The Missoula Children’s Theather comes to town every year and Xenia has gotten some great parts over the years. She keeps doing better and better. She had the lead female role (again) this year and did a great job. This year the directors nominated her for a position in the theater summer camp. See all the pictures of this year’s play here:
https://www.joehuffman.org/pictures/Album.aspx?a=50
I just got a call that the Boomershoot 2004 shirts have been fixed and are ready for pickup. I hope everything is correct this time. We are running out of time to fix things if not.
Someone at work just sent me an editorial by Phil Lucas, Executive Editor, Panama City News Herald. The online version is here:
http://www.newsherald.com/viewpoint/phillucas/040404.shtml
There are some interesting points that I find difficult to refute and uncomfortable accepting. I’ve pretty much accepted the basics for some time, but the larger picture painted by Mr. Lucas is disturbing. He says,
We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims.
They can’t get along with their neighbors on much of the planet: France, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia, etc. etc. etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical Muslims.
We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them.
And goes on to say,
Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resent the Crusades. Well, Madam Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.
Let’s recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe, and when they reached sufficient numbers, they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years.
Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again. Ask France.
Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland.
What isn’t explicitly said, but bothers me so much, is that we might be in a position such that we have to declare on a planet wide scale that there is a religion that we will not tolerate the existence of. Wherever, whenever a sufficient size group of fanatical Muslims exist we are compelled to imprison and/or kill them to preserve our lives and freedoms. And if that is true how can we avoid sliding down the slippery slope in regards to some other group of religious (or non religious) people and justifying the use of our military against them? What is the criteria that we can use unambiguously such that when we use force we are justified? This isn’t the same as declaring war on a nation state. These people exist in nearly all nations and are willing to use force, suicide bombers in public places, car bombs in the basement garages of office buildings, and nearly any means you can think of to kill the unbelievers. We can’t fight just the people wearing Swastikas on their hats and when the central government collapses declare victory and go home a few years later. This is a much, much different type of war than we have ever had to fight before. How do we win this fight without risking the loss of the freedoms we are fighting for? Do we plant eavesdropping bugs or informants in mosques and/or churches to see if the clerics are advocating violence? And when they realize their houses of worship are bugged do we put bugs in their homes? Everyone’s home?
Does anyone have any good answers?
The target bodies (as Ry calls them) for Boomershoot 2004 need to be assembled. They are short tubes with lids on each end. One end can be glued into place before we put the ‘interesting stuff’ inside. My daughter Xenia did another 54 of the 4” targets today. I did 144 of the 8” targets. And Sami and Nick just completed the 550th of the 6” targets. We are getting close to having all we need. Next weekend should put us over the top on the target bodies. The following weekend we will start filling them.
Ry is having nightmares about the Boomershoot. Reality is a little different — at least so far. I picked up the t-shirts yesterday. They got the order wrong. All the general t-shirts had STAFF on them, all the staff t-shirt did not. I salvaged what I could and they took the rest back. They should be ready by next weekend.
Kim called last night. The pickup is leaking radiator fluid and big clouds of water vapor come out from under the hood. I asked where she was and if it was overheating. She was in town and it wasn’t overheating. I told her to park it at the auto repair shop and tell them about the starter problems too.
A couple hours later Barb calls to tell me when she had the oil changed in the Jeep they told her it was leaking radiator fluid. Not as bad as the pickup apparently. I had her make an appointment with the same repair shop for Friday. I’ll take a look at it tonight and if I can fix it easily we’ll cancel the appointment. In the mean time Barb will use the van to go to work. I’ll be on foot again this Friday as I handle getting all the repairs done.
I wonder what’s next…
I got a call from Kim today. She was a gas station buying gas and when she went to start it, it wouldn’t even turn over. I had her really turn the key hard and jiggle the key some. It turned over and finally started.
