I've Never Enjoyed Badger Hair So Much

Just before Christmas, after about 4 years of use, my can of shaving cream was about dry.

Around the same time I'd read on Cam Mather's blog how he shaves only with olive oil.  I'm not brave enough to try that yet out when my wife asked me what I'd like for Christmas I asked for a shaving kit.

My wife gave it a good try but it seems like nobody sells shaving kits anymore.  Fortunately they still sell the brushes and soap individually and I got my Grandfather's old shaving mug from my Grandmother.  You could probably use any old mug though. 

Then I had to find the  aftershave. They don't make High Karate anymore so I was tempted to go for Aquavelva but since I had my Grandpa's old mug I decided to use his aftershave too: Old Spice.  If it's good enough for hobos it's good enough for me.

Using a shaving mug and soap instead of canned shaving cream took a little getting used to.  The lather doesn't last as long and is more watery so it drips a bit.  Because of this I divided my face into sections and do one at a time.  Neck, left cheek, right cheek, chin then upper lip.

To make the lather you don't need much water.  I just run hot water over the brush for a couple seconds and then stir away.  One of the nice things about shaving this way is that the lather feels warm on your skin.  Plus I find it gives me a much closer shave.  Maybe the hairs in the brush lift up my stubble somehow?

Although this doesn't have much to do with prepping or energy efficiency I think shaving with a mug and soap is better for the environment in the long run.  Those aerosol shaving cream cans can't be recycled but the good old shaving soap comes in a small recyclable (or compostable) paper box and is probably healthier than whatever chemical makes the canned lather last for hours.  Plus my soap is made in Montreal and I suspect a the canned cream comes from China (or if it doesn't it probably soon will).

This Topic Sucks

I finally got around to using the Foodsaver vacuum seal system that I got for Christmas and I love it!

I've been trying to dehydrated a lot of food and so far I've been storing it in mason jars with oxygen absorber packs. These O2 absorbers do the trick but they lose their efficiency the longer they have contact with air. This makes it tricky to store them. If you don't seal them up airtight, when you go to use them again they won't work anymore.

A vacuum sealer though can take the place of these O2 absorbers and you'll never have to worry about them going stale or running out. The O2 packs aren't expensive to buy, I paid about 30 bucks for 100, but its nice to never have to buy them again.

I'm sure most people are familiar with these type of vacuum sealers. Typically they seal food in plastic bags by sucking the air out and melting the end of the bags so air can't get back in. The company claims frozen vacuum sealed steak will last up to two years without freezer burn!

The model I have comes with an accessory hose which is where things really get fancy. There's all kinds of accessories; wine bottle toppers, meat marinaders, leftover containers, even a mason jar sealer.

What I have however are the vacuum canisters that come in 3 sizes.

The canisters are meant to actually hold food but somebody on The Survival Podcast forum had recommended these over the mason jar attachment because you can vacuum seal almost any jar inside them.

Basically you just loosely place the lid on the mason jar, put it in the canister, hook it up to the tube and turn the machine on.

The machine is rather loud but as air in the canister decreases it gets quieter for about 10 second, when it shuts off. This means the air is gone.

The vacuum in the canister removes the air from the mason jar and seals the lid tight. You can double check the seals by pressing the lids to see if they "pop". No pop means no air.

I've also read people claiming that this method will seal foods like pickles and jam in the original factory jar but I haven't tried this yet.

I really like it so far and recommend a Foodsaver to anybody who's looking to store food. The only problem I have now is that I've run out of mason jars!

Quiet But Still Busy

I haven't posted in a while here since it's been a pretty hectic few months for me and my family.  My wife went back to work after her maternity leave, I injured at work, left one position and started another, birthdays, Christmas etc..

Despite all that I've still been doing a few prepping things but nothing that really deserved a post of it's own in my mind.

Most importantly I installed a new entrance door in my basement.  We have a little stairway that leads to the basement and the door looked like it was an old barn door.  It was made out of planks and had an old latch for a door knob.  This latch was literally a hole in the door that lifted a metal bar on the other side.  Needless to say it was pretty drafty so I usually just covered it over with a vapour barrier and sealed it off in the winter.

