Ruh-Roh......Western Rifle Shooters Association Blog Taken Down.....

Just hear about it from Phil over at BustedKnuckles.

For the time being, WRSA has relocated here.

And as I saw on another blog.....maybe you can stop the signal.....

Almost time to go back to old BBS' to distribute info!

YCMTSU!

Just heard on the scanner that a BOLO has been issued for two heavyset men in a gold Jeep Cherokee. They were talking with the people who called it in that they were "Looking for anarchists to shoot", and were heavily armed with "assault type rifles and pistols".

Earlier I head discussion of stretchers and a triage unit being set up "In case we need it tonight".

And some of the "Federal" frequencies I have programmed in are lighting up, and I've never seen that here.....

If I had a better antenna, aimed South towards Denver, I could probably get some of their wide-area coverage repeaters, but 60~70 miles is just too far with the little whip antenna I have on it.

Think I'll go clean some stuff, and inventory some other stuff, and get a few other things ready-to-use.........


1950MST - Colorado State Police just nailed a group making Molotov Cocktails at Colfax and Broadway, near City Center Park, next to the State Capitol.....

Getting a Bit "Spicy" in L.A.

Just got a text from my son. They're boarding up all the windows and doors at the large grocery store he works at near LAX.

No word on if they're going to send the employees home.....yet.


And on the local front, I see there were protests in front of the local PDHQ the last couple of days.

Read all about it here.

I have no idea of the history of our local PD in regards to complaints of excessive force.  I suspect a lot of these people are the local snowflake population out doing their virtue signalling.....

Late Spring Storm!

I've been watching the weather today, and we went from a 20% chance of rain to 30%, then to 40%, and now it's pouring, with "garbanzo bean sized" hail.

And it hurts when it hits!

It just started to rain, then small hail started coming down. By the time I'd cleared space in the garage,(maybe two minutes), and ran in the house to get the keys for SLW's car, it was raging, and I got pelted with a whole bunch of big hail while running (well, what *I* call "running") from the garage to her car.

That stuff hurts!

We got .15" of rain in a few minutes, and the yard was covered with hailstones. The hail melted within minutes as it was 85* here all day, and yesterday, and the ground was pretty warm.

I think we'll get some more rain, but the heavy stuff has passed.

Here's what my weather station recorded. Not the rapid rise in barometer and humidity, accompanied by a large drop in temperature.

And the radar from 2025 local time.

Still some out there, and the radar return indicates we should be having sprinkles, but nothing yet.

Spring Cleaning the Garage.....

Should probably call this one "Wake up, honey..."

Jammed up in the back, too....

And along the driver's side....

But after moving things around, rearranging things, and tossing some things away, we can see some progress....

I can walk through there again!

And finally, I can get to work on the ugly front bumper!

The tires that were in the bags taking up way too much room were the ones I had on the Jeep when I moved out here. They still have about 3/4 the tread depth on them, but I drive so few miles out here that I'm just going to leave the Blizzaks on the Jeep year-round. The "Summer Tires" are in the Jeep and will be going to Discount Tire for disposal, unless somebody wants them.

The small LED light fixture I had over the workbench went casters up, so I'm finally getting around to hanging the 48" LED fixture I bought last year.

This will get hung from the ceiling between the workbench and the front of the car. Should give me plenty of light on the front of the Supra, and some on the bench.

Sweet Little Wife has picked up a new hobby....refinishing furniture, of all things! She bought this really cool, very well made drop-leaf table at the ARC Thrift Store. It had some damage to the finish (it's 50+ years old), so she tried cleaning it. No joy....So she's gone down the rabbit-hole of learning to use stripper to get the finish off, then block sanding it with increasingly finer grit sand paper. She put one coat of finish on it, decided she didn't like the color, and stripped it all off again! She's learning very fast, and is getting an appreciation of what "Hand Made" means. In the meantime she's also picked-up an equally nice side table for $10, and an absolutely killer cedar chest made by Lane. We decoded the serial number and found out it was made in the Summer of 1941! So she now has a Pre-War, solid cedar with veneer, American-made classic piece of furniture. It has finish damage on the top veneer, and after realizing she had a real "heirloom", she decided to take it to a guy in town who does exquisite work.

Things are opening back up here, and life is slowly returning to normal. I'm sure the sheeple in town and the students will be talking of "The NEW Normal", but that's just something the chattering classes do. For the rest of us it means we can go back to living our lives pretty much as if nothing happened.

You know, kinda like "Global Warming"?

New Canoe for Drjim??

Hmmmm....change the hull number to 61 and I might be interested.....

Bummer about SpaceX scrubbing the launch, but the weather was a bit too iffy. And clear weather will help the Photo-Optics Team get better film and/or video of the launch. Considering it's SpaceX, they probably do 100% video. I went to a High-Speed Imaging conference some years ago, and the recording of high-speed events had pretty much gone to all video by then. The company putting on the conference was literally the last place in the world we could get our high-speed (400fps/16mm) film cameras serviced, so I got to spend two extra days in training with the guy that worked on our cameras.

Finally On Kubuntu 20.04_LTS

I downloaded it a couple of weeks ago, and slowly began the process of getting all my bookmarks and stuff off the drive in this PC and on to a portable drive. Then, before I started, I realized I had some new drives in the workshop, so I went and got one of those. I swapped the drives, and completely disconnected the "#2 Drive" in here that I use for storage. I've had issues in the past where the installer for the Operating System saw two, matched drives, and went ahead and nuked the second drive, and set the two drives up is a kind of a RAID fashion, meaning I lost all the stuff I had on the other drive.

