I repaired the trap, it looks like crap but it works fine. In fact, I caught another squirrel within hours of putting it back out. This time I used the bucket method to dispatch him and it worked in like 10 seconds with no drama. Well, no drama for those of us not being killed. Unfortunately this guy chewed up the springs completely so the trap is officially broken until I can find some appropriate replacements. He must have been pretty mad to chew through metal springs.

With the farmers cheese getting to the end of it's usable life, one of the woman's facebook friends said she should make pierogi since it uses that sort of cheese. I ended up making the filling yesterday and then made the dough today and produced a few meals worth today. We'll have some tonight and I'm freezing the other half. We did a test batch of 2, boiled them and then she pan fried them in bacon grease leftover from breakfast. Not bad at all for a first attempt.

The big news is from the match yesterday. I shot better than I ever have, ever. To get classified in USPSA you have to have shot a minimum of 4 classifier stages, and this match had 4 classifier stages in it. That's unusual, but Tilley wanted some people to be able to potentially go up a class before the real match season begins. They take the best 6 out of your last 8 classifiers as a rolling window and when I guess those 6 are good enough for the next class you get moved up.

The people I was talking to about it said that the official USPSA web site gets updated on Wednesday morning, so I'll know then what my first ranking is. Hoping for C, so that I can work my way up to B over the next 12 months. It means I'll have to shoot a USPSA match per month because not all of them have classifier stages in them and I won't be awesome every time there is a classifier stage. Still, a good start.

I had my first interview for the CPOC job on Friday, went pretty well but I really don't want to type a bunch of stuff in. If something comes out of it, I'll write it in. Otherwise, just another interview.

I did have a phone interview thing with a recruiter for an external job, way way too much travel so I turned him down quick.

Also, repainting the base plates on my range mags and cleaning them out today. Lotta soot and dirt in them and they're starting to bind up.

Will says "my car isn't starting, but I jumped it and got to work". Yea, then it won't start at work because your battery is shot. At least after I jumped it at the office he drove directly to the auto parts store and over-paid by 35 0.000000or a battery. Whatever.

Mags are reassembled after cleaning and repainting. Ready to go!

Got the deed, guess we really do own it. Or the LLC does anyway.

Also, I broke down and got the non-threaded G44. I'm keeping the M&P as the suppressor host, it's way better at being an all around 22 than the G44 but.... today at the range (yep, snuck out!) I put 250 rounds through the G44 and it's a way better trainer than the M&P or the conversion kit. It doesn't just sorta look like a Glock, it feels like a Glock. Maybe I'm being overly dramatic, but it was fun to run drills with.

Super tiring weekend. Curling ran long (even though we lost big time we socialized a lot), we had to go brunch and stuff with Beth and Michael, and today we had to go to another brunch / open house thing with Rachel. Then we got home and had to cut trees for the mushroom logs. Oh, and planted the plants we got from Beth. That, and the time change... I'm beat.

Yesterday we were supposed to be going to setup at the BCNC tech summit, but that's been canceled due to virus stuff. Netapp pulled out last week, and BCNC shut the whole event down this week. I can't tell if this is warranted, or just a nice version of panic.

With the setup off the table, I was able to attend (remote) the all day training whatever thing work was putting on. Interesting topics, but WAY too long, too much marketing crap, not enough tech. We don't need to be sold on the tech, well sell it. We just need to know what it can do so we can use it to solve problems. But alas, no one ever believes that, we have to hear about Gartner.

While wasting time with that, I decided to try to make cheese. Started with two gallons of milk and an assortment of spell components, I mean, ingredients (culture, some chemical to make the fat solidify in store bought milk, etc)...

After a few hours of heating, curd cutting, etc I got the curds separated from the whey (which I saved some of for bread):

I hadn't built the cheese press yet, but they say you can just pile some weight on top of the follower in the mold. They suggest books, or jugs of water... but what could I possibly have that's small, easy to stack and really heavy?

Yea, that actually worked. 12 hours later, the cheese is ready to dry and age. I've cut it into 4 pieces and will package each separately so that I can age for 30/60/90/120 days to see what impact it really has on the sharpness of the cheddar.

The birds have started hatching, I think the last of them popped out last night. Here we go again.

The first attempt at vacuum sealing the cheese failed. A lot of moisture came out right away, you could see it pooling in the bag. That's not right. Another site I read said he has to leave it out 2-4 days before sealing to make sure it's dry. Just seems so strange leaving cheese just lying out in the open for days on end, but I guess that's how it works. Or so they say. We'll see.

The weather is getting nice, we were sitting outside and the birds were squawking from inside the house so she brought Wobbles outside for a look see... and apparently a therapy session too. So serious.

I snuck to the range yet again (how often is that going to work???) since the virus thing is keeping business slow. Got in a lot of drills with the G44, so easy to burn ammo in that thing. Without the cost and fatigue of lots of 9mm, its' easy to just keep running drills over and over again.

My strong hand and weak hand only shooting is getting better thanks to lots of G44 time as well. It's like dry fire, but better. Apparently I've seen the light.

Super busy weekend, even with the start of the virus scare ramping up. Pulled down the raspberry fence to reuse elsewhere, but did leave the old garden box covers over the top of the remaining berries. I don't expect there to ever be any berries to eat, the birds will see to that, but at least the plants can survive.