I had been wanting to replace it for a while but since new exterior doors can be expensive I put it off and did other things that were less expensive or could be purchased a little bit at a time like insulation.

My wife and I reorganized our finances a few months back which gave us a bit more flexibility so I decided that with winter on it's way it was time to replace Old Windy.

I decided to go see a local manufacturer of windows and doors, Leo Groulx who's now in his 80s and recently had his 60th anniversary in business.  He's semi-retired now and his shop mostly consists of he and his son.  He said he sometimes calls in his old employees to help out but they were all retired!

I decided to get a door with a sliding window despite the lower insulation quality.  My basement is old and the windows are small so it gets pretty dark.  This way we get a little bit more light down there and I can open it in the summer to let in some fresh air.

It took Leo and his son about a month to build my door and he charged me $385. When I picked it up it was so "fresh off the line" that the caulking was still soft! Christmas was coming and I appreciated the personal service so I handed him $400 and asked him to keep the change.

I had helped instal doors before but this was my first time doing it alone.  It was a lot easier than I expected but it was difficult getting the frame square on such an old uneven basement.  I did the best I could but the door still sticks a bit. Oh well, it's much better than the old door and one of my motto's is "Perfect is the enemy of Good".  One trick I read about that really helped is to nail a short piece of 2x4 on one end into the frame above where you're installing the door.  When the board hangs down it will keep the door from falling out of the frame while you level and square it off.

Hopefully this will help us save a bit on our natural gas bill which is running about $160 a month now (way too much in my opinion).

As for all the other stuff I've done...after writing a few paragraphs about a door,I just realized that maybe I can write a post for each of the other things I've done recently so that's what I'll do!

The Ultimate Extreme Clothes Dryer Vent!

The other day my wife noticed that the floor around our clothes dryer was really cold. We had always noticed that the air in our dryer was always a bit cooler but this was really colder than usual and winter isn't even here yet!

I'd been considering changing our dryer vent to a better quality model that would prevent cold air from entering for a while now but kept putting it off. With the cold entering like that I couldn't put off any longer so I made a trip to my local Home Hardware store.

I'd seen energy efficient vents before at Home Hardware and had a particular model in mind. Strangely I couldn't find any energy efficient models at either Canadian Tire or Walmart.

There were only two models at the store but I picked a model by Broan. The other vent was not only more expensive but came across as a gimmicky "as seen on TV" product. Broan is a well known brand and it looked more like a regular vent only larger.



Basically instead of vent flaps that open and close it has a styrofoam ball that rolls forward and up when hot air is exiting. It rolls back and seals the vent when the dryer stops. The vent cover is also well insulated with the walls made of 2 inch thick foam.
By replacing the vent I was also able to see what was inside my exterior walls: straw. My house was built in the 1930 and straw was a common insulator back then but unfortunately it doesn't insulate very well. If we weren't planning on moving in less than 5 years I'd remove the interior drywall and put in spray insulation with a high R-Value but it probably isn't worth the effort.



Hopefully this will help a bit with heating and with a new basement door also coming soon, whoever buys this house is gonna be getting a pretty energy efficient home! 

Raking Leaves is for Suckers!

I hate raking leaves.  In fact, I usually don't rake them at all or do the minimum necessary to make the yard look half-decent.

We have two large maples which dump a lot of leaves on our small 20 x 30 back yard so I felt very smart when it occurred to me that I could just use the lawnmower to turn the leaves into mulch.  No more raking ever again!  I felt very smart to have figured that out all by myself but that didn't last because I quickly realized that a lot of people do this.

The weather was nice today so my wife and I decided to get the yard ready for winter and I broke out the lawnmower for my anti-raking experiment.  I set the blades a little higher than normal because I didn't want to harm the grass.  Result: I'm pretty impressed!

