Is It Friday Yet?

I mean, no matter how I slice it, it's nowhere near the end of the week. In fact, unless I'm sadly mistaken, it's the beginning of a new week! How can that be? Does it have something to do with the end of Daylight Savings Time, or maybe the rising power of China?

So after a grueling week in a deluxe resort, hardening our arteries with Sputhern cooking and breaking clay pigeons, I was barely able to drag myself home and wanted nothing more than to sleep late. I made the mistake of visiting Weather Underground before I collapsed, where I discovered that Saturday was going to be a magnificent autumn day in the mountains, a day not to be missed. So by 6AM Saturday morning we're on the way to the cowboy match hosted by the Cheyenne Regulators up in Cowboy World north of Colorado, with visions of lovely blue skies and gold quaking aspens.

Autumn ended at the Wyoming state line. By the time we got to the range, it was fogged it, wet as an old horse blanket in, bitingly cold and — of course — windy. Like really windy, the kind of Wyoming wind that can find any tiny crack in your defenses (and since Indiana and I failed to bring iny defenses at all, those cracks were legion). The Cheyenne Regulators are a hearty bunch, though, and the club members assured us it would warm up, probably around July.

The match was fun, I think, although it rained procedural penalties on me...a good sign that my brain had failed to make the adaptation to winter shooting. BTW, the back-up back-up rifle, the Marlin 1894 .38, was a bit cranky on a stage when a piece of something or other — heck, maybe ice — got clogged behind the little lever dohicky on the lever that retains the lever when it is closed. Since the little lever wasn't levering, it wanted very badly to stay closed. Situation resolved with a heathy crunch and a shot of WD-40 to rinse out the remainders.

Got my FAL back from DS Arms with a new DSA scope mount and a mild trigger job. Am presently agonizing over what scope needs to top it. I'm halfway leaning toward the little Millett DMS 1-4 24mm, but that Burris 1.5-6X Tactical looks appealing (albeit expensive). After all, I'm not headed for Afghanistan next week, and the FAL was never designed to be a long-range tack driver. GUNSITE has a Major Battle Rifle class that I hope to film for SG 2012, and I plan to use the FAL in that. I want to get the gun debugged well before the class.

John R., I'm sorry I missed the conference in San Fran as well...would have loved to have been there, but my schedule right now is just brutal. Trust you'll be at SHOT next year. Working on THE BEST DEFENSE next week and the week after, then SG for the rest of the month. We'll be starting filming for GUN STORIES in early November. I plan to take Thanksgiving Day and Christmas off.