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Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
My daughter's blog
Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
Other Idaho Bloggers
Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
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That Backup Generator I Had Installed...
We went up there this morning with my daughter and son-in-law--and the garage door opener didn't work. Then we went in the front door--and there was no power. Then we went to the meter--and it was completely blank. Idaho Power, it seems, has lost power to hundreds of homes in the Horseshoe Bend area because of weather--and five hours later, the power was still out. My wife no longer thinks that I was being paranoid specifying a backup generator for the house.
So why didn't the backup generator start up automatically? That's what it is supposed to do, within 30 seconds of losing grid power. The electrician was supposed to get back up to the house after the heating guy hooked up the LP gas line to the backup generator to verify that it actually works. Apparently that didn't happen. So now I have a house with no heat, no electricity--and without the pressurization pump running, no water.
I am not a particularly happy person at the moment. At least I am not trying to live in the house.
Last house project entry.
Why I Am Hassling With Lead Filters
The results just came back from the water test performed after the lead filters went in a week and a half ago. The previous two water tests had shown 15 parts per billion of lead, and 37 ppb of lead. This test says that there is less than 2 ppb of lead--meaning, it is below the level that they can measure.
Last house project entry.
Another Thought-Provoking Speech by Michael Crichton
Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century. Well worth reading for his points about how oversimplified models run the environmental movement, and a history of how this simplistic approach produced a series of environmental disasters at Yellowstone.
Big Bertha & A Mighty Wind
I've mentioned Big Bertha before--my 17.5" reflector. (There's a picture at that link of it.) I've had it sitting in the back yard the last several months, since it is only portable if you can pick up 250 pounds by yourself. It has been adequately protected from the weather by an enormous tarp. After several attempts at getting it to lie flat, and not have the winds pull the tarp off of it, my wife suggested that I aim Big Bertha skyward, and then drape the tarp over Big Bertha rather in the manner of a condom--which, until now, has worked quite well.
Anyway, this evening we had very heavy rain--and a remarkably heavy wind to go with it. It didn't topple Big Bertha. It appears to have lifted it right off the eight or nine inch long pivot pin that allows it rotate in azimuth. Nothing was damaged (except, perhaps, the grass where it landed), but this solved the question of whether to bring it into the garage or not.
I've been planning for some weeks to move Big Bertha up to the new house. Partly, the new house (once the skies clear) will have much darker skies than we have here in Boise. Partly, Big Bertha creates a pretty substantial dead patch on the lawn. Moving it now gives the grass a chance to regrow before summer, when we will put this house on the market. The third reason for moving Big Bertha into the garage is that I am planning to put casters under its base so that I can roll it in and out of the garage at the new house.
There's nothing quite like carrying a massive telescope into the house during a rain and wind storm. Everyone should do it once.
House Project: Finished Closing Today
The house is about 99.9% complete. What's left are largely minor touchup issues (wind whistling around the front door) and the problem of lead filtering. This has taken up just about all my time, preventing me from completing editing of my next book, Armed America, and preventing me from blogging about the important issues of the day. Even though I am off work this week (my company shuts down between Christmas and New Year's Day), every spare moment has been spent dealing with house issues, or machining a new ScopeRoller product.
There was some last minute confusion about the final price of the house, because we had paid some costs to Idaho Power directly, and the builder was still showing almost $2400 as having been paid by them. The final cost came to about $267,000.
First, the filters. I mentioned that the lead filters seemed to have been clogged because we didn't have adequate prefiltering to remove fine particles. Here you can see the filters in their new state, and after just a couple of weeks of use--in a house that has not been occupied.
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I mentioned that the water, while safe to drink (at least, for a short period of time), and actually tasty, is a disgusting color without the lead filters. 
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That's not all minerals. Most of the visible stuff is probably dirt that got kicked into the water tank during installation of the floats that tell the well pump whether to run or not. It looks terrible, however, especially compared to the slow, but very clean water from the lead filters.
The electrician purports to be done, but I see a few signs that he didn't finish a few phone and television cable jacks.
