The woman is off to Cleveland to visit with her mom and grandma and the rest of the Ohio clan. So glad I am not a part of that disaster.
Adventure weekend is over, fun, but I'm glad to be home and resting. Saturday I drove down, got the rifle sighted in (I switched back to the $25 Walmart scope, the Springfield one is just too big for the rifle) with the lead-free ammo and then setup camp. Looked like some sort of Jeep commercial:
Yes, that is the same tent I used in high school. After that I went walking around for a bit but it was pretty hot out, close to 80, so I decided to go back to came and sit and read for a few hours. As it got toward dusk I went back out trying to find rabbits.
I missed 2 completely, I swear they heard the bow firing and jumped off at the last second. The 3rd one I saw at 37 yards (so says the rangefinder after the fact) and took the shot. It looked and sounded like a solid hit, the rabbit flipped over and stopped moving. I drew another arrow and went to move in and he hopped up and ran into the bushes. WTF? The arrow was about 3' behind where he was, covered in hair and blood. Did it just pass through him? I couldn't have been a miss because the arrow clearly had essence of rabbit on it. I felt pretty bad about wounding one so I called it a day. Back at camp I fired up the lantern and settled in for some dinner and another few chapters of my book.
Today I set out again only with the rifle, I wasn't as confident in my archery and didn't want another wounding. I saw a few rabbits on a ridge about 60 yards away but I didn't know which way the edge of the property was and I didn't want any missed shots lobbing bullets into random farmhouses or cows so I didn't take a shot. I tried to sneak around and get on the high side of them but they didn't stick around while I bumbled through the woods.
It was getting pretty light out so I decided to head back to camp, make breakfast and head home. About half way down the hill I was on a rabbit popped out next to the road and stopped. I shut off the Jeep and he just sat there. Um, OK. I got out and he still just sat there watching me. I went around back, opened the hatch and he just ignored me. I put my headset on, and still he just sat there. I got the rifle out and he went back to eating. I wanted to save as much meat as possible so I aimed high on the body behind the head and pop, he went down like a switch had been flipped. Took him back to camp and it took me an hour to skin and field dress him, but I was very happy to be able to do it all by myself. The skinning knife I got worked perfectly. Once he was all cleaned I could see that the bullet had gone completely through and shattered his spine. Couldn't ask for a better shot (other than a head shot which I wasn't going to try). The traditional rifle and animal shot:
The hunting guide says that black tailed jackrabbits are good to eat, we'll have to see. I saw a lot of cotton tails this weekend (which aren't in season yet) but they're so small compared to the jacks. Gun people take note that the rifle has been cleared with an empty mag in there for the pic. I'm not walking around in condition 0.
Because I wasn't hunting them, I saw several turkeys and spied this one deer watching me drive by.
As soon as my tent dries out from the morning fog and being packed away wet I'll almost be done putting stuff away. So much work and money for 1 rabbit and some reading by lantern. Oh, and I did find a Verizon pre-paid phone, and it mostly works out there. Good for emergencies.
The car dealer called while I was away, the mechanic didn't call him on Friday. Don't know if that means they're working on it or haven't yet. Perhaps the deal isn't dead yet. The woman's car is acting up, now it's making some strange squealing/grinding noise from the drivers side wheel. I pulled the wheel, it's not the brakes nor are the CV boots torn up. I guess the joint could start to fail even without the boot being torn and the grease drying up... or maybe it's the wheel bearing. There was no play in the wheel though. Good thing she's got a real mechanic to deal with this stuff.
P90X... ugh. I managed to squeak 1 more rep in every set in the chest/back push-up/pull-up routine. That's good news, but man am I sore and tired!
I got a shipment notification from the 50 BMG guy, looks like my repaired bolt assembly is headed back my way. Rude that they wouldn't answer my original query asking if they even received it.
Getting very excited about the trip this weekend. The wife was making fun of me for laying in my sleeping bag in the living room... I was just testing it out after washing it! She's worried that I'll be camping alone and out of cell coverage. Maybe I should try to find a Verizon pre-paid phone at 7-11 or something (Verizon is the only coverage out there).
I'm at work early today, it's going to be an action packed day. At lunch I have to go pick up a saddle from some chick at Sun (my woman was trying to sell it to her but it doesn't fit her horse right) and take that home and then the woman and I are driving out to Manteca. I finally found a car I want to get as my bopping around car, an '04 ZX3 Focus. Of course the only low mileage, 5-speed with the 2.3L engine (that doesn't use a timing belt!) I could find was in freakin' Manteca. Why must I always go to Manteca to buy vehicles? There is an '01 locally but the dealer wants 200% of Edmund's book value. Lame. The Manteca one is actually (after our phone dealing) priced well at $5800 out the door (so $5200 before tax and tip). Dad checked it out while he was out working there on Monday so it's at least not total crap. I'm looking forward to having a manual car again. The woman said now that I don't have to drive the Jeep as much we can 'trick it out' and not worry about it's road handling. It would be nice to have some more aggressive tires so we could have gone on the snow runs with the club. BFG ATs are the best AT tire out there, but they still suck balls in 2' of snow compared to a real off-road tire.
