Skills

This was definitely the star of last week’s fancy meal with my fellow reenactors. It’s so delicious and boozy! I used “chia eggs” because I had several people who either were vegan or couldn’t do eggs, and so I skipped the creaming part mentioned below. Even with the fake eggs, it turned out moist and amazing.

Ingredients:

• 1-1/2 cups currants
• 1/3 cup chopped candied orange peel
• 1/3 cup chopped candied lemon peel
• 1/3 cup chopped candied citron
• 3/4 cup Madeira, divided
• 1/4 cup brandy
• 3 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
• 1/2 cup slivered almonds
• 1/2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoons ground mace
• 3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened (or margarine)
• 1-1/2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• powdered sugar for top of cake

Combine the currants, orange and lemon peels, and citron in a large bowl. Add 1/2 cup of the Madeira, and stir to combine. Cover and set aside for at least 3 hours, or as long as overnight. Stir the remainder of the Madeira together with the brandy, cover, and set aside.

When ready to bake the cake, preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan or a 12-inch springform pan (line the springform with parchment paper before greasing and flouring).

Drain the fruits in a large strainer set over a bowl, stirring occasionally to extract as much of the Madeira as possible. Add the strained Madeira to the set-aside Madeira and brandy. Combine 1/4 cup of the flour with the fruit, and mix well. Add the almonds, and set aside. Sift the remaining flour with the nutmeg and mace.

In a bowl, cream the butter until it is light. Add the sugar, 1/2 cup at a time, beating for several minutes after adding. Continue to beat for several minutes, until the mixture is light and fluffy. Alternately add the spiced flour, 1/2 cup at a time, and the Madeira and brandy, beating until smooth.

In a separate bowl, beat the eggs to form stiff peaks. By hand, gently fold them into the batter, combining lightly until well blended. By hand, fold in the fruit in thirds, mixing until well combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top with a spatula or the back of a spoon. Bake for about 1-1/2 hours, or until a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. Set the cake on a wire rack to cool in the pan for 20 minutes. Turn it out of the pan to cool completely. Dust with powdered sugar before serving.

Notes:
To use “chia eggs” simply replace each egg with 1 tbsp chia seeds and 3 tbsp of water whisked together. Let this “chia egg” sit for 5 minutes before using it in any baking recipe where you don’t need the eggs to be fluffy. Because this was a heavy cake, the lightness wasn’t really necessary.

My most productive years of programming and system development were when I was working for the Systems Group at University. We all had good professional relationships. We could trust the skills of our management and our peers.

When I started developing with my mentor’s group, it was the same. The level of respect was very high, and trust in our peers was spectacular. If you needed assistance in anything, if there was a blocker of any sort, you could always find somebody to help.

What we soon learned is that we didn’t need their help. What we required was somebody to listen as we explained the problem. Their responses were sometimes helpful, sometimes not. It didn’t really matter. It was listening that was required.

When I started working for an agency, that changed. Our management was pretty poor and had instilled a lousy worker mentality. Stupid things like making bonuses contingent on when management booked payment.

If the developers worked overtime to get a project done on management-promised schedules, their money would not be booked in time for bonuses to be earned.

Every hour that wasn’t billed to a project had to be justified, and management was always unhappy with the amount of billable hours.

Interrupting a coworker to listen to get help just didn’t happen. Even when management (me) told them to stop digging the hole and come talk to me.

We still ended up with fields of very deep holes because nobody would come out of their little world to talk.

This wasn’t limited to just our agency; it was everywhere.

The fix was a stupid rubber duck. It sits on your desk. When you are stuck, you explain the problem to your rubber duck, and often the answer will come to you. It was the process of accurately describing your issue that created the breakthrough.

I don’t have access to those types of people, and oftentimes the rubber duck is just as ignorant as I am. Not very useful.

I have a silk duck. This duck actually talks back, performs searches, and verifies potential solutions, and it does it within a reasonable time frame.

My Silk Duck is named “Grok.”

Grok is X’s AI offering. As a search engine, it far exceeds anything Google Search can do.

