Ron Helwig

At the most recent Porc Fest, I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation by an extended family that is working very hard to become self-sufficient. They talked for over an hour on all the various aspects of such a life, but what I found most interesting was the mention of danger.

I'm not sure exactly why, but this morning's walk/run was the best one in years.

Last night I had some whiskey. Not too much, but enough to get feeling alright. For some reason I sleep "faster" and better when I've had some liquor. I think I sleep deeper, and so get a better rest sooner. Unfortunately, I seem to be allergic to cheap whiskey, so I can't really afford to drink every night.

In Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged", there is a place where the masters of production go to hide and wait out the eventual collapse of government and society. The collapse takes many years to get going but escalates in an exponential fashion.

Map of the route

This morning I tried a new route to take Otis for a walk/run. Much better views and less issues with loose rottweilers. Its also 5.7 miles, more than twice the 2.4 miles of the old route.

I didn't track the time it took, but I did run a significant portion of it. By the end of it Otis was tired but happy.

Tomorrow I plan on taking along my phone/camera. Right now the leaves are right around peak color, and some video and pictures would be fantastic.

As the video partially illustrates, I have been busy. I built the pathway down to the shore through some bushes in a couple of months. I had to hack out the trail (which had regrown after Roger moved back to Minnesota) and then I built it up to get it above the normal waterline.

We had our second Pink Pistols shoot here yesterday. I think it went pretty well. I was scrambling all about because of our 3 rangemasters, two were gone and the third was a little late. It was fairly hot and humid, but the rain held off until evening. We also had two video crews here shooting footage.

June 2008 Pink Pistols crowd

After being sick for over a week, I'm finally getting into Spring. We got the boat out, and Otis has been enjoying standing on the prow while we do all the work. We're going to start working on the range again soon, probably this week. Today we had more people over for the "church of John Browning", including some kids who got to shoot under the supervision of an NRA certified trainer.

The hard drives on the laptop finally failed, but luckily I had already ordered replacements and copied all my valuable data.

I tried out a Linux variant, but apparently the drivers for my RAID controller are insufficient. Thus I had to re-install MS Windows. If I could have gotten it working with Linux, I would have also had to install something called cedega - that supposedly would allow it to run the Windows version of Civilization 4.

I do have Civilization 4 installed and operational, which is key. It didn't work until I applied the 1.61 patch.

OK, I'm getting my new site all set up.

I'm finally going to have a blog. WooHoo!