I had my second strange college dorm dream. Sunday night I dreamt that I was moving into a dorm that was mostly empty. There was a long hall, sorta like Weatherford past Vareck's room around the corner. All the doors were unpainted wood and had brass numbers on them, the floor was rough finished concrete. At the end of the hall was a step up into another hall that had 4 rooms off it. Mine was the last room on the right, with a final room at the very end of the hall. I woke up before I could open the door. Last night's dream I walked down the same hallway and although I couldn't see anyone I knew that the rooms were now occupied. When I got to the step-up I saw that the end room was occupied and the door was open. I tried to just say 'hi' and go into my room but the guy came out to talk to me. He was some sort of skinny Indian looking guy who said that these last 4 rooms were usually for freshmen whereas the rest of the hall was for the football team. I couldn't figure out why I was such an old freshman but I did say that this was just temporary while I got my off-campus housing setup. Unlike real college where I wouldn't want to be near a bunch of football players, in the dream I thought it would mean they have lots of drunk hot chicks around. At least I'm getting smarter in my dreams! :)
Oy, oy, oy. We drove out to Manteca, checked out the car and there is something wrong with it. There is clearly something wrong in the right front wheel area, some bad noises coming out of that part of the car under acceleration load. The dealer took it (and me) to a mechanic and I rode around with the mechanic and he could easily reproduce the noise on demand just like I could. The current plan now is for the mechanic to actually take it apart and see what it takes to fix it. If it's reasonable, the dealer and I will split it and call it good (because other than that the car seems good and is pretty fun to drive for a front drive econo box). If it's not reasonable then the deal is off and the dealer can fix it or not as he sees fit. For once I did the right thing, I think. I do like the size of the covered space behind the rear seats, it's much larger than I thought. The remote door locks are after market and there was clearly some crazy ass stereo in there; lots of monster power cables running to the rear. The aftermarket CD player works and I can pull out those extra wires. The chirpy alarm noise when you work the locks though has got to go.
The woman rode with me on the bike to REI today. We went surface streets on the way and she braved the freeway on the way back. You can see she's smiling, it can't be that bad:
At REI I got one of the dual-power surefire lights (using my 20% off coupon and dividend money). The woman is making a bug-out bag to have at her office in case of disaster and wanted a flashlight. I gave her my old LED light and got this surefire to replace it. The light has two settings, a low power mode that lasts 110 hours and a 60 lumen high power that lasts 16 hours or something. Crazy light output and battery life out of these now. My G2 is still a better combat light, it's 80 lumens and just comes on and off, the fancy two-way is too complex to use under stress.
The rest of today I spent making ravioli. A double batch, way too much work in one sitting. I made cheese, mushroom and spinach for the woman and I made rabbit for me. The rabbit took several hours to prep and cook, but tasting the filling seems to indicate it was worth it. We also made stock out of the rabbit bones, so next time we need some we'll have fresh stock.
Yesterday we went to the mall, I managed to find 6 shirts and 1 pair of pants that I liked. That's not bad, so I tossed out a bunch of old work shirts that had seen better days. I also ordered some tru-spec pants that are tacticool, but still look just like cargoes. If I can't wear them to work though they'll have to go back. We also hit the surplus store for some water jugs and other misc crap for camping next weekend.... and..... a portable hammock! Yea! I'll tie to a tree on one end and the Jeep bumper on the other. It's going to be great.
I had the strangest dream about being captured and made to serve (sorta) aboard some sort of Russian submarine. We docked somewhere really strange and I went ashore and wondered if it was where Vareck was working. I took a picture with my phone and then started back to the sub when I was accosted by some dude claiming I was an American and should die. I made it back on-board and then was worried about emailing the pic because it might contain location info, and then I was trying to read a newspaper I found but it only contained the weather section. There were windows in the sub (um, what?) and they had some sort of grandma like lace curtains on them; we could see the guy that bothered me standing on the dock threatening to light the sub on fire. No idea what that was all about.
I changed the oil on the bike the other night, took me about 45 minutes from start to finish. This time I marked the filter as to which way it comes off... trying to figure that out is what takes the longest each time it seems.
