Cookies for dad's birthday are done.

And the bread is done and turned out edible.

Not 100733830uffy and risen like I would have liked, but totally edible and actually pretty good for putting butter on (dense enough not to pull apart). I've since made some toast with it, that worked too.

Pasta is in progress. I made the dough yesterday to let it rest over night as instructed. This is a new dough recipe, new filling and a new way of folding them.... so yea, so many ways to go wrong here.

Many ways to screw up, but none of them happened. Even down to the Parmesan crisp. Damn.

Picked up this audio switchbox to flip between the laptop and the phone without rushing to unplug/plug stuff in. I can't find one that does all 3 (left/right/mic) so I'm just switching the left/right and leaving the mic hot to the phone all the time. That's OK because the computer is using the big USB mic and not the one on the headset anyway. Sorta convoluted, but it works.

Guess I need to buy the same setup for work now.

Woman wanted dessert for some reason so I whipped up a batch of brown sugar cookies. I used half bread flour, supposed to make them fluffier instead of crunchy. I don't have a non-bread flour version to compare against, but these are really really fluffy and light. Could eat a lot of them very easily. Dangerous.

Match today, and I did pretty well in spite of not competing in a while. 17th out of 68 overall, and 8th out of 38 in the SSP (Stock Service Pistol) division.

I should have done good on this stage, I mean you're shooting through and around a van, my forte! Unfortunately I dropped some shots against the last target at 20 yards, 3 C zone hits. Merf.

Solution for my GPS issue on the bike. I've been just putting my phone in a little magnetic phone holder pouch and sticking that on the tank, but it leaves my phone vulnerable to damage and having the power cord hanging out the side is kinda asking for it to break. What I figured I could do is just use the offline maps function and load my trip into mom's old Galaxy S4 which makes a fine GPS even without a sim card or service. Still have to have the connector hanging out the side, but the connector on this phone seems way more solid and if I bust it I won't cry as much as breaking the connector off on my actual phone.

Getting some extra hay in since the hurricane is likely to screw up the hay delivery situation for a while. Just 4 extra bails, they're rationing at the feed store. At least the goats can eat all the leaves on the trees that get knocked over for a while.

Speaking of hurricane preps, I've been turning frozen ground meat into jerky at a rapid pace. Even if we're without power for a few weeks we'll have ready access to tasty protein.

The woman went by the store to pick up a few things and found it looks surprisingly Venezuela like...

Michael came over with the tractor and we did some grading in prep for the storm as well. The main barn keeps flooding so I added a board (actually old boards from the deck, so really old hard pressure treated stuff that I had on hand) along the base and used that to back fill some clay and dirt against. Michael had a bunch of clay so we busted that up with the tiller and mixed it in with the soil that was there. Should help divert water away from that edge.

Additionally, he graded down the entire slope on that side, knocked down the high spots and made it so water won't flow toward the barn at all. In theory. We'll know shortly what's going to happen.

Made a cool change to my page generator script and forgot to document it. I can now use the file dates to build the page and not just the image name. Handy when the image counter flips or things come from multiple sources.

Big batch of jerky is finished. 4 pounds of venison, 5 pounds of elk. Wanted to use up the meat in the freezer to make room for ice. We're doing lamb tonight and then all that's left to grill when the power out is some chicken thighs and then we're out of frozen meat. Lots of ice in there though to keep the pasta frozen.

Hurricane fun, the woman brought the goats in the house for a while. She sat with them for about 11 hours keeping them company and catching excrement in a cup.

I meanwhile was doing some loading I wouldn't normally do. Well the 556 load I would do, and in fact needed some more of my 'accuracy' round, but the 300BLK, the 357 mag and the 380 are new. I doubt I'll ever fire those 300BLK subsonic or that 357, but the 380 I'm going to test next range session and if they cycle right I'll make a bunch more. Although, at the gun store yesterday trying to buy more HP38 it didn't even look like it existed anymore. Google says it does though, but the store had no empty spot on the shelf for it.

