I have a Shooting Bench

My latest creation is finished. I put the top on my new shooting bench, planed it, sanded it, and put more sealer on the wood. It’s ready to use.

I thought I was done with the metalworking yesterday, but then I realized the bench had no feet on it. The tubing on the rear side had nothing to prevent it from sinking into the ground. I fired up the dry saw and plasma cutter and made two 3″ by 3″ squares of 11-gauge steel, I ground the paint off the ends of the tubes, and I welded the squares in place and added truck bed coating. Done.

I also finished cutting wood for the top. I would have been done two days ago, but I had to go buy another two by six. I applied water sealer to the wood and left it out all night to dry, and today I was ready to assemble the bench.

I used 5/16″ by 3″ lag screws with big washers. I laid the wood out on a tarp, and I rolled the bench over on it so it was upside-down. I located and drilled pilot holes in the wood using the holes in the frame as guides, and I inserted and tightened the screws.

After this, I righted the bench. This was not fun. New pressure-treated wood is very heavy, and I had 36 feet by 5.5 inches by 1.5 inches of it to lift.

I got out some hand planes and made the top and edges of the bench a little friendlier. I sanded it lightly and rounded off the sharp corners. After that, I applied more sealer to the top, and I was done.

I’ve very happy with it. My welding got better and better as I worked, so there are a number of very pretty welds on it. The paint looks great. It’s very strong. I stood on it and jumped up and down, and it was not unlike jumping on a concrete driveway.

I have not gone through with my plan to add a way to pull it behind my cart. I’m thinking it over. It may be best to pull it by the bottom brace instead of the top brace. When the bench is tilted upward on the side with feet, it takes the weight off that end and puts more of it over the wheels. It would be easier to tow this way.

I was thinking of taking that strut off because I installed it by mistake, but now I see that it makes the bench much easier to move. You just lift so the strut is at chest level. All the weight goes to the axles, so you don’t have to hold the bench up. It’s like a balanced wheelbarrow.

This bench is very, very nice. It makes me regret buying a stainless table for my barbecue area. I spent well over $300. For maybe $150, I could have had a much stronger table set up just the way I wanted. It wouldn’t have been stainless steel, but truck bed coating and pressure-treated wood work very well outdoors.

There is no reason why I couldn’t build a less-robust patio dining table. I could use 1″ tubing and 1″ lumber. When you’re having lunch, you don’t need a table that can hold a ton. Of course, I’m assuming the wood wouldn’t warp like crazy. Pressure-treated wood comes full of preservative fluid, and it eventually evaporates, causing shrinking and warping. I guess I could use wood that isn’t treated, though. My outdoor dining area is under a roof.

I’ll try to put the bench in the pasture and try it out later in the week. If the cattle touch it, I’ll have them deported.

More Evidence for my Antifa Tribunal

My new shooting bench is taking shape.

Today I put the remaining pieces on it and finished the welding. I was thinking about getting a new welding table, and I can now confirm that I need one. This afternoon, I had to take the shooting bench off my table and stand and sit inside it to weld. This was the first time I had ever had to get inside one of my projects.

Everything went well. I have a couple of lumpy welds I decided to grind down, but generally, I did an acceptable job. The table doesn’t rock when I put it on its top on the driveway, so it can’t be all that warped.

Once I was done with the welding, I put the wheels on it so I could roll it out for a photo. Then I shot most of a can of truck bed coating onto it. I figure I’ll need one more can to finish it.

I went to Home Depot and picked up some wood for the top, and I also bought deck sealer. I got the cheap kind. Pressure-treated wood may resist rot and bugs, but it soaks up water and swells, and it gets moldy. Maybe sealant will slow things down.

I’m hoping I can use the bench without paint. There may be times when I don’t want a slick surface. It probably doesn’t matter, but I’m playing it safe for now. I can always paint it later.

I’m considering making a cart attachment so I can pull the bench around with my EZ-GO. If I drill one big hole in the bench’s frame, I can come up with a way to attach it to the cart later.

The bench seems very low. Without the top, it’s low enough to sit on without jumping. The wood will raise the height an inch and a half, though.

I have to keep it low in order to do proper recoil management. If you’re going to go to the trouble of making a bench, you might as well make it correctly instead of making an amateur bench no serious shooter would want.

It’s very sturdy. If it were overloaded to failure, the axles on the wheels would probably collapse before the wood and metal box would give. An online calculator estimates that each of my steel crossmembers will deflect about 1/20″ if a 500-pound weight is suspended from the center, and I have three crossmembers with two by six lumber on top. I need the bench to be rigid, so it made sense to build it too strong.

I’m very excited about this project. Should be a great addition to the shooting area. I just hope the cattle don’t take a liking to it.

…your Shooting Bench Costs Five Times as Much as Your Dinner Table

Work on the shooting bench is going very well.

Today I attacked the steel I bought yesterday. Most pieces had very little rust, and that was a rare blessing. I removed spots of rust from the shiny pieces, and I gave the rustier ones more effort. Then I started drilling holes.

This bench will have a nearly square upper frame with a crossmember bisecting it. When I put wood on it, the boards will lie across three pieces of steel tubing. Screws will pass through the tubing from the bottom, into the wood. That means there have to be lots of holes.

I used 2″ tubing, so I set my square to 1″ and used a carbide scribe to mark the centers of the tubes where I needed holes. I used a tape measure and a Sharpie to locate the holes along the lengths of the tubes. I used a punch to make dimples to guide my drills. I drilled through the tubes with a #35 bit, because I happen to have a whole package of them. I followed with a step bit, which opened the holes up to nearly 7/16″ and deburred them.

Using a pilot hole makes drilling go faster, because it gets rid of the hardest part of the hole to drill: the center. A drill’s flutes move very slowly near the center of a hole, so they don’t do much. It’s worse with big drills, because the flutes don’t go all the way to the center. If you drill the center out with a small drill, which has flutes that come much closer to the center of the hole, you get much higher RPM’s, you move fast, and you remove the metal which slows down bigger bits.

Once I had holes on one side of each tube, I was able to use the drill press to put holes in the other sides. I dropped oil through the existing holes, onto the areas where I was going to continue drilling. I used the existing holes as drill it guides. I ran a big drill bit through them, and the existing holes located the holes on the other side. When I was done, I deburred the new holes with the step bit.

I can’t say enough about step bits. Unless you’re drilling deep holes, they’re totally superior to ordinary bits. They cut much, much faster. You have to get good ones, though. Cheap ones just spin in place.

Once I was finished with the holes, I had to figure out how to weld a nearly 4-foot-square frame on a table measuring about two by three feet. I had to use all sorts of clamps, including wood clamps. You can weld metal with wood clamps. You just have to take them off before the pads melt!

Right now, enough of the capital B is tacked together to make an A, and one leg is tacked in place. Tomorrow, I plan to install the other legs, finish the welds, and get started on painting. I should be able to use the bench in about three days. Sooner, if I don’t insist on painting the wood first.

While I worked on the bench, I thought about my plan to upgrade my welding table. I don’t know if I want to deal with a project this big again on this small table, and a new table would be similar in size to this project.

I keep going back and forth: put my own table together for maybe $400, or buy one for around $1300?

If I were to build one, I would have to make somewhere close to 300 16mm holes in it, through 3/8″ steel. Every hole would take at least two minutes to drill. Ten hours of drilling? Seems like a lot.

If I were to buy one, I’d go for the 1/4″-thick Fabblock from Weldtables.com. The 3/8″ table is too expensive. So I would lose rigidity and durability.

Also, I would make a shopmade table bigger, since it would cost less. I would go for 36″ by 48″, whereas I was looking at a 36″ by 42″ Fabblock.

Welding tables have to be very flat, and welding makes things warp, so the pitfall to making my own table is obvious. Making welded objects flat is not easy. I would hate to spend a lot of money on metal and then end up with a bowl instead of a table.

As dilemmas go, this is a good one to have. I could be trying to choose between paying the rent and buying winter clothes.

I will put more photos up as I go. Can’t wait to put this table to work.

Meat-Eating Weirdo Builds Scary Shooting Bench

Recently, my friend Mike visited, and we shot in my pasture. I have a very nice roofed shooting platform which I built from pressure-treated lumber. You have to lie down to use it, and that didn’t work well for Mike. He used a Home Depot folding table.

The platform is a joy, but I can see that it won’t always work for guests, and it probably weighs 350 pounds, so moving it to different distances is not practical. I can do it on rare occasions, but I’m not going to keep the tractor next to it all the time. A bench will be easier to move, it will be easier on guests, and it will be nice when I want to shoot from a seated position.

I learned some stuff while I was planning the build.

1. Real sniper wannabees do not build benches with cutouts. A cutout will encourage you to sit beside your gun, not behind it. It will also make it too easy for you to sit upright. These issues will cause problems with recoil management.

2. A proper bench is low. I thought a tall bench would be nice because it would be comfortable. I learned that you need a low bench so your back will be nearly horizontal where you contact the gun. The idea is to make bench shooting like prone shooting. Again, recoil is the reason.

