Plus Turkey Thoughts

I am learning more about hunting, which is not nearly the same as saying I know a lot about it.

Today I bagged another squirrel. With my dad’s SUV. I had to take him (my dad) to the bank to get something notarized. At the Belleview BoA we were treated to a remarkable spectacle: the only rude person in Marion County.

A lady who worked at the bank interrupted me twice when I walked in. I started to ask where we should wait (line or chairs), and before I could say it, she cut me off and told us to sit down. I started to speak again, and her kind face snapped open instantaneously to let another order fly out. I had no idea whether she knew what I was going to ask, but we sat down. Maybe I should start wearing suits to the bank.

As she was walking away, my dad called her a smartass.

Then she gave another elderly customer very bad advice concerning online banking while we waited. She was condescending and impatient. She told him he needed a smartphone to pay bills online, which is totally wrong. A PC will work fine. Telling an octogenarian to do something using a smartphone is virtually the same thing as telling him it’s impossible. Anyway, he was really mad.

There are some benefits to old age and dementia. One is that you are allowed to say absolutely anything. My dad called her a smartass from three feet away, and when she said she was doing her best, which did not appear to be true, he said, “It’s a very poor best.”

I can’t get away with things like that.

I’m not in favor of insulting bank employees, but she brought it on herself. I stayed out of it. Perhaps I should feel guilty about being entertained by it.

Back when I was on better terms with my sister, I sometimes got her to “talk to” people for me. When someone was giving me a problem, putting them on the phone with her was worse than throwing snakes on them. She’s her father’s daughter. It’s funny how useful abusive people can be, when put in harness.

I wouldn’t do that today, but it did work.

I should have had a phone tree. “To talk to Steve’s sister, press 1. To have a cup of acid thrown in your face, press 2.”

To get back to the squirrel, the road was very wet, and we were doing maybe 45. A squirrel ran out and started doing its Pixar dance, trying to knock me off balance.

Wrong guy for that game, my friend. I am the Christopher Walken of squirrels.

I maintained a steady speed, and then there was a thump. I do not swerve or brake for wildlife unless I have to. Especially annoying wildlife. I don’t want to have to tell the EMT’s I killed someone in order to save a neurotic rat that lives in a tree.

To my credit, I turned around, found the squirrel, and ran over him two more times. Once to be humane, and once for all the mangoes squirrels have cut off my trees. Stop it; I kid. I was trying to be kind. When I found him on the way back, he looked as dead as Myspace. But I made sure.

I felt bad about it, but not that bad. It’s a rat from a tree, and it was trying to make me drive into a ditch.

I deleted a bunch of Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead jokes right here. Trying to be good.

Hunting has my head in a spin. Squirrel season, not counting the automotive version, which runs all year, is over. I have been trying to get geared up for coyotes and coons. Now turkey season is here, and I have no idea what to do.

I am asking people for advice, and my understanding is that I have to go out in the evening and hope to see turkeys landing in trees. I’m not sure if this is a cute hunting joke intended to make me look stupid (honest, the snipe will walk right into the bag, you’ll get to keep your doctor, and you’ll use your timeshare constantly), but it’s what I was told. In the morning, you set up near the trees and call the turkeys.

My area actually has turkeys, according to a neighbor, so maybe I’ll score. I was going to go out tonight to see if I could spot them, but it’s raining cats and turkeys–I mean dogs–so I don’t know if that will work. I guess they have to roost on rainy days just like dry days. It’s not like they can hole up at the Ramada Inn.

Locating roosting turkeys is called “roosting turkeys.” Just FYI. Jot that down.

The obvious question here is, “Why can’t I just shoot them out of the tree?” It’s illegal. I don’t see why it’s not allowed. The bag limit is the bag limit. If you wipe out two turkeys in one easy evening or 33 miserable days, what difference does it make to the turkey supply? None. I think the state is just sadistic.

Maybe my logic is faulty. After all, in some states, the government breeds and releases wild turkeys for hunters. If my argument is good, they should let you go to the breeding place and shoot them through the fence.

Is that a bad idea, or am I just a visionary?

I got some good news. I can shoot turkeys with a rifle. I don’t have to use a shotgun. This will double my range and make it possible to try for head shots. Hope I can pull it off.

I got some other good news. At least SOME people say wild turkeys don’t taste disgusting. The only one I have personally experienced was smelled, not consumed. A friend’s mother roasted it, and when I walked in the house, it smelled like someone was frying a bum. Her explanation was that she hadn’t gotten all the pinfeathers out. I don’t know whether that’s right. Many people on the web say they’re tasty.

It’s hard to judge, because we’re talking about turkey. It’s one of the easiest things to cook, and one of the things almost no one cooks well. It’s very hard. You put it in the oven at 200 degrees (less, if you’re brave), wait for the internal temperature to get close to the safe mark, and then turn the heat up to brown the skin. Throw some seasonings on it first. That’s the whole secret. But it’s too much for most people. They roast at 325 and get dry turkeys that taste like golf ball cores. Turkeys that bounce.

If wild turkeys were the greatest eating animals on earth, most of the people who tried cooking them would say they were awful, because they would ruin them.

Real turkeys (the kind you buy wrapped in plastic) are supposed to be the dumbest terrestrial animals on earth, apart from swing voters. Stories of their stupidity are legendary. But somehow, wild turkeys are brilliant and hard to hunt. This is what I’m told. They can see like the Hubble telescope, they can hear ants cough, they have x-ray vision and freeze breath, and they can read your thoughts.

When you spot them and draw a bead, they can get out of it by waving a wing and saying, “These aren’t the boids you’re looking for.”

I think that’s the whole list of turkey powers, unless they also do telekinesis. Pretty intimidating. I can’t believe anyone ever gets one. But people said squirrels were geniuses, too, and they let me walk up and fill them with lead. “Who do you think you are? This is my tree! Bark! Bark! Bark! OW!”

People say squirrels are harder to hunt than deer, and if that’s true, I’m going to be up to my keister in venison this fall.

Why is it called “venison” instead of “deer meat”? It doesn’t come from a ven. Why doesn’t it have a nice short name like beef? I know! We should call it “deef.”

I have two new squirrel feeders. I was going to hang them today, but it’s too rainy. I’m going to put one in front of the house and one in back. When squirrel season rolls around again, the rats will be addicts. They’ll scurry up to get their fix, and then they’ll pay the piper for all those “free” nuts.

It should be a great way to practice marksmanship, and it will ensure a good supply of fried squirrel. It will allow me to keep my shots low and safe, which is also nice. I told someone I know I was keeping my friends close and my enemies closer.

I could also get a deer feeder.

Interesting thing: in Florida, I am only allowed to shoot “gobblers and turkeys with beards.” A gobbler is a man-turkey. Gobblers are supposed to have long projections of hairy feathers on their chests. These are called “beards.” Evidently, there are some confused transgender hens out there, because some hens have beards. I think they had to include them in the list of eligible turkeys because it’s unreasonable to expect a hunter to know the difference between a man-turkey and a turkey tranny. It’s the same kind of confusion that has resulted in a lot of hurt feelings after Tinder dates.

Turkeys are way ahead of us in the gender-confusion game.

Maybe trans-turkeys sued to get on the list. “Caitlyn Turkey Doe v. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.”

I can’t shoot a turkey within 100 yards of a game feeding station, if there is feed in the station. I wonder if that means I have to clean out the squirrel feeders when I hunt turkeys. I can see the little squirrels, circling the feeders, shivering and saying, “I NEED those NUTS, man.”

That would make them cold-turkey squirrels.

It’s still pouring, so I guess I’ll make a PBJ and give the turkeys a day of mercy. It’s too late for the squirrel pedestrian, however.

Boat drinks, my friend. Boat drinks.

Gucci Gun Rests Confuse Me

I want to be comfortable when I shoot from a table in order to zero a scope. That means every gun has to have a bipod or a rest. Rests have the obvious advantage that they work with guns that don’t have bipods installed, so I would like to have a nice rest.

Years ago, I got a Caldwell rest. It’s a three-legged thing with a thick screw that supports a tiny beanbag that supports the front end of a gun. I thought it would solve my problems, but I got it to the range, and I found it was so short, I had to mash my face down against the bench to see through my scopes.

I have no idea why rests are so short. My assumption is that manufacturers expect you to use them when shooting prone.

That rest was the reason I started buying bipods. It was useless.

The other day I went to a gun forum and asked if anyone knew of a good cheap rest that was tall enough to use from a table. People meant well, but they gave me suggestions that pretty much started at $140. They recommended a thing called a Bald Eagle. You should see it. It’s full of machined parts. You can move your gun up and down with micrometer-like screws. What on earth?

They’re telling me I will shoot more accurately. Of course, accuracy is not what I’m after. I want to be able to zero guns in at realistic hunting distances. I don’t need 0.0001 MOA. If I can get a gun to shoot close to 1 MOA while zeroing it with a rest, I’ll be ecstatic. In reality, I should be happy with worse accuracy than that.

Here’s my assumption. I know I can shoot 1 MOA at 100 yards, if the gun, ammunition, and weather do their part. I can do that with a bipod, which probably costs $30. That tells me I should be able to get some kind of cheap device, like a big sandbag, that will do what I want. As long as it’s tall enough and steady enough, I can shoot more than well enough to do what I need to do.

Wrong? I don’t think so.

I thought someone would recommend a giant beanbag. That would have been great.

Now I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m asking questions on a gun forum, presumably from people who know a lot more than I do, but I can’t make myself believe I need a ridiculous Buck Rogers gun rest in order to get ready to shoot a damn coon.

Yesterday I sighted my .22 in at “coon distance,” which is an unmeasured distance that looks to me to be about as far as I would be from a coon if I were hunting. My rest was very high tech. It was my left knee. Coupled with a $17 plastic Adirondack chair from Home Depot, it made for a very adequate zeroing support system. I’m probably accurate to within a 1″ circle, and that will kill a coon as dead as Hillary Clinton’s 2020 campaign.

I’m thinking I should make a rest from scrap wood. Plywood base. Flat piece of plywood perpendicular to axis of fire. Another flat piece of wood against it, with a padded notch at the top for a gun. One piece of wood has a slot in it. The other has a thumbscrew in it. You slide the notched piece of wood up or down to get the height you want, you tighten the screw, and you’re all set.

What’s wrong with this plan?

I could also weld a gun rest together. I could have one piece of tubular steel inside another, with a screw going from the outer tube up against the inner tube. Use the screw to set the height of the inner tube, which would have a notch thing at the top.

I can’t help wondering if the guys with the sleds and vises and clamps are nuts. How can you call yourself a marksman if you have a machine doing all the work? Why not build an Arduino trigger-pulling machine and fire the rifle from your phone? You could sit in the house and shoot targets from a rifle set up half a mile away. You could program it to shoot while you’re in the Bahamas on vacation.

Some of these guys made gun rests from car jacks. You know the little scissor jacks people hate? They put beanbags on them. What???

If you’re going to do that, why not use a jackstand from Harbor Freight?

Hmm…I have jackstands. With urethane pads on top.

The things these guys do look so stupid, there must be an explanation I don’t understand.

I’m pretty sure I can shoot 0.75 MOA with my .17 HMR, with just a bipod. If I try, on a calm day. If a green amateur like me can do that without a crazy mechanical helper, then surely a serious gun nut can do it. If that’s true, what good do their wacky toys do them?

What if it turns out my perception is correct, and all these people are wasting their money and compensating for a basic failure to learn how to shoot? Is that even conceivable?

I don’t know the answer, but I am 100% positive I can learn to shoot very, very well without all that crap, and I don’t see why I should buy any of it.

I’m not against spending money when it’s necessary. If I want to shoot well, I can’t get around the need for good ammunition. I can’t get around the need for good stocks that are bedded correctly. There are some things you have to have in order to be accurate. I wouldn’t mind getting dies and whatever to make my own rifle ammunition, because that appears to be completely justified. But before I’ll spend $140 on a gun rest, I’m going to have to see proof that I need it.

Here’s something you wouldn’t expect to make a difference: shoes. A few years ago I realized the tennis shoes I was wearing were hurting my pistol accuracy. Some shoes aren’t stable, so you wobble around a little while you correct your balance. I wouldn’t scoff if someone told me he had special shooting shoes.

I don’t know the answer. I got a monopod yesterday, and I’m going to go try it. I bought a spinning rimfire target so I can shoot over and over without changing paper. I’m going to go sit in my blind, assuming a bear hasn’t filled it with turds, and see what I can do.

Internet sources say Chris Kyle shot from a bipod. He shot people a mile away. Why didn’t he have a sled? What am I missing here?

