Snowflakes in Hell

No, I’m not talking about that guy who used a .22LR to try to bore a hole in his house for installing a satellite dish, and accidentally shot his wife.  I borrowed my friend Jason’s nail gun to get some last minute baseboards installed in the loft area, where the builders and previous owners have so far neglected to put them.  Baseboards are one of those things I thought were mostly decorative, until you see what happens to drywall when you don’t have them, especially on corners.

After using a nail gun, there’s no way I could ever go back to a hammer.  I’m not sure how civilization made due before the nail gun.   The Amish don’t know what they are missing.  Clearly a barn raising could be done before noon if they adopted this technology, and then they could spend the rest of the day drinking, if the Amish actually drank.   Perhaps this is why they eschew technology, because with all the spare time, what are you going to do?  Drink, and watch TV.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Now we just need to finish the painting in that room, and get Bitter’s stuff put up there, and we’re good to move on to painting the bedroom.  Before too long, I might not feel like I’m living in a warehouse!

Bitter arrived with the moving truck on Thursday.   On Saturday, the movers came to move everything from the truck to my living room.   The first picture was taken after Bitter had already moved and put away a good portion of the kitchen boxes.

The kitchen stuff is getting put away first.  Naturally, since we’ve both been living on our own for a while, there’s a lot of duplicate equipment.  Most of my knives and silverware are inferior to hers, and so are departing.  Same with pots and pans.  Of course, now we have four fondue pots, two food processors, and two bread machines.  Not stuff that’s typically thrown out, so I’m guessing we’ll be craigslisting a lot of it. 

Of course, we both had the same type of Corelware, so now we just have a lot of it.  She has a lot more cooking stuff than I do, such as a press for making raviolis, actually, I think there are two of those.  One in case you want to make a flat ravioli, and another for making folded ones.  It’s a good thing I have a big drawer in the kitchen for stuff I almost never use :)

I normally get the air conditioning ready to go until late June or July, but since it’s supposed to hit 100 on Monday, I decided to flip the switch early this year.  Last night there was no way I was getting to sleep without it, and with Bitter unpacking lots of boxes and with moving furniture around, I figured now was a good time.

So coal will be burned, and atoms will be split to further my appetite for cool comfort.  Thanks be to thermodynamics.

I have never had a more acute need for closets that use TARDIS technology than I will by the end of this next week.  Consider this from Bitter:

Tomorrow the goal is the bathroom and my bedroom.  It may sound easy, but you guys have no idea about my bedroom which has three closets.  That’s going to kick my butt tomorrow.

I have thrown out two large contractor bags full of clothing.  I figured it’s high time to accept that I’m not fitting into the clothes I used to wear right out of college.  That should make a decent amount of room to accommodate Bitter’s stuff.  But also consider this:

On Monday, I drive back to Philly, probably with Christmas decorations in the back.

I don’t know what it is with chicks and Christmas decorations, but every chick I know, even ones that live on their own, have at least a tub’s worth of Christmas decorations.  And that’s not even counting the shoes.  Where are we going to put all the shoes?  This is where the Time Lord technology comes in.  I need some place where we can fit everything, and still have a reasonable living space that looks nice.   This is about the time I seriously regret not buying a house with more storage.

Going to to my friend Carrie, who is 22 today:

Here at Snowflakes in Hell, we celebrate chicks with guns.  Especially chicks who shoot AK-74s, and invite me to shoot on their 700 acre ranch.  Happy 22nd Birthday Carrie!

Crap!  I will try to get to the range tonight to shoot this match, but it’s been a rough month for finding shooty time, aside from my regularly scheduled matches.  For one, I only spent the first weekend of the month at home.  Every other weekend I’ve been in Virginia.   This weekend we took some new shooters out to the NRA range in Fairfax.  The good news is, for the month of May, I’ll pretty much be home, except for the Louisville weekend.

IHMSA match is this Sunday.  Got my red dot pistol scope in the mail, mounted it on the Mk.III and got it zeroed.  I shot a 24 with it, which is the best I’ve ever done on pistol.  Now this is indoors, where we scale the animals down for 25 yards to approximate shooting them at the outdoor distances.  I probably won’t be able to do quite as well outside, but I’m hoping.  Twenty four isn’t getting anywhere close to our top shooters, but it’s beyond the realm of embarassment, when you consider I’m shooting a factory Ruger Mk.III Hunter, and not a fancy Thompson Contender, or Anschutz Exemplar.

I will be shooting both Field Pistol, with the S&W 629, Production, and Smallbore, Unlimited Any Sights.  I may do Big Bore with a 629, Unlimited Standing, for kicks too, depending on how I’m shooting.  This means I will be furiously reloading .44 Magnum and .44 Special for the next two days to get ready.

Bitter and I paid a visit to the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C. this weekend.  Not a bad walk around the tidal basin, except for all the other people.  This weekend was also the Kite Festival which gathers around the Washington Monument.

