Packing away 90 percent of my dress pants, won't be needing these any time soon. Could have done this 2 years ago when I moved to CPOC, but it just didn't seem like it was proper. Now... mixed feelings.

The garden is fully in, now we wait.

Participated in my first ever 2-gun match, and got roped into ROing as well. That made it tough, not as much socializing since I had to work and no down time between stages. Either ROing or shooting. Did pretty well though, came in 9th overall.

Their scoring is such that if you run clean it's a 10 second bonus, so basically your first mistake costs a minimum of 11 seconds. I had one miss on a stage, the only penalty so that cost me 15 seconds. Imagine had I not gotten that...

Here's a fun retirement thing to do... inventorying all your random gun parts. Not all the junk in the box (yet) but starting with all the spare AR and Glock parts and small stuff in the box under the work bench.

The (now discontinued) Springfield XDe is the gun that I thought dad should get for his carry gun. He keeps insisting on decocking the 1911 and carrying it (inert) with the hammer down. That's not how you carry a 1911, is dangerous to do since you're basically firing the gun with your thumb on the hammer and makes it impossible to deploy quickly without practice which he won't do. The DA/SA trigger with a decocker on the XDe would let him carry hammer down safety on or off, but have a heavy 12 pound first pull to make up for his poor trigger discipline. Then if/when he gets more comfortable or proficient he can switch to cocked and locked, but the gun is still lighter than the 1911 and carries a few more rounds.

The sticking point was the $550+ price tag. I found this one used at Eds and got it for $359 OTD by paying cash. We split the tax basically, and while it was only $15 or something off asking, it's still $15 that cost me about 2 seconds to get. Winning.... except now I have an XDe.

Jason and I took it to the range and it turns out it's pretty easy to shoot and very accurate. Sights are maybe 1/2" off at 10 yards but that's too small of an amount to try to adjust without a sight tool. It's POI is right at POA at 10 yards with at least 3 different 9mm loadings so that's good, it's not picky. The extra weight vs a G43x, of which it's basically the same size as, makes it easier to shoot and less punishing. The DA/SA mode isn't that bad, I was doing doubles against the steel at 15 yards with no difficulty switching between the two trigger weights. With enough practice I think it would be a non-issue.

There aren't a lot of holsters to choose from, and since it's unknown if dad would actually carry it (much less pay me back for a holster), I just modified the old XDs holster to fit. Sean's heat gun makes short work of the kydex softening and now it looks like that's almost kinda a commercial holster for it. If you squint, and don't look to long.

Freak hail storm left some buildup on the deck and beat the crap out of my garden. Punched some holes in leaves and whatnot but it looks like everything survived.

Here's a movie of the hail storm, I was just too lazy to make a thumbnail: hail movie

I thinned the radish shoots out today, a before and after picture. It said 1-2" spacing, I went closer to 1" and just hoping it's not over crowded.

We went to Freddy's for burgers for our take out of the month, and they were complete crap. The meat was flavorless other than 'salt' and the bun was completely nothing. Basically the only flavor other than salt was the pickles. I wanted to do better when we made them at home, so I made buns from scratch rather than using the rolls we usually use. They came out.... OK. Nothing fantastic, but also not just chemicals.

Finally used that scrap lumber Will brought over to make some target stands for the range. I'm going to leave these out in bay 2, hopefully people won't shoot the damn sticks. Well they will, so let's hope they don't shoot them in the first few weeks.

That reminds me, I have to send in a check for my club dues.

The BCG from the poverty pony went back today; rode the scooter up to the UPS store and dropped it off. Be curious what they say.

My best ever placing at a Tilley match! OK it's 15 out of only 20 shooters (the 21st guy dropped out after 2 stages when his optic shit the bed) but it's better than being last like last time.

Drug the truck across the yard and got the cable all tensioned and ready for use. One feature of cheap winches, the line speed under load is slow. Really slow. Won't win any races but it will get you out of trouble. Eventually.