If anyone out there can help me understand why I need a precision X-Y slide table with a vise in order to shoot a .22, please inform me.

2300 Words to Help You Pass the Time

I got up late today. A couple of months back, I fired my alarm clock. I hate alarm clocks. It doesn’t matter how nice the wake-up sound is. After a week, it will feel like someone shoving hot needles into your ear. I quit using the alarm, so sometimes I get up later than I want to. Daylight Saving Time just started (or ended; I never can remember how it works), so I suppose that makes my body think it’s early.

I’m a morning person now, which is all the miracle anyone needs in order to believe in God. I used to loathe mornings. My natural tendency was to wake up at noon, and when my clock went off at seven or whatever, I always felt like the world had ended. I couldn’t move. I felt like a magnet was sucking me down into the mattress. I just wanted to go back to sleep. I haven’t had that feeling in years. Mornings are just like any other time of day now. But the alarm sound…that, I still hate.

Today I woke up not long after eight, which is acceptable given my current lifestyle, but when I started to pray and get the day going, I conked out without realizing it, and I woke up at 9:45. Big disruption to my prayer life. I have to sit and pray now instead of doing other things.

When I fell asleep, I dreamed I had overslept. I thought I was in my favorite bedroom at my grandfather’s house, and I was trying to see what time it was. I was trying to read the alarm clock, but I couldn’t see clearly. For some reason, I was looking into it from the back. I could see the back of the display, but I couldn’t read anything.

Imagine dreaming you overslept, while you’re oversleeping. But it could be worse. The dream I really hate is the one where I dream I can’t sleep.

My dreams are so realistic, when I look back on them, I have a hard time distinguishing them from reality. Sometimes I think about a place I’ve been, and then I realize that place doesn’t exist. I dreamed I was there, and then the dream was stored in my memory. Sometimes I have to think for a while to determine conclusively whether a place in my memory is real or imaginary.

I have another weird thing that happens when I’m in bed. It generally happens during prayer, because if I’m lying in bed, I’m either praying or sleeping. I’ll fall asleep for an instant, and then I’ll wake up. During that instant, I’ll think about a person I just imagined. I’ll think that nonexistent person is real. That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that in the blink of an eye, I’ll create a complete history of that person. I may think of him or her as having a career and relatives and so on, and it will all seem real. When I wake up, I realize it’s imaginary, but I can’t understand how my mind can come up with all that background in a second or less.

Thank God I forget it. I would hate to have a head full of imaginary buddies, like fake names in Google Contacts.

I guess for a brief instant, my mind turns into Twitter. That’s a place inhabited by imaginary individuals. “Right on, Chrissy Teigen. Women should breastfeed EVERYWHERE, stark naked! And I’m not just saying that because your publicist pays me.”

I have issues with my imaginary people. I don’t just create them with no context. Maybe the person will owe me money, and I’m trying to get it back. Maybe I’m supposed to help the person paint his house. There will always be some kind of story that evaporates along with the character.

I wonder if the oversleeping dream came from God. Maybe looking into a clock from the back means I’m wasting time, trying to get too much detail from God about the supernatural and the way the world works. I’m not supposed to know everything. I can’t carry that.

Or maybe it’s just a stupid dream.

Now that I think about it, I believe the dream is about the natural world. I think I focus way too much on understanding and responding to events with my unaided mind. That makes a lot more sense. God would never tell us to stop trying to learn about him.

We can never understand all that much about what happens around us. We have the illusion that we know a lot and see a lot, but each one of us sees the world through a tiny pinhole. Anyone who tells you different is on a pathetic ego trip and will eventually be humbled pretty badly. People like that are destined to have Zaphod Beeblebrox Total Perspective Vortex moments, only without the hack that saved Zaphod.

Douglas Adams died an atheist, and he was younger than I am now. Terrible to think about. At this moment, he is having a Total Perspective Vortex experience that will never end.

It’s sad to see people you can relate to deny God. The director Joss Whedon is another one. I’ve enjoyed a lot of his work, but he uses the borrowed term “Sky Bully” to describe God. Not only does he reject God; he thinks doing so is a crucial part of maturation. Of the nonexistence of God, he said, “That’s a very important and necessary thing to learn.”

It’s hard to imagine how anything can be important or necessary in a universe where people simply go out, like the glow from a firefly’s tail (or the run of a canceled TV series). If nothing lasts, nothing has any importance. The greatest evil you can do won’t affect anyone for more than 120 or so years. That’s the upper limit of the human lifespan, and in a universe that lasts forever, it’s mathematically indistinguishable from nothing.

Maybe he means believing God doesn’t exist is important if you want to set yourself free to do all the fun things God is against. That’s probably it. It’s suitably trite, like all atheist platitudes.

It doesn’t take much to impress an atheist. No matter how tired their arguments are, they always think they’re fresh and ingenious.

These days, homosexuality tops the list of fun things God won’t let us embrace. We used to think homosexuality was a problem. Now we think God and Christians who are against homosexuality are the problem. It’s just like the notion that Israel, the only civilized nation in the Middle East, is the problem in that part of the world. Muslims (who torture and execute homosexuals, by the way) will love each other and live in joy once we let them kill the Jews. We know this because Muslims have always been so nice to each other. Yep.

Get rid of one set of combatants, and the war will end. That’s what the people who hate us think. Satan’s children don’t realize there will always be conflict. Kill all the Christians, and Satan’s children will eat each other in our absence. They will find reasons. Look how many atheists they murdered in the USSR and China.

Atheists and other unsaved people are the real fireflies. They may entertain us for while, but very, very soon their names will be blotted out forever, and their infantile works will disappear. They will be removed from our presence, and some say our thoughts, for eternity. There won’t be any gay pride marches or BLM or Antifa riots where we’re going. Everyone will be pro-life. Everyone will be pro-Israel. Everyone will love the God of the Jews.

I can’t imagine a world without conflict. I wish I could conceive of the sensation, so I could enjoy it in advance.

Living in Marion County is a little bit like moving to heaven. In Miami, everyone hates each other. Rudeness is normal. Cubans hate blacks. Blacks hate Cubans. White people are unwelcome, and we know it, so we sell our houses and leave.

Up here, people are so nice I still can’t get used to it. Doesn’t matter what their ethnicity is.

Heaven will be nicer yet.

I feel like I’m ascending. This, oddly, is a very Jewish idea. The real name of the Jordan River (“Yarden”) means “descend” in Hebrew, and Jews who leave Israel are “yardim,” or, “those who descend.” When you move to Israel, you make “aliyah,” which means you go up. When I applied to be a kibbutz volunteer, I went through an annoying agency called Kibbutz Aliyah.

Jerusalem is pretty high up, and the Bible describes Jews who went to Jerusalem to worship in God’s presence as “going up.”

Ocala is a monstrous step up from Miami. It’s like moving from the gutters of Calcutta to Beverly Hills, in spiritual terms. Miami is a rotting hole of carnality and ignorance. Ocala is wonderful, but I feel I have another upward step to take before I leave the earth. I seriously believe I’ll be in Tennessee soon. I hope so, because hunting has made me miss Appalachia like crazy.

Last night I went to Gander Outdoors (a sporting goods store) to buy more tools for hunting, and when I got to the register, the lady who rang me up joked with me like I was her cousin. I am not an extroverted person. In Miami, I have to repeat myself all the time because no one understands English, and I’m used to people being cold or hostile. I don’t automatically kid around with strangers. It’s strange to have cashiers and waitresses show me warmth and familiarity.

There is a way southerners talk to each other, and if you’re not a southerner, I can’t explain it, but it’s very welcoming and inclusive. Here, I can fall into it. In Miami, I might as well be talking to porcupines with inflamed hemorrhoids.

Puercoespins con hemorrhoides grandes.

I still have so much healing to do! It’s very hard to let people be nice to me. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to live in Miami. I was blind to what people were doing to me. I tried to make it work. I was descending, the whole time!

Funny thing; I’m from Eastern Kentucky, which is part of a southern state, and I can tell you, people there are not that nice. There is a streak of Celtic blackheartedness in them. Many people in the mountain areas ridicule their kids and spouses. They spit out little barbs all the time. They can’t say nice things to people. They have to find roundabout ways to do it. Up there, a person will say something nasty to you, facetiously, hoping you will see through it and understand they mean something nice. They’re afraid to say things like, “You look very pretty today,” or, “I’m very proud of you.” I have had this problem myself. These days, I feel very liberated when I say something nice to someone without putting a little hook in it.

There is a lot of Celtic blood in the mountains, and Celts are mean. Their tongues are like whips. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Everyone knows the Scots are mean, but the Irish are mean, too. They may hide it better, but there is a lot of hardness in them. They didn’t become the biggest terrorists in Europe because they’re warm and forgiving.

In this country, the Irish have great PR. You watch movies, and you see gentle, half-drunk people who smoke clay pipes and say poetic things. Totally unrealistic. The Irish are angry as hell!

Call me prejudiced. I don’t care. I’m old, and I’m going to die soon. I can say whatever I want. Go ahead and ban me from Aer Lingus. That will teach me.

Miami poisoned me, but when my family moved there, we brought ethnic poison of our own. I never thought about that until now. At least I don’t think so.

Mountain people in Kentucky and other states have problems, but people are nicer in other areas of the South.

I continue watching healing videos on Youtube. They make me wonder what purpose I serve here on earth. I see Christians going out and healing total strangers. What do I do? I blog and manage real estate. I have a strong prayer life, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s nice to see Christians getting out there and demonstrating God’s love.

I’ve been watching a guy named Tom Fischer. Through his videos, I found someone else. A young man named Troy. He only has a few videos. He heals people, too.

When he talks to people, his face shines. It makes you sense God’s love. That’s impressive. I’ll embed a video.

I can’t do this kind of thing. I have not been called or empowered to do it. Evangelists are salesmen, and as I often say, I couldn’t sell poop to flies. If you know a Christian you want to turn away from God, give me a call, and I’ll talk to him. He’ll be worshiping the devil in a week.

There are things you just shouldn’t try to do until God gives you power.

That’s what anointing is all about. “Anointing,” figuratively, means “authority.” A person with an anointing has a commission–an assignment–from God, and God will help him get it done. If you have an anointing, God will part the Red Sea for you. If not, you may lose your church and be imprisoned for something like fraud or pedophilia.

Tom Fischer goes up to Jews in yarmulkes and gets them to let him heal them in the name of Jesus. If you don’t know Jews, you don’t understand how crazy that is. It’s like selling pork in Mecca. But God helps him get away with it.

I can relate to the prophets, because no one listens to me. If I said something obvious which was so brilliant it could end all of the world’s problems in 5 minutes, people would chase me with pitchforks. My old pastors think I’m an idiot. My relatives think I’m an idiot. Many people I’ve gone to church with think I’m an idiot, and I’m talking about people who, in some cases, are nearly illiterate. People who can barely read and who know how educated I am feel completely entitled to lecture me. It’s something to see.

My dad started telling people I was smart…after he lost his mind. I have no words to discuss that! When I was winning the Miami spelling bee, getting crazy test scores, and doing graduate work in physics, I was still an idiot. But now I’m smart. If he goes into a coma, I’ll be a genius.

He says I’m smart, but he doesn’t think I’m bright enough to decide what to throw out. He takes things out of the garbage. When I really want to be sure I’m rid of something, I have to destroy it before I throw it out. Sometimes I’ll pour dishwashing liquid all over it. He says I’m smart, but people’s actions show what they really think.

Never pay any attention to what people say. Always look at their actions.

Don’t count on me being right about the people in the videos I watch. For all I know, they could be axe murderers. I only know what I see.

One Day Closer to Coyote Bath Mats

I’m trying to figure out whether I qualify to be called an outdoorsman yet.

I’ve done a ton of fishing. You could put me on a 60′ fishing yacht in Boston Harbor and tell me to take it to Eleuthera and catch marlin or yellowfin, and I would need no advice whatsoever, except for a pilot’s help getting across the Devil’s Backbone off Harbour Island. I would just need a credit card and some grunts to do the peon work. I’m not the greatest fisherman on earth, nor am I an expert captain, but I can do it. I can also bleed and clean the fish.

Maybe that counts for something.

I have shot a few rabbits. This is not exactly big game hunting. You walk around, look for rabbits, and plug them. But it is a form of hunting.

I nailed a few squirrels this year.

Today I set my portable blind up in order to see how it worked. I was quite pleased. It sets up fast, and it appears to function. I learned a few things, and I think the bugs are mostly out of my blind-hunting system. I realized I needed a monopod to support my rifle, so I’ll be buying one shortly.

