Letter from Santa

From: Santa Claus

I regret to inform you that, effective immediately, I will no longer serve the States of Georgia, Florida, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas on Christmas Eve.

Due to the overwhelming current population of the earth, my contract was renegotiated by North American Fairies and Elves Local 209. As part of the new and better contract I also get longer breaks for milk and cookies so keep that in mind.

However, I'm certain that your children will be in good hands with your local replacement, who happens to be my third cousin, Bubba Claus. His side of the family is from the South Pole. He shares my goal of delivering toys to all the good boys and girls; however, there are a few differences between us.  Differences such as:

1. There is no danger of the Grinch stealing your presents from Bubba Claus. He has a gun rack on his sleigh and a bumper sticker that reads:  "These toys insured by Smith and Wesson."

2. Instead of milk and cookies, Bubba Claus prefers that children leave an RC cola and pork rinds [or a moon pie] on the fireplace. And Bubba doesn't smoke a pipe. He dips a little snuff though, so please have an empty spit can handy.

3. Bubba Claus' sleigh is pulled by floppy-eared, flyin' coon dogs instead of reindeer. I made the mistake of loaning him a couple of my reindeer one time, and Blitzen's head now overlooks Bubba's fireplace.

4. You won't hear "On Comet, on Cupid, on Donner and Blitzen.." when Bubba Claus arrives. Instead, you'll hear, "On Earnhardt, on Andretti, on Elliott and Petty."

5. " Ho, Ho, Ho!" has been replaced by "Yee Haw!" And you also are likely to hear Bubba's elves respond, "I her'd dat!"

6. As required by Southern highway laws, Bubba Claus' sleigh does have a Yosemite Sam safety triangle on the back with the words "Back Off."

7. The usual Christmas movie classics such as "Miracle on 34th Street" and "It's a Wonderful Life" will not be shown in your negotiated viewing area. Instead, you'll see "Boss Hogg Saves Christmas" and "Smokey and the Bandit IV" featuring Burt Reynolds as Bubba Claus and dozens of state patrol cars
crashing into each other.

And Finally,

8. Bubba Claus doesn't wear a belt. If I were you, I'd make sure you, the wife, and the kids turn the other way when he bends over to put presents under the tree.

Sincerely Yours,
Santa Claus

OK. This Elf on a Shelf Stuff Just Got a Little Too Weird...

Had No Idea John Boehner Had A Cat

Been There

Works For Me

Endeavouring to Persevere

I joined a facebook group about reloading a year or so ago.  I thought I might learn something.  I did learn that people are powder coating and painting lead bullets and that they work about as well in handguns as plated bullets but, for the most part, the group doesn't seem to be exactly my cup of tea.  

It seems like most of the posts are by people who want to know how far to seat their bullets off the lands in their rifle, people who seat their bullets to the cannelure but aren't happy because they think they are too far off the lands when they do that, people who want to talk about stainless steel pins for tumbling media or people that want someone to tell them their load data so they don't have to look it up for themselves or actually do any shooting to develop a good load.

Occasionally, some old curmudgeon will comment something to the effect of "why don't you buy a book, go to the powder company's website, read the label on the can of powder and do what it says or shoot your gun to find out what it likes?"  For the most part though, people will chime in with answers.  

Most of the time the answers seem reasonable.  Sometimes some of them are just plain dangerous and the people that post them are too ignorant to know it.  Some day, someone who doesn't know better will actually do what some of the stupider people say and somebody or their gun will get hurt.

By contrast, a month or so ago, I helped a buddy get started reloading for his 30-30.   We went over the basics of using the various tools that were in the box of slightly used equipment that he bought but we didn't actually load any ammo because he hadn't decided where he wanted to set up his reloading operation.  We planned to get together the next weekend and load some ammo but one thing after another kept getting in the way and it didn't happen.

A couple of weeks ago, my buddy called me to tell me that he wanted me to come look at the ammo that he had loaded.   He proceeded to tell me about every step of the process and about how well it shot and wanted to know where he could get more powder and bullets.  I went by last weekend and we did some shooting and his ammo was plenty good enough for anything  you'd expect to be able to do with a Marlin 336 .  Funny thing is, my buddy is recovering from a divorce and doesn't have internet.  Can't afford it just yet.   How the heck did he load good ammo on his first try without someone to show him what to do and without access to the internet?   Lacking digital sources of misinformation, he had gone all analog.    

