StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - Save Money, Eat Better, Help The Environment

StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - Save Money, Eat Better, Help The Environment

A useful website for seeing how long food can last.

Learning About First Aid

You most powerful survival tool is between your ears. Training will help add to you capabilities.

Here are a few sites that will help with that.
Red Cross find a local chapter and take a first aid course.
ProCPR has videos you can review.
Hesperian Foundation is where you can get Where There is No Doctor, a very useful book for those times you are far away from good medical care and many other books.
University of California TV Several video programs on the subject.

Let it snow and snow and snow

We got a bit of snow the last couple of days. You can see this car has great snow drift crawling over it.

Having a shovel in the car is certainly good but you still need to have something on the outside to reach the car in the first place.

Power has been stable but we have a few alternatives handy. I did pick up an extra 60 hour candle for the Jack 'O Lantern, multitasking is good.

My Ham radio batteries ran down while participating in to our net so it is recharging now, I need to remember to recharge them more often.

Our homeschool COOP was going to have a Halloween day but postponed it because of the snow.

I helped a girl who was having trouble getting her car into a parking spot there is a layer of ice under the snow which makes it treacherous for driving. The big problem of this snow storm is that it is the first snow of the season and most people seem to have forgotten that snow is slippery over the summer. When we commuted between Colorado Springs and Denver on snowy days I started counting the number of cars on the side of the road I quickly noticed that most of the vehicles were SUVs, we were halfway there before we saw the first car so I kept a SUV to car count. It started out at 10:1, and it took until March until they met parity. Drivers seem to think 4x4s have claws or something, it only gives you 4Wheel-Go, not 4Wheel-Stop or 4Wheel-Steer.

The thing I peeves most about these storms are the Snow Cruisers. You know these guys, its always guys, they have the 4x4 and they justified buying it with "I can drive it in the snow." Well, it snowed and so they have to drive it around. Actually, the funniest thing I have seen was the one guy down the street from my BIL he wanted to go snow cruising but all he did was block the street for an hour or so in front of his driveway. It looks like he had bald tires or something but he drove back into his garage and shut the door behind him.

If you do have a 4x4 get some good snow tires for it. A great trick I learned for an old state trooper is to have a complete set of snow tires for the vehicle on rims and a good jack so you can just swap them out in the garage real fast and then you can change it all back when the weather is good.

Timeline: The secret history of swine flu - health - 29 October 2009 - New Scientist

Timeline: The secret history of swine flu - health - 29 October 2009 - New Scientist: "Six months ago, swine flu emerged as a massive threat to global health. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but our timeline explains how the origins of the H1N1 pandemic go back more than a century"

This is a great post on how the current evolved over time.

A Basic First Aid Kit For Home

A good home First Aid kit is really good insurance for the little hazards of life. Sure you can go out and buy a pre-made one at the supermarket or pharmacy but this is one thing you should really make yourself because what you put in it depends on what you know how to use. Your kit will have vastly different things in it if you have medical training then compared to one for someone with just some first aid training or no training at all.

This is not some kind of Combat Lifesaver kit or anything like that it is just the kind of things you'll need to deal with the workaday injuries that come at home. This is for dressing regular cuts and burns you'd get in the kitchen or working on the car in the garage. You would want some different thing in it for your car or office, but that is another post.

This kit assumes you have a family with children:

Emergency Numbers, Medical Consent Forms, and Medical History for each family member
Prescription Medication information, Allergy Medicine
Pain Relievers, Cough and Cold Medications
Oral Medicine Syringe or Other Pediatric Dosing Instrument
Hydrocortisone Cream, Antiseptic Wipes, Antibiotic Ointment, Hydrogen Peroxide
Bandages of Assorted Sizes, Bandage Closures, Triangular Bandages, Elastic Wraps
Adhesive Tape, and Gauze in Rolls
Two-Inch and Four-Inch Pads
Sharp Scissors with Rounded Tips
Safety Pins
Tweezers
Thermometer
Petroleum Jelly, Calamine Lotion, Aloe Vera Gel
Cold Packs in the frig and a couple of Disposable, Instant-Activating Cold Packs for blackouts
Latex-Free Barrier Gloves
Small LED Flashlight

You'll want to go through the medicines and see which ones are expired and replace them. Do this twice a year, just before school starts is a good time, particularly for the cold medications.

Caught the flu and made some chicken soup

Well, we caught the flu, it is deeply annoying.

We were almost out of chicken stock so I grabbed a big party pack of chicken wings at the store and whipped up a half batch of chicken stock. I forgot to freeze up some small water bottles but dumping ice into plastic bags worked just fine. The temperature of the stock dropped to about 60F in half an hour the frig can easily handle that.

Then I sweated up some onions, garlic and carrots with plenty of salt. Then added a cup of the stock and water. I really like the wing-based stock because they tend not to produce too much fat and with all the connective tissue releasing collagen the stock sets up like Jello in the frig.

Once the stock melted and everything came up to boil, I backed off the heat and added some leftover roast chicken and a 1/4 cup of Acini de pepi pasta, they plump up almost like barley.

Just the smell was wonderful and the taste... Campbell's eat your heart out.

Afterwards I was thinking that if we hadn't had the pasta we could have made a thickener out of some of the schmaltz and some flour (a couple of tablespoons each) and then we could have made a cream of chicken soup. Which could be fun.

See also Chicken Soup for the Flu-ed Soul

Winter Storm Tonight

It looks as though the winter storm is here. It's been overcast and windy all day but it is starting to rain. They are predicting several inches of snow by morning. I ran out and got some extra milk and stuff. We should be fine.