Sneaky does know that chick that fought. Here she is as of today at work sporting a nice black eye.

I'm writing this via my old Mac Air, I finally got around to bringing it out to install 10.12 on it and see if menu meters can be made to work. The answer... YES. It's been fixed to undo whatever stupid shit Apple did to make it stop working before. It's the primary reason I haven't upgraded, I like menu meters too much. Apparently the Amazon Basic Ethernet adaptor I'm using doesn't work under 10.12 so that's a reason not to upgrade my actual work machine. It is nice to be able to use wifi though, the wifi in my personal MBP has been dead for years now so I'm always dragging around an Ethernet cable and the EoP adaptor for use when the USB wifi widget won't cut it.

I've been moving ammo cans into the new storage space and now that I can't stack them more than 5 high I won't have enough room for all 87 cans on the original holder. Fortunately I had enough scrap in the bin to make a 2nd row, so now there is a front and back row for can storage. All the 9mm is moved and the 45 too I think, now it's the 556 cans before we move onto "misc".

The woman said I could stage a gun in the front of the house as long as it was secure. Amazon is branding these cheap safes now and a touch entry safe is $50. I've been using one of the wall mount versions of this for a year or so now and it's working OK so I grabbed one of these little versions. I had Sean cut up some metal scrap I had to make some backing plates so the safe is bolted through the bottom of the TV credenza and the metal is making a 'sandwich' out of the crappy plywood. It's not going to stop anyone but neither is the safe, but it at least makes an attempt at slowing them down while the alarm is going off.

Mom went into the Hospice House on Friday, they attempted to go to Cherokee to go to the casino and it was just too much for her. She's home now, meds adjusted and crisis averted for now. To take dad's mind off it I took him to the kickboxing event that 4 of our fighters were participating in.

3 of our 4 fighters lost (I'm beginning to have some doubts about our coaches!) but Sneaky knew one of the chick fighters. Marybeth Wells is an EMT out of Winston Salem and he apparently has met and worked with her. He keeps saying she's so hot, but it's really hard to tell with the headgear, mouth guard and all the face punching.

Mom asked for another cake, so I found a recipe for a buttermilk vanilla cake to use up the rest of the buttermilk. The frosting for this one uses 6 cups (!) of powdered sugar. Holy crap that's a lot of sugar. They layers were supposed to be in 8" pans but I didn't have any and the neighbour only had 9" pans, so the layers are much thinner than they're supposed to be. Hopefully it won't impact the taste or texture too much.

I had that frame thingy on the 92F that adds a rail and it adds a lot of bulk as well. I do like the green color though, so I cleaned up the stock grips and hit them with a quick shot of Krylon. With them cleaned and painted it really makes the rest of the gun look beat.. and it is pretty tired. It's a 26 year old gun that's had a hard life.

Planted some peas and spinach, and as mentioned before I left the pine needles and stuff on the area the raspberries are. It's working like mulch, there were very few weeds where the debris was so I'm leaving it alone.

One tiny pea sprout as of today. Those seeds were from last year and I planted them too deep so I'll be lucky to get anything.

Uh... working?

Shot the match this week (did horrible), went to a few lessons (did well), met with some customers, etc. Basically a typical week with nothing worth reporting.

Oh no wait, I can think of something unusual. The pruned raspberries are growing well and I planted some peas.

We went for a hike followed by a picnic at Raven Rock Park south of here in Lilington. It was a nice park split by the Cape Fear river, but man was it crowded. Not CA crowded (and not full of trash and douchebags with Starbucks cups) but for around here it was super busy. It was in the low 70s today which is why everyone was out and about.

On the way back from the park the woman wanted to stop at the Fainting Goat Brewery. They do not have goats, but they do have some really good beers. We got one of the tasting flights and of course I like the Belgian Triple the best. Almost as good as Aviator's "Devil's Tramping Ground", or maybe better. Would have to try them back-to-back to really know. The most amusing part is that they're in FG&G's old building. Very odd to be back in that building and have it not be a gun store.

