Matter of Facts: When Mother Nature Chooses Violence

Welcome back to the Matter of Facts podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, politics every week on iTunes, Ditcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mwefpodcast dot com. On Facebook or Instagram. You can support us be a Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Raveley Andrew Nickar on the airside of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. We are already being harassed by people in the chat. I think it's hilarious though. The proud textan is accusing anybody else of being late because he's always late to these freaking shows except for this episode and the last one. That's okay, that's okay, it's my fault. It's my fault. I got a phone call like twenty seconds before we were supposed to go on the air. But it was family related that as well within batt Yeah, it. Was either going to be it was either going to be family related work related or family related medical something or other. And it was family related work related, so it can wait a little bit. Yeah, okay, so we got raggle fraggle I see a doctor, scary guy a proud Texan and a Jim Rowles. And if I. Miss somebody, I apologize. I don't think I did. I just did a quick little once over. Let's do admin work. Then let's get to a topic first and foremost. You should promote bad decisions by becoming a patron. And if you don't know what promoting bad decisions means, you're not in the patron chat because we promote bad decisions constantly. Like it's literally like having a big group of older brothers who are like, yes, you should go buy that new gun you really want. Yes, you should spend four thousand dollars on the night Vision. Yes you should go spend a weekend camping in the woods with your idiot friends instead of going out how to on date night with your wife. We are here for you to promote bad decisions and make your spouses angry, if only you will allow us. True sometimes detailed instructions on how to build illegal devices. Not that you would, but it's fun to know how to do. Yeah, I would say that this that this little excursion. Comes with a VPN. But if you if you talk to us and don't have a VPN by now, I don't know what you're doing with you. I don't like to inconvenience my FBI handler. That that that is a point my FBI handler does does. I'm convinced he gets a real, a real kick out. Of the memes that I share around. That's exactly where he's right, guy. We're learning what not to do. That's it exactly. It's an educational experience. It's it's also you should by emerged from for the vibes from the Southern galos. It supports a small business, it supports us. You get a funny T shirt, have a deal that links in the show description right above it, right below the whole Patreon link. I don't remember what order they're in, but they're all on the show description. And if you'd like to prevent war crimes, you should check out Disaster Coffee. You use code m F to save a couple percent on your coffee order. And if you want to encourage war crimes up to the Canadian level, I recommend whiskey in the coffee. Whiskey in the coffee is always a good decision when you're not at work. Depends on the work. Look, workman's cop doesn't pay out if they find out you were drunk on the job. That's all I'm saying. They don't pay out if you were drunk on the job. But so that Uncle Randy's front porch, my wife has started drinking that almost exclusively cold now and claims it tastes like chocolate. She says it tastes very chocolate if you drink it over ice. Okay, so here two things. First of all, Uncle Randy's front porch does kind of have I wouldn't call it like when you say chocolate. I wouldn't say it has like a milk chocolate or a sweet chocolate taste it to me. It's almost more like cocoa maybe, or like Baker's chocolate. You know. She just said it tastes chocolatey to me, and my brain said that's chocolate. Yeah. Well, the air thing is like whether the call. Whether you drink your coffee hot or cold, whether you brew it hot or cold, does influence the taste. So by icing the coffee she might be bringing more that note. Could she really enjoys it? So that's all that matters. Yeah, So a couple of comments doctor Scary guy, Yes, Chrispy and the fam is Southern gals. That's who's running the merge for us, The guy the comments yes, learn what learn? What not to do do is do not do as we say or as we do. Yes. And then there's. Some smart ass here that's still talking about not getting a chainsaw before Mother Nature chose. By to be fairy, gave you way more shit about your lack of shotgun. And I have amended both of those and got no credit for either one. No, No, you never will, I never will. It's like the Bridge Builder all over again. Yeah, doctor scared guy. I only use VPN to download my little pony comment comics. I read terrorism material in clear text. Might as well, I mean, strong, move, strong move. One more comment then we'll get to it. Uprising blend is definitely more acidic than. The darker bruise. Yeah, Like, like I've talked about before, Raggle the So in general terms, the more towards light roast you get, you're gonna get more cidity, the more towards dark roast, you're gonna get more bitterness and like. Based on that, you can kind of get a medium, a medium dark, and a dark and you can figure out what you like pretty quickly. But you can also have some influence over the acidity of the coffee with brew methods. So like, if if you like the taste of uprising, but the acidity is a bit much, you could try you can. Try cold brewing it for one. Definitely don't brew it and then microwave it twice the next day. That please much more acidic. Please don't microwave coffee. That's just sad. Put it in the scene, give it. A proper burial. Start another pod. Besides, you buy more that way. Do. All right, So one more thing before we get to go in about this. There will be upcoming reloading content because I had a person that I know I met through Cyper Survivalist, who was also a listener of this podcasts, who called me literally yesterday and said, how fortuitous you've been talking about reloading. I just bought someone's turnkey reloading setup who wanted to get out of a hobby. Sure, and I'm not going to put his business out on the street, but he spent maybe a tenth of what he has in terms of value in terms of like components, equipment and everything else he's He could literally start manufacturing ammunition tomorrow, except he has never done it before, so he asked if he could write shotgun with me on my bench, just kind of get a feel for things. So sure, I told him the next time I am spinning up rifle reloading, I will happily invite him over. And you know, we'll get him. We'll get him educated. I got a coworker that he shoots a little bit of nine mil, so I talked him into buying components and then just bring him over to run off on my press. Since he will buy exactly what I told him, I said, we can just just turnkey, dump powder in, put bullet on thing, put casings in the in the hopper, good to go. We can spin him out his year's worth of ammal in like two hours. Yeah, uh, Jim, I still like you either. The microwave coffee, I just I think microwaven coffee tastes like sadness. Look, my wife gets the fresh pot of coffee every morning. I drink whatever's left the next day. Okay, But I am forced him it that I am a bit of a coffee snob. You are like, that's okay. I didn't. I didn't set out to become a coffee snob, but daily repetitive drinking of very high end coffee has kind of spoiled. Me at this point. Oh yeah, I'm sure if I got to the point of micro roasting my own coffee like you do, that I would eventually hate microwave day old coffee. But at this point I need dark, warm, not hot, because I've never really managed to drink hot coffee. It's always room temperature by the time I get to it, and somewhat caffeinated. This sounds like a parallel to the whole reloading conversation we were having last episode, where we were talking about like, yeah, you know, neck tension might matter, but it doesn't matter enough to make a difference. Because I don't shoot that well. Yeah, Or like I'm shooting a nineteen eighties Rhymington seven hundred hunting weight barrel and trying to get match precision out of it. I mean the barrel is kind of become a limiting factor at some point. Yeah, I mean, the fact that I'm using a Mister Coffee drip machine is definitely a factor at this point. Now, I will I will go to bat over this, because there there are coffee nerds and there are coffee snobs who say, like drint and dript machines are the most awful thing it's on earth. And while I will happily admit they're not my first choice, I'll drink drip coffee all day long. I actually I like the taste of drip coffee or like a percolato same thing. Well, you got to remember too, it's like it's that's the coffee you and I grew up on. This drip coffee, I mean, blue collar free coffee in the break room is always shitty burnt drip coffee. So anything that's not burnt and still dripvet probably all right. Although I will say this much, that eighty cup Hamilton Beach that I keep over there. For activities here, that does a good job. One twelve ounce bag of disaster coffee fills that thing enough to do eighty cups and it makes a decent cup of coffee. I have to admit, you know, I have found, as with most cooking coffee anything like that chili, the larger the bats you do, the better it turns out. So really you should just overcook everything. I have I have had the thought of, like I've thought about dragging that thing out like a summer camp trip, just because like, but it could never be one of those days where we're like we're going into town or we're going to do stuff. It would have to be a we're gonna sit around the campfire and goof off all day long, because there's no way on earth, even with the group we bring out summer camp, we're gonna drink eighty cups of coffee in anything less than like half a day. I'm good for like sixty cups by lunch, sixty eight ounce cups. Oh no, sixty ounce that's what it is. It's a little bit different than bad. Good for six. I'm good for sixty ounces by lunch. Me and Rachel need to have a discussion. If you drink through was it six sixty times eight? Yeah? No, that'd be a lot four hundred