The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Look what a Generous Reader just sent me!

The person who sent it to me has waited a long time for confirmation of receipt, because it got hung up in transit for a while. But it did get here, and given the paucity of reloading supplies for sale lately it was a most princely gift.

I just got a spam email from Sportsman’s Warehouse, which I think I bought one thing from three years ago. And since it was titled “Spring Shooting Sale,” I naturally clicked. (pro-tip for spammers).

And the ammo for their Spring Shooting Sale consisted of two whole pages!

All shotgun shells.

All out of stock.

Sigh.

Spent a lot of time in bed, if not actually sleeping. If this time works the way the first jab did, I’ll sleep like a rock tonight and wake up tomorrow feeling fine. As it is, if I had an 8-5 job I would probably have called in sick yesterday. I really felt like crap, mostly stiff and sore. I woke this morning feeling much better, not nearly as sore. Just kind of sluggish and not with it.

Day after I got the first jab I got away with a headache and a very sleepy day. This time I wish I were sleepy, so I could sleep through the discomfort. Turns out the thermometer I stashed in my sick box doesn’t work well, it insists my body temperature is abnormally low but I really feel like I’m running a fever. Makes sense given that that’s one of the predicted symptoms. Back is sore, all my joints are sore, my scalp is sensitive, even my eyeballs hurt.

Have to go do afternoon chicken chores soon, and then maybe I’ll try lying down for a while.

Apropos of nothing in particular, just priming you to be ready to put up with a a bunch of complaints tomorrow, probably.

These aren’t any exotic strays…

And naturally they made a beeline for my yard, because “let’s go crap all over Joel’s yard” seems embedded in Angus mix DNA.

…and I always wanted to be ‘in,’ so…

Last summer Ian brought a bunch of fancy metallic targets to the Gulch, for use in shooting videos. It quickly became clear that the bane of our shooting existence was going to be this one full-size Mozambique…

The head portion is easy to knock down, and then you’re supposed to be able to reset it with a solid center-mass hit. Maybe you can, with a 50 BMG or a 20mm. With a .30 cal it’s iffy. With a 5.56 or 7.62 commie or any pistol including .44 Magnum at greater than 20 yards, forget it.

It’s supposed to mount to 2X4s but regular lumber allows the target to flop around so much we assumed that was probably the problem. So I found some oversize lumber and trimmed it to just barely fit the mounts. Then last summer (and my right shoulder) went completely to hell and the target got left in the barn. It’s really heavy.

This morning D&L are far away at a doctor’s office so I’m feeding horses and dogs for them, and also not worrying about noise complaints. So I laboriously dragged this overcomplicated nightmare thing out to the range with a rifle and full mag and that box of pistol reloads I filled the other day, and now I can confidently report that…

That stupid target just doesn’t work very well.

Warm with NO WIND, which means it should definitely not be mistaken for Spring. Spring comes with knock-you-on-your-geriatric-ass wind, standard. Still, mid-sixties in early March is not to be wasted. March is the month that breaks your heart. So I’m spending as much time outdoors as makes any sense at all. If I fray the end of my stump it can heal when the weather goes to hell again, which it inevitably will.

Yesterday I even took the ebike to town, for no practical reason other than Joel’s Sick of Winter.

This morning I spent some time in the reloading shack after a long morning walkie.

Broke into my last big box of cast bullets…

…which I bought last year just before everything dried up. Not familiar with this brand, and if I ever have a choice I won’t be buying it again. Some of these things look like they were hammered with a branch from the ugly tree.

But they’re just for plinking and practicing, it’s not like they’ll embarrass me at Fort Benning.

And speaking of embarrassment…

Oops. Should have seen that while cleaning primer pockets. Last time around for that case is one too many.

I found my first project for when Spring finally does come…

I did not go deep enough with that front pier on my ground mount rack. It has come completely loose from the crummy dirt/sand/ash where I had to put the rack. Need to order some 8″ sonotube – I can usually get concrete locally and at present I have lots of rebar. This rack doesn’t get the kind of wind gusts Landlady’s does so it probably won’t end up the way hers did – but it still came loose and needs to be fixed. Maybe I can just bury this one deeper, in a wider hole with rebar hammered deep, pour concrete in the hole, then connect it to the rack with a longer 4X4.

