OldIronFan

The land around me that is being developed, at an alarmingly fast rate, has not been farmed for at least a decade, if ever. Most of that land was either owned by a farmer who has been gone for at least a decade or two and the land was left in Family Land Trust but not actively farmed or was owned by a large land trust for the purpose of speculation/wealth. The only farms that still exist in a ~40 mile radius of me are 30~100 acre hobby farms with less than 100 head of livestock, a few hay fields, or a few 10~20 acre fields of row crop. At least here in my area of Mid TN the ground is too rocky or the hills to extreme to row crop for food production, efficiently or economically at least. The ~30 acre field behind me had soybeans 7 or 8 years ago. That was the last time it was planted. The last planting was left unharvested and the field was returned to weed/brush growth. The cost of the diesel to harvest the beans was greater than the yield from the field would have paid. I think he has partially bush hogged it twice in the last 7 years. Not a huge loss in my opinion, soybeans are horrible and the more fields of those we loose the better off we are. Along those lines our, now sold, family farm was up in Robertson County and in the middle of lots of small to medium sized tobacoo farms. With already low and further decreasing demand for tobacco products much of that land is being repurposed. Some of it went to corn or hay, some of it went to developers, some of it went to livestock but there is a lot of it that is just not actively farmed for any purpose anymore. I don't think the blame is solely on home development even though it hurts to see pretty woods and fields turned into subdivisions.

Back when I had a decent salsa garden (tomatoes, tomatillos, onions, garlic, multiple peppers) I made upwards of 100 pints of salsa every year. Some went to family but we tended to go through at least a jar a week in our house alone. Since I had the water bath canning setup I threw cucumbers into the mix and made ~20 or so jars of pickles annually. I ended up getting pretty good with jams and jellies as well. Friends and family always wanted my jars of pepper jelly and Blackberry jam for Christmas every year instead of gift cards or a bottle of wine. I never got setup to pressure can so I never did try low acid veggies or meats. Now I do not have a garden and the new house is not conducive to starting one. No fences and hordes of deer, rabbit, armadillo, opossum, and skunks make it nearly impossible to keep plants alive that are not right up against the house. If they ever develop the land behind me and I have to put up a fence I might try again. I adopted the square foot gardening raised bed method for my last garden and had some great success with it. Efficient and easy maintenance as well.

A world record Walleye came out of Old Hickory Lake in 1960. In the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's it was a regular practice of northern anglers to come down to Tennessee to walleye fish in the winter to get some "warm weather" fishing in while their home lakes were frozen over. It was nothing for them to pull dozens of walleye out a day. Now there are few if any walleye left in Tennessee. There is a small population in the Caney but it is not significant by any stretch. Licenses and limits are in place for just those sorts of conservation issues. Snag fishing for paddlefish is another prime example, without a limited season and limits there would be no native populations left. Most anglers now target crappie, bass, or catfish not because they are a preferred species but but because they have breeding rates that allowed them to proliferate through extreme overfishing. There is simply not that much else left to target. Even if you are a trout fisherman in Tennessee you are not fishing natural/native populations but rather controlled hatchery spawned populations. Hatcheries paid for by the a portion of your fishing license as others have mentioned.

Or the thought of going to a retail location to stand in line to buy those paper tickets including going hours early if it was a high demand show. To explain it to the young folk. "Apple just launched the latest iPhone and each apple store only gets 100 each of them."

Oh god, trying to stay awake through another showing of the slides when any relatives came to visit. My pops had thousands taken from the window of a C130 over Vietnam, Japan, Guam, and most of the south pacific islands.

Still had three pedals no matter where the gear lever was located. Learned to drive in a 65 Chevy C10. Straight 6, 3 on the tree.

Ammo manufacturing can come with some big issues. Requirements on how much powder you can store, where you store it, how much you can have in a single location, Distance requirements from your storage location to nearby structures and roadways. If you are getting into more commercial level volumes there are a bunch of other things to consider like static discharge prevention. Things that are not a huge concern for a home reloader become a much bigger concern when you start dealing with pallets of powder kegs and primers.

3 Pedals is so rare now. Last time I took my wife's car to a place we needed to valet park I had to do it myself. The no one on the valet staff knew how to drive a manual. Or a well in general even with an electric pump. My grandparents place still had 2 active wells, one with the above hand pump and one with an electric pump out in a small pump house.

Music Videos on MTV 3 channels and no remote control on a console TV Cable Box with a rotary knob/dial (and flipping that rotary dial back and forth quickly to try to catch a glimpse of a channel you did not have!) Gas below $1.00 per gallon

I am 6'3" and bounce around between 250 to 275lbs depending on how much I have been working out. I did not fit well with the factory 93 LE seats that were in the car when I got it. I now have modified seats it it that fit me much better.

