There's an alien baby

in my left, upper arm.

Some of you veterans of military vaccinations know what that means - Abby got an anthrax shot! (It's actually a tender lump that's visible to someone looking at your arm - it's creepy)

I had this entire series a hundred years ago on Okinawa, but, of course, I haven't had a booster since. So....

At least I remembered this well enough to get it on the left, because I sleep on my right side, and the "alien baby" makes that uncomfortable.

Life is Good

Tomorrow I start doing Army stuff, and I'll be doing it for more than a year. The actual mobilization isn't quite here, but it's time for a few days of home station prep, then a pre-mobilization trip, then the mobilization itself.

So this is really my last evening of enjoying the total bum's life. The Mister and I decided that we should celebrate that with high-quality chow. So we headed over to Central Market, traded a kidney for a cart full of goodies, and fired up the grill. It all begins, of course, with meat. Sweet, succulent, fabulous meat.



There might be something better than the ribeye, but I haven't met it yet. Of course, we're crazy dog people, so we buy the bone-in ribeyes. A little marinade, a little time...then onto the fire!



The Mister normally doesn't look this frightened of things, but the fire was hot. Very hot. Don't worry, we didn't leave the steaks on too long. But meat alone is not, some folks say, a balanced meal.



So we added some asparagus and shrimp, and called it well-rounded.



'Twas wonderful. Bloody, yet crispy. And now, I'm sure I have something to organize for tomorrow, but I think first I'll drag my meat-stuffed gut over to the couch for just a few minutes.

Note to self...

The next time I promise someone an object, I should probably locate it first.

I was trying to locate a desert tan Safariland thigh rig. It came home with me from Iraq, but I had never really warmed up to it, so it was going to live with someone else.

I could have sworn all my random tactical holsters were in the giant green footlocker in the garage. But...no.

Since the object was tactical, and not in the footlocker, and not in the rotation of gear I've been using for Army stuff recently, that left only one option. It had to be in the attic. Shit.

For those of you not in Texas this week, please allow me to point out that it's pretty toasty here. It's extra-super toasty in the attic.

The attic, by the way, has only one dim lightbulb. And since the Mister has been in the Service nearly 18 years, and I have been in several services for quite some time myself, can you imagine how many boxes and bags of military crap we have up there?

Uniforms, woodland. Uniforms, DCU. Pouches, ALICE. Pouches, MOLLE, tan. Kneepads, tactical, coyote brown. Boonie hat, DCU. Boonie hat, woodland. Boonie hat, chocolate chip. Boonie hat, ACU (hold on - I might need that - toss down the attic hatch). Duffle bag of miscellaneous raingear, duffle bag of jungle boots, duffle bag of duffle bags (???).... Plastic trash bag of gloves, plastic trash bag of belts, plastic trash bag with elbow pads, more belts and...hey! A tan Safariland thigh rig!

I crawled down, victorious and drenched in sweat.

It's like Hell's Own Military Surplus store up there. A smarter woman would take a day and organize all that crap, but I'm really not htinking that's going to happen anytime before our next move.

Choices

Xavier has an excellent post up about choosing your first 1911. It is truly fabulous, and if you don't have some 1911s, but think you might need one, you should go and read it immediately. Then don't forget to come back here.

I came to the 1911 platform...probably the way a lot of us do, although it's not a very glamorous tale.

I'd heard about the 1911, and why it was the best handgun ever made, and why the military had to be out of it's collective mind to have ditched it. But I'd never fired one (we were not a handgun family). After I got out of the Marine Corps, I made a friend who one day let me shoot his 1911.

It was a few rounds at an outdoor range. I squeezed them off generally in the direction of the target, handed the pistol back, thanked the man, and went home. And thought about it. Gosh, that's a big round, but that was a comfortable gun and it didn't have a bad trigger pull...

So I decided that I wanted a 1911. The Mister and I were not yet married (although we were Living In Sin Together), and we were po'. That would be poor, but we couldn't, at that point, afford the last two letters.

The Mister, being a pretty romantic guy in his own creepy, militant way, saved his nickels and pennies and, come Christmas, Santa brought me a 1911 - of a sort.