and eighty ounces. You'd never be out of the bathroom. No, I just missed it in my math because I went to Yeddie Coffee mug is twenty ounces twenty times three is sixty uftah, And then I forgot to convert it back. Anyway. The whole point of the episode was to talk about when mother Nature chooses violence, because you know it is it is April. We're getting back into spring and summer spring storm season that we've already had some listeners get storm damage. Yep, winter was receding the war airs beginning to warm up. The thunderstorms are getting more energetic. We probably are out of the range of blizzards up where y'all are. I'm assuming I know nothing about blizzards. No, we have had blizzards up until a week from now. That is the dumbest bull crab have heard my life. The year my wife was born, her mom went into the hospital was at eighty five degrees and when they left with her in the car, it was twenty five and blowing. You live in hell, Yes, yes, I literally do. And that's that's completely discounting the politics of the region. No, just the weather live in. My family decided, Hey, look, you know, the East Coast kind of shitty. We don't like it. Fuck it, We're gonna go a little bit further. They got to the Midwest and they went, you know what, this is absolute hell. But I don't feel like walking anymore, so we're staying and nobody ever left. I can't talk too much smack though, because you think about where I live, Like when the Rablay family came here, in seventeen thirty two. It was nothing but freaking alligators, mosquitoes the size of chickens, and swamp landing, and these bunch of couiyawns looked around and thought this is the place to set up shop and live here for two hundred and ninety fricking years. Or the French dropped them off and they forgot to continue walking. My wife is correct, Illinois already had fifty. Nine tornadoes this spring, So y'all it's been a interesting spring. Yeah, but that is raggle. Couldn't hear anything over my screaming child, isn't parent? Turn the volume up, Yeah, turn it up. They'll they'll appreciate it, or they'll learn something one of the other. It might be something you don't want to learn, depending on the level of spice of the episode. But you know, so, yeah, I mean that that was what we decided to sit down and talk about today fifteen minutes. And we've been bull crapping the entire time. But it really just comes down to, like we're getting back in a storm season. We're probably a couple months off from hurricane season. We are at least down here, like we are well within the range where tornadoes might start to be a thing. We actually had a couple spin off of thunderstorm just a couple of weeks ago down here, and we're always at risk of major thunderstorms, which around I don't know what thunderstorms are where you are, Nick, but down here, a good strong thunderstorm like that's street flooding. That's really it's impassable almost immediately in the New Orleans area. That sometimes times is it won't usually immediately lead like homes flooding, but it will drastically reshape your commute home in the afternoons because like whole sections of the city are just no longer accessible because the roads are flooded eighteen inches deep. So it depends on what we're getting. Like last week, we got five inches of rain in about two days, which for around I know it's not as much by you, but around us is quite a considerable amount of rain pretty quick. It looks like people are saying the stream stopped. Hum hm, it shows it up, Nope, nope, saying YouTube. It says YouTube is live. Huh now it's showing. Interesting by the comment See. Here's the weird part though, is they're still commenting mm hm and we're. Still means it's been I don't well, we're still streaming the YouTube. It shows everything up. Somebody just dipped over to Facebook, though, that'd be the weirdest fricking thing if Facebook, No idea, Garrett, Yeah, no idea. No idea. How about I talk and you poke your head into YouTube and see what's got what's up? You can't do. All right, it's YouTube streams having problems. Of course YouTube's having problems. It's run by it's run by idiots. But anyway, so. Actually the first time we were going to have this cool little little, this cool little what's called a poll for everybody to participate in, And now nobody can participate because the stream got shut down, but we'll throw it up anyway and see if anybody actually can get in. So there's a poll up right now. If you are watching this live on the stream, you can type a one, two, three, or four in the chat and you can select which type of storm most concerned you hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzard or other, because I'm not listing all fifteen thousand different types of freaking problems you could run into. But you know, participate if you feel if you feel led to I'll leave that up for a couple of minutes, so it looks like it's just. Frozen YouTube on YouTube. I don't know. I don't know, guys. When I tried to log into it on my end, it just showed it buffering. So maybe YouTube is upset with us. Don't know. If you see this rumble Facebook somewhere around there, so we'll see there nothing we can do about it. From our end. It shows our data is good, so what can we do? That's all right? If anybody's watching, the poll is now live, So Grek, you're gonna have to type your one again because I had forgotten to start it by the time you typed one. Oh no. So part of why I won't I recommended to Phil that we talk about this a little bit is when you do get storm damage, there are a few little quick fixes you can do to prevent it from getting worse after the after the event, due to additional storms and whatnot, or animals getting in. Obviously, if you can prevent the damage ahead of time, that's always best. So Phil, I know, go around you guys. You get quite a bit of warning for hurricanes. You get a few days warning, right, I mean. So here's the thing I've made a little secret of the fact, it's not exactly a state secret, that you should know that a hurricane's coming into the golf. At least several days in advance. Excuse me, got a frog in my throat and he wouldn't hop out. But you at least know that a hurricane's coming into the golf. You don't always know exactly where it's adding initially, but you should be well aware that there's a hurricane coming into the gulf that has potential to thread in the Louisiana coastline several days in advance. Sometimes you may not know until like forty eight hours out it's gonna get it's gonna be line you where it's gonna be lining somebody else. Mhm. So you know, up around us, it's more tornadoes, blizzards, blizzards. We get a fair bit. Of warning for how does that work from a person so from a person who knows fuck all about blizzards. All right. So the way it works is is they'll be tracking a storm front, just like just like with a hurricane. They'll be tracking the weather front and it's say, following a pattern where there's a lot of moisture build up in the air. And you know, just like they predict rainfall, they can predict. Estimated snow totals. And what they'll do is a couple of weeks out they'll be like, hey, just you know, there's probably a winter storm coming. And as it gets. Closer, you'll see there are a couple a couple of models. There's like the European and the North American model for predicting weather. And if you see those two models, at least in our area, if you see them trending together, that usually means you will get no snow at all. Regardless of what they're predicting. If they wildly deviate from each other, you will get one or the other. You will probably get somewhere in the middle of the two. But for the most part, what causes blizzard conditions isn't the amount of snowfall. It's the amount of wind you get alongside snowfall. So I believe it's forty mile an hour winds or more and three or more hours of snowfall coinciding it at the same time. So essentially between them being able to predict precipitation, so they'll call for say, well, the most recent blissard we have. We got about a foot of snow, but it was a foot of snow with forty five to sixty mile an hour winds, So put the snow around here not really an issue. The fact that the wind was picking up so much that it was lifting the snow up off the ground and creating conditions where you couldn't see more than one hundred yards in some cases, sometimes even less. It's only about seventy five yards from the front of my house to my neighbors front of their house, and they always have their light on out front. We couldn't see the light on their front porch from our front from our front window. So you know, with with blizzards, there's not a whole lot you can do other than not being out in them to prevent damage because you're just going to get the snow you're going to get. It's going to pile up on your house where it piles up. But the reason I brought up the warning for you tornadoes, you don't. Get a warning, not really. You get a few hours. Maybe you get a warning of hey, there's going to be a severe thunderstorm event coming through, But for the most part, are tornadoes form very quickly, and they end very quickly, and they travel very fast. You know, you don't have a few days where you're like, Okay, there's there's a there's a tornado happening, and it's coming this direction. We know where it's coming, where it's going. No, I mean down here at least at least about the best we get is that we'll usually get some forecasts maybe a day maybe two prior that, like there is a serious thunderstorm coming in, there's enough energy to be potentially tornadic. And then obviously we're like around here, most of the weather's coming in from the west, so we're looking westwards towards bat Rouge, towards Lafayette, towards Lake Charles and East Texas to kind of give us a forecast stuff like if it's making tornadoes over there, it's probably gonna make. Tornadoes around here too, potentially. Yeah. Yeah, that's very typical. I mean, we'll see usually by us, if a storm is gonna break up, it'll break up in the western half of the state. If it doesn't, that's usually a severe storm for us. A lot of times we have a we have a large glacial deposit to the west of us to the west of my county. It's a it's. A large