I LOVE this holster!

After five days in a woodlot and at the sawbuck, my pistol really needed a good cleaning even though I never fired a shot. I was too wasted to do it last night, and didn't plan on taking the time this morning because W and I are supposed to have breakfast at S&L's. So, since I was dressing up in "real people" clothes anyway, I decided to carry my frankenMak instead. I don't really like the Mak, because I'm more comfortable in the boonies with a 1911 than with a snubby little .380 that was designed for shooting uppity proles in the head at close range. But then, we weren't going into the boonies and the biggest thing I was likely to encounter was a rattlesnake. So what the hell?

Anyway, then W told me I had the time wrong and there was another hour before we had to leave. So I pulled the tools out of my range bag and went to work.

Then I went to clean the holster. This is that cop holster (Glock brand? Does anybody know if Glock made/makes leather goods?) I got at the flea market a few months ago. The belt loop is held out away from the pocket by a very stiff piece of folded leather, and it's a real crumbcatcher. Now it was all full of twigs, dirt and sawdust I couldn't dig out of there. But it turns out it's held on with three screws and comes right off for cleaning. If you ever open carry you've got to get one of these; it is the best 1911 holster EVER.

Okay, since sometime around the early '70's, ...

Roy Clark has played the definitive - if rather flashy - Maleguena.

The question has been, how the hell does he do that?

Here's how.



He does it by being fast like a freak with his right hand, and having the tips of all his left fingers replaced with coatings of pure unobtainium.

But other than that there's no trick at all. Anybody could do it.

Don't believe it? Here's a terrible bootleg video of him doing the same thing years later, with an acoustical twelve-string...

Do what you promised to do...

...and it will usually work out well for you.

I'm not a Christian. But I did try it on for several years, studied the Bible closely, and found parts of it quite illuminating. One line in Psalm 15 always stuck with me:

LORD, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill?

He who walks uprightly, And works righteousness, And speaks the truth in his heart;

He who does not backbite with his tongue, Nor does evil to his neighbor, Nor does he take up a reproach against his friend;

In whose eyes a vile person is despised, But he honors those who fear the LORD;

He who swears to his own hurt and does not change;

He who does not put out his money at usury, Nor does he take a bribe against the innocent.

He who does these things shall never be moved.

I was thinking about that this evening while driving home and congratulating myself for having done the right thing and - heh - gotten away with it. That business about "He swears to his own hurt and does not change" is a situation I've been flirting with for days now.

For most of this week I've been dreading the question I needed to ask D&L. Today I finished sawing up all the firewood I cut and hauled to their place. I can't estimate how much cut firewood is in a pile, but it was a couple of mighty big piles. There had to be a couple of cords there, and they only use it to heat their workshop. It's way more wood than they cut last year. So it seemed: A. Sufficient to their most profligate needs, and: B. A helluva good job of work for the money they offered me. If I stopped right there, I made far less than $10/hour and worked damned hard to get it. But...stopping right there wasn't my understanding of the thing I'd promised to do. I'd promised to cut ALL the deadwood in their meadow, and then chop it up for firewood. I didn't realize how much wood there was in that meadow.

Oh, I didn't want to keep that promise. But I've got damned few customers for my labor at this point, and pissing one of them off made less business sense to me than losing my shirt on one deal. Besides, over the years they've been extremely good neighbors.

So after I'd raked up the mess from my cutting, and while I was servicing the chainsaw to put it away, D was making noises about how I was all done. Those were welcome noises, but I wanted to be sure we were on the same page. So I told him that while it made sense to me that I should be done, and that I certainly welcomed being done if I was, it wasn't my understanding that I was done and I was prepared to continue if he wanted me to. He looked at me like I was crazy and pointed to the big pile of firewood. "Why would I want you to cut more than that?" he said. "You did a good job, and you're done."

So now I'm relieved, and got paid, and also get to feel all righteous about myself into the bargain. A good day.

Thus endeth today's self-righteous sermon. Now I'm gonna take a shower and booze it up.

SpaceX got one into orbit!

I haven't paid a lot of attention to SpaceX lately, because so far their only product has been press releases about their latest test failure - plus they took a lot of money from NASA which, while probably necessary, didn't endear them to me. But hey, you know what Willy Sutton said about that.

