Time time time to do.....

As I look around the house there are some things that'd be nice if I did them but they seem just overwhelming when thought of as a group to do.... And a lot of it is Home Depot related...

1. Install a cat door in the garage. $150 (4 hours)
2. Install gate door squaring kit on three fence gates. $110 (6 hours)
3. Apply weed-n-feed treatment to yard. Apply fire ant treatment to yard. $50 (1.5 hours)
4. Apply layer of mulch to beds and garden. $300 (8 hours)
5. Build planter boxes for garden. $200 (6 hours)
6. Buy new car. (4 hours)

And then of course all the regular crap I do during the day for fitness and shooting practice. And mow the yard and do dishes and stuff. I basically have a week's worth of all day style projects to do. Maybe I can get Super D to help me, that'd motivate me more to try and plan all this stuff out.

Or at least buy the materials and have them on hand. Sigh.

Words!

I was trying to think of how many languages I know even just a single word in while I was bored driving from Atlanta to Little Rock today. Here is what I could come up with:

American English
British English
Spanish
Arabic
French
German
Russian
Italian
Norwegian
Swedish
Latin
Hebrew
Brazilian Portuguese
Vietnamese
Japanese
Korean
Mandarin

Yep, 17 languages in which I know at least one word.

Road Trips

I have a lot of road trips for matches now through Sept where I'll have to start flying again for the USPSA Nationals then in Utah. The beginning of the year I had to fly to like 4 matches. Flying is almost always about $450 a ticket, $250 for a rental car, $300 for a hotel. So right away just the three basics of it are a thousand dollars.

But now that I have a big string of ones I drive to I have to run the numbers again and see if it's cheaper. So I still have the $300 for the hotel. Unless it's close enough I can cut a day off but that only happens about 1/3 the time. So I'll leave it as a value. Zero for rental car. So that leaves gasoline as the equivalent to the plane ticket. Say I have to drive 400 miles to a match one way, at 18 miles per gallon that I get in my truck that is 22.2 gallons of gas at $2.25 a gallon for a total of $50 each way or $100 total.

Fly to major, $1,000 at least. Drive to major, $400 at least. That's a big difference!

As I think about reducing costs for 2018 I might have to go to only one fly away match during the year. And I'm thinking of cutting my amount of major matches to like 5 instead of 12-14 like I do now and maybe adding in two training trips instead. So I'd go from a travel outlay of about 14 grand a year I had in 2015-17 down to around 7 grand. Also coupled with the resultant savings in ammo, entry fees and so on.

So yeah, unless a major sponsorship thing comes along it looks like 2018 will have to be the year of only 5 majors with only one of them being flown to.

Sugar water and dry toast.

Jurrasic Bug Park

When I left San Diego for Arkansas I had a list of things I thought I probably wouldn't enjoy about Arkansas. Well something that wasn't on that list at all is definitely number one.

And it is BUGS! For the past year I have had some sort of constant bug bite or 40 before I learned what chiggers are...

Seriously, it may be where I live in the state or the pass times I'm involved in but the number of freaking bugs and how much they bite me is what I hate the absolute most about Arkansas.

Freak

I just saw what looked like a husky mixed with a chihuahua. Freakishly wrong.