hqueen's collection of Far From the Usual stuff.

[Icu4dzs]

Managed to get our directv straightened out. The guy was only more than an hour late. We ended up eating dinner after E got here while he was still working. He did come up with a creative solution for us to put the dish at the back of our yard, which should be clear of obstructions in the line of sight for quite some time! All we need to do is take the tractor and trench it a little bit to bury it and we'll be good to go. HD is soooo much clearer than regular TV, lol We got a satisfactory deal, so I am ok with this. And now I can watch the olympics!!

Went to the steel plate shoot today, and had a BLAST. Determined that I still struggle with the handgun, I flinch before it goes bang which means I don't hit targets. :-/ E helped me a little bit, but there really wasn't time/place for training, which I am cool with. I know what I REALLY have to work on. However, the 22LR is a whole nother animal....I TORE it up. I think my best time was under 5 seconds with targets and 5 shots. My next best run was a 9 second set of 5 shots that included a mag change. I LOVE shooting that little gun. It has been christened the Pip Squeak and it is SO appropriate! I know what I've got to work on, now it is just a matter of trigger time and focus to do it.

You mention having anticipation jitters with the handgun. What caliber? The you said .22LR is good for you. SigSauer makes a dandy handgun for .22LR called "mosquito" and it is what I use to train my daughter. Very nice and easy to handle. Try that one and let me know how it goes.
Saepe Expertus, Semper Fidelis, Fratres Aeterni
Trim sends
//BT//

 

[hqueen13]

The issue with the jitters is with the 9mm handguns. The 22's don't bother me. We just picked up a Ruger Mark 3 22/45 that we'll get after the 7 day wait next week. I've shot one before, and the mosquito as well, and they are just fine. Its the 9 that I have to work with more. I also don't think I've found my ideal 9mm yet. Just gotta keep trying things out.

Got a bunch of projects planned for this weekend. My friend E is coming over, he's interested in the butter making process, so I'm going to do that, and then we're going to look at a number of projects and see if he has suggestions or ideas. I have to repair my crepe myrtle ( ), look at the gutter to get the drainage fixed so that it is no longer a mosquito farm, work on getting the cable buried in the back yard, look at getting some sort of support boards across the top of the cabinets so that I can store things up there and HOPEFULLY get some of these jars out of the kitchen floor, see about getting a shelf built in the corner so that we have a place to store the water jugs a little less in the corner where they get tripped over easily... you can tell I am on a roll! We'll see how much of that we actually get to. He's also going to take a look at the brakes on the truck, and maybe somehow check a few other things since he can do minor repairs.

Tomorrow morning I'll ride the horse, then we have some errands to run, including getting the M4 transferred into my name, and then run up to a Seafood Festival since our favorite vendor will be there selling Moose Antlers for the dogs. Should be a good weekend, I am VERY glad it is here!

And now it is dinner time :/ at 9:00

 

[hqueen13]

Today I:
- Worked the horse for an hour+ and then hosed him off and left him comfy in the stall
- We headed out and over to the barracks to complete the transfer papers for my M4 into my name from his so it'll be all official and nice and neat for the gub'ment
- Stopped by the gun shop to drop off said M4 to have the owner set it up with a two point sling so that I can carry it comfortably without having it bang my knees
- Headed up to a seafood festival north of here to swing by a vendor that sells Moose Antler chews for the dogs. They LOVED the ones we got at the horse expo last Jan and we wanted more. Festival was free, and it was really nice to walk around along the promanade on the bay. (the dogs are now HAPPILY chewing away on their fresh antlers!)
- Returned to the gun shop to pick up the M4 and another gun that a friend wanted some work done on. The shop owner did a fantastic job on the sling for me, the unfortunate part was that it was about half again more than we expected. But that is not surprising in the long run since I'm so small that getting the sling to work effectively is not easy. Getting many things for me in the gun world isn't easy.
- Got home and realized we should probably go check for parts for the gutter we want to fix tomorrow, and get a replacement piece for the spigot that I broke today (darn thing just wore out and THANKFULLY broke when I turned the water OFF!). Headed out to Home Depot and picked up those parts.
- Stopped for dinner on the way home because we hadn't planned anything for dinner when we set out this morning
- Got home at about 6:00 and I still felt like doing things so I jumped on the mower and mowed the field that SORELY needed it for about an hour. Got a little less than half of it done, which is awesome because that mower FLIES. It is a Ferris mower,and I don't think I want to buy any other kind of mower. It has an independent suspension so that the engine is cradled more so that it can go faster. It cuts about 10 acres an hour if you are rolling.
- Stopped mowing when I thought I felt a few raindrops, and it was getting really windy. Put the mower away and then headed down to the barn to pick Storm's stall since he was in all day. JUST got into the barn and the bottom FELL OUT. As mom puts it, it was a frog strangler for a good half hour or better. I have no idea how much rain we actually got, but it was deafening to be in the barn. I finished picking the stall, refilled his free choice supplements in his stall and put away a few things that I had, and then hung out with N while we waited for the rain to chill. It finally broke and I made a dash for the house, I needed a shower but I didn't really want one from Mother Nature!