You can spend $200 on a special chair for blinds, and I probably should, but the plastic Adirondack chair from Home Depot is really comfortable.

I set it up near a known choke point: a hole under one of my fences. Coyotes, coons, and foxes use it, so I know that if I sit there long enough, I’ll see something I can kill.

I read up on coons. They love marshmallows. This is supposed to be one of the best baits. I think I may dump a tin of sardines and some marshmallows by the fence, sit in the blind, and see what happens.

I am very sorely tempted to get a night vision scope. I have to think about it. They work great when you know where the game is, but it occurs to me that scopes have small fields of view, so how do you know where to look? Do you have to get a second night vision device with a wider field of view to tell you when the coons show up?

Man, it’s tempting. Shooting animals with a light seems sloppy and crude. Sitting in the dark and blasting them when they have no idea you exist…that’s hunting. If you can do that AND cover your infrared signature so the government can’t see you in the dark, you’re basically Rambo. You are a Carlos Hathcock starter kit.

I’m not much of a hunter, but I feel like I can say I’m a hunter without feeling like I’m totally full of it.

I left the blind set up. It seems to me that animals will be less freaked out by something they’ve seen sitting around for a while. I want to see how it holds up, too.

It’s marshmallow and monopod time. I’m going to run out and see what’s available.

More

I went to Gander Outdoors and got me a monopod and a cool spinning rimfire target that will save me a ton on paper targets and reduce aggravation.

While I was there I saw this dummy, which reminds me why I don’t do tactical. If the Village People knew about 5.11 gear, they would have another member.

New Rifle Underwhelms

Today I took my new Marlin 60 .22 rifle out, scoped it, and tried to get it sighted in. It was a nightmare. It was so inaccurate, it actually scared me.

I have a cheap BugBuster scope. This is an amazing Chinese toy that gives 3-9x magnification with a lighted reticle. It’s very neat. I’ve been using it on an air rifle, and it works.

I was going to put my old Bushnell rimfire scope on the .22, but I lost part of a ring clamp. I ordered a scope mount for it. Then I decided I wanted to use the BugBuster instead. The new mount turned out to be too long for the BugBuster, so I had to move the air rifle mount to the Marlin.

Annoying.

I got everything set up, and I put a chair in the pasture about 50 feet from a target. Plenty close enough for sighting in. I shot, and I wasn’t on the paper. That scared me. I don’t want to send bullets over a road or another farm. I moved WAY up and started over. Even at 30 feet or so, I couldn’t do a thing with the rifle. It was spraying bullets into an area 4″ wide, and it was so inaccurate, I couldn’t figure out which way to turn the scope knobs.

I took the scope off and shot offhand at very close range, and I was still all over the place. I went and got a table, and I shot from a rest. Still bad. I switched from cheap Remington ammo to CCI Stingers. No help.

Finally, I went in the house and got my old Nylon 66 rifle. I was wondering if I had forgotten how to shoot. It was already full of cheap ammo. I blasted away offhand, and I shot into a very small area. The ammo worked.

You can imagine how frustrating this was. Nobody wants to go back to a store and say, “This rifle won’t hit the target.” You can imagine the response. “SURE it won’t. It’s a BAD BAD rifle. Maybe you should exchange it for a cast net.”

I threw some more rounds into the Marlin, and it shot just fine. I put more rounds in. Again, it shot well. I didn’t know what to think. It was getting dark, so it was too late to put the scope back on and try everything a second time.

I am perplexed. I know guns like to be broken in, but this is crazy.

At times like this, you start to wonder if you’re really a good shot.

I started trying to find Internet information on problems with new rifles. I found an irrelevant article by Chuck Hawks. This is a noted gun curmudgeon. I’m not sure he has any idea what he’s talking about. He says Smith & Wesson makes garbage, which is pretty much the opposite of my experience. Anyway, he wrote an interesting screed about accuracy.

He seems to think sub-MOA accuracy is mythical. Can that be true?

I have a .17 HMR rifle. The last time I shot it at 100 yards, I got either 1 MOA accuracy or so close to it, it’s virtually 1 MOA. I didn’t get the calipers out. It could conceivably be 1.1 MOA, but it’s not 1.2. It might be 0.95 for all I know. I know what an inch looks like, but I’m not a ruler.

I shot 5 consecutive rounds into a space an inch across. If you measured from the outsides of the holes, you would get a figure of an inch, +/-10%. If we’re going to split hairs, 1 MOA is actually more like 1.05″ than 1″.

Here is something Chuck Hawks said:

I have written it before and I will write it again: these groups are achieved on a word processor, not in the field. At best what the writer means is that once, when the stars were momentarily aligned in the sky, he shot a 1″ group with the test rifle. He will never admit in print that he shot nine other groups ranging in size from 2″ to 4″ with the same rifle.

However, the inexperienced and the gullible take these “test reports” to heart. The most absurd exaggeration is accepted without question, and endlessly repeated (and embellished) online. The boldest liars become authorities on marksmanship and rifle performance. It would be depressing if it were not so absurd!

I’ll tell you right now, I can shoot the .17 HMR in calm conditions and get 1 MOA accuracy or something so close to it, it doesn’t matter. I don’t practice much, I have no training, and I don’t try that hard, so I should be able to do somewhat better if I work at it. This is with a $200 rifle shooting store ammunition. Granted, it’s only 100 yards, but I can do it. I feel sure that if I can do it, a whole lot of other people can do it.

Can I do it while tromping around out of breath in the woods, without a rest? No way. My best guess is that I could shoot 2 MOA consistently if I had trees to lean on, but I don’t think I could do any better. I don’t know, because I don’t have any opportunities to do that kind of shooting. I suppose I could tape targets to trees, walk around, and shoot at them. Even then, it’s not like shooting an animal. Some animals will hold still and pose, making shooting them nearly as easy as shooting paper. Others aren’t cooperative.

Can I do it at longer ranges? I don’t know. The farther you get from targets, the more you have to know about shooting.

The caliber of the gun doesn’t matter. I’ve learned that shooting big guns with lots of recoil is just as easy as shooting little guns. The recoil comes AFTER you shoot, so it doesn’t affect your accuracy. If you can shoot a .17 HMR well, you should be able to shoot a scoped Ma Deuce well.

Hawks says hunters shooting animals with 8″ kill zones at 150 yards or less should be perfectly happy with 4-MOA guns. That sounds awful to me. Are there really guns that shoot that badly? I mean, do they shoot that badly with good ammunition, when held in a sled? To me, that’s how you define a rifle’s capabilities. A person holding a rifle will always shoot imperfectly, so it’s not fair to judge a gun by what it does when a person holds it. The sled should provide the best measure of a gun’s true capabilities.

If I were shooting a 4-MOA gun at 100 yards to sight it in, I wouldn’t know how to do it. If you have bullets splattering all over a 4″ circle, how do you know which way to turn the scope knobs? Do you fire 25 rounds to get some idea where the center of the 4″ circle is and then try to move that to the center of the target?

Hawks says 3 MOA is good enough for 200-yard kills. He also says no hunter should ever take a shot over 400 yards. The idea is that it’s cruel to the animal to risk wounding it without killing it cleanly.

I read this stuff, and then I think about the average shooter. Most people who shoot regularly would be lucky to hit the ground consistently if they tried. That’s my claim, based on what I’ve seen. I’ll bet 95% of hunters can’t shoot 3 MOA at the range, using a rest, with the best equipment in existence. I wonder what interesting stories guides have to tell. They must get a lot of clients whose marksmanship makes for good entertainment.

I think there are a lot of people out there who shouldn’t shoot at game over 75 feet away. Many people shouldn’t shoot at animals at all, except out of necessity.

I want to feel confident when I hunt. I want to know that there is very little chance an animal I shoot will run off and suffer because I didn’t kill it quickly. This makes me wonder about my dream of going out west and shooting prairie dogs at long distances. Maybe it’s a bad idea, or maybe if I do it, I should make a very serious study of accuracy and distance and limit my shots accordingly.

It’s probably a bad thing for hunters to brag about long shots. If a shot was lucky, you shouldn’t have taken it. If you’re really good, I suppose it’s another matter.

I don’t know how good 1 MOA at 100 yards is. Maybe it’s common. But it does sound like it’s good enough to get me in the door. I should be able to hunt competently and responsibly. If I can shoot 2-3 MOA in the field, I ought to be above reproach.

In the movies, people pull of insane shots. It’s all nonsense. In real life, shooting his hard, and even if you do everything right, you can’t shoot like Quigley or James Bond. Chris Kyle couldn’t do it, for that matter. James Bond is a fictional character. Daniel Craig and the rest of the boys never shot anything but blanks. In reality, now that I think of it, they probably couldn’t have hit a watermelon at ten feet. I doubt any of them ever had any training.

Tomorrow I’ll try the Marlin again. Maybe there was some kind of manufacturing crud stuck in the barrel, and I’ve blown it out. If it still shoots badly, I’ll return it.

The trigger is atrocious. It’s as if there are little rocks in the receiver, and you have to break them before the gun goes off. The Nylon 66 has a magnificent trigger. Truly exceptional. I wonder if the Marlin can be enhanced. I hate bad triggers. They say a good shot can overcome one, but I notice serious shooters insist on smooth triggers. If it really didn’t matter, would they do that?

If I can’t get it to work, I’ll probably get a Ruger 10/22. I should be able to get one to shoot accurately. If necessary, I could have the crown worked on. That should be a cheap job.

The Vogons Were Amateurs

Leftists get very upset when you criticize the government, because when you do, you criticize their god. They know how important it is to their agenda that everyone think the government does a great job. But what happens when you actually deal with the government? They screw up and screw up and screw up, and just as conservatives say, they don’t care, because it’s almost impossible to get government workers in trouble.

Seems like the cops and our precious military personnel are the only government agents they hate.

I am here to criticize the god of the left. I had a horrible experience (again) with the Post Office. No, I am not referring to Shakir the Angry Muslim Mailman, who had the nerve to put tip-soliciting cards in my box on a Christian holiday and who got furious because I used to stamp “DELIVERED TO WRONG ADDRESS!” on the multiple pieces of other people’s mail he gave me each week. No, I am not referring to his successor, the crazy lady with the wrist cast who got the Post Office to force me to move my mailbox 20 feet closer to the driveway (until 10 minutes after she was replaced, at which time it was moved back). I am referring to the problem I had with a knife I ordered.

I picked out a knife on Ebay, and because the price was so low, I splurged on express delivery. I was supposed to receive it yesterday. I signed up for email delivery updates.

By the way, do you have an ex-wife or maybe and ex-boyfriend you want to stalk and murder? The Post Office has a handy service that will help. You can sign up to have photographs of all of their mail emailed to you. You don’t have to provide an ID. The government photographs all of our mail (not in order to gather information on us; oh, no), and they decided to make the pictures available to us so they can pretend it’s a feature, not a grotesque threat to our privacy and liberty. If you’re planning to slit someone’s throat, and you want to know if someone else has been sending them love letters, now you know what to do.

Anyhow, I gave the Postal Service my phone number and received updates on my phone. I wrote about this already.

Yesterday, I received a very nice update. It said the driver had taken the package back to the Post Office.

It did not say, “We are at your gate; please let us in.” It did not say, “We are on the way with your package.” I did not hear a horn honk. They had my number. They were too inept to use it to call me.

Today I gave up and drove to the Post Office.

There aren’t many unpleasant drives in Marion County, but today I found one. I had to drive about 9 miles to get the package, and it took about 25 minutes. That’s urban Miami speed. The roads were torn up. I got stuck behind a country trailer loaded with someone’s personal furniture (I’m sure that was kosher), and he turned at every turn I had to take. I thought I would never get there. I went in and picked up the knife. I talked to an employee just long enough to confirm that they didn’t give a crap about my problem. I went home. Very slowly.

God bless Federal Express. Think how much worse the Postal Service would be if they didn’t have Fred Smith showing them up every day.

I contacted the Ebay seller and told them negative feedback was on the way. We’ll see if they care. You don’t send a small package and demand a signature without informing the recipient.

I can’t believe I finally got my knife. I wasted 10 days trying to get one from an incompetend Amazon seller, and then I thought the Ebay knife was the answer to my prayers. Then they tortured me as much as possible until I got it home.

It looks very serviceable. The blade is very heavy. The edge is great, if the job it did on my junk mail is any indication. The sheath is not elegant, but it ought to function very well. It’s Kydex with a few rivets.

I don’t wear a belt, and the sheath is made for a belt, so I guess I’ll have to come up with a different solution. I’m not defiling my ensemble with a belt. I think people look insane when they combine belts with suspenders. It’s the Lumbergh look from Office Space. Maybe I can get some Kydex and some Internet know-how and make a sheath that hooks over my waistband.