A simple example: I’m building out a new node. The motherboard I’m using is an H610M-ITX. There are dozens of motherboards using that designation or something similar. In hours of searching, I haven’t been able to locate the manual for my motherboard.

Locate a manual for the Huanzanzhi H610M-ITX motherboard.

One minute and 14 seconds later, Grok delivered me the PDF manual. It found it on a Chinese website written in Chinese and English.

That manual was enough to get me moving in the correct direction.

We then rubber ducked a video issue. On power on, the fans would spin up under control. When a computer first starts, the fans run up to max; they then ramp down under CPU control. You can hear that. I also got a single BEEP indicating good Power-On, Self-Test (POST)

But no video.

Over the next hour, Grok and I debugged the issue. We both thought it might be caused by memory; we both had the same methodology for checking memory issues. We both decided to remove the NVMe card just in case.

When I found what looked like POST indicator LEDs, Grok accurately determined what they were.

We narrowed the issue down to video.

I noticed that my silk duck kept talking about iGPU. I figured out that this must mean “integrated Graphics Processing Unit”.

Why would a motherboard have built-in video displays, and yet Grok was talking about iGPU?

I thought for a moment and then asked, Verify that Intel Core i3-12100F has iGPU.

Here is the kicker: while I can get this motherboard to work with a graphics card, that doesn’t help me as I need that slot for my Fiber NIC. In looking at other motherboards, some of them seem to work with CPUs without iGPU, while others require iGPU.

This “feature” never occurred to me. It makes sense, but Grok is the one that found it for me.

Conclusion

AI has its place today as an assistant. It can do a great job of rubber ducking. It does a good job of editing articles, if you keep it in its place.

This is a powerful tool that is only going to get better.

Features, Issues, Bugs, and Requirements

When software is upgraded or updated, it happens for a limited set of reasons. If it is a minor update, it should be for issues, bugs or requirements.

What is an Issue? An issue is something that isn’t working correctly, or isn’t working as expected. While a Bug is something that is broken, that needs to be fixed.

A bug might be closed as “working as designed,” but that same thing might still be an issue. The design is wrong.

Requirements are things that come from outside entities that must be done. The stupid warning about a site using cookies to keep track of you is an example. The site works just fine without that warning. That warning doesn’t do anything except set a flag against the cookie that it is warning you about.

But sites that expect to interact with European Union countries need to have it to avoid legal problems.

Features are additional capabilities or methods of doing things in the program/application.

Android Cast

Here is an example of something that should be easy but wasn’t. Today there is a little icon in the top right of the screen, which is the ‘cast’ button. When that button is clicked, a list of devices is provided to cast to. You select the device, and that application will cast to your remote video device.

We use this to watch movies and videos on the big screen. For people crippled with Apple devices, this is similar to AppleTV.

When this feature was first being rolled out, that cast button was not always in the upper right corner. Occasionally it was elsewhere in the user interface. Once you found it, it worked the same way.

A nice improvement might be to remember that you prefer to cast and what device you use in a particular location. Then when you pull up your movie app and press play, it automatically connects to your remote device, and the cast begins. This would be just like your phone remembering how to connect to hundreds of different WiFi networks.

If you were used to the “remember what I did last time” model and suddenly had to do it the way every other program does, you might be irritated. Understandably. Things got more difficult, two buttons to press when before it just “did the right thing.”

Upgrades and updates are often filled with these sorts of changes, driven by requirements.

Issues and Bugs

If I’m tracking a bug, I might find that the root cause can’t be fixed without changes to the user interface. I’m forced into modifying the user interface to fix a bug that had to be fixed. Sometimes making something more difficult or requiring more steps. It is a pain in the arse, but occasionally a developer doesn’t really have a choice.

An even more common change to the user interface happens when the program was allowing you to do something in a way you should not have been. When the “loophole” is fixed, things become more difficult, but not because the developer wanted to nerf the interface, but because what you were doing should not have been happening.

Finally, the user interface might require changes because a library your application is using changes and you have no choice.