I come by it honestly – for the first winter the Lair had a ridiculously inadequate free sample of a solar power system that couldn’t even run CFLs in the morning without triggering the low voltage alarm. I was proud and pleased that it worked at all, but it only improved incrementally over several years and I’m left with a serious fetish about reducing my electricity usage to the absolute minimum. For most of the past going-on-ten years, the biggest single draw in the whole cabin was the coffee grinder* – and I have a hand-crank grinder for Plan B, which shows you how seriously I take coffee.

Anyway: For most of that time the kitchen stove was a vintage – possibly antique, I don’t know – gas range that never ran well but always ran, and didn’t require the slightest hint of electricity to operate. At the beginning of this winter the oven crapped out. I couldn’t figure out the cause and anyway replacement Gaffers & Sattler parts were not to be found. Big Brother bailed me out with a Brand New Stove – and I’m so behind the times that I didn’t even think to research whether it had a gas pilot in the oven.

It didn’t. Instead, apparently like all modern ovens, it had a huge heating element that pulled serious amperage getting so hot that propane gas burst into flame when exposed to it. And the first time I saw that happen, I about plotzed. I immediately began plotting an emergency Plan B in which I swapped my beautiful brand-new stove with the old one (with gas pilot in the oven) currently residing in Ian’s Cave.

Since then I’ve planned my bread baking for sunny days whenever possible. Baking day is almost the only time I actually use the oven, so even though the new stove’s been here two months I still haven’t acclimated to the change. This morning I finally remembered to go get my Kill-A-Watt out of the powershed and look at how much juice the heating element actually pulls.

And seriously…

…less than four amps isn’t going to make the wires sizzle.

I did worry at first that the heating element might overamp the inverter, which is only rated at 600 watts, but…

…even that isn’t a worry. This draw does pull down the charge in my small battery bank quite a lot, given that it has to go on for almost 20 minutes until the oven is hot. I can’t think of any purpose so important it would convince me to run the oven at night. But once the oven is hot, the heating element only comes on periodically and briefly. On a nice sunny mid-day it quite overcomes the charging voltage but only pulls the batteries down to like 12.4 volts.

I’ve baked bread on a cloudy winter day without any danger of damage, and that’s as bad as things could get. Anything more extreme than that, like nighttime, and I just don’t use the oven. So I need to relax and learn to love it.

—-
* Since the old days the grinder has been joined by a clothes iron and a vacuum cleaner, either of which will drain the batteries to the point where the inverter shuts down if you let them run too long. But they’re not everyday appliances.

So yesterday SpaceX launched the third prototype of its comically sci-fi looking Starship. It launched beautifully, hovered at 10k above the ground, did its terrifying bellyflop falling-with-style thing, then relit and landed neatly on its tail in a manner that would have made Doc Smith proud. High fives all around, cut to commercial.

Eight minutes later…

I’m told that the flight was a complete success in every way that mattered for the test, but it did have a tragicomic ending.

In both the best and worst of all possible ways, we’re living in the future. I kinda feel like private-sector tycoons are finally achieving what all us 60’s kids assumed would be commonplace by now – just in time to hand competent spaceflight to our dystopian masters. Sigh.

How to make a practical paper target holder that would go in and out of my car handily was always a problem for me, until 3 or 4 years ago when a TUAK reader suggested another use for chicken wire.

I’ve been dragging this around in the Jeep for a couple of years now, as needed, and it works great. PVC is an obvious material but leaves you with the question of how you attach the target. Chicken wire works great. If wind is an issue it would be easy to fill the legs with sand or, more permanently, cement while still leaving them detachable.

You will naturally shoot out the center of the wire. This turns out to make no difference not only because you’re not attaching targets to the center anyway but also because clothespins work on broken wire as well as on unbroken.

And if by some chance you wreck a clothespin, well, they’re cheap.

Last week I saw a herd of cattle set up shop around the watering station near Landlady’s place, and naturally assumed they belonged to the ranchers who hold the local grazing lease. I was resigned but unhappy – they run hundreds of cattle through here when the grass permits, which means meandering cattle knocking down my stuff and shitting on it, all the large wildlife moving away, and occasional encounters with bad-tempered breed bulls which can be hazardous if you’re on foot. I don’t get a vote, but if I did I would much prefer the cattle to not be here.

