I had to get up at the completely barbaric hour of 6 am to take a one hour drive down to Watsonville to another range to take an all day NRA Range Safety Officer course. I passed the test with 100%, so I guess I'll get a certificate in the mail at some point.
I'm officially exhaustificated and am apt to pass out in my chair at some point if I don't make some nice, bracing COFFEE! Ahem ...
When I got home from the range today, my tenant stopped me and wanted to show me a beautiful red juvenile King snake that she'd almost stepped on.
We got to talking, and I mentioned kitty (as opposed to Kitty), walked over to point out where I'd put the kitty bed, and there he was. She got a good look and said that he wasn't new, he was Brat, the tom cat that they think might be Kitty's brother, and she'd recently gotten some good pictures of him from up close. I was thrown because he's lost a ton of weight and seems a lot smaller. He sure doesn't look like the big cat I took pictures of under the house.
He had some nasty looking wounds on his front elbows the last time I saw him some time back, and I think that's slowed him down. She said she thought the wounds were still there, but if so, they aren't as noticeable as they were. They were quarter-sized patches of red, raw flesh.
She thinks he isn't long for this world, but I'm not sure. He still eats, and even though he's been missing for a few days, he knows there's always food and water here, and now a warm kitty bed. Short of trying to trap him, that's about the limit of what I can do.
So thanks for the name suggestions, but it looks like new kitty is the same as old kitty. I just never see him in good enough light to tell, I guess.
At the 1900 match, I was given about 15 old reloaded .30 Carbine cartridges that someone had bought at a flea market a long time ago. Who knows what the load was, plus they had lead bullets. So I pulled them down, tossed the lead bullets in my lead bucket and the powder into the shrubbery as a fertilizer. That left me with the cases, containing an apparently mixed lot of very old primers. Given that it's dangerous to decap live primers (although I do it all the time with 9mm), I decided to get out the Carbine and blow them all off. I wasn't sure how loud they would be, so I shot from inside the utility room out the door, pointing across the driveway to the hillside.
POP. That was about it. The cases are now in the tumbler where I hope at least some of the corrosion comes off. When they're a little cleaner, I'll decap them plus a bunch of other empties someone else gave me, and give them another round of cleaning, which should set me up for a final reloading run in the near future.
On today's walk, I saw the rear door of a Subaru Justy laying against the hillside. It looks just like the car had augured straight into the hill with only the rear door sticking out. Amusingly odd.
Got the club website updated. For some reason it was a struggle - the wrong versions of several pdf files kept turning up. I never figured out where they were coming from, but I plowed through until I got all the right ones up. Yech.
I'm hungry. Time to start thinking about dinner ...
Gas jumped again - it's now $4.30 cash or $4.36 credit card. It's probably cheaper in Santa Cruz, as we're at the end of the distribution line and the one station has a monopoly.
Had a good time last night catching up on 40 years worth of drama. Unfortunately, his son, who was at some sort of counseling session, had to get home and he was the ride, so we had to leave it well before covering all the bases. He's an interesting person who for years has been putting out the Sota Iya Ye Yapi Official Weekly Newspaper of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South and North Dakota. The Sisseton–Wahpeton Oyate are two combined bands and two sub-divisions of the Isanti or Santee Dakota (Sioux) people located on the Lake Traverse Reservation in northeast South Dakota. The current enrollment of the tribe is approximately 13,000 members.
Back in January 2009 I wrote an entry on Celia Hayes Adelsverein trilogy. At that point in time, I was half-way through the second book. I won't repeat the backstory here - go read the entry.
After writing the entry, I finished the trilogy and wanted more! She obliged by writing two more books about one of the more fascinating characters in the trilogy, Margaret Becker Vining - Daughter of Texas and Deep In The Heart. Margaret ran a boarding house in Austin from a cabin that her father built before there was an Austin. It was improved and added to over the years. Through it came many of the real characters of that time - Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, Jack Hayes and many more. The books stop after the annexation of Texas to the US but before the beginning of the Civil War. The horrors of that war were already covered in the Trilogy.
She's a really good writer. Her characters come alive. The history is very well researched and she makes it live. I highly recommend her work. If you're from Texas or love Texas or just historical fiction, these works are for you ;)
Now that I've finished those two, I'm starting on Adelsverein again.
I think we can safely predict that Kyle Busch won't be getting any more rides on Harvick's airplane. He took out more cars tonight than anyone else. I thought he'd finally grown up this year. Pfffth. May the fleas of a thousand camels inhabit his nether regions ...
And congrats to Regan Smith, who ran a good strategic race and got his first ever win at a very difficult track for Furniture Row, an underfunded one-car team. All the drivers are really happy for him.
LOCAL MEDIA PLEASE REMIND RESIDENT TO CHECK ON NEIGHBORS DURING THIS COLD SNAP AND ALSO MAKE SURE ALL EXPOSED PIPES ARE INSULTED TO PREVENT BURSTING OF PIPES.
