I wanted to buy a wheat recipe book today and the sweet young thing who answered the phone said, " Sorry it's out of stock. We can get it to you in 10 (AS IN TEN) weeks." I guess this the way of things to come.I respectfully declined. BTW, Amazon.com didn't have any on the shelf.I guess I'm not the happy camper.

-- nine (nine_fingers@hotmail.com), January 23, 1999

Answers

nine.......

here's a start.....

rinse 1 1/2 cups of wheat berries....add to 3 cups of warter or broth that you've brought to a boil with a bullion cube or two or a teaspoon of salt......bring back to a boil, and reduce the heat. Simmer, covered) for 3 to 4 hours, or until tender.

you can then eat the cooked wheat with a little butter or with gravy like you would rice, or............my favorite.........add a cup or so to a pan of cornbread before you bake it for a wonderfull nutty bread to sop up soup or stew or bean pot liker.......mmmmmm

-- andrea (mebsmebs@hotmail.com), January 23, 1999.

My $0.02 worth ... from the upper midwest .. USA ...

A local farmer friend had a tractor-driven generator that connected to the PTO (for the non-agricultural folks, this means "power take-off" .. a special mechanical connection on the rear of the tractor that's used to drive all kinds of devices such as harvesting equipment, conveyor belts, hay bailing machinery, etc...).

Anyway .. after many years of service .. the generator failed recently, and the farmer (who is also a personal friend of mine) called the regional farm equipment supplier to purchase a replacement as a normal course of business (not at all Y2K related). These generators are normally a stock item and have been for years. He was told that the supplier was out of stock and the manufacturer was back-ordered to the point where the entire 1999 production was sold out.

I've heard similar stories that may be related .. and while they might be local/regional in nature .. it's also a first. Granted the ice storms in the southeast may be contributing to the problem, but there aren't any memories of similar shortages caused by the much larger and more severe ice storm in the New England/Quebec regions just one year ago.

Hopefully manufacturers will have at least *some* time to ramp up production.

-- Dan (DanTCC@Yahoo.com), January 23, 1999.

Conventional wisdom, expressed here and elsewhere, says manufacturers of key equipment in great demand for Y2K are not likely to invest in enlarging their production facilities, since they'd be stuck with the excess capacity after rollover.

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), January 23, 1999.

Dan as far as PTO generators go, there are still a lot of farmers around here who are buying, based just on last year's ice storms in upstate New York. I expect that the wave of buying from that storm alone would keep demand high for a couple of years as each farmer who doesn't have one now sees his neighbor get one and says "You know, that's not a bad idea..." The six inches of ice on the ground outside right now can only add to the demand as everyone thinks how bad it could have been if it had been all freezing rain and not snow with sleet and freezing rain on top.

Loks like your buddy had better find a good generator rebuild shop, and maybe ought to buy some spare parts sets, too.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), January 23, 1999.

There are still plenty of small (5kw) portable generators on the shelf in central North Carolina.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), January 23, 1999.

See how long it takes to get a Katadyn Pocket filter NOW. It used to be that I could walk into the camping store and buy one off the shelf...now you have to wait for months!

-- Tim (pixmo@pixelquest.com), January 23, 1999.

Camping stores and sporting good stores in central North Carolina are still stocked to the hilt with Pur water filters and purifiers such as Scout and Explorer. Most of them never stocked Katahdin because they are so expensive.

-- Puddintame (dit@dot.com), January 23, 1999.

I've only recently begun my y2k preparations, so when I received a catalog from one of the dehydrated food suppliers about a month ago, I just ordered a few things (soup mix, dry milk, and some non-food items) to sort of tiptoe into the food storage world. I mailed in my order, and finally called the company yesterday to find out where my stuff was. The woman I talked to said they were backordered on the milk and the soup mix and they didn't expect to be able to fill my order for another 10 to 12 weeks. That certainly got my attention. I don't quite know what I'm going to do about it, but I did run right out to Rite Aid and buy a few more of those little Danish hams.

-- Pam G. (Pam95818@aol.com), January 23, 1999.

