A writer for Outside magazine will be showing up in Moscow tonight.  Tomorrow Ry and I take her on a Boomershoot adventure.  What the editor wanted her to do was attend Boomershoot 2004 but they just missed that.  The weather sounds like it will be on the good side of typical for a Boomershoot. 

Day Mostly cloudy and breezy with a shower or thunderstorm in the area
High	67° F
Maximum RealFeel®	65° F
RealFeel Shade®	63° F
Winds	N at 9 mph
Wind Gusts	19 mph
Maximum UV	4
Thunderstorm Probability	25%
Amount of Precipitation	0.24 in
Amount of Rain	0.24 in
Amount of Snow	0 in
Hours of Precipitation	2
Hours of Rain	2

Most Boomershoots have more rain (and/or snow and hail).  Wind is about normal -- well into the obnoxious range but not into the impossible range.  Temperature is a bit above normal.  But the writer is from Los Angles so a bit above normal temperatures will be a good thing.

This week I spent a couple days in Seattle at the University of Washington Hospital Medical Center having some tests done on my stomach and esophagus. I have been having esophageal spasm every once in a while for the past five to seven years. They have been happening more and more frequent and more intense and I finally let Barb convince me to have a specialist look at me. What follows are the "highlights". Lots of verbal information gathering was done at various steps along the way. And a fair amount of waiting too.

First they ran a tube up my nose and then down into my stomach and measured the pressure of the muscles in my esophagus as I swallowed. They would squirt some stuff (either salt water or this gooey junk) into my mouth and I would swallow. They did this 10 times for each substance.

Next came the endoscophy -- visually looking at my esophagus and stomach. They put in an IV, positioned me on my left side facing the doctor and gave me an injection of some sort of sedative. I remember the room looking just a little bit "wavy" and Barb and one of the workers came rushing in to ask a couple quick questions. I answered, they left, and I turned to face the doctor again. I opened my eyes and I was in the same exact body position but in a different room and Barb asked me "How do you feel." I said, "I feel like I just woke up." I wasn't groggy or anything. My eyes were working well, it seemed to me that I had just blinked but things weren't quite right because I was in a different room. Very strange. The assisting nurse had said I would remain conscious and be able to follow directions but I may not remember anything. I remember absolutely nothing of the procedure. I now have picture of the inside of my stomach -- a place where the sun doesn't shine. Everything looked normal.

Next came the upper GI -- X-rays of the stomach and esophagus as I swallowed a barium compound (which tastes a lot like caulk). The doctor found a small hiatal hernia. That probably contributes to the problem but isn't a big deal.

Next came the PH probe which stayed in until 8:00 AM the next morning. A wire went in my nose and down my throat to my stomach. A ground wire was fastened to my shoulder. A monitoring device about the size of my hand was on a carrying strap that went over my shoulder. I couldn't take a shower or get anything wet. The wire made my nose tickle and irritated the back of my throat. I had terrible urges to cough and sometimes to sneeze. I need to record all "events" such as coughs, sneezes, eating, lying down, going upright, incidences of heartburn, burps, etc.

The next morning at 8:00 AM sharp they removed the PH probe. About 8:30 a medical student took a bunch of medical history and did a physical exam. Blood pressure, pulse, listened to my heart and lungs, looked in my ears, nose, throat, felt a number of lymph nodes and pressed and thumped my abdomen and chest. She left for a while then the doctor and student came in and announced "you should go on antacids". Surgery wasn't something he recommended. I have a fair amount of acid reflux and it was surprising I didn't feel it more (I seldom feel any heartburn) and that is causing the spasms. I asked about the effect of not having acid in my stomach -- doesn't it play a role in the digestive process? He said that it may have a subtle role that we don't understand yet and that may be why some people get diarrhea when they go on antacids (I don't). But that nutritionally it doesn't seem to affect people. Okay. I can do that. I took Prevacid for several weeks on two occasions and it worked well for me without noticeable side effects. I don't like to take drugs and I particularly don't want to take a drug for the rest of my life. But as near as I can tell this is a pretty benign drug in terms of side effects and not having any more of those exceedingly painful spasms would be most welcome.

Lots and lots of stuff in the news about this.  The constitutional challenges to it are the most interesting aspects to me.

I especially liked this article: http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/05/18/grossman.mass.marriage/

[New York Attorney General] ... Spitzer concluded that same-sex marriages should be given full force and effect in New York so long as they were valid in the state where they were performed. (Late yesterday, Rhode Island's Attorney General issued a very similar opinion, while Connecticut's declined to answer the recognition question.)

So can New York same-sex couples marry in Massachusetts, and have their marriages recognized back in New York? It's a conundrum. Assuming Spitzer's view of what New York courts will say is correct, then the law in New York is that such marriages will be recognized if valid in Massachusetts. Yet Massachusetts' Marriage Evasion laws say they will only be recognized if they are permitted in New York.

Fascinating stuff.  And as I have said before I love the implications of the people that typically are the enemies of gun rights are breaking legal ground on getting other states to recognize licenses issued in another.  This will make it very difficult for them to deny recognition of our concealed carry licenses issued in one state in other states.

I've been getting email from people that participated and people that read Kim duToit's blog entry.  Mostly good stuff, but some noticed the same flaws that we did and wanted to report them. 

I made a comment on Kim's blog about being able to delete the pictures I took of him and Stephanie now that he had said such nice things about the event and me (I'm a “National Treasure”).  He immediately wanted a copy of the pictures and when I complied he posted them on his blog.  Honestly, I wasn't going to show those pictures to anyone but Barb.  I knew they would be amusing when I took them, but I wouldn't have deliberately embarrassed him.  But never-the-less, I'm now a “Papparazzi Bastard“ as well as a “National Treasure“.  All in good humor -- I think.