Yesterday Barb and I went to the farm to deliver the potassium chlorate stored in our garage for Boomershoot 2004. We had just barely left the house when this terrible screeching sound would happen when I would speed up the engine. Arggh… another repair. I turned around and came back to the house. The alternator belt was loose so I tightened it. I put my toolkit in the back of the pickup. With our luck the last couple of weeks we would need it before the day was over. But we didn’t. We made it there and back without incident.
We dumped off the 550 pounds of potassium chlorate, rearranged a few things, measured power cord lengths (I need to buy some short extension cords), measured the output of the solar cells (about 180 mA at 3:00 PM). Barb convinced me to lie down on the ground and just experience the fresh air of spring for a few minutes. It was very pleasant, we love the springtime in this area. I put a new lock on the shed, then we drove to Mom and Dad’s place, gave Doug his lock back, said hi to my parents and borrowed the fertilizer truck to go buy the ammonium nitrate. I wanted about 2500 pounds and because of their lack of control in the loading of the truck ended up with 2600 pounds. That is fine, I will be able to store the excess for next year. We drove back to the shed with the truck and off loaded about 700 or 800 pounds into the empty containers. We ran out of time and drove back to visit with Mom and Dad some before we came back home. Ry and I will go back on May 1 or 2 to build a bunch of targets and off load the rest of the AN.
Last week it was the brakes and idler arms for the van, today it was the windshield for the van, the pickup transmission was rebuilt yesterday, and today the brakes on the pickup had to be repaired. It just seems to keep coming in. Glad the credit card company increased our credit limit. We will get it all paid off next month but it’s still very painful.
Barb reminded me that last year about this time she got new tires and new brakes on her Subaru then Kim totalled it. Kim drives the pickup now. Hope she doesn’t total it now — as Ry put it, “You are married to that pickup now with all the money you put into the transmission.”
On Sunday Ry and I tried out a new shooting game. Ry’s brainchild — Boomerpins. Very much like a bowling pin shoot. Man-on-man (we did have one female shooter so maybe it should be ‘person-on-person’) single elimination event. As expected, this being a beta test, we had a few glitches. We recovered fairly well (sorry Don, you got screwed when that target fell apart). Here is a video of one of the matches:
http://www.ryjones.org/boomerpins.avi
We discovered a few months ago with Ry’s van that if your windshield has a chip or crack the nearby explosions will cause the crack to propagate. We rediscovered that with my van on Sunday. It had a small crack from a rock chip that required the windshield be replaced but I hadn’t gotten around to it. After Sunday’s game the crack had expanded to nearly the entire height of the windshield.
https://www.joehuffman.org/images/BoomerPinsEffectOnWindshield.jpg
I have an appointment tomorrow to have it replaced.
Last week it was brakes all the way around plus the idler arms. This week it’s the pickup transmission and the van windshield.
Last Saturday we discovered Kim had taken the pickup to Spokane with a friend. The rules for her an the pickup were that she had to stay in town. Spokane being about 85 miles away did not qualify as staying in town. I tried to gently talk to her. She quickly got in a huff, packed up and left. Great fun — now we have a runaway. We found out where she was staying and we weren’t too worried, just very sad. She finally came back about midnight on Tuesday.
While in Spokane the pickup transmission lost reverse. It had them pretty worried but they made it back into Moscow just fine and tried to get it fixed on their own. No simple fixes so they told me it was not working and I took it in to have it’s transmission rebuilt.
