From the yearbook... a vintage "rocket club" photo. I can't believe we're hand drilling into home made rocket motors... lovely safety gear there.

Went to FG&G yesterday and picked up a Savage 93 Mk2 in .22 with the factory 16.5" threaded barrel. I'll need one when the rimfire can finally clears BATF approval which could happen any day now. Or any month now. I'm thinking April at this rate but whatever, I got a gift card for giftmas and wanted to use it toward this. They didn't have any scopes I liked so I picked up a cheapie from Midway, it's at least mil/mil and doesn't have any cheesy tacticool features that I'm aware of. It's side focus as well, so basically like the Millet POS I run on the .17 but $100 cheaper... so how scary will it be? Probably fine for something that's designed to shoot 50 yards really really quietly with this stuff:

Yesterday and today while loading ammo and watching way too much of the Mythbusters marathon I managed to bake some stuff. The in-laws got me a "make your own pretzel" kit and I divided up the recipe and made some bagel dogs. Just like at the mall! Today was just a loaf of bread which I'll take over to my parents to go with dinner tonight. I gotta say, making your own bread is a lot of work.

The woman wanted some hangars on the wall to hold her victory lane hats in the puzzle room, so I knocked that off the list today as well as re-caulking the shower.

Yesterday I also went and hit a bucket of balls at the driving range since the weather was so nice. Did pretty well I think considering how long it's been since the last golf outing.

So that's what that crashing sound was. Sigh.

Mom sliced the loaf open and BOOM, it's done correctly! Smooth texture, edges nicely browned, etc. I've recreated wonder bread basically.

Took about 3' out of the dryer vent, it used to go left out of the dryer then do a 180 back around to run across to the vent outlet. The manual says that's no bueno, you don't want more than 1 90 degree bend. I don't see how that's possible since you can't mount the dryer sideways but whatever, now it goes out to the right and up into the vent. I also fixed the leaks, once again using duct tape on duct work like some sort of crazy person.

Priming tool busted tonight, and right when I was starting a new test batch. I found some "fast steel" epoxy like stuff in the junk box and using two nails with the heads cut off as a "split" I'm attempting to repair it since I can't exactly just run out to the store and buy one. It's ugly as hell but it just might work. If it does I'll grind it smooth and hit it with some spray paint and call it done until the replacement parts arrive.

We got just over 3" of rain total the other day and with all the draining mods I've made getting more water into the pond it really filled up. The burn island is totally underwater now. That's awesome, I wish it would stay that high. Lotta pine needles got washed in there, wonder if I'll have to dredge it out some day.

Giftmas dinner was pretty good, we had fennel and leek potatoes, ham, mushroom and bacon green beans and some sort of spiced apple thing. I pointed out that it's pretty much what you can get in a hungry man dinner... :)

The best gift of the season was a hat and jacket that the woman got me. While watching "Gold Rush" I said it would be cool to get a hat from the company that Parker's dad owns. You can buy all the 3:16 mining crap that Todd Hoffman is selling but that's just pedestrian stuff, having a hat you can't buy would be cooler and way more rare/hip/whatever. Unfortunately since you can't buy them, you can't exactly go buy them. The woman contacted the people she knew that moved from Alameda to Alaska and it turns out they know the Schnabel family up there and just drove over to the office and asked them if I could have a hat. They gave me a hat and a fleece jacket, both with the logo. How freakin' cool is that? Of course no one will get the significance of it, but that's what makes it fun.

So, Parker wearing the hat in season 5 (or 4, whatever is current) and my very own:

Watching parts of the myth busters 9 day marathon (they're showing all 228 episodes) and loading ammo. At least I'll have something to show for all the time I'm spending vegging in front of the TV. Some of this brass and all of the powder date back to the OSU era, with much of the 9mm brass having come out of Clay's full auto M9. That stuff is pretty beat up and hard to resize, but since I'm going to be shooting this ammo in matches and not collecting the brass it's OK that it's on it's last legs.

Cleaned up the wiring on the barn cams this morning, got things tucked up out of the way, ran another outlet box in the main barn so I could remove the extension cord I was using, etc. Not going to win any home builder quality awards but my electrical is better than what's in there, and that's scary. Some day I'll rewire the whole thing and get the circuits to make sense but for now this is good enough.

Ha! When I went to verify the barn cam was working I saw a whole bunch of pictures of me working in the area, and then this about 4 minutes after I came back in the house. They must have been waiting for me to get out of the way so they could wander through.

We've got 2 inches of rain since late last night, that's good, the pond always benifits from more water.

For the last 52 days I've been doing an extra set of push ups before bed and right after I wake up. I started with just 20 and have added one to each set each day and am now doing sets of 72 as of this morning. However, I really start to struggle after 60 and often have to stop and rest for a sec to finish up. I guess my goal is 100; hadn't really thought about where to stop, just wanted to get in some extra. It's really, really hard on class nights because I'm so tired from class and then have to slog through all those push ups before bed... but it's all for a good cause.