Grabbed my shower and am now relaxing. I LOVE productive days! I am getting ready to do it again tomorrow, too! It'll start with another ride (OMG! Twice in one weekend!), then I'll get the mister set up in Storm's stall with E's help, going to make butter and hopefully pemmican, work on the gutter, repair the crepe myrtle, bury the cable, and whatever else I can come up with. Wish EVERY day was like this! Can't wait until we can have our own place where I can run my own schedule and do things like this all the time!!

 

[hqueen13]

Sunday was just about as productive, with the help of my friend E.

- Got up and rode Storm again (twice in one weekend AND four times since my last lesson!!! Its a RECORD!) Had a GREAT ride
- Hose him off and then got the misting system set up for him in his stall. He is going to be one cool dude! (and of course that means that the weather is only going to be in the mid-80's for the next week, you know, now that I am all prepared to keep him super cool and everything...)
- Move his name plaque that my dad made for me (tricky measuring stuff) with E's help (E helped me to put up the misting system, too)
- Took a break and grabbed lunch
- E made a cheesecake that he left at home cooling and since he rode his bike over we had to go get it, and we needed to get some lumber to add boards over the tops of the cabinets in the kitchen so I can have more easy to use storage space, and we needed corn for dinner, so we headed out on our errands
- Took us longer than expected because we ended up relaxing for a while at his place. He also sharpened my benchmade that I carry ALL the time AND he reversed the clip for me YAY!
- Got home, fixed the boards over the cabinets so now there isn't a hole on top of the cabinets and you can easily put things up there, and got all the junk that was already up there put back up there again
- Ate dinner of fresh corn and chicken quarters from the farm and it was SO good
- Ended up heading back out to give E a ride on Storm, which was really interesting, he did really well for his first ride ever on a horse and considering Storm is 17 hh that is nothing to sneeze at.

It was a great weekend, I'm just exhausted (and crampy ) today, so I am dragging pretty bad. After E rode Storm, we were hanging around BSing and I mentioned something about vaulting up on him, and E wasn't sure what I meant, so I figured I'd make a futile attempt to do it, which is what I have done every other time. I checked in with Storm to make sure he was going to be ok and stay steady for me, and then put a hand in his mane right in front of the whithers, stepped back, took two steps forward and kicked up and swung almost right up. I had to squirm a bit to all the way up, but that is MORE than I have ever done before. I hugged him when I got up there, and lounged about a little bit, swinging my legs and laying across his back. When I decided to get down, I scooched all the way back and off of his butt. He never twitched an ear the entire time. He has been being SO good lately.

Productive weekend, and now I'm back into the blah of the work week. Hurry up weekend! Lessons this weekend, and I can't wait to see what we'll be able to do!

 

[Denim Deb]

Sounds good.

When I was a kid, I used to ride a larger paint pony at times. And sometimes to mount him, I'd have his head pointing downhill (this was in PA at my grandparents' neighbor's house), then I'd run up behind him put my hands on his butt and jump on that way. He always just stood there and let me.

 

[hqueen13]

Haha, Deb that is awesome! I don't know that I could do that with Storm... vaulting on from the side is hard enough, LOL I was quite frankly shocked that I made it up there, the last time I had tried I was pretty far from being able to do it, and that was a couple years ago, maybe even more than 3 now. I don't really know what changed physically since then, but I made it up there fairly easily, and didn't have to do too much squirming to actually get upright.