ridge of glacial deposits, and that alters some of the local weather patterns in a pretty nice way for us. A lot of the major storm systems that we get break up or divide across that ridge for whatever reason. It has to do, I think with the wind currents. But occasionally we'll get storms that don't come out of the west, that come out of the east. Those are always catastrophic for this area because they almost get stuck at that ridge line and just hover over our county, just hammer it with wind and rain and sometimes tornadoes. So with a blizzard, is it I guess I just always assumed it was a fall that was the biggest concern. But you're you're laying out, it's the wind. The snowfall is a problem. Yeah, Like twelve inches of snow is a problem, But the problem is that the snow doesn't just land and stay where it is. It's the fact that it cuts visibility down so much. Well, it cuts visibility and the snow continues to drift across the roadways. Okay, so if you're getting say twelve inches of snow in three hours, great. The plows wait for the three hours. Sometimes, like if school gets canceled, they'll wait until the snow's done, and then they'll plow it all off the road one shot, good, great done. Snow comes in the middle of the day, school's already in session, the plow trucks will run intermittently keeping up with the snow. But around here we have a lot of wide open farmland, especially in the winter. So what you can get is you got that foot of snow spread out over ten thousand acres, all blowing across the only highway between two towns, and so every five or ten minutes you could have another foot of snow dropped on the road. So you have low visibility, you have slippery road conditions, and you have piles of drifting snow, sometimes several feet deep, even if you only get three to four inches of snow. So what's an ounced prevention for roads impassable because of several stones snow? So don't it really is just. A hunker down, a weighted out kind of situation. Yeah, for blizzards, there's really not much you can do to prevent it. I mean, afterwards, there is a little bit of prevention you can do clearing the drifts away from your house, especially if you have so our house, we have a chimney in a fireplace, so all of our exhaust for any of our natural gas appliances goes out above the roof. Okay, my old house had a powered vent that came out about three feet off the ground, So if we got a lot of snow or a lot of blowing snow, you would have to go out occasionally move that snow out away from those vents so you don't build up carbon. Monoxide in your head. Makes sense. That's one kind of prevention you can do. You can also get that snow away from the house, or just knock the drifts down so that it's not piled up against your siding. That can cause water intrusion and ice damming up under your siding or up under your shingles. Makes sense. And see kind of the analog to that on the hurricane side is that usually with hurricanes around here, it isn't like it isn't usually the hurricane itself that causes the most deaths. What usually wants to kill on a lot of people as bad as the sounds is falling trees, smashing through the roofs and hurting people. And I hate to say this way, there's no polite way to say it, but people who have no functional understanding of how generators work, lighting them up inside an enclosed area and asphyxiating themselves. That happens a lot in winter here too. Unfortunately, we usually get if we get a really nasty winter storm that knocks out power, there's usually a couple of people in the county that either fire up a barbecue grill inside their house, or they fire up their stove, their natural gas stove, leave the door open, or fire up a generator in the house or a kerosene heater without proper ventilation. No pre salting you must read for the audio listeners or Steward, we'll get angry with you. Garret's asking if pre salting driveways works. Sometimes sometimes, yes, sometimes no. Part of the problem you can get if you pre salt your driveway is the first round of snow melts and then freezes again, and now you have ice under the snow. That sounds like a gigantic pain of the ass it can be. Or you can get a slush layer where that snow just keeps compacting down into a denser and denser amount, and then you get what some people call heart attacks snow, very heavy, dense, wet snow that cause you'd have to do more physical exertion. Now, he's been known to trigger heart attacks and kill people, especially the elderly or the less physically active. Yeah, it's it's not good. Yeah. I just saw somebody duck back into YouTube and then duck back out. So I'm assuming that stream is just frag for the night. Probably is no way. You know, what can we do. We'll probably get some kind of notice about it later find out. Maybe maybe not. But this is why we stream to Facebook and YouTube and rumble, because if you can't find us in one of those three places, then the FEDS got us. Yeah. But as far as like ounce. Of prevention for like hurricanes and that, that really tends to be Like my biggest concern down here is, you know, like obviously be aware of the weather, beware the storms, track, make rational, reasonable plans whether or not you're going to ride it out or you're going to evacuate. If you're going to evacuate, do it damn well early enough that you can get out before you get stuck on the fricking roads, like no duck. And if you're going to if you're going to opt to ride a hurricane out in your home, like make sure it's a defensible position. Make sure you have a low enough flood wrist that you don't think you're going to have to evacuate the middle of the hurricane. Make sure you have enough food and water to be able to ride it out. And I feel like that applies a lot to like blizzards too, Like if you're going to stay at home, make sure you got the things you need to stay warm and stay sheltered and stay fed. Now, for tornadoes, I mean, I don't know what y'all do. I'm assuming y'all probably huddle up in the basement. Is probably as close to being at a bomb shelter as possible. Well, you know, we don't have basements down here, like you and I have had that conversation. That's if I had a basement, it would be a it would be an in ground swimming pool under the house. It would. You know, For tornadoes, the best thing you can do is if you have a stormfront that is coming towards you. And this is kind of I would like to say common sense. But a lot of people ignore it. Nothing common about common sense naked is twenty twenty six. Now that's true. Get out before the storm gets there. Take all of your random shit on your yard and put it inside, or put it on the leeward side of the house, the side of the house away from the wind direction. Don't leave a bunch of missiles lying around in the yard for the wind pick up. The worst thing you can do is well, one of the worst things you can do is to have loose debris in the yard that can get picked up easily and thrown so because that stuff will go right through the side of your house. I mean, my wife sat and uncle lost a good portion of their fence because the neighbor refused to stake down there trampoline and it decided in one of our recent storms that it was going to migrate from two yards over through his fence. Yeah, I made it a point. So my wife has a thing about wind chime, She absolutely loves them. Make a point every time we have a severe thunderstorm coming through to grab those freaking at a bare minimum. I'll hang them on the back of like the chair, so instead of being at head high, they're at like knee high. They're nice unload of the ground. And I mean we have some pretty pretty good sized windows on the back of the house, so they could probably still threaten the windows, but by being lower, the idea is that if they do get blown off the backs of the chairs, they have less room to go before they hit the ground. True, but for like hurricanes, Yeah, we drag all that in. We packed literally, so the way we prepped for Ida, we took everything off the back porch and we either put it in the shed, which we thankfully had extra room because we took the generator out of there and you know that kind of stuff. So everything off the back porch except for the barbecue pit, which I figured was heavy enough we were gonna be okay without that. But we packed packed the shed full. Anything that stayed on the back porch, so that was fairly heavy was pressed up against the house so it didn't have any room to like get a running start before it hit the house. Cleaned everything around the whole outside of the house, undid all the hose bibs like we did. Anything we thought could get picked by the wind got secured in the garage or in the shed. We did not take the extra step of plywooting over the windows. Honestly, I'm i'm, I'm. I go back and forth with it every single time, because, on the one hand, a broken window would be another thing to have to fix after a hurricane. True, but on the flip side of things, those windows are all old enough at this point that they pretty much need to be replaced anyway. You know that's reasonable. I mean I I would love and Garrek brings us up in the chat, it'd be great to build functional shutters for your house. Uh, the way my windows are set up, I cannot put shutters over my windows because they're usually set up in banks of three and they're quite wide and fairly short. My windows open in like a tilt out style instead of a swing to the side or slide. Up, just because of the just because of the style of my house, and so you can't get a shutter on the middle window. With tornadoes, we really don't have time to go out and put boards up over windows. And generally the best, the best play for a tornado, Yeah, get down on your basement, the most sheltered portion of the house. If you don't have a basement, if you have a big heavy cast iron tub. That's not a bad place to be. No, But here's here's a thought. What would it What would it cost? I don't mean cost is like monetary, but like time wise to take like some heavy duty moving blankets, put some fairly heavy duty grammets in them, and then screw some hooks into the outside of your house at the corner of those windows, so that you just throw the groms over the top and hang them in. At least now you have a soft