Thursday is thirsty.

--After staying up until 4:45 this morning watching Netflix videos to keep myself on my night shift schedule, I got a call at 10:00am from an assistant district attorney, who wanted to discuss a family violence case that I had filed. She was shocked that I had put my cell phone number on the cover sheet, and apologized for waking me. I told her that I would much rather be awakened by an ADA with a question than have the question go unanswered, and have the case suffer. I don't think she fully believed me.

--I woke up with a completely stopped up nose. I took a Zyrtec (well, a store brand cetirizine HCL, anyway), and feel so much better, now. I think that pill cost me a bit less than 50¢. It's good for 24 hours. No side effects. I like living in the future.

--Slate is putting up a graphic depiction of deaths by gunfire since the Sandy Hook shooting. Even though I'm politically opposed to the editor, there. I find the map pretty interesting to look at. Looks like Chicago has a problem.

--Speaking of graphic depictions, check out the weird wind here in north Texas.









Depending upon which end of US Hwy 82 you're on, the wind may be blowing briskly at 20mph from the north in Wichita Falls, or freshly from the south at 10 mph in Gainesville, which is about 80 miles to the east.

--It's really nice outside. I'm going to do some outside work today. To believe the East Coast-obsessed newsies, though, the Only People Who Matter will be buried in a blizzard today.

--This past weekend, my good friend Joe Speer, proprietor of Jackalope Rifle Company, was coming through town, and dropped off my elder daughter's custom Mossberg Chuckster model 620K .22 WMRF single shot bolt rifle. He had done it as a project rifle, starting with a heavily used old rifle, and did some lovely things. The barrel and receiver are reblued, the stock was refinished, a purple heartwood stock end tip was put on, an ebony pistolgrip cap was put on, and a buttpad was installed. He filled the wallowed-out sling swivel holes, and the hole where the tang sight (sadly not to be found!) had been ripped out. You can just see the wood plugs, but you cannot detect them by touch. The inletting is very good. The trigger is quite good. My daughter has something that I'd never had given me: a custom rifle.

Joe and I and my dad all went over to Big City to Cabella's, and found that there not only wasn't a round of .22 WMRF to be had, but due to panic buying, there was almost not a single round of any common caliber. But Joe, a rather strident fan of the .30-'06, happily reported that there were decent stocks left of his favorite caliber, even in the Remington Core Lokt 150g and 165g load-- arguably the single most popular load for that caliber. Smirking, Joe said, "That's because a man with a .30-'06 doesn't panic."

--I need to order a part from Numerich for my daughter's best friend's Ruger Mark II safety. Her dad bought it, took it apart to clean it like the good former Marine he was, and put it back together and couldn't get it to work. He gave to me to fix. Oops. We've got Missing Parts Syndrome. He's a great guy, and his daughter's like family for us, so I'm happy to buy the part for him.

--While we were running around, we let Joe's dog Butcher run around in Mom's back yard. Mom got home and texted me that the dog was gone. We bailed out of Cabella's and began the not-insignificant drive home, slightly panicking. Mom called me back. Butch was sitting on my front porch, patiently watching Joe's vehicle to make sure that he didn't go anywhere without his companion. I called off the search party, and we stopped and got some Whataburger. Apparently, they don't have those everywhere. Odd. Here, they're on every corner, seems like.

--My beloved burr grinder broke. We're getting another. In the meantime, I'm drinking coffee that came pre-ground, out of a big can. Huh. So this is how you people live, is it?

--I watched Shooter last night on NetFlix. It's almost unrecognizable as an adaptation of Stephen Hunter's great thriller Point Of Impact. I'm still amazed at how Hollywood flouts the rules, and lets a violent felon like Wahlberg handle every gun that they've got in their inventory. I'm amazed that BATFEIEIO gives him special dispensation to do so. But it's okay; he's on the side of the angels now*.  I could stand to see that Kate Mara chick a bit more, though. As learned in Starship Troopers, if you're going to completely stray from the book which the movie is based upon, you might as well put some hawt chicks in the flick.

--Speaking of the Robert A Heinlein novel Starship Troopers, someone has put up the unabridged audio book of it on YouTube, and it's a guilty pleasure to listen to while tending to other things around the house or while driving.  It won't last very long; someone will cry copyright violation**.

--It was getting kind of late last night when my wife and I decided upon pork loin for dinner. We thawed the three-pound hunk of meat in about 13 minutes, split it sagitally, dusted it with salt, pepper, thyme, and garlic powder, and coated it with olive oil. Then we put it into the oven at 350 for an hour, and programmed the oven to turn itself off. Then we went to the store. We returned to a fantastic dinner, with which we prepared mushroom gravy and peas and carrots. Total prep time for everything couldn't have broken 20 minutes. Again-- the future? She is tasty.

