Saturday morning, seeing that I was sick, I decided to forgo anything too exhaustive (ha ha) and just go get the Jeep exhaust fixed. It's been banging against the gas tank skid plate and I wasn't sure how to deal with it. The Jeep forum had several ideas: tweak the brackets, re-bend the exhaust pipe, replace the whole exhaust with a custom setup, etc. I went back to the Mexicans at 13th street and they looked at it and went with the tweak the bracket method. $10 and it's fixed. I could have done that, but I guess it's knowing when to tweak and when not to that's the trick.
That evening we went to dinner and to a comedy show with Scott and Lina. Dinner was crap (they picked some cheesy chain-line restaurant in Palo Alto) but the comedy show was 50% good. Staying out late did not help my cold or whatever this is.
The best part of the event could have been before dinner when we were walking around and found a fancy foodie store that carried various types of flour. We got some "0" Italian flour and some whole wheat flour we'll try making pizzas out of.
Today I spent a bunch of time getting an amp and antenna installed in the Jeep. This way my 5 watt HT can act as a 50 watt quasi-mobile with a real antenna. The hardest part of the whole deal was trying to find the right connectors at Fry's. They really shouldn't call themselves and electronics store anymore, they're sorta a big Walmart electronics department with some misc junk that radio shack would sell in the 80s thrown in there to fill a few shelves.
One of the blogger people sent this pic of the woman, now we can actually see she is hanging out with the team at Sonoma.
Finally a use for that semi-transparent mode on the terminal.app... I can have the slides up to the examples page for the class while I type in the terminal. Makes it much easier just being able to see the syntax I need behind the window I'm working in. Just change my eye focus and I've got the info I need. Even easier than having it on a separate screen.
Package arrived for me today. My new mil-retical monocular (easier to carry around at the archery thing, no real need for binos to check out targets) and a magpul backup rear sight for the AR. Don says it's good; I was dubious since it's plastic but it does feel well built and since it will never see action it's good enough. Three quick pics, one with it down, one in the up position and an attempt at taking a pic through the EOTech.
I'm at Puppet training and with 15 geeks in the class trying to use one crappy network connection over a saturated wireless network it's really hard to type. 1200 baud like... OK maybe 2400 baud, I don't exactly remember what it was like to type back in the modem days, but being able to type ahead about half a line is reminiscent of the good old days.
Class was good today, I learned some stuff and asked our local experts some more intelligent questions than I could have before. Two more days of learning.
I forgot to put my radio in here, so I stock image of the Yaesu VX-8DR which I actually have started learning how to program. Tone squelch, tx offset, all that crap. Oh, and a pic of my actual license from the FCC.
After league tonight I spent some quality time and got my new quiver installed (no more falling apart on me on the range) and got the fall-away rest installed. With all these new goodies I can hardly even recognize my bow anymore, all my muscle memory on how to draw and nock arrows has to be re-learned.
Good thing I didn't have any plans for that stock money other than giving a big chuck of it to the government because the septic system at the cabin just failed in some major way. $1000 later they can tell me that the leech lines aren't blocked, but they're not draining. Hooray. Next up is $590 worth of digging so they can tell me if it will be $4k or $10k to fix. On top of that, the deck has some serious dry rot going on and will have to be replaced. Up there this weekend I took a pic of the evidence (the tank lid being underwater):
Let's back up a bit since I've not updated much lately. First off on Friday I went to see The A Team with some people from work (because the woman was at NASCAR she got to miss out on the movie, which she was very grateful for). I thought the movie sucked, it wasn't even fun to watch really. As I told the foo guys I don't like the whole mega-zoom/shaky-cam stuff they do now a days. I realize that sets and backgrounds are expensive and all but the movies would be so much better with more 'cinematic vision' and less in-your-face CGI crap. I'm just getting old I guess.
Saturday I went up to visit my parents and in theory to go for a ride with dad. He's not doing very well for a variety of reasons so I didn't expect we would ride far. We didn't go anywhere on Saturday, we just checked on the cabin and talked to the realtor (with all of the issues I've finally seen the light and am going to get out of the money losing rental game while I'm still ahead). Sunday we went up to Heenan Lake which is a hunting spot I wanted to check out and from there went to Alpine Lake for lunch, then I continued down Hwy 4 home while he and the other guy (one of his friends from up in Pioneer) went back home. He just about fell over at every stop though, he can't control the bike at low speeds. Probably because he's in pain from being hunched over on it all the time, it's not exactly comfortable. He probably would have figured that out if he had sat on it before he bought it...
Oh, and on Saturday on my way up I stopped by Bass Pro and got a new quiver to replace the one that broke and I stepped up and got a fall away rest to replace the Whisper Biscuit I'm using now. I haven't had a chance to install them yet, but hopefully tomorrow I'll get the quiver on before league and can dork with the rest afterwords.
Not much to report other than my 1st year stock vested and I sold it, and that I'm really, really sleepy.