Barb and I had a major meltdown on Friday night. It lasted well into Saturday. What finally got us out of it was that I realized she really wasn’t understanding me. She was trying, but just COULD NOT understand what I was saying. My words would be translated in her mind into something other than what I was saying. I did not realize this until I asked her to repeat back to me my words — a simple five or ten word sentence. She could almost do it, but not quite. A minute later the words were gone. She literally could not understand me. As I started exploring this with her I realized that a tremdous amount of stress in our otherwise wonderful relationship was due to this communication problem. And it works both ways. She would say things that I didn’t understand and she was completely baffled as to why I didn’t understand. I worked out some techniques to reestablish communication once I have detected that a transmission error has occurred. By Tuesday I had the tools working pretty good and had a couple chances test them out. Here is a good example of fixing an error in her understanding me:
The phone rings. I see from the caller ID it is someone she knows and the call must be for her. She answers it and says a few words and hangs up. I ask, “What did he say?” She says, “Nothing.” I know that literally speaking (which is how I am) this is not true. He must have said something to her. But she didn’t understand that I wasn’t interested in a summary of the conversation I wanted the details. Rather than escalating and yelling “He did too say something, WHAT DID HE SAY?” I said, “What were his words?” She said, “Oh, …ummm … I said, ‘Hello’. He said, ‘Hello’, I said, ‘Joe is here and will leave soon, can I call you back?’. He said, ‘Yes, that would be fine. I’ll talk to you later.’ I said, ‘Good-bye’. He said, ‘Good-bye’.”
I was thrilled! Previously that would have escalated into a fight as I demanded more and more insistantly that she tell me what he said and she would keep saying that he hadn’t said anything. I had to halt our conversation to tell her what had just happened. She hadn’t even realized that we had just avoided another fight over nothing but a communication problem. Another incident from Tuesday when I didn’t understand what she said at first:
We were talking about our (relatively) new table and chairs. She said, “These chairs are so solid that even Jamie can’t break them.” Jamie is our 19 year old son who is 6′ 3” and weighs about 250 lbs and isn’t careful with the furniture. What she said wasn’t literally true. Jamie if he deliberately tried to could break the chairs, but he wasn’t likely to in everyday use. I detected that what she said was not true and my strongest impulse was to tell her that it wasn’t true. It took real effort to not say anything. I struggled for a bit and realized that it was the communication problem again. She said something that didn’t accurately represent what she meant. It was close enough in the way her mind worked and she knew that if Jamie wanted to he could deliberately break them. So in my mind I corrected the ‘broken’ statement and replayed it, just in my mind, “These chairs are so solid that even Jamie can’t break them during normal use.” It worked. I didn’t have this uncontrollable urge to correct her and have us get into a fight over me constantly nitpicking everything she says.
Here is an example where neither of us is understanding what the other is saying:
I ask if she has taken the film in to be developed. She says “I had a busy week.” I say “I’m sorry to hear that. So did you take the film in or not?” She, seeing that I didn’t understand her first answer tries to explain more clearly. She says, “I had to work extra hours because Walter was on vacation. Joy had a dentist appointment and I had get snow tires put on my Jeep.” and it goes on for a minute or more as she tells me all the details of her busy week. I keep expecting to hear something about the film, but I hear about the weather and the bad roads, her schedule and the taxi service for the kids and dealing with her mom in the nursing home. I ask, “Why can’t you answer my question?” She says “I did!!!”. “But I didn’t hear it. It’s just a yes or no question.” “I can’t give you a yes or no answer. I have to tell you all the background information.” “FINE!!! You just HAD to give me all the background information. I’ve got it! NOW WILL YOU TELL ME THE ANSWER TO MY QUESTION?????!!!!!”
I suspect some people, Barb will say 99%, say I should be able to figure out the answer (the answer is “No”, for those 1% of people like me). But it’s not at all clear to me. She has given me additional information that is apparently relevant to my question. But what she has done is increase the ambiguity. Perhaps she is telling me that she dropped the film off but didn’t have time to pick it up. Perhaps she is telling me someone else dropped it off (I asked if SHE dropped the film off, not just IF the film was dropped off). The more information she gives me the more possible answers there are. In her mind the more information she gives me the more clear the answer is. Simultaneous with her making the issue more ambiguous for me I make the issue more ambiguous for her. I give her less and less information trying to make it very specific and simple for her to answer. If I had given her more information then she would have understood the question. I should have said, “I’m going to the mall. If you haven’t taken the film in yet, I will.” By giving her less information and showing some irritation she interprets things in a completely different way that what I intended. In her mind I’m mad at her because she didn’t take the film in. Which was never true. But by the time the conversation is over she cannot possibly believe anything except that. And I cannot believe anything other than she is deliberately trying to avoid my question. Both of us are really pissed at the other. With my new understanding I can probably correct the commuication error without the anger on either side.