As you can see in the pictures the mower really did a good job of breaking down the leaves.  Where you'd see nothing but leaves at first you'd see mostly green after the mower went over them.

It also occurred to me that when making compost the guides always say to include a good mix of greens (nitrogen) and browns (carbon).  It just happens that a good source of greens and browns are grass clippings and dry leaves respectively.  By mulching these leaves they'll have the winter and spring to break down and turn into natural compost.  I guess there's a reason mother nature doesn't rake the leaves eh?

Food Dehydrating Fun!

A few weeks ago I received my Excalibur dehydrator in the mail. I bought a refurbished model with a 10 year warranty for $160 at the companies website (they're regularly over $200) but shipping was another $56 and duty was $27. I'd recommend looking into the Canadian supplier, Basic Life Essentials, to lower shipping and avoid duty taxes. You can also order them from Amazon.

There are less expensive dehydrator brands out there but if you want to seriously get into dehydrating as a way of preserving and storing food I'd go for an Excalibur. I used to have one of the smaller less expensive models. They're good for trying out dehydrating and making a few snacks but f you want to dehydrate a bushel of apples that you pick up on sale at a farmers market or do a whole 10 pound bag of potatoes you'll need the Excalibur. The other models aren't large enough and it would literally take a week to dry all those apples or potatoes. For this reason I'd also recommend getting the 9 tray Excalibur instead I'd the 4 tray model if you can afford it.

I've been trying out tons of different foods in the dehydrator and so far I'm pretty impressed. You can eat the foods dry themselves or rehydrate them to use in meals. When you dehydrate the food the texture is never the same as fresh but that's okay if your using them in stews, soups etc.. To rehydrated them I boil the dried food for a few minutes. You can also steam your veggies to rehydrate them.

(Above: dried tomato, red /green peppers, celery, mushrooms, broccoli, potatoes and my assistant)

The dried peppers in my homemade salsa are pretty good. The potatoes are excellent pan fried or in a stew but they're too thick and slimy mashed. Rehydrated apples in an apple crisp are also really good.  Tomatoes come out soft but are good for soups.  As for broccoli, the stems get too tough so just dehydrate the tops. I haven't done onions or garlic yet because supposedly they really stink up the house and it's too cold to open the windows to ventilate.

My general idea is to buy veggies on sale and dehydrate them so they'll last a long time. I got a bunch of mason jars for my birthday and bought oxygen absorbers from that Canadian supplier I mentioned above. If I put the dried food in the jars with the O2 absorber it should last at least a year though various sources claim they'll last up to 5 even 30 years! Personally 5 years seems the limit to me and after 2 years I'd be wary.

The website Dehydrate 2 Store is a great resource with tons of recipies, tips and how-too videos.  The book "The Dehydrator Bible" also has a lot of great tips and recipes which is where I found my recipe for apple crisp.

I'm learning that there are a lot of different methods and recommendations out there so if you want to get into dehydrating try different things and have fun experimenting!

Our Water Bill VS Our New Washing Machine

Exciting times!  Our food dehydrator AND the latest water bill arrived yesterday!

After I've tested out the dehydrator more I'll blog about it but for now a quick post about the effect our new high efficiency washing machine has had on our water bill.

Our previous water bill showed that we used 46 cubic meters of water during the first 4 month billing period of January to April.

This latest bill showed that we only used 29 cubic meters!

I suck at math so correct me if I'm wrong but:
46 cm - 29 cm = 17 cm
17 cm / 47 = 36%

So that means we've used 36% less water!

If you've been reading this blog you may remember that our first water bill showed 79 cubic meters used!  I estimated though that our average was around 58 c.m. since our newborn baby probably bumped up our usage in the first billing period.

So this means that since earlier this year, we've dropped our water use from 58 c.m. to 29!  That's a 50% reduction!  Hopefully this trend will hold.

As I said before, I'm very impressed with our new LG high efficiency washer and dryer and would recommend them to anybody.

With the money we're saving from using less water and electricity while doing our laundry these machines are going to pay for themselves in a year or two!