Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day everyone. May your day be filled with the laughter and love of family and friends.

Wanted

Professional football players and coach. Must be able to compete/coach at a minimum of the collegiate level. Interested parties can apply in person at Denver Broncos corporate headquarters.

Newest Member of the 700 Club

That would be the Remington 700 club, and not the 700 club of Pat Robertson fame on the ABC Family channel.

For years I've wanted a Remington 700. My Dad has had one since before I was born. 6 months before I was born to be exact, chambered in .270 Win. That rifle has taken more game in our family than any other rifle. It's taken countless deer, numerous elk, and one moose. I also took my first two deer with that rifle. (One a side note, all this hubbub about the model 700 recently hasn't made much difference to me. Dad's got one in .270, and my brother has one in .243. In our experience, this dust up is much ado about nothing.)

Being a southpaw, decent rifles are hard to come by. Very few rifle makers offer their wares to us lefties. And even fewer still offer them in the caliber I was looking for, .308 Win. Oh, I could have had all kinds of stuff from Remington, Ruger, and others in calibers ranging from .204 Ruger all the way up to .375 H&H. But .308 was very few manufacturers list of chamberings.

My first left handed rifle in .308 was a Savage Model 10GLXP3. A decent enough gun, the Savage. Excellent trigger in the Accu-Trigger, but the rest of the gun left a lot to be desired. It was too light, firstly, and was not fun to shoot because of this. Secondly, the parts seemed to be made of pot metal. Lastly, the stock looked to be made from something besides walnut. Oh, it looked like walnut, but if I were to scratch the surface finish off, I'm betting it would've been a white colored wood under there.

Last spring, I scared up a used Ruger M77 Hawkeye in .308. Very good gun, easy to shoot with enough weight to absorb the recoil. She came with a Leupold VX-1 2-7x33mm scope sitting on top. The previous owner had glass bedded her, and she shoots like a dream.

Last Friday, I was down at the local funstore here in RC, and was ogling a newish left handed 700 chambered in '06. Nice dark walnut stock, mounted iron sights, and just an all around good looking gun. Talking with the sales dude, I was lamenting the fact that Big Green had offered the left handed 700 in every caliber under the sun EXCEPT .308 in their hunting line. The only place you could find a lefty 700 in .308 was in either their line (XCR) or the police line (SPS). On my way out the door, I talked with the owner and passed along my frustration at not being able to obtain what I was after. He didn't miss a beat in telling me that he had, in fact, put out a left handed 700 in .308 that very afternoon. Talk about a dose of cold water.

TOTAL AWESOMENESS!!! That's what I wanted to hear! So I had them put it back for me and yesterday I went and traded that Savage Model 10GLXP3 towards that 700. After adding a Sightron S1 3-9x40 scope and Leupold bases and two-piece base, the total OTD was right at $504.

So yes, Louise, I'm now a member of the Remington 700 club.

He's Hit Everything He's Aimed At, Carter

Bonus plug for an obscure western movie reference, that being John Cleese from 'Silverado' commenting on the fact that Danny Glover's character 'Mel', was shooting at a trailing possee not to hurt them, but to scare them away. He also says, after having his hat shot off his noggin, 'Today, my jurisdiction ends HERE!'.

Why do I bring this up? Well, there was an editorial in the Casper Star today talking about how great the One is.

From his 'landmark' health care legislation, to the 'financial reform', everything the One wanted, he got. Or as John Cleese remarked 'He's hit everything he's aimed at, Carter!'

Where I diverge from the letter writer is this. All those pieces of the One's legislative agenda were precisely what pushed the greatest mid-term turnover in over 70 yrs. Over 60 seats in the House of Representin'.

What the letter writer fails to comprehend is that this is not a left-of-center country. We are a center-right bunch who tend to think that the .gov needs to stay in the nifty little boundaries set forth in that 223 yr old piece of parchment commonly referred to as 'The Constitution of The United States', most notably the enumerated powers spelled out in Article 1, Section 8.

No where in this document does it lay out the foundation for the unprecedented power grab seen these last 2 yrs. Even under the most twisted of logic, these grabs don't pass the smell test. Personnal mandates to purchase? Uh-uh. Federal ownership of two car companies? Nope, not there either. Taking over student loans? Sorry, that ain't in there either.

Now, adding 4 million acres to the federal land regsiter? Can't quite see that either, as outside of post offices and military reservations, the USGOV can't own land.

See what these...folks...don't want to admit is, all of the cool little college/univeristy experiments that worked so well in the labs of their progressive icons don't work out so well in the real world. See California, where they're in the hole $40 million per day paying off pension liabilities. Or New York, where they've comtemplated a sugar tax to help pay for all those little entitlement programs that work oh so well.

Nope, they can keep all those little social experiments to themselves, thank you very much.

Whew...What a Week and a Half!

It's been a week and a half since the twins arrived. What a whirlwind! Wife spent 4 days and 3 nights in the hospital. Got the babies home a week from today, and got met by 'The Nanny' (our 10 yr old cat), who's not entirely sure about the new additions to Casa De Hazmat. She got a courtesy sniff of the little ones as soon they arrived and has since decided that whenever they're in the room, she's not.

As advertised, sleep has been something of an illusion so far. Their feeding schedule is 0600, 1000, 1400, 1800, 2000, and 0200. Which gives us around 3-4 hrs of sleep at night between feedings.

They also had their first trip to the doctors office today. So far, he's the 'big' brother, weighing in at 6 lbs, 3 oz to her 5 lbs 15 oz. He also has an inch on her, 20" to 19". There was also a noggin circumference done, but I can't remember the numbers there. All told, they are growing right along, right where they're supposed to be.

It has been a running joke since we found out the wife was pregnant that these two would probably be the most heavily armed children around. Between the AK collection and the 1911 collection, (now at 9, BTW with the addition of a Series 70 Colt Gov't in 9mm) plus a couple of shotguns for good measure, the twins won't lack for protection around the house.