Barb is pretty happy with things too. I don’t think she really understand why I can’t understand her sometimes. At this point I’m having to do all the work to correct the communication errors but I don’t care. I’m so incredibly thrilled to be able to communicate with her. And I’m reevaluating a whole bunch of things that have happened over the years. So many of them are related to this relatively simple communication problem. We each have blind spots where we don’t really get what is being said and unfortunately I think her blind spot is right in the middle of where I am the most comfortable and vice versa. I’m having to work to understand her and to change to get her to understand me. But that’s okay. It’s so much better than before.
Last night at aerobics class I realized there were other communication errors that I was having with the instructor. With my new tools I recognized what happened but I still don’t know how to fix them. Here is the story on that:
One of the moves we do involves either doing it alternating off of each side of the step or multiple times off the same side of the step. If alternating the instructor will give us a count “Two“ or “Eight“ or something like that. If off the same side it will be twice and she will say “Double“. She said “Two“ and I did it off alternate sides consistent with what she said, but she and everyone else in the class did the “Double“. She saw that I was out of synch and thought back and realized she had said the wrong thing. She looked around, realized everyone else was doing the same as she and even as I struggled to get back in synch with them told me I might as well do it the same as everyone else even though that wasn’t what she had said.
What is going on is that I was getting all my cues directly from her words. I watch her feet to keep time and to learn new moves but when actually executing things I rely on her words for what to do next. The others in the class are probably picking up on other things such as knowing what comes next because we have done this same sequence before or because they are reading her body language better than I am to know what is about to come next. There are other examples of this that happen on cosistent basis because the instructor always gives the verbal command late between these two different moves. I mess it up every time. It doesn’t matter that much if I can’t correct that error. But it’s really cool that I now know how the errors are occuring. I am very literal with words and they override other data sources. Most other people are not. This joke illustrates the concept:
Two engineering students were walking across campus when one said, “Where did you get such a great bike?”
The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday minding my own business when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike. She threw the bike to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, “Take what you want.”
The second engineer nodded approvingly, “Good choice; the clothes probably wouldn’t have fit.”
Life with Barb takes on a whole new meaning now. I’m giddy and thrill to hear her talk. It’s like a little orgasm each time I catch and correct a communication error. If I can do that without making her feel like I’m blaming her for all the errors (which they are not) life with her is going to be very very good.
Gun control group sues Justice Department
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, along with the Million Mom March, said the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed gun makers to replace the housing for the firing mechanism on legally owned semiautomatic assault weapons, which the groups say violates the 1994 Assault Weapon Act.
Nice. The law will almost for certain expire in September making their lawsuit meaningless. In the mean time they are expeding resources against an adversary that isn’t really their enemy.
I went out to the site again today. Considering the late start I got and all the talking I did with the neighbors when I got there I got a lot done. Before I left the 6″ and 8″ tubes (but not the ends for them) were delivered. Two pallets, I don’t know how many boxes, but there were a lot of them. I loaded up the pickup with stuff that was ready to go out on site and filled the hole (plus some) in the garage that the stuff in the pickup left. If I hadn’t been able to drive out to the shed I would have had to leave the stuff on the pickup until I could. The garage is very full now.
Xenia finished the gluing of one end on the 4″ tubes today. As soon as the disks come in for the 6″ and 8″ tubes she can start on those.
The lock on the shed was malfunctioning. I think it corroded internally. My bolt cutters were locked in the shed. I borrowed Dad’s and a different lock and went back out.
I finished all the electrical work in the shed I needed to get done before the event. There is still some stuff I want to do, but it’s not critical.
