Category Archives: Home Life

Stuff going on in my personal life.

Our Fragile Infrastructure

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This recent post of Joe’s reminded me.  I don’t remember whether I posted about this before, but a couple years ago during a state highway upgrade outside of Moscow, Idaho, a fiber optic line was cut.  One little line.  Typically, we think of having a cell phone, a computer with internet access, a land line, and a radio as being diversified with regard to our communications.  Well, not necessarily.


When my cell phone was unable to reach anyone outside the Moscow area I tried the land line.  No go.  Then I tried to get on line and check e-mail.  Nope.  Then I turned on the radio.  More than one station dead.  It turned out that more than one cellular service, our local internet access, much of the land line traffic, and even some radio station feeds were using the same FO line.  I don’t know if that’s changed.


I view large scale electrical generation plants in the same light.  Your local food supply may depend on one or two highways and one rail line, and the stores have been relying on the “just in time” inventory method more and more.  A similar situation may exist in your local hospital.  I don’t know.  It costs money to keep extra rooms, beds, personnel and supplies available, much beyond the normal demand.


We tend to take a lot for granted.

We cannot go back

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Co-worker Chet stops by my office and chats every once in a while. We both grew up on a farm, we share similar views on the world, and have similar concerns about the current economic situation. One of the concerns is the potential for world wide economic collapse. This has lead us to ponder how we might deal with the collapse of technology. How would or could we survive in a world with greatly diminished supplies of various natural resources such as oil, metals, fuels, and even water (electricity is needed to move it for irrigations as well as direct human consumption). As a consequence of those reduced supplies the food supply would be dramatically reduced. Our total population as well as the distribution of that population would make “going back” even to the time of our childhood (the 50’s and 60’s for Chet and I) nearly impossible without dramatic and extremely painful consequences.

Some of the concerns are that food production today is heavily dependent on oil based fuels, fertilizers, and pesticides. The yields (bushels/pounds per acre) on the farm today about almost 50% greater than what they were when I was a small child yet our food surplus is smaller than what it was then. If we were to attempt to go back to horse powered farm production it would take something like 20 years to increase the horse population adequately and it requires about 1/3 of the farm capacity to feed them.

The food distribution problems are just as bad. The populations of major cities require food (and frequently water) be brought in from at least 100 miles away if not 300 miles away simply because the land within a smaller radius is not capable of supporting a population that size. How do you transport the food with greatly reduced oil supplies? We can’t produce enough fuel on our farms.

Shall we talk about heating? Coal, natural gas, and oil either directly or indirectly via electricity produce much of the heat for our buildings. How are those supplies going to hold up in an economic collapse? The metals to distribute electricity are already being stolen and sold for scrap (H/T to Roberta). Read Doctor Zhivago or watch the movie. It’s a novel but it was based on events from the Russian revolution and civil war of the early 20th century. People will burn their furniture and even their own houses to keep warm. In todays world I expect even pieces of streets and road (asphalt) will disappear in the night to be burned as heating fuel.

Apparently these concerns are far from new. Yesterday Chet sent me an email (bold added):

As we have discussed several times we cannot easily go back to our parents or grandparent’s way of life if we lose today’s technology.

It looks like this idea has been known for some time. I found this quote in ELEMENTS OF TECHNOLOGY published in 1831 (second edition).

“The augmented means of public comfort and of individual luxury, the expense abridged and the labor superseded, have been such, that we could not return to the state of knowledge which existed even fifty or sixty years ago, without suffering both intellectual and physical degradation.”

Full book at: http://www.archive.org/details/elementsoftechno00bige

That is from 1831!

The civil unrest in the Mid-East is not just something that happens someplace far away. Wisconsin may be the first sign of stress in the U.S. but other states are very close behind and things are going to get far worse before they get better. The attitudes of the people protesting economic belt tightening and demanding revolution will guarantee it. A lot more people need to do a reality check to avoid disaster.

