Weekend Update-

What is this anyway, Saturday Night Live? It seems the only time I have for posting these days is on Sunday evenings. Some of my lack of posting is simple laziness but mostly I've benn busier than ever and when I'm not being busy, I've taken some time to just sit and relax and read a book or two.

First of all, I've not said anything about the crisis and tragedy of the mining accident down in Huntington. There's nothing I can add to everything that has already been said and if you've seen any new broadcasts over the past 2 weeks, you know the story; 6 miners trapped during a cave-in and 3 men killed while working on the rescue crew with 6 more suffering various levels of injuries. Now, after drilling 4 holes from the top of the mountain, down 1800 feet into the mine trying to locate the trapped mines, the officials are saying that the 6 trapped men may never be recovered. The mine is unstable and further digging to rescue or recover the men may just cause further collapse and injury or death of anyone trying to go into the mine shafts.

This is a terrible tragedy and the stories of the grieving families have been on our nightly news each night. My heart hurts for all of them and I wish there was some way for them to be relieved of their pain. As it is, they may not even get to bury the bodies of their loved ones.

Myself, I can't imagine working underground every day, digging coal oout of the rock. It scares the crap out of me to think of doing the work that these brave men do every day. I think its a shame that we still depend on coal for power production and I'd like to see every coal burning power plant replaced with a new, shiny nuclear powerplant so that miners like these wouldn't have to go underground.

My heart goes out to those families whose loved ones are trapped in that Huntington mine.

So what else have I been doing? I've taken the Para-Ordanance Warthog out for its first outing at the range and so far, I'm not ready to make this gun my carry gun. Like many chopped 45s, this gun has feeding problems... Grr! Its accurate and shoots where I point it and even pretty controllable for its shortened grip but it doesn't feed ammo reliably.

I shot 110 rounds through the gun. On nearly every magazine full, the last round out of the magazine fails to feed. The round comes out of the mag, gets the rim under the extractor but hangs up with the nose of the bullet against the top of the barrel hood. This hangup must have happened 8 or 9 of the 11 magazines I ran through it. Additionally, I had repeated failures to feed in the middle of the magazines where the round of ammo didn't even make it up to the bolt face but instead got hung up under the bolt as it returned to the closed position after recoiling.

There's a possibility that I was limpwristing my grip and that could be the cause of the misfeeds, but I'm not sure. I was making an effort to keep a firm grip on the gun to prevent this problem and I don't think that my grip explains why the last round in the magazine hung up so routinely. When I got home and cleaned the gun, I also discovered that the magazines had some kind of getting sticky coating on them. So I cleaned the magazines, inside and out with some solvent and applied some spray dri-film lube on the insides.

Now I've got to go back to the range and see if the sticky coating was holding up the magazine performance. I'm hopeful that the problem is solved but I'm not carrying this gun for protection until it shoots reliably.

The scooter's not working- again! Same problems as before, cutting out at high speed, not idling, dieing when the throttle is opened. I've left it sit most of the weekend because I'm mad at it. I'm either going to have to buy another carburetor for it or just keep struggling with it.

I did get the camper's awning repaired and reinstalled. The front crossbar got seriously bent when the water filled up the awning during our camping trip to Oregon. The aluminum extrusion was bent about 2 inches out of straight and by some careful bending using a couple sawhorses and the bottom of my workbench, I was able to get it nearly straight. I put new velcro on the front of the extrusion to hold the screenroom in place and I got everything put back into the storage bag and rehung on the camper.

I finished another pretty good thriller novel this morning after working on it most of this week. The book was Black Order and except for a few cheesy concepts, The SIGMA secret arm of DARPA is one of them, its a pretty good thriller. It has James Bond style thrills and secret agents and a evil bad guy with a plan to take over the world using secret technology. Its a worthy summer read and I enjoyed just sitting and reading in the shade of the carport.

I also got the overgrown weedbed in front of the house cleaned out and turned back into a flowerbed this morning. That flowerbed gets overgrown so fast its just remarkable.

What else? No movies this weekend. I did go visit Darren's 3rd scooter and ATV store, down in Bountiful on Saturday, tried to find a new face shield for my helmet as mine got damaged the other day and I'm still looking to purchase a fishing pole before this next weekend so I can go fishing with Kenny.

The job has been very hectic lately and shows no sign of relaxing in the near future. Last week I gave 4 briefings on 2 different programs and prepared charts to brief a 3rd program next week. So blogging from the job has become almost impossible as I try to keep all my programs moving forward and getting accomplished.

And now, its 10PM and time for me to get my shower- except I still have clothes to fold nd put away so I can find them when I need to get dressed for work, starting tomorrow morning.