sided covering so that if something hits you have a chance, like release that energy before something just smashes into your windows. You could kind of a soft sided. Would it helped maybe with some small stuff. Trouble with tornadoes is that they tend to throw stuff like two by fours through brick walls. Yeah. So this is part of the reason why, like, in a perfect world, I would love to be in the situation where like I would absolutely love to be in the situation where I have true motorized functional storm shutters and all the outside windows. That'd be great. But I also know that like rationally realistic, and that this is part of the reason why, like I've talked myself out of the generator upgrade, and I've talked myself out of a lot of the storm preps. I was looking at it for a while. Is because where I'm matt in my job right now, I if there's a major hurricane about to hit this area, I get deployed right And that. Sounds like if it's bad enough, your family comes. With Well, if I'm getting deployed, my family is coming with me. I'm not leaving them behind even to ride out a Cat one without me. So no, there's no reason. It's just it's that kind of situation where where it's like, if there's no one here to man the generator, if there's no one here to like make sure the stuff in the fridge and the freezer doesn't dethaw. If there's no one here, if I pack up the most important things in my life, my my wife, my daughter, the cat, and the damn cat, and like, you know, a couple of boxes of really important hardwareplace paperwork and some things like that, then quite frankly, you know, putting aside an extra thousand dollars Earmark just to restock the fridge and the chest freezer when we get home. And hell, most I know at one point. As a matter of fact, Yeah, my Homer's policy covered like they put up. I forget how many hundred dollars towards replenishing any food that was lost during idea. Oh really, it. Wasn't a ton, It was not an but it was not enough. Probably in average week's groceries. It was a few hundred bucks, but it was it was It would not have been enough to completely refill that chest freezer full of all the meat that would have spoiled. But you know, it's just one of those things. That's just that's Garrick. I'm still confused about what you do. So in the most general terms humanly possible, because I don't like to talk about my employment in a public setting. I work in the public sector, and I do things that have to get done twenty four hours day, seven days a week, three or five days a year without fail. And therefore, if my primary workplace is to be inconvenienced or threatened by a major event a storm of some sort, then they have I think one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy five seats prepped for as in an alternative work site about a five hour drive away. Yeah, one thing that. Some public sector jobs do very well. Is they keep the core, must do functions, able to work from multiple locations. Should the facility be damaged or destroyed. Yeah, and especially when you're talking about servicing like six hundred and thirty five thousand employees. Saying your paychecks in the mail will get to it when we get to it is not really an option. Your paychecks in the mail is in the private sector. Old. Let's call it covert speak for give a new job you're not getting paid. Yeah. A guy that comments, no, not FEMA. No, no, he's not one of those feds. No, I do not. I do not work for FEMA. But suffice to say that, like that, that is the constant fight that I'm having with myself of like I could do this and this and this, but if no one's here to turn the freaking switch on, then what does it matter? And you know, here, here's the other thing to think about too, though, Phil. How strong is the exterior wall of your house? Strong enough that an oak tree hit it and it didn't shift any of the beams, strong enough that. The wind speed. During IDA, the wind speed clocked at the at the foot of the bridge, which is about three quarters of a mile from my house was one hundred and thirty miles an hour. Right, so hundreds. The thing about shutters is, depending on how they're constructed, they can do one of two things. They can deflect damage, or they can act as a full like an actual shield across the window. Old school storm shutters around me did not act as like a shield for the window. That wasn't their their design. There were really more for keeping rain and wind deflected, not debris. Because when we get a tornado through here. If you get a near. Miss from a tornado on your house, it may shift your roof a foot off the house. Oh my, like your roof is still there. You still technically have a roof, it's not where it's supposed to be. It might just move a few shingles off your roof. It might shift your entire house off the foundation or say rotated. A ninety degrees. I've seen that happens. You take a direct hit from a tornado, your house will not be standing. Probably CAT one ORF one probably would be still standing. You'd get rough damage. F two you're probably losing most of the house. F three or above you're losing the entire house. So now's the appropriate moment before we dovetailed this int a like because we're crunching steadily towards how to fix damage. What's the spiciest If it was a tornado, it's tornado, But like, what was the what's the spiciest storm you've personally had to deal with? I have watched a tornado jump the house that I was in. I've watched a Category three jump the house that I was in, or an F three jumped the house that I was in. I was in my grandparents' house. So its at this house, passed you over and zap this house. In other words, no, no, thankfully, it hit no houses at all. It hit a cornfield across the street. We watched it come across towards the house about two hundred yards from the road. It lifted up past the neighborhood entirely, drop down behind him, and then just tore off through a nature preserve. Fortunately it hit no house. It hit a couple of businesses, but no one was there. Garret. Do we anchor our houses to the foundations? Yes, we do. It's not enough. It's not enough. I'll put it that way, So I have to throw the poll back up it's actually been running in the background, and we got four vote of what type of storm concerned. You the most? It seems mostly. Yeah, hurricanes has had four votes to zero for everybody else. So honestly, for me, it's tornado. So if you haven't voted, you can put a one, two, three, or four down in the comments and it'll log right there and we'll see who won this argument at the end. Garret, you know it. Here's the thing. Anybody here that's not familiar with tornado damage, google Joplin, Missouri. It's a town that no longer exists. Well, it was wiped entirely off the map. So during that tornado, I will say that in terms of ferocity of storm. I will give it even odds between Hurricane Ida and the F three that wiped out my workplace ten years ago. I was at work when an F three tornado like flipped cars over in the parking lot, ripped one entire wall off of this office building. And oh god, I mean that's just my facility. It demolished a warehouse that was across the street from us, and they never rebuilt it. It severely damaged the Folger's coffee plant that was at the end of the road, like it tore some crap up. Garrick. You might actually remember the the pictures from the Yeah, the tornado that went through the Meshoot area of New Orleans, New Orleans East, back in twenty sixteen. Yeah, I was ground floor when that. I was ground floor of a facility when that went right over the top of us. So, you know, Phil, you said I'd had like one hundred and thirty mile an hour winds. That is below the bottom end for an F three tornado. Yeah, and I'm aware of that. But the reason I put it. I'm just saying, like it, one hundred and thirty, one hundred and fifty is usually like an F three. The reason I put those toe to toe is because that tornado was literally, like from my coworker yelling get away from the windows to the noise stopped was like five to six minutes. Yeah, I mean, like you it was. It was over before we even fully realized what was happening. Whereas that's tornado, whereas Ida was. It started late in the evening, the power got knocked out after about an hour, and then it just whooped on us literally all night until. Maybe two three o'clock. In the morning was when it finally started to like pull past us, and Gillian didn't go to sleep until I think seven o'clock in the morning was when she said, like it finally it finally stopped. Yeah, you know for for around us. Phil. Have you ever seen a tornado turn the skygreen? Mm hmm. So one of the ways, at least one of the Old wives tales ways to know that there's a serious possibility of tornadoes is that the sky starts turning weird colors. It'll go from like gray storm clouds to all of a sudden, you'll see like a green hue through the sky. I'm not sure why. I think it has something to do with the updraft and how that's moving the water in the clouds. I believe that when we were when me and my wife were first living together, we had a friend of mine living with us, and. We did have a pretty nice store. Unfortunately, it didn't drop a tornado in our town. It dropped the three tornadoes outside of our town where you know, we were looking out the back window and it goes from quite a lot of lightning to zero lightning and the sky turning green, and then in that green glow. You could see a funnel cloud. So the start of a tornado starting to come down out of the clots. From that to the storm being completely past us was probably about twenty minutes max. So you really don't have a whole lot of time. And even at that, our tornado sirens didn't go off until the funnel cloud was past our house, so we wouldn't have had any warning. Have we not been looking out the back window? Oh jeez, you know, I just remembered the first Matter of facts camping trip. I wasn't there for that one. You weren't there for that, but you didn't hear about it. It I might, so maybe. It's something my memory. Do you guys get a tornado? Yeah, we had a tornado on the ground, so before we before we get to the last bullet point here. So it was our It was the first matter of fact camp trip. It actually wasn't summer. It was back in the