All Right. Show Yourselves!

I know I don't have a lot of readers yet, but I'm going to put this in, anyway. Go ahead and add your pin to my Frappr map. Let me know where you are. It's over there in my left-hand column.

C'mon, all the cool kids are doin' it! Now, you can, too!

Walrilla

Update: Gonna keep this on top for a while.

City Politics

Well, the city agreed to apply for a grant and match funds with it for a new softball field. As some of you may remember, I blogged about this in my last incarnation. Now It's finally coming true. A field just for our special needs kids. Nothing on it will keep "regular" kids from playing there, but now there will be nothing to impede our kids. Wider entrances to the dugouts, sunken bases, base paths compacted harder for wheelchairs. Its a regular field, just more accomodating. And it will allow the Softball Assn. to host 16-team tournaments now. That's a pretty nice amount of money coming in for a small town softball league. About 20 girls on a team, 1 or 2 parents per girl, maybe siblings, too. Gotta eat, gotta have somewhere to sleep. That makes for some nice revenue for other businesses in town, too. I know it wasn't given to us just out of the goodness of their hearts, but at least it was given.

Walrilla

What the Hell?

What's going on with TTLB. Ive dropped several levels while my link count has gone up.
Surely there aren't that many new blogs with a greater traffic than mine? I guess my next level will be "Lower than Whale Shit"

Walrilla

Shootin' stuff

Well, KurtP over at A Trainwreck in Maxwell is posting about making a decision on a new smokepole.

If he goes with the 1851 Colt Navy, I hope he goes with the steel frame over the brass if he intends to shoot more than cornmeal through it. He emailed me and asked if I could share some secrets about black powder and asked if there were any solvents to use to get the highly corrosive blackpowder residue out of the barrel and how expensive they were. I told him I would tell all I knew about smokepoles and their care and feeding, but then I told him the best solvent was thermally excited DiHydrogen Monoxide. I also told him he should be able to find it conveniently near him.

Now that happens to be true, but I just failed to tell him that it was simply plain old hot water. Yep, that's right, simple boiling hot water, with just a bit of dish soap to cut the bullet lube, poured through the barrel and scrubbed and patched until clean. I've even been known to field strip my '51 Navy .44 and boil the barrel and cylinder, although Dear Wife gives me hell for using her good pots. Finally, a little gun oil on all action surfaces and even less in the barrel and chambers, and you're good to go.

Since I'm a Confederate reenactor, I never shoot lead through my pistol. Only 30 grains of FFF black powder, topped off with cornmeal, in each chamber. The cornmeal compacts down when you run the loading lever into it, and keeps the black powder in the chamber. When you fire the pistol, the cornmeal just kind of forms a cloud in the smoke from the powder burning, and falls within 5 feet. No one ever sees it.

Black Powder comes in four grades: F, FF, FFF, and FFFF. F is the coarsest ground, used for cannons, and rifles over .75 caliber. FF and FFF are used for rifles and pistols, and FFFF, being very finely ground, is used for the priming pan on flintlocks.

Well, that's all I can think of right now. If you have any questions, leave a comment or email me. I'll do my best to answer your question.

Walrilla

If G*d had meant Texans to ski...

He would've made bullshit white!

My son just got back from his first ski trip ever. He's all right, no broken bones, but he did twist his knee, and now he's got Cedar Fever, from being where the air is clear, then coming back here where the air is a solid mass of cedar pollen. Oh, well, he's young, he'll survive.

His baseball coach is not going to be real happy with him for twisting his knee. Kinda hard to pitch when you can't put all your weight on your stationary leg without wobbling. Guess he'll be out of the rotation for a while.

I've never been skiing, even though I like cold weather. Being from Texas, I was eight years old before I saw my first snow. It was a few years before I saw my second. You people up north don't need to start in on me about how good I've got it. I've been able to wear short sleeve shirts most of the year here. Dreaming of a white Christmas? I've never seen a white December!

Oh, well. I'm glad my son is back whole.

Walrilla

DeathRace 2006

I wonder why people always have to cut across two or more lanes of traffic to enter or exit a highway RIGHT in front of me, causing me to slam on my brakes? Are they that tired of living? Could they not figure out that if they were going to get on the highway, they might want to be in the RIGHT FRICKIN’ LANE!?

Seriously, people have nearly hit me 5 times this week trying to enter the highway from the far right hand lane of the service road. I used to live in Houston, and people were never this bad there. I live in a small town now, only about 30, 000 people, but half of them are crazy drivers.

If this keeps up, I am going to buy that ’78 Chevy 1-ton, put on a drill-stem brush guard, hotrod the engine, and DARE ’em to cut in front of me again! Nothin’ says fun like pushin’ a Ford Taurus down the highway at 90 mph, with them standing on the brakes and it having no effect whatsoever. Bet it’d make ‘em think twice about cutting in front of that bald guy grinning like a homicidal maniac!

I’m just sayin’!
Walrilla

PEBKACs

Okay, as promised, here is the post I said I would put up tonight.

Well, that looks kinda skimpy. Let's fill it out some.

PEBKACs - Up in my title bar I promise bonus points for anyone who knew what a pebkac or an I-D-10-T was. I-D-10-T is easy. It's computer geek-ese for idiot. Pebkac is a little more difficult. I noticed a visitor got here today by searching for "what is a pebkac". That's a term from my Customer Service Helpdesk days, and it means "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair", and was a more obscure term to describe a luser who just couldn't seem to extract their cranium from their rectal orifice. Another good one was "operator headspace", used in describing an airhead.

Every job has these terms. Just ask a mechanic what is meant by "a loose nut behind the wheel".

Speaking of loose nuts, tonight I was in a local fried chicken restaurant, picking up dinner for my daughter and myself. My stepson is playing in an out of town baseball game, and my wife went to watch him, leaving me to take care of my daughter. Anyway, I witnessed a young man filling out an application for employment.

Please, for the love of God, learn how to dress and take care of simple personal hygiene before you ask for that application! He had one of those teenage scraggly, patchy, beards that say "I haven't shaved in 10 months, ever since I dropped out of school", his hair was greasier than the deep fryers in the back, and he was wearing a filthy ripped t-shirt that had definitely seen better days. To top it all off, he was wearing a knit cap with foul words and skulls all over it. Homeless? No! I witnessed him pull car keys and a nice cellphone from those scrungy pants pockets in search of who knows what.

Now, lest you think I'm just a prudish old fart, I guarantee you I can hold my own with any foul-mouthed Sailor or Marine(those fine fellows being the creme de la creme of cussers) you care to put up against me. That being said, I also guarantee you will never hear or see any, repeat, ANY word of questionable reputation from or on me during a job interview, even if the interviewer uses it first.

It's just plain common sense that you would want to impress the manager with your cleanliness and sense of responsibility, otherwise, why even bother? If you don't want the job, why even waste the sheet of paper?

That, my friends, is a clear visual definition of a PEBKAC, an I-D-10-T with an advanced case of recto-cranial insertion. Unfortunately, it seems to be catching, more and more.

Walrilla

So don't pay me this week

Yeah, yeah, I know. I started this back up with intentions of posting a lot more than this. I promise I will throw something up later this evening.