He bought me a Ballester Molina. This is not, strictly speaking, a 1911, but it sure feels like a 1911. And we could afford it, and I had it, and I loved it.

Loved it, loved it, loved it. But it would only feed FMJ, and so I, of course, eventually, needed another 1911.

Around that time, we became foster parents for an insufficiently loved Springfield Mil-Spec.



I have to admit, I disliked that pistol intensely. The grip safety felt sharp at the edges, the whole thing didn't quite seem...put together. And, of course, it was stainless steel. I find stainless tacky in the extreme. But! It convinced me that I really needed to find a good, well-finished 1911.

Which led to my Warrior.



I may well have fallen victim to Kimber's excellent advertising, but this gun makes me happy. It ran like a clock out of the box, it's phenomenally easy to shoot very well, all the bits and surfaces were pleasing from the get-go... Loved it.

But, of course, it's a railed 5-inch 1911, which is a little hard to tote, right? Which meant I needed another 1911.



And thus came the Pro-Carry. Which is also a sweet shooter, after a significant amount of effort and profanity were devoted to extractor issues.

But here's the point, for anyone who read Xavier's excellent post, and is still on the fence: You just have to buy the first one.

When you start asking question of the Learned (and I am not counting myself among them) about the 1911, and you start surfing the gunnut websites, you can get so much information that you don't think you should buy anything until you can afford a high-end piece by a master pistolsmith (not that I wouldn't swap a couple of toes for one). But it can keep you on the fence and off the range.

If you think you want a 1911, get thee to the local gunshop and buy one. Some weird mil-surp knockoff? Sure! A truly entry-level gun from one of the big manufacturers? Get down with your bad self.

Don't get sidetracked or disheartened by all the information and opinions out there on this most popular of firearms platforms. It's a fun pool to swim in (even down here at the shallow end), and you won't know unless you jump in.

I'm a despot

I did it last night, and I'm going to end up doing it again. That's right - I am Abby, Queen of Backyard Ethnic Cleansing.

The systematic elimination of an ethnic group or groups from a region or society, as by deportation, forced emigration, or genocide.

Can you see it?



Of course, it's their ancestral home. Or, at least, a habitat that's pretty much ideal, regardless of where they might originally hail from. There are bricks, directly under a drippy spigot. And a porch light that attracts bugs.

Alas, they cannot be tolerated in the Kingdom (Queendom?) of Bad Dogs, for they vex mightily the Very Small Dog, and make him foam at the mouth most voluminously.



[sigh]

I moved one last night (avoiding the toad pee), and it looks most likely that I'll be relocating another tonight. At some point, they'll probably file complaints about Forced Amphibian Relocation with some sort of Toad UN, and I'll find myself in front of some shabby international tribunal, explaining how it was all really for their own good.

Oversights and inclusions

I finally got around to updating the address for Confessions of a Gun-toting Seagull. Jim rid himself of MySpace a while back (which, I admit, frightened and confused me), and has now joined the rest of hoi polloi on Blogger.

Also, we've added SpeakerTweaker's place - Where Sometimes Things Go Bang. Tweaker is one of those guys who shows up with really useful and helpful comments, so he's a repository of good info. Or, at least someone who could tempt you to buy another gun.

And finally, last but certainly not least, I've added LabRat and Stingray over at Atomic Nerds. Scary smart folks, those, and paralyzingly funny when the mood strikes.

I figured this would be a great time to do blogroll additions, since I'm rebuilding my favorites list. I'm pretty cheery about having more of these great people on my official "click every day," because some of us need things to be simple.

If you're a bad person

you have to spend eternity doing online Army training. Thus far today, I've done Heat and Cold Injury Prevention (for the 7,894th time since 1996), Media Awareness (Jesus God), and Mine Awareness (Bosnia version).

[sigh]

Coming soon is Law of Land Warfare (another one that the DoD feels is worth hitting four to eight times a year), Suicide Awareness (ditto), and miscellaneous installation-specific computer user orientation courses.

However, I don't think there's anything on my to-do list as terrible as the Commander's Safety Course I took that involved memorizing the appropriate form to use when investigation a helicopter crash during training (as opposed to during real-world operations, since that may very well have been a different form).