3. A bench should not have built-in seating. Every time you move your rear end, you’ll move your point of aim.

In order to see your own shots land, you need a muzzle that doesn’t jump or move to one side. To get that, you need to be directly behind your rifle, not beside it. You also need your body to be a good backstop, and that means you want to lean forward. It all adds up to a low bench with no cutout.

I never liked cutouts anyway. I always felt I had to strain to get behind the gun.

I’m building a simple table about 4 feet square. The height will be about 29 inches.

I thought about materials. First, I thought of wood. I decided against it. A strong wooden bench will be heavier than steel, it will require more ingenuity to put together, and it will require big, thick parts that are likely to get in the way when shooting. A steel bench will be lighter, and it won’t incorporate a bunch of two-by-sixes that make for cramped positions.

Today I went to my metal dealer and spent a hundred bucks on 2″ square tubing. I also bought a bunch of hex screws and washers. I plan to weld a metal frame and screw two-by-sixes to it for a top. I’ll put the screws through the tubing from the bottom. They won’t go through the top of the wood, so no hardware will be in my way.

I made a mistake by choosing 1/8″ steel. It’s pretty heavy. It will be much, much stronger than necessary. I guess I added 30 pounds to the bench’s weight. I couldn’t lift it even if I made it with thinner steel, though, so it’s not like it will be a problem. I should come up with a way to add wheels so I can pick one end up and move it.

The bench will be one solid weldment with a wood top, so it won’t break down. That will be a problem if I move. I can cut the legs off with grinder, though. If I did that, I could move the bench in pieces and weld it back together somewhere else.

I should be able to do all the welding tomorrow. Cleaning the metal to paint it will take a while, but it won’t be bad, because the steel they sold me is very bright. Once it’s welded, I’ll need a day or two to put truck bed coating on it, and then I can screw the top on. I think I’ll paint the top with farm implement paint. I just need a slick surface I can wipe down to get rid of mold or whatever.

I’ll need a mat for the bench. My prone mat is not suitable because it’s made in 4 flat sections. You can’t just unroll half of it and hang the rest off the front. I have a couple of very thick bath mats I don’t use for anything. They would be perfect.

It’s nice to have another welding project. It’s nice to know I’ll have a fantastic bench. If I couldn’t use tools, where would I be? Factory benches are not very good, and they cost a fortune.

Night Vision Bargain Disappoints

Back when I moved here, I bought myself a cheap night vision scope, thinking I would shoot coons and other critters with it. I believe I wrote about it recently. It’s an ATN X-Sight II. I used credit card points to buy it, on a lark. The cost was $600, which is not a lot for night vision. It came with an infrared flashlight to help it see things.

I was busy with my dad, and I never got around to night hunting. Now I’m trying to get the scope to work.

It’s a badly executed product. No two ways about it. Yes, it works, but it won’t do what the ads make you think it will do.

1. The IR illuminator is not very good, so you need to get a better one for long distances.

2. The scope will eat the 4 AA batteries ATN says to use, so don’t even try. Buy a zippered butt pack and a 20,000-maH USB battery plus a micro USB cable and use these items to power the scope. It will run for hours. ATN sells its own version of this setup for $100, but you will pay more like $30 if you buy things separately.

3. The scope has Bluetooth, but it does not work well enough to be useful for anything.

4. ATN has an app for the scope, and it will help you change the scope’s settings or show another person what you see through the scope, but that’s about it. You can look at your own photos and videos, but you can’t save or share them. As for changing the settings, you can do that using the scope’s buttons.

A few days back, I tried to use the scope in the backyard, just to get ready. Without the illuminator, all I saw was a green mess. There was nearly no contrast between one thing and another. When I turned on the illuminator, everything went bright green, and I saw nothing at all.

Today I updated the scope’s firmware, and suddenly it started working. Here’s a photo.

As you can see, the scope is still a little confused about the date.

Now I can see well enough to shoot varmints. Unfortunately, the scope is zeroed for my .204 Ruger rifle at 100 yards, and I expect to be shooting at maybe 50. I have to take it out and shoot some close-up targets.

How do you shoot varmints if you can’t see them? That’s a great question. The scope has a small field of view, so there is pretty much no possibility that I will be able to spot game. I can put bait out and watch a small area, or I can get a different tool for spotting. I can find animals with the other tool and shoot them with the scope.

I think. I’m just guessing.

Night vision is the cheap way to shoot at night. The best way is thermal. A thermal scope will make any warm object light up, even if it’s behind leaves. If you take a thermal optic out in the woods at night, you will be able to see every animal around you a long way off, as long as the view isn’t completely blocked. You’ll even see birds in the trees, like little Christmas lights.

I’m thinking I should get a thermal monocular. When I spot critters, I can shove put the monocular down and use the scope.

I’m trying to get advice as to whether this is a good idea.

What if it works? Then I’ll use the night vision scope until I get tired of it, and I’ll upgrade to a thermal scope. I believe I’ll still need a monocular to find things, because monoculars have big fields of view.

After that, I should be able to hammer hogs at will, provided I can find them.

It’s annoying, buying a product from a company that doesn’t seem to care about whether it works, but as long as I accept the fact that it doesn’t do everything it’s supposed to, I should be able to have a lot of fun with the X-Sight. I will be very cautious about buying a thermal made by ATN, though. You only get to fool me once.

Three Lemons in a Row but no Jackpot

I guess I’m now the world’s leading critic of the Marlin Model 60 .22 rifle.

I bought a Model 60 in 2018, I believe. It shot 4″ groups at 50 feet. Not yards. Feet. I sent it back, and Marlin gave up on it and sent a new one. I shot that one, and the feed tube fell off.

My buddy Mike wanted another .22, so naturally, he settled on the Model 60. I told him he couldn’t be my friend if he bought one, but he didn’t listen. He bought two. He bought an old one, and he also bought a new one. He liked the old one because it had a bigger magazine and a longer barrel.

This weekend, he brought the old one down, and it stovepiped about 50% of the time. A stovepipe is a failure to eject. The spent casing sticks out of the action, and it looks like a pipe.

When he left, he left the gun here. He was having issues with his gun case, and he figured he would be back soon.

Today, I decided to try to fix the gun, which came from Gunbroker. I have never been cheated on Gunbroker, but it looks like Mike drew the short straw. His gun had been modified several times by a master gunsmith. It was modified in the same sense that what puppies do to carpets is modification.

The Model 60 comes apart when you remove two takedown screws under the stock. Mike’s gun had three screws. The forward screw was normal. There were two screws at the rear. One went through the trigger guard. The other was set in a very nicely drilled hole in the stock, to the rear of the trigger guard.

I removed the middle screw, and it turned out to be a wood screw which didn’t fit tightly. It probably came from Home Depot. The top was black, but the rest was zinc. Apparently, the unknown master gunsmith took a Sharpie and painted it.

It ran into a pot metal or aluminum (Marlin, so probably pot metal) block at the rear of the action. The threads in the block didn’t look too hot. The factory screw is probably a #8 machine screw, and the master gunsmith used a #8 wood screw, so there was conflict.

I went to Numrich and looked the part up. They had a reproduction part. The price was great, but…fake part. I found the real thing on Ebay for $8.75, delivered. Consider that ordered.

I considered the possibility that the loose-fitting stock contributed to the stovepiping issue. It seemed worth checking.

I took the corresponding screw out of my 2018 Model 60 and tried it in the old gun. It fit, even though the threads had been abused. That told me the new Ebay screw would work.

The far-rear screw was in a blind hole. Explain that. Someone took the time to do a very good job drilling a hole that went nowhere.

Maybe the rifle stock was snapped off at some point, and the screw was inserted to add strength after it was glued in place. Of course, this would be a stupid idea. When you put wood back together with good glue, the joint is stronger than the wood was to begin with, and drilling a hole would make a weak spot.

I don’t think this is what happened, because I can’t find any sign of a split.

The gun still stovepiped when I was done, so I looked for answers online. People said Marlin 60 ejectors tended to need adjustment.

The Model 60 does not have an ejector, really. It has a cheap spring which is consistent with the low-grade engineering found elsewhere on the gun. If the spring gets bent, which it does, you have to fix it. I opened the gun up again, removed the action, and found that the master gunsmith had put a totally unnecessary S-curve in it.

I took the curve out with pliers, and then I did what is known as the penny/nickel trick. You can find it on Youtube. You fix the spring so the distance between the end of it and the cheap feed throat part is between the thickness of a penny and a nickel. It’s easier than using feeler gauges.

I put 5 rounds in the gun. Four shot just fine, and the last one stovepiped. I opened the gap on the spring up slightly, and I tested it again. It shot perfectly. For a Marlin.

Now Mike has a gun that works, and he owes me $8.75. I told him he could put a new roof on my chicken house.

If you’re wondering how to take the action out, there is one pin at the rear of the receiver, and you can push it out with your finger.

