Road Warrior

3550 Miles since the 19th of January.  I still have a run to my hometown for the last of my stuff to complete this move to Community College Town.  This is growing tiresome, and the prospect of spending the night in my truck tomorrow night isn’t promising.

School Daze

I’m a week into a vocational program at a community college.  I feel that I’m pretty far behind the learning curve.  I have exactly enough experience with the tools and methods being employed to be in my own way.  Clearly, I am unable to empty my cup fast enough to learn.  I started meditating again.  I’m starting tomorrow with a far less full cup.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.  R.W. Emerson

One person will get this.

It was not a drive by.

 

Riddle III

Cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be smelt. It lies behind the stars and beneath the hills. Ends life and kills laughter. What is it?

 

The Go-To Rifle

Mine’s a Remington 700 ADL in .30-06.  It’s been in a couple of different configurations.  Some of them really worked well.  Some didn’t.  Right now it’s wearing Warne rings and bases, a Leupold fixed 4 power, and a HS Precision stock.  (I got the stock well before the Lon Hourouchi flap.)  I’m a fan of the stock.  It adds a little more weight than a standard factory synthetic stock, but it’s a bit better balanced.  Most of the time, I shoot Remington’s 165-grain Core-Lokt load.  It will stay right at an inch and quarter maybe a little better.  I’ve also had excellent luck with the Hornady 165-grain SST bullet.  I’m very happy with the way the loads perform, and I’ve never lost an animal with the rifle.  I have the gun sighted in about an inch and a half high at 100 yards.  That gives me the ability to hold pretty well dead on to 300 yards.  The longest shot I’ve made with the rifle was on a decent sized meat doe at about 260 yards.  The doe, hit through both lungs, went about 30 yards and piled up.  I’ve never been able to recover a bullet, of either type, from that rifle.  I suppose it’s not terribly fancy, but it does work for me.  I have other rifles, but none I use more.  Frankly, I don’t even have a rifle I like more.

 

I’m curious if the concept applies to other shooters.  Do you have a go-to rifle, and if so, what is it?

 

Riddle II

This runs fore to aft on one side of a ship, and aft to fore on the other. What is it?

 

Query

Anyone out there have any good recommendations for a reduced/gallery load for the .30-06?

I’ve found several listed but I was looking for feedback from an actual user.

 

Riddle

Before I came, confusion abounded.
I’m late, I’m late was frequently sounded.

I’m not average, but was based on a mean.
My size, in theory, is constant: fifteen.

I’m two dozen steps, again in theory.
But walk my length and you’d get weary.

I take half and quarter steps at times.
In reality, I don’t follow the lines.

I shrink to nothing in two cold extremes.
Over a thousand miles wide in the betweens.

What am I?

My take on this whole TSA thing.

So the TSA has managed to offend a pile of people.  There have been threats of opt-outs and no-flys. The use of backscatter machines has been attacked.  All of the enhanced pat-downs have been compared to sexual assault.  The TSA screeners have been compared to Nazi agents, child molesters, and have been made villains.

Now I will be the first to say that the TSA sucks, and needs to be abolished, but I quit on them when I was flying in Class A’s for the United States Army and got searched and patted down.  I also have metal in my feet and ankles from a fall during a training accident, so I get the Full Monty every time I fly.

I decided then and there that I was done with flying.  I’ve not flown as a civilian.

The whole security theatre is a farce.  The TSA security cannot stop a determined attacker.  It won’t happen.  Not a chance in hell.  The Israeli method won’t work in the US.  I don’t believe that it would scale to the number of people and flights in this country.

I’m not real sure that I’d consider a frisk sexual assault. I’ve been frisked and frisked people before. A frisk is not an assault.  Claiming that a search is horrible is weak when fliers know it’s a possibility.  We lost that war when the first metal detector was installed in an airport.

I think it is the height of horseshit that the TSA can make an amputee take off their prothetic or make someone with a medical condition disclose it.

I think it’s boggling that they are able to search a person out of view of their bag, or a bag out of view of it’s person.

The backscatter machines are not being represented truthfully.  The MSDS are not available to the public and everyone and their brother knows that the images can be saved and transmitted.   I’ll admit I don’t know enough about the radiation and the threat it poses to have an opinion, but I have to guess that it’s not good.

I find it wildly funny that most of my gun owning friends are so perfectly willing and eager to villainize a group of people.  When they complain that they are the victims of being misrepresented.  Same goes for my police friends.

As for the people that have proclaimed that they will fight the TSA people that touch their kids, I say go for it.  Put your money where your mouth is.  People that have enough constitution of character to fight the TSA already don’t fly.   So please keep beating your gums it impresses the shit out of me.

There are plenty of solutions to the TSA, chief among them, stop flying. I’m even okay with politely tying up the system and causing major delays. I like the idea of making them change gloves and being as deliberately slow as you can in the lines.  Take pictures of your gear before it goes through the scanner, call the police if something is missing.  Make them miserable.  Cost the airports and the airlines enough money and something will change.

Failing that, fight them, make it impossible for them to continue.  However, if you are going to do that be prepared to live with those consequences.  Understand that you might take a huge fine, or jail time.  Stop talking about it and do it. I see no reason whatever to meekly submit and then say how awful that you were treated and what a big badass you will be next time.

 

Here’s something that I want to see saved forever.

While I hope it never gets to be vote from the rooftops time in this country — we haven’t run out of soapboxes and ballot boxes yet! — the man who tells me it is had damn’ well better have a rifle in one hand, a ladder in the other and some shingle-grit under his fingernails. There’s a word for the guy who preaches violence from well behind the lines; a couple of words, actually, and it’s a coin toss between “coward” and “agent provocateur.”   -Roberta X-

You can find the rest of her writing here: http://twowheeledmadwoman.blogspot.com/