The Gun Counter

Vonz90 wrote:https://gigapixel.panoramas.com/navy/football/20171007/

Picture of my son at the Navy-Air Farce game. He is in more or less in the middle.

Handsome fellow.

HTRN wrote:

Netpackrat wrote:Amazon's free shipping is increasingly worth less than you pay for it... Latest batch of stuff that has yet to ship, was ordered on the 17th. Good thing I don't need any of it soon.

Ahem.

Yeah, they still haven't shipped it. I don't need any of it urgently (or I would not have ordered from Amazon), but if it goes on much longer I am going to cancel most of it and order elsewhere.

OTOH, I recently ordered something from Home Depot that Amazon wouldn't ship because Alaska. Tracking says it started out in WA state, then went to Oregon, and is now making its way through California...

So, only when I try to cancel that order do they decide that NOW they want to ship it today, and won't let me do that.

Just acquired a 98% rust free 1985 Toyota Celica GTS liftback rolling body shell. Guy was gutting it for an enduro car. Came with a zero miles freshly rebuilt engine & new stage2 clutch and fuel pump and a Kirkey racing seat.
I have the identical twin to this car behind my barn i bought 20 years ago wrecked. So i have every part to restore it.
Best part? Guy wanted it out of his garage so his wife could park in for winter...$500.
Coincidentally i just sold a Ford explorer parts truck for a $500 profit so it cost me nothing.

Time to ramble on about my nuts again.....

It's a serious mast year here. We have one *very* large bur(r) oak that is just outside our property line, in state land. We also have one black walnut on our lot, and three more just over the property line in our neighbor's yard with branches hanging over ours.

We've never seen that oak produce acorns before this year. Now it's going bonkers. The walnuts are also producing like mad.

Yesterday I had a pair of helpers each fill a 5 gallon bucket with acorns and walnuts. Was easy, despite only being able to get at a fraction of the goods. The oak because only a relatively small part of the canopy hangs over our lot, the majority is over heavy brush we don't want to mess with. Similar story with the 4 walnut trees- most of what they're dropping is in the neighbor's yard. (We haven't gone over to prowl for nuts because we haven't had a chance to ask yet. We know they would say yes, but they also know that we would always ask first. It's like that )

Just for kicks, my wife and I had a look at the forage. She pried a bunch of the acorns out of the caps (which on these is tricky) while I cleaned some walnuts. New process this year. I took them out on our patio, stomped them really hard and ground them underfoot to get most of the husk off, then scrubbed them with a stiff brush in a big bowl of water to get them the rest of the way clean. They're sitting on paper towels drying right now. (My hands are various shades of brown. Much darker at the extremities, like finger tips, like the 'point' of a Siamese cat.)

We each did about 3 dozen or so. That dropped the level in one of the buckets by about a third. Which caused the helpers to immediately go top off the bucket - took them only a few minutes. Scary.

I still have a couple dozen walnuts from last year. They've been sitting in a bowl in the kitchen for a year. Yesterday I ate one. Getting it open was brutal. Tasted like 'walnuts' (English) plus an extra bit of sweetness, and just a hint of apples. Slightly astringent/bitter aftertaste. So after sitting at room temp for an entire year, they don't seem to be rancid. I'm impressed.

I'm not a huge fan of nuts, but I do like the occasional walnut, pecan or hazelnut.

Oh, and these acorns are off the charts. The squirrels have been ignoring the walnuts to feast upon them, and still can't keep up. Inside their caps, the whole thing is nearly the size of a baseball. With the caps off, the acorns themselves are slightly larger than the walnuts. My wife said something about how, now it makes sense to her how in some places and times acorns were considered food (still some places now).

I found a pecan tree in a park a few weeks back and it seemed like it was producing a lot, but there's something wrong with it. When things 'ripened', the husks opened leaving the nuts exposed, the nuts were only the size of cashews at best, and the few I opened the nut halves inside were tiny and shriveled. Oh well.

Need to find some proper hickories.

Got side swiped in a hit and run today

Thankfully its only cosmetic damage, and relatively minor.

Found out that we've got a rat eating our walnuts on the tree. Live trap has been secured and is set and baited in the back yard as I type this. Live trap because with dogs we can't use poison, and snap-traps are out since I'd just catch dog paws with those.

g-man wrote:Found out that we've got a rat eating our walnuts on the tree. Live trap has been secured and is set and baited in the back yard as I type this. Live trap because with dogs we can't use poison, and snap-traps are out since I'd just catch dog paws with those.

Peanut butter.

Ayup. Wife smeared the stuff on the actuator inside the trap, and I set it out in the corner of the yard. I'll have to check it before I let the dogs out, but expect it will likely have an occupant in the morning. Little bastards...

Started watching "Project Binky" by Bad Obsession motorsports on youtube. Imagine two working class guys from central England(Shopshire, to be exact) try to shoehorn in a celica awd drivetrain into an oginal (and thoroughly clapped out) mini. Now add in a does of Monty python and Benny hill, with an opening sequence that is clearly a nod to Police squad. One of their latest episodes is how to tig weld a coffe mug...