Everyone who goes to Washington really ought to go to the FDR memorial. It’s what you would imagine government bureaucrats, many of whom owe their jobs and livelihoods to the policies of FDR, would come up with. It’s basically a giant fountain dedicated to big nanny government. It makes me sick.

Today is the last day of my “early 30s”  From tomorrow on, for the next three years, I’ll have to consider myself in my mid 30s.  I might be able to push that to 37.  Sounds like a nice idea.  I’d only get two more years of “late 30s”, but that’s OK isn’t it?

… there is just no pleasing everybody.  I think next time I’ll just leave it at Happy Generic Holiday :)

Or is doing the whole daylight savings time transition several weeks earlier a lot tougher on the ol’ biological clock than it was doing it at the old “spring ahead” time?  I’m still not completely back on schedule in that regard.

Bitter was planning to come up this weekend, but Heller oral arguments are Tuesday, and all the cool kids are in town, and we got an invite to possibly have dinner with some of them, if there’s time, so here I am.

Went up to the BassPro in Arundel Mills Mall in Maryand today to pick up some powder and large rifle primers.  Based on availability, I ended up getting Unique powder, and some Remington Large Rifle primers.  Ended up picking up some shotgun ammo too, since I was there, and needed some.  Rreloading will begin Monday when my dies all arrive.

Still answering e-mails from last night.  Silhouette was crowded, so I got back late.  Then had to watch Lost.  This morning work is kicking my ass again.  Lots of bureaucratic stuff to deal with in addition to actual work.  Happens every once in a while when the senior managers feel like they aren’t in charge, whatever that means to them (usually wasting people’s time with meaningless garbage).  I could take up blogging full time if I got into senior management, as I think collecting a paycheck to blog would do a lot less damage to productivity then pretending to contribute something.  We’ll see how things go after lunch.

Today seems to be everything go wrong day.

Good thing about the snow: No work!!

Bad thing about the snow: Too hazardous to go see Bitter :(

Well, today I decided to spare my coworkers my plauge and stay home.  I woke up with a nasty cough this morning, so I can no longer count on copious use of hand santizer at work to prevent me from becoming typhoid Sebastian.

Last night I ran out of my drug of choice, Claritin-D, which you now can’t get at the 24 hour supermarket because the pharmacy is closed, meaning no one is there to wear the jackboot.  This morning I will have to go submit to the government anal probe to get my favorite Table I precursor.  How come no major candidate is running on telling the UN to go to hell and repealing this nonsense?  Does anyone agree with it other than power hungry politicians?

Either way, enough about The Man making my cold medicine a controlled substance.  Blogging activity should be close to normal.

Ace of Spaces thinks people who are sick should stay the hell home.  I tend to agree, but I’m being a hypocrite today saying that.  I feel like dirt, yet I’m still at work.  Granted, no way in hell I’d come to work with the flu, but I shouldn’t really even come in with a cold, and risk making other people sick and miserable.

The problem is, I am a hoarder.   Company policy is that we get six days of sick time a year, but we get to deposit unused time into a “sick bank”.  Given that a cold will last up to a week, I can’t really afford to take the time off and still have anything left over should I get the flu, and the flu is particularly bad this year.  My instinct is to hoard sick days for a serious illness, rather than the sniffly coughy kinds of illness.

Wise companies will encourage or force sick employees to stay home, so as not to contaminate a company’s entire labor pool, but most HR people, who make these policies, tend to enjoy putting the cart before the horse.  If you create policies that discourage people from taking sick days, you can’t be surprised when people show up sick, and the plague spreads through the company like wildfire.  I think for most HR types, it’s more of a priority to prevent employees from treating sick time like vacation.  Good employees won’t do that (at least not much), but human resources departments will seldom want to blame bad hiring and bad performance management practices, which are hard to fix, when you can appear to fix the problem with a few simple policy changes.  Giving the appearance of action is a pretty fundamental drive for lazy people who want to look good for others who won’t bother to look all that closely.

Bitter and I hadn’t much to do today.  I’m feeling lousy because of the cold I brought back from the camping trip.  We watched the movie Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.  It’s a great movie, until you realize that you can’t get that damned song Pennsylvania Polka out of your head.  Yes, yes, click the link!  Get it stuck in your head too, and sing along:

Strike up the music the band has begun
The Pennsylvania Polka
Pick out your partner and join in the fun
The Pennsylvania Polka
It started in Scranton. It’s now number one
It’s bound to entertain ya
Everybody has a mania to do the polka from Pennsylvania

While they’re dancing
Everybody’s cares are quickly gone
Sweet romancing
This goes on and on until the dawn.
They’re so carefree
Gay with laughter, happy as can be
They stop to have a beer
Then the crowd begins to cheer
They kiss and then they start to dance again.

Sing along now. You’ll hate me for weeks for this. But misery loves company.