The best way to get a gun labeled “Marlin” to shoot correctly is to buy a Savage, a can of spray paint, and a stencil. Actually, I saw two messed-up Savages this weekend, so let’s go with Ruger.

The Marlin 60 is junk. There is really no way to defend it. It looks good, it shoots well when it shoots at all, and it’s light and handy, but Mattel has made sturdier, better-designed products.

But enough about the AR-15.

ZING. Rimshot.

I thank God the problems with this gun were easily fixed. Now I just need to convince Mike to quit buying them.

Stuff We’ll Miss When the Left Succeeds in Gutting America

My friend Mike spent several days here, and now he’s on his way to the airport. I’m glad he managed to make it, because he has been working way too hard, in an area where it’s not easy to get out and shoot.

He brought an assortment of firearms, and we got a lot of range time (i.e. backyard time) in. We had successes and failures.

He has two new Savage rifles. I like Savage because their rifles are very accurate, they come with great triggers, and they’re not expensive. I have a Savage bolt action and a semiauto .22, and they have been trouble-free. Sadly, Mike’s experience has been different.

He brought an A17, which is a semiauto rifle in .17 HMR. I suggested he get a bolt gun, but he wanted to be able to spray at will.

We put up some targets and got to work zeroing the scope. Things went poorly. The gun fed very badly, crushing a lot of cases. Mike finally noticed that it fed reliably when he wedged a piece of plastic between the magazine and stock. The hole for the magazine was too big, so something was needed to make it fit. It’s going to have to be worked on. Many people who own this gun have similar complaints. Maybe Savage got a batch of bad stocks. There is no excuse for letting a gun with this kind of problem leave the factory. It’s a known issue, and it’s simple to check before packing the gun.

I put him on my shooting platform, and he was not able to get comfortable. He has some problems with his neck. He has a cervical fusion operation scheduled.

He managed to shoot maybe 2 MOA, which was good under the circumstances.

The next day, after setting up a table and chair, we tried to shoot his Savage Model 110 in 6.5 Creedmoor. It refused to fire. Something is going on with the bolt. You have to activate the safety and go through a complicated procedure to get the gun to fire. Very annoying. Time and again, he got set up to shoot, pulled the trigger, and got nothing.

The scope was also a problem. It hit him in the nose when he shot. I thought he wasn’t supporting the gun with his shoulder, but then I shot it, and it hit me in the nose, too. To make the gun work, you have to lean over so your nose is off to the side. I have never had a gun with that problem before. Is the stock too short? No idea. I should have checked the length of pull.

We were really hoping to get the gun working. We lapped his scope rings and bought match ammunition, and we expected good results, but it didn’t work out. I shot a few rounds and got about 1.5 MOA, which was definitely the gun’s fault.

On the up side, Mike will only have to make one trip to get the guns fixed, since both will go to the same place, and he’s within one hour of the Savage factory.

He also brought an old Marlin 60. It gun stovepiped about 50% of the time. I Googled and found that a lot of people have feeding problems with this gun.

I’ll say it again. I think the Model 60 is junk. So far, I’ve worked with three, and all three were losers.

He left the Marlin here. I’m going to clean it and see what I can do to make it feed.

On a positive note, I shot my Savage A22 on the same day, and it ran perfectly.

The nicest gun he brought was a Dan Wesson 1911. Very nice weapon. It’s beautifully made, and it shoots fine. I got my PC1911 out, and we lit up my steel targets. I think the Dan Wesson’s trigger is too heavy, and Mike wants fiber optic sights, but it’s an excellent gun.

If you buy a new gun, and you want to travel with it, I strongly suggest you get the bugs worked out before you get on the plane. Otherwise, you may eat up vacation time trying to get it to work.

I shot my Ruger Precision Rifle and my Tikka T3x Superlite. The Tikka was disappointing. It’s a great rifle, but it’s not the right shape for prone shooting, and I was not really prepared to prop it up effectively. I didn’t want to use a bipod, because I figured a hunting gun should be zeroed the way you plan to shoot it in the field. I shot a little over 1 MOA, which is more than good enough, but I know the gun can do better. The factory recoil pad was a horror. It feels like it’s made of iron, and it has a sharp point on it so it goes right into your shoulder when you shoot. I have ordered a Limbsaver pad to replace it.

The Ruger Precision Rifle was a joy to shoot, as always. Strictly sub-MOA. Never a problem. If your groups are bigger than five eighths of an inch, you’re doing it wrong. My Savage 93R also ran perfectly. I fiddled around with it at first, but when I got it where I wanted it, I made a neat little string of 5 holes covering less than an inch.

The 93R has been discontinued, and people who review the successor model criticize the 93R over piddling things. Hmm. Great trigger, astounding accuracy, complete reliability, a good rigid stock that works fine once you put a cheap adjustable cheek rest on it…and the gun cost something like $280! I don’t see the problem. I have a $400 scope on it, and I feel it was 100% justified.

I can literally shoot ping pong balls with it at 100 yards and expect to hit them nearly every time. I couldn’t be happier with it.

The RPR is almost boring, which means I need to get to a long range and shoot at longer distances. Shooting endless 5/8″ groups at 100 yards isn’t going to teach me much.

I find myself wondering if there is any point in trying to make the Tikka shoot better. I’m pretty sure the whole problem is that it’s just harder to shoot than an RPR. I think it’s possible to develop more skill and overcome the rifle’s unfriendly geometry and relatively stiff trigger. Is it worth it? Will I ever want to shoot a hunting rifle that accurately? My guess is that if I ever have a legitimate need to shoot that well, the smart move will be to lug the RPR with me instead of fighting the Tikka.

I have at least three rifles that will reliably shoot sub-MOA from a rest, and I have two more that will do nearly as well. I have some others that might come close if I fiddled with them. I think the bases are pretty well covered.

Mike is planning to change his work schedule, so he should be able to visit more often. Maybe we’ll hire a guide and kill something edible.

Ribs and Rifles

My friend Mike is visiting. We’ve had quite a day.

We went to Core Rifle Systems to pick up some ammo he ordered, and it turned out they had Hornady ELD-M 140-grain match ammo, which was better than what he had asked for. We arranged a switch, and now he’s all set for the weekend. We plan to get his new rifle running.

We also hit Rural King, where, unbelievably, they were selling Norma match ammo at a Rural King price. He snapped up several boxes.

Before running our errand, we stuck two racks of ribs in the smoker. Mike was the first person to fix decent ribs for me, about 30 years ago, and he inspired me to get my new smoker. This week, I was only able to get baby backs and trimmed St. Louis ribs. No full racks of spare ribs. I decided to make one rack of each type and do a comparison. We also had macaroni and cheese, barbecue beans with smoked sausage, and Texas toast made with homemade bread.

This was a good opportunity for me to compare baby backs to St. Louis ribs. I’ve never been a fan of baby backs. They’re small, dry, and expensive. That’s what I believed, but I decided to give them a fresh chance anyway. Turned out I was right. They’re worthless. The St. Louis ribs were nearly perfect, but the baby backs were on the dry side and had a lot less flavor.

I don’t know why people eat baby backs. Ignorance, I guess.

I have finally produced what I think is nearly perfect macaroni and cheese. How did I do it? Predictably enough, by correcting Alton Brown. The more I know about cooking, the less I think of him.

When I created my old recipe, I used Brown’s recipe, along with at least one other, as a starting point. The dish was good, but I felt it could be better. I thought the cheese could be smoother and cheesier.

Brown says to put cheese, panko bread crumbs, and butter atop macaroni and cheese and bake it. This is a bad idea. It tends to make the cheese separate. You don’t want to overheat macaroni and cheese. Baking it is not a good move.

Here’s what I did. I made the noodles. I made the sauce using cheese, half and half, butter, starch, an egg yolk, and sodium citrate, among other things. It was silky-smooth. I did not boil it.

I put the noodles in the microwave and nuked them until they were blistering hot, and then I stirred them into the sauce. This way, I got hot macaroni and cheese without boiling. I put the crust ingredients on top and broiled them. This gave me a perfect crust without heating the rest of the dish too much.

It’s magnificent. Couldn’t be much better.

I used 12 ounces of cheese and 8 dry ounces of noodles. This doesn’t include the top crust.

It was great having Mike in the kitchen, because when I needed help with something, I didn’t have to explain it, do it for him, or do it over. And he knows good food when he tastes it. Most people don’t.

We were talking about the microwave. I said I didn’t like using it when I cooked for guests. He said he always used it to cook for guests, because they couldn’t tell the difference.

He has a point.

If we ever recover from dinner, we’ll get some guns ready for tomorrow. We plan to do a rimfire invasion in the pasture.

Yesterday we shot .22 pistols. Mike was concerned about his skills, but we set up around 50 feet from the 6″ steel targets, and he had no problems. I had to explain that most people would have a hard time hitting a 6″ target from 7 yards. Tomorrow we’ll probably start with .22 rifles and move on to .17 HMR.