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Anyway, there's a water issue to be resolved in the next few days, and some grading and exterior trim painting to do when the weather improves. Otherwise, the house is complete, and livable.
We took a friend up to take a look at today when we went up to measure for drapes, and to drain the water tank (in the hopes that some of the ugliness is dirt in the tank that will just drain out).
Here's the road leading to our subdivision.
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Going up our driveway.
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The laundry room.
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The kitchen.
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A view like this almost makes doing dishes tolerable.
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The family room.
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The dining room.
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My son's room (assuming that he isn't away at college), with the "worst view in the house."
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And his bathroom.
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The living room.
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The guest bedroom.
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Guest bathroom.
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My office.
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Okay, there's still some debris to be cleaned up when the weather improves.
The master bedroom.
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And the view out the back door.
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Last house project entry.
Guns & Alcohol: A Bad Combination
Actually, almost any form of machinery and alcohol is a bad combination. But these tragedies should be a sobering reminder as you get ready for the New Year's Eve parties. Like this one, here in Boise a few nights ago: BOISE -- Boise Police have filed charges against a man who thought his gun was unloaded when he shot and killed his friend early last Saturday morning. Detectives say alcohol played a role in the shooting.
Every gun is loaded. You never point and shoot a gun--even an "unloaded" gun--at anything that you are not prepared to destroy. Ever.
Dustin Nagy, 22, of Boise, faces a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a friend.
Dustin W. Nagy, 22, of Boise was booked into the Ada County Jail late this morning.
Nagy is charged with involuntary manslaughter and unlawful use of a firearm.
Detectives say Nagy was showing his friend Paul Lawrence a .40 caliber semi-automatic handgun at the victim's West Boise home around 1:25 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 17.
Nagy told police he did not believed the gun was loaded when he pointed it at the victim's abdomen and fired.
This isn't just a Boise thing, unfortunately. I had no problem finding a number of recent tragedies, like this one, in the Houston area: PORTER - A late-night house party where numerous teenagers had been drinking ended with the shooting of a 16-year-old boy who died early Tuesday at a local hospital, police said.
Or this one in Georgia:
Derrek Delk, of Porter, died from a single gunshot wound to the neck, said Precinct 4 Justice of the Peace James Oren Metts.
The shooting happened about 6:30 a.m. at a house in the 22300 block of Smith in southeast Montgomery County.
Montgomery County sheriff's investigators said teenagers who attended the Monday night party found a gun on the property.
The teenagers began loading and unloading the magazine and racking the slide. The gun went off while in the hands of another 16-year-old, striking Delk in the neck, said Sgt. Carey Mace.A brother talks about the agony of being shot by his own brother and then having to kill his brother in self-defense.
Or this piece of rank stupidity (fortunately, not quite rising to the level of tragedy) in Virginia:
It all took place Friday morning on Dekalb County Road 1942 in Collinsville.
"He said I'm gonna kill both of you. And I just watched him...didn't say a word. And he went down there and got his rifle," says James Craig.
James Craig says his brother, Gary, had been known to get in fits of rage...fits of rage made more severe by alcohol.
It was Friday morning when Gary was drinking and started cursing James' wife, Sheila.
Gary was kicked out of the house and got a gun.
"I kept telling him put the gun down, put the gun down. And he kept saying I'm killing all of you," says James Craig.
That's when Gary started shooting.
"I turned to get my rifle, and then he shot me in the back as I was going to get my rifle. Quick as I picked it up I fired two shots. And then I don't what happened. That was it. That was it," says James Craig.
In the end, Gary was shot and killed.
James says he was shot seven times, and his wife was shot twice.
"The bullets hurt. But, not near as bad as what I had to do," says James Craig. James Galasso received homemade liquor and 5,000 rounds of ammunition for Christmas.
By 4 p.m. Christmas Day, he decided to use a little of both.
Authorities said he�d been drinking when he started firing his gun out of the back of his mobile home on Dunivan Drive in Campbell County.
�He fired at least 200 times,� said Capt. Kevin Schmitt of the Campbell County Sheriff�s Office.
With volley after volley ringing out in the neighborhood, which is close to Candlers Mountain Road, residents starting calling 911.
