The woman wanted dessert, so I was going to make the old standby of sugar cookies (because we always have the ingredients on hand as the recipe is pretty simple) but instead I tried something new. We had some leftover brown sugar and some wonky cinnamon sugar mix I made up previously to try to recreate Kelly2's cinnamon toast (which I wasn't able to do) so I made cinnamon sugar cookies. They turned out very well, even without letting the dough sit in the fridge long enough.

When I cut them from the semi-chilled dough log they ended up getting squished into "D" shapes and not circles, but when they baked they spread out into mostly normal roundish shapes.

I had two logs of dough, I froze the 2nd one since it said you can freeze the dough up to 6 months. Next time she wants cookies it's just defrost, cut, dust with the magic mix and bake.

I got this super lightweight pocket holster off eBay, and while I don't like how the edges of the gun dig into your leg (and more importantly dig into the material of your pants potentially ruining them) I do like that it's a full ounce lighter than the other pocket holster, mostly because it's mostly "not there". An ounce seems like it's not a big deal, and for the P380 I would rather have the comfort of the slightly bulkier Desantis holster, but with the P32 we're talking a 10% reduction in total weight carried. A holster like this on the P32 takes it down to 10.5oz fully loaded and holstered. I gotta try that, so I ordered one for it. They're pretty cheap.

The P32 doesn't really have sights to snag on stuff, and it doesn't have a slide lock lever to dig into anything, so it should be pretty snag free. We'll know in a week when it gets here.

I actually got $5 off the second holster order because the brake I ordered prior wasn't delivered by the guaranteed date. Apparently eBay will give you a $5 credit if they miss their delivery window. Beats the zero you get from Amazon.

Because I'm removing the brake on the AR to put the rimfire can on with the conversion kit, the brake isn't correctly timed anymore. So, I ordered this one because it doesn't have to be timed and shouldn't throw the zero off like the fancy one that requires timing. This isn't a brake or a flash hider, it's more of a "noise forwarder" but it should be good enough.

Nothing significant here, just a picture of the van on the driveway. I forgot something and had to run back to the house and didn't want to hit a tree trying to back up the whole way so I just left it here while I went back. Could make a good screen backdrop or something.

The goats got their yearly checkup, shots, etc. Wasn't a big production because I didn't have to do anything but watch.

Made some naan with a new recipe. Turned out pretty well, we just needed to make it a little thinner and cook it hotter so it fluffs up.

Another busy weekend. Maxwell brought over 30 quail eggs for this trial and we got them in the incubator. I'm keeping it here in the basement were it's more temperature stable and I can keep an eye on the humidity (and water level) and stuff myself every day. With it in the barn at his clinic the temp swings were pretty dramatic and while the heater could probably keep up with the cold, it can't make it cool down if it gets too hot. Shouldn't be a problem with the lower temps we're seeing now but it's better if it's just indoor stable and not stressing the heater out.

Yesterday I went up to Slacker's cabin and met with him, Dave, Fred, some army dude named Eric and some Russian chick that came with Fred. We screwed around running drills against steel, and then sat around chatting. I left around 7pm, it was nice sitting by the wood stove in the cabin but I had to get home and was getting really sleepy.

No pictures of the day, but here's me parking at the pistol pit.

Today I finally got to blow the driveway, yard, etc. I didn't take pictures, but here's some camera footage of me in action. Wee!

Also trimmed the goat hooves today..

and made cheese crackers using up some "pizza cheese mix" that's been in the fridge for a while. I kept track of the thickness, baking time, etc so next time I can start with the right settings and not have to experiment as much. If of course I can find this note card...

We took the old Toshiba laptop to the woman's office, so now its on the wifi and automatically ssh'es to the hosted VM with an open tunnel, so when I ssh to that same system from home I can double-bounce through it down to the laptop. I've got an encrypted volume on there I can now backup my files to. Encrypted off site backup without having to pay for storage at Digital Ocean.

First internship day at Bandwidth was yesterday. It was pretty good, long, exhausting, but good. Will be very interesting to see if I can keep it up and provide them some value over time.

With the cable DVR gone, there was no longer a clock under the TV. Shouldn't be a problem since there is another clock in the room but I missed it, so amazon provided me with a cheap solution:

I like the multiple brightness settings, I've found one that's just about right.

We actually won a league game! We were trading ends back and forth the whole time so the game was close, but the last end we managed to score 3 to solidly win. I honestly didn't think we would win anything this year, but somehow the team with 3 noobs on it managed to beat someone. That's gotta be embarrassing.

The micro holster for the P32 is here, and it's pretty good. I ran a bit of tape along the leading edge to take the bite off it, but otherwise it's solid. With the lack of sights (basically) on the P32 it doesn't snag on the material of my pocket and with no slide release there is nothing digging into my leg and potentially wearing through the pocket material.

Those 'magic bullets' from Fred for the 300BLK are really fat compared to the ELDs. Using the same seating die depth the magic bullets seat to what's shown in the center round, but that won't actually chamber in the rifle. The one on the right is the depth that sets the bullet right against the lands and is the maximum length. In theory, the lack of jump to the rifling should help accuracy. We shall see.

The woman has a barnyard puzzle she's working on and there is one piece that has a tiny chick on it. I keep taking this out of the puzzle and hiding it around the house. She claims it's annoying, but she laughs every time I send her a picture of it in a new spot.

