We actually won on Friday at curling. The team we were playing had 2 subs, but all of the players were better than us. However, they were just not coming together as a team. Meanwhile we were hitting 500f our shots and had a solid strategy and it paid off. We're still 3:1 for the season, but at least we're not getting skunked.

We actually scored 4 in one end which is a total record for us. Extra special because of my broken toe, made things much harder and painful for me all night.

The woman wanted Dutch Crunch sandwich rolls, apparently it's a thing in SF but no one here has ever heard of it, even at the fancy bakery by her office. So, with a recipe in hand I attempted to make it. IT's two layers, a normal bread with a rice flour 'frosting' that bakes into a single piece.

Turns out it's really good. I used the stone to bake them and that was my only mistake on this batch. It browned the bottom well like you would want on a loaf but this isn't a loaf. Next time I'll just use a cookie sheet for the rolls and keep the stone toward the bottom just to keep the heat consistent.

No presentation skills but a ham and turkey sandwich with these rolls, Havarti cheese and some butter pickles was pretty awesome.

Jason got a Glock 44 yesterday and put about 300 rounds through it. Today we took it back out and tested 15 different types of ammo through it and my M&P compact. The short version of the story is that the M&P is way less picky about ammo, I was mostly OK with 13 out of the 15 types. The G44 was mostly OK with about half of them. Stick to high velocity stuff and it's OK, but anything standard or subsonic or with a heavy / slow bullet and it freaks out. Lots of light strikes too. It's not versatile, but get the right ammo and it's a good trainer for a G19 for sure. Felt like a 'real' Glock.

Toe is still messed up, but actually getting better. Not looking better, still bruised and such but at least I'm walking more normal most (some?) of the time.

About half way through the "Total Money Makeover" book. It's probably more useful for people who are really money dumb and live above their means, but there are still a few tips to be pulled out of it. I'm asking Robert what it would look like if I took some money out and paid off the house. It's our last and only debt, would be kinda cool to have it gone. No write off cries everyone! But with the caps on that now it doesn't actually get us anything so we're paying for the privilege of keeping the cash invested. That's paid off the last few years, but when the markets turn it won't be the case. Take some off the table while it's still going strong? Seems good to me.

Was going to put some stuff in here about changing jobs at work, but I'll wait until it's settled out and if something actually happens first. Otherwise it's just all speculation on stories.

Something else I'm forgetting... hmm...

Now I remember! We took the birds over to Maxwell's today. The woman went with to say goodbye to Wobbles as we reunited him with his flock, but they were clearly going to kill him (he is crippled after all) so she took him back. However with just him and the other runt in the laundry room it doesn't stink so bad. Older birds poop isn't so gross, the baby poop is nasty.

The woman posing with Wobbles one last time.... until 30 minutes later when he was on his way back to the house.

I'm going to modify this brooder to be two sided so we can clean one and have the birds in the other than just flip sides when it's time to clean again. I also am starting to plan some sort of outdoor (in the chicken run) coop for quail. That way they can be inside the enclosed run but safe from the chickens, yet if they escape they just end up in the enclosed run and not outside where they'll get killed by a hawk in about 5 seconds.

We had a 2-day QBR over Monday and Tuesday. Mostly just the same old crap as every QBR, except this time instead of a paddle and the theme being "all in the same boat", this time they handed out little bats and went with "swing for the fences". Little weapons, free at work!

Instead of a sit down dinner after, they just did drinks and appetizers at some hotel downtown. Probably very trendy, but I wasn't in a "wow look at this!" mood. Just trying to survive the day.

With my toe still screwed up I couldn't go to class last night so I went to the gun club meeting. No one else would go with. Its getting harder to put up with the FUDDs at the club each time, but sometimes you gotta put up with crap. The facility is nice enough and it's never crowded and it's cheap. The price you pay for FUDD leadership I guess. Plus, you get these fancy meals in the winter when they can't grill outside:

Today is Lugnut's 4th birthday. Goats are getting old.

