brass thingy on the end of the hose it will help you get it onto the whatchamajig with the round handle where the water comes out of the wall. If you get your  Sharpie all wet and it won’t work anymore, just remember “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.” Continue reading“Surviving Seniorhood With Sharpies – Part 3, by St. Funogas”

(Continued from Part 1.)

Vitamins and Drugs – Remember the good old days when a bottle of vitamins which held 200 capsules was good for 200 doses? Those days are long gone and the low-integrity makers of gummy vitamins now label the bottle with, “Contains 165 with 15 freebies! 2,000 I.U. per serving.” They know your antiquated brain and eyes aren’t working any better than communism did so they’re certain they can take advantage of you knowing that you left your reading glasses on the dashboard before walking into the store to buy vitamins. Therefore, all you’re going see is the large “Contains 165” and miss all the nonsense in the ultrafine print about “per serving.” The print is so small the only thing that could read it would be a literate yeast cell fluent in English. And that would be with his reading glasses on. You won’t even notice it for three weeks so when you finally do, call their 800 number to complain about their predatory marketing practices, then take your  Sharpie and write “2/Day” in very large letters on the bottle on at least two sides.

Before hanging up, tell them you’d feel much better about their company if they sent you a coupon for a free bottle of vitamins to help you forget about their unsavory marketing tactics as well as to help you remember to take two per serving. Then remember to take your vitamins. On days you forget, go look in the mirror to be sure the “I” on your forehead hasn’t washed off in the shower. Now that I’m past the dry-erase stage, I have to redo mine weekly while I’m waiting for Sharpie’s “tattoo formulation” to be released.

Are you tired of trying to read the small print on that bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet that you never use but are saving for an emergency? Even though you pick them up and look at them weekly while standing there bored brushing your teeth, you still never remember what they’re for and have to squint at the label to remind yourself. Sharpies love to be of service when they can help you write “PAIN” on the top of one and “Kidney Stones” on the top of the other. Now you can read them even while flossing and don’t have a free hand to pick them up for the umpteenth time. Sharpie will also work for the medications which you take daily and the Sharpiefied cap can be transferred to a new bottle. By transferring it to each new refill you won’t have to keep going to the trouble of prying that top part off the child-proof cap so you can actually get it open when you don’t have a five-year old handy to do it for you.

Food Storage and Other Preps – No prepper worth his freeze-dried stroganoff would think of putting those buckets of rice, gallon jugs of oil, or #10 cans of textured vegetable protein into the storage room without writing the date on top. Not only will that help you calculate usage for planning future prepping quantities, but also keep your stuff rotated since you can’t read that fine print they use on those use-by dates even with your new reading glasses or that literate yeast cell that reads your vitamin labels for you. Dates will also help calculate at what point your beans have turned to stone and can be used for various masonry projects around the homestead, or turned into AR-15 ammo and assorted other projectiles after lead is no longer readily available. “Whoa, Bill! What’d you take out that roving horde with?” “Well Sam, nowadays I use .30-06 organic legume-skin-jacketed pintos with weevil-bored hollow points.”Continue reading“Surviving Seniorhood With Sharpies – Part 2, by St. Funogas”

While much of the following is geared towards us older folks who can no longer remember the day of the week nor find it on the calendar without reading glasses, much of it also applies to young geezers and anyone else trying to get their life and/or their preps more organized.

I wish I were making this all up or just trying to be helpful, but most of these are things that I do to make my day-to-day psychological survival possible by avoiding little frustrations caused from not seeing, or remembering, what this or that thing is, or what’s in the box or bucket, and where the heck did I put that info after I went to all the trouble to figure it out?

Hopefully some of the ideas in this article will help you, inspire you to come up with some of your own, and maybe brighten your day a little at the same time.

Every year I go through a lot of Sharpies, those pointy permanent markers that come in almost as many colors as that big box of crayons you dreamed about as a kid. I used to have a great memory, but then Late Onset Mental Retardation (LOMR) set in a few years back and now I can’t even remember my phone number. Here are some of the ways I put Sharpies to good use while waiting for medical science to find a cure for LOMR and general cognitive decline.

Food Storage Buckets – We wouldn’t dream of actually writing anything on our precious food-storage buckets after they set us back 8 bucks apiece! And certainly not with something permanent like a Sharpie. Being a person who enjoys thinking outside the bucket, I write on mine with Sharpies. The two times since Twinkies were 12¢ a package when I needed to change what was in the bucket, I took a piece of white duct tape and made a new label to cover the Sharpie writing. The buckets look so much more professional with the writing right on the bucket. You can always put that tacky piece of tape over the name of the old contents if you ever change what’s inside. On the other hand, roving hordes have been known to pass up pantries with ugly tape labels in favor of better-organized larders with increased eye appeal, so I’m going to have to rethink this one.Continue reading“Surviving Seniorhood With Sharpies – Part 1, by St. Funogas”