Some pictures Sean took that I wasn't aware of. Couple of me on the ground, one of the entrance to the shoot house, and, uh... me standing there waiting?

I got the components to build up my first 'battle belt', and I've already made some mistakes according to people I sorta trust on the subject. We'll have to see when I get a little time with it how bad it's setup. Poorly, how poorly it's setup.

One of the lights on the garage stopped working, so I assumed the bulb died. Then a second one stopped working and I figured the other bulb died. Nope. They were both the day/night/motion sensor things and presumably the electronics went out and they no longer functioned. Sigh. So we spend some time at Lowes and Home Depot trying to find lights we liked that had both a larger size for the garage here and a smaller size for the side of the house on the deck. These aren't the best, but they're the best of what we could find locally. 3 of them installed easily, one was a pain because the wiring box was not installed correctly and I had to get creative with the mounting bracket. Fortunately the existing bracket for that one oddball box (which had the newest of the old lights) worked with the new light bolt pattern so I could modify the old bracket a bit without fear of screwing it up. Now it's set and we have 4 very bright LED lights on the house... with no electronic control. Just a dumb ass switch.

Curling again tonight, this time with a bunch of people from the woman's horse barn (or former barn). They wanted to do boys against the girls, which worked out pretty well for the boys. At first we were worried, the chicks scored 2 in the first round, but then our massive skill overcame their beginners luck.... or something like that. Mostly we just sucked less because they were getting tired and couldn't make any sort of throw.

The guy coaching us said that in the spring they'll probably have another skills camp. 8 weeks of weekly lessons. The woman and I are thinking we should sign up. Even if we're not going to get into curling it's something we can do together and neither of us has a real advantage. Well OK I think I have the advantage because I don't have a fake hip and am more flexible, but she does OK and it's not a strength sport.

I was putting some cases of ammo away (rotating some steel Wolf out of the cache and replacing it with some light brass reloads that I really like) and found this in one of the cases:

That's pretty damn cool. And now we've doubled down on the fact that this ammo will never be shot. It's the softer recoiling reloads I like with the polymer jackets, and now in nickel cases.

This is why I don't get to go to the store, I end up buying expired mixes and making random baked goods. I screwed up the water amount (I did 3x 1/3 cups which is not quite the same as 3x 1/4 cup) so I added some flour into the overly wet mixture hoping it would fix it. Turns out it did, the stuff came out even better than the lemon loaf at Starbucks. Now I understand why their stuff has so many calories, even this dryer loaf as 1.25 sticks of butter in it.

Just doing some dry testing of the battle belt proved that the 1.5" web inner belt was too narrow, even though it's what they say to use. Not wanting to buy an expensive wider belt as a test, I found a 2" web belt at Home Depot for just under $5. It's a replacement 'tool belt' belt, but it looks exactly the same as a cheapie tactical belt, same webbing and same buckle. At the range today it proved to be correct, it sits much better with the 2" inner belt.

Some additions to the battle belt. I got a single holder for the flashlight, and attached one of the dump pouches from my rabbit hunting backpack. So much for everything matching.

Discovered this by accident. I was thinking of other spots to mount the QD sling adaptor on the AR, and noticed that the keymod holes looked almost like the QD holes, and sure enough the first keymod hole on each side of the hand guard works as a QD point also. They cut some little grooves in the hole so the ball bearings in the QD can pop out into position and lock it in. Handy.

The woman got this at some winery when her parents were here. It's some sort of dessert wine, not really my thing, but good enough to share on a cold evening in front of the fire.

Back when I was a kid I used to make ramen for myself and just put the pot on this cutting board to eat it. I mean, no reason to dirty a pot and a bowl, right? When I went to college I asked to take the pot and cutting board with me, and mom said no. The cutting board was made by her father and she didn't want to give it up. Now that dad is cleaning out the kitchen of old stuff in preparation of his new woman moving in (frightening prospect!) I wanted to grab the cutting board.

Rumour was that one of mom's sisters grabbed their fathers knives and the cutting board, but the rumours were not true. Dad couldn't find it, but it took me all of 30 seconds to find it in the kitchen, buried in the back of a cabinet. Now it's mine, my official inheritance from mom. :)

I've been tracking ammo inventory for a long time now, but I've not really been tracking ammo usage. Now that I'm shooting enough to be wearing out parts on guns, I figured I should track round counts. Originally I was just sorta "yea, it's got X thousand through it" but that doesn't really scale and it's easy to lose track. So, now.... a new tab on the ammo spreadsheet that will track actual usage based on date and the most commonly used guns. The graph is just me screwing around, I don't think it's got any actual value vs. the auto-total fields.

$30 later, I have a camera inside the garage pointed at the doors so I can tell if they're shut when we're away. I keep worrying that they pop open because they hit a pine cone or a leaf flies in front of the sensor as we drive away. Now I can check my phobia.

It's not the best view, but the camera is mounted on the ceiling out of the way and powered off the garage door opener outlet.

Sneaky and his woman came down today to go to the gunshow to pick up an AR for the woman's kid for giftmas. After we collected my woman and went to eat. Nice social visit.

My 360 camera showed up today, and at first it was a little hard to setup, but then the secret to the wifi was in the first amazon review. Of course you look on the reviews to see the secret to setting things up, the engrish manual is useless and the menus are the worst I've seen yet.

