And then there was range day...

I've loved every bit of this mild Winter and long Spring.  I love working outside.  I've gotten a lot done.  But I'm getting tired.  The joy of digging in the dirt has begun to feel like work.  So I needed a distraction.  Outside but different.  And right at the time that was becoming obvious I got a call - "Going to the range tomorrow - wanna come?"  Yeah boy!  Just what the doctor ordered - a day in the sun with the smell of gunpowder.

I'm still exploring. The great thing about going to the range with Murphy's Law is that I can try out so many different guns. The feel of guns has changed over the last few months.  The guns that felt too big to start with feel fine now because I have more experience with handling them.  So I had a couple specific requests for today - a Glock 19 and Glock 23.  Midsized 9 and 40 in caliber.  Love the 3 dot sights. Obviously need practice, but they are "keepers".  Definitely on my short list for next purchases.

And of course, ML had what he referred to as "only the", which would be more than normal people have.  The M-60 is sighted just fine, although the breeze kept blowing down the target just before "lift off".  A few scavenged pieces of strategically placed wood cured that.  And then it was my turn:

This gun has a high "Ooooooo" factor, and it drew other shooters like a magnet.  The reaction of a shooter allowed to try it out:  "I gotta get me one of these!"  And it made me laugh - every shot made my pants legs flap in the breeze it created.

Then there was the AR-15.  A bit heavy for me to steady at the shoulder, but a world of difference once the tripod was dropped.

The M-1 got a lot of play today, too.  This gun range allows for tactical practice, and on a beautiful Spring day it was fun to do a little bit of running around.

Queue a little bit of Creedance Clearwater...

Yeah, I never did grow up.  Or I was old before my time.  The guns weren't loaded, and as kids we ran all over the mountain, "playing soldier".  50 years later the guns ARE loaded, and I hope it stays at the level of play.

I didn't see any poison ivy. I'll be sure of that in about 48 hours.

And there was a Mauser, and a Ruger Mini 14 - ML knows those details.  Carbines are definitely a better fit for my short self, but every gun feels good to shoot. Particularly when followed by lunch and beer.  If only I hadn't had to go back to work.

I'm ready to start messing with .45s next time.  I'm having a bit of trouble with the hand with the sprained finger - it doesn't want to heal and it's hard to put pressure on with that hand, even with a make-shift splint and taped to the finger next to it.  Slides and such are hard to manipulate.  But time and familiarity will improve that, and I imagine the 1911 that felt too big 6 months ago will feel just fine very soon.

My Favorite Perfume

A warm winter has given us a bumper crop of biting black flies, and it's amazing how good this smells when being outside means having a cloud of the aggravating buggers around your head.

It's also amazing how loud one of these things is when it's walking around inside your ear.

Pieta - The Thirteenth Station of the Cross

"Come, all you who pass by the way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering."  The anguished cry of a mother who has just watched her precious, radiant, beloved son be tortured to death in the most hideous and agonizing way possible.  The cry of a mother who has heard her innocent son’s cries of agony and of abandonment.  The cry of a mother who has helplessly listened to her child’s agonized gasps for breath, watched him bleed, watched him die.  Now, her child’s savaged body is placed in her arms.  It is sticky with drying blood and slick with new, and cloaked in the stink of the suffering of the last few hours. Already, the flies will have found their bloody meal and be lighting on the ripped flesh seeking to lay their eggs in the fertile ground of violent death.

The old man Simeon rejoiced when the infant Messiah was laid in his arms in the temple.  But after his song of joy, he turned to Mary and said “But you yourself a sword shall pierce.”  A sword?  The stab of a sword would be a minor prick compared to the grief this mother feels now.  A real sword through the heart would be a sharp, quick end to the grief.  This is a crushing agony that makes it a struggle to breathe, much like when the Crucified One had to struggle, pushing against nailed feet so that He could raise up and gasp air into lungs compressed by His own sagging weight on the cross.  

Yet breathe she does, because a promise was made.  Have faith in God and at the end of days, all will be made right.   All will be perfected.  And Mary, ever faithful, clings to that promise even in her agony and in the seemingly endless depths of her grief.  She clings with a lifetime of experience that has taught her that faith is not a fuzzy, warm safety.  That faith does not mean that she will know all or understand all.  That faith will not protect her from pain or heartbreak.  That faith is both a gift and a decision made.  So she takes one breath and then another, knowing even in the depths of her anguish, that at the end of days all will be perfected and made right, indeed, all HAS been perfected and made right by the bloody, lifeless child she now holds in her arms.

