The FDA has as part of its mission a responsibility to promote U.S. agriculture
The FAA has a similar responsibility to  promote the U.S. aerospace industry.

Why doesn’t the ATF have a responsibility to promote the U.S. booze, tobacco, and guns industries?

There is a direct inverse relationship between the temperature and amount of ambient outdoor light and the chance of an electrical problem in my home.

Ah, the joys of living in a 65 year old house.  You never know what’s going to break, and there are so many things that can go wrong that troubleshooting can be an endless chain of trial and error.

Last night, about an hour after dark and as the temperature was headed south of freezing, most of the lights in the house flickered, died, and then came back on very dimly.  Checking and flipping circuit breakers did nothing to alleviate the situation.  Based on a hunch, I switched out each of the breakers in the box (yes, I have a lot of spares), but nothing seemed to work.  After a  while, we noticed that the house was getting chilly.  The gas fire in the furnace was coming up due to the thermocouple, but the blower motor wasn’t getting enough juice to run.

After a few hours of fruitless effort, I figured out that if I pulled several of the circuit breakers, the circuits that ran the lights in the main part of the house and the refrigerators would come up at 100%.  After that we decided to wait until morning and call an electrician.   We built a fire, made sure the kids were in their warmest pajamas, and broke out the extra blankets.  Over the night it got quite chilly but the fire kept the the house livable.   Irish Woman and I took turns staying awake as a fire watch.

This morning, a quick call to my brother-in-law to get the name of a good electrician pointed me to calling the power company.  LG&E came out and diagnosed the issue with one look at the connection to the house.  The coupling where the line from the pole attached to the house were corroded, loose, and burned black.   A quick trip up the ladder and the lineman had replaced them.  After putting the breakers back in and and flipping them back on, everything came up, including the furnace.

So we got lucky.  Hopefully our electrical service will be more reliable.  Heaven knows how long those connectors had been up there.  It’s just dumb luck that the problem was fixed before they burned through and a live wire was dancing across my roof.

But all’s well that ends well.  On a plus side, just in case LG&E or an electrician couldn’t fix it today, I spent half the morning splitting firewood, so we have enough for several days all stacked up and ready to go.

The rest of my day is going to be spent in front of a warm fire, watching Netflix movies, drinking cold beer, and watching the cats and dogs snore.

The probability that you will have car trouble when trying to leave for work is directly related to the temperature outside.  This phenomenon is enhanced with a direct relationship between how dirty your engine block is and how nicely you dressed for work.

When the time comes for me to finally get rid of this mini-van, I’m not going to trade it in.  I’m taking it out to the range, filling it with tannerite targets, and shooting at it with my 91/30 until it is a puddle of burning metal.

There are few feelings better than when a bureaucrat admits that you are more stubborn than they are and quits resisting your efforts at efficiency.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

H/T to Merlin on this one:

Lesson 6
Forget the BMW and buy a mini-van. And don’t think that you can leave it out in the driveway spotless and shining. Family cars don’t look like that.  Do the following:

1. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment.
2. Leave it there.
3. Get a dime. Stick it in the CD player.
4. Take a family size package of chocolate cookies. Mash them into the back seat. Sprinkle cheerios all over the floor, then smash them with your foot.
5. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car.

Substitute BMW for F-150, and you’ve got my take on it.   Of course, he forgot the mention the twelfth lesson:  Look forward to the day you look in the mirror while shaving and realize you have as much gray hair as you remember your father having.

I’m armed and I’m proud!

Finished listening to the latest BB & Guns podcast.  The lovely Breda and JayG discussed how they approach letting people know that they are gunnies.  The callers added in their own two cents, and I have to say that I agreed with everyone for the most part.

I’m not a gun nut.  I’m certainly not a collector.  I can count the number of guns I own on both hands, barely.  I stack the ammunition deep because I’m a cheap bastard and buy in bulk as much as I can, not because I’m getting ready for the revolution.  I don’t lust after the newest hotness from Ruger, KelTec, or the sundry AR-15 vendors.  I do admire the craftsmanship of a well turned out firearm, especially antiques, but I doubt I’ll ever have enough disposable income to invest in collector grade firearms.

But I am a shooter.  Luckily for me, my work environment has a lot of shooters in it.  One of my shooting buddies is my manager, and there are at least 10 hunters and recreational shooters within a stones throw of my cubicle.  Kentucky in general seems to be pretty OK with people owning and legally carrying guns.  One of the benefits of living in fly-over country, I guess.

Outside of work, Irish Woman’s Indiana family is definitely pro-gun.  At the annual Hoosier Roundup, almost all of the campers and trucks have at least one NRA sticker on them.  We spend the late summer talking about prospects for hunting, and the Christmas party is heavily leavened with hunting stories from the deer season.  One brother-in-law in particular has introduced me to several of the gun stores in Indiana, and when he can make the long drive down he joins us at Knob Creek.

The other side of Irish Woman’s family, on the other hand, is much more mixed when it comes to guns.  With the exception of one brother, the rest of the family is thoroughly steeped in the left-wing doctrine of the “Only Ones,” where only the police and military need access to firearms.  When Irish Woman let slip that I had purchased a shotgun, there were actually members of her family who advised her to get out of our home for her own safety.  Amazingly enough, I’ve never told these relatives that I have, on occasion, come to their homes either with a gun in my pocket, or at least a gun in the glove compartment.  Heaven forfend that they should learn that I am taking my daughter to the range so she can learn to be a responsible gun owner and shooter.

