In reference to my title on this one, if you haven’t seen Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, get thee to the movie kiosk or the Netflix stream, or whatever flavor of movie rental you prefer!

I believe it was the first Christmas Jenni and I were together. We were recently married and had not known each other for very long in the grand scheme of things. Many people were betting against our success, and it was hard to blame them. In the first year of our marriage, we bought a house, had a kid, and our net income put us comfortably in the poverty bracket. I wouldn’t trade that year for anything.

I’ve got sensitive facial skin. Gillette ought to run the census, because their demographic intel is incredible! When I got to about shaving age in my teens, I started getting Mach 5’s in the mail. They were useless to me. None of those multi-blade monstrosities have been any good on my face, but lead to endless razor burn and breakouts. I found that Grandpa’s old safety razor made for a beautifully close shave without side-effects, but I was not comfortable using it. Teenage boys are not well-known for their minute dexterity, and it took me half and hour and several cuts to get a shave with the thing. So, I went electric. In my adolescence, I had an electric shaver that served me well, even if it didn’t ever shave very close.

Then, on that first Christmas of my marriage, my new wife gave me a really nice Panasonic wet/dry electric shaver. I might add that she doesn’t particularly like me to wear facial hair. Now, that would make the little shaver 11.5 years old. It has served me well for over a decade. But, in the last few months, its performance has suffered. The battery would need to be charged more often, and the blades were showing clearer signs of their age. A couple of weeks ago, it finally deteriorated to the point of uselessness.

I was shaving one morning, and the old motor was giving its hum, albeit a few steps lower in pitch than when it was younger. When I got to the tougher whiskers on my chin, rather than being cut, they got jammed between the blades and the screen, and pulled hard. No amount of turning the switch off would make the shaver release its death grip on my facial hair. I wound up gritting my teeth and yanking the wayward device from my face. That was the final straw.

The Panasonic has gotten to the age that blades and batteries are no longer readily available, and would likely require a seal kit to install. I don’t even want to think about trying to obtain that! A new shaver would probably be a better option. It appears that this early gift from my young bride deserves a Viking funeral at long last. As Murphy’s Law would have it, a new shaver has exactly zero priority in my life right now, as we are pinching pennies in every conceivable way, with the start of the business and all. So, I took up Grandpa’s safety razor again.

I have a few blades for the antique razor, and when they run out, replacements are cheap. I didn’t realize exactly how dilapidated the Panasonic’s blades had gotten until using a real blade again. Where I was shaving every morning with the wet/dry, I can achieve similar results with three mornings a week using the safety razor. With the repetitive use, in my adult life, I’ve gotten a lot more efficient using the blade. What took thirty minutes as a goofy teen takes five now – and that’s with a whole lot more facial hair. I’m starting to think that I won’t own another electric, even when I am not feeling so thrifty again.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been a bit of a slug on grooming. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still showering and using deodorant. I just haven’t bothered to shave. Over the last couple of days, I was noticing that my head was getting a little fuzzier than I like it as well. So, this morning I decided to fix it. I got out the Wahl clippers and the #1 guard and went to town. I don’t often cut my own hair since it’s difficult to see whether I got it even in the back, but I thought that it would be far more likely to get done if I only had to ask Jenni to even up the back when she gets home from work.

Once I got all trimmed up, I looked really funny (to me anyway) as the hair on my head was roughly the same length as my stubble. So, out came Grandpa’s safety razor and I took care of that as well. Now, I look more like a respectable business man than an insane bum – always a good thing. Funny enough, I have not cut myself once in this round of using the old single blade. I’ve often mused about going to a straight razor, and I think I’d like to try that one day. The problem is that you don’t just need the razor, but all the peripheral stuff as well – the strop, stone, brush, cup, soap, etc. The initial investment is significant but well pays for itself in savings on supplies. There’s simply no cheaper way to shave in the long run. Until I do make such a jump, it appears that I’ll be using the old safety razor.

Need a chuckle? Go read this. Jen emailed me the link this morning. It’s pretty much all the same talking points of the anti-gun crowd warmed over again. The author holds to the psychotic principal that we can stop the criminals by making there actions even more illegal than ever before.

He alleges that violent gun crime is running rampant in America without citing figures (as they tend to do). In reference to our very well-documented arguments that concealed weapons do indeed reduce violent crime, I will paraphrase his counter-argument to a sophisticated “Nuh-uh!” He says that it is an illogical stance and that we should prevent criminals from getting guns. He prattles on with his “There ought to be a law” attitude, missing the point that thousands of existing, restrictive gun laws are not doing any good, and completely writes off the natural deterrent of would-be criminals risking their life to violate others. That’s natural law right there.

