Memories

In an odd confluence, there's a thread on Arfcom about going through photo albums and The Lovely Harvey archiving her photos to the NAS.

The thread is about, "should I save these?"

There's people he doesn't know in those pics.

If you're looking a pic of a place you don't recognize, with people who are strangers, should you keep it?  Especially if the person who took the picture is gone?

I take a lot of pics since the hobby went digital, and I can mostly remember what's going on in the pictures.  But will anyone else?

Many pictures I take get a caption here on the blog.  I explain what's going on and give context that won't be with a file on a hard drive.

I have folders of photos named "Card Dump" which was just moving it off the camera onto a hard drive.  Photos that should probably be culled ruthlessly because there's multiple attempts at the same photo there.  I should also organize them into other folders to that there's some damn context.

I do a better job of curating my Flickr account than my NAS.  I should probably change my habits. 

Peaked

So far, the vast majority of the people I've known who've managed to attain the rank of Eagle Scout have failed to do much else with their lives.

It's a small pool, but strangely consistent.

Bland

You can live indefinitely on a diet of potatoes, cooked kale and whole milk.  It is nutritionally complete and has sufficient calories.

Would you want to?

On many forums when someone is discussing an old design, like the 1911, there's always at least one person who will chime in that they only own MODERN designs and don't have a cabinet full of useless relics.

First off, Sunshine, in the course of owning my safe full of useless relics; your "modern" design isn't mechanically all that different from a 90 year old gun.  The big change has been in materials.  Related to the materials change is a trend to make them easier to manufacture.  But they're still using the same tilt barrel short recoil action that Browning and Saive put into the Hi-Power.  And that came from eliminating the link on the 1911!

Still.

Where did this idea that gun ownership must be brutal and utilitarian come from?

My thinking about the post about the 1911's and Glocks that have slipped through my fingers reminded me of clinging tenaciously to the minimum for home and self defense.

I was forced to be utilitarian because I had to be.

But these people talk like being anything but is shameful and I don't understand it.

I've long held it's OK to own a gun because it makes you happy even if it's a useless piece of shit.

My .25 ACP collection has no real utility; but I think they're fun.

It is OK to have fun!

I wonder if these are the same people who have every penny planned out in advance and eschew having fun in their earning years because they're going to be rich and able to do anything they want when they retire young.

I've met a few of these people living in Florida.  You know what they do?  The same thing as before without a job to keep them occupied.  They don't know how to have fun so they sit in their well furnished, but sterile, McMansions and do... nothing.  They're bored and unhappy and don't understand why I'm so cheerful being a poor.

Bidding War

Every so often I look around for a Gen 1 Glock 17.

An actual, vintage, 17.1 is very hard to come by and, usually, very expensive; so I end up looking at the Lipsey's Gen 1 Classics.

A couple weeks ago I found one with a penny start and not much bidding, so I put a max bid of $300 on it.

It went from $250 to $260 and it stayed there pretty much until the last half hour.

The last two bidders didn't get past my $300 until almost the last 15 minutes, then spent the next hour and a half running it up to just over $400 in $5 increments and resetting the clock to auction's end because of Gunbroker's 15 minute rule.

While $400 for one of these appears to be a decent deal, the bidding war reminds me of why I bid the way I do.  Put the max I'm willing to pay as my max bid and then let it ride, or not.

Because these two, "it's just $5 more," for another $100.

There's going to be around another $100 in fees, shipping and taxes too.

I learned about auction fever with my '91 Caprice.  I paid $8k for a solid $5k car because I couldn't let the other bidder win!  If I'd stuck to my plan, I would have paid $4,500 for a 9C1 and gotten a 350 instead of a 305.

But I learned something important that day.

Buh Bye

"Well, bye," C. Bill Brocious.

Puerto Rico would like to stop being a US territory and return to being a Spanish territory.

I am fine with this, with one proviso:

Every Puerto Rican on the mainland is deported.

They've long irritated me with their blatant nationalism and refusal to even visit there; having been born here and somehow not learning to be an American or speak English.

The worst neighbor we've ever had was some kind of Puerto Rican nationalist and they were loud, obnoxious and the yard was covered in trash.  The empty lot is a far better neighbor.  New Jersey plates on all the cars too, so that might have been the real problem.

But aren't ALL the Puerto Ricans on the mainland from New Jersey if you check their license plates? 

They're the pricks whose kids took a bb gun to our windows one evening.

It still amuses me that the deputy who responded to our call couldn't do anything because Mom denied the kids were outside at the time and there were no bb guns in her house.

Bitter amusement.

But, with us glaring from the front porch, said, loud enough for us to hear, "You're in Florida now, not New Jersey.  Shooting a gun at dwelling is a forcible felony, and the homeowner can shoot back.  Any kind of gun.  BB gun, paint gun, squirt gun, staple gun, are you following me here, Mom?"

They moved very shortly afterwards because they'd seen us with rifle cases coming and going from the range. 

Is It Part Of The Pattern?

As I get balder, I notice that I am growing thick luxurious hair out of my ears.

It's really irritating.

Like A Scorpion It's My Nature

I did it again...

A female friend was venting and I was trying to fix the problem.

Ladies.

Don't bring us a problem you don't want solved.

Solving problems is what men do.

We wait for the opportunity, it's the main thing we bring to the partnership.

Don't get mad at us.

Don't say shit like, "now do you see why we're angry all the time from keeping shit bottled up?"

Because I'm going to reply with something like, "I figured you'd be happy getting the problem fixed!"

