Election Survival Shopping List: A Semi-Annual Resupply Inventory Report TPS-0134

I figure this would be a good opportunity to share some insights on what I have purchased for this twice a year a resupply delivery, where I went from hauling stuff into my land to being blessed enough to have someone do my procurement for me and then do the delivery.

I'm gonna give an overview, a verbal unboxing, if you will, to just give some insight into what sort of process is going into what I'm procuring, because I don't have all the money in the world, I have to really think because if you get it wrong, you're only planning to do this twice a year, you really screw up if you don't get the right batteries, or you get the wrong part, or you get not enough of a part, and your project just dies on the vine until the next delivery.

It's not just convenient to go and I can't get official deliveries here. There's no address. So that means I have to be creative, and I have to spend a lot of time planning in advance and thinking through the scenarios.

When it comes down to it, in terms of the deliveries, some stuff gets lost, and then I have to make sure I get stuff all ordered in advance far enough to where, if they start losing things in the mail and I have to order it again with or without the refund being processed. I've gotta make sure I can fill those gaps.

It's happened a couple times on this order where stuff disappeared, got a refund. I had to reorder it from a different manufacturer/supplier in order to make sure everything showed up on time.

You get a promise of delivery within a certain time frame, I'm not gonna say who is at fault or even gripe about it, because I'm still quite lucky to have the setup that I have, so I don't wanna complain about it, but I just have to adapt to it and be aware of it, because last thing I want is to order something and then have it show up late after the delivery has been made for me out here.

It's really been a process of learning how much time in advance I need to give for not just what the delivery promises, but triple or quadruple that time frame to be sure that there's no stragglers. That's an added cost for me the way I'm doing this.

But if I have to compare the ordeal that it would be to try to go out and get a one off item that I missed I mean I've had to do that before and it not cool it was not fun and it was a lot easier then, it's a lot harder now for various reasons I've explained in the past.

This survival experiment has been a little over three years and I've been stripping away every tentacle of the system that I can.

So every time I'm hoping that it will get fewer and further between that I need to to do any kind of resupply.

Eventually, I'll be growing everything I need to eat and heal myself with.

I'm already capturing all the rainwater.

As long as my supplies hold up, I basically got a year's worth of food, approximately and several years of materials that I shouldn't need to replace, and that should set me up to need far less materials ongoing.

I don't buy stuff just to buy it. I'm having redundancy and replacing things that are going bad, and keeping it as minimal as possible.

So without further ado, I wanna go through the list of what I ordered and give a little bit of commentary on it and thinking behind it.

This is in no particular order.

So starting with the top, I did get a spool of black and red copper wire.

It's a thicker gauge than I had previously gotten which just gets battered by the sun and was failing. I don't know how bad my solar power system was depleted but it was night and day when I repaired that weak and thin sun baked wire and weathered wire. Barely any of the wire was even connecting.

It needed to be replaced. Luckily, I had some extra so that I could splice it with the same material.

But I realized that this time, now that I've got a new spool, it's thicker gauge, it's gonna perform better.

I'm probably going to wrap the wire with a less UV degradable material, it's more resilient, and just sheath it all with something that will block the sun and shade it and keep it in better shape for a lot longer.

So I'm excited about that. It's really an important upgrade.

Then, associated with that, I got a charge controller so that I could have more solar panel capacity.

I have several charge controllers that are very small duty, but this is gonna be basically four of those in one, the perfect amount for me to have the right charge controller, it turns on and shuts off the charging of a battery once it's within a certain range of what's considered fully charged. You don't want to overcharge the batteries for many reasons.

So the solar panels, once they've topped off your battery bank, there needs to be an intelligent circuit that is gonna break the circuit and shut them off.

Then when the power drains from the batteries, it intelligently knows when to kick back on.

So that's a charge controller. I've got several of them, and I am finally getting one that is gonna serve several panels, and not just one each.

So excited about that.

To go with that is the electrical tape. I have been at a loss without it, and it's really, it's really a joke. What I've had to do without proper electrical tape. I'm excited to be able to do it right and do it the way I know to do it best, and that is when splicing lines together, use electrical tape.