I got an email and a call from an editor for a magazine that wants to do an article on the Boomershoot.  Very cool.  We (Ry and I) said we would put on a special event just for their writer.  She said that it would be arranged.

Some U.S. soldiers humiliate some military prisoners of war and in retaliation the terrorists video tape the beheading of a civilian? I see... That makes our course of action so much more clear. These are not people that are worthy of negotiation with. These are people that are only worthy of imprisonment and extermination. They can practice their religion all they want, they can believe in their "one true god" or twenty. But they will live by a set of rules that include allowing innocent people to have beliefs and practices different from theirs or they will be hunted down, captured and/or killed. They cannot seem to tolerate our existence so it appears that we cannot tolerate theirs. As I said, with sadness, before... there is a certain amount of symmetry their willingness to die for their beliefs because we are willing to kill for ours.

I slept 12 hours on Monday night.  10 hours last night.  Physically I'm feeling pretty good now.  The weather was (relatively) great!  A big plus there.  But I'm disappointed that a lot of the boomers didn't detonate and that a lot of the fireballs failed to ignite.  We changed the target bodies, the mixing/grinding equipment, and added a very small amount of marking chemical to aid in determining if things were well mixed.  Other than that things were the same (we think).  So why the change in detonation?  More research is required...

Jason got some great video that I will need to “borrow” soon.  I have film in the camera bag that needs to be developed and Xenia has a bunch of digital pics to sort through.  Maybe I can get to it this weekend.

I've been awake since 2:00.  Probably won't be able to get back to sleep until very late tonight.  I would pack up the pickup and leave now but Kim still hasn't come home with the pickup. I asked that she bring it home by 6:00 and I suspect she will stay out until 5:50.

The weather is looking great.  Absolutely the best forecasts ever (except for July '99 when we had the fire the next day).

Ry, Paul, and I went out on site today.  Found out the new cardboard ends for the targets are so tough they slow down the .22 LR bullets enough that it won't detonate with them.  It's not a problem with our mix.  This is very good news.  The bullets used by shooters are much heavier than the .22 LR bullets and shouldn't loose near as much velocity when going through the target bodies.  The fireballs still didn't work for some reason, but we can cheat with cans of sterno for the few fireballs we need to do.  We used a blender to grind the ammonium nitrate and it does it faster than the coffee grinders.

Lots and lots of targets to build tomorrow.  But with three blenders I think we can crank the product out fairly fast.

For the first time this year I had trouble going to sleep and staying asleep due to the Boomershoot. Even now my stomach is tied in knots. There aren't really any big obstacles to overcome. Things are a little behind but we have a plan to take care of that. Everything is looking pretty good. Even the weather isn't too awfully bad. Probably one of the best weather forecasts ever for a Boomershoot. I think part of the problem is that I'm not working on it. Tomorrow I start and don't stop until it's done.

We got a little bit of a late start when Kim didn't come home last night and I had to go find the van to move stuff from it to the pickup.  During the night someone had sideswiped the van which was parked on the street in front of a friend's house.  Then Tidyman's didn't have any sandwiches made up and I had to wait for them to be built.

It took a while to set things up and move things out of the shed so we could have room to work.  We didn't really get building targets until about 11:00.  Then one of the grinders died.  I called Barb who was coming out with Tim and Lisa (to deliver their camping trailer) later in the afternoon and asked her to buy two new ones.  I got the truck with the rest of the ammonium nitrate on it and we off loaded what we could from that.  But because we were running behind schedule on the consumption of AN we didn't have enough room for it.  Barb showed up with the grinders about 15:30.  We used the new grinders with great success for about 45 minutes until one of them died too.  We built targets until 19:00 or so, off loaded all the AN we could squeeze into any decent sized container we could find.  The AN had absorbed some moisture and made a mess of the truck bed in places so we had to put the rest of the probably 200 or 300 pounds of AN in sacks and use a pressure washer to clean up the truck.  Back to the field with the pickup to load up the stuff that needed to be cleaned and had to come home.  Made it home about 23:45.  Cleaned up the mixing stuff and was in bed by 23:58.  This morning another grinder was dead.  Three out of four died.  The cheapest and most difficult to use one survived.

Also had problems with fireballs not working and the mix not detonating with a .22LR.  We're going back out on Wednesday to do more tests and try and get our production line going.  Then get caught up with the production we didn't get done yesterday.

The guy at the repair shop is an idiot.  If he had accepted any of my money I would post his place of business (he is the owner) here.  He replaced the fuel line, which needed replacing, but he routed it wrong such that when the throttle/choke lever was in the choke position it would pinch the fuel line off.  It should have been obvious because the lever wouldn't go all the way into the full choke position.  He lost one of the screws that holds the housing on.  He didn't position one of the hose clamps right and a different fuel line came part way off while I was working on something else and leaked fuel all over the steps to the house were I was working on things.  And he put a bracket on slightly wrong such that the kill switch would only be engaged if the throttle lever was in just the right position.  I rerouted the fuel line and had to cut three inches off of it so it would fit.  I adjusted the bracket, but I didn't have any metric screws to replace the missing ones (one was already missing).  And I put the clamp on properly.  The generator now starts and runs just fine.  I'm a bit worried because choke doesn't seem to be adjusted quite right.  After it is warmed up I used to be able to choke it enough to kill it.  I can't do that now.  It will run richer, but not enough to run really 'ragged'.  I'll try it again tomorrow morning when it is cold and see if it chokes enough to start.