Beware of "experts" on the internet

I've noticed a new phenomenon. It seems like every 20 year old with access to his Mom's video camera is now a pseudo-journalist.

There is one jackass in particular who has me annoyed today, a kid from Texas who has posted a couple of hundred videos on youtube in which he tries to portray himself as some kind of firearms expert. He is posting really unsafe things, like "tap loading" a Brown Bess, firing blanks indoors with cartridges made of 4F priming powder, using the wrong granulation of powder in guns behind a round ball, and using loads two and three times a standard charge.

Please, every gun that you buy from anyone should have come with an owner's manual. If it didn't contact the manufacturer or importer. It is imperative that proper loading instructions and load data be followed or sooner or later somebody is going to get hurt. We provide a detailed owner's manual and suggested load data with every gun we sell. When it comes to "experts" telling you ho to load your gun, believe nothing that you hear, half of what you read, and maybe 5% of what you see on youtube.

9 y/o Caleigh "got" Memorial Day for the first time today

Today we went to town to march in two parades with 4H. She has been doing this for a few years, but this year was really special.

She had been writing pen-pal emails to a guy from RI we met last year at a WW2 event at a museum in MA. He was a friendly, gentle old man, a fighter pilot during WW2. She recently wrote him an email and it bounced, so I looked into his whereabouts only to find that he had died a couple of months ago. She was pretty sad because this wasn't just a hero she read about in a book, this was a real live person she had met and talked with. I told her to keep him in mind this weekend at Memorial Day exercises.

We marched in the first parade in the north part of town to the little cemetery on the hill. There was a police car, the VFW color guard, the 4H kids, and the school band, along with a fire truck and ambulance. At the cemetery, there were prayers for the dead, speeches by the ROTC kids, and a firing squad salute, followed by Taps.

At the end of the ceremony she came running up to me with tears in her eyes and told me "Daddy, that song with the bugles made me cry". On the way home we talked about the symbolism of Taps, and about her pilot friend.

We were expecting guests to arrive at any minute, and were not planning on going to the town's other little parade since her 4H group wasn't scheduled to be in it, but she insisted with tears in her eyes and I could tell that this was really important to her.

We got back to town in time for her to find a different 4H group she could fall in with to march to the monument in the center of town. The same school bands played the same songs, and the same color guard fired a salute, but through the whole thing she remained attentive and listened to every word in the speeches and prayers.

I don't think I have ever been prouder of her than I was today. She really got what Memorial Day is about. In the past it was fun for her to be in the parade because you get to march and carry a flag, but for the first time, she understood what the parades & ceremonies really meant.

It has been one of those days

So far today:

I've managed to set off the smoke detectors...twice.

I dropped an orange-hot frizzen as I was taking it out of the forge and dropped it in the snow, where it immediately melted it's way down to the ground where I had to forage around in the steamy snow with a pair of tongs to find it.

I managed to chop a pressurized air hose in two with a Mapp gas torch, causing it to whip around the shop creating noise and havoc, like the runaway hose as a fireman's muster.

But this is a new one: as I was taking a drink from me ever-present glass of iced tea, I had to spit a small, hard, sharp object out. Of course it was a flake of flint that managed to land there from testing locks!

Once again, bit off more than I can chew

It seemed like a good idea right? There has been a week or more of hotter than usual weather, no rain to speak of, and all the water everywhere is drying up.

The pond out back is partially spring fed, and it is choked off with leaves and debris along with the drought, so it pretty much dried up. Here's where my brilliant idea comes in: why not drive the tractor into the dry pond bed and dig it deeper. If it were deep enough, it could allow fish to survive in it over the winter, we could swim in it, and it would be an overall healthier pond. Digging it out would eliminate the leaves and debris from the spring fed part, so more water would flow into it. Right?

Yeah, in theory. The part of the plan I didn't calculate was that UNDER those leaves and debris, the clay bottom of the pond is still wet with gooey, slimy mud. The kind a 4wd tractor can't quite get out of. The kind of mud that you need to call a dude with an excavator to dig your tractor out of.