It has qualities that make it easy to use, easy to kind of reset if you need to, and it doesn't leave a lot of sticky debris that will make a mess and then disrupt the functioning of the circuit.

So next thing is, I got a couple different boxes of carabiner sizes.

This is for the flood sport operation of these tarps that I'm laying in pond pits to catch rain water, pretty much most of at least half or more of the small carabiners, I used for the first experiment of these tarps anchored down with paracord and pieces of wood buried in the ground to anchor the corners of the top down so it wouldn't catch wind and blow away and stay in place and be anchored down.

But I was using small carabiners for that and the force of the wind whipping the the tarps around, it forced them all to literally bend out of shape so that they weren't even effective.

They could have easily fallen out. They weren't clipping in anymore.

So I got some way more sturdy ones. I don't know exactly the specs at this time, but the smaller ones are about 2 inches, and the larger ones are about 4 inches.

They're about three times as thick, so they're definitely not gonna warp in any way. And I'll be able to use the smaller ones for other things. It's so windy out here, I clip my shade hat to my paracord necklace. I clip my keys, wallet and phone in with paracord and carabiners and use it to hang all kinds of items.

I just can never have enough of the small carabiners.

I had run out, and it's been a couple of years since I had to kind of triage and switch one around for one purpose to another as needed.

But now I know I never wanna not have extra on hand.

Next, after that is another several hundred feet of paracord, which I wanna wean myself off of.

I'll get to another item later. That's part of that process, but I definitely can't live without it for now, and can't risk anything inferior to it for tying these tarps to the ground.

There's no way I'm gonna have my tarps blow away or fail, because I wanted to move beyond the synthetic materials and paracord (parachute cord or 550 cord.

It's strong. It's good for a lot of things. It'll probably be one of the last artificial, synthetic, unnatural supply that I ever say goodbye to permanently.

I did just decide I was gonna say goodbye to duct tape, because I use it on all kinds of things but it's always a nightmare when it starts to fail and never really lasts that long, certainly not in The desert heat and sun.

Even if you keep it out of the sun, it just ends up just being a mess, and it's toxic, and it's petroleum based.

I decided I've got other ways, I can use silicon for sealant for certain applications, and then I've had a lot of luck with basically bailing wire or electrical wires.

So I'm gonna go into uncharted territory. No more convenience of duct tape on everything I'm gonna figure out how to get by without it, and that's a big change. So wish me luck on that.

Next I've got a splitter valve for this silicone tubing that I use for my irrigation in the garden.

It's these barbed outlets that you slide the silicon tubing on, and then they've got the valves that you turn to open them or close them.

That's what I'm using now for being able to set the flow rate for several different segments of an irrigation line.

Next thing is dome lights. Nothing is worse than a fix it ticket for one of your license plate lights being out.

It may be sold as a tail light depending on your vehicle type, they're standardized and universal.

So I was able to get a set of those lights to make sure that I'm always running with some on hand.

I've been in the habit for when I do drive, which is less and less anymore, but whenever I do, I don't wanna be caught up in some kind of fix it ticket drama.

So I'm gonna always look in a mirror, or look in glass or something behind me, do whatever I gotta do to test brakes, running lights, left and right signals, emergency, everything.

I wanna test every configuration of the lights before I go anywhere. The odds of the of them going out in the middle of a trip...it has to happen eventually. But the difference between checking the functioning of the lights every time before you go anywhere...you wouldn't do it if you were commuting every day, you probably just roll the dice.

But for me, if I'm only gonna drive...I haven't driven in over a year, if I'm gonna drive again, it's only gonna be once a year I don't want any drama because I don't wanna have to come back out and drive again.

You can never have enough replacement parts for vehicles, not just for safety, but for liability.

I don't advocate any kind of negligence with responsibilities as a driver. I got a clean record. I'm a very good driver, very defensive and safe driver.

I say 99.9 % of the time, I have good habits and part of that is having tools, having replacement materials, having safety materials and whatnot.

