Irish food for lunch. They're a sort of potato pancake with onions, bacon, etc (very tasty!) covered in some sort of cream sauce (gross) and chicken (meh).

Day 1 with the rental car... the partner SE at the customer site this morning thought I was having a midlife crisis for owning such a vehicle, and another guys said "hey, you're driving Bumble Bee from the movie!".

You can tell it's not the real bumble bee, it's missing the black stripes and a whole lot of Megan Fox.

I got two packages at work today. The first was my RTP business cards so I no longer have to hand out Sunnyvale cards, the second was my insight speakers jacket. The date on it was from January so it's been sitting down there a while or they've been bouncing it back and forth between RTP and Sunnyvale and finally figured it out?

Jacket is an XL though, they didn't have any larges so it looks like dad will get a shiny new Netapp jacket.

Dad called last night to talk about the rental car for their visit. Apparently it's going to cost over $1k to get a car for two weeks. That's nuts, so I used the corporate account to get one for less than half that and I'll drive the company rental and my parents can use the 4runner.

Broken gun gets a new custom holster from a local dude that makes them to order. Some day I'll get to carry it... if only I had a slide stop.

Rainy day project, assembling the dump cart so I can move the fire wood and spread gravel.

Pesky squirrel wouldn't move his ass when I was headed up the driveway. Get your drink and move your rodent butt!

I loaded up the remainder of my AA#5 powder and then built a test load with some 800-X with both the last of the golden saber bullets and some new Hornady semi-cheap ones I got on sale as well. The 800-X powder sucks, it's really fluffy and light and doesn't meter well so it's going to be really inconsistent. I'm going to use it up though, it does burn and that's good enough for practice ammo.

At the range testing stuff I found that a bunch of the rounds stuck in the chamber and jammed up both the Springfields pretty hard. When I got back to the house I ran all 400 of the rounds I just loaded through the size checker (which I just got last week having never had any question about the sizing of ammo after I've loaded it) and found 10% were out of spec; too wide at the base by .004 which causes some serious issues. Most of the out of spec rounds were in GFL brass and my guess is that it was from Vareck's G21. The unsupported Glock chamber causes bulging at the case base and regular re-size dies often don't re-size that. I've picked up a Lee "factory crimp die" which is supposed to deal with that bulge issue weather it's caused by lack of sizing or by the case being pressed down during crimp because the OAL is out of spec. We'll see if this does the trick. I seriously do not want to have to trim pistol brass.

Tuesday I got hammered in the groin and managed to walk it off after a few minutes. What I couldn't walk off though was when I jammed my toe. I wasn't even doing anything, just trying to getup and run around the mat. So lame I hurt myself standing up! Now I'm walking around limping because I can't flex my big toe without serious pain. Stupid toe.

I also lost my badge yesterday and had to get a tmp. I went back to where we had lunch, nothing. Scoured the parking lot, nothing. Got home... found it in my laptop bag. I forgot to clip it to my belt in the morning, so it had just been sitting with me all day. Retard moment #2. I'm losing my mind!

On a positive note, my workout record is getting filled in nicely and I'm progressing on all the exercises. The big jump was on day 5 where I started adding a pause at the midpoint of the motion. It makes a huge difference if you have to stop in the middle, it means you really have control over the weights and aren't just throwing things around.

Had lunch at some "fire grill cafe" type place at the big mall up north. It's right next to the cheesecake factory so I assumed it was just overflow space for people who like the food at cheesecake factory. Turns out it wasn't half bad, I had fish tacos that were actually pretty respectable and well seasoned. Either that or my standards are pretty low now and anything that isn't fried on the end of an oil drum is good.

My parents swapped out the carpet in their living room for hardwood. Not sure why they didn't put hardwood in to begin with, and really not sure why they went with white carpet instead.

Small amount of ice this morning. Nothing at the house or on the roads around here but clearly some ice in the trees in the Biogen parking lot this morning (over there at 11am for a meeting):

Last night we went and picked up some chairs for the puzzle table. Considering the table and chairs came from two wildly different sources on craigslist months apart I say the match pretty well. Notice how there are no puzzles on the puzzle table. What are the odds there ever are vs. just being done in the kitchen? The woman already said it's "lonely" in the puzzle room and you can't see the TV. Shockers.

