Brrrrr!!!!

Check out my thermometer. The bottom number is the outside temp.















My uncle and I went grouse hunting for a few hours yesterday afternoon, and the wind chill was absolutely shocking. Nothing I'd rather do than trudge around in the woods with a bird dog and a shotgun in sub-zero wind chill! Now we're havin' fun!!

Ouch!

I'm so tacti-cool it hurts...

Behold, my latest addition:



The Magpul Enhanced Triggerguard

This is useful for anytime you're wearing gloves. My rifle came with a fold-out triggerguard, hinged at the rear. All you had to do was push in a detent-spring and it would come open. Problem is, the triggerguard would then be poking downward at an angle and would no longer be serving its stated purpose -- that of guarding the trigger. Duh.

So, if you varmint-hunt in the cold, or your AR is your truck-gun when you're cutting wood, or if you just roam the woods with tacti-cool OD Mechanix gloves on, this'll work for 'ya.



Tactical overalls are optional, of course.

No class...

... doesn't mean "no work." My nursing instructors are all out of town for meetings today, so we don't have classes. That should be a good thing ... maybe I could go shooting, or finally clean my shotgun, or take a nap, or read a book ...

But noooooooo .... I have to climb Mt. St. Busywork for my "Intro" to Computers class. By midnight Sunday, I have to take 3 online surveys and write a 2-page paper about the results, and I have to do another project in which I consolidate info from members of my class group into a paper (or Power Point presentation or Excel spreadsheet) in which we compare our data to data we find on-line.

Wait a second ... if this is an "Intro" to computers ... why does the instructor assume we know a damn thing about Power Point or Excel or even Word? (I'm not exaggerating ... I have people in my classes that - literally - can't do anything with a computer more than e-mail and web surfing. I'm serious. They don't understand how to order anything on-line. I wouldn't be surprised if half the class couldn't use Word.) I've been in the "working world" 8 years before this ... I taught myself to use Power Point and basic Excel, but most people in my class don't have that experience. I wonder how they'll handle this ... or if they'll just drop the class.

And that's just my computer class. I've got more drugs to study for my Pharmacology II class than I can handle, and my Childbearing/Family instructor wants us to HAND-WRITE "drug cards" on 25 drugs before clinicals begin on Feb. 9. I hate busywork.

On the other hand, I finished my drug regimen for "Latent Tuberculosis Infection" 2 days ago.

That means ... tonight ...

... I get beer...

Skeet!!

The mighty HODAR, Mamacita and the Kid came up for the long weekend. HODAR & I shot some skeet. I learned that you really, really need to be diligent about a good cheek weld when shooting a shotgun or you get a good cheek bruise.

Other than that, I'm taking 18 hours this semester. Blogging may be light.

Results

I nearly forgot to post anything about my first 50 reloads. All of 'em went "bang" - and only one round initially didn't feed. I racked that round out and put it back into the mag. It fed the second time around.
















I need to fiddle with the overall length of the cartridges. In order to have the proper OAL as indicated in the reloading manual, I'm ending up with the bullets seated so far down in the casing that the case neck is sticking up past the edge of the bullet (if that makes any sense). Backing the bullet out will lower the pressure of each round, so the only potential problem that might cause is that the rounds might not have enough power to cycle the slide. I'll do a few test rounds & see what happens.

Other than that, I tried to concentrate on better form while shooting these rounds. In the Fighting Pistol DVDs I got for Christmas, James Yeager describes a grip on the handgun in which your strong hand grips front-to-back, and your support hand grips side-to-side. It felt to me like that improved my control -- but, as it tends to happen when I try something new, I stopped paying enough attention to proper trigger squeeze and ... well, you can see where all the groups ended up. Yep -- the 'ol flinch rears its ugly head. Once I can get the grip down more naturally, though, that should work itself out.

No lawyer jokes on this blog...

... thanks to LawDog:

I don't care how justifiable the killing was. I don't care if you're in Deepinahearta, Texas and the deceased is laying in the middle of your living room floor with an axe in one hand and a detailed murder list in the other.

Call your lawyer.

Miss Fluffy and I have had our CCW licences in two states now. In our former abode, we knew a lawyer who could have hooked us up if things went south (since this individual didn't specialize in self-defense cases). In our current state, though, we've been remiss in that we haven't made contact with one.

I'm trying to rectify that as I type this.

If you carry a gun, or if you have a gun in your home and might ever use it to defend yourself, you would be well advised to do the same.

And no lawyer jokes. Funny how people seem to view cops and lawyers similarly: Seems like everybody loves to hate cops and lawyers ... until they need one.

First batch!

As promised, here's my other Christmas gift (the one that's bolted to the table in my basement):

















It's a Lee Turret Reloader. And here's my first batch of 50:
















I test fired 5 rounds before I ran this batch, and all went "bang" (without destroying my handgun or blowing off my fingers, thankfully!), and fed without a problem. I didn't want to do more than 50, just in case I start having trouble with round #6.

For those of you who are interested, I'm using S&B once-fired brass (of which I've collected thousands over the years), Alliant Unique powder (5.1 grains per round), Winchester large pistol primers and Valiant 200 grain lead semi-wadcutter bullets. I've never used semi-wadcutters, so I wasn't sure how well they'd feed, but the few rounds I tested seemed fine.

Since it's a nauseatingly mild day (sunny and 56 degrees right now), I'll most likely have a range report ready to go this evening.

Reloading is really pretty easy. For me, the toughest part was getting over the mental hurdle of stressing over blowing something up. As long as you follow the data in a quality reloading manual (and follow that data to the letter) you won't have a problem. Once my first test round went "bang", I felt better about it. It's kind of silly to get worked up about it, I suppose -- but I can't afford to replace a damage gun or to re-attach fingers right now, so I don't feel all that bad about feeling so relieved the first time it went "bang"!

I need to find somebody with a chrono to see how closely the FPS match what should be happening per the manual. For now, though, the rounds fire, they feed fine and they cycle the gun. That's good enough for the time being.

Thought for two days ago...

Nothing changes on New Year's Day

U2 - "New Year's Day"