Look! Shopping in Vegas for men that isn't centered around buying boobs, cigars or fugly ass ghetto shirts:

Hiers and I went and looked around, and I picked up a new pair of pants. They've gone away from the all heavy cotton material that all of my current 5.11s are made out of and switched to a lighter more stretchy material. Looks like it will dry faster and it's clearly more comfortable, I just hope it holds up as well. They said the color will not fade (my grey pants are really faded to a strange color) but I like the warmth of them in the winter.

Dinner last night at Craft Steak, and it wasn't a work paid for event. Ouch. I had the quail appetiser, scallops, prosciutto risotto and spinach. The risotto was actually under seasoned, the first dish I've had at Craft that wasn't 100%. I figured they had to back down a little because of the saltiness of the prosciutto, but there wasn't enough of it to offset the lack of seasoning of the rice itself.

The other SEs make fun of my wine snobbery, but then they all wanted me to suggest what they should order. Ha! Justified. I picked a Hess cab for most everyone else since they were doing steak, but for myself I picked a Zin from Amador county to start with for the quail, then switch to a Santa Barbara pinot to go with the scallops. It worked surprisingly well.

Overall, my hatred of Vegas has sorta slacked into a general feeling of dread vs. active hatred. Probably because there is not a definitive list of things to hate.. it's just everything that sorta sucks. Other than the walking I guess, I am getting some good exercise in that way. Wouldn't mind my normal day having a few hours of walking in it.

Masterful plan at the mandatory fun party last night. I stole this hat and was wondering around so everyone saw me, started taking pictures with the dancers and generally "participating" early on. That way when I snuck out everyone would actually remember I was there.

After the work party that came in handy because everyone wanted to go to this Irish pub themed bar. I went along, but inside it was crowded, loud and smelled of fresh vomit. The smell got to me after about 30 seconds so I used my ninja skills of getting lost in the crowd and vanished. This morning the only people that knew I was gone were those who were upset they couldn't sneak out as well. Even invited my boss's boss to lunch with Fujitsu and he didn't say anything about my absence... probably because he doesn't remember anything but the hat.

The gym was much less crowded this morning, only hard core guys for the most part. I mostly did some stretching, foam rolling and multi-move free weight exercises with light weights. Just enough to keep me from cramping up from all the sitting. I also got outside for a bit, walked around outside the hotel. I may have to ditch an afternoon session and go outside again and see the actual sun.

Mission accomplished! Or primary mission accomplished. I made it to Vegas, got my rental, survived a night in the cheap ass hotel (no front desk clerk there for checkout in the morning but two sheriff's deputies, so they've got their priorities down), got to the CCW class, passed the shooting qual (duh), survived the lecture and test, made it to the Luxor, got the sheriff's office 1.5 hours early to get a low number, got processed, finger printed (with a 2nd set to send to Utah), got photos, got out, got gas, got the rental car back and grabbed a cab to the conference center on time to make my first session. Whew.

10 shots at 10 yards before heading off to the airport. This will be the benchmark target. It's pretty good, other than the 1 dropped shot I always seem to have in every magazine but we'll see how my skills degrade with a week off of no live fire. I will have the G26 with me for the class... oh wait, so I guess I will do some live fire tomorrow, but it will still be 5 days of no live fire. I will try to dryfire when I can though. So really it's a 5 day window of dryfire only (if I can practice every day).

Trying to find any picture on the phone that isn't of a plate with holes in it, a goat doing nothing or a whiteboard capture from work. I did get a picture of this guy in the back yard yesterday:

Time to power down the MBP, it gets a week off while I'm away.

Wow, the gate is filled with the elderly, the morbidly obese, and young single moms. Yep, that's who goes to Vegas. Not a lot of old dudes, but I guess it's true men die first. No troubles checking in at least.

The woman is literally carrying the goats from the main barn to the goat barn... they got trapped by the rain and flooding and she didn't want them to have to walk through the big puddle...