--When I learned that a DWI Third Or More case that I had filed got a conviction, I was pleased. When I saw that the driver got several years of prison time, I was impressed. The driver had been represented by a very good attorney, and the evidence, while solid, was circumstantial. This was a first felony DWI for the driver, and no one saw the driver actually driving. However, the investigator did a fine job. :) I sent an email congratulating the prosecutorial team for excellent work. I don't know if it makes their day to hear praise from a lowly street cop, but it makes my day to get positive feedback from them. Believe it or not, I don't believe that most of those people are in it for the money, nor the power.

--My wife and the girls have infected me with an earworm. Those Walk Off The Earth people, who got internet fame for doing a superb version of Somebody That I Used To Know using five band members and one acoustic guitar, have put up a new song. It's one-take live acapella dubstep version*** of Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble".  I have never taken anything remotely beatbox to be a serious artistic style, but dang if their visiting artist ("KRNFX") doesn't actually kinda impress me as having a talent.

I stress that this normally would not be my cup of tea. Uh, it's just something the kids had on. :rolleyes:

_________________________________________
*By which we mean to say, he wants to ban all guns.

**And well they should. The people who produced and published that audiobook deserve to get paid for their work. I'm a fan of defending intellectual property rights. But, yeah, I listened to the audiobook all the way through. Does that make me a hypocrite?

***Does that even make sense?

Monday this and Monday that.

--Car adverts are certainly different than they used to be. Try reading the ad copy for the Pierce Arrow Motor Cars, from 1919. It just zings off the page, doesn't it?

--I bought a riding lawn mower yesterday for $160. It runs really well. This is my first riding lawn mower, since using the tired old Montgomery Ward model that my parents bought when I was about 9. This one is a Murray.

--It won't fit into the shed. I'm going to have to build a little shed for it, with a wide enough door. 

--I finally cleared my desk of the huge number of cases that I had on it. Maybe now I can get some good patrol done.

--My elder daughter is hassling me about going shooting. I think that I'll make that happen.

--My younger daughter got a ridiculous device for Christmas that allows her to make miniature pies on lolly pop sticks. She makes and rolls out the dough, and then cuts out little discs of it, and puts in pie filling (she sometimes makes it herself out of berries), and then cooks them, 6 at a time, with a waffle-iron-like apparatus. They're called "Pie Pops." They're silly. They're tasty.

--My father got a new truck, in which we brought home the riding mower. That's one of the nicest vehicles that I've ever been in.

--We detailed my old Saturn on Saturday. It looks pretty good. I need to get a new tire for it, so that it will pass inspection, so that I can more easily sell it. I couldn't believe how expensive even the cheapest tires are. $50 for the cheapest that I found, plus $28 in balancing, mounting, tax, tire disposal. $78 for a tire that's going on a car that I won't keep a week. I walked out. Maybe I'll actually buy a used tire. I haven't done than since I was a teenager, and even then, I knew that it was not a good idea. This old car has a salvage title, and I reckon it'll bring about $1000. It served us pretty well, actually. We bought it in 2003 for $5200 out the door. It was two years old then.

--I wish that all my guns had finishes as shiny and well-preserved as those in Django: Unchained.

--Remember that we still have troops in Afghanistan, for no reason that I can ascertain. This is over four years after our current President took office, and nearly four years after he won a Nobel Prize for peace. Why is he getting a pass on this?

--My elder daughter read the above over my shoulder, and said, "There's never a reason to go to war!" That stopped me down. I limited my response to 15 minutes. I hope she thinks about what I told her. She's a very smart kid, but I had no idea how sheltered she was.

--The news is full of stuff about a Notre Dame football player named Manti Te'o, who was this past fall a sensation because he played splendidly, despite his girlfriend passing away. Now we find out that she was not a real person, and he claims to have been pranked. There is rampant speculation as to how much he really knew.   Yet none of the newsies are openly addressing the issue of what motivation a single guy in an uber-masculine male-dominated sport would have had, to invent a mysterious long-distance relationship with a fake girlfriend.  It seems to me that the most likely answer is also a tragic story, too.

Some this and some that.

--Mad Max: Beyond PaintBall.

--I read Hunger Games  on my Kindle, and it's actually a pretty good story. A quick read, I got the second one. You can buy the electronic "Boxed Set" of three, but it's pointless to do, because it saves you nothing.

--I sent Tam some pics and questions about a recent .32 that I handled on a recent call. I'm eager to see what she comes up with.