I guess the point of all of this boils down to situational awareness and discretion.  When I’m among friends, we openly talk about guns, including what each of us is carrying if it’s an environment where we can carry.  When I’m not among other gunnies, I try very hard to not be “The Guy with the GUN”.  I’ve heard this called “Don’t scare the white people”.  Even though it’s perfectly legal in Kentucky, I have only open carried a couple of times in Kentucky, and then only when I’m away from Louisville.

If someone asks me my hobbies, I’m honest and list shooting and hunting along with reading.  If I’m carrying and someone I know isn’t very cool with firearms asks me, I’m honest and tell them that that I’m carrying.  I’ve put out a general invitation to my friends to go to the range with me, and a couple have made soft commitments to go once the weather gets better.   I just don’t make it an issue that will cause problems in a social or work environment.

But I don’t hide my hobby.  I don’t lie when asked about it, and if someone wants to honestly discuss guns, hunting, or gun rights with me, even if they are diametrically opposed to it, I engage with them.  I probably won’t convince them, but I will at least give them something to think about.  Who knows, if I keep talking to them, they may take me up on the range trip, and if they enjoy themselves they may become shooters themselves.

So what do y’all do?  I’m especially curious how people in countries that are definitely anti-gun tell people about the hobby, or how people who travel to a lot of different anti-gun areas discuss it with the locals.

A gentleman who runs a center for wayward animals has decided the best way to raise awareness of his facility and to possibly raise money is to live for 30 days with two lions in their enclosure.

He plans to eat with them and sleep near them.

I hope everything works out for him.  Nothing can go wrong here, right?

He’s just going to be unconscious next to two apex predators, and try to eat the same food they do for a month.  Of course, he fails to recognize the fact that he himself is made of meat.  But come on, he knows these animals.  They’d never decide that he might make a good appetizer or late night snack.  He’s never seen the Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom film of lions pimp slapping each other over a zebra carcass, has he?

Good luck.  For the sake of the lions, I hope nothing happens.  I’d hate for an animal to be destroyed because some jackass decided to forget that they’re not German Shepherds with a weird haircut and got himself eaten.

That’s why I can never understand people who have animals that are normally wild predators as pets.  They are trying to impose a standard of conduct we place on animals that are a product of thousands of generations of breeding towards suitability for being a pet on animals that are maybe two generations away from “Nature, red of tooth and claw”.

Yes, that wolf or coyote cub you found out in the wild makes a wonderful lap dog, until it realizes that it doesn’t have 10,000 years of selective breeding for docility and subservience and decides your neighbor’s kid tastes like chicken. 

I’m really impressed by the folks who put a lion or Bengal tiger on a leash and take them for walks.  Nothing says Mal Hombre like a guy whose pet considers him an emergency food supply that can’t run very fast and doesn’t have sharp teeth or claws.

Don’t even get me started on the guy who has the 12 foot python in the bathtub and feeds them whole rabbits in an effort to keep Fluffy from dining on his wife’s Labradoodle. 

Look people, your pet is for companionship, labor, or burglar alarm.  You want a canine that impresses me?  Get one that will take itself outside and not snore while sleeping in the middle of my living room.  Think a big cat will improve my opinion of you?  How about you figure out how to make a housecat fetch?  And the snake guy?  Just have a couple of hits of NyQuil and climb in the cage with Scaly the WonderBoa.  Consider it a present to me. 

Og, of Neanderpundit fame, has opened a new blog, Made in America.  He plans to review and promote products that are made here, as opposed to a Chinese slave labor prison.

I’ve added him to my ever-growing list-o-stuff in the RSS reader, and it’s on the blog roll.  Enjoy!

Raindogblue illustrates why the safety of you and your family is primarily your responsibility.

Due to budget cuts, the sheriff has eliminated all shifts, but one. Starting January 1st, the ten remaining road deputies with be working  3 PM to 3 AM, seven days a week. There will be no coverage in the county from 3 AM to 3 PM.

Police are dedicated, self-sacrificing individuals.  The good ones could be working a lot less for a lot more money if they chose to.  But they can’t work for free, and they can’t be everywhere at once.

It would  be interesting to find out what besides police coverage the county he’s talking about cut to save money.  It would be fascinating to see what they chose to not cut in favor of the sheriff’s budget.

This has been a very interesting year.

My oldest has graduated high school and is off to college.  So far so good on that front.

The day job continues apace.  Some changes, but still the same basic job.  There are enough people out of a job nowadays that I won’t complain.

Irish Woman’s job has been chaotic, but things are evening out.  She still labors at making doctors happy with technology, which is still the most thankless job I’ve ever seen in IT.  She also labors with the madness that is life with me and my hellions, so she has more steel in her soul than most.

Girlie Bear is starting to show symptoms of teenagerhood.  She continues to enjoy doing stuff with her old dad, but frilly dresses, lip gloss, and boys are creeping in.  She’s discovered science fiction and is reading it as fast as I acquire it for her.

Little Bear is doing very well in school, and has started looking forward to high school.  In 4 years, I’ll be halfway through getting my kids through school.

BooBoo has firmly ensconced himself as the apple of his mother’s eye, and his dad thinks a lot of him too.  Parenting is becoming easier as I learn to understand what he says.

The other pets are still crazy.  We have gone an entire year without gaining any mammals in the household, which is pretty amazing considering our track record.

Over the last year I’ve met a lot of good folks through the #GBC, and I hope that this year I will actually meet them in meatspace.  I plan on going to a bloggershoot or two, and am trying to figure out finances to make it to the NRA convention in Pittsburg this May so I can meet the cool kids.

I hope this year has been as good for everyone else.  I really appreciate the feedback y’all give me in exchange for my brain droppings.  I hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year!