Drove to Spartenburg SC today to swap a subaru for a subaru, very boring. Long 9 hours though. Yesterday I also drove, just the used stuff up to service but this was the first ride:

It's a 2018, with 12,500 miles on it. Clearly it was someone's occasional toy, had some dog hair in it. My guess is the usual single dude gets a dog then gets a wife then she starts popping out kids and it's time to replace the toy with a solid reliable minivan, but instead they get a crappy Subaru SUV.

The stick in that thing is amazing, like Miata level amazing and it's got plenty of power to get in trouble. Comes on really linearly though, easy clutch engagement and then zoom, off it goes into the high revs. It was more fun than the STI even. The STI has more power and is faster and AWD but you feel like you're forcing it to go. The BRZ just kinda wants to play.

Last run was to the glass shop and I was hungry (after 2pm) and the guy I was following suggested we try the "best Mexican place he's found since leaving Riverside". OK then.... it was.... meh. I mean for here it's good enough, and I would go back, but the bar here is notoriously low.

They had this sign, which is the truth.

This goofy sculpture thing the woman has keeps breaking, there just is too much leverage on that glue joint. I needed to come up with some small piece of plastic to reinforce things, and the best I could do was a chunk of a primer tray cut up with the dremel. Works, and you can't see it when it's on the shelf and she's happy so it's a win.

Can't recall if I mentioned it already but I ordered one of the travel guitars I've been looking at for the last 6+ months. I got a factory referb off eBay, and there was a 50ff coupon and a 200ff coupon which stacked and it ended up as $152 delivered, basically half of the amazon price for a new one. Sounds awesome, right? Well... 'referb' doesn't mean what you think it means. This thing had 2 tuning knobs that were broken (no resistance so they wouldn't stay where you put them when you played) and there was something wrong with the pickup inside. The D and G strings could be tuned with a clip on vibration tuner, but once 'in tune' and you actually played it with a headset or plugged into the amp it made a horrible sound. Couldn't tune them with the phone (sound) based tuner at all. Back it goes.

The form factor was pretty good, it was totally playable from a size perspective but the action height was 2x too high which made it really difficult to play well. That could have been corrected, a $100 setup at Harry's where the straighten the neck and sand down the bridge would have done the trick but overall it's just so.... cheap. I doubt it would really survive much travel.

The woman has been in PHX since last Thursday and I'm in somewhat of a holding pattern. Spending a lot of time at home, don't want to be too far away from the goats. Not working, not going to class, not even the range. Very odd.

My first all on my own uber trip! The Jeep was ready for pickup (failing engine mount and oil pan replacement done under 'warranty') but the woman didn't want to take me and Sean was kinda slow on the idea (because he also didn't want to drive me) so I actually tried uber. Dude showed up, took me there and there was no drama. Vehicle was a black on black Corolla and it was the cleanest car I've seen outside of the showroom. How he keeps a black interior that clean I'll never no.

Here are all the receipts for work done to the Jeep. I may have got myself a problem here, or maybe all the problems are fixed? Perhaps I really should look into one of their service contracts if this keeps up.

The micro sized tuner I got for the Taylor that wouldn't get hit by the case lid when I put it away with it on quit working a while back. It wouldn't read the low E string most of the time. After forgetting and closing the lid and bashing the good tuner one too many times I got another small one to try. It's pretty slick, the notes roll in from the side instead of being centered with a bar or other indicator moving around. The double articulated neck lets me put it on there in a usable spot yet low enough not to get hit by the case. It seems to work, and as long as it keeps working I think we have a winner. It's USB rechargeable so it will die some day but unlikely for a long time.

Our of boredom (most likely) I piled up 3 of the keltecs I don't use (SU16, PLR16, KS7) and took them to FG&G to trade. I lost a lot of value that way, but really don't want to deal with jackasses from the forum any more.

This is what I replaced them with, a Springfield Hellion. Another bullpup, it's like I don't learn my lesson but the reviews of this one claim it's actually accurate, not just marketing accurate.

The reviews were correct. With just the 1-8x Vortex on there, in the cold and wind I managed to get these groups as the 'best' and 'only' shot with each ammo type. 55gr M193 and 77gr Hornady. The M193 was pretty much as accurate and it's cheaper and way easier to find, so that's awesome that I don't need match 77gr to get reasonable accuracy. It could be more accurate even, these were just the first tries and the center dot on the optic is larger than the aiming spot at 100 yards.

Rather than putting larger and larger battery packs into the emergency kit for the radio/phones, I decided to try a solar panel. First test, slightly overcast and just tossing the panel against a tree gets me 5 watts out of a '15 watt' panel. That's not... bad I guess? Give it full sun and it gets to 10 watts and I'll call it it a win. Just haven't had a sunny day were I'm at home to test again. Today.... rain.

Picture is blurry, but I got caught in an accident on I40. They closed the road right as I rolled up.

With all the clocks on computers you wouldn't think an external one would be required, but the mac clock is only visible on the active screen so I'm always looking around for it, and when I'm playing games on the PC the clock is hidden by the full screen game and the mac screens go to sleep. This little LED clock is a total splurge but also easy to read and not so bright as to blind me.

Yesterday was the prepper car event, where I was teaching the 101 of car maintenance. Tire changes, checking oil, batteries, etc, etc. I had an outline of stuff, thought it would maybe take an hour to go through but it was 2 hours and I wasn't even at the 75% mark. People had a lot of questions. I figured there would be 2-3 people there, but ended up with 12 so that makes it slower as well. In all though, it was good. Or at least I enjoyed leading the talk and sharing some info. Smaller women didn't enjoy the difficulty of getting lug nuts off tires in the 'change your own tire on your car' section.