Hhhmmm...a dude with an excavator...maybe I should have called him in the first place instead of driving my tractor into the pond.

I suppose that to know my limitations, I need to push them now and again to find out where they are.

Gun deaths vs vehicle deaths

Here is a neat little widget that I found online. It is a counter that compares how many gun-related deaths there have been since the beginning of the year to how many vehicle deaths, falls, swimming pool accidents and other ways of being killed. The data is based on CDC statistics. In comparison, guns are generally pretty safe.

The interesting thing is the large number at the bottom which shows how many guns were used in DEFENSE of life.

Fort at No. Four is rising from oblivion!

I wouldn't allow myself to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes, but there is actually a rescue of the Fort at No. Four going on!

There is a new director who loves history, has a small business background, and understands the value of volunteers. The Fort was open last weekend for a work-party day on Saturday, and a general open house on Sunday. A nice crowd turned out.

This year the Fort will open up a few more times in preparation for reopening for real in 2011.

Read their schedule here.

If you know us, then I don't need to tell you how important #4 is to us. Wendy and I were married there in 1999. We held my Mom's funeral there in 2000. I first joined as a member of the Fort at No. Four in 1991, just shy of 20 years ago.

Another Bike Week is history

This past weekend wound up the 2010 Laconia Bike Week. Every year a couple of hundred thousand biker show up in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire for a day, a weekend or the whole week.

This year, I managed to spend three days in motorcycle-related activities. First, I rode up for the day last Tuesday with my friend Bob. He started riding last year and had never gone to bike week before. We went to see the manufacturer's demos at Funspot to check out the new Royal Enfields, went wandering around looking at bikes, vendors and people at the Laconia Roadhouse located at the Weirs Beach Drive-in (the epicenter of activities), had some food at the Broken Spoke Saloon, and stopped by the Rt 104 Diner on the way back out of town to see the mobile Indian Motorcycle Museum that a guy sets up there every year and as luck would have it, there was also a classic car cruise night going on at the same time. Got myself a pretty good sunburn that day.

On Friday, Wendy, Caleigh and I went bike shopping at a couple of the bigger dealers in the Concord/Manchester area and found a bike for Wendy. She has short little legs and can't reach the ground from a tall old Jap bike like mine. What we found for her was a scaled down cruiser style bike called a Hyosung Aqulia. It is a 250 V-twin that sits really low and only weighs 366 pounds (by comparison, my vintage Suzuki GS weighs in at over 600 pounds and is at least 10" to 12" higher in the seat. After leaving a deposit on it, we headed up Rt 93 to Laconia to get dinner and see what we could see on Friday night.

Saturday came, and we were back out on the road to go pick up her bike. We went in her Jeep, and on the way home she followed Caleigh and I home. She hasn't ridden since before Caleigh was born, so it probably wouldn't have been a good idea for her to get on it in Manchester and ride it the 100 miles home through bike week weekend traffic.

I think I got more riding time in during the last week than I did in all of last year. Now that Wendy has a bike, maybe we'll be more inclined to take the bikes to go places as opposed to going in the Jeep.

Chicks are getting bigger, time to order more

On the last day of April, roughly 5 weeks ago, our first batch of meat chicks arrived in the mail.

Now most of them are just about the size of "Cornish game hens". People don't generally know this, but what is called a 'game hen" in the supermarket is neither a game bird nor a hen. They are usually Cornish Cross roosters that are a month old. If left to grow longer, they become the standard chickens that you'd buy at the meat counter, and left even longer they become those giant Purdue Oven Stuffer roasters.

I'll probably let these grow out another 5 weeks or so and put them in the freezer for winter. In the mean time, it is time to order the next batch of chicks. I get 50 at a time. A certain amount of them are lost to piling or whatever, but around 75-80% of them live to be Sunday dinners.

The plan is to order some every month, as soon as the previous batch vacates the brooder or the growing-out pen. That way, we make the best use of the weather when we don't need to worry about water fonts freezing.