I've been killed.

Well at least in Sock Wars. I'm dead. My lovely lovey socks arrived today. The Assassian Hat Lady got me! They are a most amazingly lovey shade of lavender. I think I'll wear them tomorrow. Maybe if I get excited I'll find my camera and post a photo of them.

New TV Showshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

Well this year I decided to try watchng some of the new TV offerings. My friend Tadao is in Heroes. Well he's not in the opener, but he's got a role in one of the later episodes and its a small role but you know.. it means I'm going to watch it. I've seen the first episode twice. Once downloaded from iTunes and once off my Tivo. It's really quite good. This year there seem to be a fairly big crop of SF shows. I always try not to get attached, but I inevetably get hooked on the first once cancled


Standoff is also pretty good. It has Gina Torres who played Zoe in Firefly as the head of a unit of FBI negotiators, it also has a departmental romance and fairly OK chemistry between the characters.

We'll see what else I start watching over the next week or three.

Ok I admit it at my worst I'm a stream of consiousnes blogger. This means that I just heard something really funny from down the hall and I can't resist posting it. I think this is why I don't normally post from work. AOL blacklisted our mail server. That's right, we can't send mail to AOL.com anymore. BWAHAHAHAHA Maybe it's not funny to you, but we do so much of our student recruiting through email. Apparrently we look like spammers.

The trigger has been pulled.

I realized my blog had become all about shooting again. There are other things in my life, really. I'm knitting for sock wars. My assassin tells me my socks are in the mail. So I don't have very long before I'm dead. Well barring the randomness of the USPS.

My target didn't know the game had started when I sent her email yesterday, so hopefully she's gotten started. I'm getting close, provided the socks aren't already at my house (which seems unlikely) I'll survive to get these in the mail.

This sock wars thing has been really amusing I never tried to see how fast I could knit a pair of socks before. They're always my sitting around waiting knitting. Heck there's a pair that's been in progress on my desk for 21 months and the first sock isn't done yet. I hate the needles they're on though which isn't speeding them up at all.

I've also been working hard on www.knitlikeapirate.com. I've got two more patterns I'm beta knitting, then the finding of test knitters and seeing if they can make them turn out, then I'll post them. Then I want to create a knit parrot and a knit monkey (complete with tiny vest and tiny gunner's cap). So... It's not that I'm not knitting I'm just knitting in silence. I should finish mom's socks too. Hmm.. more knitting less typing if I hope to survive to mail these socks!

Well I joined a trap league. Chilly's old co-workers had a team with space on it. We shot the first two rounds in the book last night 21 and 18. I may regret this as they're going to be my handicap rounds, but oh well. We shot at night, so I was wearing my regular glasses not my sunglasses, and we were shooting under the lights. I sort of like the lights. There's no visual distraction. Just glowing white bead and glowing orange clay. Put them together pull the trigger, make dust.

Also apparently most the guys don't shoot full chokes. Who knew? I figured all the trap guys used full chokes. Most of them were pretty well set on taking the slop that the modified chokes gave them. I have to say I like having a full choke, the sight picture is always the same when I break birds, it doesn't allow for much slop.

The other interesting thing is these guys let any bird they aren't on go. They just call for another one. That's against the rules, and yet, they do it quite brazenly, multiple times per round. Whatever. I guess the league is pretty loose about such things. It's not a habit I'd want to get into though.

Ahoy!

Arrr! Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. http://www.talklikeapirate.com A year ago this very day I taught Heidi to knit. She had an unfortunate tendency not to push her pirates off the plank! This year we're the proud people behind http://knitlikeapirate.com. It all started with a bad idea about a felted tricorn hat. Yes, that hat you teased me about Mom. Well, now it's gone bigtime, over 1000 hits yesterday, and people I don't even know have knit the hat. We're going to put up a rouge's gallery of completed projects. I'm in love. I never knit it the way I realy wanted in black with gold, but somebody did, and it's twice as amazing as I thought it would look!

I'm giddy, an unseemly degree of giddy. I almost feel sorry for my co-workers. Next year watch out, our site will be bigger and better for Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Mechanical Meltdown

Well trap shooting yesterday was a disaster. Not that my scores were bad. 21 the first round and 14 the second. Which means I cleared my 17 average for the day, but still a disaster.

The first round was ok for a while, but I was never sure why I was hitting the ones I hit, and I hit some I clearly thought I should have missed.

The second round was worse, standing on station 3 (I was shooting leadoff) I missed the first three shots and I couldn't figure out why, then I looked at my feet. Hello! Pay attention to what you're doing. They were turned so I was standing almost perpendicular to the house. Which makes chasing anything to my right near impossible, also, not a good stance for a shotgunner at all, which explans why I got hit in the jaw by the shotgun because my mount was thusly screwed up.

I just totally spaced off all the mechanical basics of shooting. Put your feet in the right place, put your gun in the right place, put your head in the right place. These aren't rocket science, but if you're screwed up with those three all the talent or luck in the world won't get you anywhere.

Lea Hernandez House Fire

Lea Hernandez house burned. It's about half destroyed. Who's Lea and why do I care? She's an artist and feminist and all around swell human being. She's behind Rumble Girls and Cathedral Child. She's been a guest at AnimeIowa a few times. The people all got out ok, but the pets didn't. I feel just terrible. She's taking donations via paypal. Info on donations here.

Lea's LiveJournal

girlamatic where she was once and may still be an editor(I don't know for sure)

Just so you all don't think I only blog about shooting anymore, soon Sock Wars starts! In a week or so we'll get the gauge requirements and I'll have to go find yarn and needles. Then sock knitting with a passion to see if I can stay in the game past the first few days.

Also Mort's allergies are terrible right now, the poor little guy is baked out of his gourd on antihistimines and still scratching passionately when he's awake. I swear they mostly work by not stopping the itching but making him sleep through it.

Well today was more trap shooting, on a Saturday instead of Sunday because Erik has to work Sunday. I shot for crap. Well you know the scores were ok, but mentally I just didn't have it together at all. The first round I was above the bird, ahead of the bird, behind the bird wherever, anywhere but on it. The second round about at the third station I noticed that anything moving to my left I could see two barrels and two birds, which means my tape was in the wrong place or too small. The end result scores of 17 and 19. Which aren't bad but I can do better. My mount was all over the place too, so I've got two brusies in completely different spots that are both the wrong spot for having a shotgun. On the up side, my lifetime average is now up over 10! which I have been waiting a long time for. My actual average over say 10 rounds or so is something like 18.

Also I filled out the form to be called about trap lessons. Sadly the guy called me back while I was at work and I never got back to him. I'll have to try again. I think I'm finally to the point where some learning might do me soem good. I'm know what I'm doing most of the time. I can see mistakes when I make them. I can see most the birds break, or not.