Someone in the neighborhood behind us posted on facebook that they had water coming across their driveway from 'the woods'. Stacey saw that post, told Kristen who told me who went out into the dark to see who's well was pumping water everywhere. I hooked up with the drunkards two houses down in the search and eventually we found this:

Those people weren't home and not answering the phone so one of the drunk rednecks successfully disconnected the power at the well head... with much sparking as he pulled the connection apart with the pump running. They can fix it when they're back but at least now it's not running 24/7 wasting water and power and flooding the field.

Update on the new tuner... now it too is having trouble reading the low E string. Why does the big one and my original fender cheap one both work flawlessly and these other two don't? What's the secret?

Giftmas bonus check from work. Pretty sure this is another first:

The "trail rated" badges on the Jeep are fakes. They're real badges, but the Jeep isn't trail rated. No manual patriot can be because there is no low range 4x4 option. The CVT models have a version that has a fake low range so that with tow hooks, skid plates and some better tires it can qualify. Anyway, once I learned the badges were fake I've wanted to remove them and today I got around to it. 3M adhesive removal wheel for the win.

However.... on the drivers side the badge was covering a dent! Oy! Maybe it's why they did that in the first place. Oh well, a dent is better than a fake badge.

I ordered a $35 bayonet from Amazon to see if it would lock onto the Hellion and it didn't fit in the same way Jason's real surplus one didn't. The handle mount on this one was 0.01" too thick. Perhaps the rifle is out of spec, but I'm not about to start filing on the rifle so I detached the mount from the bayonet and got to filing. Slow and steady and now it's clearing the mount base and locks on solid.

Jason commented that it looked like I filed it crooked, but in fact the whole mount is just typical Chinesium junk and sketchy. This probably isn't how it's supposed to look:

The rifle with it's stabby bits attached. Wouldn't want to take it to war, but it will be perfect to troll Jeff at the next rifle class.

Put the second key holder up, now we have the vehicle keys on the main one in the mud room and the shed, generator and other keys in the laundry room on the other. Yes, not secure.

Went to the range today and tested the Magtech steel case 9mm. Short answer is that it's 'fine'. Not as soft as the Sterling but less smokey and dirty than wolf, so a clear bargain in today's market. I will still use the Sterling for matches since it's lower recoiling but no reason to not get the Magtech as the Wolf/Tula supply dries up.

Enchiladas for dinner last night with dad and his woman. Tasty.

The NC legislature passed some 'protect the children from online porn or something' bill and now pornhub is blocking all connections from NC. The .gov wants some sort of 'digital ID' to be used to login, which sounds like the start of some sort of tracking. I can live without pornhub, but what's next? We all know it starts 'for the children' and then turns into pure BS. Perhaps 2024 is the year I finally setup a commercial VPN solution and start making where I am? Would at least let me use iCloud drive from Panera.

BUG match and both Sean and Boz beat me... but neither were actually shooting BUG. Both were in CCP so using G19 sized guns with 10 rounds, vs. my Hellcat with 6. Unlike last time, every stage could be shot with exactly 10 so as long as you didn't screw up the CCP guys didn't have to reload at all, but all the BUG people did. That's more of a game changer than just the larger gun. Even if it was only 1 second per stage for that reload (and it was more for me, I only had 1 clean reload the whole match), taking those 6 seconds off my time puts me well ahead of everyone and I think they know it. Such is the game, and they're just afraid to play. :)

Yet another Jeep problem, this time it was right after I got gas. Fired back up, went to drive away and.... dead. Wouldn't restart. I figured it was the battery... but because it was running at the time the alternator should have been doing it's thing and I would have been fine. That would indicate that the alternator wasn't working and I had been running off the battery the whole time and that last start was just the last juice it could supply.

Of course none of my supplies were back in the Jeep yet, so the woman had to drive the jump box out to me. With the box, it would restart but then not run when it was removed. Clearly the alternator... right? Tow truck time, with an additional charge for the mileage to drag it back to the dealer. At this point I was pretty done, I wanted to just sell it back and admit my mistake and move on with life.

Turns out it was just the battery. Apparently a bunch of chrysler branded vehicles will not run at all if the battery isn't good. Even if the alternator is fine, if the battery is wrong it just shuts off. That's very dumb. They dropped a new battery in just to move it into the shop and it all works fine now.

I never got any sort of warning light and there is no gauge for voltage so I went the easiest route I could and got a replacement USB power widget for the phone charger that includes a gauge. There is a difference with the engine off vs. on, so the alternator is doing it's thing. I'll just have to keep an eye on it. That 'off' voltage seems really low but who knows how accurate this thing is and/or what sort of regulation may be going on before it gets to that lighter socket. The one in the van is hard wired to the battery with a relay so it reads the true battery voltage.

Apex is growing up, we now have blue city issues like random needles in the gas station parking lot. Just noticed this gem while I was waiting for the tow truck.

The woman asked for this from her parents for giftmas so we could put the golf bags out of the way and not have them falling over in the closet. I'm good with that. Rather than put it in front of the ledge around the garage, I made some feet for it so I could screw it down to the ledge and get it more out of the way. The woman painted them and I finished my part of the project by mounting it up. She can organize, I just tossed random stuff on it for the photo and to get it off the floor.

Looking at those photos now, I should have either routed the edges a bit, or at least cut some 45 degree angles on those corners to make it look sorta like more than just some wooden slats. I'm not really a woodworker, I do rough framing work.

Briggs gave me that deer meat and I made up 3 batches of jerky using some old untested seasoning packs. Bad idea. They're very meh. Editable, and I'll eat all of it but not my best effort in 15+ years.