The library introduced a new requirement because their update changed the API. Now your code flow has to change.

Features

This is where things get broken easily. Introducing new features.

This is the bread and butter of development agencies. By adding new features to an existing application, you can get people to pay for the upgrade or to decide on your application over some other party’s application.

Your grocery list application might be streamlined and do exactly what you want it to do. But somebody asked for the ability to print the lists, so the “print” feature was added, which brings the designers in, who update the look to better reflect what will be printed.

Suddenly your super clean application has a bit more flash and is a bit more difficult to use.

Features often require regrouping functionality. When there was just one view, it was a single button somewhere on the screen. Now that there is a printer view and a screen view, with different options, you end up with a dialog where before you had a single button press.

Other times the feature you have been using daily without complaint is one that the developer, or more likely the application owners, don’t use and don’t know that anybody else uses. Because it works, nobody was complaining. Since nobody was complaining, it had no visibility to the people planning features.

The number of times I’ve spent hours arguing with management about deleting features or changing current functionality would boggle your mind. Most people don’t even know everything their application does, or the many ways that it can be done.

David Drake’s book The Sharp End features an out-of-shape maintenance sergeant pushed into a combat role. He and his assistant have to man a tank during a mad dash to defend the capital.

At one point the sergeant is explaining how tankers learn to fight their tank in a way that works for them. The tank has many more sensors and capabilities than the tanker uses. Those features would get in the way of those tankers. It doesn’t matter. They fight their tank and win.

As the maintenance chief, he has to know every capability, every sensor, and every way they interact with each other. Not because he will be fighting the tank, but because he doesn’t know which method the tanker is going to use, so he has to make sure everything is working perfectly.

My editor of choice is Emacs. For me, this is the winning editor for code development and writing books and such. The primary reason is that my fingers never have to leave the keyboard.

I type at over 85 WPM. To move my hands from the keyboard is to slow down. I would rather not slow down.

I use the cut, copy, and paste features all the time. Mark the start, move to the end, Ctrl W to cut, Meta W to copy, move to the location to insert, and Ctrl Y to yank (paste) the content at the pointer. For non-Emacs use, Ctrl C, Ctrl X, and Ctrl V to the rescue.

My wife does not remember a single keyboard shortcut. In the 20+ years we’ve been together, I don’t think she has ever used the cut/paste shortcuts. She always uses the mouse.

All of this is to say that the search for new features will oftentimes break things you are used to.

Pretty Before Function

Finally, sometimes the designers get involved, and how things look becomes more important than how they function.

While I will not build an application without a good designer to help, they will often insist on things that look good but are not good user experiences. Then we battle it out and I win.

This isn’t a prepping post, per se. I’m off schedule due to life being busy. I’ll try and get back on track in a week or two. Be aware that most articles through the month of November will be “canned” (ie written long in advance, probably this month) because it is National Novel Writing Month and I need to sit down and write a whole-ass book (this year it’s my 18th century cookbook) in 30 days. 50,000+ words in 30 days is not easy, and I don’t do a lot of other writing, though I may pop in to say hi. We’ll see.

So last weekend, I was up at the Fort. It was the big “Out of Time” timeline event, meaning they invited people from other eras than the Fort’s (which is 1740s through 1760s, roughly) to come and set up outside the palisade and present information on their part of history. We had someone from 13th century, quite a bit from WWI and WWII, and of course my 15th century group, The Brotherhood of the Arrow and Sword. With all my favorite reenactors there (only the Vikings were missing, as they had an event elsewhere), I asked for and received permission to plan a grand meal for everyone.

As you can see from the image to the left, it was quite the feast. I had three “removes” (we would call them courses, today). We ended up actually putting all the food onto a big table and letting people get stuff buffet style, which I totally lost control of. I really got descended upon by locusts, and that was not what I had intended. Next year will be better, with the “removes” going out on the table for people to get food from. Also, those with food allergies needed to go up first, and that didn’t happen. I learn new stuff every time I do this. 🙂

The preparations for this meal started on Friday evening. The salt cod had to go in to soak, as the water needed to be changed several times before it was put in with the turnip to cook. I think I changed the water five times? Regardless, the cod was not at all salty by the time it hit the table, and actually was quite good all mashed up with the turnip. The “pumpion soup” (squash soup) was incredibly tasty and easy, and I will be doing it again. The salad was “just” salad, but looked at tasted quite good.

