Yesterday my back was so bad that I actually took half a day (well 1/3 a day) off, I wasn't able to get dressed and into the office until 11am. Just getting out of bed is a challenge when you can't use your back.

Today it's better, as long as I don't push it. Taking my shoes off in the security line was a challenge, no where to sit down and even if there was I wouldn't want to look like an old cripple until I actually have to.

Headed to AUS this morning. The PDX flight before mine was really empty, they only had an A group. The AUS flight looks packed as usual and we're still an hour away. They've also changed the flight times this year, making it leave later outbound and earlier back home so I have to take 3 days now to get a reasonable amount of time in the office. Not happy about that but what can you do, all the other flights to AUS connect in some random ass place and take a lot longer so I would still end up having to stay 2 nights. Maybe every 6 weeks will be good enough for AUS this year vs. every 4.

With my fancy military pack now being used for gun stuff I had to come up with another bag to travel with. The roll-on bag would have worked but then I have to get bin space. Instead I went with one of our CIA duffel bags. So far it's working out, although carrying the weight on one shoulder is a painful with my back the way it is.

Finished working on the bike today, got the front pads swapped out so now it's got new all around. If I didn't clean the pistons off well enough it will ruin the seals like happened on the KLR the first time around, so I'll know in a few days if I have to rebuild the calipers due to my lameness. It took a 10-15 good stops to get them to start to bite into the rotors but now they're starting to bed in and the brakes are really strong again. I'm sure they're no better than before but with the extra material there is less fluid moving so less flex? I had to take out a little bit of fluid of course when pushing the pistons back in, could it really be that significant with slightly less in the lines? No idea.

We went to Lowes today and got some shelving to finish up the garage, the woman was tired of my fumbling around and ugly piles of crap everywhere. I got most of my ammo into the ammo cans and put away. Kinda cool one of the 50 cal cans actually has 50 cal ammo in it. With my 5 shots every 5 years, this is a lifetime supply of crappy ammo. Good thing I have brass and bullets to make real rounds should I want to be accurate.

While buying more plastic boxes we got some to organize all the emergency supplies. Gone are the cardboard boxes and things stashed all over, we now have 4 large tubs of MREs, dried food (which lasts forever it seems), water, medical supplies and a bunch of personal comfort items (TP, tooth brushes, etc). We need to re-do the clothes and get some towels and blankets in there. The woman wants to move everything from the hall closet into the storage under the front steps. It's all concrete down there, and dark, I wonder how cool it stays in the summertime? Normally we just store the extra propane and gardening stuff down there, but it's a huge space and will easily hold all the supplies locked away. I'm going to duct tape everything closed in case there are rodents down there. I'm hoping they can't eat through the 25 layers of plastic....

Playing with all the MREs made me want to try one. I did a quick review for the foo guys:

I had the beef ravioli tonight, it was fine.  Seemed a little starchy
and it didn't go with the 2009 d'art Zin I poured at all.  :)

What's really odd is the worst part of the meal, the part I actually
stopped eating, was the cookies.  They're just like animal crackers
but they taste really really bad.  Very chemically, which is amazing
since I think normal animal crackers are just a big bag of chemicals
to start with.

I didn't try the M&M but they look civilian so what's to try.  I did
eat the applesauce pack which was good enough, and I've got the
pretzel sticks left over for my lunch tomorrow.  I'll probably try the
drink powder at work too.

The heater worked easily enough, used way less water than I thought it
would take to activate the heat pack.

All-in-all I think it will make fine emergency fare.

This morning I changed the oil in the bike and put new brake pads on the back (they were the originals with 40k on them) after a warm up run over to Reeds. I wanted to get a new holster for the upcoming class, something with an extra retention system in it. Not because I feel like I'm going to be wrestling with someone over the gun, but because I'm always afraid it will pop out when I'm carrying it hunting (which is why I usually don't). I'll be slower with the retention device but I'll still do OK at the class. I'll be practicing before hand anyway, I'll have a few thousand presentations out of it before I ever get to class.... good thing you can practice the draw without actually having to shoot anything.