I suggest never eating baby back ribs, and be careful about listening to Alton Brown. He’s entertaining, but sometimes I wonder if he can cook at all.

I don’t want to get back into cooking heavily, but when I cook things I already know how to make, I might as well do it right.

Hope your Black Friday went well.

The Sooner You Listen, the Less You Suffer

If you hope to have any ammunition at all in the coming months, you have already blown it, so you need to get out there and see what you can do to mitigate the problem.

My childhood buddy Mike is visiting this week. He doesn’t get many opportunities to shoot where he lives. He’s in the Northeast. Poor guy. He’s bringing some firearms, but he hasn’t been on top of the ammo situation.

He has a rifle in 6.5 Creedmoor, and he hasn’t even fired it yet. I have been looking around, trying to help him find something to shoot. He has three problems. First, he can’t get anything locally. Second, ordering ammunition online is generally very expensive right now. Third, he can’t order ammunition online anyway, because it would arrive after his trip.

I know, I know. He should have been shopping in May.

The best local deal I could find for him was about $50 per box. Crazy. Ordinarily, very good 6.5 ammo goes for under $35, and a lot of it is considerably cheaper. A business near me sold Mike several boxes, and they’re holding it until he picks it up.

I use a site that provides alerts when ammunition is put up for sale. Today at 5:18 a.m., I got a message saying Sellier & Bellot 140-grain 6.5 Creedmoor FMJ was selling at a good price. I didn’t see the alert until after 10. Every box had sold by then.

I found a site that said 14 boxes were available. I ordered 10. I received an email acknowledging the order. Things looked good. Then the owner of the shop emailed me and said the computers were not keeping up with actual stock. He had nothing left, and the order was canceled.

I found a third site with a very good price, and it allowed me to put 5 boxes in my cart. Then the transaction wouldn’t go through. The shop’s proprietor emailed and said the company that processes credit cards was having problems. He said he would hold the ammo for me until things started working.

That’s where I am right now.

Why did I order ammunition, if it won’t be here for Mike? Because I already have the same stuff here. I can give Mike cartridges from my cache, he can reimburse me, and the new ammo will fill the hole. Maybe we can get the local place to take the expensive ammo back. They have no reason not to, since they should be able to sell it again in about 15 minutes.

I hope he doesn’t get stuck with overpriced rounds, but he really should have been preparing in the early summer.

As for me, the alerts paid a handsome windfall. I have some 6.5 hunting bullets for reloading, but I didn’t order as many as I should have. Today I got an alert, and I was able to get 300 more for a good price. Now I just have to learn how to reload rifle ammo. And I need some critters to shoot.

You may wonder why I don’t just give Mike rifle ammo, like a good friend. Well, if I give him ammo that cost me 60 cents per round, I may have to pay $2.00 per round to replace it, and I might not be able to get it at all. If one of us is going to have to overpay by a factor of three, it shouldn’t be me. And I do plan to give him a certain amount of ammunition. While reloading materials are scarce, prices have not changed, so I can still reload economically. I have some pistol rounds I can replace for much less than the going price of $45 per box. He can make it up to me by springing for pizza or something.

While he’s here we have to mount a scope on his rifle. That means buying rings. We’ll have to hit Bass Pro. We may have to lap the rings, since he is not likely to splurge for precision equipment. I have never lapped rings before, but it looks like a simple job, and I have the tools.

Remember the days when you could go to the gun range and enjoy yourself without wondering if you were shooting the last ammunition you would ever be able to afford? Man, those were good times.

Thank God I stocked up on a few things. Some calibers could be problematic in my future, but significant amounts of others may end up in my will. I should be able to enjoy my hobby to one degree or another for as long as I live, or until leftists confiscate everything and put me to work sweeping up dead birds at a wind farm.

Oddly, you can still get AR-15 ammunition at acceptable prices. It’s as though supernatural forces wanted us to be well-armed so we could murder each other during the tribulation.

The AR-15 is extremely popular, and it was designed for combat, not putting food on the table. Looks like Americans will be extremely well supplied if Trump haters riot and murder as predicted. I would expect to see leftists who are generally unskilled, unorganized, undisciplined, and poorly armed, facing defending conservatives who would fare much, much better.

It makes sense. If you think you’re entitled to equality of outcome in everything, regardless of whether you do anything to earn it, your entitlement mindset is also likely to apply to civil war and terrorism. You will probably expect to be handed victory because you belong to a group with a lot of social credit.

It’s easy to pick on old, unarmed Caucasians and Asians in public places. It’s easy to throw poop and bottles at the police, who are legally barred from using real force. Going into red areas and invading the properties of seasoned shooters and former military personnel will result in totally different outcomes.

There will be no participation trophies or affirmative action in a civil war. If you don’t know what you’re doing when you try to hurt others, meritocracy will put you in the grave, and all the street murals in the world won’t help. A disabled young man named Gage Grosskreutz could tell you all about it.

War isn’t tee ball. Leftism conflicts with reality, and the harsher reality is, the more the conflict is exposed.

It’s very sad. The world is full of human beings who could be agents of God’s love, and who could be preserved and unified forever in a realm of peace and joy, but most are condemning themselves to indescribable eternal torment because their pride and sadism won’t let them listen to correction.

As Usual, You Were Lied to

It’s a wonderful day. I just saved hundreds of rounds of .45 ammunition from the factory-second bin.

Something like 12 years ago, I got an ammunition press, and I got to work. I figured it had to be pretty simple to operate. After all, they sell them to millions of people who aren’t engineers.

Once I got started, I learned that ammunition presses aren’t the greatest products. Little unforeseeable problems pop up all the time. You can’t just do what the manuals tell you to do. That won’t work. You start out following the manual, and then when the problems the industry doesn’t like to talk about start popping up, you have to come up with solutions.

Are you planning to make ammunition for a semiauto pistol? If so, this is your lucky day. I’ll tell you what you need to do if you really want your ammunition to function. If you don’t listen to me, you can probably stumble around and come up with a way to make your ammo work in your own carry gun, but if you let friends try it in their guns, they may end up driving home from the range with cases stuck in their chambers.

When you make ammunition on a progressive press, which is a press that takes multiple rounds through various stations that do different things, you have to use at least three dies. A die is a press attachment. Your press will push your casings into the dies and pull them out, and each die does something different to casings.

The first die pushes the old primer out of your casing, if you’re using used brass. It also removes any bulges caused by firing. Now you have a skinny, round casing with no primer.

Before you go to the next die, your casing sits on a gadget that shoves a new primer into it.

After priming, you come to a die that flares the mouth of your case so you can shove a bullet into it.

The next station is a powder measure. This is a weird device that measures powder and dumps it into your casing. Now you’re ready for a bullet, so you shove one into the flared mouth.

After this, you run into a problem they don’t tell you about.

You still need the press to seat the bullet correctly in the casing, and you need to get rid of the flaring on the case mouth so the case isn’t too wide to go into your chamber. Hornady, the company that made my die sets, wants you to think you can do this with one die. They sell three-die sets. The last die seats your bullet with a rod sort of a thing that pushes the bullet down when you raise the cartridge to the die. There is also a hollow tube in the die, and its job is to contact the case mouth lightly on all sides and compress it just enough to get rid of the flare. This is called crimping.

It doesn’t work.

Actually, it does work, but not very well. It’s not simple to set up. You have to adjust the height of the crimping part so it just barely crimps the mouth. Then you have to screw the seating rod down to just the right height to give you a cartridge of the correct length.

The crimping ring is rounded on the inside, so it bends the casing mouth inward as it crimps it, giving you a rounded edge all around the mouth outside the cartridge. Because the crimping part only touches the end of the casing, it won’t necessarily compress all of the flare. Parts below the contact area may still be too wide for your gun’s chamber (or the smaller chamber of someone else’s gun) when you’re done. Also, you lose the clearly defined rim on your case. It ends up with a rounded rim, and lots of guns use a sharply defined rim to situate cartridges in their chamber.

You can end up with a cartridge that balloons out slightly just below the mouth. Then your casing may get stuck part of the way into your chamber. Chambers aren’t straight cylinders. They’re tapered. Your rim has to be small enough to slide into the narrowest part of your chamber.

If your rounds won’t chamber, the rims are probably the issue. You can check it by using a Sharpie to paint your casing. Chamber it as well as you can, extract it, and look for the areas where the ink is scraped off. You’ll probably see shiny brass around the rim and nowhere else.

Guns of the same caliber don’t have identical chambers. Some chambers, especially on guns made to be accurate, are tighter than others. Some guns have loose chambers in order to make sure ammunition always goes in and out reliably, so if you use a gun like that (like a Glock) to test your rounds, you may find you can’t shoot your ammunition from, say, an expensive 1911. You may take your freshly-made thousand rounds of ammunition to the range and find out you can’t shoot any of it.

People will give you extremely bad advice. They’ll tell you to use your chamber as a gage when you set up your press. This is how you end up at the range with no usable ammunition.