Yes, I cooked a turkey over a fire. This was my first time roasting a WHOLE turkey, as in the past I’ve always disjointed it and cooked it in pieces. I wanted to put the entire turkey out, though, and so I roasted it in my largest cast iron pot. I started it breast up, flipped it after 1.5 hours, then flipped it again after 1.5 hours. It spent its last hour in the beehive bake oven, crisping up its skin to a lovely brown shade. The turkey literally fell apart, was juicy and tender, and basically disappeared within a few minutes of being put out. The ham was “braised,” which means I seared all the sides first, and then boiled it. Or rather, it simmered most of the day. The result was delicious, and it was reduced to a single meatless bone and a piece of gristle before the end of the dinner. I was so pleased that everyone liked the food!

I think I served about 40 or so people. We ate in the Great Hall, which is also where I did most of the cooking. I baked bread in the outdoor beehive oven (four loaves) and did the rest of the cooking over coals in the two fireplaces at either end of the Hall. It was nice to have all that space for cooking! Of the side dishes I made, the clear favorite was the Roots a la Creme, which are basically root veggies in a cream sauce. I have to admit, they were very delicious, and I ate the leftovers (what few there were) the next day.

The star of the show, though, was definitely the Rich Cake, from Martha Washington. I have never made a cake like this before, which is dense and full of extremely alcoholic fruit. It was moist, solid, flavorful, sweet, and indeed very rich. I will absolutely be making it again, though perhaps with a few minor adjustments. I can see what that thing could be set on a shelf and left for a month, though. There’s so much alcohol and sugar in it, nothing will touch it! LOL! Think of it as an edible Christmas cake, the kind we usually use as door stoppers.

Ratafia biscuits were the other new-to-me dessert that I attempted. They did not turn out as well as I had hoped, but they were not a clear fail, either. They were very edible, with a lovely almond undertone to them. They didn’t “loft up” as much as I’d hoped, though. I think I folded in the almond flour too roughly, perhaps. I will say, I’m never making the ratafia biscuits again without modern conveniences. Whipping the egg whites until stiff BY HAND was quite the adventure, and my arm still hurts. Totally worth it, just to prove I could do it, though. It might not have been so difficult if I hadn’t started out by creaming the butter for the Rich Cake first, then creaming the sugar into the butter for that same cake, all before moving on to whipping egg whites by hand for 25 minutes. Yes, I’m nuts. But you know what? I know I can do it, now.

Here’s the thing. A lot of people there thought I was crazy for putting this dinner on. Cooking for that many mouths, spending an entire day in prepping, cooking, plating, and all the rest. I did have help, though, with two very good friends who took the time to show me the ropes (they’re both retirees from restaurant business, and know how to do proper mise en place). Everyone loved the meal, but yes, many of them thought I was insane for not putting at least some of this stuff into the very modern oven to bake. I was determined to do this “the 18th century way” though, because I know that if I can do it that way, then doing it with modern conveniences is easy.

This is also research. The cookbook I’m about to write next month will feature all of the recipes I used in this supper, along with many others that I’ve tried in the past two years. While I tailor my recipes to be cooked in a modern kitchen, the instructions suit those who want to do it the 18th century way, as well. I have to know how it works, so that I can explain it to others. Having the opportunity to work the kitchen for a big meal that way gave me a ton of insights into how an 18th century kitchen would have run. It makes my explanations better, when I’m talking to visitors at the Fort or to the encampment of my 18th century reenactors group.

Above everything, this is prepping (see how I masterfully brought it back to prepping? Go me!). I now know without a doubt that I can cook for a large group with nothing more than my two hands and fire. Nothing can stop me now! Oh, and everyone is looking forward to next year!