But yesterday, while I was sawing logs, SpaceX got their Falcon 9 off the ground and into a successful orbit.

Nay-sayers snarked about 1964 technology, and lamented the death of NASA's Constellation Program. But NASA ... well, don't get me started on NASA. I've called it the Space Flight Prevention Agency for years. If NASA had been in charge of the westward expansion, they'd still be expensively experimenting with ways to get highly-trained professionals across the Mississippi. We're talking about a government agency that, forty years after the moon landing, no longer has a way to put people into LEO. And people still want to leave spaceflight in their bureaucratic hands? I think not. Oh, Washington will keep shoveling money at them, because congresscritters will always want to brag about jobs in their districts. But it's a complete waste, and has been since Apollo.

The problem isn't the technology. The technology has been around for fifty years. The problem is the business model. In 1972 NASA promised the space shuttle would provide routine access to LEO at about $1000 per pound launch cost. It kept neither promise: The insanely-expensive shuttles are harder to maintain and launch than the Saturn V was, and the cost-per-pound was closer to ten thousand than to one - not to mention all the perfectly good people the horrid things killed. And all that money just begged Congress to get involved, with every one of those hundreds of parasites demanding a piece of the action for their districts in exchange for them voting more money to NASA. It's no way to run a business, and if you can't turn spaceflight into a profitable business there's no reason to do it. Put government in charge of finding a use for space and you end up with the International White Elephant Space Station, whose tiny crew is so busy keeping the thing running they don't have time for anything else.

Okay, see, I told you not to get me started on NASA. But you wouldn't listen.

Anyway, the business of business is business. It's time to stop farking around with government bureaucracies and let the big boys do it. It's forty years past time. I was supposed to be wearing a shiny suit and living on an asteroid by now, dammit.

Gloom, Despair, and Agony on meeeee...

I got to D&L's around 7:30, to find a very disgruntled couple of people. D was up on the straw pile, L was on her tractor with a pallet on the forks. Six or eight pallets were already filled with very moldy straw. It seems the huge tarpaulin they'd covered the straw with had failed in the middle, without letting them know. They figure they lost maybe $300 worth of bales.

I worked on cutting firewood until about 3, and if I could have gone another two hours I'd have finished the pile but my back is killing me. Plus it was 95+. Plus I'm old and lame and lazy. But tomorrow for sure. Then I can go out in the meadow and start over. Oy. But there's a shower in the barn and bourbon in the bottle. I'm off to avail myself of both, possibly simultaneously.

Whose idea was this "move to the desert and be a penniless hermit" thing, anyway? I want a few minutes in a dark alley with that guy.

Back to Room 101...

Oy. I spent all yesterday morning cutting up firewood for D&L, and maybe got through a third of the pile. (This job seems to work in thirds.) If I were stronger I'd be slowed by the fact that they've only got two chains for their chainsaw, and four solid hours of cutting juniper is enough to thoroughly dull two chains. But that isn't really a limiting factor for me, because at the end of four hours I'm too wasted to lift kindling.

So at the rate I'm going I'll have five days invested by the time I've chopped the wood I cut on Monday. I'm making quite a lovely big pile of firewood for them. At the end of this pile I'll have provided them more firewood than they put up all last autumn, and I'm hoping they'll elect to leave the rest on the trees. But I kind of foolishly contracted to cut all the deadwood in their meadow, so if they want me to I'm obligated to do this all over again - at least three times. For what I'm getting paid that would be a disaster, but I'll do it if I have to.

If they got the chains sharpened yesterday afternoon, I'm off to do it again this morning. At least it's gotten me out of the doldrums.

So you want to build a straw-bale house...

D&L have been working on this house for two years now. They figure they've got maybe another three before they move in. That gigantic pile of straw is their outside walls. For the record, most of the barn is also full of straw bales. They had to buy last year, right after the harvest.

Granted that it's a very elaborate house, but still...

I note that Washington DC no longer prohibits firearms...

...as long as certain common-sense requirements are met.

It's not the DC Council's fault that so far nobody has been able to recite the Bhagavad-Gita while hovering in mid-air. But as soon as someone does that to their satisfaction (They're still arguing which translation should become the standard) that gun registration will just sail through.

Well, I'm not getting any work done on the Lair...

...But I am making money.

