Slow start...

Spent the morning blogging about cool old rocket-ship-looking Thunderbirds.

More later.

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Whupped.

Spent a week in Akron doing work with 4" schedule 40 PVC pipe in an office building at night after the employees had gone home, and then drove the four and a half hours home yesterday and I am just absolutely whupped. I'll probably be hearing sawzalls cutting pipe and drills coring concrete in my head for days.

It was good to get home to Bobbi and the cats and my own bed, though.

Today's gonna be a rest & recuperation day while I catch up on some promised writing.

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Ugh.

I had intended to go to the outdoor range today, but it's going to be swamp-ass hot, like Gulf Coast levels of heat and humidity, and neither the Mustang nor the Zed Drei have any refrigerant aboard currently.

If I were faced with a week- or month-long stretch of this, I'd just cowgirl up and go, but when you can look ahead to Thursday and Friday and see it's going to be more bearable, it's easy to just punk out for a couple days. I'll maybe hit the indoor range on Thursday and Friday.

The next three days are supposed to have highs in the mid- to upper 90s and dew points in the low 70s, and it's those dew points that'll take the starch out of me. Bicycling and walking around the neighborhood will be bad enough, but 30 minutes or more in a car with no A/C? Nah. I'll skip that. Next week is supposed to return to more normal late summer weather.

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Sorry, guys.

The week... hell, the whole month ...is off to an unbelievably crappy start.

I'll try to cheer up and be funnier.

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Confession

I couldn't even bring myself to go to the indoor range this morning.

Indy Arms Company has a fantastic air handling system, such that you actually feel the breeze from behind you on the firing line, and that's great for ensuring you're not breathing nasty, lead-y air.

But on a day like today there's just no way the A/C can keep up with the sheer volume of outside air being sucked in to feed the ventilation system and so even on the indoor range it's swamp-ass hot by 10:30 or 11:00. Some days I can deal with that but today ain't one of them. I've got a mess of laundry to deal with this afternoon and that's about the limit of my exertions.

I'll just have to make up for it on Monday morning.

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Place Holder

Busy this morning. More to come this evening.

In the meantime, say hello to this very good boi.

Sorry...

I absolutely have to get some chrono testing done this morning so I can ship off a review this afternoon.

I won't go to the outdoor range on the weekends... it'd be impossible to get any chrono testing done then anyway ...and today's the only dry weekday in a solid block of rainy weather stretching from last Tuesday to this coming Friday. We're on pace for one of the wettest Aprils on record here in Indy.

Duty calls.

More this afternoon...

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Oof.

Left Dallas yesterday morning slightly after 0800 CDT and got back to Roseholme Cottage sometime just before 11PM Eastern. That's a long day on the road and I am wiped out. (And I was just passengering. I find that, when I'm driving these days, something around six hours is nearing my limit.)

I'm hoping to muster the energy to deal with a suitcase full of dirty laundry sometime this evening, but I have a feeling that today's otherwise gonna be pretty much a write-off.

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Sorry…

Taking a sick day here.

Got kinda banged up yesterday.

I’ll try to get back to normal content tomorrow.

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Ugh.

The worst part of being out of town at TacCon for most of a week is that I get home with a full to-do list and an email inbox that's a disaster area*, but I need at least a day to recover before I can really get things back to my usual manageable level of disorganization.

Meanwhile, apropos of nothing in particular other than me turning on the TV this morning, here's a photo of Lou Ann Hamblin teaching her four-hour block on Responding to Active Killers...

Welp, I gotta unpack, do laundry, process a buttload of photos, and then see if I can't get back up to action speed again tomorrow.

*I mean, even more of a disaster area than usual.

Forget that...

Me, about to drive out to the range to shoot jello: "Alexa, what's the outside temperature?"

The Robot of Disappointment: "Right now, it's 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Today, expect a high of 64 degrees."

Screw that. The top's down on the Bimmer in the garage and I can't raise it at these temps without risking damage...well, further damage...to the rear window.

The weather forecast says it'll be a lot better at the range on Tuesday, so Tuesday it is.

I've got a few different kinds of 5.7x28mm to test, as well as .32 H&R Mag and .327 Federal.

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Well...

I punked out of going to the range yesterday morning. Seeing that today was supposed to be warmer, I figured I'd hold off for a more pleasant experience.

It's definitely supposed to be warmer...this afternoon. But right now it's in the low forties outside, which is noticeably cooler than yesterday morning.

Hopefully by the time I go tooling over to MCF&G, it'll be feeling balmier.

I'm happy seeing the colors of the trees, but shooting small-ish frame revolvers with heavy loads is un-fun these days on cold mornings. I can definitely tell where that right thumb broke in the motorcycle wreck.

Using the wide-angle lens on the iPhone 13 Pro Max gets the whole tree in the frame.

Roundup

Greg Ellifritz has his TacCon '22 link roundup posted.

He notes:

"I started writing about TacCon back in 2014. It’s interesting looking back. My 2014 TacCon Roundup post had 15 article links. As late as 2019, I had 12 links. This year there are six links. I miss the days when folks blogged about their experiences. In a couple years, I might be the only one writing about this excellent training resource. Yes, the art of blogging is dying."

Hey, I haven't even finished processing all the photos I took yet, dude.

I used a bunch of keystrokes...

...but at the other, other blog.

I'll get some more and be back in a minute here.

Perishable Skills...

I hadn't busted any caps since that Modern Samurai Project class in Ohio back about Halloween. Been pretty desultory about dry-fire in the interim two months, too.

It shows.

FPF Training targets available here. (I don't get a kickback, I just like them.)

That's fifty rounds from the Stance and twenty-five from the Ultrastar at seven yards. Pathetic. It's not like I can blame going fast, either, because I doubt more than a handful of those splits dipped below the half second mark. The only good thing that came out of that was it appears I don't suck all that much worse with the Double-Action first pull on the Ultrastar than I do with the subsequent follow-up shots.

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Working on a post...

In the meantime, have a picture of an adorable pupper...

Yesterday...

...I broke a tooth. It wasn't much of a mood enhancer, to be honest. At least the dentist was able to squeeze me in for an emergency repair at 11:00 this morning.

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Excuses...

Finishing up some work this morning. In the interim, have a picture of Huck looking surly at having his nap disturbed.

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Sorry.

Today was mostly spent wishing my headache would go away. VFTP will return to our regularly scheduled programming in the AM.

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Busy earlier, but back home.

Range trip this morning. Got the dot sighted in on SECRET REVIEW GUN and did some jello shots for a speculative article (I've never written an article on spec before, so this is untrodden ground for me.)

Also popped a few caps through that little Bond Arms 9x19mm derringer for yuks. More later.

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