The fence was reused to protect those new plants that Beth and Michael gave us, and to re-do the fence around the birch tree we planted last year.

The G44 proved that yep, they can fire out of battery. Something got stuck in the chamber area that kept the round from going all the way in, which kept the slide out of battery just a little... but it still fired. Case bulged and blew out as you can see, my hands got dusted with soot, but otherwise things were OK. Took a lot of fiddling to figure out what was in the chamber. None of us could actually see anything but eventually the repeated cleaning and scraping got whatever it was out and things were back to normal. 1250 rounds on the gun so far, it's easy to shoot 22!

Finished up the 4th coop, ready to deliver it with the birds in a couple of weeks.

We got the mushroom logs planted. 3 types of mushrooms this time, we'll see what we get. We cut way too many logs for the number of spoors she bought, or... we're planting them closer on the logs.

First cheese batch was air dried for 4 days which kept it from 'weeping' whey, and I've got it sealed and in the wine fridge aging. Did more research on waxing, maybe I will give it a try at some point.

We were out of shavings, the only 'prep' we really needed before the lock down. Would have been messy dealing with pooping goats with no shavings so I zipped over there and got a load. Whew.

Had an in-person interview at ePlus yesterday. Last week John Bengivenni contacted me about an SE management job at ePlus and since he's a friend of Hiers I figured I should listen to what he said. The in-person went well, now I have to start the actual process he said, like actually get contacted by the recruiter and apply for the job.

Built that shelf to hold my cheese and jerky supplies. Kinda wish I had done a 3rd shelf now, but it would be very tippy.

I should say something about the virus and such since that's like 990f what's going on in the world, but really, I'm tired of it. Things are going to shit out there, but nothing I can do about it in here.

I'm cranking out pasta like mad. Using up ingredients we had on hand, using up the eggs the chickens are popping out, and generally making up a lot of easy to cook meals later. Three batches, a carrot agnolotti, a spinach and cheese ravioli and a 3 cheese ravioli. Those "3 cheese" should be 4 cheese, but we didn't have one of the cheeses. Adapt!

I wanted to modify the hutch to have 2 doors on the wire side but I don't have the hardware to do that and going to Home Depot seems like a bad idea... so I took that little screen I made for the brooder and screwed it into the frame. Now the door is half sized with no permanent mods made and no extra (visible) screw holes. Adapting, again.

Jason got the idea to actually have us measure how far out of battery the G44 can be and still fire. We have 3 of them between us now, and after measuring them all it turns out that mine is actually on the 'tight' side. Sean's brand new unfired one has the largest tolerance and Jason's with over 4000 on it is in the middle. It appears that this is just "how it is".

The woman is working from home from here on out, and she's trying to quiet down the echos in the office upstairs. We moved the bedroom rug in there which helped but then the next time I checked on her she's gone and built this sound break. Looks like she's building a blanket fort.

The order of 22 I got the day the panic started has arrived. It used to take 1-2 days to get ammo, this order took 10. With the panic buying clearing anything out, this is probably the last order of 22 I'll see in 12 months (or more, if prior panics are the model).

Yesterday Sneaky texted me and said "didn't you want one of these?". They took a Gen 1 G17 in on trade! I told him "yes" and he worked a deal using his employee discount type thing and got it, and is going to sell it to me if I can ever get up to see him again. He's in in $325! No box, no papers, 1 original mag so it's not super collectible but it's a numbers matching Gen 1 G17, it's worth at least $700 as it sits? I won't pay that, but just over $300, I'm in. Looks like the serial shows a build date between April 1988 - January 1989. Cool, a 1988 Glock. :)

Running out of paper towels, but the packing material from the ammo order seems to make a fine floor for the bird cage.

The woman went in to her office to get the mail and do a few calls from there, so I took the opportunity to butcher the squirrels and get them better packaged. Originally they were just cleaned and stuffed in zip lock bags but with too much moisture and too much air so they would have been freezer burned pretty badly. Now, they're as good as store bought.

Last of the pasta finished. Found some dried basil in the fridge so I put it in the noodles. Smells pretty good.

So, the woman let me out of the house as long as I promised to not get out of the van when I arrived, and using proper HAZMAT protocols when dealing with anything (gloves, wipes, etc).... so I got my trade goods together and headed up to Sneaky's:

and came home with the Gen 1 Glock 17! Woo!

A call to Glock corporate (they don't do email in the US, WTF?) turned up the build date on the serial is June 1988. The Glock collector guy says that's toward the end of the run (last serials start with E) but it's still a legit shooter grade Gen 1 with the gold un-updated internals. Now, if the virus thing ever clears up I can actually go to the range and try it out.

Had some basil left from making pasta so I tossed it in the bread dough to test the 'herbed bread' idea. Worked, wasn't funky or anything but basil isn't the right herb for this application. The sea salt sprinkled on the crust though? We'll be doing that every time now.

Birds are too big for the brooder so we've moved them into the wired hutch. Took the legs off and just set it on cinder blocks so the poop has less distance to fall and hopefully makes less of a mess. That rubber runner should be easy to take out and hose off every few days, or at least that's the theory. We'll know in a few days either way.