I love micarta handles. Whenever I watch Forged in Fire, I always scream, “USE THE MICARTA, YOU IDIOT!”, because smiths are always choosing nutty handle materials that shatter. As far as I know, micarta is the adamantium of knife handle materials. It’s basically fiberglass made with ordinary fabric.

I learned some surprising stuff about knife steels. I think I have been too hard on 420HC, the metal used in my disappointing Gerber Gator II’s.

The alloy 420HC is cheap compared to 440C and a lot of other metals, and generally, knives made from it are not great. It appears that one company is an exception to this rule: Buck. They take 420HC and harden the edge to something like Rockwell 58. That’s acceptable. I had read that Buck had special heat treating skills, but I assumed it was marketing BS intended to cover yet another great company’s descent into the toilet. It looks like that was wrong.

If what I’m reading about Buck is right, they may be providing very good 420HC knives at very good prices. I am still suspicious, because Buck itself uses the phrase “medium edge-holding” to describe the knives, but maybe they’re okay. This metal has some advantages. It’s very tough, so it can take a beating, and when you get it sharp, you can get it very, very sharp. Some metals are hard to put a serious edge on.

Some day I may try a Buck folder just to see what it’s like. I would not be shocked if I were disappointed, but maybe I wouldn’t be.

I hate a knife that gets dull fast. Sharpening twice a month is okay. Sharpening three times a day is not. There is some very impressive steel out there, and it’s not unreasonable at all to expect stellar performance, so I prefer not to fool around with junk. In the kitchen, cheap steel can be useful, because you can always keep a diamond hone handy, but elsewhere, you want a knife that doesn’t have to be suckled and coddled.

I wish the Post Office had a face so I could punch it. I will pray about that.

Time to go check the game camera. I hope it actually did something last night.

Stay Away From Choke Points

As much fun as it is writing about my new fort and game camera, I feel like writing about God today. If I end up having a topic, it will probably be the upcoming decentralization of the church by the Holy Spirit.

A few days back I wrote about a man named Ken Peters. He had some long dreams about the future. He had these dreams in 1980. He was a “practicing Catholic” (his term) at the time, and he says that because he was a practicing Catholic, he didn’t know anything about prophecy or the Bible. His dreams line up well with what’s happening today and with what many Spirit-filled Christians expect to happen in the near future.

Here’s something I’ve been harping on for years: I believe God has been telling me the day of the bloated, pus-filled megachurch is ending. Is “pus-filled” harsh? I guess it is. Anyway, I think he has told me the day of the bloated, pus-filled megachurch is ending. I expect to see a true grassroots church rise up, connected and taught by the Holy Spirit, with no tithes or church-mandated offerings.

Everyone loves to say, “I hate organized religion.” I think God was the first to say it.

Ken Peters saw post-rapture grassroots revival in his dream. Here’s something he said:

It was almost like everybody was like Jesus walking around doing these works. You did not have to have a pulpit to stand behind to do this in this part of the dream. As a matter of fact I never saw anyone standing behind a pulpit. I think they finally understood the purpose of the ministry is equipping and releasing you to go out and be God’s superstars.

BAM! Am I too old to say that? I want to be cool so the “kids” will “dig” me. I want them to take photos with me with selfie sticks made from recycled materials. I want to wear skinny jeans and grow a beard that looks like Chaz Bono’s. Anyway, BAM!

I don’t really want any of that stuff. I’m just riffing on hip preachers. That includes anyone who inserts “dude” in a Bible verse.

I’m so sick of churches and denominations. I hate being told I have to give money to rich white trash. I’m tired of the idea that gasbag denomination bigwigs have to give God permission to do things. “Sorry, Father. We’re cessationists. Take your miracles outside.”

It just hit me…isn’t this exactly what the rabbinic Jews did to Jesus? He healed people on the Sabbath repeatedly, just to infuriate them, and it worked. Look at John 9:

They took the man who had been blind to the P’rushim. Now the day on which Yeshua had made the mud and opened his eyes was Shabbat. So the P’rushim asked him again how he had become able to see; and he told them, “He put mud on my eyes, then I washed, and now I can see.” At this, some of the P’rushim said, “This man is not from God, because he doesn’t keep Shabbat.” But others said, “How could a man who is a sinner do miracles like these?” And there was a split among them. So once more they spoke to the blind man: “Since you’re the one whose eyes he opened, what do you say about him?” He replied: “He is a prophet.”

“P’rushim” means “Pharisees.”

While I was looking that up, I came across a neat passage from Mark, which preceded a story about a healing. Maybe it’s the same healing (Bartimaeus) mentioned above. James (Ya’akov) and John (Yochanan) had been trying to get Jesus to give them the best seats in heaven, and Jesus set them straight:

When the other ten heard about this, they became outraged at Ya‘akov and Yochanan. But Yeshua called them to him and said to them, “You know that among the Goyim, those who are supposed to rule them become tyrants, and their superiors become dictators. But among you, it must not be like that! On the contrary, whoever among you wants to be a leader must be your servant; and whoever wants to be first among you must become everyone’s slave! For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve — and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

How apt is that? As soon as you build a church and call a man pastor, you begin setting one believer above another. People start to think they’re supposed to kiss up to God’s special little secretaries instead of talking to their father directly. The whole system falls apart.

I can’t imagine having to live by the claptrap that comes from the mind of a grandstanding socialist pope or his homosexual employees. And the nonsense that comes from greedy charismatics is beneath spitting on.

Churches will come under legal regulation, right here in the USA. Anything resembling guidance from the Holy Spirit will be banned. You wait and see. This is what will happen, if churches are allowed to exist at all. When that time comes, going to church won’t be much better than going to a whorehouse. Satan will be able to control and/or ban churches, just as he does in China and Saudi Arabia. But he will never be able to control individuals. At least not to the point where you can’t pass the message on before being turned in by Siri or Alexa.

Satan is weak and small. He needs human organizations to propagate his authority. God can work through trillions of people simultaneously if he feels like it, with no physical communication between them at all.

The argument that Peters is a prophet is bolstered by his prediction that individuals will spread the gospel in the future. If he had said the pope would do it, I would have quit reading him, possibly after throwing up.

While I was looking at testimonies on Youtube the other day, I found a guy named Tom Fischer. He calls his outfit “Cardboard Box Church.” My best guess is that he and his wife ARE the ministry. He has a blog, and I don’t see any sign of a big building or TV cameras.

This couple walks around talking to people. They ask if they’re in pain. They ask about other health problems. Then they pray for people, or they command illnesses to go. They tell people Jesus loves them. Nothing controversial. Well, his work isn’t controversial unless you belong to “the only church founded by Jesus” or a religion that calls Jesus “May his name be blotted out forever.”

The people in the videos say they’re healed. BANG (I got tired of “BAM!”)! Are they really healed? You will have to ask them. I don’t know everything. Anyway, they do things like lifting crutches up and walking on feet that had been sore minutes earlier.

This is what Christianity is supposed to be. You tell people about God. You tell them he, not you, is the healer. You do what the Bible says Christians are supposed to do, i.e., you get people healed. You don’t beg for money. You don’t say, “Man, I need a jet.” You don’t stand in front of your church, like my last pastor, and tell members they have to give money to you on your birthday, along with cash to honor your dope-dealer son.

You can do individual ministry outdoors. You can do it at the mall. You can do it in your living room. It’s free. No equipment is required. You can even do it by yourself. Prayer, blessing, and cursing are ministry.

Fischer and his wife have videos where they heal people in Israel. That takes guts. The Orthodox are very hard on Christians and Jewish believers who talk to Jews in Israel. You can catch a beating. You may have rocks thrown at you. Being spat on is almost obligatory. And when you accost any Jewish person, anywhere, and mention Jesus, you’re likely to be cursed and called a Nazi. Somehow Christianity has become associated with an anti-Christian political faction, and no amount of logic can shatter the delusion.

It probably doesn’t help that the Hebrew word for Christians is “Notzrim,” which sounds like “Nazi” but is a reference to Nazareth.

I can’t imagine making headway with ANY Jewish person, let alone an Israeli inside Israel. I’ve known tons of Jewish believers, but no unbelieving Jew has ever shown the slightest interest in Jesus around me. I’ve had lots of Jewish friends who didn’t believe, and I went to school with hundreds of Jews, and not one has ever demonstrated any inclination to consider accepting Jesus. I don’t deal with Jews here in northern Florida, but back when I saw them from time to time, I didn’t bother trying to give them what I had. It’s astonishing to see the Fischers pull it off.

Forget Jews; I can’t even talk to Christians about God. They get angry. They become uncomfortable. They tell me they know everything already. I am the least effective evangelist on earth. I am singular. Talking to Jews about Jesus is something I consider impossible.

I’m getting off the topic. To return, I like the kind of ministry the Fischers have, and I know it’s the Christianity of the future. It’s unstoppable. Stopping a church is like forcing a bus to stop. Easy. Stopping billions of Christians is like trying to catch every raindrop before it hits the ground.

I love the way these healings take place. There is no fasting. No one cries or screams. People don’t walk around in circles, begging God to help. Fischer says things like, “Pain, go now, in the name of Jesus,” and that’s it. Very nice.

Imagine how different unbelievers and backsliders would feel if this is what they thought of when they thought of Christians. They’d see us as powerful, helpful people, not fat, crap-spewing leeches who make TV pulpits stink like gangrene. The characters who go on TV and pour vomit into our ears were put there by Satan, not God. They work for Satan. They drive intelligent people away.

I saw a video in which Fischer talks about President Trump. Fischer sounds like a yankee, and his wife has a Jewish first name, so one would not assume he was conservative. His video startled me, because he spoke in support of Trump. He has the same kind of concerns other serious Christians have. He sees censorship increasing. He’s against gun control. He talks about martial law. It’s amazing how the Holy Spirit invariably makes people more conservative.

Conservatism isn’t God’s answer to our problems. When separated from God, it’s carnal. But you can’t be led by the Holy Spirit and be anything but conservative. Liberalism is based on hatred of God combined with covetousness and pride. Leftism tries to make our stupid, cruel, unfair, greedy, incompetent government the messiah. It’s worse than a golden calf. A golden calf can’t take your money or force your kids to sit and listen to homosexual and anti-Christian indoctrination.

I feel like I’m burying myself when I write blog entries like this. I’m giving the devil’s people nails to drive into my coffin.

Imagine what would happen if I ran for office. Imagine me being offered any position of power. The freaks and witches would find my blog and republish excerpts all over the world. They would call it hate. The SPLC, a true hate group, would give me official recognition, simply for believing the Bible.

Right now, it’s legal to say the things I say. That won’t always be true, and there is no legal guarantee that I won’t be punished in the future, for future laws I’m breaking today. As of this minute, our system has a powerful bias against enacting laws that punish people for prior acts, but there is no reason that can’t change. Funny how no one ever talks about that. Our pundits are very obtuse about things that should be obvious. Remember the real estate crash? How many investing geniuses thought it would never come? And we still listen to them.

When the Soviets, who served Satan, went after the Christian Czar and his family, they didn’t give them a trial or think about the legality of the things they had done. They put them in a basement and fired pistols into their brains. When the leftists in Cambodia executed people for crimes such as reading and wearing glasses, no one was interested in prior laws. The statists in Nazi Germany and Austria punished and murdered people who had not committed crimes, and they even did it outside their own borders, to citizens of other countries.

Satan’s people are very efficient. They don’t believe in a God who punishes evil, and they think people are just smart monkeys without enduring spirits. They will kill us here, just as they have killed tens of millions overseas. They will kill us just as we run chickens through mechanized slaughterhouses. They’ve done it before.

The people who will do it are here already. They are your neighbors, coworkers, and relatives. A lot of parents will be turned in or even murdered by their children. Remember when Obama told kids to spy on their parents? That idea didn’t come from his own confused little mind. He didn’t build that. His master gave him a prompt.

Sometimes I think about all the religious and conservative personalities who tussle and quarrel openly with their Satanic counterparts. They feel safe, not because they think God looks out for them, but because they expect our laws to protect them. Big mistake. One day the Internet Wayback Machine, which preserves all sorts of material from the web, will be used to regurgitate evidence to be used at trials. Wait and see. Things people said that were legal in 2005 may get them hanged in 2025.

Fischer says something interesting, and I agree with it. He says the path is becoming narrower. Decades ago, Christians here could get by without real sanctification. As he notes, we like to say, “I am a work in progress,” instead of cleaning our lives up. That won’t fly in the future. You will have to know God personally in order to get protection. I know what it’s like, getting action from God. I’ve done it many times. I know how to lay the groundwork. It takes a long time. You can’t do it the minute the Climate Change Denier Einsatzgruppe pulls into your driveway in a stretch Prius.

