Tab Clearing...

• Head of RT admits in interview that there are more clandestine influence operations where that one came from.


• A tour of Fort Wayne... the one in Detroit, that is.


• Beware of acorns!

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Ouch

So I'm feeling this pain in the extreme rear of my mouth and a tenderness in my gum that, if I weren't fifty-mumble years old, I would swear was a wisdom tooth erupting.

I had my wisdom teeth out in my late twenties! Well, three of them, but that's all they could find.

A check with the Google indicates that, indeed, that last one could have just been lurking around waiting to cause me misery later in life.

Still, as thoroughly as my teeth have been x-rayed not long back, you'd think someone would have expressed surprise at a wisdom tooth still lurking around, un-erupted.

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Ouch.

I don't go to public ranges on the weekend because they're way too crowded with normies and their questionable gun-handling habits, and I missed my Monday morning range session because I was home sick, so I'm really rushing to get this 2k test finished.

That meant showing up at Indy Arms Co. yesterday morning with two hundred rounds of Winchester 124gr FMJ...

Even in 9mm, two hundred rounds just stuffed into magazines and dumped downrange as fast as possible...probably over the course of twenty minutes or so...is a lot of shooting. I sometimes feel it in my wrist and the base of my thumb these days, and it's a reminder that I probably need to get more religious about taking Osteo Bi-Flex and maybe an extra calcium supplement over and above my regular multivitamin.

Total round count is at 1,450 now.

Pain in the neck. Literally.

After a two or three day event where I've been running around with a couple cameras and often a camera bag hanging around my neck, I sure feel it. It's not the same full-body ache as after a physically strenuous class; it's definitely localized to the trapezius and neck muscles.

But still... Ow.

And this time around I'd even specifically packed light; it's not like I was schlepping a couple pro DSLRs and big telephotos.

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The French Correction

So, set the wayback machine for the summer of 2007, when I was still living in Knoxville, right after I left Coal Creek Armory. Having some spare time on my hands, I drove over to Nashville to spend a few days at Oleg Volk's place, hanging out and providing an eclectic selection of guns for photographic purposes.

The first morning there, Oleg and a few others were heading out to go do some shooting. Having just finished a good long stretch of six-day workweeks at an indoor range, I begged off. "I'll just chill here and read, if it's all the same to you guys. If you want to shoot anything I brought, feel free to drag it along."

Among the guns they elected to take was the MAS-49/56. I handed Oleg a couple boxes of Portuguese FNM-branded full metal jacket ammunition and told him to knock himself out.

He asked where to hold on the target at a hundred yards.

"How the hell should I know?" I replied, "I've had it a couple years, but never got around to shooting it."

I spent a pleasant couple hours in silence with a book, and when the crew came trooping back in from the range, Oleg had an unhappy look on his face and was nursing his right thumb.

"What happened?"

"The rifle tried to break my hand."

Yikes. The internet wouldn't be happy with me if I broke their photographer, no matter how indirectly.

It turned out that Oleg let the bolt fly forward to chamber the first round, and the rifle promptly slamfired, kicking up a gout of dirt a few yards in front of the line and pranging the base of Oleg's thumb with that big round nylon knob on the MAS charging handle.

A bit of research on the internets turned up the fact that this is what we would call a Known Issue with some ammunition, since the MAS has a large, heavy firing pin meant to deliver a healthy lick to a hard French military primer.

The two solutions for this I uncovered at the time were to either have a 'smith lighten the factory pin, which seemed pretty iffy, or to track down one of a small number of titanium firing pins someone had allegedly made in unicorn-like quantities a few years earlier.

The importance I assigned to this task can be assessed by the fact that I finally got around to it last month...

CONTINUED AT THE OTHER BLOG...WITH PICTURES!

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Ouch!

As far as winters go, this one has been fairly mild. We've had a few decent cold snaps, but they've been brief. 

Snowfall-wise, this is the least snowy winter in Indianapolis since they started keeping track in 1871. The airport has seen 1.7" for the whole season. Here in Broad Ripple we got about an inch of fine, dry powder the other day, which was the most we've had at once so far this winter.

It was light enough that I decided to grab the little kitchen broom we keep in the basement for just this task and whisk the snow off the front steps and sidewalks before heading out for a walk.

I got about two whisks of the broom in before my back let me know it wasn't having any of it. This wasn't the old nerve twinge familiar from falling asleep atop a full-size steel 1911 IWB at 4 o'clock, but the sort of twitch in a muscle that you feel right before your calf knots up in an awful, spasming cramp.