We won another curling match! That's 2 of 6, so now somehow we get into the playoffs.

The eggs are getting to the point where I've turned the rotor off, and they should start hatching toward the end of this week or into the weekend. There is a thing known as "candling" where you light up an egg with a flashlight (but you can see how they would use a candle in the olden days) to see if there is anything in there that's growing. For a chicken egg you can apparently see something, for the quail it's just "dark". I did this to all of them and it looks like 2/3 of them have something going on inside, I don't know if that means that many will hatch or just have the potential to hatch. Time will tell.

Photos of the eggs show the difference of dark vs. light. The right is dark, the left is light where the whole egg interior glows.

Went to a new restaurant with Bandwidth called Gravy, downtown. I tried the gnocchi, it wasn't bad.

Did another presentation for the S3 kids with Will, this time on competition. I took a pic of the room from the front before everyone was there, and managed to think to take a picture of Will doing his part, but no one took a picture of me doing my (way more awesome) part.

Saturday I helped Perry teach a "Intro to Competitive Shooting" at the Wake range. 16 students, almost all true noobs. It was fun, and gave me a chance to teach something I already knew and test the theory that I enjoy teaching. Something for my career homework.

Surprise last night, the quail started hatching! I was not ready, and had to scramble to setup the brooder... but then realized what a fire hazard Maxwell had built so we had to come up with plan B. Hopefully the plan B stuff gets delivered on schedule, otherwise it's on to Plan C, and I don't have a lot of faith in that plan.

Sunday Phil was in town visiting and we went to the range, and while there he remarked that one of my brake lights was out. I ordered up some LED replacements and they arrived and dropped in as expected. The drivers side tail light I've had out before, wiring in the backup camera power to the backup light, but the passenger's side had not been out before. One of the two little screw like thingies holding it in from the back was cross-threaded and a bitch to get out. Then of course it was hard to get back in since it had been previously cross threaded. Ford quality, but I guess it's not going to be noticed until after the 3 year service life is up, so who cares if it's not right?

Big difference in technology levels here...

Other than lacking a photo, I'm pretty official now, for an intern.

Have had two chicks die on us today, the first sometime over the night and the second this morning. The second was mis-formed a bit, had a bag leg so I can see why he didn't make it. The first looked fine, I didn't see any signs of it having trouble when I put them up for the night (having noticed the lame one thinking it would be the first to go). Hopefully the heater arrives on time and the woman can transfer them all over to the brooder while I'm at work.

Curling last night, both the woman and I are sick. We played the 3rd best team in our league, but we only lost by 1 point. We actually traded ends back and forth scoring, but they hit 4 in one end which pretty much sealed our fate. We were only down by 2 in the last end, could have come back!

Still sick, went to the gun show with everyone today. Jason bought a crap ton of primers, Sean got some primers, bullets and found an original (wood) SKS stock so he can un-Tapco his SKS. Tim... not sure what he bought he came early and left early but was carrying around a backpack with tags on it so he at least bought the bag and probably to put something in it. I... just got these Tula primers. They're cheaper than CCI, but mostly I got them because it's funny. Get that communist taste in your own home made ammo.

The match was... interesting. I'm still sick, and running the match while sick is hard. For the first few stages I was slow and inaccurate, and then by stage 3 I suddenly came alive and was able to power through and suddenly I was both fast and accurate again. I ended up beating Sean, but not Ian. He's getting the hang of using that red dot and now he's faster than before.

I'm 8th overall but actually 2nd in double stack (basically everything without optics that isn't a 1911). The red dot crowd is taking over the world. Not sure I want to go that way, but it's clear it's going to 'hurt' me if I don't.

The woman wasn't happy with the tub as the brooder so I built this. Took a day, which was faster than I had thought. Guess I'm getting better at both simplifying designs and putting things together.

Got the pizza stone in and wanted to try a test loaf before thanksgiving. It turned out amazingly well.

Pulled out most of the ghetto wiring the dealership put into the bike and got the tail lights working again. Technically it's the brake lights that weren't working, the tail running lights were, but whatever, it's all fixed now.

And of course when I went to get the inspection done it was cold and raining. At least there was no line to wait in.

Sneaky sent me back my AR pistol upper so I rebuilt the pistol removing the 7.5" upper with the trashcan brake and going to this 11". Better ballistics, if old school with the quad rail. Everything accessory wise moved over from the Sub2k so my total cash outlay on this was... practically zero. Actually I think it was zero, I had everything I needed in the parts bin already. Pretty sure I'm short a set of sights now though.

The real loaf for thanksgiving turned out amazing as well!

The full dinner. Not your typical meal but in many ways better.

The wine was not our first pick, but both bottles that we had left from the VA wine trip had gone bad. They said to age until 2017, and it's past that so I would have thought they would be fine but both were really foul in different wants. Clearly something went wrong with that batch at the winery because they've been properly stored the whole time. The wine we did serve was one of the last bottles from CA. We got it at the winery, so that will never happen again. :(

With the return of the repaired wood splitter I've been going at all the firewood, and it's now done. The new engine puts out way more power which makes the hydraulic ram more powerful which means that even the dry elm and red oak just fly apart. OK maybe not "fly" but it splits it pretty easily.

The woodshed is full, so we moved my home built rack over to a better spot and will stack the rest of the split wood on it. Shouldn't need to split wood for at least 2 seasons!