In fact, if things continue as they are, which I don't expect, I'll need to cut back some.

I've got two regular gigs for neighbors, which between them make me 60% of my "dog nanny" wage and probably don't total six hours' work per week. That alone would keep me in essentials, though it doesn't pay for incidentals, emergencies or building materials. My woodcutting gig for D&L will net me about $150 plus a meal a day, with no expenses beyond the gas to get there. Now I've got another $150 trash-hauling job that's a lot less work, but because it involves trips to the county dump which I can't legally do I made a deal to share the wealth with W. Between those and another job I can't talk about (nothing illegal or anything, just private) my first month without dog-nanny wages is promising to be quite nicely remunerative. By my standards, you know.

Landlady has insisted on continuing to pay for Ghost's food, because she's not ready to just let me adopt him. And to be honest, though I often joke that he doesn't remember he was ever her dog that really doesn't seem to be true. He lives with me, but when she's here he insists on starting his day by touching base with her.

Finally, just lately I'm making out like a burglar on other peoples' cast-offs. I was just lamenting the death of a brand-new t-shirt because most of my shirts are rags, when somebody came by with a gigantic plastic bag full of clothes a son-in-law couldn't fit into anymore. There were a bunch of t-shirts (I'm just going to have to get over my objection to advertising companies I never heard of on my own back) and a near-lifetime supply of jeans that fit perfectly! I don't normally wear jeans, because I can get surplus BDUs really cheap and they're perfect desert wear. After years of doing that I find jeans far too hot and confining. But as a few friends have gently tried to point out, BDUs are fine when I'm in the boonies but when I come to town they make me look like ... well, not exactly The Grey Man. I've felt for some time that I need to dress more conventionally when I'm going to be around strangers, but my very few remaining pairs of conventional trousers are falling to pieces. I have some really nice clothes squirrelled away in a suitcase, but those are only for when I have to travel to a city. So this care package couldn't have come at a better time.

So anyway - money and supply-wise, June is shaping up to be a great month. But just when I was congratulating myself for finally making progress on the Lair, I suddenly don't have the time. Hopefully by the end of next week that will change, because I need to keep moving on the Lair. At least now I can console myself that my lack of progress isn't from too much sitting on my ass. I've never been convinced that I was really earning the money Landlady gave me for watching the dogs and the property. But I'm sure earning it now, boy.

Dogs and Halfway Measures

Sometimes I catch myself in what seems like a peculiarly male sort of idiocy, in which the actions available to me are either all one thing or all the other and neither is desirable. No really earth-shaking examples come to mind while I'm waiting for the first cup to brew, but I think you know what I mean.

The incident that brings it up this morning involves a dilemma I've been struggling with for a few weeks now. For years, it was the custom that the very first thing I do upon becoming more-or-less vertical in the morning is open the door and let all the dogs out so they can do their business. In fact last summer, since the bugs never got bad, I just bungeed the door open and the boys slept in the yard if they wanted to. But Magnus and Fritz seemed to have a moderating influence on the younger dogs and that influence is, alas, no longer present. This spring Little Bear became reluctant to come back in after I released him, and I couldn't trust him to stick around. In fact sometimes he showed up at the neighbors at Oh Dark Thirty, and that's just unacceptable. Till he grows out of that, LB can't be allowed outside unsupervised or unrestrained.

Now, LB has a bladder of Magnusesque proportions. I swear that boy could fill a jacuzzi first thing in the morning, not that you'd want him to. So he really can wait till a decent hour, when we're either gearing up for walky time or headed for Gitmo. But that doesn't mean he likes it. I tried putting him on his tie-out cable first thing, but he won't go while he's cabled-up unless the alternative is just exploding like a Jihadi with a Semtex belt and a yen for 72 virgins.

This morning he obediently stood aside and let Ghost go out alone, but then pestered me without mercy. I like to stay in the warm lair till I'm damned good and ready to go outside, which at a minimum means I'm fully-dressed, fed and coffeed-up - but then I know how to use the toilet. He kept putting his chin on my lap and rolling his little brown eyes at me - not being obnoxious, but conveying an unmistakable request. So I figured, well, it won't kill me to stumble around the yard for a few minutes as long as he comes right back inside.

He seemed okay with that compromise. So we're going to give that a try for a while.

Well, this certainly takes it to a new level...

