peejman

Meh. At least until he blows out his knee again.

I've considered an air rifle to dispatch the rabbits. It would be mostly up to to wife to do the dirty work. While they are eating her garden and she has lots of experience cutting up critters to feed other critters, I suspect she'd be less than thrilled with idea of eating them herself. Besides, if my dog was worth a darn, she'd be keeping the rabbits away. Mother Earth News has a rather prolific e-newsletter. Backwoods Home has a monthly e-newsletter. Both are free.

Forgive my ignorance (or blindness)... where's the insulting reference to Islam? I wouldn't buy one, but to each his own.

Purdy. Wish I had the time/money to get into cowboy shooting. It looks like great fun.

I'm quite sure it could nickel and dime you to death if you're really anal about stuff, need all the latest gadgets, etc. I dump some compost and fertilizer, turn it, plant it, water it, and see what happens. I pull weeds occasionally. I spray for bugs if they get really bad. I don't kill myself messing with it. You are correct. I've no idea how I came up with $0.40. It has to do with efficiency of heat transfer and cost of the energy. A gas burner on an open stove is very inefficient. The air space necessary for the burner to burn allows lots of the heat output to escape to the atmosphere rather than being transferred directly to the pot. An electric eye where the pot is fully covers the element is far more efficient. That's how the nifty new induction elements boil water so fast. The catch is that the gas burner's total output is 10x higher than the electric eye, so the reduced efficiency is more than compensated for by the much higher output. 1500W = 5120 BTU/hr compared to the 50,000 BTU/hr gas burner. Electricity costs $0.086/kWh. Using the grill bottle example (and doing some conversions...) yields $1.4/kWh for propane. Bulk propane would be much less expensive, but you can see the difference.

Happy B'day!

What it boiled down to was me trying to shoot too fast... practicing double taps and such. Squeezing really hard helps reduce the amount the gun comes off target during recoil and shooting fast is all about keeping the gun on target... so why not squeeze the frickin' life out of it, right? Now that I know what the problem is, I can mitigate it to some extent. It still pops up when I'm trying to go fast. That's a good point too... the basic principles are the same, but I suspect that the simple wheel diagram would be too complex to use effectively if it included effects both hands.

What kind of cucumbers did you get? You generally won't find seeds/seedlings for the big, dark green cucumbers like you see in the grocery store. The seeds/seedlings are generally smaller and much lighter green. They will turn yellow if left on the vine too long, it's too hot, or not enough water. A small garden can easily pay for itself. I typically spent about $30 on plants for my small home garden (maters, cucumbers, okra, etc). If you're willing to grow from seed, you can spend half that. If you're good at harvesting and preparing seeds from previous years, it can cost nearly nothing. I then spend about $10 on compost and another $10 on fertilizer. So that's up to $50. I generally water the garden from my rain barrel unless it gets really dry (like now). Tap water is cheap... pennies per gallon. Just swagging numbers.... $0.02/gal, 20 gal/wk, 16 week growing period = $6.40 for water. That's way more tap water than I use. So I'm up to about $60 total annual cost, assuming my labor is free. Produce at the grocery store runs roughly $2/lb. So if I get 30 lbs of produce from my garden, I broke even. I've never kept track, but my guess is I get way more than 30 lbs yield. I'd guess I get about a bushel of yield per veggie. A bushel of cucumber or tomatoes weighs about 50 lbs, 25 lbs for okra, peas, or beans. Again all those numbers are guesses, but yes, I think I'm saving money. Easy enough to figure up... Stove element ~ 1500W. It wouldn't need to stay on high the whole time, but say you run it for an hour. Power costs $0.086/kwh. So that element costs $0.13/hr to run on high. A 20lb propane bottle costs $20 and google tells me propane has about 20k BTU/lb and a turkey fryer burner is about 50k BTU/hr.... 2.5lb/hr on high... 8 hrs per bottle... $0.40/hr to use. The water costs $0.02/gal and you'll use a couple gallons. A dozen quart mason jars costs $16, so $1.33 each and they can be re-used many, many times... One could factor in depreciation the pressure cooker and stove, but I think that would be minimal per jar given the potential quantities. So... as with most of these things, yes it's cheaper as long as your labor is free. Want to pay yourself $15/hr? The cost goes way, way up.

http://www.usflag.org/uscode36.html

Perhaps if we built a large, wooden badger...

I wonder what kind of precedent this sets? How many others will come to the forefront expecting the general public to make them millionaires for their undeserved suffering? Nothing against this lady, just curious where we go from here. Hopefully she'll make good use of the money, open a school to teach parents how to teach their kids manners or something...

While a good idea, I suspect putting your stuff in a cooler with an icepack every day will get tedious real quick. Tint the windows, get a windshield shade, and window vent visors. Keep your stuff out of direct sunlight. It'll still get hot, but it's the difference between unpleasantly hot and burn-your-fingers hot.

