Category: Personal

I’ve arrived in Northern Virginia.  Spent the better part of the day getting my car fixed.  Had to take a day off work, unfortunately, once I realized it was going to be a while.  Bitter is entertaining some folks from work this weekend, and David Hardy is in town, so we’re going to try to meet up with him.

But you know, I’m here pretty much every other weekend.  Any of you Brady folks visiting today ever want to get together for a drink, since you guys are DC based, and all, just leave a comment.  I’ll even meet you in The District, which is sadly much less safe than Fairfax County, but you don’t have to worry about sitting next to a bunch of strapped gun bloggers :)  We’re the kind of people who obey gun control laws, you know.

Sorry for the light blogging today.   Had a dentist appointment this morning, so didn’t get any posts done before leaving the house.  Got a new employee starting tomorrow that was just dropped on me (despite the fact that I ask for two weeks advanced notice for this crap), so I have to get the relevant package together.  I have no help desk staff currently, other than me, so I end up being the one to deal with new hires.

I’ll just borrow ideas from Uncle:

1. I’ve never bungee jumped, but I’ve seen Rockey Horror Picture show two times.  Last time I went, there were two hot chicks making out in the theater in front of me.  I might have watched that more intently than the show.
2. I don’t own a lot of guns by some people’s standards, but probably more than Uncle or Bitter.
3. My legal name is 100% Irish
4. I got my wisdom teeth removed last fall.  Dry socket was the worst pain I’ve ever had.  The narcotics were good though.
5. My liver is 50% Irish and 50% German
6. I could pretty much repeat Uncle’s line for this one, except I lack a graduate degree.  And my grandmother did graduate from high school.
7. Bitter has not yet asked me to marry her, but she’s been looking at wedding stuff all weekend. (she’s putting together a post on the wedding industry)
8. I once shot and killed a bird with a BB gun without meaning to.  It got in between me and the target.

I was showing Bitter where I grew up. My father, and now my sister, are volunteer firefighters with the Ridley Park Fire Company. My father lives in Newark, Delaware now, and is mostly not active. I was kind of surprised to find a picture of my sister on their site not more than a week old:

She’s front and center, with the first shovel moving from left to right.  Directly to my sister’s left (picture right), is my brother-in-law. Click to see the whole pic.

I’m sure my tree surgeon has never seen a poem as lovely as a tree either, considering it’s going to cost me $1050.00 to have the fallen branch removed from my lovely red maple tree, have all the other limbs cut away from the wires (seven of my trees are impinging the utility wires), and one of my sweetgum trees is nearly dead, and has to be removed. I have another sweetgum tree right across the driveway, just in case I miss having monkey balls all over in the fall.

Last month I had three of the trees on my property trimmed for $800. They did a good job. Of those trees, I lost not a twig off them in the bad storm. I was debating on whether to have them take the sweetgum tree down now, or have them do it later. Doing it now will be cheaper. Tree surgeons seem to charge a base price just for coming out with all their gear and equipment, so I figure if I’m going to have them out, I might as well have him set me up so I don’t have to worry about my trees again for quite some time.

But damn, think of the rifle I could have bought with the $1850 bucks I’ve spend on tree surgery this year? I’m not buying another property with 12 trees on it. It’s either going to have only a few trees, or so many trees I don’t have to care!

We had some storms roll through.   At work they seemed to be pretty mild, but when I got home, it looked as if someone dropped a bomb on my neighborhood.  I had to dodge a few down trees.  My blog was down earlier, and this is why.  Our power went out briefly.  It looks like I have a limb down on the house:

 

One of those lines holding up part of the branch is my FiOS cable which supplies internet for the blog.  Hopefully the rest of the branch will not come down in the mean time, or I’ll be seeing ya all for a bit.

 

Considering my neighbor’s house looks like it had a tree struck by lightning, and the people up the street had a tree come down on the power lines, snapping the pole, cutting out power for that part of the neighborhood, and closing the street.  I’m pretty lucky to have gotten away with a minor branch down on the roof that almost, but not quite took out power, internet, or cable.