Describing churches full of weak believers, Jesus said. “What a terrible time it will be for pregnant women and nursing mothers!” My old church, Trinity in Miami, taught people to stay in sin and worship money. Most of the people at Trinity will join Satan because they never belongd to God in the first place. They’re on Facebook now, promoting BLM, which is a Satanic movement. Most of those who won’t join Satan will be trampled and crushed, because they are corrupt, empty-headed, and feeble.

If you don’t know God personally and communicate with him throughout the day, you are running naked through an electrical storm, and you are not going to make it.

I keep watching Fischer’s videos. I hope I’m right about him. So far, he checks out, but I have made mistakes before.

Advance and be Ostracized

Now that I’m a game camera guy, I’m trying to improve my game camera game.

I started calling game cameras “trail cameras” because I saw other people using that term on the web, and then I found out “game camera” was right after all. Maybe smelly hippies are promoting “trail camera” because it has less of the scent of hunting, masculinity, whiteness, capitalism, and normal sexual orientation. I am not sure.

I went to Amazon and bought a cheap camera, and I got results with it. Then I found out I could have gotten considerably better video with a name brand. I feel like I need to upgrade already.

Here are some things you need to think about when you buy a game camera. They eat batteries, and batteries are not free, so look for one with good battery life. This varies so much, it may literally be worth it to pay three times as much for an efficient camera. Also, the illuminated area in infrared night shots may be small, so get a camera that gives you a whole frame to look at. Finally, ignore the 1080P claims and the megapixel claims. My camera has 1080P and a billion pixels, and it’s still grainy.

I’ll post some photos captured from video. I assume still photos would be much better.

This is a coon by my fence. This is not the whole frame. Only about half of the frame is illuminated.

This is a coyote by my fence. Pretty neat.

This is a fox that jumped on the fence. I didn’t know foxes were this coordinated. He jumped to the top of the fence with no problems, and then he stood there with no wobbling at all.

It looks like the big winners in the reasonably priced camera war are the Brownings. They make a couple of cameras called the Black Ops Pro and the Strike Force Pro, at around $150. They have great battery life. I put 8 new AA batteries in my camera, used it a couple of times, and then lost a night of video because the batteries were dead. The Brownings will go months on a set of batteries. I think you can see why I would be willing to pay more.

I don’t understand why game cameras don’t use wifi the way action cameras do. It would make checking them much easier. You can get full-blown cellular game cameras, but they cost a lot, and you have to have a good cell signal.

All of last night’s creature visits are lost because the camera’s batteries died. I found some old frozen pork in the fridge, so I put new batteries in the camera, put the pork by my fence, and turned the camera on. We’ll see what I get tonight. Whatever it is, it probably won’t be a herd of nocturnal Chassidic Jews.

I bought a portable blind. It’s an Ameristep Caretaker. What this really is, is a small tent made for hunting. It has openings you can shoot out of. It has room for two Adirondack chairs (you can see where I’m heading) and a cooler.

Cooler, scoped rifle, chairs, Christian music on the old Worktunes hearing protectors…I’ll have it made in the shade.

I told the cashier at the store it was too bad the blind didn’t work on people. She started telling me how great it was and how much she enjoyed hers. You have to love this town. Where else would a female cashier have her own blind?

Even if it doesn’t help me kill animals, I can set it up in my upstairs hideaway and have a cool fort, like the ones I made from couch cushions when I was a kid. There will be a secret password, and of course, no icky girls will be allowed, even if they threaten to tell on me. My sweet blind is a cooty-free zone.

You’re not cool enough to join my club, so don’t ask.

I still don’t have my hunting knife, and this strikes me as a good time to excoriate the Post Office. I ordered a knife and paid $15 for 2-day shipping. The Post Office had my phone number, and they were sending automatic texts, telling me about the status of the knife. This afternoon, they sent me a text saying they tried to deliver it and gave up because no one was here to sign for it. They didn’t say, “Help us get in.” They said, “We already left.”

Okay. You have my phone number. You’re at my gate. You have the intelligence to send me a text saying there’s a problem, but you’re too stupid to call me and ask me to come out and sign?

I think you see why I was upset.

They want me to drive 30 miles to pick it up. Nice. I called to see if they could relax the idiotic signature requirement. I couldn’t get through, so I told the computer to call me back. An extremely ghetto lady called and made it clear that she could do nothing at all for me and didn’t care at all whether I ever got the knife.

This is why the guy who founded FedEx is a billionaire. It also explains why postal employees have to wear bulletproof vests.

I don’t know if I’ll ever receive the knife, and I feel sure the $15 will never be refunded.

I had to deal with my dad’s medical chores today, so I didn’t get to shoot or do anything fun. Maybe tomorrow.

Goodbye. I will be in my fort, having a secret meeting. God help any animals that walk through the room.

Gearing up for Coon Armageddon

Here’s how it is.

Florida allows shooting coyotes, coons, possums, and a few other revolting creatures all year long. But there are rules (crazy!). You can shoot a coyote with just about anything, including a submachine gun, but if you want to shoot coons at night with a rifle, you have to use a .22. It can’t be a .22 WMR, either. A plain old .22.

I have a .22. Nice, dependable, accurate rifle. Problem: it won’t take a scope. It’s a Remington Nylon 66, and you pretty much have to take it apart and build a new one to make it hold a zero. The receiver cover flexes, and the scope mounts on it, so you can imagine the problems.

I need a .22 that will take a scope. Like, NOW.

I want a semiauto. Why? Because .22’s aren’t accurate, as firearms go. In better calibers, such as .270 or whatever, bolt action guns are more accurate than semiautos. In a .22, they probably aren’t. Guns are limited by ammunition, and .22 ammunition is not that great, so if you buy a well-made .22, you’re not going to get better performance. I think.

I can’t make .22 ammunition. Come to think of it, that’s one of its big limitations. Preppers think a .22 is the main thing a person will need when the world ends, but they won’t be able to get new ammunition after the apocalypse. Hmm.

I guess the same problem applies to other calibers. I can make my own .45 shells all day, and I can find a way to make bullets, but I still have to buy primers and powder, and eventually, I would need new brass.

Anyway, it’s not practical to create your own accurate .22 LR ammo.

The convenience and low cost of a semiauto outweigh whatever tiny increase in accuracy a bolt gun would provide. This is my opinion, and it could be wrong. I believe I would never be able to shoot at anything over 50 yards away (ethically) with a .22, regardless of how good the gun was, so might as well go semiauto.

I looked at .22’s, and I found three contenders stood out. The Ruger 10/22, the CZ something or other, and the Marlin 60. The CZ costs too much. The Ruger is super popular. It’s the AR15 of rimfires. There are a ton of accessories and so on for it. But the Marlin is supposedly a superior gun with a better barrel crown. The crown of a barrel determines how accurate a gun is. It’s the last thing a bullet sees on its way downrange.

Problem: the Marlin 60 is hard to find right now. Luckily, a retailer near me has some, so I plan to get in the car and snap one up.

I looked around and found that there are some above-average .22 loads out there. Norma makes one. Big surprise. It’s probably two dollars a round. Checking. No, it’s reasonable, but it’s not for hunting. Wolf makes very accurate .22 ammo, but it’s not for hunting, either. CCI has the one I want to try. Hollow points with high velocity. The high velocity means it will cycle in a semiauto (I hope), and the hollow points are good for inflicting tissue damage. They call these bullets “Stingers,” And they cost about 13 cents each. I am hoping this will turn out to be a suitable coyote round. It would solve all my varmint problems.

Gander Outdoors (formerly Gander Mountain) sells the Marlin 60 for $169, and they reopened their store here. They sell Stingers, so I will drop by and see what I can get.

Once I have this thing, I can move my UTG BugBuster scope to it, and God help the coons after that. I won’t be much use for anything far away, but I should be able to crack coon skulls at 50 yards like shelling peanuts.

I really want a night scope. If I get an ATN scope with an infrared illuminator, I’ll be able to annihilate coons and coyotes at night, record video, and post it on Youtube.

I’m thinking I should get a portable blind and a lawn chair. I can sit a ways off from the place where critters cross my fence, and I can pop them in the head in comfort.

In other news, I learned that Florida law has changed. Up until 2016, it was legal to go out in your backyard and shoot at cans, even if you had a quarter of an acre in Miami Beach. I’m sure this made for some hilarious interactions between fun-loving gun enthusiasts and incontinent, shrieking leftists who KNEW they were witnessing felonies. There must have been a lot of unproductive narking to the cops. “Wait; we have to stop calling you pigs for a minute so we can squeal on our neighbors.”

Now the law has changed. If your house is in an area which is primarily residential AND AND AND (not OR) has a residential density of over one dwelling unit per acre, you can’t just walk outside and shoot. There is a release valve, though. You can still have a home gun lane if you take reasonable precautions.

I suppose that’s okay. It appears to be a largely toothless way of telling shooters, “Don’t be an idiot.” Take precautions, and you can still exercise a remarkable degree of freedom.

The FWC site discourages people from shooting anywhere except at gun ranges. Unacceptable and fatuous. Gun ranges are expensive. They have rules that make certain types of practice impossible. They usually don’t have facilities that let you go beyond 100 yards. I don’t know why they would cause problems by telling people to go to ranges. It’s not practical, and when the government isn’t practical in its guidance, it foments disobedience.

They discourage practicing on public land where hunting is allowed. I can’t begin to say how stupid that is.

I used to shoot at Trail Glades, near Miami. It was crowded. It was a long distance from my house. I could not shoot at over 100 yards. I had to pay almost 10 bucks every time. I could not practice rapid fire, which is essential for self-defense (one of the two primary reasons for the Second Amendment). I was around people who made scary safety errors because they were sans clue. Sometimes I had to wait in line for a station. It was bad, and I didn’t go often. It adversely affected my skills and discouraged me from improving myself and from participating in shooting, which benefits the economy and makes us stronger as a nation.

No, sorry. I will not be going to a range any time soon, unless I need facilities I can’t create in my backyard.

It won’t be long before I’m on a bigger piece of land, and after that, everyone can kiss my…can do as they please without worrying about my pleasant shooting exploits.

I learned something else about the law in Florida. It’s a felony to shoot from a vehicle within 1000 feet of any person. I’m really glad I’ve never done that here, as far as anyone will ever know. I don’t really understand it. If I want to shoot targets from the shade of my truck, I don’t see what the problem is. But I’m all about respect for the law, no matter how ill-conceived and silly it is, so I won’t be doing it. As far as anyone will ever know.

I am off to buy another firearm and add to America’s gun woes. Stop me before I plink again.

More

I had to change the name of this entry. I somehow got it into my head that the Marlin .22 people recommend is the Marlin 66, but it’s actually the Marlin 60. I picked one up today. The name of the entry had “66” in it, and that made no sense, so I changed it.

Wolf in Hog’s Clothing

I feel like there are forces out there that only want me to have crap knives.

I decided I needed a sheath knife for hunting. I looked around and settled on a semi-custom job made from 440C stainless: the Entrek Javalina. It’s a 4.25″ knife that comes with a Kydex sheath.

I ordered it on February 23, and I splurged on expedited shipping. I think I paid $7 extra. I kept waiting to be told that had shipped, but the seller, Knife Country, didn’t make a peep.

I finally contacted them to ask what was going on, and all I got in return was a crummy cut and paste of the tracking number and order date. I wouldn’t buy another knife from them if it cost $5 and was forged by Vulcan himself.

The knife finally arrived today, 10 days after I ordered it. Yes, 10. That’s expedited. It arrived the day after squirrel season ended. I took it out of the box…and it was the wrong knife. It was an Entrek Wolf, which is a slightly larger knife with a finger groove and a tanto-style blade.

Talk about annoyed.

I don’t want a tanto blade. I’m not even a Lone Ranger fan. I want a blade with a curve to it, so I can sharpen it easily and cut skin without a lot of effort. I’m sending it back, and in my little Amazon form, I gave Knife Country a piece of my mind. I have to start over. It looks like I’ll end up taking 15 days just to get a danged knife.

The up side of all this is that a look at the Wolf forced me to overcome my prejudices and admit that a finger groove, which makes a knife look kitcheny, is a good thing. It will help prevent my hand from sliding up to the blade.

“Groove” is a knife-nerd misnomer. It’s really a semicircular concave area, not a groove.

The Javalina is a neat, old-school-looking knife, but I now want a finger groove, so I’m ordering a Beaver. Yes, that’s the name of the knife. I went from a filthy hog that roots around in the forest to a fat, waddling rodent with a name that makes immature people titter.