The judicial system strikes again.... the judge who signed this arrest warrant needs to seek employment elsewhere.

That's a new one...

It's too hot when your gun is too hot to handle.... generally above about 125 deg F. The inside of a car easily gets that hot left in the sun. It also depends on the gun. Metal transfers heat much more effectively than plastic or wood and hence will burn you more quickly. Cooking off ammo is a secondary concern.

Thanks for the info. Yep. I assume he varies the j-hook to accommodate a thick leather belt vs. a thin nylon belt. $40 seems a little pricey for kydex, but they do look nice.

It's all a matter of how good is good enough? If you're satisfied using factory ammo and getting minute of man accuracy at 200 yds... you probably don't need a chronograph. If you're developing your own hand loads for the next 1000 yd match or think 0.5" groups at 100 yds aren't good enough... you probably need a chronograph. As to the accuracy and or consistency/repeatability of it... again, it depends on your intended purpose. If you're shooting at 100 yds and calculating drops at 800 yds... accuracy is paramount. If you're working up next season's deer load and never shoot past 75 yds.... consistency is more important than absolute accuracy.

Looks good. What does the back of it look like? Does the belt have to pass through or does it clip on?

Shooting a long gun left-handed does still feel a little more natural to me. With some practice, shooting it right-handed works fine too. Not getting hit in the nose with hot brass is a plus.

I'm also left handed and right eye dominant. I learned to shoot right handed. It's a right handed world and it just makes everything easier.

If he'd carried a .45, the bear would've been too scared to attack. Just getting that out of the way... I suspect they had food in the tent. Glad the kid got away.

The garden at home produced reasonably, though I'll change some things next year... I planted the broccoli too close together and I didn't plant enough. The heads we got were tasty, but I was a little disappointed with the total yield. We ate all we got, no extra to save. I planted too much spinach. It grew so fast and made so much that the plants got away from me. It got bitter and went to seed quickly. Given that both spinach and broccoli are "cool weather" plants, I was surprised how long they lasted. I didn't plant enough snap peas and they need something to climb. I was lazy and didn't get the trellis put in soon enough after they began to grow. The bed has a base of pine needles and I thought that might be enough, but the peas on the ground rotted. That was about half my plants. The plants that climbed the chicken wire around the garden (lots of rabbits around) did fine and the peas were quite tasty. Again, we ate all we got, none to save. The tomatoes are growing quite well with lots of small green tomatoes, but none ripe yet. We put cantaloupe in another flower bed where a bush died and left a hole. It's doing ok if I can save it from the rabbits. I'm also a suburbanite so unfortunately rabbit stew isn't a good solution. The garden at work is doing ok... sort of. I didn't till my area after the tractor did the whole thing and that seems to have been a mistake. My area is full of weeds, it's terrible. Most of my plants are alive, but not really thriving. I've harvested some okra, but the plants are still tiny (knee high). When I've grown them at home they'd get 8 ft tall. A lot of it was too tough to eat as well. My tomato plants are also tiny... less than half the size of the ones at home. They've also got lots of baby maters, but no ripe ones yet. The green beans that sprouted are tiny (noticing a theme?). I planted two types of bush beans, about 1/2 of one type came up and less than 1/4 of the other came up. I've gotten a couple handfuls of beans, which were tasty, but that's it. The cucumbers seems to be the only thing that's growing reasonably, though it's somewhat hard to find them amongst the weeds. I've gotten maybe 1/4 bushel so far and they've been tasty. The watermelon plants are still alive, but not really growing. If I do this work garden again next year, there will have to be some serious changes. EPA regs not withstanding, something's gotta be done about the weeds (being an industrial site, we're responsible for our water run off and were told we couldn't use chemicals). It also desperately needs more compost. The drought/heat is taking a toll as well. I put a section of perforated corrugated pipe on the downspout adjacent to my garden at home so all the rain that hits the roof ends up in the garden. I think that's helping. My rain barrel is nearly empty too. At work, the company has let us run a hose from the building to the garden and a fellow gardener put up a sprinkler system. Unfortunately, the sprinkler doesn't reach all of my area so I have to hand water a bunch of it.... which I'm headed out the door to do right now...

As others have said, if you can legally own a handgun and meet the eligibility requirements, fine with me. A coworker is a resident alien from the UK and a serious gun nut. He typically buys guns 3 at a time because the "instant" part of TICS usually takes 3 days for him.

Best I recall, the water bath was how we did it. If my wife and I get back into it, I'd likely use the side burner on my grill to keep the heat out of the house. Ironic that you have to have the huge pot of boiling water at the hottest time of the year. I like your method of freezing stuff until later in the year when it's cooler. We're somewhat casually looking for a chest freezer at the moment... need more space.

Not a $0.10 paper bag, something even cheaper.... a light switch. The judicial system is absurd. The judge that didn't tell this family and their schmuck attorney to f-off needs to step down.