No necessarily cheap or covered by insurance but there are sources for emergency meds/antibiotics without an immediate need. https://jasemedical.com/ Is one such source. They cater to preppers, adventure travelers, international travelers, ect.

My 2wd F150 is a low mile former farm truck. The 82 year old farmer I bought it from bought it new in 06 and managed to put 62,000 miles on it going to the COOP every Saturday for supplies and meds for his Hobby Herd or dump runs. He was a wealthy retired attorney who happened to have a 60~70 head heard of beef cattle. He got rid of his cows at 78 or 79 years old. Finally sold the Farm at about 82 or 83 and moved to "town". I bought the truck from him in 2021 with 62k miles. I do know he had never owned a 4wd truck in 50 years of owning and operating that farm, always 2wd F150 short cab long bed trucks. The couple of times he did get one stuck he just pulled it out with the tractor and went on about his work, no big deal I guess when you have a couple tractors around.

This is my 3rd MX-5. It is a supercharged 97. Had another 97 (bounced it off a rock wall) and a 95 that I raced for several years before selling it. Raced a 1st gen RX-7 for a few years as well. Honestly I think the Mazdaspeed 3 would be my favorite if they had just carried the awd system from the speed 6 to it. My MX-5 needs a power steering repair before spring and my Speed 3 needs an injector seal so I have been driving the 5. Once I get the Speed 3 going again the 5 will be sold off, too many cars and not enough garage.

It really is interesting to see the change in norms. When I was young a factory 4x4 truck was a rarity. A vast majority of of trucks sold were 2wd. Now in the current full size truck marketplace the vast majority are 4wd. If you want a 2wd truck you are either buying a fleet/work truck or a small midsize truck like a Frontier, Ranger, or Canyon. AWD was virtually unheard of. Now it is also common place in sedans, crossovers, and small SUV's. I started driving at a point were cars were transitioning from mostly RWD to mostly FWD. I currently have a 2wd full size truck (F150), a FWD hatchback (Mazdaspeed 3), a RWD sports car (MX-5), a FWD Van (Mazda 5), and an AWD crossover (Forrester) in the fleet. I stole the wife's Forester last week to get to work. Snow mode and AWD made life easy. Today I took the FWD van since the roads are all but clear. I will probably drive the truck the rest of the week since it has not had any exercise in a couple weeks.

There are numerous ranging reticles available on quality mid to high end optics. Most folks handle it in that manner. No electronics, no extra parts. Once learn the reticle and the math it is fairly quick and easy to range. The tricky part is having multiple rifles and getting the same reticle and/or scope for all of them. If you are primarily a one gun shooter, no problem. If you have a safe full of long guns putting optics on all of them or learning multiple reticles gets to be a more involved or expensive process. Most hunters I know run a separate range finder or binoculars with a range finder so they can scout and range without bringing their weapon up. Also allows them to use that item for multiple game, seasons, and weapons. That way if they are taking the bow, muzzle loader, rifle, or shotgun out they have one range finder to handle it all. Most target shooters I know don't bother with a range finder as they are typically dealing with known marked ranges or at least have a pretty good estimation.

United for internet but we pay extra for increased bandwidth speed since the wife works from home pulling large amounts of code and data from off site locations or cloud storage. Company pays a stipend that covers part of that bill. We dropped Hulu Live when they jacked up their live rates a few months back. We run Netflix, the cheap Hulu, Amazon Prime, Max, and Disney+ for the paid stuff. We use Freevee, Peacock, Vudu, and occasionally Tubi on the free side. We are about to drop Disney+ since we only got it as a trial and to see a few things on it. Once we did that we seldom use it. Even with all the paid channels we have our bill is significantly cheaper than the old Internet and traditional cable plans we had. We are currently getting most of our live TV, on the rare occasion we watch it, via Peacock. I do not watch sports on TV so I have little to no use for live TV. Most of the movie watching is either Netflix or Max.

sushhhhhh. Don't tell her, or at least not the full cost. Better to break it up and say oh those are not that expensive because there are not many parts, just a tube with some cheap metal baffles inside. Last one I did I paid for my can with cash and used the card for the stamp. All she saw was a $200 charge. Pretty cheap in her eyes since she is used to much higher charges from the gun store usually.

I actually bought a legit snow blower last year. I did it for a couple of reasons. First, it was dirt cheap and used the same battery packs my other lawn equipment uses. Second, my driveway is a steep incline and is very difficult to shovel. When I bought it I joked that I fully expected to never use it. With my luck once I owned it we would never see accumulated snow again. I guess I was wrong. I looked like a Minnesota local out front with a rooster tail of snow shooting off into the air and into the yard next to the drive. I was glad to have it though and a couple of my neighbors looked fairly jealous yesterday.

