Preparedness tasks weekend

We spent a lot of time this weekend doing preparedness stuff. I gave myself a few hours of downtime yesterday and managed to do this:

Oh, you didn't know we rode ATV's? Well we do now, again.
The gear I'm wearing is vintage, from about 14 years ago when we had ATV's the first time. For some random reason, we kept the gear through dozen of spring and fall cleanings; helmets, goggles, boots, riding pants, shirts, crash guards.
Friday night we heading over to the local toy store and picked up 2 Polaris Sportman 550's with fuel injection and power steering (yup, getting old). We didn't have the ATV's 18 hours and I had already sat mine on it's back end (right after the first picture was taken) and buried it in deep mud (in the second picture with the water rushing into my boot). I also got a flat tire right before we were loading back up, but it was just a bad valve stem luckily.
These ATV's will serve other purposes once we pick up some land, they can pull heavy trailer loads and plow. They will also serve as our new rigs for a majority of our mountain adventures, we can see 3x as much stuff in one day, we just wont be able to bring the dogs along. They will have plenty of fun times, but when we are 6+ hours from civilization it's better to tow and ATV back instead of try and figure out how to get a full size off road rig repaired. Wisdom.

This is how the rest of my weekend went:

We put up 46 pounds of spaghetti noodles, 30 pounds of oats, 25 pounds of flour, and 130 pounds of dog food. Once we hit the store for a sale this evening, there will be 20 pounds of elbow noodles added. We restocked and/or added about 60 canned goods along with several boxes of other items in hygiene and first aid. We canned 4 quarts of ground beef and once it cools off enough this evening we are going to put up 4 quarts or more of grapes. Wearing full kit and doing this stuff was rough, even simple tasks require a lot more effort and energy. Practice and familiarization eventually becomes second nature.

We picked up another spare pressure canner seal and vent weight at ACE hardware (my favorite store for all things canning). I was surprised to find 1/2 gallon mason jars that I can use for bread starter, powdered milk, etc. We grabbed a few boxes of nails and large packs of sandpaper, I realized we  have a lot of screws but few large nails.

This week we picked around 25 pounds of tomatoes, 12 pounds of cucumbers and around 12 pounds of zucchini/yellow squash. I checked an ear of corn and it's almost all ready to harvest... perhaps for this evenings dinner since I'm not always patient. Here is a view of the fridge after we gave away most of the harvest to the in laws and group friends:

Lunch was some food storage elbow noodles and chili, all mixed together. I made the chili 2 years ago and it tasted exactly the same as the day it was canned. We took one night off from the gym. I got an hour run in while it was sprinkling... I love the smell of the wet tree's and ground. Tonight is gym night and it should be empty so I'll be able to get a great chest and tricep workout done and possibly a few miles on the dreadmill.

So we didn't contribute to the strength, prosperity or well being of our country.... but we did contribute all of that for ourselves. As a reward for our labor, we will be going here in a few days on our yearly scuba diving trip:

Barcelona, the second largest city in Spain.