I modified four of the crates so they would fit around the bolts in the floor of the magazine. Then I put all the crates in the magazine to make sure they would fit as planned. Everything worked. 70 crates will go in with good ventilation space remaining.
The tree didn’t come down as I had hoped. Doug figured we would have a lot more control over where it went using chain saw and it was too windy when we were out there.
The grass is growing on the berm we shoot into, but I didn’t see anything coming up on the shooting area berm. I may need to replant.
I arranged to borrow an ATV and a trailer for the event. This will allow us to deliver the ton of explosives in increments of a few hundred pounds to the shooting areas, including 1400 pound up a steep hill, without using a heavy vehicle.
ATFE inspector Susan gave me permission to store explosives yesterday.
Things are coming together. The rest of the target components arrive in the next few days.
I’m headed out to the site today to do some electrical work and prepare for building massive amounts of targets. If the ground is dry enough I will deliver some crates and partially completed targets.
I think I will be able to get rid of the one tree that is in the way today. This will be a big improvement in the shooting at the more distant targets.
I spent most of the afternoon yesterday gluing the lids on one end of 3” long by 4” (inside) diameter tubes. These will become targets for Boomershoot 2004. Daughter Xenia glued a few on too. We almost have enough of the 4” targets now. We only need another 65 or so and that diamter will be done. We still need to put the ends on 380 6” diameter targets and 180 8” targets but neither the tubes nor the ends have arrived yet. I expect they will arrive this week or next. I need to buy some more glue too. We have gone through a lot of it.
I’m looking forward to the magazine inspection by ATFE inspector Sue this week. Getting that taken care of will be the completion of another essential milestone on the path to a sucessful event. Sue has always been fun to talk to and had useful suggestions too.
http://www.lewistonpistol.org/2004/ActMar.htm
I did really, really well on one stage and it brought me up to overcome my poorer showing on the other stages.
550 pounds of KClO3 is being delivered today. They tried to deliver it on Tuesday but Barb was in class instead of home like she usually is on Tuesdays. Then she misplaced the delivery notification paper. Didn’t find it until last night after I got home. Anyway, all is well. This is THE critical item for Boomershoot 2004. Everything else (except the weather) has back ups if something doesn’t come through. Once I get the KClO3 actually in my hands I’ll feel a lot more at ease.
13:00 Update — it has arrived.
Yesterday I got a call from Mike, an ATFE agent from Spokane. AGENT, not inspector.
On December 28th of last year I took my cousin Julia on a Boomershoot Adventure at a local gravel pit. As we were finishing up somebody that lived nearby showed up to complain about the explosions. Ry and Lyle tried to talk to him but he wasn’t interested in listening. He finally took down my license plate number and left.
The agent wanted to know what was going on. I asked if he knew that I had a license to manufacture explosives. He said no and I gave him my ATFE type 20 license to manufacture number and told him Sue (an inspector who works on the Spokane office and he knows) is coming down to inspect my new magazine next week and that she could probably give him more background on me if he wanted it. He wanted to know what type of explosives we had and if anyone else had explosives. I said a friend, Ry Jones, helped me mix them on site but we didn’t transport anything like that on the road. He also wanted to know about a “boomer club”. I told him a rough overview of the Boomershoot and directed him to boomershoot.org. He said that the guy seemed pretty determined to try and “do something” and that we might want to find another place to set things off. I suspect the neighbor guy didn’t get any satisfaction from the local sheriff and so he contacted the ATF.
I told him that we talked to the guy but nothing we could say could make him happy. I also said we had talked to the owner of the pit and he didn’t have problem with it. He thanked me for answering his questions and I told him to call me anytime something came up because I didn’t want to cause any problems and wanted to avoid stepping on people’s toes.
How do you liberate a people when even talk about liberation by the politicians bring demands of their removal? A politician in the U.K. suggested that kids should be taught safe gun handling and his opponents demand he be sacked.
I don’t know of any instance where a country has given up their right to keep and bear arms and then regained it peacefully.