Through posts by billijean and roina_arwen, I just found out that long time LJ friend canuckgirl passed away in her sleep early Thursday morning. They're saying congestive heart failure.
Cathy was only 47. It's a complete shock. She's going to be missed by a whole lot of people. Her sister is going to take care of the kitties.
Wireless has been out since at least Saturday morning. I've had no wireless access on 6 out of the last 9 days.
This is the AP that's up a tree. Based on the tracerts I've run, the backhaul transmitter appears to be down again, although they can't be bothered to respond to communications seeking status. There appears to be only one tree guy in the county and he must not work on weekends. Talk about incompetent maintenance and even worse customer service!
May the fleas of a thousand camels inhabit their beards!
I voted last week. This time I marked the sample ballot so I'd know later what I'd voted for - mostly because the slew of idiotic CA Propositions just won't stick in my brain until the results are known.
Now that I've voted, though, I still have to endure the constant barrage of negative campaign ads ("If It's Brown, Flush It!"). I have to carry around the TV remote so I can kill the sound when the commercials get shrill. So the other day I got this idea...
TVs all have child filtering or whatever they call it - Parental Control? It wouldn't be hard to require political ads to have a code so TVs could filter them out on command. This should be required on all political ads. Legislatures always exempt themselves and the rest of their skanky class (you'll note that the Do Not Call List specifically exempts political calls spam), but if there's enough of a popular outcry, maybe it could get forced through.
Hmmm. Walkabout Kitty seems to have returned after an absence of a week or two. I saw Mousie's bowl was empty this afternoon, so I refilled it, suspecting WK. Sure enough, when I went to bring it in at dusk, I surprised it, catching only its tail and butt as it streaked around the corner towards the access hole up to the driveway. A few minutes later, I opened the door to the driveway, and watched it run under the truck towards the tenant's place. I know it wasn't NewKitty, as it was darker and bigger, and she has food out all the time. I'll have to ask the tenants if they've seen it around or if NewKitty's food has been disappearing.
I've never done anything to threaten it or shoo it away, and I don't mind the food as long as there aren't any problems with Mousie. We'll see ;)
I have an unsolved Excel problem. The situation is an election results tabulation, with, basically, a column for voters and columns for votes for each position that's up for election. I'm looking for the total number of voters who have cast at least one vote.
Because voters may not choose to vote for every position, there doesn't seem to be any way to accurately determine how many voters have cast votes. I could make it easy by adding a new column with a check box that I'd check when inputing votes, and just sum that, but I'd prefer not to do that, and somehow use the votes cast columns.
Any ideas?
I'm going to take a walk and mull it over.
A better way to state the problem: VOTES=0 FOR rows 11:600 IF COUNTA(E:Q) > 0 VOTES=VOTES+1 NEXT row
Got it, with many thanks to all of you who chimed in with suggestions ;)
Blah. The low last night was 85 - the highest low this year, it was over 90 when I got up this morning. It's only 11:30 and it's already hit 100. The spot forecast for today is 103, and if they miss it by as much as they did yesterday, I wouldn't be surprised to see 105+. Gak!
I'm rethinking going shooting before the meeting, but by the time I have to leave, I'll have a better handle on whether or not it'll be too hot and sweaty to bother with.
I have absolutely no ambition to do anything. With jury duty still hanging over my head, I'm not going to start any multi-day projects, so maybe I'll just do some work straightening up the shop, which certainly needs it.
I don't do high heat well at all. Although, I do confess that it's still a lot better than winter storms. Whine, bitch, moan.... ;/
I was up on the hill watering this morning when my tenant asked if I'd lost a kat. He said it had showed up on his deck a few days ago and seemed friendly. He called her from the driveway, and she came around the house. It wasn't the one that's been coming by to eat Mousie's food, either. she's quite small, probably fairly young, and very skinny. I think it's female, but I'm not sure.
The tenants don't have any kat food, so I brought out a container of kitty krunchies and a food bowl and poured some out for her next to the truck. She dived in so fast it made my head swim. She was gulping down the kitty krunchies without even chewing them. I suspect most of it is going to be coming right back up in the near future ;p
He said she'd killed and eaten a rat yesterday, so she's a good hunter at least. Apparently they're getting rats on the deck trying to eat the tomatoes. Mousie is falling down on her job.
We talked about vets and the like, and I think they're going to adopt it. She's obviously not completely feral, as she'll wind itself around your legs and wants to come in the house, but not socialized completely either, as you can't pick her up. I touched her and she jumped back once, and the next time, while she was eating, she was ok getting petted and poked a bit. Then, a bit later while she was eating, I got too close and she hissed and growled. I just hope she doesn't have distemper.
I expect to see her by Mousie's bowl sometime in the near future, since she seems to feel free to explore.
