...Which is the morning news in two words.
Current forecasts call for eight to ten inches of snow on Sunday, along with record cold temperatures. It will be a mess.
Of course, the easily-panicked have been busily clearing sore (and formerly groaning) shelves of bread, milk and eggs -- along with, I'm told, a lot of the meat. Just to add to my fun, last night I unknowningly lost the battle of the refrigerator door and the darned thing spent six hours with the door a half-inch ajar. So I'll have to get out there and join them, in hopes of replacing the nice corned beef brisket I'd set back for Sunday and the Surry sausages for later on. Oh, and milk and butter, dammit.
(Effective immediately, boxes of soda cans are banned from the fridge. They interfere with things in the door, especially if those things shift. Grabbing a quick snack should not involve solving a 3-D puzzle.)
Imminent weather nightmare!!!!1!!!eleven! Plus the trash runs today and I have yet to get it out there. So...check back later for pithy insight or whatever.
Here's a little to tide you over: The other day, I could've sworn one of my friends had "cast iron cookware" in a bug-out bag list. She didn't; she was discussing prepping, in a very bug-in way. I can promise you I will never carry cast-iron, unless it's the twenty feet from car to cookfire. For bugging in, sure, 100%. You should have that stuff, seasoned and ready to use. She couldn't be more right -- and make that 200% at your secondary location/retreat/redoubt/bunker (if you have one): it's durable, long-lasting, excellent to cook in and makes great swapping stock, if it comes to that. But carry it? It weighs like, well, like cast iron! There are plenty of reasons not to like lightweight hiker's cookware, but every pound less of cooking-container you carry is another pound of clothing, food or ammunition. Run out of the last two and less-than-ideal cookware is the least of your problems. ...Deciding when to dig in and when to trek out, that's a whole other story, and then there's the issue of having somewhere else to go. (Me, I don't; for me, it's impractical. My tripwires aren't that good and neither's my freedom to cut'n'run, at least until it's essentially too late -- but YMMV. I still think it's best to already be elsewhere full time, if "elsewhere" is on your disaster plans and you can manage to make that work.)
Update
3 days ago
4 comments:
". . . sore shelves . . ."! Most awesome observation of herd dynamics in recent memory. Thanks again for sharing your insight and wit.
Yours,
Ed
We backpacked with a cast iron skillet, but that was partly to slow down the mountain goat one of us had as a brother.
We no longer have the soda can box battle in Fridge #2. Too many times I've been out to grab something cold, just to find the door propped ajar by just a fraction of an inch, with the contents on that side covered in condensation and near room temp. :(
Canoed the Boundary Waters with a cast-iron dutch oven, once. The chow was great, the portages... inhaled. Inhaled hard.
Supposedly, people who lived in the wake of troop movements early in the Civil War were able to salvage all kinds of quite serviceable, but too darn heavy to carry gear left behind.
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