There are two things you need to do, if you want your ammo to work.

First, you need a taper-crimp die. Hornady was just playing with you when they sold you a three-die set. You need 4. A taper-crimp die will compress your casing with an internal cylinder that makes contact over a long area. It squeezes the casing. It does not roll the rim inward. You end up with a casing which is the right diameter from bottom to top, not just within ten thousandths of the mouth.

To make a taper-crimp die work, you leave your old combination seating and crimping die in place, but you back the crimping part off so it never touches the cartridge. You only use the combination die to seat bullets.

Second, you need a case gage. This is a precisely machined steel tube. A company called Wilson makes them. They’re worth the money. Don’t listen to bubbas who think hammers are good tools for seating primers.

You drop your finished cartridge into the gage. If it falls right in, you’re all set. There is no commonly made chamber on earth that won’t chamber your round. You don’t have to worry about it working in one gun and sticking in another. If it doesn’t fall in, you need to adjust your crimping die until it does.

You use your case gage while you’re setting your dies up, and then your ammunition works.

I didn’t know these things until recently. I just assumed Hornady and the people I talked to on forums would give me intelligent information. Big mistake.

By the way, if your best buddy tries to help you out by giving you reloads to get you through the shortage, you better test them in your gun’s chamber. Don’t just assume they’ll save you when BLM drags you out of your car.

As of this morning, I had hundreds of .45 rounds I couldn’t trust to run in my PC1911, which is a moderately snobby 1911 made for shooters, not killers. The ammo worked fine in my SW1911, but it’s a less expensive gun with a looser chamber, probably intended to make it more reliable. The rounds used to stick halfway into the PC1911’s chamber. Really annoying.

Today I set the taper-crimp die up in my press, all by itself, and I ran every round through it. I tested them with the case gage. Now I’m all set. My target ammo works. My defensive ammo works. I kind of wish I had bought a Glock in .45 ACP. I guess there is still time. Or maybe there isn’t. It looks like they’ve disappeared.

I bought a big jug of Vihtavuori because people said it was great for .45 accuracy. Now I can go ahead and start filling casings.

To sum up, your setup will look like this: decapping/sizing die, primer punch, belling die, powder measure, seating die, taper-crimp die. Do things in that order, admit Hornady had you fooled with the three-die set, and get on with your life.

In a few hours, I went from being bummed out about my .45 situation to feeling like king of the far-right prepper nuts. I’m almost cocky enough to try making rifle ammo.

This is What Shopping Looks Like as the Antichrist Approaches

I finally did it. I broke down and ordered me a plate carrier.

A plate carrier is an unattractive vest that holds body armor plates. You can put four in, to protect you from all sides. It works great if you get shot where you happen to be covered by a plate, if you don’t mind broken ribs and so on. Unfortunately, many things most people consider important are not found in areas typically covered by plates.

The idea, I believe, is that it’s better to lose a part you don’t need to survive as long as your head remains alive. I’m not sure I agree, but that appears to be the philosophy.

Plates aren’t the whole picture. You have to get trauma pads. These are stiff foam pads that go behind the plates. When a bullet hits a plate, it may dent it, and it will definitely transmit energy to the person behind it. Pads are supposed to spread the impact out. I don’t know if they work. They look okay in Youtube videos people shoot behind their trailers.

You can also get ballistic helmets. I don’t like the word “ballistic.” It means nearly nothing. I would call them “anti-projectile” helmets. They’re not that great, in case you’re wondering. They’re supposed to be very good at protecting people from light shrapnel, but if you get shot in the head while wearing one, there is a good chance the bullet will go through OR it will push the helmet in so far, your skull will be broken. It’s still a lot better than the product most people wear in armed confrontations, which is nothing.

I don’t have a helmet. I felt like God wanted me to get armor, but I haven’t heard anything about helmets. That’s good, because a decent new one will run at least $450, and good luck finding one you can have in less than a month. You can get used military helmets for maybe $200, though.

Here’s the really sad thing about helmets: they’re disposable. At least the fancy plastic ones are. When a Kevlar helmet takes one shot, it pretty much shatters where the bullet hits it. The next round that hits in the same general area will not hit hard plastic. It will hit mushy broken plastic. The only remedy is a new helmet.

A couple of companies make steel helmets, but everyone makes fun of them. Not sure why. They’re just as light as plastic, they don’t push in nearly as much when they get shot, they don’t shatter when they get shot, and they work better around the edges. If you shoot a plastic helmet near an edge, it’s much more likely to let the bullet through. My best guess is that people hate steel helmets for the same reason people used to hate rifle scopes: a stupid, baseless resistance to change. But I don’t know much about the subject. It’s just an impression.

I was thinking it might be neat to have a thermal scope, in case Soros sends a busload of entitlement-minded, violent racists to my house at night. I could spot them hundreds of yards away, and they would have a pretty hard time getting close enough to me to fight back. Experts, however, say the in thing is a night vision monocular and an infrared laser. You put the monocular over one eye, you spot people in the dark, you light them up with a laser they can’t see, and then you light them up with something else.

It sounds pretty good, but I don’t think it would enable a person to hammer invaders from a really long distance. You wouldn’t see them until they were maybe a hundred yards off, and you would be in a lot of danger at that range.

Maybe the answer is a separate thermal doodad for picking up targets. You find them with it, and then you switch to night vision in order to deal with them. You could find an invader way off in the distance, which would be hard with night vision, and then once you knew where he was, you could use night vision to aim.

I don’t know. I’m just making up guesses using very limited information.

Okay; my guess was right. FLIR makes a product called the Breach. It’s a little monocular you can use to look around. And it’s dirt cheap. Only $2500. Let me check the couch cushions to see how much change I have.

A former Green Beret on Youtube says he carries a Breach for spotting, while backing it up with night vision. I guess I’m smarter than I thought.

Man, I would love to have a Breach. I could wander around my property locating critters for fun. But not $2500 worth of fun, I think.

It would be hell on coyotes and coons.

In the past, I have scoffed at people who talked about the need to be able to shoot bad guys at long distances. The main reason is that shooting a perp a long way off is nearly always murder. You can’t say you were reasonably afraid of great harm if you shot a guy with a knife a hundred yards away. But these are different times. These days, there is a real possibility that armed groups with very clear intentions might menace people from a hundred yards or more, leaving no practical way to avoid fighting. If 10 “protestors” with rifles start coming toward you from a long way off, and you know who they are and why they’re there, you can’t just wait until they get close enough to make police investigators happy. You have to start shooting while they’re still at a disadvantage.

The price of a night vision monocular is not far from the price of a Breach. I’m not sure why night vision monoculars cost so much. I bought a night vision scope for $600, from a company that also makes highly regarded monoculars. Anyway, if you wanted thermal for spotting and night vision for closing the deal, you would be looking at the price of a good used car.

It’s cheaper than a funeral, granted. But a lot of intelligent, informed people expect to do well with a $500 AR-15 and three or four mags full of ball ammo. Kyle Rittenhouse had no armor, no helmet, and no weird optics, and he successfully battled a large crowd of vicious armed aggressors bent on murdering him in the street. He killed two, maimed one, scared the rest off, and didn’t damage property or hurt the innocent.

I don’t know why I find this stuff interesting. Christianity is primarily about love. I really can’t see myself shooting anyone. Sometimes you want to be able to do a thing even if you don’t want to do it. I would be highly disturbed if I hurt anyone, even to protect innocent life, but the knowledge that I can hurt the wicked is still comforting.

Taking Ecclesiastes 10:18 to Heart

I learned something useful today. Putting a small amount of ginger in beef jerky really improves it.

I made another batch yesterday, and while I was mixing the marinade, I thought about teriyaki. My best guess is that teriyaki jerky requires replacing all of the Worcestershire sauce with soy sauce, but for some reason, I stuck with half and half, and I added about a quarter of a teaspoon of ground ginger. I didn’t have fresh ginger.

It made a big difference. I wouldn’t say it tastes gingery. It just has more zing to it. I think powdered ginger will actually work better than fresh, because it has a sharper flavor.

So that was nice.

I grabbed the wrong cut of meat by mistake. I wanted eye round, and I think I bought bottom round. Anyway, today, the surface of the jerky has oil on it. It’s not congealed fat. Just oil. They say you should use beef with as little fat as possible. This cut seems to have more fat than eye round. The danger of using fatty meat is that the fat will go rancid. Will that happen when the meat is still lean but slightly fattier than eye round? I don’t know, but it tastes better. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it doesn’t go bad, maybe I’ll switch to this cut permanently.

I also got new gutters installed. This house had only one roof gutter when I moved here, and it was between the roof and the patio enclosure. There was no guttering over the garage, so big, fat raindrops fell directly on the driveway. They were starting to wear it away, and I couldn’t leave the doors open when it rained, because so much water splattered into the garage. I had them run guttering over both doors. Feeling smug about that.