A brief family discussion about these concerns late last year resulted in daughter Kimberly taking it upon herself to read up on how to make your own simple medicines, grow various foods, and we made plans to plant fruit trees on some of our land. Kimberly now has avocados trees about two feet tall and pumpkins blooming in our living room:

KimsPumpkin

We might not be able to go back without suffering intellectual and physical degradation but some people will survive. Will it be you? Or should anyone even be concerned? I am concerned. Far, far from everyone has sufficient land or a Kimberly in their family.

Brothers marry sisters

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My Dad ran across some stuff about his parents recently.

CecilSadieMarriage

I didn’t realize that my Grandfather and his brother were married on the same day in Juliette Idaho or that they went to Riverside California for their honeymoon.

Also related is this post on the land they purchased shortly after getting married which my brothers and I recent brought back into the family.

Lawrence Johnston

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A few years ago a friend of mine and I were talking about nuclear bombs and he said something about all the scientists involved with the development of “The Bomb” were now dead. I told him, “No. Johnston is still alive.” “Who is Johnston?” Johnston, I told him, was the guy that invented the detonators. After the war he was a physics professor at the University of Idaho and still lives in Moscow. I’m not sure my friend really believed me. Why would someone with a background like that end up in a backwater college like the U of I? I disputed this. The U of I has done quite well for itself and has nothing to be ashamed of—well, except for perhaps Larry “Wide Stance” Craig. Other famous graduates or professors include Sarah Palin in the class of 1987, Dan O’Brien (class of ’93), and Margrit Von Braun (daughter of Wernher von Braun).


Back to Johnston—I got my undergraduate degree at the U of I and took several physics classes there. But none of them were with Johnston even though he was there at the time (’67 –> ’88). But I would occasionally see mention of him in the news and I was proud to have him in my home town.


Last week wife and physical therapist Barbara called me up and excitedly asked me, “Do you know who I have as my patient?” “No. You don’t tell me that information unless you get permission from the patient and you haven’t done that for several weeks now.” My taking her literally somehow didn’t damping her spirits as it usually does and she went on to tell me that it was one of the scientist who worked on the first atomic bomb. “Johnston?”, I asked. “Yes. How did you know?”, her spirits finally dampened a tad. “Because he is the only one left and he lives in Moscow”, I explained.


She went on to tell me he gave her permission to talk to me about him, he was a really nice guy, is 92 years old, is the only person to have witnessed all three of the first atomic bomb explosions (he was in the observation planes over Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and he would be interested to exchange email with me. “Uhhh…. WOW!” was about all I could say.


I did exchange email with him and he sent me a presentation he made at Los Alamos a few years ago about his experiences developing and deploying the first nuclear bombs. I found it fascinating. My QOTD tomorrow will come from that presentation. And despite the detailed info in the presentation about the explosives and detonators used and the requests for “upgrading” beyond chemical explosives at Boomershoot I have no plans to pursue that particular line of experiments at this time.


Thank you Barbara and Professor Johnston.


MildredLawrenceJohnston
Mildred and Lawrence Johnston

Staff Sergeant son-in-law

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As reported by daughter Xenia our son-in-law was recently promoted to Staff Sergeant at age 21.

Wow!

Congratulations John.

Update: The link has been updated to something that everyone can reach rather than just Xenia’s Live Journal friends.

Guns on campus lawsuit

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A lawsuit has been filed in my home town of Moscow Idaho to allow guns on campus. This is particularily interesting to me because of the home town jurisdiction, I have a daughter attending the University, Barb and I lived in “Married Student Housing” owned by the University when we first got married, and I know the judge the case has been assigned to. Judge Stegner is the father of a couple girls my daughters used to be friends with. Our children would sometimes visit each others home for parties, etc.. Judge Stegner was also the judge on the trial when I did jury duty.


There is a website for the case but there isn’t much there yet. The lawsuit claims the ban on firearms in family housing owned by the University violates the Second Amendment. One would think that the Heller decision would make this a relatively easy win but things are never as easy as one would like to think.