The good thing about today is that both Bitter and I have off from work, so we get an extra day.   The bad news is, even if I didn’t have off from work today, I’d probably be taking off sick anyway, because the cold I came down with while camping made me toss and turn all night, so I feel like crud this morning.

Winter camping in Luzerne & Sullivan County, up in northern Pennsylvania, went well.  Didn’t freeze to death, despite temperatures in the teens.  Overheard at the small roadside restaurant we stopped at this morning: two guys were talking about guns and hunting, with another couple at the table next to us talking about how much Hillary Clinton sucks.  One town had a sign up as you entered town announcing the local sportsman’s club clay shoot the following week.  Yep, we’re not in Philly anymore Toto, and it’s nice.

Bitter and I will be doing our annual (well, I guess this makes two years in a row, so we can call it that) winter camping expedition in Northern Pennsylvania.  I’m told there’s eight inches of snow up there, and rising.  Sounds like a good time to me!

Needless to say, won’t be much posting over that time period.

Bitter won’t be around until very late tonight, so I am off the hook for this year, pretty much.  I am told we’ll be celebrating tonight at Silhouette by painting all the animals pink, which should make things interesting with the red dot sight on my pistol.

Dr. Helen tells us why women like expensive gifts:

I never understood the whole concept of a woman wanting jewelry from a man, especially diamonds, until I read the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. In the book, two evolutionary psychologists explain why people do what they do. Why are diamonds a girl’s best friend? The authors conclude that women have to discriminate between “dads” and “cads” among male suitors. In order to find the guy that will stay with her and help her with children, she looks for two qualities: “the ability to acquire and accumulate resources, and the willingness to invest them in her and her children.”

Now it should be noted that Bitter is much cooler than your average girlfriend, but that is not to say that she’s immune from female evolutionary programming!  So I guess Bitter’s primitive human female brain is telling her “He better be willing to buy guns for the kids.”  “No problem!” says I.

Bitter and I went on a tour of the home of my favorite founding father, James Madison.   Montpelier is currently undergoing a reconstruction to restore it back to its original state after having been dramatically altered by the DuPont family, who owned it for most of the 20th century.

Most of the house is under construction as it’s being restored.  It’s actually a pretty interesting process to see in progress.  Most of the rooms are stripped down to wood lathing, most of which they say is original, and held in place by nails from Thomas Jefferson’s nailery that operated at Monticello.  Interesting to think that lathing likely hasn’t been seen by people since Madison’s time, and won’t be seen again for generations once the reconstruction is finished.

I stood in Madison’s study, which is one of the completed rooms, where it’s quite likely he might have drafted some early versions of the second amendment, and yes, I was legally carrying my Glock.  It’s quite a relief to me that none of the founding father president’s estates, except for John Adams’ are zones where the second amendment does not apply.  We visited Madison’s grave site, and despite our best efforts, we did not hear the sounds of any spinning, but it was rather windy.

I’m looking forward to returning there in the future, when the reconstruction is complete, and the home is restored to its former glory.

Sorry for the lack of posting.  Busy busy night.  Had to leave work at 3:30.  Woke up this morning with a sore back.  Today while working on some computer equipment, I bent down to pick something up and ended up with the knot from hell in my back.  It was bad enough I couldn’t really stand to sit.  I went home and got a hot pack on it, popped some ibuprofen, and I could function again.  Went to Pistol People to pick up Bitter’s present.  Came home, wrapped it, then went to Silhouette.  Got the chicken pin.  Shot lousy on rifle because my back is still kind of stiff.  Switched to pistol.  Got a 17 animals out of 40 tonight, which sucks compared to the guys who have been doing this for years, but hey, the animals are about the size of a 3×5 card cut into various animal shapes as 25 yards.  My groups with pistol at that distance are about six inches across, so I’ll take 17.  My goal is to be able to consistently break 20 with pistol.   To do that, I need to work on my trigger pull big time.

The Year You Were Born

Gerald Ford becomes president of the USHank Aaron hits his 715th home run to beat Babe Ruth’s record Impeachment hearings are opened against President Nixon by the House Judiciary Committee President Nixon resigns President Gerald Ford issues an unconditional pardon to ex-President Nixon for all federal crimes Muhammad Ali knocks out George Foreman in the eighth round to regain the heavyweight crown in Zaire Heiress Patty Hearst is kidnapped by and eventually joins the Symbionese Liberation Army Dungeons & Dragons officially released People magazine is published for the first time Kate Moss, Alyson Hannigan, Penelope Cruz, Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ryan Seacrest are born Oakland Athletics win the World Series Miami Dolphins win Superbowl VIII Philadelphia Flyers win the Stanley Cup Blazing Saddles is the top grossing film All the President’s Men by Bernstein and Woodward is published “Killing Me Softly With His Song” wins Grammy for song of the year

What Happened the Year You Were Born?

I’m not going to put the year, since it’s depressing.  But hey, at least I’m not as old as SayUncle.