But there were strange things about these particular cattle: For one thing, the cattlemen had done nothing to accommodate them. No supplements, and the well pump was still turned off. It’s a bad time to graze cattle here – it’s been super dry until recently and there’s no grass to speak of. The last time they ran a new herd out here when the grass wasn’t growing, they left quite a few corpses before they quit trying and rounded them up. And these cattle just looked wrong: I’m no expert but I know an Angus mix cow when I see one and these weren’t that. They were small, scruffy, brown, and looked poorly fed.

Last time I saw a small herd in advance of big ones, he said they weren’t his and that turned out to not be true. So when he denied owning these, I assumed he wasn’t telling the truth.

Turns out he was telling the truth. Now I’m all confused.

These turned out to be criollo, and were runaways from a ranch substantially to the south of here – they’ve been missing for weeks and must have been very happy to find a quiet place with open water. 🙂 I’m told they’ve been rounded up and herded back home.

And yes, that does mean that if an unscrupulous person found a stray, he could probably get away with eating stringy steak. No, I’m not an unscrupulous person.

How not to fill a Zippo…

Kind of reminds me of adventures I had when I was a teen, that I sort of kept to myself thereafter. Buried forever in the private mental file marked “things you should never do again with gasoline and black powder.”

I burned the woodstove briefly this morning just to take the chill off. By the time I got back from morning chicken chores it was already out and the iron was barely warm. And before I left I cut kindling for tomorrow morning’s fire the way I always do, just automatically, didn’t even give it any thought. I’ll lay the fire later in the day after the embers are mostly out.

Coming back in to the warmish cabin with my fingers tingling, I glanced at the little pile(s) of wood, noticing that Precaffeinated Joel had divided the kindling slices into four distinct sections on autopilot, because I always lay my morning fire exactly the same way every morning and that way requires four distinct sorts of kindling.

And no, I won’t presume to hold a Kindling 101 tutorial because there are as many ways to successfully start a fire as there are people who do so. The only thing you learn after the hundredth or so time you try to light a fire while shivering in the dark is that haphazardly piling up some wood and striking a match won’t get you there, and neither will a paper-fueled flare. Between those extremes are many, many effective solutions to the problem of pursuading the fire to take care of itself while you brew coffee.

And after many years now, going through who knows how many gizmos and gadgets and improvisations, I finally settled on what worked for me and I’ve been doing it so long now I can just let my fingers do the working while my mind is somewhere else entirely.

Now for a word from a true professional…

So yesterday on my way to afternoon chicken chores I saw suspicious tracks…

Distinctive tracks. Round split-hooved tracks. Cattle tracks. Grrr…

I wondered at the timing of this; maybe in a month or two we’ll get some usable grass but we sure don’t have any now. If the cattlemen released cattle here now, they must be hurting for feed. And up close, these aren’t the happiest, glossiest cattle I’ve ever seen.

And there’s a bit of mystery here: I texted neighbors about the cattle so they could make sure gates were shut and dogs were under control*. One of those neighbors, who actually maintains friendly relations with the guy who has this grazing lease, texted back that that guy said he didn’t know anything about any cattle.

Of course he’s said that before and it turned out to be untrue. So not that much of a mystery now that I recall the incident.

—
*If cattle get stuck inside your wire and die because they’re too stupid to get back out, you are legally liable for the sale price of the cattle. If a cattleman shoots your dog because he says it was chasing cattle, even if the dog is inside its own fence and nowhere near a cow at the time, you are shit out of luck for legal recourse. Both those things have happened within my time here. In open range country, cattle have more legal rights than land owners. People in cities see open range as a charming 19^th century tradition: People who live in open range see it as an astonishingly consistent pattern of politicians staying bought.

I have a love/hate relationship with primer tools.

