One picture from PHX family crap. I helped Tanner frame up the sheet of un-cut two dollar bills we got him at the mint. Not a bad job considering his dad has zero tools available. Guy has a PS4, PS3, xbox, shuffle board, fooze ball and a pool table, but no freakin' exacto knife or level.

I got off the plane from PHX, grabbed my gear and made it to the match that I didn't think I was going to get to. Jesse was there and he filed me on one stage. One of the reasons I'm not doing well is very obvious after watching this video. I keep taking makeup shots for C hits after I see them, but the time it takes me to assess and reengage is longer than the penalty for a C hit. I need to basically just accept the Cs and not have all those seconds drag out while I'm looking and shooting again.

The woman is happy, her big bag of nuts arrived and now the squirrels will be fed once again. I'm also happy because I get to eat some of those peanuts, they're actually really good.

Got my crush washers and optics from Amazon (ordered while we were away) and with a little "me" time spent I go the brakes mounted up and indexed on both the 300BLK and the 556 SBR uppers...

...and the optics mounted up on the 300BLK. Not sure exactly how I'm going to deal wit the short eye relief of the Vortex magnifier but I'll figure it out. Everything is just cosmetically on there, won't crank it down until after some experimentation.

Not a bad AR collection for a guy who doesn't even shoot an AR.

The pond is about as full as I've ever seen it, with the burn pile pretty much underwater at this point. I think the rains are done for a while now though so this is the max we'll see.

USB power meter, and I opted for the OLED display one so it's much smaller and cooler looking than the big one. I like that it also has a total mAh counter, will be useful for figuring out the draw on stuff when I want to make it run on solar.

Coyote going after those tasty quail and bunnies!

Avi has family in town here too and is hanging out for the holiday so he came by and got me and we went to that "Top Golf" place. Fun concept, but expensive and very much a scam in how you pay. They only let you charge your card in fixed increments that in turn to not match up with the cost of time on the system so unless you're gaming it exactly right you end up with money locked up in your account you can't use. Fine if you're going all the time, but lost for casual users. It probably nets them an extra 5-10% of income for those paying attention, I can see it being 25% for people who can't do math or don't notice the scam right up front.

We had to wait 2.5 hours to get signed in and get a spot, so clearly it's not a deterrent to anyone going.

Avi is still an avid golfer so he beat me the first 4 games quite easily, but then I managed to pull off a win on the last game before we ran out of time. Good thing we didn't have time to finish the last 5 balls apiece or he would have passed me by.

We did make it to PHX eventually. The flight was delayed 4 hours (co-pilot got sick and they had to divert the inbound plane to Louisville and then fly a new co-pilot down from Chicago since Louisville is not a Southwest airport) and if it had been 10 minutes later the crew would have "timed out" and they couldn't fly for another 9 hours. That's what happened on my Tel Aviv flight that got cancelled. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how much you wanted to go to PHX we made it away from the gate.

An oddball gift, and not from my mom. More stupid plastic shit no one wants or needs, but is required for the holidays.

Mom sent this picture this morning. She kept bugging me for bread recipes and whatnot so we got her a book on bread making and a bunch of artisan flour from a local NC producer. This was the result from her first attempt in the oven. Looks like real bread to me. Her trial in the crock pot didn't work out, apparently some crock pots have safeties that keep them from working if they don't have liquid in them and hers is like that so you can't bake bread in it.

The tree rats are getting braver all the time. The woman has 3 of them now that will run up the steps and take nuts from her if she drops them on the top step. I suspect that over the course of the winter they'll either forget and she'll have to retrain them, or they'll get desperate and take the nuts from her hand. If it wasn't unseasonably warm we wouldn't be having coffee on the porch and they wouldn't be getting extra treats.

My mom always gets me some random crap for giftmas and this year is no exception. She saw this and figured I would just love it. Um, a motorised piggy bank? Maybe if I was 6, not so much now. But, because it's junk from mom I'll put it up for a while before getting rid of it quietly. And yes, "cheese" is misspelled.

After struggling with how to repair the phone case, it finally hit me. Gaffers tape! Works well, isn't sticky, etc. If it works to hold my gloves together it can work to hold the phone case together.

Amazing how many people show up to the group giftmas outing when it's "mandatory fun".

