An Epic battle of Good vs Weevil

This weekend we decided in typical J style to get our year's food storage.

I was able to get off work a couple of hours early and we headed down to Borrow Grandpa M's HUGE pickup truck. I was a little nervous about driving it since my previous experience with driving the truck kinda felt like riding a bear. You give it some direction but it pretty much goes where it wants. As a result we decided to drive only city streets when driving the truck to keep the speeds low so the stopping distance wouldn't be an issue.

After a quick stop with Grandpa and Grandma M. We headed off leaving them with the red convertible sports car. They raced us for a little while, but eventually had to stop for food.

Upon arrival at the Cannery we purchased 1251 lbs of grains (give or take a pound). I wasn't looking forward to putting all that into the 4 foot high truck bed, so I asked if they minded if I backed the truck up to put it in. They said that was OK and that I could move a barrel. I am strong believer in the work smarter not harder camp, so I decided to do one better then move a barrel and back up I backed up to the truck ramp so I could use gravity and kinetic energy as my friend :). While this isn't what they had suggested they seemed OK with it and things went quickly and relatively painlessly. Not having a lot of experience with the truck I was very pleased with my backing job as I was able to get within 2 inches of the ramp.

We then headed home taking care to stay on the streets, and getting a little more comfortable with the handling of the portable living room that my Father-in-Law calls his pickup truck. To make things more exciting it turned out that the side street that we had chosen was under construction, so I got to go slalom in the truck.

After a pleasantly uneventful trip, we arrived home, and dumped all the the grains off. Since this IS date night we decided to finish off the evening by picking up and sharing some Krispy Kremes with G&G M. (thanks for staying up)

The next morning we carefully arranged all the grains and buckets and then went to buy the dry ice. (did you know you have to be 18 to buy dry ice?) After getting home we carefully measured 5 ounces of dry ice into each of the 35 buckets and labeled them and then after a couple hours we went out to put the lids on and complete the project.




Unfortunately, that's when we learned that dry ice has many times the cooling (staying) power of regular ice. As the lids continued to bulge and time continued on, It became apparent that we had a significant time commitment with managing the gas.



My limited science says that since co2 is heavier then oxygen, so putting the dry ice in the bottom slowly pushes all the oxygen out of the pail, making each pail it's own little toxic environment. This prevents Weevils from hatching and eating our food storage. I'm quite certain that we generated enough co2 based on how many times I had to burp the pails. I'm not saying it took forever, but I did have enough time to catch up on the 16 episodes of Astro boy I had been meaning to get too.....

When all was said and done we finally got them into closet at about 8:30. But we both feel a little better knowing that we have a food storage that finally is somewhat close to what is recommended.



As a little side note, when I went back to the garage to check on the other pails that hadn't yet been closed off and didn't yet need burping I found many dead insects on the lid. This made me think for a second, and I realized that all of the pails were putting off toxic fumes, needless to say I ended up opening the windows in the house after that. (and had a killer headache that night).