The ACC or AAC or whatever sportsball tournament was this week and work had an RV and tailgate/BBQ area setup for each day. I worked Thursday, which was bitter cold and the worst day for tailgating, but the good news is that only 1 customer came by during my shift so the amount of "work" I actually had to do was pretty minimal. Mostly I hid in the RV to stay warm and took calls in the conference room area in back (it's a big ass RV). The tickets to get into the event were $400 so we didn't have any extra for us peons to go in and see some sportsball action.

Saturday was the open range day at Woody's and I went at the opening at 9am to dodge the crowds. Mostly worked, I had a nice quiet morning whacking steel at 600 yards. There were 3 targets out there, 6" 10" and 14" I think. 5.1 mills put me right on for distance and the wind wasn't that strong but my skills are pretty weak at this point so I wasn't able to really read it and compensate worth a crap. At 2.5 mph I was still on the smallest target, but otherwise... *whoosh* left or right as the wind chose.

They had 3 stages setup from the match that you could shoot and honestly they were fairly easy once you took off the time pressure. :) With the time pressure they would have been a significant challenge. Well time pressure and not having these handy course charts that you don't get in the match. You have to find and range your own targets on the clock.

Today after talking to the crazy neighbour again and reassuring him that yes, we want the rain going into our pond and not draining down the hill we actually went to the wicked chicken auction. We're not close to being ready to buy anything but the woman wanted to see stuff and I wanted to see how the whole thing was laid out. Basically it's a bunch of rednecks bringing livestock to auction and standing around smoking and eating fried baloney sandwiches. The smoke was annoying, but two thumbs up for fried baloney sandwiches!

The 3rd picture shows the storage area and it was fairly empty early on in registration but by the time we left that place was packed. The woman felt very out of place, we were some of the only people not in camo. I at least had the XDs with me, but wasn't open carrying like some other people were. Weirdos.

How did "goof off and load some ammo" turn into "clean all the hardwood floors"? My arms are killing me from the scrubbing.

Another puzzle down by the woman.

Power was out for 4 hours at the house yesterday when this "thing" at the top of the power pole across the street exploded. The woman keeps talking about exploding transformers because one of the neighbours mentioned it happening years ago so now everything is exploding transformers. She could be right, whatever it was did explode. There is ceramic shrapnel all over the area and a small burn spot where something fell to the ground and started a fire before the neighbour's contractors put it out. I'm guessing they were doing something with the power???

With the loading setup on the coffee table it makes it easy to crank out rounds now. Even working slowly while watching TV I produced a box of 50 while watching "property brothers". Now I can learn about remodels and produce things at the same time.

The woman emailed me a few selfies she took with more puzzles. She's done like 5 or so of them now. If only I could get her to process brass or something instead of wasting time on these!

With all the rain last week the pond has really filled up. The burn pile is now an island. The neighbour on the other side of us said we have to clear out the culvert under our driveway because all the water from the street is running into our front yard. That's actually a good thing, it goes into the yard and then right into the low spot which is the pond. We want all that water, no reason to let it run down the ditch by the side of the road and end up in the marshland at the end of the trail.

I didn't really think of it until I heard the woman tell her mom, but the "exciting trip" the woman got to take this weekend was actually just to the gravel store to look at rock. We're going to re-rock the driveway and the planter beds in front of the house so we had to see what was available. After looking at rock we stopped by Tractor Supply so the woman could look at the baby chickens they had in stock and pick up a new bird feeder. She wants the squirrels to eat from their feeder and leave the birds alone. Squirrels climb to well to use rope mounted feeders but I don't think they can defeat the physics of the upside down cone.

Borrowed a drywall saw from the neighbour and mounted the small safe in the closet. The wall I wanted to put it in was one of the originals and it has 16" studs, but it also has some "extras" in there randomly so mostly it's got 12" or 6" of space. Lame, and not suitable for the safe. Now I get to learn to patch holes in drywall next weekend.

Threw some 185gr rounds together from components from the OSU days. Everything is labeled Andersen's Sporting Goods which means it's circa 1993? Test fired a few at the range and they work well enough so I'll start cranking out more until I run out of components.