I am a mother.  My child, who is in her thirties now, works at a job that often requires her to have an armed police escort.  Her life has been threatened more than once.  Day in and day out she has to walk into situations where Evil and madness exist, where people without consciences do appalling things and then weep not because of the evil they’ve done but because they’ve been caught.  One of her fellow college graduates has already been murdered – stabbed to death in the line of duty as she was trying to help someone.  I wonder, if I ever receive the phone call that tells me that my child has been killed, that my child has been destroyed by Evil, if I, like Mary, could take the next breath.  I wonder, have I accepted the gift of faith, made the decision for faith, lived that faith in such a way that if ever I am looking down at the lifeless body of my precious child, I will be able to take one breath, followed by another, because somewhere in all the pain I will know that another bloody, lifeless child laying in the arms of another anguished mother has perfected all and made right all in the Eternal Now of God.

The Dangers of Being Gunless

By Alan Korwin, posted at ammoland.com:

Gunless people, those who steadfastly refuse to keep and bear arms, practice marksmanship or learn gun safety create certain burdens for the rest of society.

• Gunless people increase the need for police protection, by being unable to fend for themselves in certain dire emergencies.
• By remaining unarmed, a gunless person becomes a “free rider,” obtaining safety and protection against criminal activity through the responsible actions of others.

Go read.

Thanks, Nino.

A President of Firsts

'Bama has certainly proved to be a president of firsts:

1. First Preisdent To Issue To Himself The Authority To Declare Peacetime Martial Law
2. First President To Sign Into Law Unlimited Detention & Killing Of American Citizens
3. First President to Preside Over a Cut to the Credit Rating of the United States Government
4. First President to Violate the War Powers Act
5. First President to Orchestrate the Sale of Murder Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels
6. First President to issue an unlawful "recess-appointment" while the U.S. Senate remained in session (against the advice of his own Justice Department).
7. First President to be Held in Contempt of Court for Illegally Obstructing Oil Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico
8. First President to Defy a Federal Judge's Court Order to Cease Implementing the 'Health Care Reform' Law
9. First President to halt deportations of illegal aliens and grant them work permits, a form of stealth amnesty roughly equivalent to "The DREAM Act", which could not pass Congress
10. First President to Require All Americans to Purchase a Product From a Third Party
11. First President to Spend a Trillion Dollars on 'Shovel-Ready' Jobs -- and Later Admit There Was No Such Thing as Shovel-Ready Jobs
12. First President to sue states for requiring valid IDs to vote, even though the same administration requires valid IDs to travel by air
13. First President to Abrogate Bankruptcy Law to Turn Over Control of Companies to His Union Supporters
14. First President to Bypass Congress and Implement the DREAM Act Through Executive Fiat
15. First President to Threaten Insurance Companies After They Publicly Spoke out on How Obamacare Helped Cause their Rate Increases
16. First President to Threaten an Auto Company (Ford) After It Publicly Mocked Bailouts of GM and Chrysler
17. First President to "Order a Secret Amnesty Program that Stopped the Deportations of Illegal Immigrants Across the U.S., Including Those With Criminal Convictions"
18. First President to Demand a Company Hand Over $20 Billion to One of His Political Appointees
19. First President to Terminate America's Ability to Put a Man into Space.
20. First President to Encourage Racial Discrimination and Intimidation at Polling Places
21. First President to Have a Law Signed By an 'Auto-pen' Without Being "Present"
22. First President to Arbitrarily Declare an Existing Law Unconstitutional and Refuse to Enforce It
23. First President to Tell a Major Manufacturing Company In Which State They Are Allowed to Locate a Factory
24. First President to refuse to comply with a House Oversight Committee subpoena.
25. First President to File Lawsuits Against the States He Swore an Oath to Protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN, etc.)
26. First President to Withdraw an Existing Coal Permit That Had Been Properly Issued Years Ago
27. First President to Fire an Inspector General of Americorps for Catching One of His Friends in a Corruption Case
28. First President to Propose an Executive Order Demanding Companies Disclose Their Political Contributions to Bid on Government Contracts
29. First President to allow Mexican police to conduct law enforcement activities on American soil
30. First President to Golf 90 or More Times in His First Three Years in Office

But remember: he will not rest until all Americans have jobs, affordable homes, green-energy vehicles, and the environment is repaired, etc., etc., etc.

Thanks to Nino for posting the list at WCBM.

If I Were the Devil - How to Destroy America

By Paul Harvey, 60 years ago.

A Little Reflection on Gratitude

Once in a while things cause me to reflect, and I have to say that getting involved with the local cold weather homeless shelter has led to that.  I wish more people would take a night of shelter duty.

Most people don’t realize it, but my brain is broken.  I say that jokingly, but it's true – for whatever reason my brain doesn’t make the proper amount of a chemical that regulates sleep cycles.  I have a sleep disorder – narcolepsy.  People think of this as just a disorder where you sometimes fall asleep at inappropriate times.  That’s part of it, but it’s way more complicated than that.  It affects a person both day and night.  You never feel rested, and without the appropriate chemicals the brain will go into REM sleep whenever it pleases – and going into dream sleep when you are walking down the street can make for serious challenges.  I’ve been dealing with it for upwards of 40 years now – I’m good at adapting to it and covering for it, but I also have to make certain allowances for it. 