The new poverty pony upper arrived and I've got it accessorized and ready for accuracy testing before zeroing it with a dot and putting it into service. The old one is now retired, 5127 or so rounds. The BCG that was eating gas rings is being replaced under warranty and when it arrives I'll toss it into the box here and put the whole works away for future generations to find.

Or I suppose if I ever make my own lower or something.

Fired up the chainsaw (had to use the big one, the MS250 apparently has a plugged main jet even through I drained it out last season) and knocked down all the various trees the woman had marked to remove. Nothing major, just dead stuff in some obscure locations. One dead one in a non-obscure location was right on the path to the poop area and right in the view of the camera.

I dropped it, trimmed the stump and then cut it into big sections for my lovely assistant to move out of the way. That helps the view, the IR LEDs hit that tree directly and it causes it to iris down. Now maybe it won't do that.

I've moved everything off linux VMs for the home infrastructure. DHCP, internal DNS, NTP, DDNS all run off the router itself and everything is now in 1 subnet with firewall rules to keep the cameras from talking to China. I'm running the pihole DNS filter on the raspberry pi 2 system, but that's it. I was doing internal DNS on there (on a different port) and had pihole forwarding anything on 192.168.0.0/16 or for the 'internal' domain to that bind9 server, but that was kinda extra work. The pihole stuff had to be modified in the underlying config files to use the alternate DNS port, which is documented but likely to screw up every auto-upgrade ever. Now I don't have anything unique on that box, everything is auto-installed from the pihole repo.

So without bind9 tables or isc-dhcp-server configs how do I know where everything is? Spreadsheets, a big ass spreadsheet:

Dumb, but it's the only way now that the tools are GUI based on the router. I've got the router config backed up and went to buy a 2nd one as a spare, but they've gone from $50 to over $180 now. So... time to figure out how to use a pfsense VM as a backup. Or just have one ready and when the EdgeRouter shits the bed, then figure out pfsense.

One nice feature of having everything in the router is that all the IPs resolve everywhere, so things like the traffic analysis show names:

I had that sorta working with the router using the internal DNS server, but that wasn't 100%. Some things in the GUI wouldn't use a DNS look up but they all seem to use the hosts defined directly in the router (in /etc/hosts of all places). It also simplifies DNS. Instead of the router acting as the DNS server which forwarded to the VM running bind9 that was doing all DNS both internal and external, now... it just talks to itself and then the ISP's DNS servers. All the internal clients are set to look at the pihole box first (which forwards to google's DNS and one other I can't recall) and the router second. That way if the pihole dies, at least we can get out until I fix the filter.

I hate stupid gifts, yet people keep needing to get them for me for some reason. Will just had to get this for my birthday/retirement gift. It's on brand, but unnecessary. It's also too small to actually be used as a coffee cup so it's 1000seless. Sigh.

Made up a double batch of the pea agnolotti so we had some on hand, and to use up a bunch of eggs. The critical/expensive ingredient in the filling is the mascarpone cheese and 1 tub would have left me with a lot of excess we don't have use for, but 2 tubs is enough for 3 batches. I've learned that you can't just double or triple up things so easily so I opted to make 3 distinct batches and then combine them later.

The woman suggested I skip the time consuming and messy step of pushing the mixture through the tamis and just not worry about the 'grit', but had I done that it would have proven a disappointment. On the left is the processed, uh, slurry/baby food and on the right is all the junk that was pulled out via the tamis. That's a lot of crap that shouldn't be there, and the end results are worth it.

The first long pasta sheet I went all the way to setting #7 on the rollers and it was too thin, it got cut just by the edge of the bag I was using to dispense the slurry with. Just going to #6 is good enough, and produced acceptable results without falling apart. Mostly.

I did a huge write-up on the forum about testing the 1x prism on the shotgun, but the shorter version of it is that these random Truball (tm) slugs and the trusty M500 with a new rail and the 1x mounted got me a legitimate 3 MOA shotgun out past 100 yards.

Seems impossible, but once the 100 yard zero was confirmed, I tried a shot at the 150 yard gong. First was low at 6 o'clock, second I put the triangle of the reticle on top of the plate like a little hat and...

