Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Rock, Paper, Saddam – Pen missile!

The kids were upstairs playing earlier tonight. I’m accustomed to all manner of thuds when they’re up there and tonight was no exception. ka-WHUMP. There were no immediate cries of distress so I ignored it. About 5 minutes later, my 4 year old comes into the kitchen. She’s pale, shaking, voice quivering. “I’m sorry, Mommy!”

“What happened?”

“The dresser fell on me.”

She was trying to get herself a pair of shorts and pulled her chest of drawers over on herself. She said she tried to be strong and put it back upright but she was just too little. If it weren’t for the toy box next to it, we might have had a pancake for a daughter tonight.

The whole “tried to be strong” thing got to me. Cripes. She’s just so very little.

It was a long trip, but we did it!

Last Tuesday we left Austin to drive up near Canton, Ohio for Bulletfest. This year it was a two day event and people from all over the country converged to get together and basically shoot the snot out of a bunch of old appliances and cars with an amazing assortment of hardware, both semi- and full-auto.

It was a 24 hour drive up there and it was rough. Around Kentucky, hub started saying that he didn’t think we would go back next year. He’s just a tiny little bit (ha) of a control freak and doesn’t like to be in a car when anyone but himself is driving, so he drove the whole way there and the whole way back minus around 100 miles.

Once we got there and things started happening, he changed his tune pretty quick! The firing line was probably 200 yards long.

Thursday evening a major storm blew through and pretty much decimated everyones’ canopies on the line. Hub ended up going half an hour to the nearest Walmart at around midnight to buy a new one because ours had snapped into pieces.

Friday morning dawned cold and we realized that I had accidentally set the alarm to go off on the wrong day. Whoops. So with 30 minutes to spare before the safety briefing before the line opened, we raced around crazy trying to get everything together. We made it up the hill with moments to spare and anxiously awaited the line going hot. When it did, the noise was like the end of the world. I was wearing earplugs and earmuffs and it was still insanely loud. There were some idiots there who had babies with them whose earmuffs were falling off. I hope those kids still have hearing left. Others brought their dogs and had them right by the line. “Gee, Fido doesn’t come when he’s called anymore. Wonder why.”

Ranting aside, it was a ton of fun. We ended up going through about 2000 rounds through the Uzi, mostly by letting people shoot it. It was kind of like going to a Dead show, only instead of walking through the parking lot and having someone hand you food or a bracelet, people would hand you things to shoot. I was standing there under our canopy and felt a tap on my shoulder. The guy in the next shelter was holding out his suppressed Uzi and a loaded magazine for me to shoot. Later on, a friend sent his kids to come grab me and get me to shoot his AR-50. Amazing gun, amazing… I really want one! So over the course of the weekend, I got to shoot:

Ours:
Uzi
2 AR15s
my XD9, finally!
FAL

Others:
Full auto Sten
Full auto Mac 10
Full auto M16 (mama like)
Full auto suppressed Uzi
Glock
AR50 (purr)
AR15

And probably some more that I’m forgetting. Hub rented time on an MG42, a German WWII 8 mm machine gun, and a Minigun.

Lemme tell you bout this minigun. There are only something like 11 civilian-owned miniguns in the US, and this was one of them. Normally they are mounted in Apache helicopters. This one shot .308 caliber. The rate of fire can be adjusted up to 10,000 rounds per minute. It was set to around 4,000 when hub shot it. Meaning that he put 400 rounds through it in 6 seconds. It doesn’t even sound like a gun when it goes off. It makes a big, “BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP” noise and you can’t discern the individual bangs. For all the world it sounded like a cruise ship horn to me. It’s electronically powered and simply decimates anything in its path. Hub very nearly suffered a testosterone overdose after that.

We got to visit with some old friends and new ones too, and wished we had more time for socializing. Alas, the time to go back home came all too soon and we hit the road. After around 21 hours of travel, the Check Engine light started flashing. Hm. The manual says that means there was a misfire. Suddenly the accelerator was just a meaningless hunk of metal. We coasted into a truck stop. After changing the plugs and wires it was still acting hinky. We made it another 5 miles down the road and had to pull over again. Ended up calling a tow truck to haul our car and camper those last 2.5 hours into Austin for $450. It might not have been so bad if the wrecker driver had not kept falling asleep at the wheel, whereupon we would slow down to about 30 mph and veer onto the shoulder. This didn’t just happen once or twice, but constantly over the trip home. Poor hub had crashed in the back seat because he’d been up and driving for over 24 hours and was wasted. I took to coughing loudly every 30 seconds or so, but it wasn’t doing any good. About halfway home, I said I needed to make a pit stop and spent a good long time in the gas station to give the guy a chance to wake up. I surreptitiously SMS’ed hub a message asking him to wake up and help me keep the guy awake, and he did… unfortunately the guy was just as easily distracted by conversation as he was by sleep, and we spent the rest of the trip continuing to slow down and swerve. But at least it was an alert swerve. I said several sincere prayers of thanksgiving when we got home.

And I can’t wait until Gunstock! This year it will be October 15-17. If you have any interest at all, contact me and I’ll get more information to you.

What your furniture does when you’re not home.

I finally got them up!

http://www.addlepated.net/alaska/

Well, there wasn’t supposed to be a prayer at that particular point in President Reagan’s funeral.

Sweet dreams, Clintons.

My animals are unnatural.

So was the sky tonight.

It’s all Bill’s fault. He told me how easy it is to roast your own coffee. Now I’m obsessed with it. I bought a FreshRoast rather than went hard-core with a heatgun and a dog bowl, like some of the people on Coffee Geek.

The roaster came with a pound of green beans – Swiss water process decaf Sumatra Takengon. They sucked. Majorly. I had serious reservations about the whole thing. I ran down to Mozart’s Coffee Roasters which is just a couple of minutes away and picked up some of their green beans – $4/lb for any green bean, and they have quite a variety. They were better, but still not the coffee flavor explosion I was looking for. Then I placed an order from Sweet Maria’s. Wow. They’re pricier, but every green coffee they sell is accompanied by a detailed review saying what aromas it has, how dark to roast it for optimum flavor, if the beans need to de-gas for an extra long time, etc. My favorites from there so far are the WP Decaf Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, the Ethiopian Harar, and the Costa Rican La Minita Tarrazu. I’ve learned that African coffees generally have floral and fruity notes, while Central American coffees are more earthy and chocolatey. There’s one Ecuadorean coffee, the Escafe, which is insanely bright and tangy and not good by itself, but it’s great in a blend.

So I’ve got my little spreadsheet, figuring out what I like and don’t like, and in the meantime realizing that if I drink too much coffee I get heart palpitations. Hopefully that’s going to go away once I’m off all this ear infection medication. Cause, damn that’s annoying. But it’s ok, cause I get to mix myself a half-caf blend. Today it’s 2 scoops Harar (blueberry flavor), one scoop Escafe (brightness), and 2 scoops Kenya AA WP Decaf (not outstanding in and of itself but a good base for this blend).