I certainly like the idea but it bothers me a great deal that the plaintiff, Aaron Tribble, is doing this PRO SE.


I sent an email to the lawyer that sent me the case asking what he thought the chances of screwing up things from doing this PRO SE were. I’ll try to keep everyone up to date on this action and might even have a chat with Mr. Tribble when I go back to Idaho next weekend.


Update: First error, it should have been filed in Federal Court, not locally. I wondered about that…


It also complicates a few other things that I won’t get into in a public venue.

Boomershoot family photos

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I finally got access to the pictures Oleg took at Boomershoot 2010 (thanks Barron). Here are some of my family (minus son James who was in the Seattle area that weekend) that I was most interested in getting.

Keep in mind these are just the raw images without any special post processing that brings them up to the quality product standards you normally would expect from Oleg. The tweaks were by me, a non professional, which consisted only of resizing and in the case of the first picture some slight cropping.

As is usual, click on the picture for a higher resolution version.

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This was me just prior to the shooters meeting and fireball demo on Sunday.

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This is wife Barbara and I about halfway through the main event on Sunday.
Notice how tolerant she is of me even though I have been grouchy for days? That is simply amazing someone would put up with that.
It probably helped that she received the special edition Boomershoot jacket she is wearing from Boomershooters Fred and Bruce the night before.

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Daughters Kim and Xenia.

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Daughter Kim, wife Barbara, me, and daughter Xenia.

Quote of the day—Barbara Scott

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Is he gay?

Barbara Scott
December 4, 2010
In response to Robert Fargo saying I was “devilishly handsome”.
[I think the answer is probably no. But there are some guys out there that publically say the have “a man crush” on me. And Barb claims I have groupies of both genders.

Somewhat related is the story of the woman that offered me sex for a position at Boomershoot for her husband. What is interesting is that Barb sort of predicted it before it happened. Spoiler alert,, in part because I haven’t told Barb the story yet—she ended up acquiring the position just like everyone else and paying for the position with a credit card.—Joe]

Barb and Windows Phone 7+

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Earlier, when she found out daughters Kim and Xenia were getting a Windows Phone 7 for Christmas, she told me, “You better have not gotten me one of those. I’ll be afraid to use it because I might lose it.”

Here is the video when she opens it and then finds out I got her a little something extra to go with it:

Quote of the day—Lisa

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I miss Idaho dearly. I REALLY miss being in the middle of nowhere, as strange as that probably sounds to most people. I just feel so confined in the city–almost like I can’t breathe. I feel safe most of the time (I would feel safer if I could carry on campus… but that’s another story) but there’s always this lingering thought. I never had that growing up on the farm, or in Moscow for that matter.

Lisa
December 14, 2010
1st Semester of Grad School — Finished! (Almost)
[Lisa, is my niece and grew up on the same farm I did. I completely understand what she is saying. I work in a different city on a different campus but the same restrictions apply.

It’s been 35+ years since I lived on the farm and I still feel that way.—Joe]

Quote of the day—IrishPirate

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I hope one day to tell “boogeyman” stories to my grandkids about how the Brady Campaign will come back and take their guns if they don’t adhere to the 3 (4) basic rules of gun safety.

IrishPirate
December 20, 2010
Brady’s going broke, telling same old lies
[Let’s make this a reality as soon as possible. It probably won’t be all that long before I have grandkids.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dave Barry

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Some of you … may have decided that, this year, you’re going to celebrate Christmas the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on “The Walton’s”. Well, you can forget it.  If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.

Dave Barry
Christmas Shopping: A Survivor’s Guide
[This comes pretty close to my view of Christmas.—Joe]

Video from the Paul Bunyan USPSA match

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Son-in-law John and I went to the Paul Bunyan (Pullayup Washington) USPSA match yesterday. It rained all Saturday night and continued to rain throughout the match. This made for some deep water in places, difficult to tape targets (clear plastic bags are put over the targets to help keep them dry), and soggy score sheets and shooters. We call it “Liquid Sunshine” and have a good time anyway.