It drives me nuts when these morons refuse to see that the stuff that they want to be illegal already is. There are sick people in the world that will do sick things to other people. Period. He writes about “violence enacted by guns” as though the little suckers go gallivanting about of their own free will, just looking for someone to shoot. Guns do not kill people. Gun operators kill people. Whether out of malice or negligence, it takes human interaction for a gun to become lethal. Well, almost always. All jokes aside, the gun has no will of its own. It has no hate, malice, or danger to enact on anyone or anything.

It is illegal for criminals to have guns. Criminals are people who break the law and do illegal things. More laws won’t keep them from getting guns. The criminals will simply break more laws. Even if you could somehow magically wipe the guns off the face of the planet, the sick people out there would find other ways. A tire iron will kill a victim. A rope, a stick, a bowling pin, a barbell, or even a hammer or screwdriver. There is a video at that last link, but I don’t recommend watching it. It is very gory and given the choice, I’d rather be shot dead than go through what those teens did to that man. I made it about two minutes in and thought I was going to be sick. My point is that there are weapons all around us. Most of them are less than ideal, certainly not so much as a gun, but will do the job in a pinch. The gun is not the danger in crime – the will to do harm is the danger. Take away guns, they will use knives. Take away knives, they will use something else.

He goes on to describe the Brady Campaign as ‘non-partisan’. I find myself giggling at anyone gushing over the Bradys.

He then cites the Westside School shooting as evidence of his anti-gun stance, and to argue that there should be tougher penalties. What he fails to mention is that it was in no way legal for these children to have guns. They stole guns, possessed them underage, illegally transported them, took them to a banned location, and committed murder. How much more illegal does it need to be to keep such things from happening? My solution – arm the staff. Arm the parents. When the little turds open fire, sixth grade teacher Shannon Wright returns fire, and the shooters die instead of her along with Natalie Brooks (age eleven), Paige Ann Herring (age twelve), Stephanie Johnson (age twelve), and Brittheny Varner (age eleven). Beyond what these two boys did, it is criminal that the five deceased had no defense whatsoever. It violates their God-given right to further life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, not to mention infringing their inalienable right to keep and bear arms.

Our author then cites the Binghamton NY shooting which claimed fourteen victims. Although a tragic case, it is another that suits the pro-gun argument far better. The shooter, Jiverly Voong could not legally obtain or possess guns. He had hardware that was not legal to possess in Binghamton (with upstate NY’s draconian gun laws). He transported illegally. Then, he committed murder. I wonder how many of those fourteen victims might be alive if there were a few good guys in the American Civic Association legally armed. I wonder if Voong would have bothered with his shooting if that had been a possibility.

This sentence is the real gem in the article that stands out to me:

Tragic calamities such as these beg the queWhy was an illegal immigrant able to obtain such deadly weapons so readily?

It’s actually a very good question. The answer is that when people are committed to a goal, they will find a way to achieve it. The United States is not unique in having a very healthy black market for guns. In fact, there are black market guns in countries where guns are completely banned from private possession.

The bottom line is this: Bad people do bad things. No amount of legislation is going to cure bad people. No amount of disarmament is going to fix them. At some point, the most reasonable solution is a .45-caliber slug in the brain stem. Guns are expensive. Ammunition prices grow faster than grass it seems. A good holster is worth its weight in gold, though I don’t charge that much. Training and practice take time and money. They are still far cheaper than trials for evil people, repeat offenses, and broken lives of innocent people. I pray to God that I never have to use my gun against another human being. But, I’m more willing to carry the scars from having taken another life than I am to bear the broken heart from losing my spouse or child, or to leave them without a husband and father.

Overall impression:

In a nutshell, this movie was made to make Sylvester Stallone feel like a bad-ass action hero one last time before his 65th birthday. The previews boast of a cast full of past and present action movie actors. In reality, several of those were no more than brief cameos. The screenplay was co-written by Stallone, who also co-produced, directed, and starred in the film. Yeah, this flick was basically his way of junk-greasing his own ego. It looks like his last hurrah, and seems like he wanted to take out as many action actors as he could with him. I shall henceforth refer to the film as “The Expendable Movie”.