I ordered some corn...the trucking company refuses to deliver to residential customers... so I had to get a friend who had a business to receive it for me. I've had other deliveries made to my home so this struck me as a new twist (may just be the particular shipping company). That same day, I ran out to the grocery store, leaving my two grandchildren and husband happily watching a movie...my husband is great with children and doesn't easily panic. While I was gone the lights went out for about an hour. I return to find a man who was visibly shaken....the children freaked when the lights went out, the little one wouldn't stay put in one place while he located the lantern, which I had placed just inside the door of our bedroom closet (but he didn't know it was there). So he goes for the candles, which are right on the dining room table (already set up). He then gets the children to sit at the table and drink some juice, and decides to light the oil lamps (already fueled and ready). Everything is fine until the lights come back on and he turns one of the oil lamps off by twisting the wick down --- and INTO the oil reservoir! Can anyone say potential bomb? NOW, for the first time, he thinks we should do a few practice runs as a group...rather than leaving it all to me to manage, learn, and prepare.

Then there's the recent tornado outbreaks which made him realize I wasn't all off the top of my head when I said we need to get the junk out of the cellar (got lots of boxes of old papers from school and work that need to be tossed) so it can be functional for both a storm cellar and a root cellar....Monday he said he'll clean it out for me. There are many levels of Getting It... I think we just notched up one.

I have read this forum for about a month now since Tom cued me into it...I want to thank this diverse group for their input. I'm 52, a woman who has truly never experienced serious hardship (beyond a few financially difficult decades), a good camper/hiker/some limited experience in gardening.... and geez! I DO live within five miles of a 7-11!...

I listened to three Albertson employees discussing how they had to keep going to Sam's to get plastic bags during the past week, cause all of a sudden there are so many people buying so much...so much it took two of the registers down for two days running...they didn't know why they went down. They were talking about how angry some of the customers were when the lines were long and the registers weren't open. But everytime they tried to run all of the registers two went down...?....

I went to my local stove shop to talk to Frank (a very helpful person) and one of the local police was there purchasing a wood stove. I asked Frank did she talk about to him about Y2K...he said, no she acts as if nothing's happening...talks about how she'll just eat out if the power goes out? WOW! what world is she in?

Well, that was an interesting day of casual interactions that for me seemed to connect. Thanks to all of you, Shelia

-- shelia (shelia@active-stream.com), January 23, 1999.

No shortage experience here, but when I went to Home Depot, there were about thirty *extra 25lb propane tanks ( in addition to the normal dozen) and about that many *extra propane grills. I have never seen so many in that store. Usually those things don't go one the floor until late March here in the south (GA). You know, outdoor cooking season? Could be I'm just paranoid? I hope

-- (No thanks@house.com), January 23, 1999.

Our power recently went out so I finally got around to ordering a generator. I ordered a tri-fuel model since we have propane and don't want to store a lot of gasoline. Well, I was put on the list to receive the generator in July. I joked with the girl that a lot of other people must have been affected by the winter storms. She replied, "no, it's because of Y2K." The manufacturing company's (Winco) web site states this particular generator is backed up to September. Some of their gennys won't be available until after 1/00. (Sorry, that's 01/2000 for those with enough memory space).

-- lparks (lparks@eurekanet.com), January 23, 1999.

Hi, thought I'd add my two cents. My dad checked Home Depot for a generator last week and they said the reason they didn't have any was there were still shortages because of Hurricane Mitch. My dh went to another Home Depot who also didn't have them, but their story was the ice storms in the Northeast. We were at Restoration Hardware (a ritzy hardware-like store) last week, and they had a whole bunch of kerosene lamps and lamp oil and candles, and I have never ever seen lamps and oil there before, nor the amount of shelf space given to candles. Finally, we also stopped at Williams-Sonoma to buy a manual orange juicer, and the salesclerk said she couldn't keep them in stock. We bought the last one, and she said they get them in shipments of eight, and on two different days they sold out of all eight the same day they got them. And they just started carrying them this month. All just coincidences, right?

Jeannie

-- jhollander (hollander@ij.net), January 23, 1999.

With reference to the post from "Dan (DanTCC@Yahoo.com)", I can confirm that it is not a regional problem.

W.W. Grainger is one of the largest suppliers of parts and supplies to industry and agriculture in America. They have a website here that you can browse through and see for yourself.

Grainger's offers three different "flavors" of the PTO driven generators that Dan wrote about; a 25 KW unit, a 40 KW unit and a 60 KW 3 phase unit.

The local Grainger's branch informed me today that nationwide, Grainger's is back ordered 300 units on the 25 KW unit with 12 due in at the end of January, again nationwide. The 40 KW unit is back ordered 160 units with 5 due in at the end of January, still nationwide. These units are manufactured by Dayton (Dayton Agri-pro) and I have not been able to locate them on the web.

As Dan said, these units are normally an in-stock item and have been for years.

-- Hardliner (searcher@internet.com), January 25, 1999.