Costs

Like almost everything I learn, the startup costs are quickly outweighed by the cost of the “tooling.”

My lathe and milling machine cost less than $1500. The cost of my micrometers exceeds $1000 without counting toolposts, toolholders, inserts, and a wealth of other things.

Reloading is something like that. You can get a starting kit for around $175 that has just about everything you need to start reloading. You need to add dies, reloading manual, and consumables.

Assuming you are reloading for 9mm, your dies will be between $40 and a couple of hundred. I’m currently using Redding, which prices out at $75. Manuals run $25 or so. This puts the total cost of tooling just under $300.

Your consumables will be primers at $80 per 1,000, powder at $156 for four pounds, 115gr RMR JHP at $115 per 1,000.

This puts your consumables at $351 for a total start cost of $650 or so.

Assuming you are reloading “free” brass, this gives you a startup cost of $0.60/round, which is more than range candy but less than personal defense ammo.

After your initial investment, your costs will decrease, but it will take a while before you are truly saving money.

Your next 1,000 rounds will cost you $80 for primers and $115 for bullets, giving you a cost per round of $0.195. This would bring your costs from $0.60 to $0.422 per round, including your original investment.

The place where costs really change is when you need to start reloading a different caliber. Using the same equipment, you can add a set of dies, $75, and begin reloading a different caliber.

Availability

During the great panic-demic it became nearly impossible to buy certain calibers of ammunition. Even now, it is sometimes difficult to buy certain calibers.

If you have reloading equipment, those limitations are reduced.

I, personally, reload .38 Special and .357 Magnum with cast bullets. I cast HP myself and find those rounds to be consistent in weight and go where I point them.

My LGS was only selling cowboy loads and very expensive self-defense loads. They had no brass, they had no bullets, they had no primers, and their selection of powders was limited. For the cost of a set of very nice bullet molds, I was able to create freedom seeds for my R95 and revolver.

8mm Mauser is difficult to find and expensive; I’ve got nearly 500 rounds of it for the cost of bullets and powder. The same with 30-30 and 45-70.

I believe the only firearms I cannot reload for are my shotguns. Since I only run 4 rounds a year out of them, it’s not a real issue.

This is the great power of reloading, in my opinion. You can reload for unusual calibers for the cost of a set of dies and bullets.

Quality

The big-time long-distance shooters swear by hand reloading their ammo. I believe them. When I’m reloading, I attempt to maintain that same level of quality as they do. I may or may not succeed, but it is nice to know that I’m close.

Safety

There are two big rules in reloading:

1. Don’t Shoot Other People’s Reload.
2. Your mistake can kill you.

I currently use a Franklin Armory hand primer. It works for me. I can feel each primer seat properly. Before I had the hand primer, I used two different on-press tools.

One day, I was at a private range shooting .45 Colt out of a Marlin lever action. I would pull the trigger, the hammer would fall, and there would be no bang. Not even a pop. This was a problem, but I found nothing horribly wrong. It just meant I had to fix something.

Then I switched to my 1911. Bang. Bang. Pop. STOP!

I had a squib.

This led to me pulling every bullet on that set of reloaded rounds. Luckily there were only 20 of each caliber.

Conclusion

The startup cost of reloading is not horrible. The cost grows like in every hobby. Your break-even point will be in the 4,000 round range at today’s prices.

My start was $50 for a press, four or five sets of dies, a bunch of brass, and some other stuff. I bought a pound of Hodgdon’s No. 5 powder, a Lee Reloading manual, Lee powder scoops, a box of .45 ACP bullets, and 100 primers. My total investment to start was less than $200 for my first 100 rounds, giving me breakeven on my first 100 rounds.

Your mileage may vary.

Yes, I’m a day late. I unloaded the truck Sunday, fell down, went boom. Yesterday was a lot of cleaning and recovery. So we’re a day late.