What Happens:

The exhaustive storyline is that a group of elite-force type mercenaries (The Expendables) are contracted to overthrow a dictator of a banana republic (El General). Said dictator is largely a puppet leader backed by a jilted CIA agent gone drug lord. Stallone and another member of The Expendables scout out the island to determine whether the job pays well enough for the work that it will take to complete. In the process, they meet the beautiful daughter of the General and are found out by the bad guys. They leave a swath of fire-storm fed destruction across the island and determine that the job is not worth the money. Once back at home, Stallone has a pang of conscience and decides that he must save the girl. Meanwhile, an unstable Dolph Lundgren who was just excused from The Expendables is contracted by the General and the former CIA dude to infiltrate and exterminate his former boss, Stallone. A fight on home turf ensues ending in the apparent death of Lundgren’s character. With his last breath, he repents to Stallone and tells him everything. Meanwhile, Jason Statham’s character discovers that his girlfriend has taken to another man in his most recent, month long, mysterious absence. Stallone announces that he is going back to the island and nobody else needs to feel obligated to do so. Predictably, the entire team assembles to aid his invasion. On their second trip to the island, they load everything up with C4 (which magically appears in armloads when they are ready to administer it), and kill bad guys with an assortment of weapons that share a triangular range between standard U.S.G.I.-, gun range mall ninja, and silly exaggeration of Future Weapons. There’s quite a bit of a fist fight between Stallone and Steve Austin. When our heroes are cornered between the ex-CIA’s men and the General’s soldiers, the General himself makes a statement (directly over them no less) to his men that he’s had a change of heart and plans on kicking out the Americans that have oppressed them (presumably CIA dude and his cronies). Former CIA dude chose this moment to assassinate the General, and all hell breaks loose. The Expendables are caught in a three-way battle between the soldiers and the American gang. This is when Stallone pulls out a rather large detonator switch (which must have been uncomfortably hidden in an orifice somewhere), and the rest of the movie is basically explosions, burning puddles of fuel, and raw body count. In the end, our heroes have lost no men (including Lundgren, who has a miraculous recovery and turns back to the proverbial Light Side of The Force), and Stallone saves the day. The singular surprise in the ‘plot’ is that he didn’t kiss the girl when he was leaving the island, but did promise that he would return. She was presumably left behind to cure the ills of her home with her pure heart and wise leadership. Upon their return, Statham finds that his replacement has hit his ex-girlfriend. So, he goes to the playground and beats him up along with the other bullies. That’s about it. After about the first ten minutes of set up, there are no surprises, but the entire screenplay kind of flows in all the most obvious directions. Well, besides Stallone not making out with a woman a third of his age – I really didn’t see that coming, given the context of his character.

Notable Characters:

Sylvester Stallone has never been an attractive man, in my opinion. But, he has really not aged well. His characteristic saggy eyes, crooked nose, and Novocain lip are even more pronounced in The Expendable Movie. In the film, Sly plays Barney Ross, leader of the mercenaries. He’s a caricature of a big action hero, with old skin stretched over it. He’s a tattooed, motorcycling, jewelry-wearing, gun blasting bad boy who can pull himself out of the water into a lifting-off airplane by its door-frame while wearing body armor. He dual-wields a pair of 1911s and has a SA revolver which he carries in a SOB holster which he’ll whip out to palm-fan a last-resort burst of lead at the bad guy. Carrying his M4 rifle, as with his 1911s, he aimlessly, carelessly, and wildly waves the muzzle around. Rarely does he ever appear to look for a sight picture or even pretend to exercise any kind of trigger control. This is of course consistent with Stallone’s typical, sociopathic, Hollyweird liberal, double standard on guns – even though he’s good enough to carry a gun, nobody else is. Although in his mid-60’s, it takes help from multiple men for Steve Austin overpower the grunting and snorting Stallone. Many of the other characters spend much of the movie talking about how big and bad he is. This was actually some of the better acting that I’ve seen from Stallone, which isn’t saying much.

Bruce Willis, playing Mr. Church meets with Stallone and Arnold Schwartzenegger playing Trench for a short scene towards the beginning of the film. Church presumably represents the CIA and wants to hire a team of mercenaries to flush the island dictator. Trench is the leader of a rival team. Church wanted to meet with the two of them to determine who would be best for the job. There was a little playful banter between Stallone and The Governator, and Willis got in a few pointed threatening statements, but that was about it for these two big names in the film. I imagine that Stallone dragged on the pants leg of each of these men for weeks until they relented and agreed to do the uncredited but much flaunted cameo.

Getting back to shockingly less than absolutely terrible acting, Jason Statham really opened up his acting abilities in this film and made three facial expressions instead of his standard one! In different scenes, he managed to look pissed off (as we’ve come to expect) and hurt, and happy! Statham played Lee Christmas, a knife-flinging brawler who challenged his knife throwing against Stallone’s single-action shooting multiple times during the movie.