There was also an issue over the front porch. The roof was designed in such a way that a huge amount of water was directed onto the porch roof when it rained. It caused some rot, and I had to spend a grand on repairs. Now there is some hope the new guttering will direct the rain elsewhere.

The strangest part of the roof design was the lack of guttering on the workshop roof. The rain fell straight onto the grass, in front of a concrete porch. The rain destroyed a strip of grass beside the concrete and washed out a lot of the dirt. I could not grow anything in front of the porch. Rain also threw dirt all over the concrete. Now I have a gutter that runs the length of the building, and I may go crazy and plant something in the ugly rut where the rain used to fall.

I don’t know what’s happening in the world, and that suits me very well. I have plenty of jobs to keep me busy. I don’t need to read fake news to kill time as well as my digestion. The election will have an outcome whether I read about it or not, and if the rapture comes, it won’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, regardless, because God looks after me very well.

It has occurred to me that readers may be confused because I say I feel like the rapture is upon us, but I also talk about planning for shortages, civil war, and so on. I’m writing about different possible futures. One involves me being here while leftists torch the country and force sane people to dig in and defend, and the other involves me being somewhere above, gleefully oblivious to everything that happens here. I keep feeling powerful indications that I won’t be here, but I have been wrong before.

Today I prayed God would see to it I never found myself in a situation in which I would truly need to use a firearm. I have asked for that before. I don’t want to be pulled down into the mire with the pigs. I don’t think Christians were put here to shoot people. I think when you find yourself in a situation like that, it means something has gone wrong in your relationship with God.

The ammunition situation has gotten even worse. I set up alerts so a search site would tell me when certain types of ammunition were available. This morning I got an alert, and when I checked before 8:30 a.m., the site was sold out. People are hovering by their computers, snapping ammunition up as soon as it appears. Either that, or George Soros has a bot doing it to keep patriots from getting cartridges. Of course, people have been storing up ammunition since the Obama years, so Soros and Bloomberg could bankrupt themselves and still fail to accomplish their goal.

I don’t really think billionaires are buying ammunition to cause problems, but it would make a great conspiracy theory.

I wonder what life in blue America is like. Hell, I suppose. Terrorism, lack, and irrational fear surrounding a mild disease. My cousin near Chicago still can’t buy disinfectant wipes, but they’re slashing them to $2.98 per can at my local Walmart, just to get rid of them. My cousin near Atlanta says they finally have meat in stores, although restaurants can’t get what they want because they’re last in line. My Illinois cousin is visiting my aunt in Kentucky, and she can’t get wipes there, either. Of course, Kentucky isn’t all that red. Not down deep, regardless of whom they voted for. They love government handouts too much.

There are two realities, and I’m very satisfied with mine. I have zero interest in experiencing or even witnessing the false, unnecessary reality of leftists.

If you think about it, the two-reality solution continues after death. It might as well start now.

My Welcome Wore Out Years Ago

I have a new batch of beef jerky in the dehydrator, and I just made macaroni and cheese using a new recipe. I also put a new laser/flashlight device on my AK-47. It’s an uneventful and peaceful day, which is odd, since it keeps looking more and more like the end of the age is here.

Yesterday I texted a few people I don’t hear from much. Two are former armorbearers from Trinity Church, the corrupt money-worshiping establishment I attended for about 4 years. One said he was looking for an AR-15; I don’t think he understands that he can’t wait around. The other just bought a C308, which is a knockoff of the Heckler & Koch G3, a 7.62x51mm semiauto sort of like an AR10. These guys live in Broward County, which is the county where Fort Lauderdale is located. We don’t communicate often, so it’s not like we’re conspiring to amass firearms and ammunition. It’s a grassroots thing, which means it’s probably supernatural.

I keep thinking of On the Beach, a 1959 film featuring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. The story goes like this: there has been a nuclear war. There is a deadly layer of fallout suspended in the atmosphere, and it has sterilized entire continents. Because most of the explosions took place above the equator, the radiation is confined there temporarily. People still live normally in the Southern Hemisphere, but they expect to die like everyone else. The only question is how long it will take the fallout to move south.

Gregory Peck plays a married submarine captain. Ava Gardner plays a single American woman who lives in Australia. Peck takes his boat to Australia, where he and his crew work together with the Australian government. There is some doubt as to whether the fallout has completely exterminated the human race above the equator.

The movie’s characters don’t stop living just because they believe there is no hope. They avoid thinking about their destiny. They continue raising families and doing their jobs. They have parties. A character played by Fred Astaire restores a used race car and competes in it. Old men at a private club discuss the best way to make sure they waste as little as possible of the club’s wine collection. People try to make the most of life, but at the same time, the government distributes suicide pills intended to help citizens avoid dying slowly from radiation sickness.

Isn’t this a lot like our situation? It’s as if the sentence has been pronounced and we’re just waiting for the walk to the gallows.

The big difference between our current predicament and the one depicted in On the Beach is that only one group of modern people is headed for disaster: those who aren’t close to God. A much smaller group expects deliverance and relief. We actually look forward to the end.

It’s yet another illustration of the fact that we live in different realities. The children of darkness dislike God and morality, they think 2020 is a disaster, and they’re worried and afraid. The children of light cling to God and feel grateful for the way he has prepared them. They see 2020 as a time to prepare for something beautiful. They look forward to dropping their earthly problems and being transported to heaven in perfect, youthful bodies.

I’m having a pleasant day, thinking about things like macaroni and cheese and beef jerky, but all over America, people are stewing in resentment and fear, plotting violence and theft. I’m not worried about getting sick. I’m not wondering if I can pay the rent. My head isn’t full of demonic fantasies about horrific oppression under a second Trump administration. I’m making reasonable efforts to prepare to defend myself if someone brings violence to me, but I don’t feel like hurting anyone. I don’t blame other people for my problems. I don’t think people of another race have stolen all the land and money. I don’t believe Jews run the world and need to be dealt with. I don’t think taking up arms and cleansing the world of people who disagree with me is a smart idea.

My religion tells me God will do any cleansing that has to be done.

With the passing of every week, it looks more like the things people like me have been expecting are really happening. America is becoming like a violent banana republic. Even leftists are talking about civil war. Signs of the rapture keep accumulating.

I suppose it’s always hard to believe it when you find yourself witnessing historical events of extreme impact. Noah’s friends must have been stunned when water started falling from the sky for the first time, just as Noah had predicted. The disciples must have been amazed to learn that Jesus really had risen. But extraordinary things do happen, and when they happen, people do witness them. Someone has to be be there. There is no reason why it can’t be us. Just because life has been very different all our lives doesn’t mean we can’t witness a world transformed by a blizzard of obvious supernatural events.

People are behaving as though what we’re seeing were a momentary aberration to be followed by a return to life as it was in 2019. They get engaged, build houses, and start businesses. They buy stocks and other investments in hopes of long-term gains. Businesses send out email ads trying to sell us things we may not be able to use for very long. We plant trees we know take several years to start bearing. Vintners are putting up bottles of wine they know won’t be ready for at least 10 years. High school seniors started 4-year colleges this fall. But how much of it will pay off? What good is it to give someone a 5-year car loan today if the tribulation will be howling around both of you in November of 2021?

I have a tenant who wants a 3-year lease. I refused to do it because some people who think they hear from God are predicting extreme inflation for next year. I don’t want to be locked into x dollars per month if the market rate will be 5x in two years. I think I should have been more flexible. If the tribulation is about to start, I won’t be here to worry about inflation.

More and more, I feel that it doesn’t matter what I do to safeguard my future. I see things I want, and I think, “I shouldn’t spend the money.” Then I think, “It makes no difference at all. Go ahead.” I’m not thinking about investing. I have no interest in cancer screenings. I just can’t believe I’m going to be here very long.

I thought about writing a will, but then I thought this: most people I would want to leave wealth to are going to go in the rapture. Do I really care which child of the devil gets my property? It will be a curse to that person, regardless of who it is. Does a butterfly worry about what happens to its chrysalis?

If the end of the age is really here, terrorist rioting will increase and become as bad as it can possibly be. Conservatives may finally start taking part as aggressors, not victims. It will be part of normal life. Major wars will start. Diseases that make coronavirus look like chickenpox will cover the globe. People won’t just lack toilet paper and Lysol wipes. They’ll lack bread, canned goods, grain, and produce. They’ll eat rats, squirrels, crows, pigeons, and songbirds. They’ll eat their own pets. They’ll butcher zoo animals, like they did in Venezuela. They’ll go to parks to kill ducks and swans. They’ll trap ants for food.

I walk across parking lots now to get into stores, and I see scenes from disaster movies. I see people wearing masks. I see markers on the pavement and sidewalks, telling people where to stand. I hear creepy, insincerely cheerful recorded female voices reminding us to be nice because we’re all in this together. It’s like HAL 9000 had daughters.

The voices are always female, because psychologists who advise businesses say female voices will comfort us and not make us feel bullied or challenged. How do I know that? I know it because I’m old and smart. I don’t have to check.

