The Guns And The Wine

Wednesday Grandma decided she wanted to move back to her condo. It hadn't sold yet, which with the current real estate market is no surprise, and her brothers and sisters have all been saying she needs to move back and stay there for a year to complete the grieving process. Supposedly they've taken classes that tell how to deal with losing a spouse. I say everyone's different and they ought to let her do what she wants to, but she listened to 'em and packed everything up to move back. Called up my uncle to have him helped since we moved her last time. More much of Wednesday, though, she and Mom wandered around the house arguing. Grandma insisted that she had brought a case of wine with her when she moved in, and seemed to be of the mind that we had stolen it. (A case of wine? We moved her, and we saw no wine. Since when does Grandma drink wine, anyway?) So she would keep looking and saying things like, "It's so easy for things to get...misplaced when...so many people are helping you move...no, no, that's alright. God knows." Meanwhile, Mom follows her around repeating: "Mom, I didn't take your wine."

This went on for hours. It was raining (Finally! Awesome!) but I went for a bike ride anyway. Weekend before last Dad went through the bike collection and pulled out a bunch of Schwins he'd gotten from someone we helped move last winter. Now we've all got different bikes. They're very quiet, and when you coast it feels like you're being pushed. Anyway. Had to go slow so as to not get mud everywhere. Went for something like a forty-five minute bike ride. Apparently they'd worked out what happened to the invisible wine when I got back, though I did find a green worm on my arm. He must've been busy throwing himself out of a tree when I rode by.

Thursday went for another bike ride and took some pics on a new road. Yeah, fresh material. Cheers.

Almost 108th Street(5)

Aug 16, 2007

Nifty.
So skip ahead to Saturday, because besides praise team practice, nothing really happened until then, and since I didn't get to play drums, praise team practice doesn't count. The rain clouds still haven't cleared up as I write, so by Saturday it was getting to be downright chilly. Slept with winter blankets and a sweatshirt and even a nightcap. I never wear nightcaps. Especially in August. They call me cold-blooded, sure, but that's downright frigid. :)

Helped Uncle David load up Grandma's stuff. She insisted that she wanted her old TV, not one of our newer, simpler ones that we had ready to go. So I had to pull the entertainment center apart to get the TV out. The DVD in the player was a rental and it fell off of the tray inside the DVD player. Couldn't leave it in there, so I got to do some quick tech-surgery and open it up to get it out. Pretty simple inside there. Nothing like a VHS player. Anyway, got all that put back together and her TV loaded. No way Uncle David could unload that furniture himself, especially with Grandma trying to help, so I came along and we got all her stuff back into the condo. She was really confused, telling us to where to put pieces of furniture that she'd watched us bring in and set up minutes ago. She's getting to the scary forgetfulness old people get when they get put in senior homes.

We got out of there so she could unpack, and Uncle David took me geo-caching before dropping me off at home. What it is is someone will go to a park and hide a box somewhere, then they'll hide GPS coordinates around the park that lead to each other, and eventually to the box. Then they post the coordinates of the first stage on the geo-caching website. You can set up your GPS to download the nearest fifty or so, then whenever you're bored you can look up the nearest one, drive to the park, and use the GPS coordinates to find the first stage. The GPS can get you within about fifteen feet, but then you have to find it...whoever made it hides the coordinates for the next stage somewhere in the area. Carved in a tree, in a hollow log, written on the bottom of a railing, etc. It's a lot of fun. Then at the end there's a box where everyone leaves notes or business cards or whatever.

Monday there was so much rain Travis didn't go to work, so he came over and we watched movies and played video games. It's kind of a tradition to make a huge lunch and eat it downstairs too, so we made burritos and stuffed jalepinos and stuff. It was cool.

Then today I decided the router's day of reckoning had arrived.

To get warmed up, I took a shot at an old CD with the BB gun.

Didn't expect it to explode so violently!

Here's a picture of the scrap of CD that the BB actually hit. Nice dent, eh?