On Friday my officemate (Priyanka), my boss (Sajib) , and I were talking about weekend plans and I told them I was going to attend this match with John, my son-in-law, who is in the army. Priyanka, exclaimed, “Oh! I’ll bet he is really good!” I tried to explain that actually I was quite a bit better at this sport than John. I’m not sure either one of them really believed me. So this is for them: I came in second in Limited Class with 90.43% match percentage while John came in fourth with 47.70%.

What this basically means (it’s not quite this simple but it’s close enough) is that for a given level of accuracy, on the average, I can shoot the same course of fire in about one half the time as John. Or expressed another way, for a given speed, on the average, I can shoot about twice as accurate as John. Why is that? The answer is I have practiced a lot more than John and for pistol shooting I have had better training. I also have better equipment than John but that is not even close to the dominate factor.

This was the first time I had shot a match at this range and they had more high round count stages than what we usually do at the Lewiston Pistol Club in Idaho where I usually shoot. High round count stages are fun. You not only get more trigger time but you get to “run and gun” too. It’s not particularly realistic for defensive shooting (the last statistic I read was that the average gun fight was over in 2.4 seconds) but generally people think they are more fun. Having fun means you are likely to shoot more. And even if on the first two and a half seconds of your average USPSA match relates to reality you end up practicing a lot more than if you only shot matches that were composed of stages that lasted less than two and a half seconds.

Here in stage 1 (12 Tiny Raindrops) I did the draw, a reload, lots of moving, and put 24 rounds into 12 targets in 12.24 seconds earning a 90.99% stage percentage. The stuff I learned about shooting on the move from Todd Jarrett while at Gun Blogger Summer Camp was very helpful—notice that I had the slowest Limited Class time but had better hits that everyone else.

The stage was 12 targets spread over a fairly large distance with barricades to go around to get to the last targets. It’s a little hard to see in the still picture and you have to watch for it in the video but there is a rope between the barrels as a fault line so you can’t get too close to the targets.

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Stage 2 (In The Rain) had targets on opposite sides of the bay with barricades which made it difficult to avoid a lot of moving. Plus there were targets in moderately difficult to reach positions.

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Shooting while on the move helped for some of the targets but others required full stops.

I put two rounds on each of the eight targets in a total of 13.49 seconds. This earned me a stage percentage of 90.88% and third place on this stage.

Stage 3 (Get Off Santa’s Back) was a little different. It is composed of three strings of fire. One is “freestyle”, one is “strong hand only”, and one is “weak hand only”. Although it is difficult to see in the video there are four paper targets. Two on each side of the hardcover (steel painted red) target. The paper targets are overlapping and it is difficult to see where the lower target ends and the upper target begins. The requirement was that for each string you put one bullet into each target. There were penalties for misses, extra shots, and extra hits on any given target. I got all my hits with no penalties in a total of 13.38 seconds. Nearly everyone else had a better time but my accuracy was much better. This earned me a stage percentage of 86.40%.

Some other people were not as fortunate and one person had so many penalties that they zeroed the stage.

Stage 4 (1 Tuesday #2) required moving backward! The shooter began with their hands on either side of the opening in the barricade. There are four (only two are standing in the still photo) steel targets to be shot through the opening then you had to back up to shoot two targets on either side around and through the barrels for a minimum of 12 shots. I thought I had hit the last steel and started to move on, noticed it didn’t fall, and had to return to finish it off. It took me 8.06 seconds and I got all ‘A’ hits on the paper. This earned me a 69.27% stage percentage and last place for limited.

Son-in-law John, for the first time ever, beat me on this stage. He did it with all ‘A’ hits in 8.05 seconds. Just 1/100th of a second better than me.

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Stage 5 (I Wanna YoYo) was four banks of six steel plates. Two banks of plates could be shot from each of two shooting boxes. You were required to change boxes between shooting banks. Hence you had run back and forth between the boxes. Ability to shoot on the move is of nearly no advantage for this stage.