I thought about the car idea a bit more today, and it's a struggle between the idea of nothing, of something cheap and something of quality. I'm very happy about the bike, it just sorta works with no drama. I hope I can do the same with the car if I go that route.
Yea for MSFT! They've renewed The Guild for season 4! They can't be all that bad.
I didn't actually get to make my update the other day so I'm just redoing this whole entry. 20 years from now no one will notice.
I'm sitting in the lobby working, it's impossible to get real work done let alone goof off from my office. Even with the door closed people are coming in, that's annoying but necessary in a way. In other ways it just means I can't get anything done. I've got so many write-ups to complete and design work to finish, not to mention POs to get into the system.... damn, no wonder I can't remember the root password anymore. I really am just a manager!
The exec floor secretaries just walked by headed to the elevators. SJ likes them tall and blonde it seems, and 5" heels are apparently appropriate for the exec floor. At least he knows how to use his power. :)
Sunday was the turkey hunt up in Auburn; it was all very exciting. We went up and setup a blind before dawn and after two hours of calling the guide got 5 males to come our way. 4 of them were young 'jakes' and 1 was a really HUGE old male 'tom'. I was shaking like crazy as they got within range trying to figure out exactly how I was going to draw the bow and fire without them seeing the movement or hearing me. Apparently they see 10x as well as people so even blinking can tip them off when they're within 20 yards. Unfortunately, as they got closer they sorta wandered off to the left away from the decoys, the jakes were chasing the tom away and the fighting got them all less interested in the decoys. They got within 10 yards of us but were too far to the right, I couldn't get myself turned around inside the blind to be able to take a shot. Damn bows take a lot of room to use. The guide indicated I should switch to the shotgun and just take one, but I really wanted to use the bow. They left us and went back over the hill and when I could talk to him again I told the guide that getting one with the bow was more important than getting one at all. The shotgun was just too damn easy. He was fine with that and said we could try to wait until they came back. 20 minuets later a trespassing jogger ran by... WTF? That was the end of that. The guide said that turkey can hear/see a stealthy hunter 200+ yards away and with someone running through the forest they've effectively chased away every turkey within 500 yards of the road. Doh.
We moved to another spot on a different property and setup once again. This is the view from the blind with the 'windows' open (those are decoys)
Around 11:30am it started raining, and being windy, and raining some more. We saw turkeys twice more, but they totally ignored the calls. He said they couldn't hear us over the wind because even if they weren't going to come in they would at least look up at the call, these just walked by as if they heard nothing. At 4pm we packed up and headed out, the blind had kept us from getting soaked but my fancy ass pack is anti-waterproof. It seems to draw moisture off the ground even, it was quite a mess.
The sprint 3g wireless modem thingy is faster and has less latency than the hotel wireless. I find that very odd. Either the Motel 6 has a 56k modem attached to their wireless or there are a lot of people with laptops in this place. It's pretty full, so maybe that's the case.
Work has been crazy this week. They've been coming at us fast and furious with budgets, and at 3pm on Friday they wanted a budget for the new Austin server room for the new company. Um, what? We don't even know what equipment we're going to get them nor where they're moving, so how can I have a budget already? Guess that's why we get the medium bucks, we fake stuff to a high degree of accuracy.
I've also been interviewing again, I find myself with 3 openings that need to get filled in Q3. Looks like I get the guy in Austin and will hire another for that site. That's like what, 18 people total or something? Damn, no wonder I'm so busy now.
Tuesday night we went to Left Bank for my birthday dinner with my parents. It wasn't memorable, so I didn't bother with the usual menu pics. Damn Santana Row restaurants.
Some pics have shown up on the psycho board:
Last night we went to Troya for dinner up in SF. It's the only Turkish place we could find, and true to the stuff we had in Australia, it was damn tasty. I won't go into all the details, but I can say that the following are very good (the stuff we had with the best items in italics):
We also had some wacky deserts that I can't even begin to describe (and forgot to take a pic of the desert menu) but trust me they were good. The whole meal was excellent in fact, right down to the Turkish wine. All reasonably cheap too, it was only $100 for the 3 of us for dinner including the drinks. We'll clearly be back.
Pics of the girls, with Ellen looking crazy washed out due to the window light and the cheesy iphone camera, and the main menu.
I'm back from class, and am really wiped out. I'm clearly not an operator at all. Slowly readjusting to civilian life.... at least tomorrow I won't have to wake up and go freeze my ass off in the wind and rain.
My gear is a disaster, and my rifle is sitting downstairs drying out before it goes back into the safe. May have to take it apart to get the water out of the mounts. Damn rain.
I did come away from the week thinner (the woman says I look like I lost weight) and with this certificate and hat.