springtime. Back then we moved it too summer to accommodate like people for school. Yeah, I mean, the whole things we did during spring was because Easter and spring break, and like we were trying to plan a trip when people could bring their kids when families would normally be taken off. You know, we're it's trying, we're trying to plan a family event. Sure, and we very quickly realized that the problem was about half the families that we know, their kids had the opposite week off, So it kind of screwed all that up. Yeah, we've got of the four school districts around us, two of us are one week two of them. Or the other. But that's why we that's why we moved to the summer. But anyway, so we were out there with let's see her, Josh and his daughter. We're out there that year. We hadn't met his oldest daughter and his son and. His wife yet. The Tommy and his crew were out there, although I think it was just him and his wife and the Wieners. They hadn't brought the kids with him yet. The Wilson family was out there, but they were staying at the lodge. They were like kind of on the air side of the property from the rest of us. But we're all we're all, you know, in our in our in the yurts. In the middle of the night, yeah, sleeping as you do. And my wife wakes me up and says, hey, honey, there's a tornado warning. And we knew there was a pretty bad thunderstorm coming through that evening, but we weren't that worried about it. We're in a hard sided yurt, and you know, we're probably okay. But the minute they started talking about tornadoes on the ground, like the text messages start blowing up amongst all these families like, uh, guys, we're in like a canvas sighted yurt. There's no fixed structure anywhere around here. Where's a good place to hide from a tornado? So I made the snap decision of, like the nearest hard sided building to us right now is the bath house. Yeah, that's a good spot. Everybody usually, you know, like y'all do y'all want to do? My family is going to the bathrooms. So we like jumped in the truck haul butt down the street, you know, parked in there, and as we're as we're like, you know, running into the bathroom, it like the rain is coming down and it's getting harder and the wind's picking up, so that this is probably like one of those funny little moments in time. But like when you go into. A bathroom, Nick, what bathroom do you normally go into the men's room or the ladies room. Men's room traditional all of us. Totally without saying anything, self segregated, men in one side and women to the other, just like because it's what we are a social condition. I mean, look, the paflof couldn't have planned this better. We all said, okay, record to the bathroom, and the ladies went in one side, and the men went into the other, and I We're to god, Me and Tommy and josh I think we were in there, and Joshua brought his daughter in there with him because he was like, I'm not having my you know, like. No, no, this is a scary situation. Yeah, but we're all looking at each other like why the hell all why did all the women run into the other bathroom? Like how this decision get made totally spontaneously. And then right about that time, the ladies come into our side and they're like, we are not riding out a tornado in there by ourselves. And that was about the moment that the power went out. And then you know, the couple families of preppers. Everybody has either a lantern or a flashlight or something in their pockets. So we pull all those out. We're just sitting there listening to the wind, just bsaying, like watching the weather radar, watching where the tornadoes are going. Turns out we were safe. Yeah that's good. But then you know, the wind picks up, the rain gets harder. Then it starts hailing, not huge hail, but like you know, about pebble sized all over the place. And before we leave the bathroom because we're waiting for the tornado sirens, you know, the tornado warnings to go away. We're waiting for the hail to stop before we get back in our vehicle. As we go back to bed, one of the campers, not one of our campers, but just another random camper comes into the men's room. Looks at this, this conglomeration of people, men and women in the men's room, and it's like what are y'all doing in here? And we're all looking at. Him like he's got two heads, like did you not hear the tornado sirens? Yeah, well well it wasn't the tornado sirens. It woke him up. It was his bladder. Well, you know, some people they don't hear them. I mean they try to keep they try to build them at a pitch that most people here, but some people's hearing is just screwed. Well, I mean, he seemed less concerned about the tornadoes and more aggravated about the fact that there were women in the men's room. Well, you know, it's like it's like I said earlier, it said social conditioning. It's just it. Violated his sense of arms around around here for us. Oh spring, Yeah, hurt thunderstorms coming, probably gonna be a tornado, probably gonna be hal did not expect to see new record hail this spring, which we did. I think the new record for the state of Illinois is over six inch hailstone. Now, so that's fun. Let me toss this pull back up and then we'll get to the last bullet point. The hurricanes had it with four votes to one for the tornadoes, and no. One's throw one in for me for tornadoes. I mean, honestly, lizards, you can sleep through em I think you can sleep the best thing you can do. Yeah, Stuart saying wife hates that I sleep through hurricanes. Gillian has told me on multiple occasions that we will not be riding out any more hurricanes in this house for as long as she lives. Yeah, I don't ida was. A little bit spicier than I think any of us were expecting. But you know, with the understanding that, like, there are things you can do to armor yourself against a storm if you have warning ones coming, if you do, Yeah, there are things you can do during the event to keep yourself out of worse trouble than you'd be an otherwise. But after the event passes, there's got to be a mitigation strategy to deal with like any any after effects of that storm. And it's not all just damage like down here. You know, we talked about this. Before hurricane passes. Your power is going to be out. Hurricanes didn't happen in the summer when it's hotter than fuck you outside. So keeping cool is a problem, keeping hydrated is a problem. Keeping your food from spoiling is a problem. And that's all assuming you have no damage to your house. By the way, that's just the downstream effects. Up It's August, it's ninety five degrees and two hundred percent relative humidity, and the power is going to be out for three days. So having a generator or having like a strategy to keep cool and a strategy to keep yourself fed in condition and keep yourself from getting overheated. Is life saving post hurricane. And if you have damage like what we had, you know, to Stewart's to Stewart's point earlier about the fact that I blew off having a chance on until I really needed one, I had never been in a situation where I couldn't solve a problem without, you know, with I couldn't solve a problem with anything more than like my axe, and and and a bosaw and a pole saw. And to be fair, I'd cut down some trees with an axe. Like I'm a I'm not a small person. I can swing an axe. But when you get two oak trees sitting on the side of your house, we're outside of axe territory. Now. Well, yeah, at least in any reasonable timescale, you're outside of axe territory. And that's really what you gotta what you have to get down to for damage mitigation is you need to get it down to a reasonable time scale and a reasonable amount of labor, because you're going to be short of both in that situation. Yeah. So one thing that I like to do fifteen days of power. Yeah, that sucks. And to be fair, like after Ida our powers out eight days, I want to say, Yeah, I think I remember you saying that, which I mean after Katrina there were parts of New Orleans that were out of power for weeks and weeks. Yeah. Sometimes when we get winter storms will have areas of town where the power's out for two weeks because it's just there's too much damage. So they fix the biggest line breaks first. And if you happen to be like us in the subdivision with twenty homes and only two of the homes are out of power because the trees down on the line before the last two houses, guess who was getting fixed dead last? Yeah. Well, and you know this, some of the gillions recounted to me is that in the part in North Louisiana she grew up in, I storms are their biggest problem. And if you get hit with a bad eye storm, your power is going to be out for seven days as a starting point. And if you're in the area down miles, yeah, of lines and in miles of lines in a row. Yeah, Ragle, it looks like YouTube is back up. I see three of you all on the YouTube side and two on the Facebook side. So who knows, but science Grex's haid a cheap window unit to keep one one room reasonably cool as a godsend, Yes it is. I will also say that if you're willing to run it all day and shut off some rooms that aren't necessary. I know from experience out a five thousand b tou window, you know it will cool half of a fifteen herds toare foot house. It won't be happy about it. It's gonna run your generator. Won't be happy about feeding it. No, But I will say that in the situation we were in, you know, we had the three of us, plus my in law and their three teenage kids. It's like we had eight people worth of we had eight people worth of manpower to do storm clean up and take care of the neighbors and everything. Keeping everybody cool so they could sleep at night seem like a worthwhile trade off, especially because for the fuel that we had, they brought it like they're they're they're from North Louisiana where they're used getting smacked around with like tornadoes and ice storms and everything else. So they brought in more fuel in case we didn't have enough. So literally keeping the generator run twenty four hours day, seven days a week was not a problem. So Phil what do you have you ever had your window blown out by a storm? A window blown out? No, yeah, so. We've had that happen, Not not me and my wife, but family members of mine have had that happen. And I've actually come