Goats were tired from walking and goofing around, and Decker seems to have had a rougher day than the others so it was nap time right out in the open. So much for their job of guarding the coop, at least the other two are on duty.

Another horse show this weekend, the woman didn't do very well because her horse was having a "bad week". Her practice sessions were not good so she knew it wasn't going to be a good show going in. Most classes she was running 6th, instead of her usual 3rd-ish. I didn't get any good photos as I was using her phone to take the videos (the 5SE has a better camera than my 6) so mine was never out.

I've got the evap purge valve replaced finally, so if that was in fact the issue then I should be good to go. If it's not the issue, then I'm only out ~$20 for my home brew fix vs. the $81 for the real GM part with the attached hose, or $130 for the revised GM part.

It was a little shocking how expensive the 5/8" hose was at the parts store. I could have got 6' of hose from Amazon for less than I paid for 3' locally. However the hose clamps were much more at Amazon, so I guess you just have to pick and chose what you get very carefully.

While getting the hose I was talking to the parts guys about cleaning off all the adhesive residue that was going to be on the truck when I was removing the wheel flares and the side mouldings. They had some nasty chemicals you could use, but they also said that they have the "3m eraser" in the back as part of their pro body shop supplies (which aren't out where normal people can see them yet this is available on amazon just fine). Anyway, they convinced me to try it and following their instructions it worked amazingly well. Now I over paid for it, but in all fairness I had no idea such a thing existed so I basically paid extra for their knowledge. Seems fair.

The truck now looks more modern, I think, without all the plastic on it. Very few late model trucks have plastic wheel flares anymore unless they're running huge tires and wheels, which I clearly am not. I also removed the bug guard and the smokers vents. I may put the bug guard back on, but those smokers vents are just ugly. Since all the tools were out, I went ahead and debadged the back as well. I was going to paint the little Chevy logo black to match the front but it was just easier to buzz the whole thing off. Now to figure out what to do with the big ass dent in the side.

The woman took me to this musical, but since I was on pain killers to even be able to go with my back so screwed up I can't say I remember much about it. Some singing, and lots of bright lights. She enjoyed it though.

Managed to score this online. Actually no cheaper than buying it local from FG&G, but these guys let me buy 2 cases worth at a time instead of only 2 boxes. I had to order 2 cases to get the shipping to make sense and Shawn may buy one of them off of me next month... or maybe not. I'm happy to keep it around especially since I'm trying to shoot 10-20 rounds every day, this is really only a 4 month supply.

The woman tried to park the truck in the car port....

Sigh, are we back to this again? Are they getting ready for the Clinton II AWB? Hopefully no. What I think this is based on reading I've been doing on the the 92FS is that the military learned that the finish on the mags they have sucks butt in the sand and so they've changed to a new finish. That means there are probably warehouses full of these contract mags with the old finish and it's easier to dump them on the civilian market at $15 than it would be to refinish them. These look just like the original mags that came with Vareck's 92 centurion back in the 90s, minus the markings of course.

First building project today was a stairway for the goats. The neighbours had to rebuild the steps leading up to their front door deck thing and they wanted to know if I wanted the old wood. Of course I wanted the old wood! I would come up with some wacky thing and this is it:

It's not pretty but it's solid and I used some drop siding to block in between the steps so when they fall their legs can't go in there and get caught. And they do fall. As soon as I put it in the yard they started playing king of the mountain and knocking each other around (after smelling everything of course, gotta smell all the new stuff). After 20 minutes they got tired and Taco and Decker went elsewhere to get a snack leaving Lugnut as the king.

The other building project today was to make a bullet trap. I've been firing into the woodpile but now that I'm shooing more than "just a few" rounds it's starting to build up a bunch of lead inside the log I hang the targets on. I don't want lead getting into the fireplace so I used more of the scrap to build a really solid 5-layer board thing to shoot at. Testing shows that the 22 rounds only go through 1 layer of 2x4 for the most part so I just screwed some scrap on there and when its shot up I can replace it with more easily enough.

