Category: Life

Kim du Toit today posts a response to the NRA Dream Gun sweepstakes.

It’s a decent-enough selection of guns, I suppose — but the problem is that I would only want to own a few of them (4/18), namely:

• Browning A5 Sweet Sixteen (16ga)
• Remington 870 (20ga)
• Kimber 1911 Raptor II (.45ACP)
• Colt King Cobra (.357 Mag)

,,,and I’m kinda iffy about the short barrels on the last two anyway. The rest of the guns are either in the wrong chambering (.224 Valkyrie?), duplicates of stuff I already own (.30x bolties), or a type of firearm I don’t care to own anyway (AR-15 variants) — even for free. (If I were promiscuous when it came to guns, then I could take any of the eighteen, but I’m not That Guy.)

I enter these every time they come along, and frankly, I am That Guy, I suppose. I don’t have a gun budget, and the NRA competition would quickly fill my (new-if-I-win) big gun safe.

When I enter, I make my selection based on common chamberings between guns at the prize level, chamberings I’d be able to get cheap ammo for, and then name (Weatherby over Ruger) just for bragging rights.

But I never send a contribution; there’s a checkbox at the bottom for declining but entering since no purchase is necessary.

As a matter of fact, I’ve got an outgoing entry on my desk that I haven’t mailed as I’ve been out of town. Probably the same sweepstakes that Kim got. I’ll probably mail it tomorrow and forget about it as odds are very low in winning.

Inside a record I bought earlier this month, I found a mimeographed copy of the Licking High School Pep Club Constitution.

In purple, as Ditto intended.

Click for full size

Licking is a small town a little northeast of here. I’ve never been, but I’ve tried on occasion to subscribe to the local paper, The Licking News, from time to time ever since one got misdelivered to me a couple years back. However, I’ve not pursued it to the point of actually subscribing. Just looking on the Web site for an online form to subscribe and pay. Which isn’t there yet.

Technically, this is not a Found Bookmark nor is it as interesting, I suppose, as a record store receipt, but it’s something.

Now that I’ve scanned it, what do I do with it? Pitch it, or try to repatriate it to Licking High School or the Texas County museum (which happens to be in Licking). I mean, it’s a piece of ephemera, but don’t they want it all?

As my beautiful wife and I were driving back from dinner on Friday night, I noticed numerous old cars headed north on Glenstone.

“I wonder if there’s a car show,” I said. “It’s not the Route 66 Festival.”

There was: The Street Rod Nationals.

I have not been to a car show in a while. Well, except the Royal Run and Rides 5K and car show that I have run the last couple of years, but I count that as a 5K.

I’ve always wanted to be able to build things with wood. It runs in the family. Noggle and Son Remodelers was a going thing for a couple generations of Noggles and their sons, but it folded when I was a mere lad. My parents split before I reached an age where my father could teach me those practical woodworking skills, and all I got from my childhood years was building treehouses with scrap lumber and recycled nails.

But I’ve wanted those skills, but I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to learn them. I mean, I built an outdoor toybox for my boys. But fine furniture was out of my reach.

So I thought I would build a cart for storage in my garage. We have some built-in shelving with space underneath, and we’ve stored sporting equipment and Nerf guns in plastic bins, but I wanted something that would roll in and roll out and fill the space instead of sticking out and leaving some vertical height.

So I measured and bought some lumber. And put it off. Mostly because the lumber was more expensive than the scrap lumber I built treehouses with. Then I built the base of the cart, a floor with some wheels, and it sat in my garage for months like an oversized skateboard that took up space as part of the mess instead of helping alleviate the mess in the garage.

So last weekend, I apparently had forgotten the price of the lumber enough that I was no longer afraid to bollix it up. I got about to framing the cart, and I put the walls on it this weekend.

I worked mostly from plans in my head and with a jigsaw and circular saw for cutting instead of a table saw (I have one, but I don’t actually have a table for it). I over-engineered it a bit and put in more screws than absolutely necessary. And I miscalculated the width of it so that the walls of the sides are inside the framing instead of the outside, and the framing is an inch and a half more shallow than the base.

But the first is done.

And it fits where it’s supposed to fit.

It took four or five hours to finish it up, so probably six hours total. I am going to build another; I bought enough lumber for two. One for sporting equipment and one for Nerf guns. I’m not sure if I will paint them or not as I am going to want to hurry into getting my garage cleaned up.

But the next goal beyond these carts is building some record storage since the collection has far outstripped the overloaded bookshelves that I painted seven years ago.

You know why I haven’t done hat much practicing and acquiring this skill? Because I often don’t feel like I have the hours to dedicate to learning it with all the time I expend getting and spending and laying waste my powers and pretty much maintaining in the day to day. But it looks like I find plenty of time to blog about every little thing I do accomplish. So it’s a time management and prioritization problem.

We will see how long it takes for me to make that second cart.

Spotted on the Powerline blog Week in Pictures:

I think it was on March 16 as I was coming back from ABC Books. The carrier turned left onto Republic Road and passed me going the other way.

Of course, it might still be in town since VisionCon is this weekend.