up with a pretty good way of quick patching that. So, you know, my house is brick hops awful hard. To just drive some some woodscrews into the brick, you'd have to go to the hammer drill. I was paying the ass. Then you got to retough point your brick. So what my grandfather showed me that he has always done for that storm damage. He'll cut a piece of plywood that fits into the where the broken window is easy enough, right, then what you do is you go and you grab out of your bolt bin a couple of eight inch carriage bolts. You have one person hold the plywood on the outside and push the carriage bolts through two holes in the plywood. You have another person on the inside with a two by four that's got two matching holes drilled in it, and just that across the window span, and you bolt that down from the inside. The reason you use carriage bolts is it can't be unbolted from outside without destroying that plywood and making. A lot of noise and making a lot of noise. Now granted, you can still smash out the plywood, but you can easily more easily smash out a window, So it does a little bit more to prevent look, you lose and animals getting in more than anything else, or teenage kids from dicking with it because they're bored than just a normal bolt, and the carriage bolt tends to have a little bit bigger head on it, so it's less likely to pull through the plywood. M m. No. I mean that that makes total complete sense to me. I know that, I know that around here, Like I would love to say this is common sense, but I literally just jumped on you about how common sense isn't common in twenty twenty six. But like around here, even just a little cup full of roofing nails and a couple of parts is something you just ought to have on hand, Like, Phil, are you familiar. With the flange the plastic flange nails. That's when I'm referring to his roof for holes, folm down? Is that not? Those aren't roofings aren't well, that's what we call them around here. Those are Those are repair roofing nails. No, roofing nails are typically you know, they're about yay to yay long and they've got a wider head on them. But the big plastic disc flange that you're talking about, those are for holding down like foam or felt or fabric. They also work really nice for holding down tarps they do. The pro tip for when you're fixing your roof after a hurricane. Pro tip if you're going to do that, listen if you have to do this because you have a hole in your roof or you're missing a whole sheet of shingles, your roof is screwed anyway, So let's not let's not be shy about doing what I'm about to advise. But if you break your roof, it's your problem. Lift the shingles up, slide the tarp underneath it, and then nail that mastard down underneath the shingles. Which you want to do is you want to catch the water as it sheets off of those shingles onto the tarp, and then the tarp at the bottom will lay over the top of the hub the shingles. You just want the water to go over the hole and stay on the outside. Just just mesh it into your roof. Like you see the layer of your shingles, So you've got the visible part of your shingle, which is say, this part, and then your next layer laps on top of that as you go up, so you're so that the water is always dropping down a level to the next shingle. In this case, your tart see Ragle was on my side. We've used for roofing for decades. I just really you really shouldn't. I mean, not with the plastic flangehn unless you're just patching. If you're patching holes with a tart, they work great for that because it spreads out the pressure on the tart. Well, I'm not a professional roofer, and that's all I've ever used them for is. Patching roofs. Yeah, those are not roughing. Now, Well, that's what I'm going to continue to call them. And everybody around here is going to know exactly what I'm talking about. Oh, I'm sure they will, because for what For what Your guys's purpose for them is absolutely fine. But you should not attach shingles to your roof with those nails. Yes, Well, I'm I'm in no position to advise a professional roofer, so they'll know what I'm talking about. Rags going to start a fight. Tell that to the professional roofers I've worked with. I mean, I've only half a dozen roobs, but I've torn off a lot more. And I've never seen those plastic flange nails used on. The roof that was put on properly. But hey, man, you know, maybe your coat is different down there. Maybe because of the prevalence of hurricanes, they put those flange nails on rooves just to spread out the the tension and to help the shingles stay on the roof longer. Perhaps, I honestly don't know. I just know that, like I've used them, and I make a point of keeping a bucket lying around and held. I also have a whole pack of shinkles because when they were doing my roof, they over ordered, as you typically do, and I literally told the told the guy that was putting the roof on. I was like, hey that as they were cleaning up, I'm like, hey, that that already opened pack of shinkles. You're charged me for that whole pack, aren't you? He said, yeah, And I'm like. Leave it right there. Yeah. I basically told him. I'm like, I'm not telling you do anything's gonna get you controlled with your boss. But I know, dam goodwell that if you open that pack, I bought it, so leave it on the ground where it is, and that is in my backyard just in case God forbid I ever need some shingles. So Ragle props to those professional roofers. That is the code in Phill's area, and Raggles probably such a subject to the same code because he us similar code. Well, I mean, I'm guessing it's because of the weather differences. Because here, if you take a near hit from a tornado, you're losing a good portion of the house. You take a direct hit, you're losing the whole house. You guys, take a direct hit from a hurricane once a year. You may or may not lose part of the some of the shingles, And maybe that makes all the difference. I mean, I know that when Hurricane Katrina went almost directly over the top of my parents' house years ago, they lost three shingles off the roof. Yeah, hey, that happens. Sometimes we'll get straight line wins that tear half of the shingles off a roof, you know, And sometimes the house right next door to him will have no damage at all. Yeah, but other than being. Stewart Stewart saying those nails are code here rich, you know, Stuart Stewart's over it over in southeast Texas. So yeah, but you know, still in the same latitude to get hit by the hurricanes, I mean up here. I'm assuming it's got to be a code difference, probably due to the weather. I mean, we don't use strong ties on our roofs up here. What do you mean by strong ties? Uh so, it's a I think strong tie is a brand name. Is that, like that holds the roof to the steel ties holding the roof to the wall, we call them. We don't use those. We call them hurricane straps down here. Yeah, hurricane straps, strong ties, anything like that. Usually those are used to hold decks to houses here. We don't use them to hold hold this hilarious though that you're like, you're you know this by a brand name and me and me and like those are hurricane straps. Yeah, Well, because I think I think the reason being is because you them to strongly tie it deck to your house. That's why I remember it. But like I said, most of us. Most of our roof issues are snowload related. That makes so extra extra pressure down on the roof, not pulling the roof up and off. Yeah we don't. I mean, has Sherry area ever been hit by a hurricane? We have had the rain off of a hurricane, like so the hurricane that hit some friends of ours down like the Carolinas that that hit Eddie in his area. We got rain left over from that. But it wasn't a hurricane. That's wims Oh gosh, no. No. By the point, you got to remember, I am fifteen hundred miles from an ocean. But the reason I ask is years ago Andrew and I were unpacking this exact same topic and he foolishly said, Michigan has never been hit by a hurricane. And I did research, and Michigan has been hit by a hurricane. Michigan had I cannot remember what hurricane it was, probably one well. But hear me out, but it was a hurricane that hit down here in the Gulf coast, sure, and it ate the ass out of the Mississippi Valley all the way into Michigan. And it was still a cat one as it hit Michigan. And then mereately draws what's possible. Then, yeah, it's. Possible, we've had one, but it would be so extraordinarily rare. Well, then the number of hurricanes that have hit Michigan stands at one. Let me see, let me I'm now curious. The number of hurricanes that have hit Louisiana is like, like, I don't know, probably four or five a year since forever. Illinois has been hit by four hurricanes. So so what you're telling me is there's a chance, there is a chance. And and by hit Illinois, it was technically within the bounds of the southernmost portion of Illinois. That's like four hundred miles. South of Bay technicalities count it counts man Illinois is one of the few states other than Texas, you can drive for eight hours and see nothing but corn and windmills. So so what I'm gathering is that, like, your biggest concern coming out of blizzards, other than the potential of like having a window blowout or having no, you won't get windows blown out from blizzards. Blizzards are just an irritation and potential POWERO tornado is the biggest problem here because that, look, I don't aside from having a generator for the powers out after tornado and having some emergency food, laid up water, flashlights, and that sort of thing. There is no tornado preps other than having a basement, because if you take a direct hit from a tornado, the house is gone, your preps are gone. You'll be lucky if you're alive, because it's going to drop a house on top of you in the basement, or you're gonna get some minor damage to your house. And your best prep is your insurance policy in your checkbook. You have said on occasion that there are very few There are very few short term emergencies that cannot be solved by juditious application of cash, you know, even. Long term emergencies. I mean, look, you lose a job, the best thing you can, absolutely you can have is an emergency fund, a three to six month emergency fund. Yeah, like I see this, and this is a