The picture below was taken from the sidewalk across the street from my house a few minutes ago. That cloud is smoke from a fire about 50 miles away.
Click on the picture for a higher resolution version.
This fire made the news:
Category Archives: Home Life
AOL buys Wildseed
A friend of mine, Eric Engstrom who I quote occasionally, just sold his company to AOL. As Ry put it in an email to me, he “escapes again”. Ry and I both used to work for Eric at Chromium Communications. I was his first employee at Chromium. Chromium morphed into Gitwit and then into Wildseed in a series of restructurings. The details of the sale aren’t public but I hope Eric gets enough out of it to pay off his debts and at least get back the money he put into it–which was a lot.
IPSC today
It’s been months since I went to an IPSC match. The stars just wouldn’t align themselves to allow it with the Boomershoot, troubles at work and home life all contributing factors. Finally there is nothing holding me back except a gun that is filled with lint and dust from being carried so much without use or cleaning and virtually no practice during that time. I’ll clean it when I get to the range. The match itself will be “practice”. I’m hoping I’ll be in the top half of the competitors.
Off again
Barb and I have been home for a few hours now and we are about to leave again for a few more days of vacation. Earlier this week we visited Washington State (Benton City), Oregon (Madras and Mt. Hood), Nevada (McDermitt, Virginia City, and Tahoe), and California (Carmichael).
Barb asked why I talk about the “compound” and my “arsenal” in previous posts about leaving home with the kids in charge. It’s because back in the late 90’s when I worked at Microsoft every time some gun owner would get arrested the police would pile all his guns and ammo on the front lawn for the media to take pictures of. And the news people would talk about his “arsenal”. If the guy was in a little bit of a rural area and had a few outbuildings then they would say he had a “compound”. It became a joke with the Microsoft Gun Club. The media was choosing words to demonize gun owners. We adapted the words and made fun of them. I am just continuing in that fashion. Just like the “Red-necked, knuckle dragging, Neanderthal” subtitle. You neutralize the people who attempt to demonize you buy adopting words prior to them using them on you. So…
Again the kids, dogs, and cat are in charge of the “arsenal” and the “compound” while we are gone. Xenia will post the Quote of the Day until I get Internet access again.
Quote of the day–Nancy Amos
You’ve got to be kidding. They said Joe was dishonest? Joe is the most honest person I know.
Nancy Amos
I can’t believe the timing
Barb and I got back into civilization tonight and found, after some difficulty, an Internet connection. Much to my surprise I found this email waiting for me (magazine and writer name deleted for now):
—–Original Message—–
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2005 6:21 AM
To: JoeH@boomershoot.org
Subject: an interview with XXXX magazineMy name is XXXX XXXX and I am a freelance writer for XXXX magazine.
We are working on a story about people who got fired for blogging. If
you were fired for blogging (it was unclear from the one post I saw on
another website) would you be interested in doing an interview? If so,
email me back with your name, age, where you live, what you wrote that
got you fired and where you got fired from.Thanks.
This is a national magazine everyone with two or more functional brain cells has heard of. I wrote them back saying I would be glad to be interviewed and will send them the news release when it goes out tomorrow afternoon. I also put my previous employer on the Bcc: line.
Quote of the day–Dow Scott
Joe dishonest?
Dow Scott
Vacation.
Barb and I are off on a on well deserved vacation now. I’ll have one of my kids post the quote of the day until I get internet connection again. Have a great weekend everyone!
Postal pistol match
Here is a link to Match #1. Swatting flies, standing, un-supported, at 30 feet with your handgun. Results due August 8th.
I’ll be on vacation a lot of this time and not sure I be able to participate. But I’m going to try.
Geocaching on Moscow Mountain
Barb and I went to Moscow Mountain for some geocaching this morning. It was a most successful and rewarding trip. First we replaced the Moscow Mountain High ammo can with the bullet hole in it:
Then we found Moscow Mountain Higher which we were not able to find on our last trip out on June 4th:
More pictures can be found here.
Xenia is coming home
I’m off to pick her up in Colfax. She has been gone for two weeks. We really missed her. Everytime she has called she says she misses her cat but never anything about missing her parents. I offered to bring her some of his body parts when I pick her up.
Update: No hug for me when I picked her up. No hug while we were at Wal-Mart. No hug when we arrived at home–except for her cat. After her cat got a hug then I got something that technically could be considered a hug lasting a few milliseconds. Does anyone have a pattern for making a pair of gloves, size large, out of the hide of one large domestic cat?
Job security has it’s risks as well as it’s rewards
I received this in the latest news email from the University of Idaho here in Moscow where I live.
Lawrence Johnston, a UI physics professor emeritus, traveled to Washington, D.C. this week to recall the 1945 detonation of the first nuclear weapon. The July 14 symposium marked the 60th anniversary of Trinity, the first manmade nuclear explosion. Johnston witnessed the successful early morning test July 16, 1945, and the later use of nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. He is believed to be the only person to witness all three. He lives in Moscow with his wife, Millie.