Here's a photograph...


And here's another photograph...


Aaaand...you know where this is going, don't you?

At least this time they fired his ass. I guess there are some depths of lameness that even cops can't tolerate. I mean, c'mon. Threatened by a kitten?

H/T to War on Guns.

I had a good day today.

From 7:30 until 2 in the afternoon, I had what's got to be the perfect job. It was outside in the sunshine, it didn't involve hard labor, and it meant I got to use a really powerful machine I don't have to pay to maintain.

I took photographs, but unfortunately they seem to be visiting the Horsehead Nebula at the moment. So just pretend that right now you're looking at a big tractor with a backhoe on one side and a forklift WAAAAY out in front of the other. On the forklift is a gigantic pile of chaotically untrimmed tree cuttings.

Got it? Okay: to resume...

Yesterday I worked all day in D&L's meadow with a chainsaw, and only covered the little juniper grove in one corner. Juniper is an untidy tree: I understand that some live for millennia, but they do it by dying in parts. An apparently perfectly-healthy juniper might have a single ball of green stuff, tacked onto an enormous corpse that's been dead so long it's rotten and worm-eaten. The wood never grows straight, and I'll bet 90% of what I cut yesterday is junk and kindling. For that reason, a grove of old junipers can take up an awful lot of space even though most of it is dead and seasoned wood. Wood that makes the most fantastic firewood, even if you don't usually get a lot of it per tree. And you can cut all you want without harming a single tree.

Anyway, yesterday I cut it and today I had to deliver it. L has this tractor which is the very apple of her eye. She's more than generous about lending herself out with it, to dig a footer or a grave or a trench or whatever, but I never thought I'd see the day when she'd let anybody else use it. But the problem was, if she wanted the job done that was the way it had to be. Picking up and piling all this wood was almost an all-day job with the tractor, and without the tractor it would have taken much more time and labor than I would have been willing to do for any price they'd have been willing to pay. D&L are both tied up full-time on their house project, so she decided before they even offered me the gig that it would involve me being permitted into the Holy of Holies.

Hee hee...I like tractors. I also used to get a kick out of driving the company's forklift. A tractor WITH a forklift? I'd have done this part for laughs.

It took a lot longer than expected because there was a LOT of wood! (Imagine that at this moment you're looking at a very long and impressive wood pile, approximately four feet high.) I didn't really have a good idea, yesterday, just how much wood I cut. I cut a LOT. No wonder I was so wasted.

Even good habits...

...can have unintended consequences.

After an embarrassing incident last year that could have been very bad, I've gotten into the habit of racking a new round into the chamber of my .45 before leaving the lair in the morning, and then putting the shucked round back into the magazine. Since I carry the pistol every day but rarely actually fire it off the shooting range I can get a peculiar jam where the first round in the magazine nose-dives and refuses to chamber, leaving me with an open-slide malf that can take several seconds to clear. It never happens if I've recently shaken up the ammo queue.

So like I say, every morning just before grabbing my hat I rack the slide and chamber a new round. The boys have learned this, and take it as a signal that Uncle Joel's starting to think in terms of Walky Time. They approve highly.

So this morning it's June 1, and I'm about to spend another day in a field that's allegedly all aslither with rattlesnakes. (yesterday I didn't see any.) I thought, it's about time to load a couple of rounds of snake shot. So I dug around in the ready-ammo cabinet and found my little thingy of snakeshot. I unholstered the .45, thumbed off the safety, and made the snick-snack-snick-snack noise...

..And was suddenly hip-deep in excited dogs, certain they were about to get the good walky they were denied yesterday. Unfortunately Uncle Joel has to work today and needs his legs, so it's Gitmo this morning as well. Sigh.

This "working" thing is too much like work.

I got a gig with some neighbors, cutting the dead wood out of their meadow.

Today I spent seven hours cutting juniper, and I'll bet I'm not a third done. With the cutting, that is. After that I've got to haul it all up their hill and convert it into firewood. I definitely need to get better at negotiating price, because I definitely underbid this one. Feeling very old at the moment.

Still, I console myself that I'm actually getting paid to learn something I need to know how to do. The Secret Lair will be primarily heated with wood, and nobody's going to be delivering that wood - I've got to go chop it for myself. Between the chainsaw and the falling timber, a guy could get hurt doing this. I'm a city boy, and there's a learning curve. By the end of this gig I should have some expertise, but right now I'm nursing a number of minor wounds and a plethora of not-so-minor aches and pains.