It works pretty well taped to the ceiling fan, you can make out the whole room even though it's not that high up. The night vision is useless though, just tried it and you can't see much of anything even in just a regular room. That's a bummer, was hoping to put this in the middle of the barn.

and.... it's gotta go back. The night vision works, but only if you manually go into the settings and switch it from "auto" to "night". Then it works really well. The IR LEDs are super bright and do come on automatically, so my guess is whatever makes the image sensor flip over is toast. That's why you save the boxes from Amazon, easy returns. Got another one on the way though, hopefully this is is fully functional.

Nothing to say? So odd, something must be going on.

Here is something to talk about:

Also, my dad said he's engaged now..

Also, got the 360 cam mounted in the barn and testing the night vision there. What's cool is Blue Iris takes the warped 360 view and tries to turn it into something more normal when you play the videos back.

More photos. The woman at our dinner the other night with dad and his, well, new woman I guess.

And the last of mom's stuff from her farm. A coffee grinder and butter churn. Both work perfectly, and although I'll probably grind my own coffee beans at some point (upping my douche bag game), I don't see myself making butter. Although I guess that could happen.

Saw this at work the other day. The Carter/Mondale bumper sticker looked legit. Didn't see an actual plate on it anywhere, wonder if someone just got it or what. Right hand drive and everything.

Original new fast internet with the old router (but not the tomato version, never tried that):

Upgraded to the cheap cisco router that had a gig port:

Using a USB3 gigE adaptor on a USB3 port on my work MBP via a gig switch:

Wow.

In-laws got me these canisters to help organise the ingredients. I've got one more large one flour type stuff, not sure what I'll use it for. The old canister we had the AP flour in isn't the best but it's 100x better than the cardboard box we were using for the sugar and bread flour. It's not bad enough to replace.

Made some target stands, and went to the range to test them out. Did some AR drills, loaded 1 round per mag.... 100 times. Ran 4 shot drills, so doing mag change after mag change. Getting better.

I made some tortillas tonight, and they're not that impressive. They look 100orrect, but they taste more like really thin bread than an actual flour tortilla. These would be awesome with kebabs, but are not Mexican at all. Better than pre-cooked store bought, but not as good as the raw cook-at-home ones we get at Costco. Ah well, that's why we try things.

I set some up to freeze, rolled and separated with parchment paper. If it works at all it's a sign that I an pre-make them and then we just cook them as needed. Once I get a recipe that's more restaurant-like.

Twice now my phone has gone from 100harge down to 1-6% within 45 minutes or so. I used this battery tester app to see how bad the battery is and it's not that bad... but my guess it's the cold killing it. I had it in my pocket, but it's in the 30s so maybe it's not warm enough.

Got the gazebo railings down, but that's the only thing I've done over the whole break on the project. Just not that motivated to be outside in the cold anymore.

I did however build myself a pell for practice in the basement where it's not so cold. I had to make two of the legs come off (or at least apart) so I could get it through the basement door. Will also be handy when I have to move it out of the main room into the dirt room for storage when guests are here.

Couple of shipments arrived today. One was the Lord of the Rings wine, and the other was my last ammo shipment of 2017. The Galadriel wine was a Bordeaux Blanc and since we're going to drink this and not save it as a "collectable" it didn't make sense to get the white since neither of us like white.

Got the well pump monitor working, with some encouragement from Phil and company. The circuit was already built, it was just way over built. I removed the LCD, removed the motion sensor, removed the light sensor, removed the buzzer, and I think that's it. I left the temp/humidity sensor, as long as I'm tracking data I might as well collect that info too. It's "free" at this point since I have the board dedicated to this and am going to USB it into the main server and collect serial data all the time.

Some rare photos of dad cooking. Not because the photos are rare, but because he never does it. This is him mostly making the enchiladas at giftmas because his woman is sick (food poisoning from a McDonald's breakfast burrito... and they say I make poor food choices).

Yesterday I made a batch of tortillas using rendered pork belly fat instead of Crisco as the fat component. It was very easy to work with, the rendered fat blended with the flour super easily, but the tortillas tasted weird. Probably because no one is used to tortillas having pork flavor built in.

Also, the woman busted out the cookie cutter Will and his woman got us as a gag gift and cut a goat out of one of them. She couldn't get me to make a batch of tiny goat shaped tortillas. What a shock. Now if I was making corn and going to fry them into chips.... maybe.

Went to the range again to verify the 200 yard zero on the AR, and it's clear that if I want to actually shoot at 200-500 yards with this thing I'm going to have to change out the optics. Here is a 200 yard group using Brown Bear, the stuff I got the other day and the best of the 3 rounds I tested (wolf classic, S&B from 1996 and the brown). With the flyer it's 3.5" or so, under 2 MOA at 200. Without the flyer it's 1.75", so 1 MOA at 200. Can't beat that with a stick. However... it's gotta a lot of luck involved. The 4 MOA red dot is essentially 8" at 200 yards, so the dot I'm using to aim covers all three orange stickers at the same time. I'm essentially just holding in the middle of the top of the whole target and hoping for the best. The other issue is that the adjustments are 1 MOA on the turrets so moving 1 click moves the shots 2" at this range. That's not very precise.

We went to the Chinese Lantern Festival in Cary as well this year. Pretty cheesy and expensive, but it was a good excuse to get out after dark (ie after the pets are put to bed) without having to go to a movie. It was in the 30s, and most people were dressed for it. Still some idiots walking around in shorts... which I just don't get. It's not like it was 80F during the day or something. More pictures linked off the main image archive page.

Eric said I should teach the goats to chop wood so I don't have to. Doesn't seem to work. I told them what to do, got a sniff from Decker and Taco just looked at me like an idiot (their only facial expression).