Johnson, if I recall correctly, invented and received a patent on the detonator for one of the bombs. He also, again if I recall correctly, built a lot of the instrumentation used to record the effects in the planes that dropped the bombs. And since they hadn’t asked him to teach anyone else how to run the instrumentation when it came time to drop “the big ones” on Japan he was the only person that knew how to operate the equipment. Whoops! He’s was required to go on both missions.
Wolfman’s Cabin
A few months ago I was asked to help a couple of college kids blow up a car for a movie they were making. Ry and I agreed and then as the time grew near things changed for the kids and the project fell apart. I still chat online with one of them occasionally and he has a new project he is working on. It’s called Wolfman’s Cabin. It’s described as a horror movie and I don’t like horror movies. But from talking to the director this would be a movie I would probably see anyway. It’s more than just horror…
James is home
James came back from his visit with friends in Oregon. He brought a bunch of fish with him. They went fishing in a nearby river and James did his first successful fishing. Did he like fishing? “It was boring when the fish weren’t biting. When there was one on the line it was kinda fun.”
Had we, his parents suggested he should try fishing he would have put on his shirt that says, in big letters across the front:
Keep out of direct sunlight
Then he would have glared at us as if we had suggested he give up his video games.
Rifle postal match results
I suck.
As I stated the other day I’m participating in the postal match put on by Analog Kid over at Random Nuclear Strikes. I didn’t even both to score the target. But here are the results of the first contest:
I was using a AR-15 carbine. The larger holes around the orange dots were from something else a few years ago. Just the smaller holes in the 8.5″ x 11″ paper are important. I got a few points but hardly enough to matter. Another couple additional data points–I started with an empty gun, loaded magazine on the table in front of me and from the time I moved to pick up the gun until the last shot was 55 seconds.
Pathetic. 10 shots from 50 yards, “rapid fire”, open sights, center-fire rifle, offhand. I have hit 18″ targets 7 times out of 10 at 200 yards offhand before (“infinite time between shots). This is terrible performance. I need to practice more.
Updated web sites
For local people only.
I had severely neglected a couple web sites starting sometime before the Boomershoot and just now got them all up to date. Match results in particular were way behind. That has been fixed. Check out the following for new stuff:
Barb gets a new job for 3X her old pay
I can announce it now. She should have turned in her resignation at her old job 30 minutes ago.
Barb has comes through for our family again. Numerous times in the past I have quit my steady paying job to work for a startup, some of them my own, other times someone else’s and Barb had to pick up the slack in our finances. Our move to Moscow in fact was because Barb got a job here for 2X her pay in Sandpoint. And it is that same employer who is now is going to pay her 3X what she was earning in Colfax. She is a hot commodity right now and we have suspected she was underpaid for a quite a while but we didn’t know the extent. It’s not quite as blatant as you might think because she was working part time at both the Sandpoint and Colfax jobs. But even ignoring the benefits she now gets the raw dollars per hour increase was 15%, plus the sign-on bonus, plus the $1600/year educational stipend. It’s great to be married to someone that can more than pull her own weight when needed.
James and Xenia call home
James and Xenia left town last week just as Kim was moving back in (merely a coincidence). James went ‘camping’ with friends at some cabin in Oregon. Xenia went to summer camp and is then off to Montana with her boyfriend and parents for a couple weeks.
James called and left a message on my cell phone while we were in the mountains far from any cell phone service. The message was, “Who’s taking care of the dogs?” Nothing about if we survived our Jeep adventure. Nothing about how he misses us. Nothing about how he hates the outdoors unless it is with someone other than his parents. Nope. He wanted to know about the dogs.
Xenia is not allowed to use her cell phone at camp. However she snuck off to her cabin for a few minutes on Tuesday and called–to ask about her cat.
Breast cancer info
Last night I read this news:
…the link between breast cancer and bras is slightly more convincing than the link between smoking and lung cancer. They speculate that the cause is restriction of lymph circulation and resulting long-term exposure of cells to toxins, but whether this is the true mechanism or not is pretty irrelevant to the facts above.
I’ve been telling Barb to forget the bra for over 30 years now. No luck. Pointing this news out to her last night was no more convincing. [heavy sigh]
I found this news on the web site of our ISP in a short article by Monica. Monica has long been someone I found exceptional attractive. Sure, she is probably as old as I am but she has the body shape that never fails to get my attention. She appears to be is almost painfully shy but I enjoy talking to her. I wonder if she has taken the advice on the bra more to heart that Barb…
I needed to talk to her about something today anyway. I’ll check things out while I’m there.
New geocache
While we were out in the mountains we placed a geocache. The listing was just approved.