Yesterday evening we went up to Alameda to Rex's 50th birthday party. Apparently much, much tamer than his 40th. With the woman turning 39 next month we're going to have to start thinking of our own 40th plans for next year. Damn, we're getting old.
Thursday I had to run up to the prospective DR site colo (ie Ranging Wire where I setup the NVDA DR stuff) so I decided to make a day of driving and after the colo I drove up to Redding to check on the land. Nothing much new up there other than all the grass is growing up around our clearing, we're going to have to do something about that either this or next year. I re-insulated the pump head, ran the generator and pump for about 45 minutes and.... camped for the night. Yea, I finally got to camp on the land. There is a nice flat spot down in the lower meadow so I setup the tent, played with the bow a bit (getting the sight re-dialed in after the work done to it) and went to sleep. Woke up earlier than planned, broke camp and drove back home, showered and got to work around 1:30pm. Not exactly a day off but better than nothing.
Couple of pictures. First the jackass neighbor did some more gate work, and planted some tiny palm trees. In 30 years maybe he'll have something. He did swap his 'Metallica Way' sign for a 'pit viper road'. So much cooler there, jackass. Next up a little jackrabbit that got scared up when I started the generator. There were actually 3 of them and they started running in circles when the generator fired. I read that rabbits get spooked and run a big circle (so you just stay where you are when they took off and they'll circle back to you) but it was funny to see them running around on the road like that. I only got pics of the one, I had to get the camera out of the car and the other two figured out how to run elsewhere while I was doing that. Scrawny little guys. Third up is just the Suzuki sitting in the grass. The sunlight off the white paint made the camera darken up.
Today so far we're walked to Starbucks, then I vacuumed out the Jeep and finished removing the rear seat brackets and seat belts. It's so much nicer with things sitting flat in the back rather than balancing on those 1.5" brackets. Later today we've got to go to that graduation party for the overprivilaged chick at the woman's barn.
Woot, on my way to my call sign:
Damn, such a busy weekend and week that I've not had a chance to sit down and journal anything!
First off, a picture not related to anything. I kept seeing this damn Ducati monster parked all over the garage and kept thinking that the guy really got around. No, turns out there are 3 black monsters in the garage, this AM they all parked together. Ah ha! That explains it.
Last weekend's camping trip was awesome. There were 14 people there for the day of shooting, and then 10 of them left around 5pm leaving just the 4 of us to hang out. The shooting portion was mostly handgun and carbine stuff with the people from TAD gear. As you can see they had no shortage of pimp rifles nor 'gear'.
Unfortunately though they were lacking in skill with their long guns at any range. We first setup the gong at 175 yards, the furthest we could get where we were. It was either that or 1200+ yards, there was no good spot in-between we could get to that had a backstop. Walking through 100s of yards of bramble to setup a 75 pound target was not anyone's idea of fun. These hits are from us with the .308s from the sling, either standing or kneeling. The smaller splashes, the holes in the soft metal carrier and the bar and the support legs were from the TAD guys blasting away with ARs or some 25-06 rifle someone came up with. As you can see, they sorta suck.
On the way into camp I passed 3 van loads of old looking people who were out in a field. I figured they were out checking out all the wildflowers which were everywhere. Oddly with all these flowers I wasn't having any sort of allergy issues; I must not be allergic to pollen then.
Around 1pm those 3 vans of people showed up above our shooting spot. They really were there for the flowers and wanted to come down into the meadow we were shooting in and see what they could find. We explained to them that we were shooting down there and that there weren't any flowers (which was both true statements). They said they would wait until we were done. Uh, OK. About 10 minutes later they asked if we really had enough ammo to shoot for more than an hour. Despite some of the guys 'empty 30 round mags as fast as you can' drills, they had enough .223 on hand to last well into the night. Eventually the flower people gave up and left. Good choice.
After the crowd took off we got down to preparing dinner. I had just some instant potatoes, some sausages and snap peas. They had brought bacon wrapped tri-tip and a charcoal smoker. They win! Our chef dude cooked the meat and onions and whatnot and I added to the feast by making my whole pack of instant spuds. I have no idea where they got the tablecloth from but here ya go, a feast fit for people who had been outside in the sun all day.
We ended up staying up till 1am just generally BSing, my 'java logs' made a good campfire and the every popular lantern got a multi-hour workout keeping the bugs happy and giving us light. Around midnight we did turn down the lights and put the fire down to coals so the nerds could pull out their iPhones and fire up some astronomy apps and look for constellations. Ah, technology.
Ah, leaving early. Doesn't make up for working all weekend but whatever.
It was 78F in the house when I got home, went to open a window but I thought I would give the AC a quick test seeing how I've never even heard it run. It really is quiet and seems to cool the house OK, but it seems like it's going to have to run all the time to fight real heat. Once it drops the house to 75F I'll pop the windows and go back to the old method of staying cool (ie a fan).