Jet Li played Ying Yang (I know, I know – who the hell named these characters anyway). Ying Yang is predictably the martial arts expert in The Expendables who uses caricatured Kung-Fu motions for every action (including the requisite swishing sound effects) throughout the film. He is obsessive about his diminutive stature and uses it as an argument that he should be paid more than the other mercenaries. Although his martial arts are impressive, he often finds himself helpless against the brute force of the larger characters. Although surrounded by men taller than himself, he was the giant if you count acting abilities. I’m saddened that Li even agreed to do this insulting role. He is so much more talented an actor than that.

Dolph Lundgren plays Gunner Jensen, who gets fired from The Expendables for acting recklessly and outside of the group’s code of ethics. Upon dismissal, he ominously tells Stallone that he won’t cause any trouble because he’s “a nice guy”. Gunner Jensen has a particular beef with the diminutive Ying Yang. Gunner is probably the character with the least surprises, including his betrayal and death, and his resurrection and repentance in the end.

Eric Roberts plays James Monroe, a two-dimensional former CIA agent gone cocaine drug lord. He operates the island using a team of American thugs who influence the military force on the island to keep the people in submission.

Steve Austin plays Monroe’s hired muscle, named Paine (I know – again with the silly names). He does a lot of posturing and head beating in the movie until he falls into a puddle of burning jet fuel in his final fight.

David Zayas plays General Garza, who is the only character in the film with an actual internal conflict. After years of oppressing his people, first on his own and then under the thumb of Monroe and the other Americans, he decides that his pure-hearted daughter was right after all. He comes around to an upright moral position just before his demise, for a Darth Vader-esque death.

Giselle itié plays the beautiful, kind daughter of the general. In her one-track mind, she believes in good triumphing over evil even in the worst of odds. She refuses to flee the island, thinking that she can make a difference with her presence.

Mickey Rourke plays Tool, the lovable, wise womanizing tattoo artist that gives council to The Expendables.

And, I’ve saved the best character for last: Terry Crews plays Hale Caesar, who is the support character for the most important character, his AA-12 shotgun, which nobody has heard of despite being a 28-year-old design. In The Expendable Movie, the AA-12 is louder and more devastating than any other weapon, including M4’s, AK47’s, RPG’s, hand grenades, and belt-fed machine guns. It shoots a mythical, 12-gauge round that stabilizes with spring-loaded tail fins, that explodes upon impact. This fully-automatic shotgun fired hundreds of explosive rounds from only two drum magazines and was light enough that Caesar was able to haul it all over the jungle and through the palace, and finally had to drop it to make his escape from the exploding palace.

Final thought:

Don’t pay full-price to see The Expendable Movie. Wait until it’s in the dollar theaters, or out on rental. Make sure you are boozed up first. This flick would be fun to watch with a group that was pretty well buzzed. Other than that, it’s kind of a waste of time and money.

The computer has decided to not play nicely with the printer. I hate it when this happens. I need to print out some more business cards. I would really like to break away from this nasty habit and get some cards professionally printed, but I’m not settled enough on a design to commit to 1000+ cards just yet. Thus far, I’ve been printing on Avery’s smooth-edge business cards with an old HP LaserJet. The printer does a nice job, but it needs a good cleaning at the moment.

Things that I like about this printer are that it’s been incredibly simple to use, and it runs well. It was manufactured in February of 2002. It has logged 22,573 prints in its lifetime. Of those twenty-two and a half thousand pages printed, the errors are well under a hundred. The system only stores the fifty most recent errors, but it was under that number when we purchased it used, several years ago. I’d like to completely tear it down, clean it out, install new, HP-branded supplies, clean the duplexor, and upgrade the ram. Then, it would be like a new one again. We bought the printer at a garage sale for $100 after confirming that it did indeed function. The toner cartridges were each under 10% remaining, but we still got many hundreds of prints out of them before we had to order new cartridges. We went ahead with remanufactured cartridges from a third-party supplier (which I have regretted), and it has largely run well. The price was kind of ludicrous. We were planning on picking up a color laser printer, and had planned on spending a few hundred dollars for a new one. When we found the big HP for $100, we kind of had to do it.

Plug it into the network, and it works. Mostly. When we first set it up, we had to tell it which network it was on, and we had to override DHCP a couple of times to get it to IP correctly. There are reasons that most households don’t see a printer like this one. For one, you’ve got to have a decent working knowledge of networking to get full functionality out of this beast. Secondly, they are big and heavy. Lastly, you can’t usually get a working example for $100. It has been running smoothly and trouble-free for quite a while now. Well, up until now, actually.

Over the weekend, it became clear that this was going to be a busy week for me. I’ve got quite a bit of work lined up to get done, and I’ve got several deadlines to meet. I gave out the last of my business cards over the weekend, so I hopped on the computer last night to print out some new ones. That’s when the trouble started.