On my first run there was a range equipment failure about two thirds of the way through the stage when one of the plates fell without me shooting it. This required a reshoot and I did much worse the second time through but I still took second place in Limited with stage percentage of 71.91% after knocking down all 24 plates, and running back and forth, in 39.09 seconds.

Stage 6 (Six A’Clock) was the last stage. It was composed of three strings of fire with three sets of targets. The first set was a single target which you were required to put six rounds into. The second set was two targets and you were were required to put three rounds into each target. The third set was three targets and two no-shoot targets and you were required to put two rounds each into the “shoot” targets and you were penalized if you hit the no-shoot targets, had misses, or fired more than the specified number of rounds. I won this stage with a total time of 10.38 seconds for the 18 rounds. Nearly everyone else in my division had better times but I had much better hits. I scored 81 out of the possible 90 points with no penalties and the next best shooter only scored 75 points and had 20 points in penalties.

I have a problem with more than three rounds on a single target. I can shoot faster than I can count and have to slow my shooting to match my ability to count. When confronted with this situation, and it works out for the stage design, I will load only six (or ‘N’) rounds in the gun. Then I just shoot until the gun runs dry. That is what I did in this case. I didn’t get the individual times or the splits between shots while at the match but I went through the video frame by frame on the first target and found that from the muzzle flash of the first shot to the muzzle flash of the last shot it took 1.17 seconds. This is an average of 0.234 seconds between the five shots. This was at a distance of about 30 feet. IIRC I had five “A” hits and one “C” hit.

It turns out that I accidently used a bad magazine (it needs a new follower) and it didn’t hold the slide open on the last shot. This caused me to drop the hammer on an empty chamber and I was somewhat surprised that the gun was empty. No matter—Sometimes a little surprise is a good thing.

I keep thinking Brady Campaign supporters must require frequent trips to Sears for their special needs with these sort of videos being put on the web.

Boomershoot adventure details

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As reported on Saturday we (Caleb, Kim, Sarah, Matt, Buddy, and I) had a small Boomershoot adventure. We made and blew up a snow castle. Here is the crew (minus me):

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Kim also has some pictures on Facebook.

Kim took most of the pictures while Sarah, Matt, and Caleb built the snow castle wall and I prepped the chalk dispensing target:

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The final snow castle wall just prior to destruction:

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The road flares are to ignite the four gallons of gasoline located high on the left side of the wall, on top of (and behind) the 6 pounds of Boomerite.

The snow, gasoline, and dirt went flying when the Boomerite detonated:

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I expected the ground to be bare beneath the explosion but that was not quite the case. Apparently the explosives were too high above the ground to clear it of snow:

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Next time we should put the explosives much lower to give the snow more lift.

Probably not what she had in mind

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Roberta X recommended checking out the comic Abstruse Goose. It has a strong resemblance to XKCD and a quick scan of a few previous posts was more than sufficient to add it to my list of RSS feeds.

I then hit the Random button and got this on the first click:

lathe_of_god

This probably isn’t what Roberta (or wife Barbara) would call “good”. Of course the author does have something for the women too:

jersey_shore

Is David Pruss in trouble again?

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A few years ago my brother helped capture David Pruss and wrote up his story of the event which I posted.

This morning I got a Google hit from a court in Ohio:

Domain Name uscourts.gov ? (U.S. Government)
IP Address 208.27.111.# (US COURTS)
ISP Sprint
Location
Continent  : North America
Country  : United States  (Facts)
State  : Ohio
City  : South Solon
Lat/Long  : 39.7462, -83.5451 (Map)
Distance  : 1,736 miles
Language English (U.S.)
en-us
Operating System Microsoft WinXP
Browser Internet Explorer 8.0
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)
Javascript version 1.3
Monitor
Resolution  :  768 x 576
Color Depth  :  32 bits
Time of Visit   Nov 30 2010 7:48:18 am
Last Page View Nov 30 2010 7:49:05 am
Visit Length 47 seconds
Page Views   2
Referring URL http://www.google.co…wYa3DMKwV6xGJxCorScA
Search Engine google.com
Search Words david pruss
Visit Entry Page http://blog.joehuffm…AboutDavidPruss.aspx
Visit Exit Page http://blog.joehuffm…They Caught Him.aspx
Out Click  
Time Zone UTC-5:00
Visitor’s Time Nov 30 2010 10:48:18 am
Visit Number 949,960

It could be an entirely different David Pruss but I do know that some time after he was released the Sheriff was looking for him again.

