Don't lay hose in a ditch.

Blink is a book about decision making; how split-second decisions are made in our minds, factors and bias that affect those decisions, the dangers of having "too much" information and the power that experience and instinct can bring to the decision making process. I think I got turned onto this book after reading The Gift of Fear and they share very similar styles - there's a lot of psychology and science involved in the book but all of the points are illustrated with real-life anecdotes; everything from ER heart-attack policies to war games to criminal encounters. It's formulaic but it works so I like it. The other neat thing about these kinds of books is that the reader is guaranteed to be able to apply some of the lessons to their own life experience. Blink isn't quite the page-turner that De Becker's book is, but I'd certainly recommend it for anyone interested in this kind of subject.

I tend to follow the heavy stuff with some light reading - Dead Stop is a zombie apocalypse beach read. The characters are flat but likable, though he makes the error of casting the main protagonist as a sidekick. The writing is a little too conversational and Hilliard frequently breaks the cardinal rule about using cliches. The strength of the novel lies with the zombies, which is an unusual opinion for me to have because I normally enjoy the books that focus on how the characters survive and just use the zombies as part of the setting. Dead Stop, though is the first book that I've read that uses a fungus (inspired by Cordyceps, no doubt) as the cause for the dead to rise. He also crafted the zombies as having different levels of awareness and strength based on certain environmental conditions, which is a great tool. It's been a long time since I read a ZPAW book where the zombies were "fresh" and interesting, but this one pulled it off. I got this book for free off Amazon but it's now a 3-buck download, or free to borrow with Prime.

Spent several days at the family compound taking care of the animals while my parents were away. The grass is really starting to look good but it will be another year or two before they have some genuine sod. They have corner posts set for the pasture fencing and I'll probably be helping to put in the rest of the posts next week.

( quarriors, bush bows, choosing sidesCollapse )

I have a cousin who is my age and has been trying to get hired by a paid 911 Fire/EMS service for more that a decade. He's been doing crap jobs for most of his adult life while searching for a career in the fire service. His major obstacle was that he's not a paramedic and he was trying to stay in a rural area; most rural departments are volunteers. Anyways, about a month ago he finally got hired by a small town (9 paid firefighters) an hour from his house. He posted the above picture today on Facebook, plus,

"7pm and we're testing hose. Oh joy. #wishiwasfishing"

That was a real jaw-dropper for me. This is the FIRST fire service-related post I've ever seen him make. And he's complaining. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the country do his job for free and he's got the nerve to start whining before he's even finished his rookie orientation. Unreal. I know it's human nature and all, but he's 37 and by now he should have enough work experience that he should recognize how lucky he is to have a job in the fire service - or a job at all.

First time I've seen this - soap in a theft prevention container. Sign of the times, eh? It was one of many items that are now in these boxes at my local grocer. I hope it includes an EM tag as well because, really, if you can hide six bars of soap under your jacket you can hide the whole box.

I think if I ever saw someone trying to steal soap I would just tell them to put it back and that I'd buy them a bar of soap. I've gotta admire that kind of dedication to personal hygiene. But maybe that's my internal optimist speaking, since it's probably more likely that they're stealing it to sell it...

5 Terrifying Secrets About Riding in an Ambulance


Number four is my life.

So I made this mistake. I bought one of those cheap, soft steel, Chinese-made front sight tools (left) for my AK and a comedy of errors ensued.

First thing I discovered was that the tool's relief hole for the windage drum was too small for the drum to pass. I bent the swing arm on the tool figuring that one out. Then my friend and I tried to use the tool to adjust the elevation on his Yugo SKS and the part of the tool that adjusts the front sight post bent and broke off. Total garbage - it was $6 and I got what I paid for.

I guess the easy joke would be "it's an AK - you can use a rock and a hammer to adjust the front sight" but I'm not quite that cavalier about the ruggedness of the rifle.

That shiny, glorious chunk of USA-manufactured steel on the right is a Magna-Matic AK FST; $37 shipped and worth every penny. Out of the box it feels like a better quality device because it's twice as heavy as the other tool. The circular design is inherently stronger than a C-clamp, and the swing arm appears to be about three times thicker than the arm on the Chinese tool, twice as long, and, of course, made of better steel. It also comes with a lifetime warranty (and a sticker!). I'm not an armorer but this feels like an armorer-quality tool to me.