Good thing I have backups!

So I now have a new 4TB WD "Black" drive (the "High Performance" version compared to a "Blue" drive) in here, my secondary storage drive is safe and reconnected, and things seem to be running smoothly.

I'm snagging and installing various applications as I remember/need them, as I usually do a "Minimum" install. The "Standard" installation adds all kinds of stuff I'll never use, and duplicates of popular programs so a new user can try them and see which they prefer.

Do I really need three music players, four text editors, three different photo viewers, and a dozen games I'll never play? I mean choice is good, but at some point it becomes clutter, especially if you've been using Linux as long as I have.

And since this is a release with Long Term Support, I'll have a much easier time upgrading it to the next release, rather than having to start from scratch again.

Time to see if I can get my webcam up and running so I can join the Skype session used for a "Virtual Meeting" of the Amateur Radio club aboard the Iowa.

Memorial Day.....

Others can and will say things much more eloquently than I can, so I'll just leave this here.....

Haven't seen anybody selling poppies this year, or I would have bought one, just like my Dad taught me to.

Thought  I'd add this pic of the USNS Mercy departing Los Angeles on 15 May.

Got dusty in here when I first saw it.....

Out and About Today

Had some items to ship, meds to pick up, COFFEE to buy, and several other errands to run.

Zipped in and out of the FedEx place in about 15 minutes, typically quick for them, but the USPS was a mess.

All three of their do-it-yourself kiosks were down, so I had to get in line.

A very LONG line.

And it moved sloooow.

I finally get up to the counter, put the first package on the scale, and quipped with the clerk that I usually do this myself, but the self-service machines were down. The clerk replied, "Gee....that must be why we're so busy today!".

duh.....

Oh, well, he's behind the counter all day and I don't really expect him to know what's going on in another part of the building.

Then it was up to the North side of town to do a curbside pick-up of two magnifying lamps at the Home Depot. I'd thought I'd checked "Free Shipping To Home" when I placed the order, but something must have burped when the order went in, so they did the free shipping to the store. Unfortunately they were sent to the store on the opposite side of town from where FedEx and the Post Office are.

Granted the whole town is only about 9 miles North-to-South, with minimal traffic, but it would have been nice if they had been shipped to the store I always shop at, a few blocks from the FedEx store.

Some stores had "Must Wear Mask" signs, and some didn't. People out here seem to fall into two categories.

1 - "Sheeple", who blindly follow everything the media say to do "For The Children!" without questioning. They're easy to spot because they look so meek and downtrodden, shuffling along, almost broken.... Some look almost normal, but with an air of sadness about them.

2 - "The Rest of Us", who grudgingly put a mask on when required, and immediately take it off when exiting the premises. They're also easy to spot, especially upon exiting a building, but they walk with a sense of direction and purpose, showing the pride and confidence a Free Man has.

As far as people driving along with all the windows rolled up tightly, and wearing a mask? Well, you've seen them before "unmasked". They're the ones blissfully driving along with the turn signal flashing away, usually 5~10 under the speed limit. And after several blocks or more, they abruptly change lanes lanes to make a turn in the opposite direction of what the flasher had been indicating.

Be safe out there!

And now for a little humor.....

 

Rainy.....

We've received over 1/2" of rain this week, most of it in nice, gentle showers. Makes me glad I was able to fertilize (good old "Weed-N-Feed" like Dad always used) the yard a few days before it started, and even got some grass seed properly sown in a couple of the Big Bare Spots alongside the garage. Still have about half the backyard to reseed after I went bonkers with the chemicals  the first year here -AND- didn't water enough.

Whacked the grass damn good, I did.....Reminds me of the "lawns" back in SoCal.

I wasn't used to being allowed to use so much water without risking bankruptcy and the Water Police (Lost Angeleez is NUTZ!), so I was being conservative with the water.

Didn't work and I burned out half the yard.....Le Sigh....

And swapped out my Sweet Little Wife's studded snows today for the wheels and tires that came on the car. It's a 2013 Hyundai Elantra, and the tires are just now down to the tread wear bars, and a couple of them are "chunking" in a very minor way, so looks like a trip down to Discount Tire is in the immediate future. The OEM tires are "Hankook", but I think we'll go with something better this time.


/RANT/

This lockdown BS is getting on my nerves. Not so much here, but in seeing what's happening in other states.

Kommiefornia is staying locked down for another THREE months! That's going to cause some permanent damage to the state's economy and make it even more a third-world shit hole than it already is.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of the blue states stay locked down until after the election, allowing "mail in" ballots and an astounding level of blatant voter fraud to occur.

And like some of the Interent memes are saying, why haven't we heard of massive die-offs in the homeless camps around the country?

Why are the politicians who forced this shutdown still drawing full pay and benefits?

And they took an extra vacation?

It's starting to look like time to water the Tree of Liberty again.....

Red Dots!

Since my wife has trouble with the iron sights on her TRR-8 357 revolver, *AND* her instructor mumbled something about the gun needing an optic, I popped for an early birthday present for her with a HOLOSUN Reflex Sight.

It got very good reviews on several sites I read, and Brownell's had it in stock  at a good price, so I ordered it.

I'll wait'll she goes out on one of her shopping excursions, and sneak it on to her pistol and set it up after it gets here.

Never thought she'd turn into a "gunney", but life is full of surprises.