Yesterday I shot in a "steel challenge" which is all about speed. No movement, no tactics, no cover, no reloads, no nothing. You stand and at the buzzer you draw and shoot. Sometimes fun, but sometimes a little redundant. I didn't do very well, came in 26th out of 29 shooters. I was OK on the later stages, but we started on the hardest stage and I couldn't hear the hits, and I was missing a lot so I ended up looking at the targets trying to see hits instead of looking at my sights which makes you miss more, etc, etc. Super frustrating. On the later stages when the steel was closer I could hear and my confidence went up and I did better. I was the only person shooting from concealment which they said was slowing me down, but I would rather practice drawing that way than just standing there gunfighter style.

You can shoot in any order, except for the last plate (the "stop plate") which is on a red pole. I tried going right left and left right, and found that I'm faster left right.

That evening we went to Jonathan and Blair's place for dinner and for games night. "Exploding Kittens" was somewhat amusing, but not as funny as it seems like it would be. We also played "apples to apples" which is a sort of word association game which was more fun. Apparently with the right group "cards against humanity" is hilarious so we're thinking we'll do that for new years.

I tried to make some pumpkin bars from a boxed mix. They turned out like crap. So much for trying to cheat and do something not from scratch.

I went over to Sean's house this morning and using his huge tool collection we managed to get all the factory brakes off our various AR uppers. I then put the suppressor threaded brakes on... and we tried the 300BLK in the yard. It's magically quiet! Not .22 quiet, but still not bad. My 338 can is still sorta huge for the other applications, but you can see it turns the 300BLK into a just slightly fatter 16" AR. More like an 18"

Since we were screwing around with the brakes and suppressors, we wanted to a sound level test of various .22 ammo. Here is a recording of 3 tests. The first is the CCI .22 quiet (740fps), the next is subsonic (42gr at 1020 fps) and third is standard velocity (40gr at 1070 fps). All are not bad, especially vs. actual high velocity normal rounds which are crazy loud by comparison. We probably should have fired one of those for test 4, but you kinda get how quiet things are by low loud the bolt cycling is on the video.

Not much going on but work, and some Wasteland 2. :)

OK, random little trip the last few days. My mom has been at her family farm taking care of her sister who got a hip replacement, or maybe a knee, or something. Anyway, she ended up staying longer than planned and missed her flight so dad drove up to get her. I ended up going with because my schedule was extremely light this week. Like almost no work at all.

The trip was fairly benign, and the house looks way, way smaller than I remember from my last visit in 1989. I took lots of pictures this time as it's likely the last time I'll see the place. Moms sister has taken out a mortgage on the place and given the money to her idiot kid for some business idea, that's already dead. Now the house that's been paid off for almost 60 years (!) is under debt and will be sold off when she dies. If the land was better I would think to save it, but the "farm" part of the farm is mostly gone now.

The shot below was a filter shot, kinda works. The rest are linked from the main picture archive.

The woman got me this to put on the tree. She knows I use the pseudonym "Jayne" on the shooters forum.

The video of the woman on TV is up on their web site but I can't figure out how to download it and the flash downloader extensions for Firefox aren't working (or are total scams, wanting to link to your Facebook profile to use an extension?). Here are some screen grab though.

The woman's friends that got me my Southeast Roadbuilders hat are hanging out with the Schnables again, this time in some bar.

Pulled the forms off and put the dirt back. Going to call the concrete trash can pad project complete.

Home made peanut butter chocolate chip oat bars. You put enough sugar in anything and it's edible. I suppose these are healthier than the store bought "chewy granola" bars? Hard to tell.

The external USB drive on the security camera system died last night around 4pm. The woman kept saying the cameras were acting funny, and after I replaced the bluetooth keyboard batteries and could actually login I figured out that it was choking trying to record clips. $61 at Best Buy and I'm back in business. I would have ordered it from Amazon, but with my credit card being stolen yet again I don't have a way to buy stuff online at the moment. Best Buy dude was confused what to do when someone handed him cash.

Friday the local TV station came by to film the woman and talk about the 540 project. She's becoming some sort of celebrity.

At the dealer for the 25k service on the Prius... and the giftmas music is cranked! I realise it's the retailers favourite time of year, and that it's well into marketing season, but still, it's annoying. At least the dude outside running the leaf blower is drowning out some of the crap.

I did a test run of my camera class yesterday. First live run was just at 1.5 hours, so with some cleanup I can get that down, and with questions from the class (of which I'm sure there will be tons, or at least I hope there will be) we should fill out the 2 hours. I'm going to stop by the library on my way to work this morning as it's only 1.4 miles from where I'm sitting now and check out the meeting room and see what I'm working with. I have a projector from work so I'm set there, may want to grab a portable white board if the room doesn't have one.

ESPP triggered yesterday, gotta go check on that this morning and sell off my stock and get it into savings. Go retirement, go!