I'm going to call that good and leave it alone. :)

I wasn't happy with the foregrip on the DD rifle with the magpul grip on the pic rail, felt too bulky. I found this smaller one on amazon that mounts to both keymod and MLOC and gave it a try and it's pretty damn good. Sadly amazon caught the seller and pulled the item before I could order another one. Hopefully they pop back up again and I can snag a 2nd for the spare keymod equipped rifle.

I found 1 of the BCM rail guard things in the parts box and stuck it on there and it made a huge difference. The edges of the keymod slots are, while not sharp, let's call them well defined. The BRW keymod upper is slick, the DD less so. With this on there it's really nice so I wanted to order one for the other side. Amazon sells Chinese knock-offs for $20 for a 6 pack. A 5 pack of the actual BCM ones is $12 at FG&G, so real it is.

We used to make a lot of these cinnamon swirl muffins (with just the stuff on top, not actually swirled in) back in the day and I saw the box mix on sale and snagged one. This time I made an actual swirl cake and it turned out very well. Saved on having to use all those little cups and I like eating it off a plate better than out of a muffin paper anyway.

More cooking news: we tried doubling the pizza dough for the grilled pizza. Same recipe and whatnot just half the dough balls gave us much thicker pizzas (obviously) and with the longer cooking time it actually crisped up and bubbled a bit like a real pizza. Pretty sure we'll do it this way from now on.

More, more cooking news: Andies mint ice cream. Although now I see I misspelled "Andies" I'm not about to rename all the .jpg files and whatnot. It's the same mint ice cream base as before, just with mint pieces instead of chips. Much better, but much more expensive. Next time I'm just going to use semi sweet mini chips and call it a day.

The Skallywag Tactical MDV knife set I ordered 6-ish months ago finally arrived. It's pretty nice, and hopefully that micro sheath that convinced me to try it works out as well as I think it will.

We were looking at lower end 1-6x scopes trying to find something "good enough" for non-duty grade guns and I found that the Cabellas house brand line carried a 1-4x and a 1-6x priced at $150 and $200. I was contemplating trying a 1-6x when a dude on the forum had a 1-6x with the mount for $125 and it wasn't selling. I offered him $100 and he took it.

Other than the horribly huge logos and labels (seen here covered in tape) it's not bad for the price. Even at retail price it's a good value, assuming it holds zero. The illumination is kinda kooky letting you switch between red and green, usually that's a sign of a garbage scope sold to people who don't know any better.... which I suppose this could be aimed at, let's be honest. The capped turrets are something that other manufactures are moving up-market, so having them capped here is nice. The power ring is easy to move, but lacks any sort of throw lever, and the turrets are 1/2" per click. Not labeled 1/2 MOA, but actually 1/2" so it's a "inch per hundred yards" sorta setup. That's strange, with a 556 calibrated BDC reticle. It doesn't matter at all, you don't dial this once it's zeroed so 1/2" or 1/2 MOA or 0.1 MIL makes zero difference, it's just odd to see it not 1/2 MOA.

I put it on the RDB and started to zero it and it fell apart at 100 yards. Went from what should have expanded to 3 MOA at 25 out to 8 MOA at 100. Then I noticed the rail on the RDB was actually loose. It's a problem according to the keltec forum but the fix is listed there as well so I've done it and the rail is back to secure. Hopefully next week I can get it back out and get it zeroed and see how the scope itself does.

The guy at work I got the free wood from texted me, said he's redone the top part of his deck and has another load of wood if I wanted to come haul it away. Of course I do! Good thing he kept my number, since he couldn't email/message me at work any longer.

Tuna salad sandwiches for dinner tonight, on these pretty good looking Dutch crunch rolls.

I updated my spending tracking sheet to include "Year to Month" info so I can see even if I'm over some months as long as it's offset by other months that I'm under I'll be OK. The woman says I'm obsessing about this, but when you're crafting the model you have to really pay attention to the details so you can trust it later when it's on auto pilot.