I had given him an early 1970s vintage Speer reloading manual and told him that the data was out of date but the "how-to" section in the front would tell him what he needed to know about the process.  That crafty devil sat down and read the book.

There's even more.   It seems that the powder measure and the powder scale came with printed documents called "Instructions."   After reading the book, he read those "Instructions"  too.   Then he applied what he learned from the book and the "instructions"  and loaded some pretty darned good ammo.  Who knew that books and instructions still work?

The last time I looked at the facebook page, some guy was asking whether he needed to keep his powder refrigerated.  I'm not making that up.

Suddenly, A Cow

Suddenly, a cow runs out into the road and a limo driving late at night hits it head on and the car comes to a stop.

The woman in the back seat - in her usual abrasive manner, says to the chauffeur "You get out and check out that poor cow."


So the chauffeur gets out, checks and reports back that the animal is dead but it appeared to be very old.


Well, says the woman, " you were driving, so you go over to that farmhouse and tell the farmer what you did."

Two hours later the chauffeur returns totally inebriated, a full belly, his hair ruffled, and a big grin on his face!

"My God, what happened to you?" asked the woman.

The chauffeur replies, "When I got there, the farmer opened his best bottle of single malt scotch, the wife gave me a meal fit for a king, and the daughter made love to me."

"What on earth did you say?" asked the woman.

When the door opened I just said that I was Nancy Pelosi's driver and I've just killed the old cow.

Don't you just love happy endings?


Found at The 24 Hour Campfire

Pretty Much

I Think I'm Allergic to A Certain Blogger

Every time "LB" writes something like this, my allergies get all cranked up.

Would We All Be Like The Dog


Where'd I leave my handkerchief?

New Shooter and Range Report

My brother-in-law's kids are heavily into baseball.  They are good at it.  Their team went to the playoffs  this year.  With four kids across a broad age spectrum, they always seem to be doing baseball all the time so I didn't really expect any reply other than "sorry, we have a game that day" when I sent brother-in-law a message on Thursday suggesting that we all go to the range on Saturday.

The Lovely Bride took our niece shopping on Black Friday and I spent most of Friday wrestling with a problem on my home computer so I was a little surprised when TLB came home and said that her our niece had invited us to go shooting with her, her mother (TLB's sister), her other uncle ("the brother-in-law") and three of his kids.   TLB wanted to know if I knew anything about it.  Being the honest and upstanding kind of guy that I am, I agreed that I might possibly have been the instigator.   I hadn't heard from her brother so I had just assumed that he had a game.   When I checked my messages on Facebook, he had replied that they all wanted to go.   I hadn't checked all day because of the computer trouble.  I really didn't think I needed to.   Might be why I "didn't get" his reply.

Brother-in-law (TLB's brother) had run into Sister-in-Law (TLB's sister) sometime on Friday and invited her and the niece along.  Between my computer headache and the bunch of them text messaging, everybody knew about it before I did.

We got our plans coordinated with the brother-in-law and TLB told her sister that she and the niece had to ride with us because we had to go over rules and how to operate the various types of guns before we got to the range.   You aren't allowed to touch your guns until the range is hot and there's too much shooting going on to show them anything once the range goes hot.

So we picked up the Sister-in-Law and niece and took a shortcut from their place to the Hernando Sportsman's Club.

Got there a few minutes early, checked out the club house, paid our fees and got our stuff all set up.  Their website won't let me copy any more pictures but its a really nice place.

Sister-in-Law recently completed her safety class for her carry permit.  She was familiar with revolvers from the class but had no experience with semi-autos so we brought a few of each for her to try out so she could decide which she preferred.

TLB and Sister-in-Law started out with the new SCCY 9mm whilst the niece and I took the next bench over with the little bull-barreled H&R .32 Magnum.  I know, H&R is supposed to be a cheap gun and far beneath the status of any serious shooter but this one has a rounded grip frame and a bull barrel and its easy and fun to shoot.  Kids like it because its "a magnum" but its comfortable in their hands, has good, adjustable sights, the trigger is smooth and its accurate.   Its a nice gun. I like it.