Soon deputies began to arrive.
Sheriff�s negotiators tried to contact Galasso by telephone. He wasn�t answering.
�He was inside the mobile home shooting towards the woods,� Schmitt said.
Authorities decided it was time to bring in eight to 10 members of the sheriff office�s special response team.
With a group of armed sheriff�s snipers looking on, Galasso came out on his porch and fired a gun in the air, Schmitt said.
Inside the mobile home, Galasso had a pistol, a shotgun and several rifles. During the course of the afternoon, he�d fired all the guns.
�He came out more than once and fired in the air,� Schmitt said.
Galasso pressed his luck one time too many.
House Project: Fun With Filters
I went up this morning to try and figure out why the lead filter seems to have cut water pressure to nearly useless. At the suggestion of the vendor, I opened up the filter housing, and verified that yes, the plastic sheeting was not left on the filters. Then I removed all the filters from the housing. This was an unpleasant task, sitting in the garage, while a freezing rain with a mighty wind behind blew in on me. My hands are numb from the cold, and the filters have water from the water tank, which is well above freezing, but still plenty cold. It could have been worse--the heating guy was hooking up the backup generator to the LP gas line, in the rain, standing in cold, sucking mud.
Anyway, I was only able to get 12 of the 14 filters out of the filter housing. These are held in place by big plastic nuts that are are supposed to be "hand tightened only." Perhaps they were, but I do not want a firm handshake from whoever "hand tightened" these nuts. Still, this was enough to demonstrate that the pressure problem was strictly a matter of the filters--not something else failing.
I spent some time discussing the problem with the guy at Filtration Technology who sold us the housing and lead filters. I notice that when I removed the filters, they were gray--not white, like new filters. I also noticed that the water coming out of the faucets is now tinted lightly yellowish-brown.
It turns out that the lead filters are one micron--and apparently, absolute one micron. Nothing larger than one micron gets through--as distinguished from most water filters, which have a nominal filtering size which actually means that most particles of the specified size are stopped. Filtration Technology says that the prefilter was probably not specified tight enough, and what has happened is that fine particulate matter in the several micron size has clogged the lead filters. Their proposed solution is to replace the current prefilter (which I think might be 25 micron or so) with a nominal two micron filter, feeding into a housing with a nominal one micron filter. The two and one micron filters are much cheaper to replace, and will give a much longer life to the lead filters. They are also suggesting that we should have pressure gauges on the input and output of the lead filter housing, so that we can see when it starts to clog.
I have received a few emails asking why I am bothering with lead filters on a new house. The answer is that water tests have shown variously 15 and 37 parts per billion of lead in our water--probably because we are on the edge of a rather impressive granite batholith. Granite often has gold and silver, and where you find silver, you often find lead. Certainly, some parts of northern Idaho have silver and lead in proximity, and so I am assuming that the granite upslope from us is the source of the lead in our ground water.
Last house project entry.
Goodyears
I mentioned a few days back that the Goodyears on the rear of the Corvette worked fine on dry or wet pavement--but not well at all on snow, so I replaced them with some new Michelins. The old Goodyears still have a bit of tread on them--and new, they cost about $376 a piece. So I am selling them on eBay.
House Project: Fun in the Mud
No pictures, but my wife and I ran up to the house this afternoon to dig a couple of drainage ditches to empty the small lake next to the garage. This was an ugly, filthy, muddy task, with the clay sucking my boots down until I was afraid that they were going to pull right off my feet. The builder finally came from Christmas vacation, and agrees that he needs to at least grade the area a bit better to get the water to not pool. The next step if this doesn't solve it will be putting in the drainage pipes to move the water away from the house.
There's still a river flowing through the garage (okay, only a river by Los Angeles standards), but when we were washing off our muddy boots at the end of the day, we noticed that water was getting past the drain in the driveway, and ending up in the garage. The builder is going to work on extending that drain into the garage floor.
The builder is also going to get the water filter issue resolved on Tuesday. Either the vendor makes it work, or takes it back, and we go to undersink lead filters instead.
Last house project entry.
