Saw this on the funny picture thread on the forum. No idea what it's about, just thought it was funny.

Haven't been doing much of anything useful other than recovering from being sick. I did get to the range to test a bunch of 62gr loads in the AR, and they all pretty much suck. Most didn't work as well as the 55gr brown bear stuff I was using as the benchmark. That's sad, considering some of this stuff is 3x the price of the cheapie stuff.

I did break open that box of 77gr SMKs to load some up. Yes, they're expensive but I bought them 10+ years ago so I've already lost that money to history. Notice how long the 77gr is vs. the 55gr, clearly the cartridge was designed for the lighter bullets.

I printed the manual for our on-line master class. The color printer at work was really fast and I even found binding supplies and made it into an actual little book.

Checked my weight yesterday, still at 148-149, so I didn't gain anything while being sick and not exercising. That's good news.

Look, work shoes that have actual tread on the bottom. When I started at Netapp I bought two pairs of the same shoes so that I would have a 2nd pair when the first one wore out. I had no idea that I would still be in this role 5 years later and need a 3rd pair of shoes. Might these be my last?

I tried to be nice to the woman on Thursday by making dinner. She's got these sauce packs that you're supposed to just add meat to as one of our prepper things. The packages have really long shelf lives and would add some variety to things. The downside is that they taste like crap. Nasty chemical aftertaste.

But anyway, I saw some chicken defrosting in the fridge so I cut that up to brown, and then it said to serve it over pasta. I couldn't find any boxed pasta anywhere, so I just whipped up a batch of fettuccine from scratch. Took about 40 minutes, longer than I thought and that was skipping all the resting steps. How do they make fresh pasta on Top Chef in like 30 minutes along with cooking all sorts of other stuff? Cheating?

Diced chicken seasoned and browned, fresh pasta made, nasty sauce put simmered with the chicken and then all of it just slapped in a bowl. The only good thing was that there was lots of pasta left over to eat the next night and it was good as one would expect.

One of our Masterclass homework assignments was to do an oil tasting and learn the differences between the various types of olive oil. Olive oil is only a finishing oil (you're not supposed to cook with it really) so you have to know what flavor you're adding with the oil and why. We tried a bunch at the store and came away with two, one that's from an earlier pressing where the grapes are still more green which makes it have more pepper/spice flavor, and one from a pressing of more ripe grapes that's more mild. It really does make a difference it seems.

The next assignment was to make a sofrito using two different oils to see how it effects the taste. You end up cooking this stuff for 5.5 hours. It's clear Keller doesn't have a day job. :)

Tested some 77gr loads in the AR, and found one that it liked so I'm going to load up a bunch of these and practice and see how well it actually works. If you take the 5th round flyer out this isn't a bad group for this rifle.

Snap Pea pop-up at the butterfly house last night. It was really, really humid in there, so we all had to dress like it was summer, in February. This was family style serving, so no really fancy plating, and he had a variety of meats in there as well. The best dish was the scallop ceviche with the pickled radishes. Yum.

So this happened this morning. Decker pulled a horn off, was bleeding all over, the woman was freaking out and crying, etc. Vet is on his way to the house, I think.

Last night we went to Jason's and played around with some kydex trying to make holsters for the class this weekend that allow the use of the TLR1 weapon lights. There are not a lot of choices for holsters that allow for lights, at least not that don't coast a lot (usually police centric holsters with lots of retention and being paid for by .gov money). I used an existing leather piece from the scrap bin, Sean made a fully kydex version but they both turned out usable. I don't like the brown leather, but for free you can't complain too much. I'm not even sure we'll use weapon mounted lights at the night shoot, the explicitly say to bring hand lights, but maybe they'll be some use for them.

Went to the new fight place the other day for my first lesson there. The instructor is just renting mat space basically which is fine, but man is this place a belt factory. It's about 99% kids, lots of 'ninja pizza parties' and babysitting services, but it's got a food court, a 'homework room', a full gym, etc. Pretty crazy. All of the gear is top notch though, but it will be interesting to see the real fighters training beside a daycare.

Long, long weekend. 2 day pistol class with Vickers and Hackathorn, basically legends in the training community. The scary drill was this one, we staggered the line and the front guys moved back and the back guys moved forward, all with live fire going on by both groups. So you're shooting between live people. Apparently they don't do this drill if the class has bozos in it.

My red shirt really stands out in this crowd.

Today is a holiday, so I started working on the gazebo mods. Lots of work to do here to get it ready for screening, and it's all precision work. Nothing is square or even, so lots of custom cutting and tweaking.

Letsencrypt is setup with certbot-auto, I've now to a real CA cert on my home web server and it's auto-renewing via cron and logging. Also have the config backing up to my home dir which gets replicated off-site. How long have I been running with that self signed cert?? It didn't really matter, until work started blocking all sites without CA certs so I couldn't even check my own updates unless I tunnelled past the firewall.