We are baffled by the idea that you just want to vent about a problem and leave it unresolved as long as someone will listen to the complaint and be sympathetic.

We're showing sympathy, we're offering to fix it.

I know you know how I respond to hearing about the problems of people I dislike.

It's isn't an offer to fix it, is it?

Speaking Of Past Lives

These were the tools of my trade for the first five years I was a draftsman.

Not sure where my Ames lettering guide went.

I was good at manual drafting.

CAD killed that.

I was good at CAD too.

The market for skilled drafters has contracted severely.

Not For Me Thanks

Tomorrow, for some reason, there's a rash of 4-year olds graduating high school.

There is no, possible, way for them to 18 and to have known them for 14 years.

Because if that were true, then I'd be older too and...

Fuck, there's no Toy-R-Us... I guess I will have to grow up.

You Can Tell From The Photo

In my hood, the houses are close together side to side.

But we have big back yards.

The neighboring hoods have wider lots, with more space between the houses.

And almost no back yard.

They get bigger houses too.

I think I prefer my smaller house with a big yard to the other option.

Two Weeks

I have been free of the wretched hive of scum and villainy which is AR15.com for two weeks.

I've actually read some books in the mean time.

Creative juices are flowing that had stopped.

Who knew that would happen.

Except for like five people who have no other way to get hold of me, I wonder how nice life without Facebook would be.  I once took several years off from that place.

No Plan

The Dumpster Fire Family has procured transportation so that the matriarch may get to her court date tomorrow.

She refuses to consider that she may found guilty and taken into custody to begin her sentence.

Admittedly, that's a worse-case scenario, but it's a possibility.

She's equating unlikely with impossible.

I'm putting it at probable because of her financial history and tomorrow being the very first day she's ever spoken to her attorney.

Near as we've been able to tell she called the public defender's office the one time and then sat back and waited for them to call her back.

If this is more than an arraignment, she could be in a world of shit.

Update: Today was just the arraignment.  I wonder what she pled.

If You're Going To Be Stupid

You'd better be tough.

Harvey's friend who got evicted at the end of September...

She got pulled over today.

They impounded her car.  The cop didn't have a specific reason other than her plate came up in the "seize the plate" database.

This is normally an issue with unpaid moving violations, insurance or registration.

This is the family's only working vehicle.

Did I mention she's got a court date on Monday, and no vehicle to get her there?

Fun, huh?

I think her husband is about done with this shit.

Powerless

Just as I was putting the wheel back on Moxie I heard a crackling bang and felt a thud in the ground.

Alarming to feel a thud when you've got the car up on jack-stands!

A tree decided to fall across our power lines six houses up.

I saw the lines down looking past the power company's truck when I took my test drive.

I will commend them for getting the lines back up and power restored in just three hours.

Huzzah!

More concerning was fire-rescue being at that same house just before the power company showed up, but after the power went out.

I don't know that neighbor, but I hope they weren't trimming when it fell and they got hurt.

Disconnect

There was a day when I stopped calling my dad.

I realized that I was the one doing all the work staying in contact.

Since then he has only initiated contact one time.

He called me to tell me his mom had died... a month after the funeral.

He figured that I wouldn't show up, so didn't think I needed to be informed BEFORE the funeral.

That's the last time we've communicated.

That was 15 years ago.

I did send him a birthday card for his 80th birthday.

No reply.

I feel like I was the one written off in this "relationship" and not me writing him off.

Pity.

But it's odd that the moment I stopped putting in any effort, communication stopped.  It's not like he didn't know my phone number.

But I'm familiar with this.

My sister doesn't speak to me anymore either.  She's got more justification.  I was not a good brother and she got to hear all the horror stories from Mom when I was trying to process my PTSD.

Mom didn't get to live long enough to see me on the other side of that.

I don't wonder about my sister at all, and I hope she is happy and successful without me.  She would have been far happier if I'd never been in her life, to be honest.

C'est la vie.

This Thing IS Still On

I've been busy.

Said goodbye to a favorite restaurant.  They say they're relocating, but how much will change is still getting conflicting information.

Helped JT fix his car and didn't even spend any time in the hospital after he decided to body-slam the ladder from the top of the lift.  You'd have to ask him why he thought that was a good idea, but nothing seems broken.

Getting the differential out of a 2008 CTS is super simple and easy.  He reports that it's much smoother driving when both the ring and pinon gears have all their teeth.

Perishible?

I once knew how to do calculus...

I have not used it in decades and never outside the classroom.

I suspect that it would take almost as much effort at this point to remember what I learned as it did to learn it in the first place.

Statistics, on the other hand, keeps coming up because of gaming and doing reality checks on GURPS.

Someplace I have my chicken scratching of figuring out the difference between 1d+4 and 2d and why a +4 is promoted to another die in GURPS.  Hint: it's about the mean of a honest die.

And No Paypal Link

ANOTHER fucking water leak under the motherfucking slab.

Can't even ask you to stab the donation button because PayPal went stupid.

FML, this has been the worst two fucking years of my life and that includes comparing to being in traction for six months.

Mundanities

The recliner in my room, which was the only place I could sleep when healing from me killing The Precious tends to get covered in...  Whatever.

Today, I dug it out.

I have a chair again!

I promptly put a shirt in it.

SIGH.

Some things are meant to be catch-alls.

One More Month!

Got the sewer bill today.

Same as last month, which means it's from pre-repair.

One more $400 water bill month before the reduced consumption from the repair kicks in.

UGH!