Next is boxes of screws. I can fasten together a couple of two by fours. There are two and a half inch screws to give a good full inch into into the second two by four, or into thicker wood, a four by four, whatever it may be.

Then for smaller jobs, thinner lumber, the inch and a quarter does well for me.

The idea is short ones and long ones, lots of them, they go fast and I ran out in the first year and have basically gone two years just again doing the, same thing robbing Peter to pay Paul, pulling them out of one project where maybe I overdid it and I could afford to spare a few and I'm pulling them out and using them for something else.

But it's been sad, although I did pretty much have enough to get through all of the lumber that I was able to salvage from this site that I'm on, from the ghost town of a house that was in splinters when I got here. It had already fallen down. It had completely been destroyed by the elements.

I had to sift through it, pick it apart, sort it, and then I've used pretty much every viable piece.

And now, after some scavenging expeditions, I have a whole new stack of lumber.

Quite a decent supply. Not enough to build much, but at least to build some shelves and to organize things and repair things.

I didn't have a fresh supply of that hardware. I don't wanna let that get too thin. I always, don't get enough, and should always get more.

It's also nice to have washers and nuts and bolts of various types, I would love to raid a junkyard and be able to have tons of just odds and ends of hardware.

I would definitely use it all. I pulled out the nails from the splinters and reused them. I reused everything.

Next thing is a set of stainless steel funnels. This is so important for me doing the kind of fermentation projects that I do, and just off grid, off road, very minimalistic kind of kitchenette, living out of jars, living out of canned food and stuff from the garden, and drying things.

Processing them, making powders of herbs, and just being kind of an alchemist. I have a tiny set of funnels that is good for a number of uses, but they're all in use.

They're all totally deployed. I can't tell you how many messes and how many spills and how many headaches and screaming profanity from trying to rig ways to transfer fluids.

It's just the right size for the job. Stainless steel funnels less than 15 bucks.

Angels were trumpeting when I poured my ferments where they needed to go, from the brewing container to the bottling that I'm doing, it was so priceless.

So I'm grateful to have that way overdue set. Then I got another thing, way overdue, which is a stainless steel water filtration system.

I had been Macgyvering a plastic five gallon bucket as the container that the water would go into, at first water from the city that I trucked in and now all rain water, filtering them through the black filter elements, but using a plastic bucket versus the far more hygienic and far less carcinogenic and far more durable in this climate of a desert...which is the stainless steel official system that you're supposed to have.

I've had access to one before. They're great. I haven't done myself the favor of actually acquiring one, even though I have no excuse not to, because I have the means.

I'm just trying to be frugal and not spend what I have all in one place, as they say.

But that is one thing that a friend of mine who visited said recently said, man, you gotta replace this plastic bucket.

Vinyl is gonna be the next asbestos. And I know that, but to have someone else come and say it, it struck me because of all of my rhetoric about being post plastic and antiplastic.

That's probably the most important item of all the items. I mean, it's way more important that I have a stainless steel water filtration system than I stop using duct tape, because I'm worried about how toxic duct tape is.

I'm not leaving the duct tape out in the sun all day, in the summer, and then eating it. At first I said, it should, be fine if the filters are doing a job.

He looked at me, shook his head. He's like, no, man, do it right.

I took the advice. I got the filter. I'm very thrilled about it.

It is such an upgrade aesthetically as well, and it is gonna probably protect me from all kinds of weird cancers that I was thinking I was protecting myself from. So glad to have that.

Next on this list is a restock of vitamins that helped saved my life.

Last year, I had tried to see if I could go without them but it was a misadventure and I almost died partially due to I believe, some serious mineral and vitamin deficiencies that I was not getting from the food that I've been relying on. I don't yet have enough production to really trust that I'm getting enough fresh fruits and vegetables from gardening to not need vitamins.

So not gonna cut that corner ever again. Not certainly until I have way more produce and at this point, I'm still learning how to barely keep anything alive out here.

It's been the hardest, most barren and harsh environment to try to do what I'm doing.