Jessie stopped by tonight to pick up that extra .380 I had so he could go finish breaking in his CW380 tomorrow. Guess you can't stop by FG&G at 8pm on Sunday to buy ammo, but you can come trade your friends for it.

I'm sitting in the briefing center at a customer pitch and they've opened the snack door behind me. That would be fine, except that they have a huge cheese plate and the blue cheese is stinking... a lot. It's like being trapped in a huge fart that just won't go away. Ugh.

Class last night kicked my ass once again. I went to the Raleigh school again and those guys are just a much younger (and stronger) crowd than the Cary school. I should try to stay with the old folk in Cary and get my butt kicked there with some dignity.

The guy who bought the Glock didn't want all of the magazines nor the holster for it, but didn't try to negotiate any money off the price for not taking them. So... I kept the "extras" and just sold them to someone at work adding another 10% to the total return I got out of the overall deal. Sweet. Not counting inflationary losses I think I actually got all my money out of that setup, or damn close. That's not bad at all really considering that new G27s are selling for below their inflation adjusted price back in 1997.

I wish I had some better pics to put in here but nothing much interesting is going on. I'm working a lot more (yea!) but otherwise life outside the office is sorta the same old same old at the moment. Really ready for winter to be done though.

With the new food service company in the cafe they've raised the prices on the meals by 20%+, but they lowered the prices in the vending machines by 10-15%. If only a larger portion of my food came from the machines it would be a win. Merf. On the up side, if you want to pay for real food you can (the $7 meal):

The woman's mom sent her a shirt:

Came home early and worked from here because of ice. It was warm-ish and raining this morning and around noon the temp started falling. It was 33F and raining when I left and by the time I got home the garbage cans were frozen shut as was the mailbox. I'm guessing the roads freeze tonight, and that's going to make for a fun/impossible commute tomorrow.

Went to the Dixie Deer Classic this morning with Jessie. He's got a hunting lease about 20 minutes away so he's not really looking for land or guides or anything like I am but he was just happy to get out of the house. He had his daughter with him and she sat in a backpack and just looked around the entire time. Never seen a kid that well behaved before.

They take their cornhole serious here, there were several vendors selling pretty fancy boards:

Had to work a little bit tonight, going to Biogen in the morning to do a presentation on the new FAS8k line. Mostly I took the super-technical SE presentation and cut out some of the "they don't really need to know that" info and called it good. They wanted a super technical deep dive with no marketing fluff so this is about as good as it gets.

The ducks are still hanging out on the pond, the woman is almost certain they're going to stay here until spring... so she had me put some bread out for them this afternoon. Ugh. At least it's a use for all the wonder bread her parents bought.

Last night I took the PM9 to the range to finish it's break in period and test it out with the Critical Defence ammo I'll carry in it. Accuracy at 10 yards is pretty good, especially when you figure I'm firing at least 5 different loads out of it. I've got a menagerie of 115gr JHP and 124gr FMJ rounds loaded up in the early 90s at OSU. I've counted at least 3 types of JHP slugs in there and who knows what all FMJ there is. It all works pretty well out of that tiny barrel... until the slide stop breaks. Dammit! It's a $25 part from their web site if I have to buy one but since it's a brand new gun they should just swap it out on warranty. I've emailed customer support and we'll see what happens.

We have 2 new pets in the yard, a pair of ducks have been hanging around the last week. The woman hopes they're building a nest in the burn pile and we'll end up with a bunch of baby ducks in the spring. That's just what we need, more things to feed on top of the squirrels, deer, birds and cat.

I couldn't figure out how to get ispell to guess "menagerie" out of what nonsense I was typing so I popped over to google and typed "Star Trek mane" and that was enough for it to correct to menagerie. Guess they know geeks can't spell but we know our Trek episodes? :)

Met with a guy and sold the Glock 27 off, so I'm down now to 1 gun to trade/sell and I'm done. The dude was an old codger (62) but whatever, he had the necessary permits to buy and the all important money so it's all good in my book. He's probably not some gang banger which is a good thing.

This pic is from Eric, some crazy chicks crashing their booth at a trade show. Not sure why, I just thought to include it here as we lack any bimbo photos these days.