 

[Denim Deb]

By the time I got a horse, I was too old to even think about vaulting up like that. And, there's just no WAY I'm jumping up from the back either. The only reason I could do it on the pony was because of his size, my age, and that he was heading downhill! Size wise, I'd say he was probably about the same side as Stormy-13.2 hh.

 

[hqueen13]

I'm still surprised I did it!

 

[hqueen13]

*crawls out from under my rock blinking in the bright light*
So I'm still alive.... Just been busy with other things that have distracted me from doing more fun self sufficient things. Very annoying I tell you! Well, some of it is, others not so much
Everything has been going well, even if it is crazy busy. I haven't had the time to be able to make another run of canning stuff, which is really annoying. I really want to get some things stocked up, and haven't had the time to be able to do it all at once. My weekends are pretty booked up over the next few weeks, which is going to make it difficult to get it done.
My friend just returned the two cast iron pans to me that he was cleaning up to get the rust off, and delightfully I just found this article: http://sherylcanter.com/wordpress/2...ique-for-seasoning-cast-iron/?roostBDI=375678 He attempted to season them with a bit of olive oil, but now I think I'll strip them again and do it this way since this makes a lot of sense.
Only crazy news of late is that I was out with my friend, E on his bike, on my second ride ever, and we ended up laying the bike down. We were coming up to a street on the right and a car was coming down the road we were on very fast, and I think several things happened at once, but when he went to swing into the turn to the right the bike just went out from under us. I've been struggling to ride, it isn't easy at all for me, though this didn't change my fear level. I think I was a part of why we went over, I was totally unprepared to turn to to the right, and I think both of us had our attention distracted by the oncoming car that was moving too fast, and so he didn't prepare for the turn the way he should have. He probably would have been fine had he been alone, but with me on the back, over we went. We weren't going fast, but still slid about 10 feet. The bike pinned my right knee, which also got scraped up. I was (GRATEFULLY) wearing the leather jacket that a friend had given me since I knew that 75 degrees on a bike going 40+ was going to be CHILLY (as it was I was cold, even with the jacket on) and that jacket saved my elbow and shoulder from worse damage. I ended up with a pretty bad scrape on my knee, and smaller scrapes/bruises on my hand, elbow and shoulder. I think my face impacted his helmet on the way down, which is far better than impacting the pavement, which is what I feared when we hit. Our right feet were pinned under the bike when we stopped moving, which meant that neither one of us could get up. He was too far from the bike to be able to move it, and I tried rocking it, but it didn't move. When I realized that he was unable to get up, too, I reached down to the back of the bike and lifted as best I could, which was just enough for him to get his foot out. I didn't have the leverage to lift and move my foot at the same time, he jumped up and grabbed the bike and rocked it back up again. I sat up on the pavement for a second evaluating all the pains to make sure none of them were "broken bone pain" and was satisified. He offered his hand, and I realized that I needed both of his hands to get up, the pain in my right knee was strong enough that I couldn't leverage myself up since that is my "good" knee, and I depend so much on it. He pulled me up and I took stock again as he checked over the bike. Everything seemed to be ok, with the exception that it bent the handlebar a bit, but that could be straightened with a wrench. We climbed back on and headed to his house, which was gratefully only a few minutes away.
When we got there, his mother fretted over him, and his brother and friend were a bit wide eyed. I brushed off the pain I was in wanting to get home to my "good stuff" to treat my injuries. We debated taking his jeep back to my house or taking the bike, and he asked me what I would prefer, and I told him whatever he wanted to do was fine. He chose the bike and as I was pulling the helmet back on his brother asked if I was really going to get back on the bike again. I said I ride a 2000 lb horse, this is nothing. I really didn't have any more or less fear than I did before, which made me happy, but I know I have a lot to work on before I'll be really comfortable and actually ride better on the bike. It is scary to know how much I can influence the bike to the point of wrecking.
Otherwise, things are rocking along. Its a lesson weekend this weekend, and I've only worked him once on the ground. It'll be what its gonna be! As stiff as I am right now there is no way I'm able to work him again before Sunday! I just hope all my scrapes heal up quickly so I feel ok up there on Sunday!

 

[Denim Deb]

So glad to see you back on. I've been wondering where you were. And, I'm glad you weren't hurt worse on the bike. Riding a bike isn't quite like riding a horse. You need to lean into the curves in a way you can't on horseback.