Who comes up with these names? Mr. Entrek’s wife?

The Wolf looks very nice. The blade is around 3/8″ thick, so I don’t think I would have to worry about snapping it on a really tough squirrel pelvis. The edge grind is not perfect, but it’s hand-finished, so you have to deal with little variations.

The knife looked very short when I took it out of the box, so I Googled around, and I saw that 4″ is pretty much standard for hunting knives. I think this is the smallest hunting knife I’ve ever seen. I guess they were bigger in the past, and then people got real and went for practicality, not flash.

I found out Amazon is not the place to get knives. Ebay sells the Beaver for $123, which is a whole lot less than Amazon.

I could build this knife for $60, including heat treating. That hurts. But my belt grinder is in Miami. I don’t have the best tools to shape the blade. Also, there are supposedly tricks to heat treating, so maybe the folks at Entrek know more than whoever I would end up sending it to for treatment.

The blade on the Beaver is bead-blasted, which is not something I like. You can always polish a damaged smooth surface. Once bead-blasting is messed up, you’re done. And I will mess it up. Count on that.

I also have a new folder on the way. I used to carry a Gerber Gator II, which is a really fine knife for people who enjoy sharpening. It’s made from 420HC steel. You can only harden 420HC to about Rockwell 52. I think plastic forks are Rockwell 53. A good knife will be Rockwell 58+. The Gator had a great shape and a wonderful handle, but it got dull every time I used it. I want a knife of roughly the same size, except not junk.

Gerber used to make very, very nice knives. Now Gerber is the new Camillus. If you don’t know how insulting that is, try a Camillus knife. They used to sell them at drug stores. Gerber uses bad steel because it’s cheap.

I tried to find a nice folder in 440C, but it’s not that popular, because knife makers love trendy new steels. I learned that Cold Steel now has a steel called CTS-XHP. I don’t know what it is. I’ve had two little Cold Steel folders, and they were fantastic. I carried the first one for years, and then I lost it and replaced it. It always looked brand new. Weird.

Cold Steel used to use something called AUS8, which is supposed to be slightly less good than 440C, but similar to it. In 2015, they moved to CTS-XHP, which is an American-made wonder steel. AUS8 is Japanese, except for the Chinese version.

Cold Steel put out a crazy video to show why they switched. They took a folder made from AUS8 and used it to chop manila rope. They got it to cut over 1400 times before it got dull. Then they tried CTS-XHP, and they had to quit when they got past 6000 cuts. The guys who were testing the knives were getting sore.

I decided to order a Cold Steel CTS-XHP folder. Then I learned they’re moving to a different steel because CTS-XHP is hard to obtain. Great. I’ll fall in love with this knife, and then when I lose it and replace it, I won’t be able to get the same steel.

If you think you want to try this steel, this is the time to buy a Cold Steel knife, because old stock won’t last forever. The steel they’re using now isn’t as good. How do I know that? Because Cold Steel would still be using CTS-XHP if they could get it.

I hate, hate, hate bad steel. It’s okay for a cheap kitchen knife you can sharpen in 15 seconds, but not for a carry knife that cuts things tougher than tomatoes and celery. There is no excuse for bad steel, and there is no excuse for trying to make people think crap steel is good.

Knife makers are really sleazy about steel. Buck pimps 420HC like it’s a miracle metal, but they use it because they’re stingy, not because it’s good. I’ve seen companies brag about their 440A knives, hoping to make people think it’s like 440C. It’s not; 440A is soft garbage.

You are bored now. I understand that. I don’t care, though.

Entrek knives are probably very good. The one I’m sending back looks indestructible. I guess we’ll find out. I’ll also report on the Cold Steel I ordered.

Wonder what they’ll send me this time.

Fined and Dandy

I finished today’s first prayer session around an hour ago, the breakfast dishes are still with me, and I already have some testimony.

I’ll tell you about the problem I was facing down in Dade County.

I manage my dad’s properties. One is a warehouse. Years ago, someone who was in charge of it did some work. He submitted plans and got a permit, and then he did whatever he wanted. Last year, the fire inspector noticed this, and we were warned that we would eventually be cited. This problem applied to 6 units, so several other owners were on the hook.

I talked to the inspector, and I could not get straight answers out of her. She made it sound like she wasn’t even sure there would be a citation. I was told that the condo association was working on it, and that whoever was in charge of citations would issue a ruling some day.

This dragged on for a few months. That inspector left, and she was replaced with a lady who barely speaks English. I know that sounds incredible, but Dade Couny is like a foreign country. I really mean it’s like a foreign country. I’m not being cute or exaggerating.

I called her and spoke to her, and I didn’t understand her at all. I understood her to say a citation had been issued. We had received a confusing notice. She said to call a third inspector. I put that off for maybe three weeks because I was working with everyone to get the buildings fixed.

Last week the tenants flipped out because the third inspector told them they could have a problem with their occupational license. My realtor contacted me, and we went back and forth.

I had contacted the third inspector about paying the fine, and he had sent me a link to a site that allowed people to pay for inspections (not fines). I paid, and I didn’t see any fines listed. I assumed everything went through one site. I thought that was the end of it. Eventually, I learned that the fine had been multiplied by a large number, with no notice to me. And I had no idea how to pay it, even though I had been contacting the department and asking them.

This was not a catastrophic fine, but it was very, very high. I had received no notice that the fine was increasing, so I was very disturbed.

I believe the problem is that the department held the tenants responsible and sent them all the communications. I didn’t understand that until last week. Anyway, it seemed crazy for the department to pay for its new fleet and headquarters off of one minor violation, with no warning to the citizen being fined.

I should have paid immediately, but the misleading conversations I had with the inspectors led me to believe I could wait and settle up when the dust cleared. I didn’t realize the fine fell under the heading of code enforcement. I had a code issue a couple of years back, and the city threatened to fine my dad $150 per day over something. If I had understood that the fire people worked the same way, I would have kept them on the phone every day until I had gotten the fire fine fixed.

I sent the inspector a bunch of emails on Friday, and on my own, I found a second site where the fine was listed. I paid the original fine, minus the penalties, just to show good faith.

I was stressed out all weekend, in spite of the supernatural tools God has given me to fight worry. One of my shortcomings is that when God gives me weapons, I often won’t use them the way I should. I should have spent much more time in prayer this weekend. I did pretty well, but I should have done better. Every problem–I don’t care what it is–will eventually respond to prayer in tongues. I learned that a long time ago, but I still slack off.

While I was praying this weekend, I thanked God over and over for the ordeal I was going through. Things like this always improve me. I do not enjoy them, but they never fail to produce a harvest.

Last night my friend Amanda said she would pray about the problem. She didn’t know any details. I was glad to hear she was praying. She gets very good results. In particular, she keeps getting burns healed.

Today after prayer, I found I had a voicemail. The inspector, who had been so hard to get information out of in the past, had left me a message. He said I needed to pay the initial fine (he hadn’t checked), and that they would work with me on the penalty.

Case dismissed. Back to Defcon 5. Whatever they end up charging us won’t be anything like what they threatened us with.

God does what he says he will do, and he fixes problems we create and exacerbate.

I can’t tell you how many times things like this have happened to me. I should know better than to get upset. I do know better. That doesn’t always stop me.

God has given me several words concerning worry. They have come to me over the years. One is, “Worry is the voice of Satan.” Another is, “There is nothing good about worry.” A lot of people think worrying makes them righteous, but the Bible says faith is accounted unto us as righteousness, and we know faith kills worry, so how can worry make you righteous? It’s a sick idea.

Today I got another one: “Worry is not allowed in here.” The word “here” refers to my mind and heart. That was helpful.

To understand how these phrases work, you have to repeat them to yourself several times during prayer. They make supernatural energy well up in me. I can feel it. If you just read them on a screen, they look stupid. If they don’t impress you, it’s because you haven’t put them to work.

I got another interesting word today, and I’m sure it won’t impress: “I am a living thing.” What this means is that I am always changing. I never remain the same. I improve or I rot. I can’t stand still. This is a very Biblical idea. Think of manna. If you eat it the same day you receive it, it’s good. If you try to save it and eat it the next day, you find it’s full of worms. You’re not supposed to stay in the same place and cling to the same solutions all the time. You have to grow and increase and receive new things.

I can’t remember how this applies to the situation I’ve been dealing with. Sorry about that.

I wish I could offer a testimony about how I did everything right because God had made me a great person, instead of one about him fixing my screwups, but I am still not perfect yet. Check back with me in a month. Surely it won’t take any longer than that.

In other news, my hunting knife is supposed to arrive today. Squirrel season ended yesterday. I hear tiny high-pitched giggles coming from the front yard.

I found some nice squirrel feeders on Amazon, so the giggling should come to an abrupt stop when squirrel season starts in October. In the meantime I have to figure turkeys out.

Seven Months of Rest for Insolent Rodents

Today was the last day of squirrel season. Technically it’s still on. I can run outside and spend the next few minutes trying to kill one in the dark.

I didn’t really expect to get anything. I went out with 2 shells in my gun and a grocery bag in my pocket. My main objective was to check the trail camera to see if it had filmed whatever is crawling under my fence.

I wandered down the fence line, and when I got near the camera, I saw two squirrels playing grab-ass in a tree, maybe 10 feet from the tree the camera was strapped to. I was not all that game for squirrel butchering, but the season was ending, so I decided to look for a shot.

Here is what I THINK I’ve learned about squirrels. If you really want to kill them, put up a feeder and give the squirrels a few months to get used to it. Then get yourself a lawn chair and a cooler and have fun. I suspect that the second-best method is to get a portable blind or a ghillie suit and sit in the woods like a stone. They show up eventually. My method, which doesn’t work very well, is to walk around until I see a squirrel make a mistake. Then I plug him.

The squirrels I saw today made mistakes.

The first one fell out of the tree. That’s kind of pathetic. Squirrels are known for their agility and coordination, so watching one miss a jump, plummet 40 feet, and hit the ground like a ripe coconut was an odd experience.

It ran to another tree and positioned itself around three feet up, halfway concealed. I was not going to shoot at half a squirrel. I pictured three pellets going into it and leaving it thrashing and generally being upsetting on the forest floor. I moved around toward it to get it to move, and it disappeared. I found there was a big hole in the base of the tree, so I knew where the squirrel was. I wished him good day and went after the other one. I was not going to sit out there for an hour waiting for him to come out.

A real hunter would have plopped down and waited, but this is me we’re talking about.

The squirrel’s buddy was still upstairs, thinking I couldn’t see it hiding behind a skinny branch.

I kept thinking about the nervous lady with the neurotic horses. The one who called out to me and asked me annoying questions about shooting. I really, really did not want pellets landing anywhere near her farm. There would have been an international crisis. I kept walking around the tree, trying to make the squirrel show me more fur. Eventually I got a good angle and popped him. Down he came.

He flopped and kicked a bit. I wanted to make sure he wasn’t suffering, but I also didn’t want to be bitten by an enraged squirrel with hot shotgun pellets in its butt, so I gave it a few seconds, and he stopped moving. When I looked him over, I saw that at least one pellet had gone through his eyeball. He probably died instantly. That was good news.

I truly need a .22 sidearm to help squirrels drift off to happy land. The 10mm would have left a gaping hole in the ground surrounded by fur.

I like hunting, but the lady next door has taken some of the shine off of it. I would have a whole lot more squirrels but for her. I think I work way too hard and give up too many opportunities to keep her quiet.

Today I realized there was good news. Squirrels live high in trees where shooting them without dropping rounds on the neighbors takes effort, but everything else I plan to shoot stands on the ground. That means this lady can blow it out…it means she will no longer have any reason to converse with me regarding ballistics.

I make her sound like Mrs. Kravitz from Bewitched had a baby with Rosie O’Donnell, but she may be a nice person for all I know.

Too many granola-heads get involved with horses. My grandparents and their siblings rode horses and mules for transportation. They didn’t enter them in ridiculous shows or confuse them with unicorns.

Now that squirrel season is done I have more observations about hunting.

I am now aware that hunting season interferes with life. When it’s 7 a.m. and I have a choice between doing something responsible and killing a rodent in a tree, I will generally choose the latter. In this regard, I have sunk to the level of sports fans. I don’t want to be like the annoying men all over America who keep the TV blasting during every sports season and never talk to their wives or kids. But I may be headed that way.

I wonder how many lawns in my area will, tomorrow, be mowed for the first time in several weeks.

Also, I now look at just about every living creature I see as though I were trying to shoot it. I think about distance and whether I could make the shot. I wonder which weapon would work. AK-47 for a dwarf donkey, or just a .22 behind the ear?

