Friday Posts

Is it even worth posting anything on a Friday? I'm not sure anybody actually reads blogs on Friday's besides me. Other then myself and a couple of others, it seems that most bloggers don't post on Fridays...

What do you think, post or no post on Fridays?

Posted by: Contagion at 04:00 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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I'm a bad blog neighbor.

It appears my little “vacation” from the blogosphere has taken its toll. It has been 11 days since I last actively blogged, both reading and writing. Now I have a guilty feeling as if I’ve abandoned friends and family. This honestly is not the case. I was just really busy.

Excuse 1:

I had my favorite re-enactment of the season on the 15th and 16th. Some of you may recall that I got engaged at this event AND had part of my honeymoon there. ItÂ’s also the last event of the season for us. That means we wonÂ’t see any of our re-enactment friends for almost 6 months. IÂ’m close with a lot of these people, but like in the blogosphere, we donÂ’t live near one another. Some of them travel in excess of 12 hours to get to some of the events we do.

Excuse 2:

My place oÂ’ employment sent me to Texas for 4 days. It was not a pleasant trip, and I so wished I could have gotten online at night to blog about it and to read your blogs to get my mind off everything. Unfortunately, I donÂ’t own a laptop to take with me. Even if I did, the sucky hotel stuck me in a room that didnÂ’t have internet access.

Excuse 3:

With all my traveling around, I had to spend some quality time with my wife. Sure, we did the re-enactment together, but during the day, I was either talking to the public or fighting in the battle. We didnÂ’t spend any real time together, and contrary to my surly and uncouth appearance, I know that if I want to stay happy I do need to spend some time entertaining my wife in matters outside the bedroom. Although usually the first leads to the latter, which is yet more motivation for me.

The problem with spending all the time away is that I am so behind in all the blogs that IÂ’m not even going to try to catch up. There are hurricanes, politics, jokes, emotions, complaints, rants and even the occasional profession of pure emotion out there. For me to be able to go back 11 days and read them all would require me to take a lot of vacation time, and I canÂ’t do that. This means I am sure some of you have written brilliant pieces that I will be worse for not reading.

So if any of you have written a post that you are really proud of or if you read someone elseÂ’s post that you feel that it would be a crime against the blogosphere for me to not read, please the url in the comments for me.

My normal smart arse and generally unwanted comments will resume in all of my regular reads starting tomorrow. That reminds me, IÂ’m getting ready redo my frequent visits list, if I visit your site often and you donÂ’t see your site on my list, also leave a comment. I tend to forget where IÂ’ve been and what IÂ’ve done.

Posted by: Contagion at 07:30 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Shooting and electronics.

Sunday was a good day. After getting a restful 6 hours of sleep, I woke up to my wife advising me that the DVD player is giving her a “Mecha Error”. That is what the display said, “Mecha Error”. At first, I thought that maybe something happened in the Middle East and the center of the Islamic religion was having issues. Then my sleep groggy brain realized that it said “Mecha” not “Mecca” and that there is no way my DVD player would know if something did happen there. After looking at it for a while, turning it on and off and trying some percussive maintenance (i.e. pounding on the case with your fist), I decided I needed to unplug it and open it up.

Yep, it was broke, as soon as I picked it up the tray that holds the 5-disc changer just slide right open. It should not do that. I opened it up to see if it was something, I could fixÂ… nope motor fried. Time to go buy a new DVD player. Off we run to electronic stores looking for a new DVD player. When we arrived we noticed that I could get a home theater system w/DVD for just a little more then I was willing to spend on a good DVD player, so we did some more shopping and ended up spending over twice as much as I had originally intended. I kept deciding if I was going to get a home theater system, it needed more gadgets and functions.

When we got home, Graumagus was there. We planned to go shooting, he arrived a little earlier then I thought he would, but thatÂ’s okay. He helped me carry the home theater system in the house. Then it was off to go throw lead down the range. Fortunately, the range wasnÂ’t too far from my house. Just as we arrived, I realized I had not grabbed my powder horn and I didnÂ’t think I had enough powder in my shooting box for the day. Grau was about to make fun of my stupidity when it dawned on him that he left his powder horn in his van back at my house. After making the trip home and back, we were able to get in an hour and a half of shooting. Since we were practicing, we only shot at 25 yards. My weapon was my .75 caliber Brown Bess smooth bore musket, for those of you that have never fired a gun, let alone a flintlock, and especially a smooth boreÂ… 25 yards may seem a short distance, but thatÂ’s a hard shot when you havenÂ’t had a lot of practice.

It wasn’t the tightest cluster I could have gotten, but I had five and a half of the rounds in the black. All but two of my shots would have been a kill, one was low and right and the other didn’t even hit the backdrop. I flinched really badly when I fired that round. All I know is that large caliber round balls make a lot of noise flying through a forest. Speaking of large caliber round balls, I still love getting to the range and hearing someone exclaim, “God your balls are huge!” It just puts a smile on my face.

Since my musket doesn’t have sites, I have to aim along the barrel. The barrel is wider at the breech then at the muzzle; I have to improvise how I aim. This includes attempting to use my bayonet lug as a front site. This makes me constantly miss to the right. By the end of the day, I had compensated enough to be able to hit the center by aiming to the left of it by a good 6 inches. As we were leaving Grau made the observation that the reason I pull to the right is because, “(I) carry my heavy arse shooting box with (my) right arm making it shorter then (my) left.” My shooting box weighs about 20 pounds; each bullet is 1.26 ounces of lead.

I was home in time to watch the Viking/FalconÂ’s game. Grau helped me dispose of some extra Beer I had on hand. After the game Grau took off and I started assembling the home theater system. I discovered that doing this while I had been drinking probably was not the best idea IÂ’ve had. Electricity, alcohol and me donÂ’t make a good combination. No, I didnÂ’t get hurt and the system works just fine. It just took longer then it should have. In addition, there was trouble hooking up our digital cable.

I’m just going to say now that Insight Communications sucks! The digital cable box they gave me doesn’t have the digital output to run to the home theater system. When I called them today to find out what was going on they advise me that in order to get “true digital” service I need a different box that costs $15.00 more a month. $15.00 more just so I can have my Digital Surround Sound? That is bullshite! Add that to the fact, they have raised our rates over $11.00 a month since May, and they wonder why people are leaving them in droves.

So this means I have faux digital? ItÂ’s like digital in that it costs more, but it isnÂ’t really digital because you canÂ’t have any of the features of digital. If I didnÂ’t watch a lot of channels you canÂ’t get with out a service, IÂ’d drop cable all together. IÂ’ve looked into dishes, but IÂ’m not convinced that they are any better.

Needless to say, IÂ’m not going to have surround sound coming from my cable, only from my DVDÂ’s. I canÂ’t justify paying an additional $15.00 a month just so I can have better sound.

Posted by: Contagion at 12:49 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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