My broken toe is healing up, or at least turning different colors and hurting less. I've also jacked up my peck, either from moving the generator into place myself the other day during the power outage, or doing pull-ups I guess? No idea. Sore still but I gotta get to class tonight. Too much time off due to injury already.

Speaking of the power outage and generator, we lost power after the storm on Thursday... but it happened on Friday morning long after the storm was gone. Outage was about 7 hours I think, most of the day. Fortunately I didn't have any customer visits or anything so I could sit at home and keep an eye on the generator. First time it's been run under load in the shed and it worked pretty well. Shed got 'warm' even with the doors open but 'warm' could have meant 60F, it was in the 40s outside so it was just comfortable when you went in the shed. Nothing to worry about, and the fan trick to force the exhaust out the exhaust port in the wall seems to have worked.

Two day match/class this weekend with Tilley. USPSA matches are freakin' hard, I just can not do well. Speed is almost more critical than accuracy, but then I try to go fast and miss everything which doesn't work, I get frustrated and end up not having a good time. Story of my life I guess.

Lots of flooding from the storm, the road past the farm was closed as you can see and one of the stages had to be moved up the hill a bit because the normal spot for that stage was under water.

The random banging noise in the van turned out to be a failing ball joint on the passenger side. So much for my "maybe it's just gravel" thought when driving slowly down the road. Mechanic also found that the passenger side engine mount was leaking (they're 'hydraulic' apparently) and that's why the engine is buzzing a bit. Both are now repaired to the tune of $1k (with an oil change) and I was sporting the loaner vehicle for the weekend. Parts didn't show up as planned on Friday which is why it had to carry over to Monday.

Finished stacking that shitty pine firewood. Note to self, don't accept so much free wood you can't process it, it just becomes another yoke around your neck.

Rodents damaging the truck again... $200 to find and fix this damn line.

Decker's 4th birthday is today. We couldn't get the hat on him, so we tossed a carrot in there and when he tried to eat it I just pushed the hat on his nose. Good enough.

Work day at the gun club and instead of cutting grass or spreading gravel, we decided to fix the brass screens on pistol bay 2. Before (of which I forgot to take pictures of) the screens were screwed up and there was no baseboard to sweep brass against. We built a frame to hold the screens and rehung them, and now there is a 2x6 along the bottom to allow you to sweep without touching the actual screen. About $45 in materials, hopefully they're going to reimburse us... or me.

Dinner with Heather and Jessy last night, and I made a loaf of bread to bring along. Possibly the best loaf yet!

I turned the one chamber brooder into a two chamber. This way we can keep the birds on one side while we clean the other. Way easier than dealing with them trying to fly around while we block half the door. Potentially we can just keep them on one side and leave the other clean, then when it's time to clean just move them over and clean the other half. Easier and less smell!

Made another batch of the Dutch crunch rolls and this time I didn't use the stone directly. I had it on the lower shelf but used the cookie sheet as the instructions said and the bottoms were browned but not so crunchy. The woman liked them better this way. The comb was perfect. I don't think they'll get better than this. Baked for 30 min instead of 25, not sure how I'll remember that but maybe typing it here will help.

I froze one of the rolls as a test. If it works at all, I can crank out batches of these and freeze them for mid-week dinners. Doesn't sound like much be a turkey and ham sandwich with Havarti and pickles on one of these rolls is a pretty nice meal. Or maybe my standards are low? Nope, these are tasty. :)

Had the day off yesterday so I went to the range to run some drills by myself. I had data from last April when I tried the 5x5 classifier so I figured I would re-run it again and see if I had gotten better. This is the 100old run. No pre-draws, no 'air gunning', just load the pistol and set the timer.

If you give me that head shot that's low (hey, it broke the perf, it should count!) then my total time + penalties is basically exactly what I was doing last year. 10 months of practice and my skills are not measurably better. That's sad, and a little unexpected.