Instant Incapacitation

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Apparently it’s not possible to tell a hunting story in under 1,000 words.  Something about the laws of rhetorical physics.  You’ve been warned.


 


I choose Late Muzzleloader season in Eastern Washington because it allows the harvest of almost any deer – three point minimum or antlerless.  We see few bucks around here, and since I hunt for the table I don’t care about old, tough bucks with big racks.  They’re chewy and don’t taste as good.  All that and there are very few other hunters out this late.  It’s win win.


 


Late Muzzleloader lasts one week, so I’ve been out twice a day since last Wednesday.  The below zero temp Wednesday morning was hard to take, but it was beautiful and I remember sitting up in the tree thinking, “This is definitely worth it even if I don’t get a deer.  Wow!”


 


The tree I sit in is on a steep slope, with deer tracks crisscrossing all below and behind me, with a few tracks in front along the top of the ridge overlooking the Palouse River.  I’ve seen at least six deer by Sunday (or two deer three times) but no clear shots.  Mostly I’ve seen them on the run or behind tens of yards of thick brush as I walk to the stand, or after legal hours.  One of them got stuck in a snow drift.  We usually think of deer as graceful and poised at all times, but this fellow was flailing all over the place, feet in the air even, trying to get away from me.  I was a little bit embarrassed for him.  By the time I’d stumbled out of the brush to get a clear shot though, he was gone.  That’s how it went for several days.  Several shots I could’ve taken, but no.


 


Sunday evening I was going to stay in and rest up, by my son convinced me go out again.  Good thing.  I see no deer on the way up to the tree.  That’s good.  Infiltration without detection means I have a better chance of sniping one unawares.


 


I’d been up there for no more than half an hour, mostly looking around behind me where most of the tracks were, trying to spot a deer before it got to me.  Therefore I failed to spot the nice three pointer walking casually along the ridge above, silent as a ghost in the powder snow, until he was right in front of me and already walking away.


 


It’s a sharp quartering away shot, 20 yards or less at eye level.  Good backstop with several miles of empty farm fields behind.  The time for the ideal shot was spent with my back turned.  Hurry with getting the mitten open so the trigger finger is exposed.  Silently cock the sidelock.  He’s oblivious.  He’s going to be out of view in a few seconds.  I have to duck so I can sight under some hanging pine boughs.  Aim for the heart.  That means hitting behind the rib cage at this angle.  Since I’m bending way down to see under the boughs, my glasses frame is in the way of the rifle sights.  Crap.  Have to dismount and push the glasses farther on.  Take aim again.  Time’s up.


 


Crack!  I hadn’t thought to worry about the powder charge that had been in the barrel for several days.  After that morning in below zero temperature, the barrel had frosted over when I came inside, and it had been snowing every time after, such that I’d take the barrel out of the stock to dry things out each day.  No problem.  120 grains of FFG under a patched soft lead 50 caliber ball with a #11 percussion cap.  Perfect ignition.  This newfangled percussion system you kids have been using just might catch on.


 


There’s always a moment of uncertainty for me, especially with black powder because you’re peering through a smoke cloud trying to see what happened to the target.


 


I’ve heard of “anchoring” the animal in its tracks, but was beginning to think the phenomenon a myth.  My son and I have killed around 9 deer and this has never happened, even with both lungs, and the heart, obliterated they always run some distance.  This time the ball must have upset the central nervous system because the fellow went straight down.  Zap! And he only twitched for a short while.