Yesterday we made dinner for mom's birthday. She wanted meat loaf.... so the woman had to figure out how to actually make that. Turned out pretty good, she used her mom's "pretzel meat loaf" recipe which is straight out of Ohio.

I handled dessert and wanted to use the fancy lard that mom got me for giftmas. Rather than a pie crust and some sort of pie, we found a recipe for a lard spice cake. Sounds gross, but it was actually pretty good when it was all said and done. The local TV station did a bit on lard cooking since it's making a come back and they said that you have to go back to cookbooks from the 60s or earlier to find anything with lard. It wasn't looking good when I made it, you basically cream lard with sugar (instead of creaming butter) and you also whip up egg whites with sugar and fold that into your lard/sugar/flour/spice mix. The frosting is egg whites, brown sugar and vanilla that you whip while heating in a double boiler.

The disaster came when trying to write "happy birthday" on the cake. I wimped out and bought a tube of frosting to do the writing with and it didn't come with the writing nozzle so I tried poking a hole in the seal and using it that way. It did not work.

Picked up some actual 45 long Colt ammo. Real cowboy stuff, exposed lead bullets and everything. Should be interesting for practice.

I'm picking up another little safe so I can stage a gun in the front of the house instead of just the back. Since the most likely need for a gun would be a snake, I'm going to stage the S&W 410/45 wheel gun. I'll have it loaded with 45 long colt Hornady Critical Defence like I use in everything else, but also have some 410 shotgun shells with it so if I need it for a snake I just dump the LC ammo and grab the shells and go. If I need it for some sort of 2 legged thing, the 45 LC is plenty of firepower. I also got some Critical Defence 410 rounds, which are a small slug followed by 2 pieces of buckshot. I don't have to test them much in the wheel gun, we know they'll work.

I was calling my boss's new commuter car the "hoopty mobile" but it turns out I was mis-using the word "hoopty". I thought it meant something that was pimped in poor taste, but it turns out it just means it's a piece of crap. Then on the way back to the hotel from the mandatory fun event at work, he got hit by a drunk driver. NOW it's hoopty.

Sneaky took a picture of me shooting at the farm. It was really warm out, and just starting to rain. Strange weather.

Got a letter from Toyota... shows no balance on the Prius. I think we're done here.

Didn't go shoot either match today (IDPA and steel challenge were both going on today), instead I stayed around the house and spent 2 hours looking for a set of keys to a lock box (never found them) then worked on barnyard projects.

First up was a little table to put the mineral and baking soda bin on. It was just on a cinder block which should be fine except the goats could get to the edge of the bowl thing and kept flipping it over and dumping stuff. This one has two blocks on top that lock the bowl assembly in, and it's screwed to the back wall of the barn. They won't flip this guy.

Next up were some additions to the playground. The woman wanted another bench/seat thing that could be stacked on top of the existing little platform as well as some ramps for them to walk on. They appear to like it, but they were also just having fun climbing around the wood pile while I was finding scrap to use so it doesn't take much to amuse them.

In training all this week, it's running long every day and there is homework so I'm doing absolutely nothing else. Not happy about that.

Walking past shipping on my way out yesterday and I saw some Amazon snowballs sitting on a pallet. Wonder what data we're shipping?

Jason and Hogan were visiting this weekend, so we did a bunch of socialising but not much else. No progress on any projects.

I got all excited, Liz Ashley liked my reply to her Instragram post... but she liked all the responses on that post. Damn, so close!

I've followed her as a fetish model for years. She doesn't do it anymore that I'm aware of.

Sad day, the Prius has been returned.

Decker got his first magazine today. Can goats read?

I've been making my own fire starters out of bits of Duraflame log and newspaper, and I left the log I was cutting up outside. Apparently some critter thought it would be tasty and drug it around the yard and gnawed on it for a while. Dumb critter.