I straightened up ASAP, successfully heading off the cramp, and finished the walks in some weird straight-back, leg-splayed horse stance.

I was super ginger about twisting or bending for the next day or so and it seems to have headed off whatever it was, which is good, because the last thing I need complicating my life right now is lower back trouble.

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That doesn't help...

I've been dealing with awful bouts of insomnia for several weeks now, getting by on three or four hours of sleep, and rarely more than an hour or two at a stretch.

It was initially complicated by a lot of pain in my left elbow, which I'd apparently slept on and strained. Yesterday the pain in my left elbow was first joined, then totally drowned out by pain in my left shoulder, which I must have somehow overstressed doing something otherwise innocuous. It wasn't giving me any trouble weed-whacking and edging yesterday afternoon but by dinnertime it had me sitting immobile and occasionally blurting curses.

I haven't hurt like this since I broke my collarbone and, like that time with the broken collarbone, I'm reminded of how there's very little movement the human body makes that doesn't at least slightly jostle a shoulder. Ouch.

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Ouch.

I've had persistent pain in my left elbow and soreness and tightness in that forearm, most likely from sleeping on it funny one night and then somehow aggravating it.

Even though it's my support-side hand, it definitely makes itself felt when shooting, though, especially an all-steel full size 1911. It'll be nice if this goes away; I have enough parts of me that are more or less permanently stove up and I'd hate to add my left elbow to the list.

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QotD: Ouch! Edition

"The only instinct human beings are born with is sucking. A good many never get much past that." -Roberta X

Bottlenecks

When I was down in Georgia last November, I found myself wishing I had a lens longer than the 24-120mm on my camera to get better shots of the MV Golden Ray, lying on her side in St. Simons sound. She wasn't an enormous ship, as ships go, being some 660 feet long. Still, something the length of two football fields just lying there on its side tends to attract the eye.

The big yellow arch is actually the superstructure of a salvage catamaran, the not-very-romantically-named VB-10,000.

Golden Ray is only not very big by current ship standards because current ship standards have to take into account monsters like US Navy carriers, supertankers, and gigantic container ships like the Ever Given...

https://t.co/wPQ5ezsDPm

Photo from someone on the Maersk Denver behind them. pic.twitter.com/2reFwCFDpx

— Rob McFadzean (@rmcfadzean) March 23, 2021

Ever Given is big. Really, really big. Like, so big that if you nailed an eight foot long two-by-four to the bow, you'd have just made the ship a full quarter mile long. So big that some people have noted that she might be larger than the size class known as "Suezmax". (The Suez Canal doesn't have locks, so overall length isn't as hard a limit as it would be on the Panama Canal... I mean, unless you turn your ship sideways or something.)

The effect on the global shipping trade will depend on how quickly this traffic jam can be cleared.

If the authorities in Egypt are able to free the Ever Given from the channel and move it to the side of the waterway within two to three days, the episode will be a minor inconvenience to the industry. Shipping companies generally build in extra days to their schedules to account for delays en route.

But if the ship’s extraction proves more complex, leaving the Suez blocked for longer, that could pose a substantial risk for an industry that is already overwhelmed. Global maritime trade has taken a hit over the last year because of the pandemic, pushing Egypt’s revenues from the canal down 3 percent to $5.61 billion in 2020.

“If that’s going to be a knock-on delay, then you’ll see piling up and bunching up of ships on their arrival in Europe as well,” said Akhil Nair, vice president of global carrier management at SEKO Logistics in Hong Kong. “It’s just one more factor that we didn’t need.”

The news reports are saying that control was lost during a bad sandstorm, causing the bow to run aground and the ship to slew sideways. "If a butterfly flaps its wings in China and causes a sandstorm in Egypt, how late will Hans's PS5 in Stuttgart be?"

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Sympathetic Wince

What do me and Tiger Woods have in common? 

Steel rods in our right shins from catastrophic compound tib-fib fractures, and neither of us can play golf right now.

"Tiger Woods is recovering following hours of surgery to repair comminuted open fractures in his right leg following a serious car accident in Los Angeles on Tuesday (February 23) morning. A comminuted fracture is when a bone breaks into several pieces and pierces the skin. 

Orthopedic trauma surgeons at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center had to insert a rod to repair his tibia and used screws and pins to stabilize the damage in his ankle and foot. 

"Comminuted open fractures affecting both the upper and lower portions of the tibia and fibula bones were stabilized by inserting a rod into the tibia," Dr. Anish Mahajan said in a statement. "Additional injuries to the bones of the foot and ankle were stabilized with a combination of screws and pins. Trauma to the muscle and soft-tissue of the leg required surgical release of the covering of the muscles to relieve pressure due to swelling.""