I was spoiled to have more mild climates where I could grow anything, and then I really could live without vitamins.

I'm not gonna risk it for now. So I'm glad to have these vitamins. It's gonna keep me alive.

As I get battered by the heat of the summer coming up, and I get depleted of all kinds of vitamins, trying to just make it another summer...

Next item I'm thrilled about, it's called matcha, which I wasn't aware of it. I've had powdered green tea before, but it wasn't called matcha. This product is a lot more efficient for me.

I thought I was doing good by saving money and just getting less processed food by buying whole green tea dried leaves.

I don't like to do coffee much, it gets me jittery and it's a diuretic, it makes me have to use the rest true more than I care to or need to and I lose fluids with it.

So green tea is much more light on my system. I don't need to be that caffeinated, just a mild caffeination is fine.

There's also a whole lot of other benefits in the phyto-nutrients of green tea.

I don't do any cooking at all out here. I don't use any heat of any kind. I'll do sun tea and I will use the sun for certain forms of heating things. I've yet to make a bona fide solar oven, and I don't do any flame for any kind of cooking. So the cold brewing of the green tea was pretty inefficient in terms of getting a yield of caffeine out of it. Because the cold water, or even the sun tea water, it's not like boiling. You just don't get much out of them.

Plus having to work with the tea ball and to manage that, I don't wanna say that I'm against that form of labor to have to deal with changing tea in a tea ball but it was tedious, no pun attended and it was a mess and I just wasn't thrilled about it. I have a mortar pestle, I have a grain grinder but with the dried leaves that I did grind in coffee grinder, there'd be sticks and stuff in there. I can filter them out, though matcha is better for me as it's in a very fine powder.

The problem was, if I'm not getting a lot of caffeine in the cold brew of dried green green tea leaves, then I would at least like to consume the whole thing so that even if the I don't get much from the tea in the solution, I will be consuming it into my body by eating it all and not leaving any.

I had been composting those leaves after one use, I did ferment them for a while and eat them at out of a ferment, but it was nasty, and it was really probably the worst chapter of my culinary life.

I don't know how many months it was, but it was several months where it was my only greens after my injury last year, I didn't have a garden growing because I couldn't walk for two months.

So it was at least two months where my only greens were fermented green tea leaves, which was just so nasty.

I would be happy to consume it in a powdered form where I don't have to chew on it, I don't have to taste it much.

With this matcha powder product, there's no mess. So for me, that's going maybe a little step backwards in terms of more processing of a food product.

But I also realized, I don't know why, when I was grinding the green tea leaves, why I just didn't use a little sifter to just get the fine powder and then just be composting the stems.

I still have a lot of the dried leaves in stock, I got this matcha to sort of be able to take a break from it but when the matcha runs out, before I replace it I'm gonna make sure that I tested grinding the leaves again and then, filtering them so I can have a powder product that will be similar to this.

Next item is, I got another resupply of stevia which I have grown before and I wanna grow more, I even have some seeds.

It's been a luxury, and I don't know if I'll get to it or when I'll get to it here.

I really need a more serious nursery, secured, protected environment to start from seed reliably out here.

That's gonna be a ways off in terms of the financial investment and the infrastructure.

So I do rely on importing that form of a natural sweetener, which I will tend to use in green tea.

But I'm also kind of ready to stop sweetening beverages like tea.

I just did my first experimental batch of rice wine and I'm gonna see how that tastes and if I need to sweeten it.

I'm gonna use the stevia for that. I have a lot, probably a couple years' worth of stevia now that I'm slowing down this will probably be the last time I need to get that for a while.

Next, I got a few pounds of garlic powder and some fresh living garlic that I am able to plant in the garden as is.

I've done that before, many times in my life. I've done that out here.

It usually does well, but as a backup, I have this garlic powder, which is gonna go into flavoring my powdered spinach kind of kimchi fermentation I'm doing that's a staple of my diet. Every day I have that.

Next I got 16lb of organic dried spinach powder, which is part of my daily lunch meal.