As a consequence, I initially didn’t volunteer for the homeless shelter.  I take medications at night to help control my sleep cycles. Without it, my nights tend to be lost in dreams and nightmares, exhausting struggles caused by REM sleep that start as soon as I lay down, followed by days so exhausting that I sometimes feel ill.  People think I have a lot of energy – that’s only because I’ve had to push myself so hard for so long to stay ahead of this.  I have a pattern – I’m in and out of things.  I participate heavily and then I have to back off – I’ve burned out, run out of steam.  As the Brits say, I have to have a little lie down.  Since I’m also strongly affected by the loss of daylight, that little lie down tends to last at least January and February, sometimes longer.  There are times where being a bear in hibernation is a good analogy.

I didn’t volunteer for the shelter initially because I thought the sleep disorder left me ineligible for night duty, but the calls for volunteers that were coming out were so desperate that I emailed the coordinator, explained my situation and told her to that if we could do it within the parameters of my enforced nightly medication and sleep schedules I would do it.  Her response was “Yay!  Take your meds, sleep, we just need a female warm body for liability reasons because men aren't allowed to go into the women's section.”

 So I’ve spent three Saturday nights at the shelter recently.  No, it isn’t easy to work all day and then pack up and go spend the night on a sofa in a stuffy corridor.  But I’ve come to realize that the hardest part of the job is that at 6:30 am I have to make sure that exhausted people who have spent the night on cots get up and go out to a day where they have nothing ahead of them except to get through 12 hours until they can come back to that cot.  That’s really much harder than missing a night in my bed.

By 7:30 last Sunday morning I was on my way home after a night on an inflatable mattress.  I made my morning cup of coffee – I only have one cup each day but the beans are freshly roasted by a friend (Black Dog Coffee) who drops my order on my porch.  My three spoiled indoor cats had missed me and draped themselves all over me, purring as I stretched out on the sofa with book and coffee.  As usual, I lay down so that I could look out the living room windows to my bird feeders and watch the cardinals, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, blue birds, and goldfinches that are the regular visitors.  The stray cat that I have allowed myself to be suckered by came by for his breakfast –I’m feeding four cats now.  He’s going to be really unhappy when I trap him for neutering and testing for FIV in a couple weeks. A friend called and we chatted a while – she just bought her retirement home on Lake Gaston in North Carolina and is, understandably, incredibly excited.  Then I went outside and played in the dirt for several hours. In the last couple weeks, thanks to both the weather and an electrical fire that shut down our office building and took our servers offline, I have power washed the front porch and put two coats of stain on it, power washed the porch furniture and clear-coated it, dug up the new hummingbird/butterfly beds and planted them, moved various different flowers from where they were unhappy to where I hope they will do better and patched and re-seeded a problem part of the lawn.  And grumbled because I don’t seem able to adopt healthy cats - Perry’s bill on Wednesday was $890 to figure out what he DOESN’T have that could possibly be causing him to pee everywhere, Blu has allergies that impair his breathing, causing him to swallow air and constantly throw up, and the early warmth has caused Blackberry serious hairball problems, which also means random cat barf. My carpet was worn out to begin with – now it’s a disaster.

What does this all mean?  That those people at the shelter, unlike me, don’t get to go home in the morning. My home can seem overwhelming – in reality I bought too much house and too much property for a single aging woman to handle alone easily.  But I have a home.  I have my own bed and my own sofa and my own porch.  I turned my cable TV off a couple years ago – once the nice weather starts I stop watching TV – but I still have a TV that I can run Netflix or a DVD through on a rainy night. I have my own coffee pot and refrigerator and washer and dryer and I don’t have to put all of my belongings in a bag for the day.  I can shower and throw my dirty clothes on the floor and crawl into my bed when I want to.  My yard is mine, and although I might cuss the deer for eating my plants the fact that the does leave their new fawns behind my house in the Spring is still enchanting.  I grumbled about the raccoon leaving his muddy prints all over my freshly stained porch and was delighted when I saw my little lizard, a pretty little skink, peering around the corner of the steps at me on Friday - he's grown considerably since last year.  And neighbors?  Well, strangers on my property trigger the “Kenny alarm” and I’ll and receive a phone call asking what’s going on.   If my daughter doesn’t hear from me each day a neighbor will get a phone call and I’ll be getting a visit from them to make sure I’m OK  – and they have a key to get in the house if I don’t respond.   It goes both ways, of course – I know how to get into houses to take care of various pets in an emergency and am happy and feel privileged to do so.

This is rambling, I know.  But the core of it is – how much more we realize what blessings we have when we are involved with those who don’t have.  And I really wish more people would accept the gift of that personal involvement.   It can remind you to thank God for what we tend to take for granted.