I am not actually interested in shooting, say, a yippy little dog with pink toenails, standing next to a heavyset lady at Home Depot. Hmmm…maybe I am. No I’m not. But once you start looking at animals with the intention of shooting them, you develop a habit.

I guess this will be disturbing, but I can see how hunting would prepare someone to shoot people. When you aim at a squirrel, you have to get over a sympathy hump before you can pull the trigger, and presumably, the ability to get over that hump would carry over to people if you were in a situation where you had to shoot. Also, butchering warm mammals probably lowers your resistance to inflicting harm on people. I don’t mean these things make you heartless or cruel, but they would help you control yourself in certain difficult situations.

Today I shot a cute little animal through the eyeball, and then I made a big cut over his anus, grabbed his tail and feet, and pulled his fur and head off. After that, I slit him down the belly, split his sternum, reached in, grabbed his esophagus and windpipe, and pulled his heart, lungs, intestines, and whatever else out. Things like that are not easy to do the first time around. It’s not like preparing a nice, clean, gutted, hairless pig from the slaughterhouse.

I’ll tell you what. If society continues to get more polarized and city dwellers start oppressing the rest of us, they really REALLY don’t want to come out here and challenge us physically. Nothing short of full-blown military action could save them. People out here are ready for trouble. Concealment. Long-distance marksmanship. Tracking. Trapping. Silent weapons. Automatic surveillance that works at night. Night vision. Night scopes. There are a lot of people in the country whose skills are dangerously close to those required by guerrillas.

In reality, may of the skills are identical. And people are not as tough, elusive, or aware as game.

I am not the greatest marksman on earth, but I was thinking about it the other day, and I feel better about my skills. I am now capable of shooting rifles with roughly 1 MOA accuracy. I didn’t feel like it was a huge deal when I crossed that threshhold, but I’ve been considering it. It’s not bad!

Imagine you’re in the end zone at a football game, and someone draws a circle around a quarter in the other end zone, and you shoot 5 holes in it without missing. That’s what I did the other day. In the movies, you see make-believe-playing Hollywood fops shooting small targets hundreds of yards away in difficult conditions, but that’s all BS. Those things don’t actually happen. Shooting well is hard. In real life, hitting a quarter you can’t even see without a scope is decent marksmanship.

If you take 50 average guys out of a crowd and give them their choice of the finest rifles on earth, most would be lucky to hit a dinner plate one time out of 10 at that distance. I remember shooting next to a guy in Miami. at 100 yards. He was a good shot, and he had a high-dollar .308 with all the Magpul doodads and whatnot, and he was proud as he could be to shoot 2 MOA. He was bragging about it. I got that beat.

At the time, I thought he was great, but that was before I got it together and bought a gun that worked.

If I can shoot well at 100 yards, I can shoot well at 1000. I just need to find places to shoot and do my homework, so I can learn about wind and other problems. I may never make the Olympics, but with a little effort, I can become a very bad person to mess with. And rural areas are full of people who are way ahead of me.

I used to shoot at pistol ranges, and most people have a hard time keeping all their shots on a target two feet wide. Most people shoot rifles so badly, I seriously feel they should not be allowed to hunt at distances over 50 feet, in order to keep it humane. But that was Miami. A city full of people who came from countries where their grandparents didn’t know one end of a gun from another. People in rural America have been shooting well for hundreds of years.

Next time I get the .17 HMR out, I need to move back to 200 yards and get to work. I have nothing more to learn at 100 yards. If it were in a clamp, the rifle would only shoot slightly better than I shoot now. I need to move back until my groups open up so I’ll be able to see what needs to be fixed.

I almost wish I had used the shotgun all season long. It really brings the squirrels down. I have only missed with it once, and that was a long shot. I didn’t now how much the pellets would drop, and I guessed wrong. The .17 HMR will kill them at greater distance, but it tears them up, and the bullets travel too far. The air rifle is hard to shoot, so I’m not ready to use it full time.

I have a lot to learn, outside of the gun stuff. How to sneak up on game. When to hunt. Where to hunt. How to read poop and tracks. How to bait game. How to get a full cooler of beer into a tree stand.

Fun stuff. I look forward to it. I guess I need to start studying turkeys YESTERDAY and look into decoys or whatever else I need to fool them.

There are special seasons for bowhunters. Is that worth getting into? Sounds like an exercise in self-abuse, but it would be good to have longer seasons. I can’t believe there are people who kill squirrels with bows. I’m lucky to get within 50 feet of one, and they’re very small.

I’m glad I’m learning these skills.

My knife never arrived, so I had to dismantle today’s squirrel with a filet knife and Fiskars pruning shears. It should arrive tomorrow, exactly one day after the last day when I needed it for squirrels. I think it’s safe to say I will never buy anything from Knife Country again, unless I develop an irrational fear of receiving things quickly.

As of tomorrow, I will have to walk right by disrespectful squirrels and do nothing. As if they have some kind of right to exist. That will be tough. But I’ll be installing a squirrel feeder ASAP, so as Mr. Burns said to Homer Simpson, “We’ll see who eats WHOSE shorts.”

Enjoy the grub, boys. It’s going to end up feeding me, too.

Arboreal Rats go Offline; Next up: Mano a Mano With the Wily Possum

Tomorrow, supposedly, my new hunting knife arrives. Anticipation is high. Because getting a new knife will bring me boundless joy? No, it’s just that waiting for things way too long makes them seem more important than they are.

It will be nice to have a good sheath knife, so I’m not going to knock it too much, but I wish it had arrived sooner. I will have one to two days of squirrel hunting, post-knife, before the door slams shut. If I were to kill 4 squirrels, I would be doing great, and I am more likely to get two or less.

I have to find something new to kill. I can kill turkeys as of March 17, but I don’t have a good feeling about it. I don’t think there are many around here. I have spent a lot of time in the woods, and I have never seen turkey poop. I’ve seen a metric ton of bear poop, but no turkey poop.

Today I saw a van-sized pile of something resembling coon poop. I’m familiar with coon poop because they pooped in my pool back in Dade County. This looked like coon poop, but the scale was wrong. Coons poop like beagles, but this was closer to the size of German shepherd poop. I don’t think it was dog poop, because I have never seen a loose dog here, and it had little coon crumbly bits in it. Like granola. Like hippie food. It doesn’t look like Internet photos of coyote or bobcat turds.

If it came from a coon, something is seriously wrong. Either the coon is morbidly obese, or it’s 5 feet tall.

I need to kill coons whenever possible, because there is nothing good about them at all. They do nothing but cause misery. They’re cute and all that. Don’t care. They have to go.

I can put coons on my kill list for the rest of the year, because they have no season. Even the state of Florida hates them.

I can kill possums, too, but that’s about as challenging as shooting a speed bump. It’s like playing Jeopardy against Wolf Blitzer and Vivica Fox.

I haven’t tried it, but they say you can actually chase a possum down and grab it. I feel sorry for them, because they’re ugly and have no self-esteem. They take dumps on my porch, and there are probably other bad things they do. The horse people around me might be glad to see them go, because they give an obscure disease to horses. It’s hard to get motivated to shoot possums, but I suppose I could find it in me.

Skunks. I did not know skunks were bad, but I learned that they carry rabies. That begs the question: if I shoot one, can I skin it? I don’t want to get rabies.

Is rabies a good enough reason to shoot skunks? Maybe it’s a reach. I haven’t heard a lot of stories about people getting skunk rabies and biting their kids.

Maybe we should use T-shirt cannons to fire angry skunks with rabies into extremist mosques on Fridays. Not sure those guys would notice rabies, though.

Armadillos! They dig holes and annoy people. They carry leprosy, believe it or not. Some people eat them anyway. I can’t eat leprosy, even if it’s dead. That’s a dealbreaker. Do I have a legitimate need to kill armadillos? I’ll have to check.

Yes, I do have to kill armadillos. They threaten pipes and foundations.

I’ve found a bunch of burrows on this property. I don’t know what lives in them. They are not large enough, nor do they smell badly enough, to contain hippies. I want to find out what lives in them.

My trail camera arrived today, so I have a great opportunity to film the burrows and check out the residents. Right now, the camera is in the back yard. I want to find out if the bears are visiting. I have this neurotic idea that they waddle in after I go to bed and dance in a big circle under the moon.

How can there be so much bear poop on my property when I haven’t seen a single bear? But it has to be bear poop. Something like that couldn’t come from anything else. It’s huge. Again, hippies can be ruled out.

Maybe big fat ones, like Wavy Gravy or Rob Reiner…

It must be a coon. What else could it be? Maybe it has diverticulosis or some other illness that expands the colon.

Wild pigs are worse than the Viet Cong, but I have never seen one, so I don’t know if there is any point in trying to kill them.

I am not sure there is an important reason to kill bobcats, but it’s an option.

I can kill all the otters I want, but where would I find them?

Okay, let’s see. What should I definitely put on the kill list?

1. Turkeys
2. Coyotes
3. Coons
4. Pigs
5. Armadillos
6. Rabbits

Possibles:

1. Bobcats
2. Skunks
3. Crows
4. Poodles
5. Possums

I know “poodles” shouldn’t be in there. My hands just typed that automatically because it made so much sense.

I’m reading that possums may actually be helpful, apart from the constant porch-crapping.

It’s very hard to get good advice on what to kill. The Internet is full of extremist hippie loons who will happily tell you every revolting animal known to man is beneficial. “Don’t be so quick to shoot that rattlesnake in your daughter’s nursery! Rattlesnakes eat insects and other pests so you won’t have to buy evil pesticides made by Trump-hat-wearing stormtroopers who read the Bible and think men can’t have babies.”

America is being taken over by complete idiots who think we should never kill anything. “The animals were here first.” So what? We’re more important than they are. Conservatives are, anyway. Not sure about hippies.

I don’t know how many bears I’m more important than, but I’m thinking at least 7. This doesn’t include bears that can ride a bicycle in a Chinese circus while holding an umbrella. They would obviously be worth more.

When I go out in the ocean to fish, I find fish who were there first. I kill them anyway. Being in a place first doesn’t necessarily entitle you to anything. How come “They were here first” doesn’t apply when Americans are trying to eject illegal aliens?

The squirrels I’ve been killing were here first, and I will be here last, in my plastic Adirondack chair in the backyard, sipping a tasty beverage and texting my friends. That’s how things are supposed to be.

I have to find stuff to kill, not because I’m bloodthirsty and sadistic, but because you can’t learn to hunt without practice. You can’t take 9 months off every year and expect to be any good.

I’m thinking of getting a tree stand. This is an insane platform you put in a tree. Tree stands have built-in chairs. No recliners, unfortunately. Maybe that will happen eventually. The kind of tree stand I like comes with a ladder. You sit with your rifle 16 feet off the ground, and animals, being not smart, don’t think to look up and spot you. As a result, you can sit in the sky with a cooler next to you and rain destruction on them.

They say squirrels poop on tree stands, which is yet more reason why they deserve no quarter. But I digress.

I wonder if electrifying a tree stand is legal. That’s one way to find out how far a squirrel can jump.

Tree stands are commonly used for killing deer, but there is no reason why you can’t use one to kill other stuff. I think it would be a great move in my location, because it would allow me to shoot downward. That would make shooting safer, and it would mean forgoing fewer opportunities. If I had shot at every available squirrel I’ve seen in the last two weeks, I would be eating squirrel for dinner every day.

I have two weeks to get ready for turkeys. I hope I get at least one. After turkey season ends, I’ll be forced to persecute the wretched inhabitants of the lowest level of animal society. I will feel like a vampire that eats rats. I will feel the way UFC fighters and Olympic wrestlers feel the first time they have to wrestle Triple H. “Glad mom’s not watching tonight.”

I’ll let you know if I pick up anything on the trail cam tonight. I really hope Rob Reiner isn’t in town.

Knife Lost in Fog of Cybercommerce

I am quite frustrated. My hunting knife has not arrived yet.

I know everyone wants to read about this. No need to thank me.

I went to Amazon and ordered an Entrek Javalina from Knife Center. I like Knife Center. I have bought stuff from them before. The knife didn’t ship, so I contacted them. They said they didn’t know when they would receive it. What? This would have been good information to have when I placed the order. I thought the website said it was in stock, but they didn’t have it. I canceled and ordered from a different outfit. I elected to pay $7 extra for faster shipping. Squirrel season is nearly over. I can’t let the squirrels down.

I placed my order on the 23rd. I kept getting tracking updates saying the knife was in “pre-shipping,” meaning a label had been printed but the Post Office didn’t have the package yet.