This is a pet peeve I have with some of the prepping forums and boards, especially Reddit. Cash cash will be worthless invest in lad. YadA, YadA, YadA. No. No, whenever anybody comes on that's new to prepping, everybody always says, get two weeks of food, get a month of food. Would get this much water, get a gun, get this, get back at the other thing. The thing that I never see mentioned is is your insurance up to date? Do you have an emergency fund? Do you have your insurance documents in a place where you can readily access them. I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you. And like we haven't talked about this on the show. That is probably gonna be like a raising values episode for the future to. Talk about all the nonsense that's. Been going on in my personal life and Gillian's personal life. But like having to go through a person's house and find very important freaking paperwork when they had no concept out of how to store it in a in a cohesive fashion. Is the mot is like the ninth circle of Hell as far as I'm concerned. I've told Gillian on multiple occasions, if I am ever not here and you have five minutes to get out of this house, I've literally I've told her multiple times, grab my daughter, grab the cat, grab this one box of paperwork underneath the bed, and then grab grab the the The role of emergency cash out of the out of this drawer, and that's it. Everything else, that's all you need everything else in the freaking houses is insure. All this camping crap behind me, the freaking night vision, the gun collection, all that crap. It can all be replaced. Let it burn, I don't care. Get get yourself, get my daughter, get the cat, get the cash, and get the paperwork. Because that one box of paperwork is birth certific gets, marriage license, social security cards, all my paperwork when I was in the army, which is not impossible to replace. But no, but it would be inconvenient to need to replace, especially during during an emergency. Yeah, and unfortunately, when it comes to like the Homer's entrance policy and all that, that's all online these days, it's all digital, so you know, like we can very quickly unask the house, get only what is necessary, and we can rebuild. It can be done. And you know Stewart is saying, I have a single go bag, haag with all that, I have a go I have a go box. But the point is that it's in one place. Your spouse knows about it. This is this has been one of like, this is one of those This is one of those moments where even the most art and prepper can really drop the ball. If you're the only person in the house that knows what the plan is or where the stuff is a guy that comments cash burglars love cash. Listen, that roll of emergency cash is the last thing in this house. I'm worried about getting stolen. There's there's enough stuff in this house that if somebody want to roll me up, that would just be beer money after they get done with. It, you know. But the and this is another thing about that is if you are going to keep cash in the house, keep an amount of cash in the house you are comfortable with losing. Yep, your bank account is FDI seeing uh huh, chances are pretty good you're gonna get your money out of that. If your house burns down and you have a safe stack full of twenties and they all burn, you're never getting that back. If if your entire savings plan is matt is a mattress stuffed with money, that's a bad way to go to me. To me, the cash is like one of the tiers in the plan. When we can't get into our savings account, we can't get you know, are our debit cards are lost? We need cash so we can eat and have a play, have a roof over our heads for a day or two to unwind the situation. That's what the emergency cash is. It is. It is a pretty rare situation where. If you can get out of the immediate affected area, you cannot access your bank accounts. It's an extremely rare situation. It can happen. Not impossible, but rare, which is why I do advocate for people keeping. Some cash around in the house. But like I said, keep an amount you can acceptably lose. Stewart or comfortable with the wife spending when she's mad. Well, there is. Also that, I mean, you impulse spending because there's a really good deal from a buddy on Facebook. This is when it's moments of time where I wonder if my hobbies are cheaper than your hobbies, because you like large pieces of machinery and I like small pieces of machinery. But my small pieces of machinery cost a lot. My current hobbies involved me having to fight the state's attorney over a road that doesn't exist, so I can build a garage and raise my taxes to put my hobbies in a different spot because my other hobbies are pushing them out. Of the hobby space. It'll come through first world problems. Yeah, but like that is the one thing that I will challenge everybody here too when we talk about how to deal with hurricanes, how to deal with tornadoes or blizzards or any kind of a weather based emergency. Is does your does your significant other unless you live alone, If you live alone, like you know, that's on you. If you live alone, does your executor of your will and you should have one? Yeah, does your executor know where to find these documents? Or better? If you live alone and you truly have no one else that would come looking for you if you just disappeared for a couple of days unexpectedly, I encourage you to make really good friends with a neighbor. Yeah, if for no other reason than the fact that, like you two have a buddy system or something where it's like, hey, if I go silent for a couple of days, you come check on me, and vice versa, so that you know, I don't sit here in this house and my pet eat me. That'd be proud, Yeah, there's that. Or have the dog die dehydration or something that'd be horrible. So, like, have a safety net in place. My safety net is my wife. My wife knows where my wife knows what to grab, she knows what needs, what's important, and she more importantly, she knows what's not important. Like, if you have five minutes to get at the house, don't worry about trying to clear out the gun safe. I don't give it in. Grab a gun, grab a firearm for personal protection, get the important stuff, get out the rest of it's insured. But you wouldn't believe how many people I know that they haven't told their spouse because they know where it is and in their mind, and I'm guilty of this too, by the way, in their mind, I'll always be here to take care of my fa Surely that is a natural impulse we fall into, is that I'll be here, I'll take care of things, I'll take the load. But what if you're not. And realistically, this is probably one of those lowest barrier to entry things that you can do to get a spouse started into preparedness even a little bit. Just have them know where the emergency documents are. Yeah, and I will. I will tell you that. In all but the weirdest of circumstances, you will have a much easier time convincing your non preparedness minded spouse to get involved in things like, hey, do you know where the fire extinguisher is? Hey? Do you know where the insurance car? Do you know where the insurance card is? Do you know where the cash is? Do you know where the things that are normal, everyday normal stuff in air quotes, and then you maybe dip her toe a little or his toe a little bit at a time into you know, the weirder topics, but you start from a position of this is basic stuff. Everyone on this block has a fire extinguisher under their kitchen synk. Do you know where ours is? Do you know if it's charged? Do you know? You can get the charge in your fire extinguishers checked for free at the local fire station if you have not recently. Most jurisdictions, at least most of the ones I've lived in, all the ones I've lived in, if you take your fire extinguisher down to the firehouse, they will check it and test it. And verify that it is still functional. They would much prefer do that and have to roll a pumper truck to your house. Oh yeah, oh absolutely. And if it's not functional, usually they have them for sale there as well, or they can put you in contact with the company that will recharge it for you. I mean they so, I know, Phil, I don't know about down by you, but up here by me, fire code, any industrial building, any business has to have their fire extinguishers checked and tested yearly. I'm assuming it's the same down by you. I don't know if the top of my head, but I've literally, like I know, someone of the works for a company, and that's what they do, is they check commercial fire mitigation systems. Because there's this interesting thing that will happen when you have a bunch of employees if something lights on fire, they tend not to tell management that they've used the fire extinguisher. They tend to just try to make the mess go away, especially when it was maybe done through employee negligence too. Yeah, it's been known to happen, and then you go to use the fire extinguish for next time and it's empty. Big oof. Yeah, Well, these things happen, especially when you work with industrial petrochemicals and idiots flammable metallic compounds. It's not happened at our corporation fortunately where I work. But do you have some word companies? Well, yeah I do, and it's actually my desk, but one of the companies I do some freelance work for was doing some aerospace parts out of zirconia metallic zirconium. And if you have a low volume, high surface area piece of zirconium and you get it wet or it gets humid, it can oxidize fast enough that it auto ignites itself. That's exciting just sitting there. That's exciting. Yeah, it got really exciting in their back, in their their back material handling station. Stewart Is Stewart is offering that when he installed irrigation sprinklers, he installed three on the roof ridge that way. Of his neighbor has a house fire, he can use it to. Keep the roof wet. That's not a bad idea. Might also not be a bad idea if you live in a place where forest fires are common. True. You know, I have heard of some houses having that stuff installed in their rooms in California lately. I mean, I can't imagine why. Yeah, that's fair. It wouldn't help me much since the woods are like twelve feet away from my house. You'd be surprised. Though. It depends on the wind direction a lot when you've