Anyway, details here, direct from the horse’s mouth.  Downloads begin on March 1.

The bar has the consistency of a dense cookie, not too hard, barely oily, and with a slight lemony flavor.  I had no hesitation at all about eating it.  It comes pre-cut into 2-inch cubes, each a nominal 400 calories.  The individual cubes are not wrapped inside the vacuum-packed mylar.  They are available in 1200, 2400, and 3600 calorie packs.

For their designed purpose they seem perfect.  I think they will hold up quite well banging around in the car, even with the temperature extremes they will experience.  Recommended!

At any rate, I’m pretty happy with the outcome.  Now if I could just find some time to shoot the damn thing…

Based on that post, I decided that I was going to paint one of my rifles.  First things first, I ordered some spray paint from Brownell’s – specifically the Aervoe recommended by Pat Rogers.  Instead of using the camo net as suggested, I made a vaguely MultiCam looking template from a manilla file folder.  This was just shapes drawn free-hand, and cut out with an exacto knife.  Nobody will mistake me for an artist.  This was by far the most time consuming part of this project.

Now, rifles are kind of expensive, and I’m not crazy about the idea of ruining one with my first attempt at this, so I decided to try this on a couple of magazines first.  I set them out in the sun for a little while, then hit them with a base coat of “Sand” colored paint.  Let that dry for a few minutes, than blasted them with a few broad sweeping strokes of “Earth Brown”.  That gave us the look to the left.

So far, so good.  Few more minutes of drying, then a coat of “Marine Green” through the template.

Looking good!  Little bit of drying, and next up comes “Dark Green”.

Nice!  Dry, then apply the Olive Drab:

Fantastic! Let that dry for about an hour in the sun, and we’re done.  Wonder how it compares to MultiCam?  Me too, let’s take a look:Pretty passable if you ask me.  I think that’s enough proof of concept that I’m going to give it a shot with a rifle.  Maybe next week – stay tuned!

It is an absolutely great tool for understanding how long the food you have will last you.  You provide ages and genders for the people you are storing for, from which it calculates your total daily caloric requirements.  It’s pre-populated with many common long term storage foods – Freeze Dried, Mountain House, rice, etc – as well as with everything from Emergency Essentials catalog.  You provide your inventory of each of these items (plus anything else you want to add), and it calculates total calories stored, and how long it will last.  Additionally, it allows you to order from EE (good marketing!), and shows the effect of the purchase in your storage plan.

I did a very quick, off the top of my head estimate of what I have stored while experimenting with the tool.  It returned half a million calories, which it estimates will last my family for 3 months.  I plan to properly update my inventory in the next couple of weeks, and will see what the tool thinks of that.

Overall, I’m impressed.  Added bonus, it’s free to use!

Edit: More thorough inventory of just my long-term storage items puts me closer to 620,000 calories / 115 days!

The impetus for this post, however, is the mug of their Gourmet Hot Cocoa sitting on the desk in front of me. Absolutely a wonderful treat for a snowy day.  Mix with milk instead of water and it’s rich, creamy, and borderline sinful.  It is available in 10 different flavors,  and as a 12 can variety case.  I can heartily recommend the mint, orange and raspberry flavors.  I also endorse the Mexican variety now sitting in front of me, which may have become my new favorite.