Blogorado, Day 3

Lots of fun yesterday.  Miss D. and I didn't get to visit the kittens, due to other things intervening, but we hope to do that this morning after breakfast.

After another great breakfast rendezvous, we headed for the farm, loaded up with shooty and bangity goodness, then went on to the range.  A new arrival had brought some full-auto weapons, a bowling ball mortar and some sticks that went BANG! very enthusiastically and destructively when hit by bullets of the right size and velocity.  Loud explosions and the weird whistling noises produced by bowling balls in a ballistic arc were soon heard in the land.

I didn't join the bang-makers or the full-auto fans, having had plenty of that during my misspent youth.  Instead, I adjourned to the pistol range and continued with my torture test of two .44 Magnum revolvers (discussed yesterday).  I've now put well over a hundred rounds through each of them, with the help of willing volunteers, and they're running along just fine.  I think they're going to prove suitable for the disabled shooters who're eagerly awaiting an after-action report.  I also traded for some more .45 ACP ammo, and continued practicing with two pistols in that caliber.

There are four 'stations' on the home-built range that we've set up.  One is for handguns, one for shotguns, one for 'regular' rifles and one for long-range shooting (out to 1,000 yards, I think).  Each station soon filled up, and bangs were heard from all points of the compass.  Some shooters decided that they wanted more interesting targets, so they and headed for a couple of prairie dog towns to help the local farmers by culling the pests.  There are a lot of them around here.

It may be officially autumn now, but today was summer-hot, reaching the mid-80's (Fahrenheit).  Tomorrow promises to be even warmer.  By lunchtime I was feeling frazzled from the heat, so I elected to head back to town and rest for a couple of hours before supper.  I dropped Miss D. at the farm, where others who were feeling too hot had adjourned to sit in the cool, shady barn, shooing off itinerant chickens and feral cats while talking about life, the universe and everything.

This evening's supper was well up to Blogorado's usual high standards:  steaks cooked on the grill, accompanied by baked potatoes with all the trimmings and a very tasty salad.  I can only hope the exercise I'm getting on the shooting range is helping to burn off the calories, otherwise I'm going to leave ten pounds heavier than when I arrived!  We were amused to watch one of the barn cats, which seems to regard FarmDad as its protector, squatting at his feet (which kept the other cats away) while enthusiastically attacking a bone with useful lumps of meat and fat still attached.  It later settled into various laps to enjoy scritches and suchlike, purring up a storm.  It seems steak will soothe the savage feline breast . . .

Tomorrow is the last day of Blogorado for this year.  We'll breakfast as usual at a local eatery, then adjourn to the range for a final day's shooty goodness. It's forecast to be even hotter tomorrow than it was today, so we'll have to watch out for sunburn and drink plenty of water.  I've no idea how many flats of bottled water have already been consumed out there, but I bet it's enough to float a decent-size boat!

More tomorrow.

Peter