 


Some sense of reverence comes upon me when I approach the animal.  It’s happened every time.  They are very beautiful, strong, sleek, and delicious with new potatoes, turkey gravy, fresh fruit and red wine.


 


The ball had gone in at the back of the ribcage on the right side and exited through the base of the neck under the spine on the left.  ~21.5 inches of penetration, and though you could fit your thumb in the entry wound, I couldn’t get but the tip of my little finger through the skin at the exit wound.  The ball had just barely pooped out of the skin.  Though it’s what we would call a short range prospect, I’m beginning to trust the 50 caliber patched ball load.


 


It was a good day.  I’m happy, and the freezer will soon be full.


 


I’m still puzzled.  That pure lead ball leaves the muzzle at around 1920 fps according to my CED chronograph, or a little more ’cause that’s averaged at 15 feet.  Last year I shot a deer at 85 yards and the ball penetrated 25 inches with almost no deformation.  We here concluded that the velocity at impact had been subsonic due to the very poor BC, hence a lower pressure at impact, hence the pristine ball (I recovered it from just under the skin and thought it was probably good enough to load again).  This shot Sunday was at no more than 20 yards, maybe more like 15, yet I see no sign of ball deformation so far (I’ll check it out more closely upon butchering in a few days).  You’d think with all the talk about bullet integrity, hard alloys and such, that a pure lead ball at that velocity would obliterate, giving shallow penetration.  So what gives?

The view from north central Idaho

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I knew the big snow storm was coming and rather than make a trip back to the Seattle area last Sunday I stayed in Idaho and worked from home the first part of this week. This saved me two trips over Snoqualmie Pass and 600 miles of travel on slick roads.

This was the view from my “office” on Tuesday:

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These are from Thanksgiving day at my parents and brother’s place (they live a couple hundred feet from each other):

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The picture below is also from Thanksgiving day on the farm and is to supplement this post. This is the old pull type combine parked behind the barn I was talking about:

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Quote of the day–Xenia

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Why did he marry his dead wife’s brother-in-law’s sister?

Daughter Xenia
November 25, 2010
[I wanted to answer, “Because there was a shortage of women, this is cattle country, and there were no sheep.” But there were too many relatives around listening in and I just said there was a shortage of women.

This came about because while at my brother’s place for Thanksgiving Xenia wanted to know how she was related to some guy that looked and acted kind of like a caricature of some inbred from West Virginia. It was complicated and we couldn’t help but amuse ourselves by giving her all the details of the two sisters marrying the two brothers from another family, the brother and sister marrying the sister and brother from another family (one was married in ‘45 and the other in ‘54), and the double cousins that lived in the same house. Even though she was drawing and labeling a graph she said her head was about to explode so we stopped before trying to put the lines on the tree to show that if you go back far enough her mother and I are cousins from…West Virginia.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Doug Huffman

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When they left this afternoon, Randy said Dan insisted on being the last one out out of the house. He locked the door behind him ending 62 years of residence on the place.

Doug Huffman
October 30, 2010
[In the spring of 1927 our Dad was not quite four years old but he remembers coming back to Idaho with his Aunt Pet and Uncle Walt. His mother had died two years earlier from T.B. and his aunt and uncle took him to California for the winter while his Dad, Cecil, stayed in Idaho to complete the purchase of a new home and farm land. When they drove by his Uncle Frank’s home he asked why they didn’t stop because that was where they had lived before they went to California. His Aunt, Frank’s and his mother’s sister, told him they had a new home. They drove on for almost another mile and as they went around a bend in the road his aunt pointed out a house on the hill above them. “That’s our new home”, she told him. Although none of the original buildings from 1927 are still standing there are newer building visible in the map image below. On the left side of the image is the location of my Great Uncle Frank’s home. On the right side of the image there is sort of a ghost road that makes a bend through some trees to the east of some buildings. That bend in the road was the site of the county road until the early 1970’s and is the bend in the road where Dad first saw the place that was to be his home for 18 years when he was growing up.