--We got rain tonight in one of our usual May thunderstorms. "Usual," but surprisingly absent this May, until now.

--Also absent is my usual May funk. As I mentioned, I got an A this semester in grad school. One at a time. I should go sit for practicals or something.

--Neither of my girls are doing anything productive in school. They did all the last of their testing in early May, and the teachers are calling it in from here. I do not approve, despite the high showing that both my kids (4th and 8th graders, respectively) gave.

--Remember when, as a young person making videos in the back yard, you ended up with a shaky, completely amateurish, virtually-unwatchable thing? Comes now the future, when two girls with a decent hand-held camera and some knowledge of digital editing can put together a homemade video that is far better than 99% of the dreck that I have seen presented as professional music videos. Like the best music videos, this one tells a little story, about a narcissist and her friend. Most amusing.

--I first heard that song (AWOLNation's "Sail") presented behind Jeb Corliss's amazing BASE-jumping video, which is also worth watching. But I'm sure that you'd already seen that.

--I seem to have missed this verse in the bible during Sunday school as a kid.


--‎"Tardigrades are able to survive in extreme environments that would kill almost any other animal. Some can survive temperatures of close to absolute zero, or 0 Kelvin (−273 °C (−459 °F)),[7] temperatures as high as 151 °C (304 °F), 1,000 times more radiation than other animals,[8] and almost a decade without water.[9] Since 2007, tardigrades have also returned alive from studies in which they have been exposed to the vacuum of outer space for a few days in low earth orbit." I read aloud to my wife.
"So that's what's going to take over the world, some day," she said.

Aww. Water Bears.

Thursday bits.

--My soon-to-be 10 year-old got excited about her upcoming birthday being celebrated. She recalled having heard my wife and me discuss the feasibility of taking her into the land of Big City to the Great Wolf Lodge for a weekend. Apparently, this is a really cool place for young kids. Indoor year-round waterpark. Log cabin rooms. Rustic  bunk beds and furniture made from hewn logs. Activities. Kid food. Sounds kind of fun. Uh, not at almost $500 for a single weekend night. The Wife and I had this hypothetical conversation about 10 months ago. Kids never forget. We need to speak in Spanish, more.

--Guess who got appointed to make the call, and to explain it to the disappointed kid? Why am I always the bad guy? 

--I explained that I had bought a running V8 van with cold a/c and a nifty luggage rack for that price, last year. (Which we've been using the heck out of.) I told her that she needed to be able to have something at the end of the weekend, to keep. So of course I'm getting her a cell phone. The gift that keeps on billing me.

--That sucker is going to be bulletproofed, lemme  tell you.

--I haven't gotten out to the range this spring, yet. Given the beaut weather that we have, this is criminal.

--My partner is doing a lot better, and is recuperating at home, where he could actually get some real rest. Seems that some of the perceived slowness in his recovery was from the protocol-dictated course of anti-seizure meds that they gave him.  Well, hell, of course a neurotransmitter inhibitor is going to make a person slow. They changed recipes, and he got a lot better. Soon he won't take any of that. Talking to him, he looks and sounds great. He gets tired, though. He's running on at least 5 cylinders. But he's got 8, at least. Maybe 12.

--Sure wish he'd been out with me on a tough call last night.

--With the temperate weather and rains and sun, I should be mowing twice a week. I'm averaging once every 10+ days. Lawn looks shaggy. I run the risk of being the roughest in the neighborhood. I don't want to be That Guy. I  also don't want to have the nicest lawn in the neighborhood, either.

--Tomorrow, I stay at the fire house. This will be my first time staying there overnight. William Dafoe springs to mind.

--I've been carrying my new 637, newly back from my gunsmith, in my custom 3R holster a lot lately. It's  a good fit. I need to review both.

--My prof in Homeland Security said that none of the crime originally reported in the SuperDome in NOLA during Katrina was ever substantiated. Anyone have any good sources on the issue?

--Yet again I find proof that 80% of the calls for service in a given small town are made by 5% or less of the people in it.

--You think that your spouse is giving you a hard time about something, and you come across a couple that is dog-cussing each other, and each other's kids. Then you realize that your spouse is actually pretty cool.

--I got accused recently at a civil disturbance of being against the 2nd amendment, because I told a man who had completely lost his composure to stand away from the weapons on the scene. I didn't get mad, but I set him straight: "I'm all about supporting your Constitutional rights, bud. But you called me here to diffuse a situation that you blew up. Can we try it my way for a few minutes?"--I  am  reminded of the kid who climbs a tree to retrieve his kite, can't get down, calls the fire department  to get him down, and won't let go of his kite to get on the ladder.