Someone posted this picture of me, not sure why since you can't tell who it is or what we're doing. Looks lame lined up at 3-4 yards, but we were probably doing something important.

A horrible selfie of me at the dentist! I had to get the phone out to check the date for the next appointment and had the wherewithal to take a pic of something rarely seen.

ispell knows "wherewithal".

Got my certificate auto-renewal script polished up. Now time stamps the run and does the renewal then backup as once operation so it doesn't matter how long the renewal takes, the backup is always the next command. Need to get it to restart apache as well, forgot that step. Not using the certbot-auto thing to do the restart because I'm running on an unsupported OS and the plug-in doesn't work (which is also why I have to use certbot-auto).

Some cooking class homework, big pot blanching of asparagus. It's not as simple as just throwing them in a pot of boiling water... you need to trim the leaves, then scrub off the fiber on the outside (or use the funky peeler we don't have yet), then snap them to length, then tie them into little bundles, then boil them in salt water. Takes a lot of work, but it's not hard and the results are amazing. I have a feeling I'm going to be doing this a lot in the future. Maybe not the tieing into bundles part, but otherwise...

Finished up the pothole project this morning. Friday after work I grabbed a half yard of chip and run and filled in the potholes on the main road, and today I went back to touch up any that had been packed down. Most looked OK, but I used up the material chasing smaller ones. Hopefully this will last for a while, at least until the guy with the box grader on his tractor gets motivated to re-grade the bad section.

After road duty, I cleared out a spot in the back to replant the raspberries out of the garden box. Before the neighbourhood was built there was a huge communal garden back along the back property line. Most of it is gone, scraped down to clay to put in lawn for the basics, but there is still some good soil on our side. Instead of the usual rocks and clay, there is at least 1' of good soil with no rocks, and little rows already setup. It was too easy, I just dug in the existing rows and threw up some ghetto twine/stick/streamer fence up to keep the deer away.

Yesterday I put some good hours in on the gazebo project, getting one of the corner tables in, some of the railing done and some of the header, along with framing in the door. I've learned some unorthodox tricks with the table saw, basically making cuts like it's a "plunge saw". Didn't even know a "plunge saw" was a thing until I explained to dad how I was making cuts in the middle of the boards with the table saw.

After working on the gazebo and having dinner, I made these shitty cookies. I found a sugar cookie recipe that used eggs, and since we have so many eggs I decided to try it. It uses a lot of oil in place of butter, so they're smooth but taste like oil (to me anyway). Won't make them again.

The woman took me to Costco to get my own card (I've been on the account the whole time but haven't ever had a reason to go on my own) and to get a battery for the RAV4. Costco was $90 (OTD), Batteries Plus was $120, Autozone was $150, Dealer was $160 (for an inferior battery to all the other options). The battery that comes in it is a size 35, 600 CCA and 90 min reserve. The replacement that's recommended is a 24F, 700 CCA and 120 min reserve. The 24F is the same price as the 35, so why not get the extra power? I guess the extra 5 pounds, but still...

Drops right in, it's 1/2" wider but the tray accepts a wider battery, and everything else lines up perfectly.

Sheetz periodically sends me these freebie offers but I just ignore them. This time though I got motivated and installed the app (which I should have done before since you can use the app instead of the physical card which I always forget) and claimed my free Snickers.

While out claiming my free candy bar, I met Sean at FG&G to look around (since I was too busy today to go to the range earlier with everyone else). While looking around, we found these new holsters they just started carrying. It's not kydex, it's some other plastic with a little give to it, but what's amazing to me is how small it is. A crossbreed hybrid is 2x the size, and even my custom made smaller hybrid looks huge compared to this thing. I put it on in the parking lot and it was immediately comfortable. We'll see how it holds up over time, but so far it's damn nice.

More class homework tonight, this is starting to look like a production with a bunch of spellbooks. The woman said they're 'real' cookbooks because they don't have pictures. There are plenty of pictures elsewhere in the book. I wasn't sure the printed version was worth it vs. the kindle edition, but now that we've used it a few times the physical book is really nice. Much easier than fighting with an app or tablet that keeps timing out and locking the screen.

We were glazing carrots and onions without caramelising. Turned out amazing, just like the asparagus.

Texting with Sneaky he was growing concerned at all the veggies we were cooking, so I had to assure him that I had grilled some skirt steak to go with the veggies...

Our first casualty too, the woman grabbed a pan that had just been in the oven. That's how you get 2nd degree burns in a hurry.

The camera caught the moment that Decker broke his horn off. His screaming make Lugnut and Taco faint at about the same time. Lugnut is break dancing...