I suspect power or internet could be going out any minute, really.  If it’s looking like a prolonged outage, I’ll move the blog to Jason’s server for the time being.

Bitter and I replaced my mailbox yesterday, which makes it a fresh target for any neighborhood teens to decide to play mailbox baseball.   Fortunately, that’s more of a rural teen activity, and not something I’ve seen often played in my neighborhood.   But my old one was oxidized and falling apart, and the post was hanging from a single nail.   I don’t know if this was just age, or the result of a previous game of mailbox baseball, but I had to shore it back up with screws, after I pissed off and killed the family of carpenter bees that were living in the post.  I probably should have replaced the post too, but I’m lazy.

Clayton talks about the old days of Burma Shave, a brushless shaving cream. A pox on the Burma Shave house! While I might like Clayton’s Burma Shave-style marketing gun rights idea, I’m in the Kim Du Toit camp when it comes to shaving:

Right now, I shave with an old-fashioned bowl of old-fashioned shaving soap, an old-fashioned badger-bristle shaving brush, and one of those damn newfangled multi-blade razors. The razor is my sole concession to modernity, and while I appreciate its utility, it’s not the same as shaving with an old-fashioned straight (“cut-throat”) razor, or even a single-blade “safety” razor. Yeah, those 2 3 4 5-bladed thingies work well—maybe even better than the older razor types; but since when was I all about efficiency trumping tradition, anyway?

I pretty much do the same thing. Badger hair brush, shaving mug, and whatever fine English shaving cream I happen to have at the time. I do use a cartridge razor as well, because it’s just easier, and it works well. But you don’t know good shaving until you’re lathering up your face with a dead-badger-on-a-stick’s worth of Taylor of Old Bond Street’s rose scented shaving cream. Taylor’s is very easy on the face, provides a good shave, smells fabulous, and washes clean out of the razor. To me, this is the great feature. With modern shaving creams, if you don’t have power washer level pressure coming out of your sink, it’s a nightmare trying to get the blades clean.

So no Burma Shave for me. I’ll stick to my badger killing brush and fine smelling traditional shaving creams. If you’d like to order some yourself, my favorite place to get some is Vintage Blades, LLC. He set up a booth at the big Harrisburg Gun Show, which is how I found out about him.

My New Hampshire carry license expires at the end of the month.   I put it in my pocket as a reminder to renew it.   It’s one of those things, the license is superfluous now, since Pennsylvania and New Hampshire have reciprocity, and there’s no other state that New Hampshire gets me that Florida doesn’t already.   So there’s no real need to renew New Hampshire.  But hey, it’s 20 bucks so why not.   Slip it into the pocket this morning so I would remember.

Except I went to get it, and it was gone.   I seem to have lost the damned thing.  The even bigger problem is there’s a good chance it lost it at work.  I’m really hoping I lost it on the lunch break, but I’m not really too sure where it happened, I just know that sometime between before lunch, and when I left work, I no longer could locate my New Hampshire license.

Big fear?  Someone at work will find my license, which has my name, address, and vitals (but thank God not social #) on it, and will freak out and wonder why their IT manager has a “Pistol and Revolver License” from New Hampshire of all places.  I guess now I’m not going to renew now though :)   Either way, you’d be surprised by how many people in this area, because we’re so close to the Garden State, and employ so many people from there (they call it the Garden State because what do you need for a good garden?  Lots of fertilizer.  Their politicians supply it in abundance.) think it’s just a license to possess rather than carry.

The last thing I want is to get a call into the HR droid’s office tomorrow and get questioned why I have a gun license.   I might be entirely too tempted to say “None of your fucking business.”, which could get interesting.  Fortunatly, they’d be utterly screwed without me, but HR droids tend to not care too much about matters beyond keeping the company from being sued, or keeping the blame deflected off them if something is amiss.

I need to be more careful in the future.