I had the P80 frame with the .22 slide on it, sorta taking Jason's advice in that I should just fire bricks of 22 slow fire until I learn to control the trigger better. Not a bad idea, and pretty cheap at today's rimfire prices. The Remington Thunderbolts that work so well in his G44 also work well in my conversion, but are putting out a 3.7" group at 10 yards (50 shots free style). The Armscor cheapie stuff is putting out a 2.7" group at that same 10 yards, that's noticeable. Both fire too far to the right, I think it's zeroed for CCI STD with the can on it, so not surprising it's off with high velocity stuff without the can.

This was scary though, I had a case rim blow out on one of the Armscor rounds. The gun when 'pfffft!' instead of 'bang!' and there was smoke pouring out of the frame/slide and I could feel it on my hand. Bullet didn't stick in the barrel and the gun was fine, but it still scared me.

Started building coop #4, this one will go inside the chicken run as a home for any birds I want to keep here, as well as the cripples the woman wants to save.

Used my new bottle on the range trip, works well keeping things cold (the ice was still in there this morning when I took to wash it) but when you use a fizzy drink in it you have to not point the nozzle at you when you open the tab. After the 3rd time of getting a face full of CO2 and some spray I remembered to point it away from my face when opening.

I setup a vncserver on the web hosting box. With the 'infrastructure hypervisor' host shut down there is no where for me to hit an actual desktop. I used to have a 'home' vm that was just for VNC sessions and to host my home directory via NFS to the lab clients, but that's all on the lab hypervisor system (aka the NUC) but it's also now powered down by default. I could run yet another VM somewhere, but the web vm isn't exactly doing anything and I'm not customizing the desktop any so it's good enough to host a few terminal windows.

First snow of the year started falling today around 4pm. Should last until tomorrow morning then melt off quickly as it warms. Cheese class on Saturday, roads should be clear. Curling tomorrow... hmm.... let's hope we're not looking at a lot of ice.

I'm hosting my 'documents' VM on the security PC now and turned off the core-hv box. I think I covered that already. Anyway, there are no USB3 ports on the security box and there is only 1 PCIe port which was being used by the gigE card. I've tried putting a USB3 card in there and using gigE dongles to get the network working and it couldn't keep up. I found a 3 port USB3 + 1 port gigE PCIe card for $22 on Amazon and decided to give it a try. Showed up on time (odd!) and worked fine under Windows 10. However, the VM couldn't deal with the drive directly attached like it could on the USB2 port. Guess whatever random windows-only chip set was on that card could not be used by vmware's mapping and the Centos 7 kernel underneath. Sigh. Not going to return it though, at least the backup disk is now on USB3 and when I go to clone the base OS disk as a bootable backup it will happen much faster now.

Came home on Saturday from cheese class, and saw that I had a squirrel in the trap by the truck. He's now in the freezer, and the trap has some .22 damage to it that I have to fix. The official "fish and game" way of killing animals in traps is to put them in a bucket and drown them. Seems harsh. But, if you're not wanting to damage a trap it makes sense.

Speaking of the cheese class, it was pretty fun. Of course, the tasting portion of the class was very good. :)

This is the farmer's cheese we made. It's OK, it's this semi-soft cheese and it's edible on crackers (had some on triskets today actually) but it's not the style I want to make. I ordered the right bits and bobs to make cheddar, hopefully it arrives this week and I can build my cheese press and make some next weekend.

I saved some of the whey from the class; the instructor usually just dumps it. You can do all sorts of stuff with it, but I just used it in place of water in a batch of bread dough. Rumor has it that it makes it more like sourdough, and will increase the amount of protein in it. We'll see how it turns out tomorrow perhaps.

Made the whey bread today, and it turned out pretty good. I forgot to slash the top before putting it in the oven so I had to reach in after 10 minutes and do it. Don't think it had too negative of an impact. The bread is much darker and while the comb isn't as fluffy, it's super resilient. Easy to cut and stays together while putting butter on it but not chewy or tough. Kinda amazing.

It's a little yellow, which was hard to pick up in the harsh lighting in the kitchen.

Got a cheap large pot off Amazon to make my cheese in. Plenty large for 3 gallons, should be easy to make 2 gallons without making a mess.