Open Office was very sluggish opening my business card files. In fact, it acted as if it was freezing up. So, I shut everything down, restarted and tried again. Similar results. Ran a full scan with Spybot S&D and tried again. Now, Open Office will open my files (slowly). Good enough. When I went to print, it told me that the printer was not present. I tried to print from Adobe reader instead with the same results. I also tried from Notepad.

I’m running M$ Windon’t XPee SP3 on a FrankenDell with a P4HT and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.25-Gb Ram. I opened up Printers & Faxes to see if I could diagnose the ‘missing’ printer from there. When I asked for properties on the printer in question, I was informed that the printer was missing.

I logged into the router via Opera and checked for DHCP clients. There, I can see the printer. I pinged the printer by IP just to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. Four sent, four received, nice fast connection, no problems. I shut off the printer and restarted it. I deleted the printer from the computer and attempted to reinstall it. In the printer installation wizard, I specified the printer by IP address, and the computer gave me an error, saying that it couldn’t find the printer there.

At this point, I’m at a loss. If I can ping the printer, why can’t I connect to it? I’m hoping that I haven’t screwed Windon’t up to the point that I’m due for a fresh install. I don’t have time to be monkeying on this crap. This week even more so than the last few, I need to be a designer, artist, and craftsman. Not a network sysadmin chasing ghosts in the ethernet.

It just figures, doesn’t it?

If you want to do things that others have already done, dot them exactly like others have achieved their success. If you want to accomplish things that nobody else ever has, you may have to go about it in ways that no one has ever done before. There are moments in which it will seem like insanity. But, there is a narrow line between insanity and genius, or so I hear. I won’t claim either until I either firmly accomplish my goals or fail miserably. So far, everything is going well, thank God.

In order to make top-quality luxury products, you need three things; skill, tools, and materials. I’m not necessarily writing this as a tutorial or a how-to, but for personal introspect. No, this is not advice. I’m way too early in the game to give any. Hopefully, when I get to the other end of the tunnel, I will write pretty much this same thing as advice, and add, “This is how I did it.”

The tools are anything that enable you to physically produce, or allow you to produce more efficiently. There is an overlap between tools and skills. I’ve accumulated a couple of sewing machines that allow me to stitch everything from fine silk and lace all the way up to saddle and strap type leather.

There are multiple cutting systems in my arsenal that include specialized scissors and shears, rotary wheel cutter and mat, knives, skivers, and other blades. I have made several tools, and modified others. I’ve gone from free-handing patterns onto lined yellow legal pads with a pencil to precision drawings using graph paper and a protractor, and transferring that to other media to translate it to leather. I have two vastly different rulers, two measuring tapes and a tape measure – each that get used on a regular basis. My work requires dummy guns precision cast from plastic and aluminum. It is safe to assume that this will be an ongoing process of accumulation, and weeding out of tools that proved to not be as useful as I originally thought.

All the best tools in the world are themselves useless without the skills to operate them properly and effectively. Anyone can gain skills with practice and experimentation. There are only two ways to gain skills quickly – formal training or purposeful practice and experimentation. I’ve taken the route of the latter. If I don’t like how something has turned out, I figure out what went wrong and how I must do it differently next time to get the results I want. My close friends and family have been impressed at how quickly I’ve picked up the necessary skills. My response, “I had to.” I don’t have the money or time to go through school, and I don’t have the time and luxury to learn this stuff on my own at a slow pace. Therefore, I’ve pushed myself to pick up the skills quickly. I’m not there yet, but what I lack in skills I can get with patience at this point.

Jonathan Swift coined an old saying that goes, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” This is to say that you can’t produce a luxurious product from crappy materials. This is one of my biggest irks about the direction American retail is going. It was not that long ago that Jenni could buy Italian-made, all-leather shoes at the discount store on any given day. Now it seems that all the shoes are mostly (if not all) made from cheap, artificial materials. It’s not just the shoe industry either. Clothing is poly/cotton blend (if you’re lucky), furniture is particle board with a veneer, sprinklers are plastic, watches are battery-operated and largely disposable. Home electronics are designed to be obsolete in a few years. I have an antique chrome toaster with bakelite handles on it that just keeps on going. Any modern toaster that I’ve owned burns out after only a couple of years. Where are the things that last? The luxurious things? They are being driven out by the flashy and cheap. I know that I’m not the only one that doesn’t want to participate in a disposable lifestyle. Hence, the materials that I like to work with. I have made practice runs with cheaper materials simply because I didn’t want to screw up the good stuff, but I don’t want to make a real finished product with anything less than great materials.

