Spyderco won't sell me a replacement screw, or tell me the size so I can order it elsewhere. BladeHQ doesn't sell spares, and I can't seem to find info on them online anywhere. I've seen titanium replacement sets on eBay in Australia, and I'll order that if I have to but come on, there has got to be an easier way.

So the big news is this:

I went to the eye doctor to get glasses, and they couldn't correct the vision in my right eye at all. Turns out that I have some sort of membrane growing along the back of my eyeball and it's distorting things. Not correctable with glasses, you have to have some sort of surgery to have it cut off. The other option is to "not use that eye". Great. Going back in to the surgeon on the 13th to see what the full diagnosis is and if it's operable or not.

Range day, rotated out a bunch of the house and van ammo, and got all the staged guns test fired. Well all but the 12 gauge, I'll do that next time. The mis-matched gray colored furniture was bugging me more than I thought it would. The 'sniper gray' of the magpul didn't match the 'urban gray' of the BCM foregrip at all. Not even close. Now... they're all a lovely shade of Krylon matte OD green.

The standard side of the yard stick in the pond is covered with mud and such so I've been taking readings off the metric side when I can see it. Translating those to inches was fine, but then I thought, why not just enter millimeter or inch readings and let the spreadsheet do the math? So, that's what I did:

It just picks the largest of the two cells (after converting mm to inches) and uses that value. Simple. The next bit isn't going to be as simple since we're getting close to the end of that measuring stick as the level drops... not sure how to correct when I move the stick again. Last time it was easy because everything was going up and I just put an offset, now I have to deal with positive and negative offsets from the original readings. Math, and record keeping.

Got the kit to rebuild the endura with the aftermarket scales and parts. Looks OK, but honestly it's not as spiffy as I thought it would be. Appearance wise mind you, it's totally functional and light weight and nicely built... just kinda plane. Especially when sitting next to the dart.

Lugnut chewed through the metal handle of the poop rake finally (he bites at it every so often when he walks by where it's sitting) and I said I would fix it. The woman said it couldn't be fixed. Ha, with an appropriate sleeve, some shim and some screws, anything is possible!

Those should be bolts going through and using spacers, but for now this will work. It's rock solid now, but when it starts to wobble, which it's guaranteed to do, then I'll run some bolts all the way through.

Went to the parts store and got a bulb to replace the tail light in the woman's car. The whole back piece comes off, it's huge. I couldn't see how the base lens assembly attached to the body color trim ring/mount. Had to come apart at some point or they would have to stock different tail lights for every color of the car. That's dumb and not something any low end manufacturer would try to do.

The woman fractured her wrist somehow, she'll be sporting this for the next 8 weeks. Made curling class hard for her.

Battery for the bike showed up, got the electrolyte put in it and charged and popped in today. Bike starts, so it really just was the old battery (which shows 11.5v under no load, so it's clearly not happy). Also tested that battery charger dad gave me, seems to work correctly.

UPS delivered some freedom just a few minutes ago. Got these for $206 delivered. Unlike Brownelle's, these guys had a $20 off $200 order coupon that worked with everything, vs working with nothing from any company you've ever heard of. Had to get 11 to get over $200, but hey, I'm saving money! :)

The goats currently have 4 visitors. They're so popular.

Survived the Bauhaus concert. Old goths, kinda funny.

My training was successful. By the time I started the room was packed, people even had to fill in that dreaded first row. Lots of people came up after to tell me how useful it was, so it makes the prep and stress worthwhile.

I've started wearing the Seamaster, just to see if it will even keep time. So far, it's off by +5min every morning. It mostly keeps time during the day but then speeds up when it's sitting on the dresser at night. Very odd, but hopefully not so odd that the service won't bring it back in line. Or maybe old watches were just never very accurate to begin with?

Saw another minivan variant of my van on the road today. I think it's the first minivan version I've seen besides mine.

Another round of eye scans, this set complete with an actual panic attack. Diagnosis confirmed, it's fucked up and even surgery won't bring the sensor back to 100%. 20/40 is the best he thinks he can do.

Have a customer who lives in Fayetteville and someone was driving down his street shooting windows out of cars. They hit 5, 4 of them blew the windows out but apparently the Prius glass is stronger than that. Or it was just a bad shot from a pellet gun, or it was just a ricocheting 22 or something without a lot of oomph left.

G34 hit the 19k round mark today.

