Calking Off

Things I like to do on the weekend:

I don't always get to do what I want to do, but I thought that a list would be a useful frame of reference. These are not particularly listed in any order of precedence:

Shooting Innocent Birds

The Browning Broadway Lightning (12 ga) - below -  is considered a trap gun but I find that it's a very good skeet gun as well. Super serious competitors have a number of gun options but I find that this one does all of it well. My favorite bird to shoot is the Chukar Partridge. The Chukar is difficult to hunt because it's a wary bird, but it's a good eating game fowl. There are a lot of quail in Arizona and California to hunt but you need to kill a lot of them to feed a family and something about shooting a quail makes me feel a little guilty.

I enjoy shooting skeet and trap. I'm not the world's greatest at either, but I've busted my share of clay pigeons. It's all about muscle memory and coordination. Timing is also important. To that extent, it's not unlike the activity below. The increasing cost of reloading components is making trips to the range less frequent. 

You know...

SCUBA

I have to preface this because I haven't been diving for quite a while. I snorkel on vacation a lot and 0-30 feet is a comfortable snorkel range. As I get older, I appreciate warmer water. Living in Southern California, the water is nowhere near tropical. The photo (right) was taken a long time ago. In the photo, I'm next to the USS Cavalla, now decommissioned, in the Sea of Cortez. 

Last week I checked my compressed air cylinders, stored in my garage, and found that they are out of "hydro", which means that I need to take them in and get them pressure tested before I can get them filled again. They still have a full fill on them (I use Steel 105 cubic inch cylinders), but the next time they are filled, it's a hassle.

Imagination

Though it may seem odd to you who read this blog, I enjoy things that require an exercise in imagination. I used to blow hot glass until the studio closed (economy crashed). I find that the first casualty of a bad economy is art. Artists can't sell what they create because people are busy rearranging their priorities toward food and shelter. It's too bad really because art tends to define the human condition much more succinctly than literature in my opinion. 

My present art of choice is the written word and the next in the novella series, THE BLACK SCORPIONS is being crafted somewhat this weekend. I've been working on a particularly challenging segment and I'm not sure that I got it right. The problem with art is that it's all in the eye of the beholder.  And when you write a book, there is no way to objectively know whether or not it will be well received because there is so much individual subjectivity involved in the enjoyment.

My research is exhaustive. The activity for yesterday was, "how do you introduce poison into a residential water supply in the US - and how does that differ from systems in other parts of the world." I had to find experts to provide the advice that led to the segment that you're going to read about in this coming tome.

Loafing

In the Navy, they call it 'calking off'. The weekend is designed for this sort of concentrated effort. To calk a wooden sailing ship, workers in the ship yards had to lay on their backs to work calking between the timbers that constituted the hull of the vessel. More than one drifted off to sleep while engaged in this effort - thus: Calking Off.