These are the plastic soldiers I've been shooting at with the BB gun over the summer. Collectively they've probably taken around five hundred shots. Some introductions, from left to right. Man whose abdomen is gone. Subsequently, so is everything that was attached to the top of it. Man with no head. Man who can no longer have children. Man with broken arm. Man with leg and arm shot off. Man from 'Saving Private Ryan' with a dent in his helmet. Sniper without a head.

This is a fuel canister from a framing nail gun. I was told they make a nice 'pop' when thrown in a fire or shot. He's gonna take a .22 bullet sometime today.

The router, ready to be dragged behind wild horses. Sadly, all of our wild horses are in New Zealand filming 'The Hobbit' right now, so I used the moped instead.

Post-moped. A little scuffed and muddied, but I didn't expect much more. If I'd gone any faster it would have lifted off the ground. Can't have that. Oddly, it survived a mile and a half, then fell off as I pulled up in front of the barn to untie it.

A CD after being shot with the .22. Apparently since a .22 bullet flies so much faster, the stress is gone so fast that the disk has no chance to shatter like it would with the slower-moving BB. I was hoping for something a little more dramatic. Ah well.

The fuel canister after being shot with the .22. Nothing really pyrotechnical. The bullet went in one side and out the other, there was a hiss and a small cloud of smoke, and the can flipped and flew a few feet. The can was cold to the touch afterward.

After what the BB gun did to the CD, I'd really expected a big more carnage from it against the router. Just some holes, and once the BBs got through the cover, the circuit board stopped them dead. If you shook it, they all rattled down at the bottom.

The .22 wasn't much more impressive. The holes are about the same size.

However, this time they did make it through the circuit board. The exit hole is rather shredded-looking, meaning though the bullet punched through, it slowed down a lot. Circuit boards are tougher than I'd thought.

Took a few shots with the .22 at the soldiers. This guy is lying out there somewhere with no legs.

And this guy flew backward so hard the tack tethering him to the board ripped out. Rather forcefully I might add.

After tossing the router up in the air and hitting it with a baseball bat. The front cover popped off, but that was about it. Not enough resistance I guess. Dang this thing is sturdy!

After lobbing the router off of the roof. The back cover came off. Now we're down to just the circuit board.

Sprinkled a few tablespoons of gas on it, used a lighter to light one of those 8"-long matches (the long ones don't light on the striker 'cause they're too old) and ignited the gas that way. I don't play with gas often. It keeps me cautious that way. It was pretty fun to do though.

All I get in return. A lightly charred circuit. Last time I burned plastic (the old vacuum) I couldn't put it out. Whatever they make circuit boards out of, I intend to line a coat with two layers of it. I'll be impervious to small-arms fire, fire-proof, and it won't weigh much at all.

After burning it I was feeling kind of down. Not nearly enough destruction to pay for its crimes. Then I thought to myself, hey, we DO have bigger guns. Went up to Dad's gun cabinet and selected this break-action 20 gauge. I was too chicken to touch his precious 12 gauge, besides, it's scoped for a hundred yards or so, so hitting something this close without iron sights would be difficult. In the picture you can see two shotgun shells, the yellow-tipped one is rabbit-shot, something like thirty-five lead BBs packed into a shell along with a bunch of gunpowder, designed for shooting a spread of small shot at fast-moving critters so if you're not a professional sniper, you can still kill them. The second, gray-tipped shell is a slug, meaning it's a big-butt bullet with a boatload of gunpowder. It's the kind of bullet that makes a real mess when shot at something.

I fired the rabbit-shot first. It was louder than I remembered a 20 gauge being. Should've worn my eye and ear protection I guess. It did do quite a number on the board though, sheared it right in half. At least I think it was in half. I could only find these two pieces, as the entire thing was blown away into some tall grass nearby.

After lining up the two pieces on in front of the other, I shot them with the slug. Pretty anticlimatic after the rabbit-shot. Punched a hole through both boards big enough to stick your thumb through. I was hoping for an explosions with shards of plastic flying every which way, but I called it good enough.

I must be some sort of redneck/geek hybrid. That was fun. The whole process took about two hours.

SOTD: Skillet - Savior

FTTDOTD: Save interesting things to shoot at and/or blow up. Then shoot at them and/or blow them up. Take photos.