Niece did  pretty darned well for a first time shooter.

All of her shots were on the board and a lot of them were in the black. 

When they called the range cold, the RSO told me he thought she did pretty well since she didn't shoot the target stand like so many people do and he was really impressed when I told him that this was her first time ever pulling a trigger.  That got him wound up.   As I passed the niece on my way to put up a new target, I told her that the RSO wanted to talk to her.  She got a worried look on her face and asked "what did I do?" and I told her to just ask him to tell her what he told me.  By the time I got back, she was beaming and the RSO had gone to his truck to get a semi-auto .22 rifle with a red dot sight on it.

There were pieces of orange sporting clays targets strewn about underneath the target stands.  When the range went hot again, he had her shooting those orange fragments with that rifle.  She tore them up!

I know; she has that girly, reverse shooting posture thing going on but she's a girl so its OK and we weren't trying to make her into a three gun champion.   We were giving her a fond memory.  We   were   having   fun.   That mission was accomplished.

This  is one of the reasons I like the Hernando Sportsman's Club.   Think about it.  We were shooting at maybe fifteen yards.   The RSO keeps a rifle in his truck with a red dot sight on it and its sighted in at 15 yards.   He keeps that rifle set up just so kids and new shooters will have a good shooting experience!   To me, that's what its all about.   I hate to think what he spends on ammo every month just to be kind to kids like that. 

Along the way, we tried out a few other pistols.   TLB had one failure to feed in the SCCY.  She was shooting Remington FMJ ammo.  I've really been disappointed in their rimfire ammo lately but their center fire stuff seems to work fine so I don't blame the ammo.  I'm not going to complain about the gun yet either.  I've read good and bad reviews about the SCCY guns and most of the bad ones were obviously written by morons.  I'll probably write a rant about that later.   The manuals for a lot of high dollar "carry guns" tell you to shoot 200 or so rounds through the new guns before you consider them reliable.   This was less than 40 rounds into the first 200.   It did fine with some 147 grain Gold Dots that I had loaded for my Luger several years ago.   The Beretta Tomcat had three consecutive failures to feed shooting Privi Partizan hardball.   It wasn't ejecting the fired cases fast enough.  I put in some 85 grain Hornady JHP loads that I worked up to make a friend's Lorcin actually function and it sure didn't have a problem ejecting those cases. I think maybe the Privi stuff was a tad on the mild side.

Actually, its TLB's friend that has the Lorcin.   Just want to make that clear.  K?

To my eye, few guns are more elegant than the Luger so I made sure sister-in-law and niece both got to fire it a little.

Sister-in-Law:

Niece:

Neither of them liked it much.  Mushy Luger trigger and crappy Luger sights.

Naturally, the Glock was boring as stale bread.  It just worked perfectly all day long.

Yawn.  

Nobody wanted to try the big scary .45 so I had it all to myself when I wasn't keeping magazines loaded for the ladies. I got the sights set where I want them so that was a good thing.

Sister-in-Law didn't like the automatics nearly as much as the revolvers.  Hmmm.   Maybe Lugers are good for something after all.  She's decided on a revolver and its going to be a .38 Special.    That's another mission accomplished. 

After making about a gallon of brass, we packed up and headed North to Crystal River for lunch at Crackers

(that's the only picture their site will let me copy)

and to check out a new store called "Rural King." 

I call it "new" because I had never heard of it before this weekend but their website says they have seventy-six stores in ten States and they've been around since 1960.  Reckon I oughtta get out more.

Its kind of like a Tractor Supply Store but its huge and has more of everything.  It even has a nice little gun department with prices that didn't look bad. 

They even had one of these in stock:

When we dropped Sister-in-Law and niece off they thanked us for the good time and the niece asked why the RSO kept calling her "Annie Okra."   I told her that he was saying "Oakley" and why it was a compliment. 

I suggested that she Google it.

I know the tradition here is to post some "brass catcher" pictures whenever actual shooting occurs but this was a family outing.  I'm going to keep it respectable this time.  That Black Friday post ought to have enough pulchritude to last anybody until Wednesday anyway.