Reeds had the one I wanted, the Blackhawk Serpa, in stock which was nice, I figured I would end up ordering it:

Later we had to go up to Oakland (actually Rockridge, so not the ghetto) for a book party; one of the woman's colleagues wrote yet another book and was having a launch party. On the way there we went to a gun store up that way as I was trying to find some cleaning supplies Reed's didn't have. This store didn't have them either but we did get to drive really close to the refinery up that way, it was crazy mad max looking but hard to get a picture of:

There was food at the party, but we were early so we walked around Rockridge and stopped by the woman's haircut place and went to Market Hall which is a really really fancy pasta shop, bakery, butcher shop, cheese store, etc. We didn't want to eat too much with dinner only an hour away but we got some samples of Spanish cheese, some sausage and salami and a little loaf of bread and had a picnic. The woman called it the adventure meal, and I'm not sure why but it was kinda fun snacking while watching the world go by.

The party was a typical shrink party. Those people are pretty boring, they don't do anything outside of work, or researching work, or writing books about work. It makes them rich, but not all that interesting to talk to.

Yea, the bad food is here!

I guess because it was never sold to the government in the first place that warning doesn't apply. Sorta like the EOTech stuff that all says "military/law enforcement only". Anyone can buy that, maybe that's just on there so they can stick you with another weapons charge when they arrest you for whatever.

Whoa that's freaky, my updates were exactly 12 hours apart.

No MRE for dinner tonight, Sushi Kai opened up again!!! It's not the same old place though, new owners and a total remodel if the interior. Sushi was good, prices were a little higher but they've upped the work on presentation and service. Not sure it's worth it but at least we have the option of a sushi restaurant in walking distance again.

I upgraded the ram in the macbook to 4gb from 2gb, we'll see if it makes a difference. All 3 of my macs have started running really slowly, not sure if it's an update/bloatware or my spreadsheets are getting bigger or what but I've never had this bad of interactive performance before. Or maybe I'm just getting used to the zippy seeming air with it's SSD?

Went to a black powder shoot on Sunday, it was a ton of fun (except for the 2 hour each way drive). They had a 'fort shoot' in which you get a team together and get into a little fort and shoot targets for time. Each team has to hit 5 targets per team member, doesn't matter who hits them as long as they're down. The key is to just not miss, take your time and make your shots count since it takes so long to reload a muzzle loader. Another important tip, make sure your supplies are ready before the start. I didn't even know I was going to shoot so I was just about out of powder and my flint was getting all dirty and dull; I was just about to pack up for the day when they called me over to shoot.

The second important thing to remember is shoot with people with similar weapon systems in case there is a problem. I got parred up with a guy who was using a percussion gun and he ran out of caps in the middle of the session. He tried to get some from me... but I have no caps, just a pocket full of flint rocks. Doh! He had to run back to his car to get more, but even with that and me having 4 failures to fire (damn dull flint!) we still beat the next closest team by over 2 minutes. Youth has it's advantages when it comes to working quickly under stress.

Me at the end of the day with my period-incorrect gear and a very dirty rifle. Actually doesn't look that bad in the picture.

Something is really messing with the wireless in the house, I gave up on using it and just plugged an Ethernet cable into the router. There are 18 access points showing up, that probably has something to do with it. Transferring pictures sure is easier with a wire.

We took a ramen making class today and the instructor was going over all sorts of ingredients and which you can skimp on and which you should pay good money for. One of the most surprising was the soy sauce. "toss that kikoman crap" she said and get something good. We did a soy sauce taste test and the difference is huge, it's not that expensive but it's so much better. I wished I had some sushi to go with it.

This is our favorite, the only hard part will be taking these pictures into the local Japanese grocer and trying to find it on the shelf.

Another interesting bit was some sort of sodium bicarbonate and potassium carbonate 'water' that you use in the noodle dough. It simulates the alkali heavy river water used to make noodles in some famous area of Japan that I can't remember the name of. Fortunately they had small bottles of that for us so we didn't have to try to find it at a specialty shop. I don't know how much difference it makes but when we compared the quality store bought quasi-fresh noodles to the ones we made in class it was very obvious that it did 'something' as there was nothing in the noodles but flour and that water.

Another food pic from the week is the baked ham the woman made earlier. It turned out pretty good, she didn't like the taste but that's because it tastes like ham. Apparently she doesn't like just big slices of ham, so we diced it up and she made pork fried rice which was super tasty.

I received my shipment of ammo boxes on Friday and two of them are painted really strangely with words I don't recognize. Since they're sorta tan already I'm going to finish the job and just make them desert tan instead of trying to repaint them OD green. The first one doesn't look that bad, but I think I should get a stencil and put something on there to make it look less plain. My older boxes look cleaner, but they're an older version with a glossy green paint instead of the matte. I now have 15 cans, enough to make some custom shelves to store them instead of just stacking them inefficiently in the cabinet.