Coronavirus is not a big deal, but we’re already living as though the plagues were here. God is showing us two things: diseases we can’t beat can happen, and when they do, we will respond irrationally, making things much worse than they have to be.

Coronavirus is a mild disease which appears to be vulnerable to vaccines, but what if it were like AIDS? There is no reason we can’t have a fatal airborne disease that can’t be cured and won’t let us create vaccines. It looks like coronavirus doesn’t produce symptoms in most people. There have been infectious diseases that killed the majority of their victims even with treatment, and some of those diseases are still active. They haven’t done the damage they could have because they were contained or because they’re not easy to transmit, but there is no law that says an infectious disease can’t be untreatable, unpreventable, and easily transmitted.

Imagine what America would be like if we had a real plague. What if we had an incurable disease with a 50% mortality rate, with no hope of finding a vaccine? If 200,000 deaths confined almost exclusively to people who were likely to die anyway have driven us to hoard and tyrannize, think what a real plague would do to us.

How quick we have been to give up our humanity. I’ve been taking ludicrous continuing legal education courses, and I’m required to get several hours of training in the area of technology. It’s amazing to hear the speakers talk about Zoom and cloud computing. They say many firms have discovered they make more money by staying home and avoiding nearly all in-person encounters. Our noses have been rubbed in the fact that remote communication isn’t more expensive; it’s cheaper and more efficient.

If it’s true in law, it’s true for many other businesses. It means we’re not going back to normal interaction even if coronavirus disappears. Unless there is a compelling reason for you to be among other people, it’s not going to happen. We’re making ourselves a nation of shut-ins, deliberately. It’s like we’re all turning into gamers, living on Cheetos and satisfying our need for socialization by spewing hate on 4chan.

It doesn’t take much of a threat to turn us into willing matrix residents. Our homes are turning into wombs, with ethernet-cable umbilical cords and Amazon Prime bloodstreams.

Maybe the only mentally healthy people in the future will be those whose jobs have physical components, like using shovels and handing people bags of hamburgers. If you don’t have to shower and go to work to make a living, you may have to start forcing yourself to get together with people in order to get your RDA of human contact.

The human race has a natural tendency to use technology to minimize contact. I don’t think we understood that 30 years ago, but it’s obvious now, and our overblown pandemic has exacerbated this pathological inclination.

I guess I’m off on a tangent. To get back to the subject, I know we are in a unique era unlike all previous human crises, and very few of us realize it. It makes sense that the end of the age should come now, because there doesn’t seem to be any way for us to continue as we are. I hate to use one of the left’s favorite manipulative words, but our situation is unsustainable.

I don’t know whether my impressions are right or not, but it doesn’t matter, because we’ll know by the end of the year. If coronavirus is under control, terrorist riots have stopped, and people have forgotten all about civil war, then my impressions will have been proven wrong. If I’m right, things will be much worse than they are now, and the trend will be downward.

I will not stop praying for the rapture. The quality of life for American Christians is no longer acceptable, so I would like to go home with my brothers and sisters. Even though I have peace, prosperity, good health, and fun things to do, I don’t want to hang around in a world where there is no major Christian nation left.

This must be how Jews felt before 1948.

It must seem strange to pray for the end when my life is so pleasant, but the one who makes it pleasant showed me there is a much better place.

One longs for a world in which his kind is mainstream. I think that’s understandable. If there were a movie-style matrix, then Neo would want to unplug at the end of the day and enjoy the company of other people who lived in the real world. He wouldn’t want to live forever in a place where no one understood reality or him. For me, it’s like living in Miami, where half the population can’t speak English because they have no gratitude. I used to have to use hand signals and do pantomime in order to make people understand me. Getting a haircut or ordering a meal could be a tiresome process. It’s nice to be in a place where people understand me without a lot of striving.

I don’t know what’s happening with the pandemic. If a real second wave comes, or just seems to come, I may need to get out and buy more paper towels and toilet paper. I suppose more frozen meat couldn’t hurt. Apart from these possible concerns, I don’t foresee any other practical issues.

That’s all I have. I should sign off and spend time in prayer. If things pan out the way I expect, I hope neither you nor I are here to witness it.

Newly-Minted Beef Tycoon Solves Your Problems

To answer the question I know you want to ask, yes, I have mastered the art of making beef jerky.

It’s like saying you’ve mastered the art of stirring coffee, but still.

Making jerky is extremely easy, but as is the case with many foods, you can have problems because people provide bad information.

Yes, Alton Brown is on my mind. How did you guess?

Alton Brown says to marinate jerky for 3-6 hours. I tried that. Like many tips from Alton Brown (Shun knives cough cough), it does not work. You would be surprised how long it takes marinade to get into a thin piece of beef. I made my first batch of jerky his way, and it was okay, but it was not as flavorful as store jerky. Yesterday I made a batch using beef that had been soaking for about a day, and it was very flavorful. Hand it to someone who didn’t know any better, and he would think it came from a factory.

It might actually be good to dilute the marinade or to go 12 hours. My jerky is so full of marinade flavor, it almost covers the meat taste. This morning I put a piece in my mouth while I was closing the bag, and in the few seconds I was holding it, I started to drool on myself. More than usual.

Brown also says to slice beef as thin as possible. Bad idea. When jerky is too thin, it gets too dry, it’s no fun to eat because it’s tiny and crumbly, and it takes up way too much room in the dehydrator. If slicing jerky 1/4″ thick makes a pound of beef cover three shelves, slicing it half as thick makes it take up 6. How big is your dehydrator? Do you really want to take over twice as long per ounce of jerky, and to clean everything twice?

I like 1/4″ slices. They work. When you eat a piece of jerky made from 1/4″-thick beef, you know you’re eating something. It’s not like chewing air.

I also learned that smoking the meat is a waste of time. To give Brown a little credit, he recommends liquid smoke. Real jerky manufacturers have smokers, but I did it both ways, and if there is a difference, it’s not worth the effort.

You don’t need to cook your jerky in the oven, either. Do your own safety research instead of listening to me, but my dehydrator heats to 155°, and my jerky was not raw when I took it out.

Final thing: don’t overdry your jerky. A lot of people recommend going up to 13 hours. That’s lunacy. Yesterday I went from noon until around 5 p.m. at 155°, using jerky up to 1/4″ thick, and it was dryer than it needed to be.

Here is what I recommend:

Use eye round roast. Maybe other cuts will work. This one is guaranteed.

Soak your meat for at least 12 hours.

Use liquid smoke instead of smoking.

Cut the meat at least 1/4″ thick.

Don’t bother cooking the meat before drying it.

Be very careful not to overdry the meat.

Use 1-1/3 cups of marinade per pound of beef, and marinate in a bag to make the marinade go further.

Use the same “secret” recipe everyone else uses. Here is what I used, and you can substitute ingredients.

INGREDIENTS

2/3 cup Worcestershire sauce
2/3 cup soy sauce
2 tbsp. brown sugar
2 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. Liquid Smoke
2 tsp. Thai chili sauce (not sriracha, although sriracha would work)

I think teriyaki jerky will result if you use pure soy sauce and add a bunch of fresh ginger. Just a guess, but how could it not work? If you like spicy jerky, use more chili sauce. I’ll bet you would have figured that out on your own.

There must be a thousand recipes that work just fine. Everyone pretends their recipe is astonishing and special, but they’re not. It’s extremely simple.

I don’t get Alton Brown. Is he ever right? He’s wrong about knives, jerky, and steaks. Is there ever a good reason to listen to him? I can make bad food just fine without his help. If I look to someone else for tips, obviously, I want tips that actually work. Otherwise, I waste food and my time.

I guess the answer is to use his advice, but only when it has been tested by people you can trust. Good luck finding any! People who fawn on TV chefs will defend them even when their food tastes like sawdust mixed with dog chow.

Some guy on Youtube recommends the Presto Dehydro dehydrator. He says you can buy a small one and add shelves later. I have not tried it. The small one is $40.

I have a 9-tray Excalibur I bought a long time ago, when prepping first entered the mainstream of American conservative thought. You can’t buy one now. If you go to their website, you’ll see that they’re sold out. Maybe that should concern you. Maybe God has been warning a lot of people.

If you simply buy your own jerky, you won’t spend a whole lot more, and of course, jerky is not the unique solution to food supply chain interruptions. You can buy beans, macaroni, canned fish, canned soup, protein bars, protein powder, canned milk, rice, white flour, and all sorts of other stuff. You can buy butter on sale and make ghee, which doesn’t need refrigeration. You can even buy fancy bagged bugout rations, which seem ridiculous to me. You need water and heat to make them work, and if I have water and heat, then why not make something resembling real food, for a tenth of the price?

I’m pleased with my jerky. It will last at least a year, even without oxygen-sucking packets to extend its viability. My dried apples will last years, plural. If a food crisis lasts more than a year, it means the tribulation is here, big time, so a few crisis supplies, or a garden, won’t really help.