7" at the house in Nolensville, drifts over 12" in some areas. Most snow I have seen here in well over a decade. My driveway is extremely steep, like 35º~40º steep. Took a good bit of effort to clear it. Only fell twice, pulled a muscle in one shoulder, and tweaked the already bad knee. Took the AWD Subaru out yesterday afternoon and local roads were not cleared but not terribly slick. The packed snow had decent traction even on plain all season tires. I had to force it to spin or slide in most cases. Love the Subaru AWD system. Work opened up today so I made my way in at 7am. Took the Subaru again. It was 2º when I left. Local side streets were actually slicker then yesterday afternoon due to the slush and snow pack actually freezing overnight. Still no issues getting into work. Once I got to the interstate it was virtually clear and 70mph+ wide open.

Submitted Jul 28, 2023 so 168 days or 24 weeks on my 30 cal can. Submitted Nov 22, 2023 or 51 days or 7 weeks and 2 days on my .338 can. I was told things are running 8~9 months right now on Form 4's May your approval come quickly!

The restaurant world was a temporary period for me. A means to the goal of getting back to school and into my real career in the engineering/manufacturing world. I enjoyed it, I could do it again, but it is a bit of a young mans game at times. I worked nights out of necessity and while I function fine doing that I did not want it long term especially on the north side of 50.

I did but it involved a return to school. My wife did and used her previous education plus some new industry specific training to make the jump. For me I quit my IT related job to start a second temporary career in the restaurant business that allowed me to work nights and return to school. I did a couple years back in school to get started in my new machining and eventual engineering role in the hard parts manufacturing world. I was experiencing extreme burnout in the IT world so I have been infinitely happier after more than 15 years in manufacturing and engineering. My work is interesting (to me), I have had some great experiences, and made some great friendships. I got to travel the world which was good at the time but eventually I changed roles so I did not have to do much traveling anymore. My wife spent 20 years in logistics and intermodal freight management. She eventually started her own business with two partners but did so at the worst possible time when the industry and the economy itself went into a major free fall. With the business failing and no good prospects for transitioning back to a role with a decent company, since no one was hiring at the time, she took a handful of database / SQL / and related IT courses. We scrapped together a few thousand dollars to allow her to take the classes. She managed to talk her way into healthcare analytics role for a major health care company in town after doing some creative spinning of her past logistics and marketing degree and employment roles. Within a year she was back to making just as much as her best year in her logistics career. Within 5 years she had more than doubled her salary, within 10 years she had tripled it. She now works as a senior project manager / product owner in the Healthcare/health insurance management data industry. She does not regret the change one bit and wishes she had done it a decade earlier. Her stress level is much lower, benefits are better, income is significantly better, and she actually likes most of her coworkers. She also is able to work 100% remote. Sort of odd that I was in IT and hated it bad enough to get out while she hated her career choice in logistics so bad she got out to go into IT but you have to find the groove that makes you happy. Her brain was built to stare at data, code, and Gantt charts. My brain was built to look a blueprints, geometric dimensioning & tolerancing, CMM reports, and G Code.

Gun shops will take as much as 50% of the sale for consignment firearms. They will also offer you as little as 40%~50% of the real value if you want to just sell a collection or individual pieces to them. They will mark them up significantly to either maximize their profit or leave them room to mark down if the item is slow to move off the shelf. They do not want stagnant inventory. There are fewer and fewer shops that wish to deal in used guns, especially older used guns, these days. That is especially true of the bigger and flashier stores. Your best bet is to find a knowledgeable family friend that can help value the items and assist with selling them. I have done this for two estates. I assigned a value to the items, highlighted some of the rarer or more valuable items they might wish to keep in the family, made fair offers on a few items I wanted to keep myself, and helped them sell the remainder to more distant relatives that were not beneficiaries in the estate. In one of those situations the friend gave me one of the items I had made an offer on as thanks for my help. In the other I bought two of the items at a discount and was treated to a nice steak dinner as thanks for the help. I did not expect any of it since I was just helping friends out but it was appreciated. Just be on the lookout for "friends" that want to take advantage of the situation by either under valuing or skimming off the choice pieces. Take a full inventory of serial numbers, brands, and models engraved on the items prior to having outsiders look at the collection. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet of the items no matter how you decide to handle the collection. Update the spread sheet with values or dispositions as they happen but at least you are starting with a full list of the serial numbers and have something to look back at if there are issues that pop up months down the road.

Leroy chilling after some ball time. Leroy hanging with his girlfriend Daisy from next door. Leroy patiently waiting for his mama Leroy giving up on mama and preparing to nap.