Time Properly Wasted

Let me begin by quickly summing up our status in the struggle to remain housed. We have all but eliminated the rentals. As I said to Mother, the decent ones (such as the one we're being asked to leave) are unaffordable; and the affordable ones are indecent.

Recently we both got the feeling that we ought to try buying. This would be utterly impossible for us but for the fact that the same spirit that is nudging us periodically now is an old friend whom I recall giving me a shove back in 1973 to join Uncle Sam's Flying Circus. Because I followed that powerful prompting, look at the blessings that I've received:

Shayne

Joseph ($15)

Autumn ($25)

Hyrum ($11.50)

The Old GI Bill which helped us through school after I left the service.

A VA home loan which helped us buy the house on College Ave.

We're waiting now for the VA to tell us whether we've qualified again for such a loan, and, if so, how much we can expect. Until we know these things, all we can do is look at an occasional house and hope that we'll have the bucks to get it. One house which seems very attractive to us is in St. Anthony. We were looking at pictures of it just yesterday on the computer. I don't yet know whether it was one of the houses that Len told me about recently on the phone. We hope to go up to see it soon.

Now to my muttons, as Twain would say. I killed a couple of hours with Aric Armell and his son from Colorado, AJ yesterday morning. We had 15 eggs that were way out of date. We drove to "the Cedars" a place where we've done lots of shooting before. We spread the eggs around on the hillside.

Now it had been my presupposition that, since my Savage Mako .22 LR is zeroed to strike dead on at 50 yards, we would probably set up the rifles at some distance between that and 100. But I was forgetting that, to Aric, all rifles are sniping rifles. He drove the truck back to 225 yards. I sighed. If we'd been shooting .22 Centerfires, that would have been fine. But plain old .22s have a little trouble at such distances. We had used them on gongs out to 500 yards before, and they had so little energy left by the time they got that far out that the "ding!" was almost inaudible when it came strolling back to us at about the speed the bullet had started out with.

But the gongs were about 15" wide and 2 feet tall. We could paint them bright colors so that they were easy to see. These grade AAA Large eggs weren't all that large, especially at 225 yards. We could almost always hit within inches of them, but in two hours, only Aric had hit one. The dust we'd kicked up on the others made them more and more difficult to see. Someone had tied up a frying pan at about 200 yards, and when you hit it, it would ring a little and spin around. I hit it a few times and felt a little better. But I still felt bad about hitting no eggs at all.

One might say that this was a waste of time and a disappointing one at that. But any day out shooting is better than any day when you don't. It is either time wisely used or time properly wasted.