What the....

Look what I just saw on TV.

An odd commercial, to say the least.



You get that? The Vampire Rights Amendment.

I don't get it, so I googled it. Seems the Vampire Rights Amendment is sponsored by the Vampire Rights League.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was still scratching my head, so I returned to my google search.

Turns out, this is a viral marketing ploy for an upcoming show. It's explained nicely here.

I'm not into vampires, and I think people who are tend to be kinda weird. However, that is some damn good marketing. A little web searching reveals sites and commericials for the opposition group, in fact. Some junior VP-for-advertising earned his or her bonus this year!

I swear

I'll stop being boring at some point, but for now, y'all are stuck with me going on and on about this new computer.

Today I figured out RSS feeds. Ok, maybe I didn't really figure them out, but the MSNBC feeds went away and I know how to put the ones I want in that spot. Pretty cool.

I've won the battle and sucked all my data over from the old hard drive. Downside, it seems physically impossible to make this goddam "Windows Mail" abomination recognize Outlook data files. However, I'm hoping to plunk a real version of Office on this machine this week, so perhaps real Outlook will come with it. I can't remember.

In cheery news, I finally remembered the password for my BADDOG38 email account, so I'm back to filtering a ton of spam and, if any of you choose to use the email link, I'm getting those messages as well.

Whoever dreamed up Vista deserves a size 7.5R combat boot straight between the lower cheeks, but aside from that, this switchover is going about as well as any technologically adaptive activity that I engage in does.

commo check

Can abby post using the email function on her phone? i am going to need some alternate posting options in the near future, but this one is painfully slow and seems to rule out capital letters and pictures.

The things you see

The Mister and I moseyed down to JRB today. Before leaving, we thought we'd take in some of the local base sights. So we stopped at the main "old military crap" display.



Looks pretty much like most such things. Couple of old planes, old helicopter in the background, etc etc. Heck, a few hundred yards away there's even some old SeaBee bulldozer. Pretty much the average display. Except...



Except one item that actually seemed to have attracted visitors. What on earth is the large green object that could attract visitors to one of these tiresome displays?



That'd be a thermonuclear bomb. I'd tell you about it, but I'll let the signage do that.



Pretty cool, huh? One of three. I assume that it's not one of three functional bombs. Although that would be a pretty cool thing to put on display, really.

There's also a nice plaque about the history of the JRB. I really like the ending.



Food for thought. Much as our current wars suck, what with being confusing and vague and all, it is fortunate indeed that we never trotted these critters out for a real-life use. If the order of the day was deterrence, then deterrence worked, and I for one am mighty thankful for it.

Great Ideas

I was in Fry's (the giant electronics place) with Girl Child on Tuesday. Fry's has everything, including non-electronic stuff. In fact, they had a large bin of personal-size pepper spray near the checkout.

Abby, said Girl Child, can we get pepper spray? That would be cool!

I thought about it for a moment, and my poor judgement kicked in. Sure, I replied. But if your Dad disapproves, it's a no-go, and I personally think that before you guys can walk around with pepper spray, you'd have to try it on yourselves.

She cheerfully assented, I bought a couple of little cans, and didn't give it another thought. I figured the idea of trying it out had probably turned them off.

I was wrong.

Last night, they remembered. The Mister agreed that one should experience pepper spray before being allowed to carry it to the convenience store and back. He further expressed that as part of our adult obligation to lead from the front, pepper spray should be a family activity.

You can see how this all went down, can't you?

Number Two son volunteered to get hit first, followed by Girl Child. Then I sprayed the Mister, and, against the sound advice of the three of them, allowed Number One Son to give me a thorough spritzing.

You know, that stuff sucks. I've had my share (and possibly your share) of CS over the years, but this pepper spray is a little different. Less snot and gagging (really, almost none), but it provides a really effective burning sensation.

The only bit of wisdom any of us exhibited in this whole exercise was to hold it next to the pool.



It was probably about 20 minutes before we were opening our eyes. Number One Son, the only one of us smart enough pass on the experience, spent that time giggling and pointing out that we were maybe not the smartest family he could be a part of.