This weekend, I had the most amazing time cooking an 18th century supper for about 40 or so reenactors. I had a blast, even though it was a ton of work. We started cooking at about 9:30am, and rang the dinner bell at just after 6pm. By 8pm, I was in bed, in the dark, half asleep. LOL… But what a day! Everyone loved the food, and I made both a 13 lb turkey and an 8 lb ham, both of which were stripped like locusts in a wheat field. LOL… There were plenty of successes, and a couple of partial failures, but overall I did well. People enjoyed it, and I’ve been asked if I’m willing to repeat it next year (spoiler alert: I am!). Of the side dishes I presented, though, Roots a la Creme was probably the group favorite. It just tasted GOOD. So here is the version I made:

Ingredients:

• 4 large carrots
• 4 medium parsnips
• 1 stick of butter/margarine
• 1 tbsp fresh parsley, minced
• 3 small scallions
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 shallot about one inch round
• A small pinch of ground cloves
• 1/4 tsp dried basil
• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 tbsp or so of flour for thickening
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground pepper
• 1 cup cashew yogurt OR sour cream OR heavy whipping cream
• 1 tsp white vinegar
• vegetable broth, if needed to thin it out a bit.

Peel your carrots and parsnips and cut them in large slices. Boil them until you can stick a fork in them easily (usually 15 to 20 minutes). Drain and transfer them to a stew pan. Add the butter, parsley, scallions, garlic, shallots, cloves and basil. Over a medium heat stir well to blend the butter and seasonings with the roots.

Add flour, salt pepper and broth. Boil quickly, stirring as you do, until it thickens to a sauce. Remove from heat and reduce your heat to medium. Add the yogurt to the roots. Stir over medium heat until well blended and smooth. Take care not to boil or scorch this. If your sauce breaks, take a few tablespoons out, add a bit of white vinegar to it, and whisk well. Slowly add that back to the sauce, and it should fix it. You can add broth if it’s too thick.

Serve.

Train Like You Fight, Fight Like You Train

One of the consistent doctrines of the US military is the above. And we do train that way. We train to be able to overcome, to succeed.

There are countless examples of training interfering with fighting and even more of training bringing victory to the battlefield.

The first cops into the Nashville school state that their training just took over. They moved with purpose towards the sound of gunfire. They cleared rooms along the way, rapidly with no wasted motion. When they had cleared, they took the lead and did not stop until the asshole was dead.

Compared to the school cops that ran and hid in Texas and Florida. In both cases they went into barricaded with hostages, and children died because of their cowardice and lack of training.

Another example from an earlier time: when they recovered the body of a dead cop, they found six expended cases in his pocket or pouch. Why? Because he had been trained to retain his brass when he reloaded.

Why do we train with FMJ bullets?

Cartridge Pricing

These are representative prices. I’m not suggesting that these are the best prices, but they come from the same source.
Description,Quantity,Price,Per Unit

The cost of reloading a FMJ and a JHP is the same but for the cost of the bullet.

Training Costs

If you are buying your training rounds, you are going to save nearly 60 cents per round. When you are talking about 100 or more rounds in a single training session, that is a $60 difference per 100 rounds.

That means that most people will use “range candy” instead of self defense rounds.

On the other hand, the difference between firing a reloaded FMJ vs. a JHP is 6 cents per round. Even with a range session of 200 rounds going downrange, that is only a $12 difference in cost.

For me this is a non-starter. I am working through my FMJ .45 ACP but I will no longer reload FMJ pistol ammo. It isn’t worth it to me.

I have some 9mm pistols. The Blue-Haired Fairie’s is an H&K in 9mm. The PC-9 is 9mm and takes Glock magazines, so I have a Glock.

What I didn’t have was an EDC that I actually liked. I’ve never been particularly fond of the Glocks. It might be because I was driving nails with my Kimber in .45 ACP and with the H&K, but the Glock had rounds going “that-a-way” for me. I traded it for something.

My Kahr got upgraded to a Sig P938, which I like. I just don’t like shooting it. It is so small and so light that it bites when it is fired.

That Kahr and later P938 were my EDC when I needed something small for when I was in the office. I had one box of Hornady Critical Defense for it. I fired just enough of those $1-per-round personal defense rounds to know that my FMJ reloads went to the same place.