I eat my sardines out of the can, then I fill the can with a serving of this fermented spinach powder, which I spice, so it's kind of like a green salsa.

I got some chips to go with that, which I'm thrilled about.

Next I got honey as a backup for making wine.

I'm trying to phase it out because it's kind of expensive.

I got several bottles of honey, just to be sure that if I'm not thrilled about the efficiency of the rice wine, that I have something to fall back on because it's good for my spirits. It's good for my morale.

Right now, there are two nights a week that I will allow myself to drink probably about the equivalent of three or four beers in terms of the alcohol potency of the amount.

A full quart jar of relatively potent honey wine, no kind of distillation or anything like that.

Just a strong wine is great for me. It's paleo.

The rice wine is gonna not be paleo. That's a kind of regressive step. But I'm willing to go with it because the rice becomes a food prep if I need to rely on it.

I got more yeast packets to do the fermentation, and then plantable produce in the form of sweet potatoes, green onions, garlic and leeks.

There's certainly a lot more plantable produce, but I wanted to at least re-establish these this year.

I got just this modest selection.

Then the major poundage of the food supply for my bulk food, my daily staple foods, 75 lb of almonds, 75 lb of pepitas, 90 lb of raisins, a hundred pounds of rice, a hundred pounds of flex and 5 lb of sesame.

Those come from a bulk food supplier in downtown LA which I've been going to since about 2011.

There's where I've been getting the ingredients for my trail mix all of those years.

The sesame seeds are great. I was grinding them and eating was a meal, but I kind of developed an allergy to it. So now I've decided to scale back, but not abandon it.

I'll use the 5 lb of Sesame, not as a staple, but as a condiment, because it really adds amazing flavor.

I grind the flax with the grain grinder, keep it whole for as long as I need to. Then just to not let it go rancid, I just grind a very small amount, usually a few days worth.

So every few days, I'm taking the whole flax seeds and grinding them up into a meal.

I'll mix that meal with nutritional yeast or salt, or sometimes raisins, I'll sometimes add coconut oil as well.

I had run out of flax, and for the last month or so, I was making a meal out of a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil mixed with nutritional yeast.

It actually tastes a lot like fried chicken of all things. It's amazing, but it's really not ideal.

With the flax, it's the fiber that kind of gives you that sense of, it's not super high carbs, but it kind of gives you that comfort food and a texture, I wanna feel like my stomach is full.

You feel satiated, and you will survive.

It's kind of suboptimal to be surviving on spoonfuls of coconut oil, so I knew I needed to get serious about the flax.

I thought, should I get 50 LB of rice 50 lb of flakes or should I double it and get a hundred of each. I said this is a Weird scary dangerous election year I think I'm gonna get a hundred of each and as long as things aren't hitting the fan, I'm gonna turn that rice into ferment. I'm gonna make an alcohol beverage out of it.

Pretty minimalistic. But so far, I mean, don't measure me by my culinary skills and by my diet so much, measure me by my output and my productivity. If you look at it that way, and I look at it that way, and say, you know what, If I feel all right... while I definitely made some mistakes, now I feel younger, I feel ten years younger, I feel very energized I feel very positive and my work on the land, that's what matters.

It's work that's going to, hopefully, by the time I die, the work I put in this land, it will be productive with food for thousands of years.

And it will live legally in a trust so that it will not be bulldozed, not be laid to waste.

That's the goal. So I'm experimenting with my health, doing this very austere diet, where I'm eating the same things, literally every day, and they're very minimalistic, but if I'm able to not just survive, but be very physically productive on the land, that's how I'm gonna measure my success.

It's working so far. When I have fallen apart, I've been able to put myself back together and just make it work.

So last few things here are a set of ratchet straps mainly to help my delivery personnel be able to utilize roof rack space to deliver what I need.

But I'll also use them for a number of applications here, for all kinds of things, so I can never have enough of those.

Then extending my flood sport rainwater catchment capacity from two tarps.

With just those two and with my tankage system, I was able to rescue over the course of a year, rescue enough rainwater to last for a year.