Found this in a box of crap that my parents had collected for me (old year books and whatnot). Pacificon '85! Woo! The woman actually looked through the yearbooks and her comment was "mostly girls signed your yearbooks". Huh. If only I could have capitalised on all that girl exposure somehow.

My parents also had this stacked away. Yea buddy, 20 year old copies of Quicken. Software really has changed, these all had printed manuals. I didn't even keep the floppies out of them for nostalgia purposes since I have no floppy drives anymore.

Saturday I went "hunting" sorta up at one of the game lands about an hour north of the house. I've been told you can't hunt anything there without dogs, and now I understand why. Other than the roads the rest is pretty much impenetrable trees, and you can't see squat and you can't take a shot anywhere even if you could because everything is so densely wooded. Meh. I walked around for a while but then it started to snow a little so I went home. Not a total loss though because I got OJ and mini doughnuts at the gas station on the way out of town. Nothing says adventure like OJ and mini doughnuts.

New coffee mugs handed out at work, complements of one of our resellers. That's good since my parents seem to have stolen all of our coffee mugs.

The internal net seems slow, I think I need to put the wireless, the core server and the DSL back onto the same switch and isolate it from all the camera traffic noise. Yea, it's a gig switch but come on, it's a Netgear switch, I'm surprised it's not melting down with 20mbit of traffic sustained.

Registered the Blue Iris stuff, probably the cheapest part of this whole project. Also stopped by Home Depot to get stuff to fix the roof leak I found while up in the attic and to provide power to the new barn cameras I have on order. They're only 1 megapixel but that's a step up from what's out there now and these are weatherproof so they'll last in the dusty environment.

After a bunch of hole drilling, fish taping, wire pulling and crazy ladder stunts, the 4 cameras are mounted on the house and functional. I also ran cable to the TV area so I can put the NUC there and run it off the big TV and have the time machine sitting more in the open where the 5ghz wireless signal can hit the laptops. Not that we're somehow bandwidth limited going out of the house on the DSL line but looking at these cameras live will benefit from having some more bandwidth. I kinda don't like it sitting there though, in a smash and grab robbery it's a nice tempting iTarget.

Even if I don't get the DVR software working well, the tablet view of the cams is damn cool to have on the bedside.

We also cleaned the gutters out and the woman started clearing an area she'll use as the "poop bin" for the animal shavings.

Yesterday I went to the range to sight in the .17 to take squirrel hunting next weekend... and I forgot to bring ammo. I set it out but it didn't make it into the range bag. Doh! I had 11 rounds in the mags in the stock pack which was enough to get it set at 50 yards and then move out to get it set at a 100 yard zero. Hopefully I'll find some dumb squirrels that are really close to me so I don't have to worry about longer shots.

Currently I'm waiting for my dough to rest so I can run it through the rollers and cut it into fettuccine noodles. Mom is making some sort of beef stuff to go over the top of them... hopefully her half the meal stands up to my amazing white pepper pasta! :)

I like jerky, I like chocolate.... but combined? Yea, it's gross but the woman got it for me as a gift so I'll eat it.

Forgot to mention she got a lease on a non-crappy horse from a non-crazy owner last week so she'll start lessons again soon. "Vic" is the horse, and his (her, it's?) owner is some lawyer chick that wants to put cameras in the barn. I can help!

I'm sitting in this Cisco training class waiting for it to start and I'm learning that I don't like "nerds" so much anymore. It's not so much the technology, just the people. I can't figure out what it is, just something is "off". Maybe I'm just getting old and don't want to be here and it's bleeding into my opinion of the people in the room. Or maybe these people should just learn to shower.

I did not like the PoE switch for the cameras being up in the attic due to the temperature swings so I drilled a hole in the ceiling of the laundry room and moved it down. Now it's in the temperature controlled portion of the house and I can look at the blinky lights. I screen grabbed an image from the garage camera this afternoon and used it to test what it looks like on the big screen (using Chromecast). Looks pretty good, and should look even better when the new system is here popping those images up there real time.

Went dove hunting with Dawson at Drake's Landing on Saturday morning, and I gotta say it was probably the most fun I've had in any hunting situation. It's not as satisfying as doing a solo wild rabbit hunt, but it's more "action packed". Unlike the bird hunts in CA where you're walking in mostly open terrain, rolling hills, etc where you can easily make leisurely shots on the birds as they flush, here it was all in dense forest where you're constantly getting hung up in brambles, fighting branches, etc. You don't get the shots you want, and it all happens so very fast.

Between the 2 of us we got ~35 shots on birds, and managed to actually hit 12 of them. Not exactly a high success rate but given our inexperience, the rain and the forest I think we did pretty good. They include lunch after and although it was fairly pedestrian it was filling after 3 hours of hiking around. The guide had a pedometer and said we walked 3.5 miles. Doesn't seem like much until you figure that it's not on a trail.

Sunday dad and I ran out to the prepper store and got one of these surplus food grade tanks (fairly cheap). I'm going to use it for rainwater collection for the goats... someday.

Updated my iphone home screen with this pic from a thread on the last shuttle launch: