Patriot Sporting Goods is just outside Beverly Hills Florida off Hwy 491. I was in the area the previous Tuesday and dropped by to check the place out. Prices looked good and the staff seemed to have a clue so I bought a can of Longshot and told them I'd be back after payday. Friday was, conveniently, after payday so we rolled in at about 9:30 AM.
Sometime this year I misplaced two magazines for my Glock and I was tired of looking for them. Patriot happened to have two of the kind that I needed and their price was 10% lower than Gooseburg's so that was a no-brainer. They also had three different magazines for Kahr's in 40 S&W. The nearest Gooseburg doesn't have anything for a Kahr that isn't a 9mm. I bought a 7 rounder for carry as a backup magazine. They even gave me four bucks off the Kahr mag for Black Friday.
At Rural King, we browsed but weren't actually going to buy anything but a sack of corn for a feeder until, on the way to the checkout line, we passed some barrels of bird seed. They had a bird seed scoop that was a combination scoop and funnel and it had a nifty little cut off slide built into it. I'm a sucker for magazine cut-offs.
It looked like the perfect thing for pouring smokeless powder back into a can so it followed us home with the sack of corn.
A stop by the new Bubba Que in Dunnellon was uneventful and when we got home I decided to be rebellious and load some ammo instead of doing office work. I loaded 45 ACP, 40 S&W and .32 ACP. I don't even have dies or shell holders for .32 ACP but my .32 S&W Long dies and 30 Carbine shell holders worked fine. The new funnel gizmo worked great. It also fits into a Lil Dandy powder measure and makes filling those a snap.
After finishing the .32s, my back was killing me so I stretched it out hanging from a water pipe and plopped on the couch. Halfway through the rerun of House MD that I was trying to watch, TLB informed me that Bullet the Wonder Dog had made another escape. I'd change his name to Colonel Hogan if Bob Crane hadn't been, well, you know.
Calling, whistling and clapping bought no response so he either wasn't close enough to hear us or he was far enough away from us to know that we'd think he couldn't hear us. Back into the car, driving all over the neighborhood shining a spotlight into everyone's yard we searched until the spotlight died.
TLB kept saying she had a feeling that the dog was close to home. I certainly had a feeling that he wasn't anywhere we had looked so we headed back, half expecting to see the long-eared galoot sitting by the front door wondering why we didn't take him on our trip.
Nope.
I searched the fence line to see if maybe he was trapped half under the fence. I started checking under the shed and TLB said she heard him yipping. I didn't hear a thing for a while but when I moved to the East side of the house I thought that maybe I did.
It was faint but it was him.
He'd either been nabbed by a poltergeist and was inside the TV or he was still in our dimension somewhere North and East of us and in some kind of distress. The TV being a flat screen, someplace to the North and East seemed the better bet so we hit the front yard and started calling again.
This time, we both distinctly heard him reply and it was his "Dad, I'm OK but I wrecked the car" yip. It was close too.
We were headed back to the car when he just appeared, loping down the street towards the house, thinking he could sneak back under the fence and make like he had been there the whole time.
We called him and he took off. He rounded the corner into the neighbor's backyard and TLB pulled up in the car to give chase. We went down the block and I asked her why she was going that way when I last saw him in the neighbor's back yard right where she picked me up. She didn't know why she was going wherever she was going and I didn't know why I was going too so we pulled into somebody's driveway to make a three point turn. The dog came alongside the starboard beam.
I popped the back door open. Bullet knew he was in trouble and thought it was going to come from me so he ran to the other side. TLB opened her door to give chase on foot and he crawled into the car over her and got in the back seat. On the short drive home, she asked me where he could have gotten wet.
Sure. With his lineage, that had to be it.
Being scared of retribution, the dog didn't want to get out of the car so I picked him up and carried him into the house. He was drenched and stunk like pond water.
OK. So it hadn't been that picturesque.
Toweling the smelly little prodigal off, I wanted to crank up the Edison and play "Shall We Gather At The River" but we got off track putting two and two together. There was only one place where he could have gotten into nasty water like that but it was fenced. It didn't make sense so we grabbed a flashlight and checked it out.
The dog had crossed the street to a house that's under renovation. The people doing the renovating took out about four feet of the back yard fence when they moved the electric service. Evidently, they never heard of small children, old people or dogs because they left it that way.
The place wasn't fenced anymore.
Bullet had found the opening in the fence and loped right into this:
While we were running our dragnet, Bullet was on a ledge in that nasty pool trying to get out.
TLB still wanted to thrash him for not coming when we called. I insisted that he was trying to come but was too busy not drowning. I allowed as how I hoped that either of us would make the same choice in a similar situation.
I didn't let her hit him even once.
TLB didn't get to hit the dog but she got to shop. I got my magazines and got to do some loading and the dog got baptized.
Best time I've ever had on a Black Friday.
No comments:
Post a Comment