More peppers! I think there is a 3rd batch on there as well. They all got knocked over in the storm but propping them back up sorta worked, or at least worked well enough to get that last batch to stick around.

After only a year I finally mounted up the camera on the gazebo for real. No more dangling wire or half assed mount. Actual conduit with proper mounts and a box to hold the connectors. Needs paint, but that will take another year. :) Camera isn't my favorite but it does provide a nice view of the garden box now and the blind spot on the corner.

While trying to clean up in the back I found this yellow jacket nest with the leaf blower. Got 3 bites before I ran far enough away for them to leave me alone.

Since I'm typing up this update a few days in the future from when that bee mess was discovered I can include this capture of the exterminator guys taking care of it. We pay a monthly fee that includes all maintenance spraying and anything big that needs doing like this. If we keep having problems, it's worth the monthly charge.

One of the lights in the barn went out (ballast, not the bulbs) so I decided to go the LED route. I found a 6 pack of fixtures with bulbs on Amazon for $88 with a 50ff coupon and took the risk. They don't come with reflectors, it's just two plastic bulbs attached to a cable basically but they do work. I put one on my work bench to test it out and it's so much better than my existing LED floods (that are the old accent lights on top of the book cases in CA).

Even without the reflector it lights up the feed area well. kenny did this too, but he took apart his old fixtures and re-used them with the LEDs so I might have to try that with the one with the dead ballast.

I had wanted to black out the logos and stuff on the van (which I did some of earlier) but while poking at the Ford logo on the door it broke. The Ford part fell off the mount. Rather than try to fix it and then black it out, I just went ahead and used a plastic scraper and my magic 3M wheel and buzzed all the logos off. Cleaned up nicely. A picture of it dirty at the dealership, and a picture of it still dirty but without logos now.

I was going to take a day off and go riding, but got side tracked and went to see dad's new house. I took a bunch of pictures, but honestly it's just a generic house. Styling is very similar to their old house, just a little smaller and a lot more expensive. As long as they're happy I suppose.

My idea of using the old Samsung phone to navigate failed miserably. First, the magnets in the tank bag triggered the display sleep mode (like the smart cover thing on an ipad) and then once I solved that by removing the one magnet near the sensor, the thing lasted about 200' down the road. The touch is too sensitive and it kept screwing up the nav. My iphone in the same case in the same way worked fine, so I used that even though I don't like to do that. So, I went ahead and spent $30 to get a solid mount for the phone. I can use the otter box that came with it and it locks in really solid and nothing touches the display. We'll have to see how this works on another trip soon.

I sold the .22 last weekend, today I sold off the 9mm Cobra Derringer. I have 2 better snake guns, so this one was just unnecessary.

Dorsey lent me some of his Home Depot reading glasses... holy crap I look old.

The woman's Mac Air battery died, quite rapidly. Won't run at all without the charger attached so she can't even just move from outlet to outlet like I do with the old MBP. I don't want to risk breaking her really nice Air so I suggested she just take it to the apple store and let them do it for real. She made a $130 appointment to get it done, and when we got there they said they had the battery but there was no one would could do the work. She would have to leave it for 3-5 days to get it done. Sigh.

The store was packed right at opening with zillions of people looking at crapola.

Will's kid went to camp last week and drove herself (with Will in the car) and when a kid drives themselves when they pull into the gate they make them blow the horn and then throw candy in the car. Yea whatever. So Will had a crap ton of these fireball candies in the car and gave me some and turns out they're really good. Then it turns out there is a whisky called "Fireball" which is basically the same thing, just adult, and liquid. I got some at the ABC store, and mixed with coke it's horrible. Over ice it's... drinkable.

The hinge pin on the trashcan lid vanished and the lid was flopping everywhere and ready to break the other hinge off the next time they dumped the can. The woman wanted to make them give us a new can. I noticed that 1/2" PVC fit right in there so I ran some scrap through and drilled a hole through the strongest part of the mount and screwed it together. Works perfectly.