Recently, I was commissioned to make a purse by an internet friend. Like me, she wants something special, unique, and luxurious. We settled on a basic concept and a price, and I went to town gathering up the materials necessary. The bag is to be black, because black goes with everything. So, I will start with buttery-soft, top-grain, black leather.

This stuff is soft and strong. Many of the factory-made bags are made of mystery cloth or vinyl. Even when they are leather, often they are a finished split instead of top-grain hide. Usually a top-grain bag is going to be expensive when you can find one.

She asked if I could line the bag in the brightest magenta that I could get my hands on. I scoured the local fabric stores until I sourced this heavy, tightly-woven, imported silk.

Not only is this stuff beautiful, silk has a tensile strength greater than steel, and it is highly abrasion resistant. As delicate as it feels, it is incredibly rugged and durable. At sixty inches wide, a yard is way more silk than I need to put a lining in this bag. But, there are other things it will be used for in this project. I’ll get into that more in a later post.

She asked me if I could do some accent work on her bag in stingray. She was open to color options on it, but wanted something extra to give it a little extra spark. So, I sourced this ivory-colored, sanded and polished stingray pelt.

(in sunlight)
(under fluorescent)

Here are the three materials together:

Of course, the whole thing will be stitched together in Kevlar thread where it doesn’t show, and bonded nylon where it does. I’ll finish the bag off with nickle findings and more pockets than you’ll find in a typical bag (including a couple of specialized pockets at her request). I’ll be working on this one next week. I have a feeling that it’s going to occupy most of my time over the course of the week to get everything just right. Of course, I’ll post more pictures when I’ve got a final product to show off!

I shall tag Jenni who will write the next line and pass it on. I’ll do my best to keep up with the updates. Feel free to join in in the comments section. Okay, here we go!

Black and blocky
was the Glocky
that did slay
the Jabberwocky.

Next victim! Muhahahahha!!!

Update:

Original Line:

Black and blocky
was the Glocky
that did slay
the Jabberwocky.

Quoth Jennifer:

Asked did he
upon demise
What could be
the caliber size.

Sarah:

Jabberwockies, so hard to slay,
will go down if they are shot
with a round starting with “four”
and bearing the name Gold Dot.

And Christina:

The Jabberwock, not known for wit
is easy to be stalked.
You merely find a place to sit
and leave him to be Glocked.

He comes galumphing, trailing drool
and doesn’t glance my way.
Oh, shit! No Vorpal-ammo, Fool!
He lives to die another day.

Then Lissa:

And as in uffish thought she stood,
The Goblin-wock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the front-door wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! NOT through-and-through
My lil’ Siguette went snicker-snack!
The four nine-mil’s quite turned its head
And put him on his back.

Alright. So, I haven’t been great about keeping this thing moving. I’m feeling like kind of a slug about it at the moment. I don’t really have much to say right now… Not much at all…

We had a nice Independence Day weekend, for what that’s worth. Cat O’ Nine Tales drove in to our neck of the woods for the weekend. So, that was nice. Everything just kind of worked out great all weekend. We got to the parade later than we wanted, but we still got the best parking space in town. And, when we went to set up our chairs, we found a great place to park our butts too! The weather was cool and it started to sprinkle at the end of the parade. The go-cart drivers in the Shriners were in the finest form I’ve ever seen them. They must have a practice track somewhere, because I didn’t think it was possible to drive those little suckers that hard!

We had the same story when we went to the University to see the fireworks show. Got there late, still found a great spot. It was nice. Sunday afternoon we went to the range and converted money into noise and jubilation. I made some decent groups, but my lack of practice is starting to show. That kind of sucks.

On the business front, the sales are starting to roll in slowly. I’m seeing a very slow and steady increase in interest and in actual sales. This is a good thing. It tells me that it is actually working. I’m going to wager a guess and say that what I’m seeing right now is typical of a year in. If I’m right on that, I deserve a pat on the back or something. Maybe I’m just being optimistic. At any rate, I’m about to announce a great event over at The Holster Site. I’ve got to keep that pretty secretive for the moment, but I’m getting really excited about that!

Anyway, I’ve got some other stuff to finish up in the next couple hours, and that’s about all I’ve got for now.

I had a dream last night that I bought a cow and buried it in the front yard. I buried it alive, but I left a little tunnel from the surface to its head, so that it could breathe and I could provide it with food and water. Other than that, the animal was buried – its body completely encased in soil. The thought was if I could figure out how to make this work, just think of how it could revolutionize the beef industry! Besides that, domestic cows are not exactly active creatures. They just stand around and eat grass all day. They could do that any old place – like in a hole in the ground!