Picture 1 shows the new target and to the left you can see the log I was using. Cutting 2" off the log will get rid of the lead so I'll do that at some point. Picture 2 shows the target with the first layer removed and you can see a couple of bullets penetrated and stuck into layer 2. The third is just me showing a target, which doesn't look all that impressive except for the fact that the rounds are clustered around the center, not strung out low/left like they used to be. I'm getting better at trigger control. I also realise I need glasses because my groups are better when I'm wearing my reading glasses, but I'm not ready to go there yet. If I can master trigger control then I can worry about seeing later.

The woman made this for the party today. It's actually pretty good:

The popup last week was supposed to be on the roof of the building, but with the hurricane/tropical storm/rain on Friday we had to use the indoor space. The people on Sunday were lucky, they actually got to go on the roof and they got this pic with someone's drone. Pretty cool.

I need to modify the editor script to do a "redo an entry" in which it takes the last entry and rewrites it to today's date rather than the date it was created. Since I tend to update things as I go over the weekend, getting the pictures in and uploaded and then coming back later to do the text, the actual entry date is usually a few days after I originally create it. Sometimes I fix the entry file names by hand, sometimes not.

Over the weekend we went to two BBQs, and were actually invited to a 3rd. The first was with "suppressor Shawn" the class 3 dealer, and it was a pretty horrible time. None of the people I wanted Kristen to meet where there, and those that were there were pretty damn socially awkward. At least we got to leave early to go to BBQ #2 which was really just fire pit time at the neighbours by the time we got there.

I did get to visit my hybrid 46 which is still sitting in ATF paperwork hell. Shawn said that they're just now entering paperwork from April, so it's likely that by the end of this month my paperwork will be in the system awaiting review. Basically it's taken them 6 months just to type the stuff in. Too bad the ATF bozos shut down their web based form system, but that was making it too easy for people to file. Can't have that.

Friday was another pop-up dinner, the last with Rachel as the dessert chef. It was pretty fantastic, better than the last one because in theory I didn't like anything on the menu. Many dishes with peppers, eggplant, okra, basically stuff I hate. However, it all came out pretty good. No idea how the dude does that every time.

The best dessert by far was "the nest", which you can read about on the prep sheet on the link in the pictures section. It blew away the chocolate based dessert that was served after it. Rachel says you "always have to have a chocolate dessert on the menu or people complain", but seriously, I don't think you should. The other options are just so amazingly different and not always just heavy chocolate. Even I could make a chocolate based dessert... although the orange glazed brownies I made for the BBQ were pretty gross. I blame that on the box mix, not my home made glaze. :)

Got the hood mounted, tile up and grout done. There is that funky line in the grout but that's where the pro installer had trouble getting the tile up under where the microwave was. I had no choice but to continue the tile above that. Fortunately no one will notice it, or so I hope.

Dad and I also got some retractable screen doors up which has been on the to-do list for a while. The good "Phantom" brand doors are only available with installation now, and we did not feel like spending $400+ per door for a screen so I went with the only do it yourself option available. They're sub-par compared to the Phantom, but at $130 they're much more affordable even if we have to replace them every so often. If these were on a house with kids they wouldn't last a week, but with only adults around it shouldn't be a problem.

One of the woman's patients is in some Ag program at NC State and he gave her a little banana tree that was left over from some test. She planted it (it was perhaps 1' tall at the time) and now it's doing well and actually flowered. Wonder if we'll get bananas?

Last doctor visit for a while. First the echocardiogram (which turned up nothing but a healthy heart so I should be happy about that) and then a bunch of allergy testing. After 40 jabs with little plastic needles, the best she could come up with was "dust mites" and "cat". Great...? So so flonase and I'm good to go? After all this? Lame, but we shall see.