You would think there is more hoopla about this, but I'm done. Or done for now. Done with tech anyway. Retired. Still too new to feel like anything other than a long weekend or a holiday, but unlike most long holiday breaks the weather doesn't suck.
The woman found this in the front yard. Pretty cool.
Yesterday was another of the MTS classes, this is my 3rd now. Both Sean and Jason were at this one.
Jason convinced us to try wearing our plate carriers a bit.
Because I'm narrow the plate covers almost all my torso. Good for not getting shot, but it makes it hard to shoulder a rifle. It either has to stick way out on my arm, or I have to try to keep the stock pulled against the plate. That was really hard, it kept slipping off and throwing shots low/left as the stock went high/right. The quick in the field solution was to just put a stick in this little velcro loop on the edge of the plate. It was just enough to keep the stock pinned to the carrier. Made a huge difference.
Yes, my shirt is on inside out. Didn't notice that until much later in the day.
The PA 1x prism isn't powering off and doing 'shake awake', it's just broken. A few times I noticed it off and a quick tap brought it back so I thought that it was doing shake awake, just with really insensitive sensors for the shaking. That changed though when it went out in the middle of a drill. Etched reticle was totally usable of course, and sorta proved my point that it's good to have in case the electronics crap out.
A few videos of various drills being run that I'm too lazy to make thumbnails for:
Nothing about the tweaker capture last month, well at least I can put the photos here. Might remember the story in 20 years but probably not.
Turned off the quail egg rotator and candled the eggs. Looks like 2 didn't do anything, 1 stopped growing early on and the rest are OK. Won't know how well they hatch for another few weeks but it's a good sign that there were only 3 rejects in the batch.
Finished up the winch install yesterday. Circuit breaker attached, wires created, everything cabled up and tested. Next up is to spool out all the cable and tension it.
Made up a double batch of bagel dogs to replenish my fast and easy lunch supply. Yum.
At ~4700 rounds in the poverty pony and I took it apart to check the gas rings. They're shot again, at about 300f the expected lifespan. That seems to imply that the carrier is not machined correctly and the rings are getting chewed up on the rough walls they're supposed to be sealing against. The fix is a new BCG, but for now I'll toss new rings in this one and run it until it fails.
Also at 4700 rounds, in theory, I should be seeing some accuracy degradation.
I had some wolf that I used at the beginning of the rifle's life that was running 2.1" at 100 for a 5 shot group. I put the 1-8x on and the rifle stock with the good trigger and did some 5 shot groups. Average was... 1.9" at 100 so we're good. We're good. :)
Rachael and Will are coming over and the woman wants to do chicken salad sandwiches on Dutch Crunch. The first batch I made.... didn't turn out. I tried to use the dark pans because they fit side-by-side in the oven. Even lowering the temp 25 degrees they ended up burnt on the bottom, under baked and not browned nor crunchy on top. Second batch of the day I used the regular aluminum pans and rotated them twice. Probably bad opening the oven so many times but they turned out.
Bad on the left, sitting in the laundry room to get stale so they can be turned into bread crumbs for schnitzel, good on the right.
I need either 2 small aluminum pans, or one huge aluminum pan. Probably easier to source two small ones.
The cable is down, so now is a good time to update the journal I've been ignoring for a while. I've been sick the last week, some sort of inner ear thing that's giving me vertigo. Very un-fun not being able to walk around and getting wicked dizzy every time I move my head. It's getting better, but still lingering.
Making progress on the guitar for sure. It took me a long time to pass that level 1 test, but with just an hour or two of practice on the level 3 test, I nailed it:
Obviously for the level 1 test I was just doing the online lessons and now I'm doing those plus the live lessons and homework so I'm spending way more time at it but the rewards are there.
The quail hatched, a few days early. They were supposed to hatch while the woman was out of town, but they started while she was still here. Started with 50 eggs, and between non-fertilized, non-hatching and a few infant deaths, I'm sitting at 31 birds. That's a few too many, but the guy at the feed store is interested in some so I'll have a place to dump the extras once they're old enough to be outside without heat.