Dude's gonna be off his feet for a bit and he's gonna need to learn to walk all over again, which sucks. His break sounds even worse, because I got off lightly in terms of soft tissue damage and my feet didn't get busted up.

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Mobility

So, when they gave me a sling in the ER after I broke my collarbone back in May, I figured I was going to be the best sling patient ever. When they gave me a better one at the orthopedics clinic, I strapped that thing down tight and even slept in it.

When I finally got to the ortho doc and told him this on my four week visit, all beaming with pride, he looked pained. Nobody had told me that after the first few weeks I was only supposed to wear it when I was out of the house, to keep people from bumping into my healing flipper. Instead, I had essentially immobilized my elbow and shoulder joints for a month and a half and now was going to have to rehab those.

All my life I have put jackets and coats on with the right sleeve first and then fishing behind myself with my more dextrous left hand for the other sleeve. Since May, I've constantly had to remind myself to do it the other way 'round.

As of this past week, I finally have enough mobility and lack of pain in my left shoulder joint that I can put my coat on normally again. Yay!

Oh, well...

My new zig-zag clavicle...

This will be important in my writeup of some rifle plates here this weekend.
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Grousing...

The collarbone is still all jacked up. I guess you just don't knit up as fast at fifty as you do at thirty. (Funnily enough, I remember complaining after my big motorcycle wreck eighteen years ago that I wasn't bouncing back as fast as I did when I was twenty.)

Putting on a tee shirt involves laboriously threading it over the bad wing all the way up to the shoulder, poking my head in, and then wriggling the other arm up and in. It's an awkward process.

Another thing I noticed is that I apparently habitually put open-front shirts and jackets on with my right arm first. For the first month and a half, when I was religiously wearing the sling, this was no problem, since I'd thread my right arm into the sleeve of my gun burkha and then shrug it over my left. Now, though, nearly every time I put the shirt on, I reflexively put it on the wrong arm first, then have to take it off and start over.

Were I a profounder person, I'd insert something here about "training scars".
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Ouch...

The way my shoulder feels right now, I kind wish home X-ray machines were a thing.

I suppose it's just a front moving through, but...ow.
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I don't know what it was...

...maybe the front that came through yesterday, skidding a line of thunderstorms ahead of it and dropping the temperature by twenty degrees in a couple hours, but my collarbone hurt bad yesterday. As bad as at any time since the first week after; not the dull ache I've grown accustomed to, but the jagged stab of broken glass.

It's been enough to make me wonder if somehow the fracture hadn't become mobile again.

It was better today, but only by comparison. If it's still sharp & stabbing on Monday, I may see about getting an X-ray someplace for a second opinion on just how well this thing is knitting.
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Today's the day...

Ortho appointment scheduled for 2PM today.

Here's hoping they can just set it and put me in a figure-eight brace and send me on my merry way.

I haven't the time, money, nor inclination for surgery.
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*pop*

From Facebook at about 2AM this morning:

Pretty sure I reduced the fracture today. There was a kind of grinding pop and I got all sweaty and light-headed for a bit. Oh, and the gap in my collarbone went away. 

Seems my sling was too loose and I’d been pulling my shoulder in the wrong direction for the last couple days. 

So when it popped into place, I held my arm in that position until Bobbi got home and asked her to take the slack out of my sling. 

Now I’m sitting here worrying about finding a good semi-sitting sleeping position. 

I just wanna get told I don’t need surgery on Wednesday.

Technical Difficulties...

So, I stayed up a little later than planned last night. My rationale was that I'd already blown off my intended bedtime of 11:30 and so I'd just stay up and surf the intertubes for another 45 minutes or so until my phone finished charging.

Apparently I nodded off at my desk and, when I slipped from REM into deep sleep, I also fell out of my chair. I must have hit the hardwood floor right on the point of my shoulder, because I broke my left collarbone pretty good.

Well, this puts paid to my planned trip to gun school with Gabe White in Columbia, MO. It's gonna ding my pistol shooting for the next month or two as well.

I see that my roommate lit the Beacons of Gondor while I was at the hospital or was sitting on the couch in an opioid stupor. I didn't know she'd done that, but it was a welcome surprise. Thank you so much to all who responded.

And thank heavens for this little flyweight wireless keyboard in my lap so that I can continue to type two-handed.
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Been busy this weekend...

There will come a time when I am too old for this shit, and so I want to get a bunch of it in while I can.
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