This is my current go-to tool, an RCBS that works fine, really. Doesn’t need a whole set of individual case holders, which is a big plus. Gives you enough leverage that it’s not a hand exerciser but not so much you’re crushing primers. Eliminates that idiotic elevator thing Lee tools have that seats the primer sideways half the time. But it does have one very annoying design flaw – not a deal-breaker, just annoying…

Nobody paid attention to the approach angle on the tray, and several times per session two primers will bump into each other and clog the chute. And unless you’re paying close attention, you’ll find out about it when the tray is full but the chute is empty.

I like to watch history videos on YouTube sometimes, which means mid-20^th century German weapons engineering is on my mind more often than really makes any sense. And after like the third time this happened to me while only priming 50 cases, I thought “Hugo Schmeisser would never have allowed this.” Germans: They got themselves into the most ridiculously unwinnable wars, but damned if they didn’t lose them with the coolest weapons on the field.

This is how bad the ammo situation is getting: I can’t say primers are worth their weight in gold because as far as I know no amount of gold could acquire any. At any other time if I accidentally dropped one – on a floor that’s practically paved with spent primers, mind you – I’d let it go. But…

…under these circumstances I had to at least give it a shot. And it was cause for a bit of celebration when I actually found the damn thing.

No reason to light the fire…

…lit the fire anyway.

Hey, there was a time when morning fire was optional when indoor temp was in the 40’s, forbidden when it was in the 50’s. But that was more than 10 years ago and ‘cool’ seems like cold now.

I wasn’t expecting any particular controversy over yesterday’s post. I just noticed something on a package I thought worthy of mention, and then I mentioned it. But apparently I broke some peoples’ rules – I actually got an email from a long-time and valued reader who announced an intent to flounce off and darken my door no more. Probably there were others, I don’t know.

I wasn’t expecting that. It didn’t just surprise me, it depressed me. Happily, though, I happened to drop in on the Adaptive Curmudgeon, a little place on TUAK’s blogroll that I admit I don’t visit every day – and to my delight I found that he had resumed telling the tale of The Lesbian Activist Squirrels.

The Lesbian Squirrels is a serialized story, long since more than novel-length, which proceeds in fits and starts whenever the Curmudgeon’s muse shakes off her hangover enough to kick him in the pants and get him writing. It’s been going on for years and like most serialized stories the plot kind of wanders into the weeds to play with its toes from time to time, may even blunder drunk off a cliff and spend some time in ICU from time to time … But it’s always funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. And the one thing you can always count on it to be is never…

ever…

EVER…

politically correct. Or anything remotely resembling politically correct. To quote the author…

…here’s a trigger warning: Anyone who clicks on a story with a ridiculous title like Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels knows what they’re getting. If it’s too much for your delicate sensibilities, stay in your bubble and leave us adults alone.

And that made it a perfect antidote for yesterday’s mood, and I spent most of the afternoon re-reading it. And now I feel much better. Thought perhaps some of you might enjoy it as well, if you’re not already aware of it. Or it might shock you to your fainting couch, I don’t know, but it will certainly let you know that if you think I’m bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It’s Monday, and on Monday morning I go into town with D&L for water and groceries. And as it happened, I had a busy time scheduled…

…and as frequently usually happens, I got busy loading empty water bottles and gas cans into the Jeep, don’t forget your sunglasses/hat/shopping list/gun/wallet/keys, and went off without putting a mask in my pocket.

In the little town nearest where I live this makes zero social difference. Most of the people you’ll see in a store or on the street will be obscenely baring their faces to the world, exactly as if it’s a tiny desert town way the hell off the beaten path where there’s virtually no Wuhan Flu to catch. But my friends D and L have really drunk the Koolaid on this particular subject and it bugs them when I go maskless. So I really try to remember, just to keep peace with my neighbors who generously let me hitch at least one ride to town every week and have for several years now.

But I can be bugged too, you know. And this morning, to keep the vitally-important mask thing from cropping up in future, they kindly gave me a gift…

…to keep in the Jeep for when I forget.

No doubt in the name of legal CYA, whoever designed the package art carefully and prominently added the disclaimer “Non-Medical” to the box filled with these vitally important preventatives to a medical condition. This is nothing new, I’m aware that none of the colorful cloth masks people have taken to wearing over the past almost-a-year-now-goddammit have any real medical utility.

But this just kind of rubbed it in. It irritates me.