Cecil, Walt, Pet, and Ollie (first a hired assistant and later Cecil’s wife), dad and his three cousins lived there from 1927 until 1945. The land was in another family’s hands until 1949 when Dan (Randy’s father—see the quote above) bought the land.

It’s bit off topic for this post, but Dan was a Jeep driver for General George Patten during much of WW II. I sometimes wanted to ask him about that but it always seems like there wasn’t the time to do that.

My brothers and I heard stories of the dogs, cats, cows, horses, pigs, crops, trucks, cars, and tractors of when Dad grew up on the farm. We lived about two miles west on another piece of property that Mom and Dad bought when I was five years old. A few times Dan asked Dad to come over and help fix or inspect the windmill or ask a question about the granary or another of the original structures that my grandfather and great uncle built.

In the late 1960’s Mom and Dad bought the land to the north of Great Uncle Frank’s place. It is on the northern end of this land that I build the Taj Mahal to manufacture and store the explosives for Boomershoot. The participants at Boomershoot park their vehicles and set up their shelters and shooting positions on the land adjoining the NE corner. This piece of land was given to my Grandmother Huffman, Aunt Pet, and Aunt Ada (sisters) by their father (and my Great Grandfather Carey) in about 1916.

In the map image below the shooters berm for Boomershoot is just under the “ce’ in “Nez Perce”. Shooters face almost directly south and shoot into a hillside that isn’t clearly a hillside in this image:

The pictures below are from about two weeks ago when my brothers and I walked around the farm where my Dad grew up:

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This windmill was assembled and erected by my grandfather Huffman and Great Uncle Walt in 1940. It supplied the water to the farm until about 1972. Dad plans to restore it to functional condition.

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This is part of the concrete foundation for the windmill.

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This is the grain elevator Dad, Grandpa, and Uncle Walt built in the granary which they also built.

We found old books in the original carpenter shop which had copyright dates in the 1930’s. One book that I opened had the names of my Dad’s cousins in it. Dad frequently told us stories of some of  the things his Dad and Uncle Walt built in the shop. Things like Christmas gifts and a bobsled. Dad built a carpenter shop on our farm and when I climbed the ladder for the first time, a little over two weeks ago, into the shop my grandfather built, I knew my Dad had modeled his carpenter shop on the older one. And I recalled the bobsled Dad had built for my brothers and I.

Grandpa Huffman and Uncle Walt sold the farm because my Grandpa had heart problems caused by Scarlet Fever from much earlier and he wasn’t able to do the work the farm required. Grandpa spent the remainder of his life in California working as a carpenter, in a furniture store owned by one of his brothers, and was retired for several years before dying of a heart attack when I was about 8 years old.

Last Friday brother Doug and his wife Julie purchased the land with the buildings from Dan and his wife. The land on the south side of the road, also belonging to Dan and his wife, was purchased by my other brother Gary. This morning wife Barbara and I purchased the land from on the NW corner of South Road and Meridian Road from Randy and his wife. This land is directly south of the Boomershoot site and is part of the potential impact zone if stray bullets go over the hillside we shoot into.

This land deal is another reason for the light blog posting the last month or so.

It actually makes me as much sad as it does happy to have the land back in the family again. As Dan, Randy, and the rest of their family cleaned out the buildings and auctioned off the belongings they wouldn’t have a place to keep in their homes in town I imagined what it would feel like to do the same to the farm where I grew up. I could imagine what it would feel like to have Dad walk through the house we built when I was growing up. To have him lock the door and give the keys to someone else would be very, very painful. I know it was painful for Dan, Randy and their families. They put a lot of thought into it and rationally it was the proper decision to sell the place—Dan and his wife are at an age they can’t maintain the place anymore and have lived in town for the last few years.

They said it made it a little easier for them that it was a farm family and neighbors they had known for many decades but it was still a very hard and sad decision. They plan to come back in the spring and take pictures of the crops growing and I expect they will come back near harvest time to see that too. I know I would. And they will be welcome anytime.—Joe]