Went to the range on Sunday and met up with a guy from work. Was mostly a really lame day due to the fog coming in every so often and closing the range out:

I gave him ~150 rounds of .308 that I can't use, it's all neck sized reloads for barrels I no longer have on my rifles. It all seems to work in his M14 so he's going to shoot it (with the gas system off so it won't extract them forcefully and damage the case mouths) and give me the brass back. I could try to pull them all but it's not worth the risk trying to pull that many by hand. Just getting the brass back is good enough and it's a lesson for me not to load too far ahead unless it's generic ammo. Never know when you'll have to swap a barrel out, or something.

Busy week, I've managed to get a lot of stuff done with the Israel project and with dbag not around and/or "working from home" most of the time I didn't have to deal with any crap. Well, crap from him anyway.

I've put yet another gizmo in the Jeep, this time a "Scan Gauge II" which I'm hoping to use to track what the hell is going on when the Jeep does it's mysterious misfire thing. By default it can't read the transmission temperature from the Jeep but I'm hoping I can use that xgauge setup for custom sensor reading to get it. The '07 and newer Jeeps can do it, but they also have the fancy 6-speed auto I think.

You can customize the display color too, I'll set it up to mimic the colors on the radio display. :)

Today we drove up to Auburn to visit with Heather, the woman's friend that has the brain tumor. They're going to operate on her next week and try to cut part of it out. They can't actually take it all out since the edges of it and the important brain bits are mixed together. She may die Friday, or she may live 2-5 years. Kinda hard to imagine going into that surgery. On the drive up we stopped by Chick-fil-A, the first time the woman and I have eaten in the same Chick-fil-A together in 8 years? OK at least 6. She brought her 'cow watch' along for the occasion.

While up in Auburn we went to the neighbor's house next to the woman's friend who has tiny horses. They hooked one of these horses up to a cart and were giving rides, but the woman didn't take one so I didn't take any pictures of that. Mostly I was off with 'the guys' talking about their chicken coup and trouble with squirrels eating all the nuts off their almond tree.

Full weekend, actually got a ton of stuff accomplished. The woman is right, just moving and doing is better than sitting around freaking out that it's Sunday and I have to go to work tomorrow.

Saturday we went up to Heidelberg to a butchery class. We basically took a whole pig and butchered it down to food. Pics are here, be warned there are dead creatures in them: butchery class. We now have like 70 lbs of pork: two loins, two tenderloins, two hams, two sets of ribs, two bellies, etc. We're brining one ham now, and the woman took the bellies and is curing them into pancetta (although only doing it for 10 days). We cut most of the rib meat off with the bellies but we'll use the ribs to make both for the ramen class next weekend. The chef suggested we take a picture with the spine al la predator. Uh, I'll pass.

It's unlikely we'll ever butcher a full pig again, but it's worth it just to see how it's done and where/how your meat is created before it hits the store shelf. What's amazing is just how much meat (and how many animals) must be killed every day to keep the stores full. Our little pig would have generated hardly any bacon material, so there must be either some huge ass pigs (likely) or 100s of them slaughtered just to fill a grocery case with bacon.

Today we went to Starbucks, then went to work to pickup a wood box I snagged from the scrap pile, spent some time at the archery range, got pizza at the NY pizza place on Stevens Creek, looked for ammo boxes at the surplus store, got spices at the store for the pancetta, and I tried to reach Kenny on 10m and 20m PSK/31. Kenny was a bust even after I went to the park and setup the vertical, but I did manage to log a contact with a guy in Russia. That was cool. Here are some pics of the radio stuff, and the PSK spotter pages showing the people who heard me in the US and worldwide. There aren't many spotters in Russia, too bad since I was able to connect there I should have shown up on a spotter or two.

Some pictures of the cool wooden box I got from work, great to hold powder as you're supposed to put it in a wooden box:

And pics of the crap that I've pulled out of the cabinets and want to organize. I want to get more of those ammo boxes to store, well, ammo.

Crazy headache the last few days, not sure what's up with that. Hopefully it's just dehydration (woman says it's a stress headache like in the old days).

Went to the ear doctor and they retested my hearing. In the last 4 years my left ear hasn't changed, my right ear has lost a little. Sigh. Better than I was hoping but still it sucks to learn the truth. The doc said my hearing aids are now 8 years old (I've been wearing them that long???) and if they fail they're pretty much not repairable at this time. I better look into the cafeteria plan thing for medical equipment next year, don't want to pay full cost post-tax again like I did the first time. Wonder if insurance still considers them "cosmetic items" and won't cover them like before?