I was toying with the idea of going, and that’s now greatly increased as I see that Jewel Staite will be there. Shiny.

My youngest son is having a birthday soon, and I wrapped his gifts today. A while ago, I bought a couple rolls of birthday wrapping paper, but apparently, I’ve run through them, and I had some green crafting paper and some old wallpaper that I use as wrapping paper because it’s thick and stiff, so it doesn’t wrinkle or tear. Also, it was like a buck at a garage sale a long time ago.

Apparently, I’ve been in this situation on May 9 before.

This year, though the green craft paper covered both gifts with no waste, so no wallpaper for the laddie this year.

But I’ll probably wrap gifts for his children in this wallpaper.

Is this your second post from Facebook memories you’ve done this week, Brian J.? you ask. Yes, I guess so. Some weeks I got nothing.

Tam K., as do we all, responds in a Pavlovian fashion to the Daily Double sounder on Jeopardy!:

Personally, as someone who has traditionally yelled “BET IT ALL!” at the screen every time Double Jeopardy came up, I’m enthralled to run across a contestant with the chutzpah to do just that.

In my head, I can still hear my oldest son at two exclaiming that when he heard the Jeopardy! sounder in our house in Old Trees some decade ago.

I went looking through my new computer to see if I recorded it, or if I’ll just have to remember it as best I can. It looks like I’ll just have to savor the memory.

However, I did mention it on Facebook.

Nine years ago today. Exactly.

/p>

Our shoes spent the night next to the door to our storm room.

Our storm room is an interior room with one side in the earth, two sides of brick, and with the ceiling joists supported with extra braces. It has a gravel floor, though, since our pump tanks and whatnot are in there. We store a card table and matching chairs in there along with flashlights, a little food, and a radio just in case.

Last night, we had tornado warnings off and on from 3pm to a little after 9pm. Our weather radio squalled a couple of times, and the local sirens went off once, but most of the real action took place northwest and southeast of Nogglestead.

Still, we have to be readier than we did in Saint Louis or Milwaukee. Every couple of years, a tornado touches down hereabouts. About fifteen or twenty years ago, a nearby barn got destroyed and a woman was killed because instead of seeking shelter, she went to calm her horses. It’s an apocryphoral story, though, since it’s from before we were here, and I don’t remember exactly who told it.

I know you loyal readers in Oklahoma understand.

UPDATE: A loyal reader in Oklahoma documents his response to the same system, experienced during his commute as crazy thunderstorms.

It would be my home in eight weeks if I had the money: A castle outside Clever, Missouri:

5000 square feet on 10 acres, and the shields on the gate already have the letter N on them.

At roughly a million dollars, it might still be on the market by the time I can afford it. Unfortunately, I’ll need hyperinflation to get there, but unfortunately, in that event, I wouldn’t get change from my $200,000,000 bill.

Last evening, my twelve-year-old son asked me a question that took me aback and led to a stammering, rambling, and incomplete response that probably left the boy more befuddled than when he asked.

He asked me for an overview of the Terminator story.

I mean, I have only seen the first three movies (of five, apparently), the television series, and read one of the books. So I’m not an expert.

I could made it through explaining Skynet, sort of, and the plot of the first two movies and a bit about the television series, but, honestly, it’s hard to explain them all in gestalt. It’s probably best to explain each movie or property discretely and then gloss over the problems in the timelines and continua.

I don’t think he got it. I’m not sure I do. Perhaps the best explanation is the simplest. Intelligent unstoppable killing machines travel time to kill people who are troublesome in the future.

Man, I wish he would have asked me to explain something I understand better. Like women.

You know, broccoli producers of the world sell broccoli whole, or they cut the top off and sell it marked up as broccoli crowns, or they cut it even shorter and bag it as broccoli florets (sold at a premium), which leaves them with lots of broccoli stalks that, what, get sold for silege?

Until now.

Now they can shred the previously wasted broccoli stalks and sell it at a premium as “broccoli slaw.”

That, my friends, is innovation.

So I go out to light the grill for lunch (which I can do as I work from home), and I see a yellow line drawn on the rear wheel of the truck that we park outside:

I had driven it the night before, and my first thought was whether I had hit a curb and not known it. But I dismissed the thought because the mark would have been circular, not a straight line.

I thought perhaps one of my boys had drawn a chalk line on it for reasons of his own, but I didn’t recollect the boys playing outside the day before or that morning, and I hadn’t seen chalk where they could get to it.

Then my mind went to creepy thriller territory: What if someone else drew a line on my tire for some weird purpose?

Then I saw yellow scattered on the ground near the grill itself:

Pollen.

It had rained overnight, most of the night, I guess; I slept through much of it. But it rained enough for water to stand at the boundary of the asphalt and concrete in our driveway, as it often does, and the pollen floating atop the water affixed to the tire. By the time I went out to grill, though, the water had disappeared, leaving only the line of pollen. And a little mystery for me to solve amid my preparations for grilling a couple of steaks for lunch.

But maybe that’s what the creepy chalk wheel marker wants me to think to lull me into a false sense of security.