Of course, in real life, the thought of treating a living creature in such a manner is revolting, and it is very clear that there are many reasons that this would never work, but the dreaming mind doesn’t necessarily consider all of the same implications that the waking mind does. My friends and family were excited about my cow. They were constantly asking, “How’s that cow experiment going?” My initial thought was that I would bury the cow, making provisions so that it could live, and I would dig up the animal after a week to record and analyze the results.

About two days into the experiment, we had a get together at our house where we cooked on the grill. Our friends and family came to eat and have a great time with us. Someone in the party was asking me about the cow and my experiment. That’s when it dawned on me – although I had made provisions for air, water, and food to get to the animal for its consumption, I had made no provisions for the urine and feces. And even worse, I had the animal’s body buried with no room for it to expand as the cow breathed. I was mortified and discouraged as I realized what I had done. I answered the question at the party, “I’m pretty sure my cow is dead.”

Now, please allow me to interpret:

I believe the dream represents my latent fear in going into business for myself. The cow directly represents my leatherwork, and indirectly the financial investment in the tools, equipment, and raw materials. The experiment – burying the cow, digging the air/feeding tunnel, pretty much every effort of the experiment represents the real-world effort that I’ve put into learning how to make great leather goods. The very fact that I did something as outrageous as burying the cow both represents that I want to accomplish something truly unique with my efforts, and it represents planting a seed – in this case, planting the seed of my business.

The fact that I came to a sudden realization that I had done something horrible, and destroyed all the investment, and that all the effort was for nothing – that represents my fear of the unknown. In real life, do I have any idea how much money I will or will not wind up making by the end of the year? No, I have no clue. Do I have any guarantee that The Holster Site will make a living for me and my family? No – but I had no more guarantee this time last year that I would continue to work in a traditional job.

The fact of the matter is that the fear itself is kind of freeing. In traditional employment I enjoyed the illusion of stability, when I had no more job security than I do now. Frustration then came in the form of not feeling like I was being appreciated for my accomplishments and abilities, but that was the price I paid for the illusion of stability. And, I accepted a ceilinged-out paycheck that was probably less than I was worth in return for the false security that the next paycheck would be exactly the same as the one before it.

Had the dream with the cow continued, I would have liked to see myself do something wily and industrious with my failed experiment. Perhaps I would have discovered that burying beef for several days tenderizes and seasons the meat and makes it uniquely delectable. Conversely, maybe I would have discovered that my fears were in vain, and the cow had actually thrived in those bizarre conditions. I don’t know, but I think that’s the point – the dream was supposed to be a cliff-hanger. The lesson I take away from it is to not let my fears win. I will win. I will make the best of my situation, take the steer by the horns (as it were), and make my own destiny.

As I continued dreaming after the cow dream, a neighbor down the street had a shack in their back yard. In that shack was a hideous creature that appeared to be a cross between a human child and a piglet. They kept this child-pig in a chicken wire cage in the shack. There was a six-inch tall bi-pedal dinosaur that was in the cage with the child-pig. The child-pig would draw the dinosaur in and snuggle with it, but the dinosaur was uncomfortable with this and wanted to escape. A ninja-like character crept into the neighbor’s yard and entered the shack. He used a shovel to pry the chicken-wire cage open and scooped out the tiny dinosaur with the shovel. He tossed the dinosaur into the trees behind the shack. The child-pig was furious! It screamed and squealed and threw such a tantrum that the entire shack swayed and creaked. Just as the ninja made his escape, the child-pig’s tantrum peaked and he literally exploded in a burst of fire which leveled the shack to splinters and ash. And, that was all.

I don’t have an interpretation for that last one. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the fact that I watched Beowulf before bed last night. That makes more sense than anything else I can think of.

DISCLAIMER: I do not condone nor endorse installing parts or accessories on a firearm that were not specifically designed for it. If and when I do so, it is at my own risk. If you make a decision to do something similar, it is similarly at your own risk and has nothing to do with me.

The local gun range was clearancing out a bunch of their wares because apparently they had to make some extra space so they can do some construction. We’ve been taking The Kiddo up there on Monday evenings for air rifle training. Since we were there, we decided to check out what they had on clearance. The big clearance shin-dig happened last week sometime, and we deliberately didn’t go.

As both of you probably know, money has been tight recently. Sales on The Holster Site have been slow, which is normal for a brand-new business. Still, the rationalization of the facts unfortunately does not pay the bills. We didn’t really want to get tempted to blow our grocery money on the great deals, so we avoided the main sale event.