The woman spent a week in PHX visiting her parents and taking her nephew down to UofA to check it out. He's got a full academic scholarship there, so I can't imagine he won't go. Graduating from UCLA with a ton of debt or graduating for UofA without any debt? Since he's not a gender studies major, I'm sure he'll do the right thing.
While she was gone I did a little cooking. My most adventurous thing (remember I'm sick here) was to make some corn tortillas. They turned out very well even without a tortilla press, you just put a ball of dough in a zip lock bag and use a glass pie plate to squish it. You rotate pressure around the outside of the pie plate and can see the dough spreading out. It's really cool, and shows that a tortilla press is not needed.
Once I had a few pressed and cooked, I got the wild idea to pan fry some and make a tostada. That also worked. The oil wasn't quite hot enough but for a first attempt it was edible.
The other cooking included crock pot quail that I made into stir fry, and an egg sandwich. I don't like fried eggs, except in McMuffin form for some reason. I used to get these as a treat at work, and they're easy to make at home (obviously) I just never do. The woman makes them occasionally so the English muffins were in stock, and one fried egg, a piece of cheese and a slice of deli ham I fried in the egg pan really quick and poof, a sandwich.
Since I didn't have to share the TV or explain what I was watching, I ended up watching a lot of bad movies and shows. LLamageddon, Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs, Iron Sky, well you get the idea. In Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs they didn't use any live blanks in the guns, everything was CGI after the fact. This one shotgun that showed up in a dozen scenes used by various people is not even functional. You can see that the pump is to the rear and they bolted a flashlight to the mag tube, so the pump can't actually go forward. Everyone blazing away with this semi-auto pump thing and never reloading.... they deserved to get eaten by dinosaurs.
I wanted to put some single mag pouches on my battle belt vs. the doubles I had before (pistol on top of AR) and looked at the actual name brand taco pouches. They seemed kinda cheapy for $45 each, so I got some even cheaper knock-offs from Amazon. These will not last in heavy use, the latches are junk (but zip ties 'fix' that) and I'm pretty sure the back plates will pull off the mounts at some point as well. You can over-torque the mount screws and the threaded inserts spin inside the plastic. So for $50 total I got 4 pouches and can try it out, and if I like them then maybe I can get the real thing. These will work well enough on my dryfire belt if/when I replace them.
I also did the laundry, vacuumed the house, etc. When the woman came home, everything was clean and tidy.
She wanted a lower screen on the big barn door for the summer, so I took the old manger apart and built a screen that slides into mounts on the door frame. If I had made a swinging screen door like the top half (or just extended it down) I wouldn't go all the way to the ground because of how uneven the floor is. Also a goat laying in the way would prevent you from being able to swing the door open "in". So, she gets a drop in screen half. It's good enough for the occasional use it will get. Now she's just gotta paint it.
It's made differently than every other screen of course. I split the 2x4s the long way and sandwiched the wire inside. That way there are no sharp edges down at goat eyeball level and it's possibly stronger than 2x2s with the wire on the back. I really doubt any creature will test it other than Taco rubbing his butt on it, but it should hold up. If they can snap a 2x4, they probably deserve to eat a goat.
The cable is out, so I still can't push this to the backup site. Good thing the push script does all changes since the last push and isn't reliant on time.
I setup a replacement for the Tactical Stick (Tm) on my carrier. Putting one of the Blackhawk speed strips into the webbing backwards makes it stick out and provide enough of a block to stop the butt stock from slipping off the carrier. Well, in dryfire it works. We'll see how it does live on Saturday in class... assuming I'm not still sick and can go.
Was just looking back for something in 2008 and I was so verbose back then. Entries have a ton of detail, you really know what was going on. Probably because there were so few pictures. Now it's mostly pictures and little blurbs of text. Better?