Working Title

Been busy.

Too much work.
Too much training of new people.
Too many new people quitting the job once they have been trained.
Too often starting all over with other new people.

Thats almost a haiku. Too bad I havent the energy to rewrite it into the proper syllabic form.
In the meantime, the last two trainees appear to be staying, so maybe I'll have some bona-fide free time again.

Theres been quite a lot going on here and in the world in the meantime. I was looking to buy a Russian/Soviet Moisin-Nagant rifle when I came upon a German-issue Mauser K98k that I grabbed instead. There must have been some activity recently from surplus military arms importers, because what piqued my interest in the first place was several Moisin-Nagants that I had seen at gun shows. This K98 wasn't the first of its kind that I had seen, but I have been seeing more of them lately than I can recall. This one isn't perfect enough for a museum piece since a few of the numbers do not match (meaning it was rebuilt from parts of other rifles that had been issued), but in my book that means its OK for shooting and perhaps some minor modifications. The bore is corroded from the salts used in WWII era primers (deposits in the bore attract moisture), but I think I have learned of a 'fix' for that. A proper fix would probably be to replace the barrel. I'll have to see what happens.

Cool weather returns, and I still live in a poorly insulated and drafty townhouse. Well, I refuse to spend a metric ass-load of money on natural gas heating. I went to Home Depot and got a second electric heater and a pair of 15 amp timers (the sort that normally are used to switch on lamps). The heater I bought is a variation of the baseboard heater, but it has a "soft on" power switch. That means that I've got one too many timers, since the device plugged into the timer should be left on, and lack of power causes auto shut down on this unit due to the rudimentary computer that controls the temperature and a timer which determines how long the heater will run. Thats not quite the sort of timer I had in mind, but since I intend to do without gas heat, I'll be leaving this thing on a large percentage of the time. I only going to actively be heating a 2-3 room area to 55 or 60 degrees, so continuous duty shouldnt be a problem.

Now I have some caulking to do.