What's the saying - buy once, cry once? Considering the wasted range trip that the Chicom tool cost me, the Magna-Matic is a bargain.

I'm quite certain there are better ways to study, but this is mine. I make notes on index cards; a question on one side and an answer on the other, then I go through the cards and write down my answers until I can get them all right on the first try. Pretty old fashioned but it seems to have worked out for me - I went through a promotional assessment at work and made the cut; 30 of us tried out and I was one of 9 who passed. My new title is *Master* Firefighter/Medic, which entitles me to a small raise, the ability to run a station for a limited amount of time, and, most importantly, the ability to make the rookies refer to me as "*Master*". I haven't figured out how to make them communicate the asterisks yet. Maybe jazz hands.

Master is as far as I can advance unless I go for officer which, so far, has too many disadvantages for me to favor it in the pros/cons list.

The test was actually kind of fun, though I imagine it would have been less so if I had been less prepared. It had 4 steps which I'll put behind ( the cutCollapse )

Some day I'm gonna hit one of these guys with a shovel and it's gonna make me feel bad. No casualties yet, though. I'm expanding the garden a little bit this year, and hoping to get in at least 15 tomato plants now that I've found a tomato jam that I like. I should also look into some tomato soup or salsa recipes, but I kind of want to hold off on salsa until I'm growing more of my own ingredients.

Also saw a rabbit in the backyard for the first time since I had a dog, unless I count the one I had to dispatch after one of the neighbor's cats mauled it.

This Dark Earth was a pretty standard-fare zombie survival novel. I got the impression that one of the driving forces behind the story was the author's desire to promote his idea that an interstate overpass would make an ideal survivor stronghold. Nothing wrong with that, but he really glossed over the disadvantages of that choice, like exposure to weather and lack of soil to support crops. I'd have enjoyed some details on how they made it a longterm settlement. There is no single main character but the book follows the development of several different characters from the first person pov, and the reader then loses access to that perspective when the book switches to a different character. Kind of an unusual story-telling style (I don't think I've ever seen it before) but I'm not sure of any advantage it provided. There are also some graphic rape/sex slavery scenes that occur at the hands of the villain, which I feel is a lazy way to create a villain, not to mention distasteful. So, this one will be going into the to-be-traded bin.

Louis L'Amour is the king of westerns, but he journeyed away from his realm to write Last of the Breed, which is about a modern day Air Force jet pilot who finds himself behind enemy (Russian) lines and must revert to his Native American roots to survive and escape. It's a fine story as long as you don't expect too much from it - it's basically a beach book for boys. The problem with the story is that the main character is an expert survivalist and a little too perfect for the task at hand. He's barely begun his escape when he takes an afternoon to craft a bow from a piece of ash and a deer carcass, and is then using it to slay grizzly bears and shoot pilots out of moving helicopters. I'm not gonna say it's impossible - just that I'd have liked to see a little more struggle. I found myself far more interested in the Russian characters, who were humans and had weaknesses, and I take that shifting of interest as a flaw in the book. Still, it was a fun read and I think anyone who can't help but watch "Rambo: First Blood" or "Red Dawn" whenever they're on TV would enjoy it as well.

Went to my folks' place for a few days and helped dad with his workshop project in the basement - in the picture below you can see he'd already put up some lights and run wire through the studs for outlets.

...and after...

We put up 3/8" plywood on the walls and built the shelving units out of 1x6s. Both workbenches were salvaged from an abandoned school decades ago. They're probably 50-60 years old. They're immensely heavy, but it's hard to beat free! I am ridiculously jealous of that basement.

Lonely last moment

A young man jumps from the Yangtze River Bridge in Wuhan, central China's Hubei province, into the river following another person who committed suicide minutes earlier, on Feb. 27. Police said there was little chance for them to survive. AFP - Getty Images

Reuters is reporting that approximately 500 people were injured, but it was mostly from broken glass and debris. I'd have probably been injured in a car wreck if I had been driving and saw that thing coming at me. It's no Tunguska, but that smoke trail is certainly impressive.