So I looked through all the cans looking for 9mm. I found over 1,000 rounds of FMJ or copper-plated rounds. No problem there. What I didn’t find was any JHP.

This led to a big thank you to my son. Yesterday he moved every single ammo can until we found the crate with 9 mm and .45 ACP bullets.

The Ammo Hunt

My ammo cans are in crates: 4 30-cal cans per crate or 3 50-cal cans per crate. I also have some simple crates that hold bullets, brass, and other fun stuff. Each can is properly labeled.

The issue was that the crate labeled “bullets” was at the bottom of the hardest-to-reach stack of crates.

My son diligently worked his way to that stack and handed them all out to me until he got to that final crate at the bottom of the final stack. Therein he located 2,000 JHP bullets, just waiting to grow into Freedom Seeds!

I see reloading time in my future. There is no need to have bullets when I have spark buttons, powder, cases, and seeds.

As we say, shooting is a perishable skill, and I need more range time.

Conclusion

What do you think is the proper ratio of seeds to seed dispensers? My current is around 1,000 seeds per caliber or 500 per dispenser, whichever is greater.

Newcommers

EDC

Every Day Carry. It can refer to a firearm, knife, light, or IFAK. The stuff that you have with you all the time.

IFAK

Individual First Aid Kit

Spark Button

Primers

Seeds

Bullets

Freedom Seeds

A complete cartridge, ready to fire.

Seed Dispenser

A firearm

You can buy cartridges, or you can make cartridges. The process of making a cartridge is called “reloading” because, in general, we are recycling the cases of fired cartridges.

A cartridge consists of a case, normally brass, sometimes aluminum or steel, which holds all the other components. A primer, which causes a spark when struck correctly by the firing pin of a firearm. A propellant called powder, gunpowder, or smokeless powder. Gunpowder is not the same as smokeless powder; using smokeless powder when the firearm expects gunpowder or black powder causes bad things to happen. And a bullet.

We use a reloading press to prepare the case and insert the primer. We add powder to the case, then place the bullet in the mouth of the case and use the press to seat the bullet. Once done, you have a cartridge that is as good as, if not better than, factory cartridges.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve probably used this quote before on Vine, and I have purposefully used it elsewhere many times. I use it as a checklist of things to know how to do, to teach my friends and family, to help my children learn about. More than just a checklist, though, it is a treatise on logic. This is the first of two posts on the list of things Heinlein expects of a human being.

Change a diaper. This one relates to family, and to chosen family and friends. You need to know enough childcare that you can change a diaper. More than that, you need to know that a man spending time with his children is not babysitting them, because they are his children. He is parenting, not babysitting. Same with mom. You need to know how you’ll react if a kid sasses you (because it’ll happen, trust me), what to do if one escapes your grasp and runs pell mell for the roadway, and what medications everyone in your intimate personal circle is taking in case you need to tell a paramedic or a doctor.

Plan an invasion. You need to understand the basics of chess and other strategy games. You may not be the best strategist out there, but you need to know how to fight back if there’s a problem. This is literally why we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. This is why free speech and gun rights are at the top of the list of protected God-given rights. All the weaponry in the world does you no good if you have no idea how to use it. All the weaponry int he world does you no good if you’re not WILLING to use it, if you have to. Planning an invasion means you have to know all sorts of things about guard rotation, building maps, routes in and out, security, physical barriers, targets, and a whole lot more. You have to be able to think your way through it, even if your plan is simplistic.

Butcher a hog. You must understand where your food comes from. Vegetables come out of the ground, and most of the ones we grow today require a lot of care. Animals have to be cared for, occasionally medicated, fed, watered, exercised, and loved in order to make them good food. They also have to have a clean death. And when it comes time to do the actual butchering, you don’t need to know special cuts and such, or be the most efficient, but you have to be willing to get your hands dirty and dig in as needed. You have to know that, at the point of butchering, the animal no longer cares what you do to its carcass, and your job is to make the most out of that animal’s sacrifice to feed your family.

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