Saturday Sleep In...

RE: overworked, I was probably overly affected by an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem (okay, I was trying to impress a girl) when I was being tortured in high school English class:

My candle burns at both ends

It will not last the night

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —

It gives a lovely light!

LOL!

I do feel moderately human this AM, almost enough to retreat to the basement and pull the lever on the Dillon for an hour or so, then ride the Spinner and pretend winter is almost over instead of several weeks away. I did want to get to the range because I've got a bunch of guns stacked up to shoot, including a couple of Macs, a Para Tactical Target Rifle, etc.

BTW, the gun pictured above is my Hamilton Bowen custom Ruger .30 Carbine 3-screw, by popular demand from the DRTV Forums. It's a pretty basic custom — barrel cut off at the ejection rod, an action job, fitted a tighter basepin, Hamilton Bowen's excellent "Rough Country" sights, and a wonderful almost-black refinish job. The grips are the fake ivory polymer grips that came on the gun, which I'm always meaning to replace with Tru-Ivory faux ivory grips, which look a little more like ivory, especially the "aged" version.

.30 Carbine (those are WW110-gr JHPs in the picture) is a better round than it's given credit for, IMHO. Think of it as a modernized 32-20, which it matches ballistically (110-gr bullet at roughly 2000 fps). I've never spent any time working on handloads for the round, although it's on my Cosmic List of Things to Do. I have dies, bullets and components in the gun room, waiting for me to launch myself into the dark and void of a new cartridge. In his wonderful book THE CUSTOM REVOLVER, Hamilton says, "The cartridge is capable of astounding performance, and every one known to the author has been wonderfully accurate with appropriate ammo." I have it as a backcountry packing pistol, a role currently occupied by "Thumper," my much-modified and much-shot Super Blackhawk in .44 Magnum.