got that kind of distance. I mean, When it comes to forest fires, the best thing you can do, obviously is get distance, But the second best thing you can do is keep everything wet, because green stuff does not burn as easily. Yeah, all right, So is there anything else you want to toss in here? As far is like mitigating either before or after a form. Here's when we forget sometimes. Do you know where your natural gas water if you're on city water and electrical shut offs are in the house. Oh, everybody in your household should know where the water main shut off is because that's perfectly safe for even a child to dick with. Turning it back on can cause damage if you just slam it back open, then you get a water hammer. But yeah, turning it off usually unless the valve breaks, won't cause any problems. Your breaker panel probably wait till the kids are old enough. Usually they're higher up enough that children can't go dicking around with the main breaker. But know where your main breaker shut off is, and know where your natural gas shut off is inside or outside your house, because if you do get damage to your house and say a pipe is damaged, you can prevent it from getting worse by turning off the water. You know, that's same with electric same with natural gas. That's a fair point. I can guarantee you my daughter doesn't know, and I bit my wife doesn't either. Your daughter is. Old enough that it's probably probably ought to be time to show her those things. Yeah. The trick there is figuring out had to get her to pay attention to something that's not a cell phone or her boyfriend or an electric guitar. Well, you know, I approve of the electric guitar. Not sure how I feel about the boyfriend in the cell phone. I hate that I have a. Sat She is a child of the twenty first century. And as far as the boyfriend thing, I'm n't worried about her eating him. Not the other yet murder. That was my concern too, because she was going to catch guts and eat small minnows at the summer camping trip. The girl's a savage. Yeah, his safety is the concern here. I have done my level best to raise her in my own image and. Congratulations. Yeah for those of you who've met that little girl, she's she's she's a fantastics a chip off the old rabble a. Oh yeah, but. Yeah, you know, guys, if if if the word if the only thing you can manage to do is to stop the situation from getting worse. By just turning everything off and then getting a professional in, you're a step ahead of the game because then at least your house isn't going to explode from natural gas, it's not going to get more water damage from flooding, and it's not going to electrocute someone from having live wires laying around. I have to address Stewart. I do not recruit for the Taliban. Isis not them either? Smart ass y'all. Y'all all think that this beard means that like. That it's too well groomed for the Taliban. Yeah, I mean, come on, you're missing the hat as well. I remember there being a. Hat, don't. I don't do hats very often, No, but the Taliban do anyway, Yes, thank you raggle fragle mulas, that's the one. Anyway. No, I hope we've given everybody some food for thought. I mean we are. We are charging right back into storm season. Although I guess for those of you who are acceptible to blizzards like you've been dealing with them. Stewart actually threw in the chat like fifteen thousand comments ago that this year is supposed to be a super al a Nino cycle, which means low risk for really bad hurricanes, very high risk for lots and lots and lots of thunderstorms down here, lots of septation, and simultaneously that usually comes with a drought further north. It does. Yeah, unfortunately, so we're well, I'm actually somewhat looking forward to that. I have some trees I need to take down that are near a very wet portion of my yard, and lumberjacking in muck boots is not as enjoyable as doing it in my red wings. I mean that's fair, but yeah, I mean my whole standpoint on weather and everything really is like whatever comes is gonna come, and we're gonna have to suck it up and deal with it. Because down here in Louisiana, as it is with most are parts of the country, like you're gonna have some kind of weather event to look forward to every year. Down here, it happens to be usually where we're back and forth between tornadoes one year and hurricanes the next. This might be a tornado kind of year, who knows. Well, it's definitely a tornado kind of year in the Midwest, already. Yeah, I mean we've already had a day where we've gone from the low eighties back down to the thirties overnight. That's what triggered those six inch hailstones and the what fifteen tornadoes one day. I'm hoping we don't have that to look forward to. Usually once usually, once it gets to a certain temperature down here, we're not going to get any more cold snaps. And lately it's been like mid seventies to low eighties. Well that's nice. I think we're out of the range where we're going to get another, like really serious cold snap. Yeah. It looks like we're gonna have eighty degrees next week followed by forty nine the next morning. Yeah, that's good. Good freaking Midwest problems. Hey man, we get all the seasons usually in one week, sometimes. In one day. I mean you and I have had that conversation. We've done it down here too, where it went from it went from like high sixties back to below freezing in twenty four hours. I think the most temperature swing I've seen is one hundred and two degrees. That's because you live in hell. In a day, Yeah, it was terrible, It was really really terrible. All right, Well, let's go ahead and round this out. I do have a video to make, probably wind up on. YouTube, a rumble to talk over the finer points of rifle reloading, mostly for that one person that reached out and asks for it, and also just as a companion piece to the pistol reloading video that I put out freaking forever ago. It's actually still on YouTube. I thought it might have gotten knocked down, but it's still up, surprisingly enough. But I have no earthly idea what we'll talk about next week. You and I'll have to do some discussing, especially because discussing well and week after next I may or may not be out of pocket Thursday evening for work. I'm still waiting on a firm word. All right there, let me know we can always do areer. There there is a chance I might be getting released Thursday morning, and if that's the case, I will be home well in time for. Us We are all stand up. But there's also a chance that I'm going to be held until Friday morning, and if that happens, then I cannot commit that that evening I'll be free at all. So I just I don't know. Apparently you cannot comment. We like ideas on YouTube. They've blocked me commenting. We like ideas. Why. I don't know. It's just says YouTube has rejected our comment. It says I said, do it. We like ideas because he said, I'll send. You the idea we had. Maybe they think the idea is terrorism. I don't know. I'm so freaking apparently. Apparently thinking is bad on YouTube. Thinking is bad on YouTube. Moments like this, I get just about frustrating enough to just say to hell with social media and pack all this up. But I still enjoy it for the time being. True anyway, it's fun. Yeah, it is fun when we're not getting jerked around by our tech overlords. What are you gonna do? Bitch about it, get over it, keep on keep playing in the King's court by the king's rules. Yeah, all right, matter of facts. Podcast is gonna go out the door. I don't know what we're talking about next week. So if you have a topic, you should get in touch with us one way or the other and let us know, because if not, you're gonna be depending on our lack of judgment to cook up something. Usually I will text Phil on Tuesday when I realize we haven't talked about anything yet. I try not to let that happen, but that's been happening a bit lately, just because you know, Ama, family family life will do that. Sometimes being an adult do be hard on occasion. We should talk about being an adult sometime while while not acting like adults. Yes, an episode about acting like children while drinking like idiots. We can do that. I like that idea. I'll have to get more whiskey. I'm currently out of whiskey again. Oh you failed at adulting already. I just keep forgetting to go. I would have to sell rage o. Please please go buy this man boob. Just go to the bank. I go to the bank on Friday after work, and then I get hungry on the way home, and I go like, well, I could go to the liquor store, or I could get a sandwich out of my fridge. And then I end up with a sandwich and then I get. Distracted, and then I never go get the booze I was gonna get. Nick. I mean this with all the love and admiration in my voice that I'm capable of. Mm hmmm, We're gonna have a freaking episode about being neurodivergent one day because you have You've got the most raging case of ADHD of anybody. I I I might. I might. My wife thinks I'm more autistic than eighty, but I am heavily caffeinated pretty much all the time. You could be both, I could be both. You could be is a thing. I definitely have been known to get distracted and forget things exist for months out a day time. Rachel said, if you're acting like your children, then no drinking. What that's no fun? All light things on fire in the backyard. Then the guy the comments induced autism ADHD. Right, Yeah, I mean I I definitely did just find about a two hundred and fifty page pdf about manufacturing miniature steam engines in your basement. I might have to build miniature steam engines because you can do it all on a lathe lathe Yeah that way. Ye might have a small case of autism ticklotism. I believe they call it technicalism altism. All right, Matter of facts podcast is going to have the door. If you want to hear us talk about tisming ADHD. And all that nonsense, you should let us know. And if not, then we're gonna find some other able to get into, which will probably be equal parts entertaining, terrifying and disappointing. I still need to finish up my plans for the diesel power desk fan. You should get on that, I really should. I got distracted by. The new range. All right, let's kick this one out of the door before this turns soon Irish, goodbye, get out of everybody. Night, Una Junior.