This is 2018. An Amazon “seller” can be a fat guy who never gets out of bed except to go to the Post Office. “Pre-shipping” could mean he put the knife in a box and dumped it in a pile in his bedroom next to a mountain of dirty Star Wars underwear. I contacted the seller to get the facts. All I got back was the shipping date, order date, and tracking number, which is information I already had. I didn’t even get a note. “Sorry; we mailed it yesterday.” Whew! It would be exhausting to type something like that. I guess.

Long boring story short and still boring: I have no sheath knife. The squirrels are mocking me.

On the up side, I have a game camera on the way. I have to find out what’s roaming around in my yard. I thought a coyote dug up my blackberry plant and deposited a coyote stool in its place, but as I spend more time examining poop on the web (not on German websites; don’t worry), I am beginning to think it may be bobcat poo. My friend Mike says cats bury their poo==>bobcats are cats==>do the math.

Should I shoot the bobcat, if it exists? Interesting question.

I never really thought about shooting a bobcat. They don’t sound appetizing. I am not Chinese, after all. Also, I assumed they were protected and sacred on account of being semi-big cats. Turns out they’re not. You can shoot the bejeezus out of them. There is a season, but there is no bag limit.

This is a cut and paste of the bobcat rules:

Dec. 1 – March 31

By all legal rifles, shotguns, muzzleloaders, crossbows, bows, pistols and air guns.

Those with a hunting license may possess no more than 1 bobcat pelt between April 1 and Nov. 30, unless pelt has CITES tag. Also, bobcat pelts may not be taken out of Florida unless tagged. Bobcats may be chased with dogs year round.

Bag Limit: No Limits

Explain that if you can. If I can shoot 3,000 bobcats during the season, Florida will have no problem with it, but I can only keep one skin.

I don’t want a bobcat skin. Cats smell, and bobcat pelts probably smell, too. And what would I do with it? But it makes me angry that I can’t keep them. What am I supposed to do with them if I can’t keep them? Make a big cat-smelling pile of pelts in the pasture? Is it better for bobcat hides to rot than to adorn my tractor seat or whatever? I guess it is.

Why is there no bag limit? What does Florida have against bobcats? Why is there no explanation? Why are we tagging animals we want to get rid of? Once you have it tranquilized in the back of the van, why not put a pillow over its face and get it over with?

I will never understand hunting laws.

I don’t really plan to shoot a bobcat, although maybe I should, because I suppose it’s possible that a time will come when the ability to kill troublesome predators will be important. When Oprah wins the presidency, the economy tanks, and BLM starts sending reparations squads into the suburbs to confiscate groceries.

It would certainly improve my hunting skills.

If only I had a knife to skin bobcats with.

I found a bobcat recipe online. Come on. Seriously?

I remember cutting up a dead cat in college. Let me stress: this was for a course. I didn’t find it on the sidewalk. Anyway, the meat looked pretty good, and through the formaldehyde, there was a smell that could conceivably have been inviting, but there was also a catty sort of musky stankness in there. I would expect bobcat meat to be fragrant, and not in a good way. I can’t help wondering, though.

I did a couple of bad things with that cat. For one, I used its tail to decorate an elevator. One of the elevators in my dorm was missing a button. I uninstalled the cat’s tail and inserted it in the hole. It looked like a cat had somehow shoved itself through a 1″ aperture and gotten stuck inside the panel. It was hilarious. To me, anyway. Also, there was an occasion when I wanted to do some dissection at home, so I checked my cat out and walked across campus with it. I had the option of covering it up, but, well…

They gave us those cats in clear plastic bags. They were stiff, spreadeagled, with startled expressions on their faces. “I thought I was going to be adopted!”

I wonder what people thought.

Final thing: I had a buddy who went to that class with me. He could be squeamish about certain things, including cat whiskers. Every so often, I would yell, “HEY!”, and then when he looked, I would pull out one of the cat’s whiskers with a hemostat.

Good times.

It was not alive. I want to make that very clear.

My knife may not get here for a coon’s squirrel’s age, but the game camera will help keep me amused while I wait. I should call it a trail camera. That’s what Amazon calls it. It will turn on automatically when it sees movement, even at night. I’ll probably get a bunch of videos of squirrels mooning me and giving me the finger.

I’m thinking of getting surveillance cameras for the house. If we ever have to travel and leave the house empty, I would like to have video of any “dreamers” who show up to celebrate the American dream (or Cinco de Mayo) by stealing it. Is that not a PC thing to say? Sorry, but 92% of foreign-born federal prisoners are illegal aliens, so the facts are on my side. For a few hundred bucks you can get wifi cameras and a special router. The cameras will send video wherever you want. You can upload it to the cloud (i.e. Uncle Sam’s secret 4th-Amendment-destruction server farm).

I don’t know if I want video of my property in the cloud. I am completely aware that the government has ways of looking at stuff it has no right to look at, and I shouldn’t help them. I’m not doing anything illegal, but what if that changes? What if the government and I have a falling out and I decide to do something which is moral and correct but illegal? I guarantee you, they’ll be able to subpoena my security footage. Let me check.

Yes, I am correct. My two minutes of research indicate that there are two ways for prosecutors to get your home surveillance footage. They can get a warrant, which takes a little effort, or they can use a subpoena, which is about as hard as placing an order at Denny’s. And if they use a subpoena, they may not have to tell you. Nice.

What if I decide I want TWO bobcat pelts for some compelling reason, such as my truck needs seat covers? I better not tan them in front of my surveillance system.

I think a good alternative would be to store the data on a laptop hidden in the house. Burglars would be too stupid to look for it, the fuzz wouldn’t know about it, and if they found out, they would have to get a full-blown warrant to come get it. And I might not have what they wanted when they asked for it. You don’t have to preserve your home surveillance videos for all eternity. Mainly you want them for the immediate past, so you can nail thieves.

I’m sitting here trying to foil a government grab for bobcat-related data I will never possess, and the actual people who will end up using my plan will most likely be drug dealers and terrorists. Oh well. I’ll be in the cloud, being lazy, hoping for the best and trying to get by with one bobcat pelt. Uncle Sam will get whatever he wants, and eventually I’ll start eating Soylent Green and hating Goldstein every morning.

Did you know there might be cameras on your property right now? Uncle Sam doesn’t really need warrants for yard cameras that are sufficiently far from your house. The law on cameras is extremely oppressive. The government can put cameras in your trees and bushes without consulting you, for no good reason at all. Putting them in your house takes some legal maneuvering, but if you have a pasture or some woods, forget it. They can watch you swimming in your creek naked all day, and there is nothing you can do about it. You don’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” a few hundred feet from your front door, on a remote property in the middle of the woods, where you are not suspected of doing anything illegal. How about that?

How about this: a bobcat jacket and matching pants?

Just spitballing.

Liberty is drying up and dying, so maybe there is no point in brainstorming about ways to preserve it. At least if I’m on a big spread in the woods, I’ll have the comforting false impression that I’m free.

I hate to quit when I’m making such a great contribution to western thought, but I have to go to the dump now. I hope my knife gets here while squirrels are still legal.

Maybe They do, but I Don’t

It finally happened. A neighbor spoke to me about shooting guns on my own property.

Today I got the .17 HMR out. I decided to go look for squirrels. I took the .17 HMR even though I knew it would limit the types of shots I could take.

I like the .17 HMR.

I went behind the house and set up a board at squirrel distance, and I shot five rounds into it. I was using FMJ ammo instead of the rodent-exploding kind, and the scope was set for 100 yards and plastic bullets, so I wanted to adjust the elevation. I shot. I walked to the board. I shot. I walked to the board. Et cetera.

I have very little respect for the micrometers. I turned the top one 16 clicks this way, shot, turned it 6 the other way, and so on, and after the last shot, I turned it 4 clicks and didn’t bother checking whether I was right. I knew I was just about on the money. At 25 yards or so, you don’t have to be Werner von Braun to know where the bullets will go.

Maybe 10 minutes later, I took off for the woods. I heard a noise to my right. It was a lady on another farm, calling to me. There is my fence, then there is a strip of land maybe 25 feet wide (half of which I own), and then there is her fence. She wanted to chat.

She asked if I was shooting. I said yes. She asked which direction I was shooting in. No, I was not shooting over her farm, into her barn, at her horses. That’s not exactly what she asked, but she implied that she thought I could be shooting over her farm, and she was very inquisitive. She pressed for details. She should have asked, “Is anything you shoot going over someone else’s land?”, and let it go. That’s all she can complain about, under the law.

She said her horses were going crazy, and that she had had to put them in the barn. This I very much doubt. They were a hundred yards away, with their view of me blocked, and I was shooting a pretty quiet rifle with about 90 seconds between shots. And like I said, five rounds.

Someone else on another property was also shooting. Lots of rounds. No idea where. It didn’t occur to me to ask if that was the shooting she was asking about. But no horse is going to flip out over someone shooting a 30.06 a thousand feet away. That’s not credible. Any horse that acts like that has a mental problem and needs to be medicated or put down. You don’t change your way of life over a defective animal.

I didn’t apologize. You bought a farm, you live in the country, and you WILL have to put up with the lifestyle. In Miami I had to deal with obnoxious salsa parties at 1 a.m. Things can’t always go your way.

I told her I was shooting to sight in the pea shooter for squirrels, and that I didn’t want to cause any one any trouble.

She seemed okay with that. Off I went, to kill squirrels. I didn’t see any, which was okay, because I just wanted to get out and walk around.

After I “hunted,” meaning after I wandered around and then sat on the ground under a tree looking at my phone, someone to the north fired a high-powered rifle three times, rapidly. I wondered if the horse lady thought it was me.

I am going to keep shooting and hunting on my land, because Florida law says I can. There is no such thing as a local gun ordinance in this state. An official who passes one can be fined $5000 and removed from office, which is pretty cool. I can’t be forced to stop. Still, I do not want to be aggravated by ignorant flower children who want to control their neighbors’ farms as well as their own. I do not want to have to talk to this woman every week. I don’t know if she’s an ignorant flower child with a leftist control problem. Maybe she’s a wonderful Republican who prays in tongues. I hope so, because having to bicker with a provincial, intolerant, supercilious flake would ruin this place for me.

If this lady tried to cause a problem, she would be SOL. A rabid liberal named Dziak sued a neighbor over gun-spooked horses in 2014 and got nowhere. Her lawyer fumes about it on his website. Sorry, bud. Welcome to Not New York.

I feel like it’s a message. Tennessee is in my future. If not Tennessee, some place in Appalachia where I can have 300 acres and tell everyone around me to kiss off.

Maybe it would be worth it to move to Eastern Kentucky and put up with the racism. Land is cheaper there than in Tennessee. I put up with complete idiots in Miami, and I survived. I don’t have to hang out with the racists.

Acreage is addictive, at least to me. Some people thought I would miss human beings when I got away from them, but exactly the opposite happened. I wish I had gone farther out and farther north. I would give a kidney to live on 5,000 acres.

No, not a kidney. But I would really like it. If I could get Internet access.

I might give an earlobe.

My family still has 752 acres to get rid of, 15 years after my grandmother’s death. I think the biggest piece is 300 acres. It’s up on a hill next to a national park. I want to go up there, lie on my face, and dig my fingers into the ground.

Perhaps this desire is excessive. I realize that.

Christians are supposed to love people, and you can’t interact with them and serve God if you never see them. On the other hand, you don’t have to have them in your face every day.

Jewish legend says Enoch got to where he only saw people once a year. I wonder if that’s true. Elijah was apparently solitary. John the Baptist lived in the desert. Maybe I’m not completely crazy.

Jesus didn’t spend his whole life in crowds, letting people spit on him and tell him off. He went off by himself and left them to fend for themselves. He left areas where people got on his nerves or threatened him. He eventually got out of here completely, apart from occasional visitations in spirit form. He only had to spend 33 years with this taxing species.

I can see how God might want me to move farther out and see less of humanity. People drag me backward in my walk with him. The vast majority of people I interact with are not positive influences. Let me put it this way: compared to being alone with God, almost no one is a positive influence. That’s a high standard to meet. I’m not strong enough or rooted enough to be immune to temptation and provocation. Maybe more isolation is what I need. I certainly want it. I love my friends, and I want to see them from time to time, but even good Christian friends take my attention off God.

It’s great when good friends visit, and it’s also great when they leave, as long as the visit isn’t too short.

I can tell this is a done deal. I can feel it in my heart. It may be three years from now, but I will be moving on.

I’m going to sit around and look at property, just like I used to do before we moved up here. It will be fun. It will give me something to dream about. This area is wonderful. I thank God for it every day. But something even better may be coming up.