cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Memorial Day Weekend Recap [2 days worth of entries composed in gmail here in 1 entry] I am tired. Too much shit going on, not enough resources (money), and too heavy a social calender lately. Trish keeps setting up these nights out with friends that are fun but getting too frequent. I do not want to be out drinking and hanging out into the wee hours week after week. Hosting a Memorial Day barbeque yesterday was also a bit much. I would really have liked to just have a day off and instead I'm doing yard work in the hot sun all morning, cleaning, splitting wood for charcoal and entertaining guests. I just want to sit at home and play with the kids. We also had house guests on Sunday night and the timing was really an awkward pain in the ass. All of this was planned by Trish and I wish that she would consult with me first. The rifle bu1lding test class was a great success on Saturday and Sunday. Both M@users turned out beautifully and we got everything done precisely on schedule. Our guinea pig student had a great time and left totally thrilled about the whole thing. He got to play with an acetylene torch and blacksmithing tools, learned to drill and tap threads for screws in steel, and he can now take apart a M@user and reassemble it probably with his eyes closed. For a cubicle-bound programmer geek, this was probably the most fun he has had in years. The only problem is that the rifle is horribly inaccurate. It looks good and goes 'bang' reliably but it was shooting 2 foot groups at 100 yards. Bah. We figured out that the throat of the ch@mber was badly eroded and there is nothing for it except rebarreling, which we are doing next Sunday. However, this was part of why we did a dry run. Now we know that we need to deal with this for paying students. We are looking into the practicality of rebarreling all of the students' rifles as part of the class. The problem is keeping the price tag within $1,000 and that gets tough when the cost of a new barrel is added in. The original plan was to have a class of 4 students but we are now thinking that we should start with 2 and then have 4 in the next one. So much of what we were doing over the weekend involved one-on-one stuff. We need to scale our teaching up carefully so that we don't shoot past a reasonable level of supervision. I set up a little 20 yard .22 plinking range in the front yard yesterday for guests to use. It was brought to my attention that I'm actually a pretty good shot. I usually practice shooting by myself and when I'm teaching people to shoot I rarely get to pull the trigger at all. We had a little spinning metal target and I hit it again and again, keeping it in constant motion for about 50 shots without missing once. I was under the mistaken impression that anyone could do this when in fact nobody else could hit the smallest spinner more than once out of every 10 attempts. _______________________
Its weird how lazy and ineffective I feel right now even though all empirical evidence points to the contrary. Someone wants me to come over to her house after work today and remove a medium sized snapping turtle that has moved in and is eating all of her koi. I have never eaten turtle before and would enjoy having the experience to write about. Ok, that someone is actually Mary. The silly thing is that her husband is perfectly capable of doing this. He tans his own deer hides using traditional methods. The guy is not exactly squeamish. I pointed this out and she still wants me to come over and deal with the turtle. I suspect that the bottom line is just that she likes to come up with reasons for me to come over. We still haven't fucked and I feel like it would be a bad idea at the moment since she and F. are having some weird marriage troubles. If he is ok with it, then they should just come out and say something already. If dude wants me to fuck his wife then I'm perfectly happy to do so. I just need to know, unambiguously, that he approves. To be perfectly honest, that whole drama is starting to wear thin with me. I can tell that it is only a matter of time until there is some stupid, big blowup. F. and Mary are both really great people, but they are also both emotionally volatile and very sensitive. They get very emotional about little things, which is often refreshing when it is positive emotion but in my experience such people can become a sort of ticking bomb. Spend enough time with them and eventually you will do something unwittingly that causes them to blow up at you with spatters of messy drama everywhere. I am the opposite of this. I don't do drama. I tend to be fairly reserved, emotionally. This means that I tend to have a lot of self control if I am unhappy about something. More importantly, I am an extremely forgiving person when it is clear that there was no malignant intent against me. This is probably why I have managed to collect so many people of the mercurial, emotional bent like F. and M. and Mary and others. They can boil over about something and while they probably end up alienating almost everyone that they know over the years, I end up being the one person who is willing to let it go and welcome them back as if nothing had happened. A long history of these types of experiences is why I think I like Erin so much. She doesn't flip out about anything. She is a very steady, reserved person much like myself. No gushing out of constant emotion, but also no messy boil-overs. _______________________ I was foolish enough to let myself get roped into being a delegate to my Congressional district's Democratic party nominating convention. Its kind of a dull thing this time, since we hold the seat and there is no primary challenger. In retrospect, I have been a delegate to every one of these district conventions since 2002. I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't a fucking 3 hour drive each way this time. That is pretty much my whole day gone right there. My involvement in politics is now pretty minimal. I'm not even on the local party's committee any more. No time. We've got that rebarreling project happening on Sunday, in preparation for the new class. For fuck's sake, I just want a day off already. When was my last day off? A month ago? I don't even know. This shit is why I'm not all that worried about the warning that the D1scovery channel producers gave me about the pace of work involved in making a show. As it stands, I only get about 1 day off every 4-6 weeks. I'm already used to it. So long as I'm finally going to really get paid for keeping up this kind of pace, I can deal with it for a year or two. 2:54 p.m. - 2010-06-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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