Someone on the forum pointed out some damage around the edge of the striker hole there, and it looks like they're right. Not likely to impact functioning at all, the hole is pretty deep and that's just some pitting on the edge, but still, some evidence of wear.

Had a dud round at the range today. Cycled it through the rifle a few times, no luck. First true dud I've had yet, usually they go off on the 2nd hit for the 9mm stuff, and I've never had one need 2 hits in 556. Can't say that anymore, after only 3500 rounds (3498 to be exact).

Spent a lot of time today expanding the manger in the goat barn. Couldn't really "expand" it though, ended up just rebuilding the whole thing and making some changes. Since it was one of the first things we made, it was all nailed together which was quite annoying to deal with.

It's now wider, has a 'kick board' along the bottom to keep Taco from chewing on the end of the wall boards (somewhat broken at the bottom since they're the originals from the 80s) and now stops 18" above the ground like the one outside does. This means no old hay getting stuck in the bottom and them never eating it and just rotting away. This one is way more solid than the original, it's well tied into the wall and that 4x4; should be solid for as long as we want.

Decker is still trying to dominate the food area, but now he can only block half of it with his fat butt.i

Made a batch of pasta tonight (dough made last night) using the corn recipe from the Whisk class. It's so tasty, even with canned corn. Didn't eat any, just froze it all for later.... OK, I ate some of the filling and some scrap pasta uncooked just to try it out, that's how I know its good. :)

New chromecast installed, works very well and we can now stream HD video with no issues. Took me a while to setup because for some reason I had the old chromecast blocked at the firewall so when I reused the IP for the new one... all sorts of things barfed. The old one is setup down in the basement for whatever. Still works, no reason to toss it, might use it to show photos or something on the TV where high frame rates of HD aren't required.

Did a firmware update on the router and the nanostation that links the neighbor's house to us, and found that the phone app does that very well (handling upgrades). Also found that you can do static DNS entries on the router and it will show the names in the traffic analysis page. Not as good as letting it read them from DNS like it should, but since there are only a handful of IPs that can talk to the net in general these statics should be good enough for now.

Both VMs on the windows box crashed with some strange VM ware CPU error. Didn't think to screen shot it, probably should have before resetting them. They came back up OK.

Joe (guy at work) knows guys in the data center and warehouse that have 'spare parts' that we can sorta kinda steal to solve little customer issues. Mostly it's cables and such, not so much as drives/shelves/controllers, but often that's all that's missing to make something work (cable just too short). Anyway, we grabbed some pizza to feed these guys as as a thank you for helping us out twice last week. Only downside is the van smelt like pizza for 3 days after...

Spent some money today, finally, after 3 years, I got new shin guards. You can see the difference between the old on the right and the new on the left. The old set were the grappling kind, instead of a few straps holding them on they have a compression sock like thing on them. They stay in place if you're grappling, but they don't have as much padding and they're really hard to clean well. As you can imagine, even with Lysol spray they still stink most all the time. These new ones are open and have no fabric so they should clean up a lot nicer after use. Now I just have to get used to wearing them, they feel really weird and unstable.

Fixed a couple of bad boards in the feed room floor. Always feel like a real rancher when I have to fix random stuff like this. I'm out of the original reclaimed wood, down to using scrap off the deck. I think these were the last of the really sketchy original boards that finally rotted out.

After curling, we got my shin guards up in north Durham on the way to the chicken farm. The woman got two new birds today, and we'll get the next 2 in two weeks when they're old enough to take. These two are named Sweet and Sour, and Sour really is kinda a grump (the one trying to fly away here).

The woman's mom sent this picture of a picture of the woman as a child kissing goats. She really has done that her whole life apparently.

I suggested we make a frittata for dinner since we had to many eggs. Brussel sprouts, bacon and cheese. Yum. Really starting to like these things.

And that solves the "automatic watch dies every weekend when you don't wear it for a few days" problem:

It's a low end unit, but they all seem to run the same electronics and motors, it's just the quality of the box, glass, padding, etc that drives the price. The woman said one of these would have made a nice birthday gift, but I didn't want to wait months to see if I liked it. Now that it seems to work and isn't totally annoying (to her, I can't here it at all but she says it makes a very slight whirring noise) then maybe someone (ie her family) can get me a nicer multi-watch version or something as a gift. Then I can have several of my Hong Kong rolexes spinning around ready for use. Although who knows if those auctions can take actual use for very long before blowing up.

Grabbed the first load of material for the chicken run expansion project. With the new birds inbound it's time to get the run expanded so they've got more room to do whatever chickens do.