"I've definitely considered writing Daryl in to the comics," said Kirkman. "Norman is always pestering me about it. All I can say right now is that if you have been paying attention to the Internet we did just release a series of teasers called 'Something to Fear' for a new story arc that's coming up and it's a series of very threatening looking people with very specific weapons and one of them has a crossbow."

Here's another one that's designed to follow you around without a remote control, take video, and then automatically upload the video to social media. I can't imagine wanting one for that purpose, but the idea of having an easily deployable, airborne security camera is pretty neat.

I don't know what made me think I could watch this on CNN. Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly both spoke, and then as soon as David Kopel (pro-2A) started to speak they cut out to the reporter and re-played Gabby Gifford's statement. They went back to live video once (anti-2A) Chief JJ of the Baltimore police department was ready to speak.

I guess I could have flipped over to Fox News and gotten the other side of the story, but fortunately I figured out that C-SPAN would cut out the middle man. The state of American media is revolting. When I was in college I got a BA in English with an emphasis on journalism. For the 3 years I took journalism-related classes, every teacher I had (and they were all liberal) stressed the importance of impartiality. Any sentence that even smelled like an opinion was struck with red. Editorial articles were a tiny fraction of our workload because those weren't "real" journalism. Obviously that doesn't sell in the real world. We have to rely on a voiceless camera for an unbiased opinion, and even those should probably be regarded with an index of suspicion.

If you'd like to watch the whole session (3 hours 47 minutes) it's located here: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/310644-1

If you're pro-2A, I'd highly recommend David Kopel's opening statement and his written testimony.

There are some great illustrations towards the end of the video that show the scale of the event and the speed at which the glacier is melting. I found it interesting that he described the calving as "horrible, scary". H.P. Lovecraft often described events in his stories that were so huge in size or implications that they were terrifying and even challenged the sanity of the character viewing them.

Watership Down is an adventure novel - a bit like Redwall because the characters are animals, but in my opinion it is vastly superior in content and execution. The basic plot involves a warren of rabbits who are forced from their home due to an impending disaster (human encroachment) and must travel across dangerous and unknown terrain to find a a new settlement. During their journey they encounter several other warrens, each with their own social system and social problems, including police states and caste systems. The social issues were probably my favorite part of the book, but there is some incredible world-building and great action scenes as well to maintain the pace. I can easily see this novel being one of those "comfort books" that people pick up every few years, like The Hobbit is for me now.

History of the Donner Party was a bit disappointing; it has some remarkable detail about the conditions in which the survivors were living but the timeline and the people involved were difficult to follow; the author's strength was in researching, not writing. One of the things that impressed me the most about this book was how the Donner Party was remarkably resourceful and knowledgeable in some areas (capable of repairing and moving their wagons over impossible terrain, able to manage the logistical difficulty of such a journey...well...mostly able) but they were remarkably unprepared and helpless in other areas (building shelters, clothing themselves properly, pooling resources and cooperative effort). The history of cannibalism amongst the party is glossed over fairly heavily. The author obviously has an aversion to addressing it, and when he does he always prefaces the statement with an elaborate apology and appeal for forgiveness, often speaking to the reader directly. This book is available for free at Project Gutenberg, but I'd recommend looking for a history written by someone else.

Now that my parents are moved into the house, the sorting has begun. Dad built these shelves in the basement to give some of the odds and ends a home. I immediately had a desire to go home and remove one side of all my interior walls. I am so jealous of this basement.


Amongst the "yard sale" corner I found these gems. The Joys of Jell-O book is a riot; almost all of the recipes sound freaky-naughty. Listen to this stuff:

Ambrosia Loaf
Three-fruit Fantasy
Party Salad
Tahitian Delight
Cream Topped Peaches
Tangy Cabbage Salad
Hawaiian Eyeful
Ring Around the Tuna
Seven-Minute Frosting

I need to know who thought it was a good idea to mix Lemon Jell-O, cabbage, spinach, chives, and carrots.

Recipes available on request.

Nancy's ship came in early! Unfortunately, coming home early means they're going to have to go out again, probably in two months, to finish up their deployment. And if they go out again, it's not going to be just long enough to make up for lost time; they're certain to tack on an additional 2-4 months.