They had the dregs of the clearance items in one corner of the facility when we were there yesterday. Since this is like the ‘third-day-garage-sale’ stuff, we decided to give it a quick look. We probably shouldn’t have, but SCORE!!!!

Tritium pistol sights! We had been wanting to get some night sights for our S&W M&P’s! They didn’t have any to fit the M&P, but they had them to fit some of the older Smith pistols. I thought to myself (or possibly out loud – sometimes I get confused), “How many different dovetails could Smith & Wesson possibly cut into their slides?” I unloaded my M&P45c to compare. At a precursory glance, it looked darned close! It might be worth the gamble to get a couple sets! How much of a gamble though?

Not the $115.00 original price, not the $20.00 marked down price, but a mere $5.00! Worth the gamble? Oh hell yeah. Does it hurt the budget? Only nominally. So, we got the stuff home and I went about seeing if everything would fit right. Here’s what came in the kit:

The front sight is actually marked with the Trijicon logo and has the white ring around the tritium tube. The rear sight has the v-shaped sight groove highlighted with a trijicon ‘I’ to dot with the front sight. (I haven’t been crazy about the three-dot stock sights on my M&P anyway.) You can see the kit also came with an allen wrench to stake the rear down, some generic thread locker, and a plastic drift that feels and smells like Delrin. I know it’s weird to describe a polymer by its smell, but there you have it.

The front sight was slightly taller than the stock blade, but would slide into the end of the dovetail securely. Since it was taller though, if I tried to use it with my stock rear, it would make my POI low. We can’t have that! So, I decided the only rational thing to do was to pull my factory rear and see if I could get the XS on there. The M&P series pistols have a strange little block mechanism in the slide that is spring-loaded against the rear sight. So unless you are careful, it will come apart like a Chinese watch. The guy in this video shows us all about it except how to get the thing back together:

I didn’t need help taking it apart though! Once I had the stock sight removed, I compared the two. The one on the right with the one set screw is the stock sight. The one on the left with two set screws is the tritium.

Looks close enough to me! So I hammered the replacement sight into place and cranked down on the set screws. Then I proceeded to remove the front sight.

They look pretty close too!

This actually gave me more problems than I like to admit. It wanted to catch towards the middle of the dovetail slot on the slide. So, I’d have it almost tapped into the center and it would pop across to the other side. It was horribly frustrating. Eventually, after cussing and tossing my hammer and some deep breathing, it centered for me.

I went to reinstall the slide on the frame only to find that the little block dealy from the video that sits under the rear sight would not compress and allow the slide to clear. Apparently, the spring was bound up inside the hole. So, I pulled the rear sight back off, shot the spring into a mystery location until Jenni helped me find it, let her wrestle with the spring for a while and eventually put everything down. I was pretty well resolved that it wasn’t going to go together that evening. That’s okay.

Then we had to give it one more try. I pushed up on the thingie from the underside of the slide and used my finger to compress the spring completely into the hole. I then slid the disk over it, keeping pressure on the underside to hold the two pieces flush with the spring compressed. That allowed me to get the rear sight slid far enough on that I could let go and tap it into place. Then the slide went on and the pistol functioned almost normally. Almost.

Remember how the original rear sight had one set screw in the middle and the replacement has two? One of those set screws strikes the little disk that holds the little spring. With the set screw torqued down it was pushing the disk and distorting the spring so that the slide and trigger didn’t want to play nice with each other. But, I was undeterred for two reasons. 1 – The replacement was actually a far tighter fit than the original. 2 – The original only had one screw holding it down – I’m sure this one will be fine with just one screw too. I simply backed off the offending screw and checked everything else for tightness.

And, the results? Voila!

I wouldn’t believe they weren’t intended for that gun if I had to take someone else’s word for it.

Now, these had been sitting on a shelf for quite some time. So, a very valid question is do they still work? Let’s see that last sight picture with the lights off.

That ought to make it easier to sight the gun in near-dark conditions! We got two sets of these, one for Jenni and one for me. When I finally got the set installed on my pistol, it was far to late to think about doing the same thing to Jenni’s. Maybe I’ll install hers this evening.

DISCLAIMER REPRISE: Don’t try this at home! Just because I did it does not make it advisable or a good idea.

Over there. It’s like this.

M.D. Creekmore at The Survivalist Blog – a survival blogdedicated to helping others prepare for and survive disaster – with articles on bug out bag contents, survival knife choices and a wealth of other survival information is giving away a 1,000 round case of 9mm – 124 Grain FMJ (a $200 value – donated byLuckyGunner)! To enter, you just have to post about it on your blog. This is my entry. Visit The Survivalist Blog for the details.