So I have been fighting and ear infection since early December. I have been on a 5-day and 10-day antibiotic. This Friday it was back and I was back to the doctors for the third time. I am not on some really mean antibiotic that I will likely have to take for 15-30 days. I guess I have some really nasty infection and it's kicking my arse. Tried to go to sleep last night and tossed and turned from midnight till about 3:00AM. Advil bearly touched the pain. Laid there for another half an hour and finally gave up. The pain was mind numbing and I was definitely not going to get back to sleep. I surfed the web for a few minutes and then realize that I might a well go and install my Christmas present from my brother, Halo 2 for the PC. This is the first new game I have gotten for my home computer since... hmmm I don't remember.

I played for about 3 hours after getting it installed and updated. I just finish another two hour session after Abby went to sleep. So far I am having a lot of fun with it. I really enjoyed the first Halo and this story is just as good. The Flood does not freak you out quite the way it did with the way it was introduced in the first game. The vehicle battles are very cool and I love the way the vehicles take damage. I also like due weilding the weapons despite how much I generally hate duel wielding in movies. (If you have ever tried to duel wield a pair of handgun you'll realize why. Can't hit crap and you go through ammo twice as fast.) Over all it's been pretty good.

One thing the game does point out though is my new 2.33 Ghz Core 2 quad computer is nice but the 128MB ATI graphics card is definitely lacking. I had to turn down the detail and turn of the aliasing to make the game playable when the terrain is complex and/or a lot of bad guys are on the screen at the same time. Any suggestion for a good graphics card that can handle a game like Halo 2 without being supper expensive would be great. I would guess another ATI or Geforce card in the 1/2 GB variety is what I need but would love to hear specific suggestion from those a little more up to date on this type of thing.

These were by far the most psycho and busy holiday time I can remember. I am sure those that read this don't want all the gory details but suffice it to say it climaxed at my parents house Christmas afternoon when we had 16 people (1 infant-Abby, one toddler, two little kids, three teenagers, and nine adults) and to make it interesting mix in one ancient and grumpy beagle dog, two miniature border collies that need much larger doses of Valium and one two year old golden retriever that just wanted to play with every one but that the other three dogs thought he is try to eat them. Chaos and hilarity ensued.

Abby was a real trooper through all this chaos. I am sure there were days her butt never hit the ground being passed from one friend or relative to another. She final wore out yesterday coming down with a minor cold and has been a bit fussy do to that.

In addition to the Christmas festivities we also did Abby's baptism Sunday after Christmas with a get together afterwords and dad, brother and myself slipped off Sunday evening and hunted deer for two day.

I was asleep well before midnight last night and I am going to need another vacation just to recover from this one.

I just noticed it has been nearly a month since I have written a post. Update in short bullet form

-Abby is doing good and growing like a bad weed.

-She is developing some personality and she will now snuggle with daddy (something she would not do until about a week and half ago) which is very nice.

-For the most part she is a very happy baby

-I have created a new word for when Abby is not happy: Fussicated, the state of being and acting fussy.

-GFWTR got a clean bill of health post pregnancy.

-A cousin on my father's side of the family was killed last week in a motorcycle accident, very unpleasant and hard weekend followed.

-I have shoot two pistol matches since my last post. Did stellar at the earlier one, completely tank the more recent one.

-Work has hit an all time low for me. I have never been this unhappy at work since I started here. Something has to change...

-I bought a new-used gun Tuesday night. Should be a good winter project gun. More on that later.

-I am looking very hard for a good deal on a desktop computer to replace my aging 2.0Ghz Celeron laptop Something higher end (Core 2 Quad), any suggestions would be greatly appriciated!

It's been snowing like mad since Friday afternoon. I shoveled several inches out of the drive way Friday night so GFWTR could get in the drive. I shoveled 8-10 inches out of the driveway this morning when I got up. I also help dad dig out his drive too. I am going to sleep good tonight. When I got home from the Grocery store a hour ago there was another 4-6 inches of fresh snow down and it's snowing even harder if possible.

I was suppose to go over to Erie for a USPSA match at one club an annual banquet for a second club. Both were canceled. Hopeful the storm lets up tonight and we can still make the match tomorrow. I have not shot since early last month and my trigger finger really needs a work out.

I tried to go over to the local range and police supply store a few blocks away and do a little shopping but they were closed. So I went for a drive around. Pushed one car through an intersection when they got stuck and general just had fun tooling around in the snow. Many of the back street had hardly seen a plow and as I got brave I went south out of the city and hit some of the hillier back roads. The Element despite having nearly 45,000 miles on tires that were never really good in the snow did pretty good for me. It's still a strange sensation when those rear wheels kick in pulling a hill. If you hit the turns just right it will do this real fun 4-wheel drift through the turn. Anyway I eventually ran out of blue juice and so hit the grocier store and the gas station for a top off and a gallon of blue juice.

Here's hoping the storm dumps it all this evening leaving enough time to clear the highway so I can go shooting tomorrow.

So I will post more in depth on last weeks events later but for now know that I have a really bad case of poison ivy, bad enough that I have a doctors appointment at lunch today to try to get some good meds to fix it. I have heard enough hooky home remedies since Saturday to write a book on the subject.

Myself and several of the guys I shoot with scored 6 barrels like the one pictured above. The state of Pennsylvanian auctioned off ~120 barrels of brass and we grab six of them. I assumed the brass came from the state police academy or similar. Each barrel was advertised as having at least 146lbs of once fired brass and it was suppose to be nearly all 40S&W. The barrel I got had 149lbs on the lid and it does appear to be nearly all 40S&W and even better than that is about 99 percent Winchester brass and very few Glocked brass at that. Apparently the mostly use Beretta handguns. There is a few 223Rem, 45ACP and 9mm mixed in but not very much at all. 146lbs of 40S&W brass should be a bit over 14,500 cases and for just under $20/1000 at that. I think that will keep me going for a few years. The case cleaner is going to getting a work out over the next few days for sure.

On a side note I finished my taxes tonight and come out ahead!

The volume of small arms fire around midnight in the vicinity (inside Cleveland proper) of tonight's New Years Eve festivities I attended would have been mildly alarming had it not been for the amount of alcohol I had previously ingested. Instead I simply shook my head in bewildered amusement at the stupid people and went inside when the shotgun pellets started landing on the roof where we were standing. GFWTR drove me home, she was a real trooper putting up with me.

http://www.merzo.net/

I'm sure this has probably been around for sometime but I just found it today and thought it was pretty cool. gfwtr got a bit impatient with me while I looked up the Millennium Falcon for her. I kept getting distracted by other ships.

Wiley must have been executing one of his overly complicated and devious plans to dine on road-runner and it must have included the use of a United Airlines 737. Well in usual Wiley E. Coyote fashion something goes horribly wrong and in this case poor old Wiley E gets sucked into the number two jet engine during takeoff. I don't envy the poor engine mechanic that will have to clean up that mess. As usually the only one injured by Wiley's plan was himself. The plane manage to make to get into the air and then turn around for a successfully emergency landing at Denver International Airport.

via Aero-News Network