So I reached the break even point for rainwater catchment with only two tarps over the course of a year. I just got 3 more. I started with two. I'm adding three.

It is a significant force multiplier. That will mean that as I use water for irrigation and for hydration and for sanitation, whenever it rains, it doesn't have to rain that much, and I will be back to break even, and then I will relatively soon, even when in a drought, I'll be able to be confident that I'll end up with more water than I'm able to store at that point.

I'll be able to move closer towards the goal of having seasonal ponds and then year round ponds, and eventually will work out once I have them sealed with bentonite, that, let's say I have five of these pond pits, and one of them gets fed into by the four. The four dry ponds.

If I can get to a point where I find out how many catchment ponds I need to line with tarps and catch water every time it rains, so that I can maintain a year round pond in one of the pond pits.

So that's the idea of figuring out what that ratio is gonna be.

Obviously, it's gonna change based on what the rainfall is in any given year.

But at least I know my tankage capacity is enough for my needs to go one year to the next.

So as I deplete it, I'll be able to top it off faster with less rain, and then start to have that excess that can be applied to making the seasonal and then year round ponds, that's what I'm excited about.

That's gonna be the next level. I used to think, for a while, why did I just start with two? I should have gotten more to begin with, but you live and learn.

Now I'm thrilled to know that I know what the drill is.

Next, the last couple of things here. I did get a 150 units of four and three quarter ounce of wild caught sardines.

I eat that every day. I was spacing those out but I think that was part of my downfall, not having a daily three plus ounces of meat based on recommendations that I've read about, what you should aim for.

I had been a vegetarian for many years and then became an omnivore again probably around 2011.

For financial reasons, I just have a sardine can every day, they're low on the food chain, low bio magnification of toxins, bottom feeders.

There are reasons why I feel safer than I would with other fish that might accumulate more toxins up the food chain.

Just a little side note, but I was eating two cans a week. Now I eat a can every day just to make sure I don't risk depletion and be in danger of death the way I was last summer.

I was too frugal.

Last thing, I had some financial donations, some gifts by a couple of folks.

That paid for a set of solar panels, a total of four of them.

But I've gotten by so far with the three panels I already have, though they're getting old.

I have a battery bank of three marine batteries, though I decided not to scale into more batteries. I wanted to scale up just the solar panels. I really don't wanna have a whole bunch more toxic materials on the land.

If I can get by with three batteries in the battery bank, and then rotate them out over time, but not have an excess.

I don't wanna be tempted also to mess with my circadian rhythms.

I like the fact that I've got panels, I've got just enough batteries to make it work alright when the sun is out, but when the sun goes down, those batteries quickly drop below 12 volts. They will continue to charge small devices overnight. But I can't run much.

I'm trying to limit myself from over computing

When it's time to go to sleep and wind down I wanna be in line with my circadian rhythms. I don't wanna be up with unnatural light and doing work, because I will work all night I'm in the zone with something on the computer.

I don't like that. I don't wanna live in that paradigm that I used to live in the city. Now I live in a paradigm where I enjoy the sunrise and the sunset every day.

There's not a day that I do not participate in the magic of those experiences.

When I was in the city, I missed both every day and I woudln't have been missing much because I didn't have the 360 degree horizon in all directions I've got here.

So last thing I wanna do is miss every sunrise and sunset because I'm sleeping in too much and I'm going to bed too late, and I'm just not paying attention because I'm distracted.

So I'm glad to have the four extra panels that are gonna allow me to force multiply my monitors. I'll be able to make use of some spare monitors.

I'm excited about that because, it's been abysmal doing the kind of web development I'm doing with only one monitor.

I definitely need that space. Every square inch of every window is gonna be put to use so that I can streamline the app development process that I'm now getting more proficient in, so I can create more fun stuff for you.

Alright, so that was everything for this twice a year cycle.

This is one of those two deliveries, and it's gonna empower me to stay alive and stay strong and stay productive, and then have the tools and equipment and gear and kit that I need to extend and to evolve the projects that are going on out here.