Got the fixed stock in for the target AR. This will be way better for this application, no more wiggle from the adjustable. It's also got a wider cheek piece which is nice. You can't run a fixed riser on these because it will interfere with the charging handle use. I guess that's another win for the side charging ARs.

Trying to make sandwich bread instead of the funny round loaves. Pretty much worked, but this dough wasn't 'white sandwich bread' dough, that's got sugar in it. Going to try that at some point.

Amazon being stupid. I ordered a 512gb SSD to put into the woman's work system to do an upgrade to windows 10 on, and they offered same day shipping. Perfect, easier than going to Best Buy and fighting the holiday morons. Just a few minutes past the delivery deadline, they drop this on the porch:

Pretty sure that's not an SSD. Sigh. So I've got to return that and reorder the SSD. Thanks.

Hauling the birds over to Maxwell's place. It's only 6pm but it looks like the middle of the night. Bootleg poultry...

The woman has the lame (literally) bird setup in the old hamster cage. He's going to live his life out here as her pet, I guess.

She wanted him to have a choice of places to hide, under the warming brick or somewhere else, so she made him a little house. Funny boxes you find in our recycling pile....

Yesterday we went to Lowes and spent $500 on new blinds, door weatherstripping stuff (to make it more sound proof) and a bunch of new doorknobs and locks for the woman's office remodel. Apparently she doesn't like the 1990s themed gold door knobs. They go with the pink and yellow walls and the linoleum floor. One upgrade they have done is a nicer faucet in the bathroom. It's one of those pour style ones that I wanted for the house. At the time I looked at them they were $300-500 each, so I wasn't interested in spending almost a grand just to have pour faucets. If they put one in an office, they must be cheaper now.

In the storage space I found over a full box of the linoleum tile they used in the office. I left a few tiles for them to fill in the flooring gap when they knock the hole in the wall (they're putting new pad/carpet over the existing flooring) but otherwise I'm taking it home to use as flooring in the coops I'm building. This shit is hard, it should clean up easily.

On the topic of birds, the batch of Bobwhite quail eggs showed up and I've got them in the Hovobator doing their thing. These hatch slower, 22-24 days, but I'll have their brooder built over the holiday.

Medium chicken egg in the background of that picture for scale.

Today I went up to Perry's 800 (!) acre plot of land that he's going to try to turn into a shooting park. He's got a ton of plans, no idea if it will work but he's going big. One of the things they want up there is to have a hunt park and offer quail hunts. They just didn't know anyone yet who has quail. Huh. Our first customer?

Here's a picture of the van siting in the middle of a field they use for civil war reenactments at his place. The weather was amazing today, great day to be outside.

Work is progressing on the woman's office remodel. Paint and the 'arch' between the rooms is done, I've swapped out all the interior hardware and the internet connection is live. I'm getting 5gig coverage out into the foyer from the cheap router I stuck in there, so that's basically officially 'good enough'. She's going with the base 200mbit service and speed zone on the phone was showing 214mbit so we're good.

Built a new quail brooder, this one is a lot better than the last. Lower roof, easier construction techniques and... a cleanable floor. I found this leftover tile in the storage at the woman's office and since she's replacing the flooring this will officially be scrap. So... no reason not to use it for quail hutch flooring. They'll enjoy the 90s vibe.

Christmas eve, flashing BIOS. It's how we roll. Getting the best laptop I have setup and ready to be my do-it-all home desktop.

I picked up a 1-6x strike eagle with a mount for $250 off the forum. The guy never actually used it, his astigmatism made it not work for him. His loss, my gain. It was completely new looking, came with the box and blister pack for the $80 mount, etc. It's on the Ruger PC carbine and the 1-6x should be enough power for a small rifle in 9mm.

Trying the sideways monitor thing. Leaves more desktop space (physical desk, not virtual desk) but it's taking some getting used to.

I wanted to get Taco Bell tonight, but wondered what sort of weirdos besides myself would be in Taco Bell on Christmas eve. So instead, I got burrito supplies at the store to make my own and found this which should satisfy the craving.

Yes, yet another hutch. This is a two chamber version like the one on the youtube channel I was watching has. This way the birds have somewhere to go to get out of the cold if they want, and he's got a sand bath inside his. I ran out of plywood and had to get creative inside, but otherwise it's a solid build. Hopefully between the two brooders and two hutches we should be good until spring.

More arts and crafts. Wanted a way to protect the 22 conversion bolt carrier when moving it around. Saw this idea online and built one for $4.

This was frightening. Had a primer come out of a 9mm round and when the slide closed after firing the previous round this one got jammed in the chamber. Eventually I got it open and out, but the primer sticking back out like that caused the round to get shoved too far into the lands of the barrel. Had it actually gone off, I suspect the gun would have blown up due to the increased pressure. Frightening. First actual problem with steel case 9mm in the 33k round I've fired so far.

Brother in law got me this off my giftmas list. Good choice.

Someone tore into the hay room using the camera as a place to stand and work on the plastic wiring.

Wile replacing the plastic wire with metal, I found that the critter had also chewed part of the camera wiring up. He basically ate off the reset button.

In the spirit of baking, I tried making pretzels. Ugly, but they tasted OK.

For attempt number 2 I tried to just make sticks and that didn't work at all. Came apart while boiling, baked up shitty, ended up tossing the batch.

Shot an IDPA match, did pretty well considering I screwed up the last stage (fired 3 round at targets instead of 2, most the targets all day had been 3 so I had 3 on the brain). 3rd in division, 11th overall out of 73 shooters. All three PCC guys beat me. What can you say, carbines rule the battlefield.

We had one shooter that had to leave early, so other people were shooting his spot. On the last stage no one else wanted to shoot his slot so I did. I got a 14 total when I did it (due to the extras) and when I ran it for him I was 10.5. Correct number of shots and because I had run it before I had a good feel for how to optimize movement a bit better. People were impressed. Overall too I beat a lot of reasonably well ranked shooters. I must be getting better.

On the way back from the match I stopped to get lunch and ended up dumping fries between the front seats. Dammit. While cleaning it out later I was having trouble seeing and couldn't see much in general in the back when I was vacuuming it out. Obviously a lighting upgrade was required. I had those LED panels for the office project I hadn't done yet, so I popped one in the van. Plenty bright, don't think I need another back there.

I couldn't take the sideways monitor anymore, too weird. I pulled the best two monitors I had together and went back to the side-by-side format. I also tripped over the broken rolling mat for the last time and tossed it and replaced it with one of the pieces of carpet we pulled out of the woman's office. It had a cut-out on one side which perfectly matched up with the milk crate under my desk. It's almost like I planned it that way.

Quick van upgrade, I put (finally!) some carpet strip material up under the platform ledge. I kept snagging things on the exposed edge of the carpet wrapped under the platform, especially fluffy things like my gym bag. A couple dremel cuts to make smaller sections out of the single long one I bought and now all the high traffic areas are properly trimmed out. What's cool is you can't even see it from the top side which is good since I don't think BBQ black would stick to that aluminum very well.

We caught the rodent doing the damage to the barn, the woman saw him duck back inside the wall behind the wifi router (which he had chewed through the power and ethernet cable to earlier in the day. When I pulled the wall open, I found this:

With all the wires exposed it was just a matter of time before he got fried, and/or shorted those with enough spark to ignite the tinder box he was building in the form of a nest. We got lucky there. I added more hard cloth to try to keep him out, but I told her if I see him around the barn again I'm going to shoot him. He's cute blah blah but if he burns the damn barn down... well better dead than risk it.