Here’s something preppers don’t seem to talk about: human beings are resilient. We find new ways to cooperate and survive. If blue-staters manage to deprive us of stuff to keep nuclear plants going, we’ll adapt and use our endless supply of coal and oil. If they kill our cell service, we’ll build networks. If they confiscate our bank and security accounts, we’ll create our own banks and securities firms. We have the vast majority of the farmland, we have the oil and the coal, we have lots of industry (not like the 1860’s), we are much better at fighting, and we have God on our side. We even control a lot of California farmland. Unless the tribulation itself comes down on us, we should be able to keep civilization going in “Jesusland,” as Der Spiegel calls conservative America, regardless of whether there is a civil war. We may get damaging interruptions, but they would last weeks, not years. That’s my opinion at this moment.

I’ve probably said it before, but I always think of this when I think of prepper scenarios: Jews in Auschwitz had submachine guns and hand grenades. Look it up. People have ways of getting what they need when God is with them.

I have been too pessimistic about the dystopian future. Barring the complete manifestation of the tribulation, things shouldn’t be all that bad in red America. Even in the tribulation, billions of non-prepping human beings will survive 7 years. They will wish they had died, but still.

I think blue America has more to fear, and that makes sense, because they reject God more completely. They don’t produce a lot of food or oil, the police and military will break against them, they don’t know how to fight, they don’t have the kind of armament we have, and they are burdened with huge numbers of ignorant, hostile, ungovernable welfare addicts who will do nothing but complain, riot, and steal. People who live on the government nipple will be useless for fighting and government works, and they will attack the people who are actually able to get things done. Blue society may decapitate itself, as it did in Cambodia. Without competent people to organize and command, how will a new nation of mindless terrorists pose a threat to red-staters? If they were any good at anything, they wouldn’t be what they are today.

I suppose this situation would breed a new crop of blue-state conservatives, too late to do them any good. There will be a price for being a virtue-signaling poser.

Let’s say Orlando residents rise up against people in my red county and try to kill us and take what we have. First, you would have to organize that kind of rabble and get them to act in concert. Can’t be done to any significant degree. Maybe you would get occasional caravans of unintelligent, selfish, unskilled people who would be more likely to shoot each other than to harm me or my neighbors. Second, you would have to get them to drive a long way to attack. That’s not something they’re inclined to do. They’re inclined to loot stores and homes that are within walking distance, and they are inclined to prey on each other because it’s convenient and they are lazy. History proves this. Third, they would have to be able to overcome us when they arrive. So people who don’t know how to shoot would have to overcome entrenched, orderly, easily commanded, highly motivated 2A proponents, many of whom enjoy shooting scoped rifles, and many of whom are sitting on large stockpiles of ammunition.

Anyone who can kill a deer at 200 yards can kill a person at the same distance. What percentage of our modern terrorists can hit anything at 7 yards?

Think about Kyle Rittenhouse. He was up against at least two assailants with firearms, and he maimed one of them. He also killed a “man” armed with a skateboard and a third person who was attacking him. He did it quickly and easily, he didn’t harm the innocent, and he got away. That’s a picture of future encounters if America has a civil war. People who aren’t ready shouldn’t start trouble with people who are. A gun doesn’t make you a factor unless you know how to use it.

To shoot invaders on my land, I would just have to get a big screen TV box and put it in the pasture. I would wait for them to fight over it, and then they’d be easy pickings. They might even kill each other and save me the trouble.

I guarantee you, we would have a real militia in place before the Antichrist’s ad hoc troops arrived. I wouldn’t have to go it alone. I wouldn’t have to stay awake every night, peering across my land with a thermal scope in order to kill invaders before they arrived at the house. There would be patrols and watches. The sheriff and the police departments would be everywhere, helping coordinate the effort. It would be the exact opposite of the situation in blue cities, where people would be too busy looting, burning, killing, and raping to think about coordinated sorties into other areas.

There would also be large prayer meetings here, all the time. That’s the most important thing.

Life would be different for stubborn conservatives who live in places like New York and LA. They would be killed in their yards or in front of their apartment buildings, by people who see them (or pretend to see them) as thieves and traitors. Law enforcement could not save them. The neighborhoods of professional victims are too big; the supply of murderers is too abundant. Conservatives, Jews, and Christians (not fake Marxist Christians) would drown in seas of demon-controlled handout addicts. So would their children.

It would be nice to offer my property as a shelter for unprepared blue-area friends, but how would I feed them, and how would they get here? Sometimes you can’t help people even if you want to. I know a number of people who would like to hole up here. Can’t take all of them. Maybe a few, if they bring their own food. If trying to help your family just means I have to starve along with you, it’s not helpful at all.

Once the closest ones arrived, the rest would probably be up the creek.

It’s interesting to speculate about the future. I just hope God removes me before things get bad. If I’m storing up arms, ammunition, and food for people who will be left behind, fine with me. They are welcome to it as long as I’m with God. It’s a fantastic trade.

In the meantime, I enjoy my little efforts at preparing food. Hope it goes bad because I never need it, but it’s comforting to make an effort.

Give me Dried Meat, Water, and Bullets, and I can Survive Anything

My first batch of beef jerky is done. I just took it out of the dehydrator. The verdict: pass. It’s real jerky. It will work.

I used about 2 pounds of eye round. I cut off maybe an ounce of fat, and I ended up with 14.8 ounces of jerky. I thought the yield would be a lot smaller. It looks like the ratio of jerky to fresh meat is nearly 50%. The meat is slightly drier than I would like, so I think the ratio, once I get it together, will be at or above 50%. Based on a perusal of per-ounce prices of store jerky, I believe I made between 20 and 40 dollars’ worth for $15 or so, including marinade.

I’m leaving the bag open so condensation will not settle in it and make the meat wet. I think that will cause mold. I plan to close the bag up when the meat is cool.

Is it worth the effort? It doesn’t look like a giant bargain compared to the jerky I could have gotten for $20 per pound, but it looks great compared to the stuff that costs over $40 per pound.

I can get Uncle Buck’s jerky from Bass Pro for $20 per pound, and I like it a lot. On the other hand, it’s not as dry as my jerky, so I would be paying for a considerable amount of water. Wild guess: with water taken into consideration, I’ll say an Uncle Buck’s price of $25 per pound would more accurately reflect the food value I’m getting. Maybe I’m getting a 40% savings?

I may keep making it. I think I can make top-notch jerky, and a 40% savings is pretty good.

As has often been the case, I am disappointed in Alton Brown. He recommends marinating for 3-6 hours. Based on my results, let’s make that 24 hours. I went over three hours, and the flavor could be stronger. Smoking for one hour (smoke time, not including warm-up) worked fine, though. I don’t know if his Liquid Smoke idea is any good. It would allow me to skip the smoker, so that’s a big plus.

Do I really want to make jerky as well as I can? If it tastes fantastic, it will be hard to go easy on it in lean times. Maybe okay jerky is best.

I saw a How It’s Made video about making jerky. Maybe I’ll watch it again and look for tips.

I plan to keep drying apples until I can no longer stand it. They’re wonderful.

Walmart sells nuts really cheap, so I bought pecans. I guess if I bought raisins and almonds, I could make my own trail mix. Lots of calories, good shelf life, and not much weight or bulk.

I got two big jars of Hoosier Farms powdered cheddar. This is the stuff they use in things like Cheetos. I pop corn with bacon grease and put powdered cheddar on it. It’s decadent. I figure I can also use it to make mac and cheese, along with my ghee and evaporated milk.

None of this is going to be very helpful if our dystopia doesn’t include electricity. I’ll have no water. I supposed it will be made available somehow, but people would probably have to wait in long lines at distribution points, which could be impossible to reach without gasoline or diesel.

I’m putting my chips on an electrified apocalypse. A generator and diesel would run me over $50,000 for one year, and if diesel were hard to find, I would be able to do it no matter what I was willing to spend. You can’t just put a 20,000-gallon diesel tank in your yard. Not unless you’re a hard core nut. If your tank isn’t enormous, you’ll have to refuel it often, and if there is no fuel, you’ll look pretty stupid after the first tank runs out.

I have relatives (long deceased) who had natural gas on their land. They sold the rights, and in the package, they demanded to have gas piped to their house, free of charge. People like that are sitting pretty. If you live in Appalachia where there are hills, and you have gas, a clean creek, and enough land to grow food, you will be an aristocrat when Democrats destroy civilization.

Conservatives have nearly all of the oil and coal, and we have lots of refineries. We have lots of ports. Presumably, some things will still be available to us even after demon-ridden leftists extend their Tiktok-video mouth-frothing and shrieking from 30-second periods to entire days.

Tomorrow I’ll try to knock off more dried apples, and I’ll probably hit Walmart one more time. Then it’s time to sit back, pray, and hope the people who expect an imminent rapture are right. Leaving for heaven would be a lot better than sitting in my house eating disaster food and scanning the woods for “protesters” with a rifle scope.