All in all, it was quite the family learning experience. By morning, it was already taking shape as a future Family Legend. Of course, the two kids who'd participated in the spraying were declaring themselves Morally Superior to their brother and all their peers.

Little masochists. We may have future Marines on our hands, if they persist in relishing Things That Suck.

As an aside, I'd heard good things about pepper spray. But at this point, I would be inclined to recommend it, particularly for walking in dog-infested areas.

Teaser

Tomorrow...the family that pepper sprays each other...

Outtake from daily life

The Mister and I were at Kroger. We had two boxes of Hamburger Helper (Bacon Cheeseburger type), a bag of fresh green beans, and a crate of beer.

We approached the checkout. The Mister looked at me and said, "Wow. Are we white trash or what?"

Which reminded me..."Yes. We are. And we need cigarettes."

Yea!

After three attempts, I got the correct doohickey and have sucked my photos, documents, music, etc over to the new laptop.

This please me greatly.

In celebration, let's have some photos, shall we?



Here we have the Mister, riding around in circles recently. This does not look like fun to me, but apparently it's for him. Speaking of fun, check out this sign in a motel room we stayed in while fishing at Lake Fork.



I like that sign very much. And, for our last photo, we shall feature something else I like very much. Squirrels with lightsabers.



That last one is courtesy of those wacky kids over at ARFCOM, my favorite source for odd photos and excruciatingly detailed firearms information.

Ugh (PartII)

Well, I think the worst is over. The chills lasted a couple hours, and I woke up with enough energy to eat some toast, drink some water, and dig some ammo out of the back closet.

I'd better wake up feeling fabulous, 'cause I have plans to be shooting in the morning.

Alright, back to bed. Because the only think that fixes problems faster than hydration is sleep.

Ugh...

This was one of those days...I got up and took Mom to the airport, which is always kind of a bummer.

I came back, finished wrestling some Army paperwork, made the drive over to the unit, and, on the way home, was forced to use my ninja-like driving skills to avoid a three-car wreck on I-20 directly in front of me.

(This got more annoying when, immediately after I ascertained nobody was bleeding out and that I had no moral obligation to do anything other than get back in and continue driving home, all drivers involved started working toward a bitchy discussion of who was at fault)

(I will also note that it looked like everyone involved had been on a cellphone, with the possible exception of the big handsome pit bull who was panting cheerfully in one of the vehicles)

Got home, took a nap, woke up with a sharp, twisty abdominal pain. Hmmm...I didn't really eat very much today, so maybe I'll have a sandwich when this stops hurting so much.

Alas, instead of resolving itself with a nice sandwich, my stomach decided to be painful for a good hour, and finally resolved itself in the most dramatic bout of power-yakking I've done in years. In good news, it does seem to be much happier now.

Alright. Off for more quality time with my red Gatorade, and maybe a tuna sandwich here in a few.

Again, with the hate

It's amazing the number of passwords, logins, etc, that I had stored in my email inbox. On the dead laptop. Thus, it's amazing the number of things I can't quite access yet.

[snarl]

Additionally, I find it interesting that the PureEdge viewer which the Army is now using for all its forms is described as having "issues" with Vista.

[snarl]

And finally, this setup came with a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, after which I assume it will disappear and leave me with that godawful Fisher Price Microsoft Work.

[double snarl]

The New Laptop

has arrived. Bringing with it strange default settings, cheerful helpful little messages and, of course, Windows Vista.

God, I hate change.

Chillin'

by the pool. It's shaping up to be a rough weekend with Mom in town. Next up on the agenda - hit the Amon Carter Museum and troll around for places with decent wine and snacks.

The Mister has taken off to ride his motorcycle rapidly around a track and, in a slightly sadistic fit of fatherliness, opted to take the kids with him. They toted off a large cooler and a tent for some shade, so I assume they'll survive.

We eagerly await the arrival of the new laptop tomorrow, so I can stop borrowing the Mister's desktop to blog. Although I do admit, I kinda enjoy the full-sized keyboard.

Here's hoping your weekend is as mellow as mine!