This "off-the-grid" and "off-the-books" business has its drawbacks. Don't let anybody tell you different.

TMG

I think it's probable that if you're reading this at all, you are likely to agree with the proposition that Too Many Guns (TMG) is essentially a null value - there simply is no such number.

TMG=∅

This is, of course, a highly subjective determination. Paul Helmke, for example, could easily place a value on TMG and express that integer in an extremely simple statement:

TMG > 0,

in that any number greater than 0 equals Too Many Guns. But even he, if pressed, would assign quite a list of qualifications and exceptions to the effect that TMG becomes a null value if G refers to Government guns. I don't have enough math to know how to express the complete equation, but this post would have been substantially funnier if I could. It probably involves cosines.

But who cares what he thinks anyway? For purely practical purposes, "TMG" only truly comes into play in the matter of storage and maintenance. For many (by no means all) people, a pragmatically accurate statement would be

TMG ≥ C^s + 1,

or the capacity of the gun safe(s) plus one gun, at which point things can get hard to keep track of.

Can you tell I'm having trouble finding something I've been looking for?

Lookin' busy here...

Landlady and M are here for the long weekend. We got a bunch done on her project, and tomorrow we'll be moving either to M's Dome or The Secret Lair. I'm running out the door with fresh bread for a get-together with the neighbors, to wit: The very first dinner party at Landlady's Meadow House! Very exciting, may run late.

So no blog for you.

Yes of course the old lady deserved to die.

She wouldn't answer the questions.

Ten years ago the big complaint was the "long" census form, which has now been spun off into a "separate" form called the "American Community Survey." Now there are hundreds of stories about census "workers" coming to doors and demanding information, or even going to neighbors to get information about you. This old lady really meant it when she told them to get off her lawn, so of course she had to die. There just wasn't any other way to deal with her.

I'd ask something stupid like "Do you still think Mr. Policeman is your friend," but somebody would just give me a lecture about how this was a perfectly proper thing to do, and how if you don't cooperate with the nice police officer of course he's going to shoot you, what else would you expect? Simply getting off her porch and leaving her alone couldn't possibly be an option - how else would the proles learn proper respect for their betters?

God, sometimes I hate the world.

Had a good day for once.

The electrical and insulation on The Secret Lair is finally coming along, making me feel better about life. I needed a bunch of little things to proceed, so I tagged along with W to town for a hardware run. After that it was too hot and windy for wrestling with insulation mats, so I finally decided to find out why the track on the Jeep's passenger seat wouldn't let the damned thing go back even halfway.

Took the seat out, and couldn't find anything wrong. Took the track off the seat, and just as I was about to despair I found that itsy-bitsy rock that had wedged itself deeeeeep inside the track. Multiple banging on the track had wedged it in really good, but I finally winkled the damned thing out and everything started moving again. Lubed it up, bolted it all back together, and at last the Jeep is a two-seat conveyance again. Happy day! Took about two hours in the sun and wind, but I still got'er done.

Look, it isn't socialism, okay?

It's just people who are 'way smarter than you, making your decisions for you. For the good of society as a whole, sometimes the good of the individual must be sacrificed. These people have all the facts, they have the big picture. You little people can't be expected to see the whole thing from 'way down there, so just relax and trust your leaders.



It isn't socialism. Totalitarianism isn't socialism unless it says it is.

H/T to Karen De Coster.

Earth to Angsty Actors: Shut Up.

Look, I don't begrudge Jeremy Irons his pink castle, or his six other houses or his fleet of cars. If I had his money, I'd spend it on myself without remorse. But just where the hell does he get off with bloviations like:

“People must drop their standard of living [so] the wealth can be spread about. There’s a long way to go.”

But of course this time it's not just talk. Already he has divested himself of his vast collection of possessions and currently walks the earth doing good, like Kane in Kung Fu. Meeting people. Getting into adventures. Right? Oh, wait...

Launching himself as a green campaigner, Irons has revealed plans to make a documentary about sustainability and waste disposal, likening himself to Michael Moore, the controversial film maker, although “not as silly”.

Too late, Jeremy.