Life

Park Road 1C

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

The weather was too nice this morning to not go for a motorcycle ride. A little chilly at daybreak, but no big deal there. Just wear the right gear and off you go.

I took a bunch of back roads to go from Austin to Smithville, Texas. It was quiet, peaceful, and beautiful scenery. I was in no hurry. When I got to Smithville originally I was going to head up FM 2104, cut over US-290 to TX-21 back into Bastrop as I love driving through the Lost Pines area that TX-21 cuts through. As I came upon Buescher State Park I remembered how it connected to Bastrop State Park by way of Park Road 1C. Click for Google Map goodness.

If you are a motorcyclist within riding distance to this road, you need to take it at least once. I have always wanted to take it and today marked my first day to take it.

You will need to pay $2 “drive through” fee to the park, but that’s fine as I am a supporter of our State Parks. The road is about an 11 mile run and is just wonderful. It’s quiet (only encountered a few other cars), the scenery is awesome — I love riding through all those tall pine trees, and areas where the trees are so dense and grow over the road like a canopy. The posted speed limit is 30 MPH but I found myself just staying in second gear and going 15-25 MPH most of the time. Why? Again, no hurry and enjoying the ride.

That said, it really is a road you should take slowly. There are many twists and turns, many blind corners and a few blind hills. Signage is almost non-existent (no signs to say slow down, blind curve ahead, etc.). While the road is technically wide enough for two cars, there are many places where there is no shoulder. Furthermore, build up of leaves and pine needles may have built up on the side of the road effectively narrowing it by 6-12″ on a side, which doesn’t seem like a big deal until you’ve got a truck coming the other direction and they’re not on their side of the road. The road surface isn’t always the best, plus I encountered areas of water, wet leaves, sticks and branches (had to even pull over once to dislodge a small stick that had caught under my bike’s frame). I almost hit a squirrel, but was surprised to encounter no deer (what with the rut starting and all). So while I certainly could see in an ideal world this road being awesome to fly down in a sport bike, I personally wouldn’t recommend it give the nature of the road. But then, I’m more of an old biker than a bold biker (lots of old bikers, lots of bold bikers, but not many old bold bikers).

Besides… the ride is so beautiful, why would you want to go fast and miss all of it? As soon as I came in the back entrance of Bastrop State Park, majestic is the best word to describe it. Big trees, as far as the eye can see. Words cannot do it justice; you just need to experience it yourself.

After coming out in Bastrop, stopped into John’s Guns. They are quite friendly folk so we talked for a while. I picked up a couple .50 cal ammo cans for storage (they’ve got some of the best supply in the area), some .38 Special practice ammo, and headed home.

Life is good.

Found A Cane

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

As you know, I’ve been looking for a cane. My requirements were pretty simple: hardwood, crook neck, simple design, something that could be used for walking but also fighting, that I could take it anywhere (e.g. onto an airplane). It was a bit frustrating that I couldn’t find a cane anywhere in town that fit these needs. This is understandable tho, as most people who need a cane need it for true assistance with walking thus needs can be filled in other ways, such as using aluminum canes or wood with non-crook necks. I admit I was “this close” to ordering something online if this one place didn’t pan out.

But it did.

Someone had suggested I try out a feed store, so I went to a local Tractor Supply Co.. They didn’t have any canes in stock (they said sometimes they get them, but they’re never ordered they just show up every so often). However, the gentlemen there said to try a place called Callahan’s. I stored that in my head.

Daugther and Wife have started taking horse riding lessons, and they need some boots. I asked Tom where in town I could find boots that would suit the need but wouldn’t cost much. Until Daugther stops growing I’m not going to invest tons of money (even cheap Chinese boots are still kinda expensive), and I’ll spend the money on Wife once she knows what she wants. Tom suggested Callahan’s. So OK, now I have a few reasons to go there.

So today we went and visited Callahan’s General Store. The website will tell you nothing about the place. But folks, this place is awesome. It is a general store, with a little of everything. Western clothing, boots, hats, housewares, lots of cast iron cookware, toys, hardware (i.e. nails, screws), plumbing, feed, vermin traps, horse tack, livestock management needs, Texas-sized belt buckles, housewares, knick-knacks, even chicks and ducklings and sometimes rabbits. It was amazing the breadth of things they offered.

Upon walking in one of the first things I saw? A rack of canes. 🙂 I dug through it. A lot of neat canes but only a few crook-neck ones. Of the ones in there, this is the one I chose:

The cane is made by Brazos Walking Sticks. Or at least, that was the tag attached to the cane. The thing is, the tag says it is this model, but it certainly isn’t that model. This twisted oak model is close, but it’s certainly not twisted nor finished like that. It’s probably classified as the natural hardwood crook neck cane. Either way, they’ve got a lot of really cool canes.

It feels a little long for me. I’ll work later tonight on sizing it.

It should be suitable for martial arts work. It is a little heavy, so swinging it for strikes is a little much but certainly managable. There’s a point in the crook that feels thinner than the rest. I’m not sure how well it will stand up to abuse as I feel some flex. Sure some flex is expected, but it does make me wonder. Also the opening of the crook is just wide enough to fit around my neck, so it’s a bit narrower than I’d like. Still, this is a good start to things. Plus I like the look. It has a lot of character.

We’ll see how it goes. If it breaks or winds up not being suitable for martial technique, then I’ll probably seek out a purpose-built cane, such as from Cane Masters.

As well, Callahan’s General Store is neat! We did find boots for Wife and Daugther, which aren’t ideal long-term but should suffice for a good long while. Also bought some “cookies” for the horses. Neat store.

All Hail Great Customer Service

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

What follows is a story of great customer service.

I use a Comp-Tac Minotaur MTAC holster. It’s seen a lot of wear and abuse but still works great. I’ve wanted to get a second holster to have as a backup, plus being leather-backed having a second allows me to rotate. I know you don’t always have to rotate leather goods, but given the sweat and dirt this holster will encounter, it’s nice to be able to swap in another holster while you take the one out for some maintenance. So about a month ago I purchased a second MTAC.

As noted, I didn’t immediately wear the new MTAC but conditioned/protected the leather. Then, the holster sat on the shelf because I had other things to tend to. A couple weeks ago I finally got to trying it, but when I did I noticed the Kydex shell had problems. I emailed Comp-Tac, they issued an RMA, and I sent it back.

So far, this is good customer service. It’s been easy to obtain their products, turnaround is quick, if the customer isn’t satisfied they immediately work to remedy it.

Here’s where it goes from good service to great service.

I knew about when the returned package would arrive (sent parcel post, so no tracking). Soon after it arrived I received an email saying my order was being worked on. Next day I get a phone call from Comp-Tac. They were calling to explain that some of the things I saw as bugs were in fact features! For instance, how the “opened up” the covering of the magazine release was a feature because some people wanted to be able to drop a magazine without unholstering. I don’t see the point. The XD has an ambidextrous magazine release so just reach to the other side. But I did point out a legit flaw in how the front/top edge of the Kydex was curled and thus the front sight was hooking. I explained everything, he agreed with me, but I could tell a little reluctantly. Nevertheless, what came of it was really cool. You see, he certainly listened to all of my concerns and desires and said “we’ll take care of you.”

A few days later (sent USPS Priority Mail) I get my new holster. And yes, it was totally new. I expected just the shell to be returned but I received a new leather backing as well. I examined the shell and noticed they made the shell to address my issues. The top part of the shell, relative to the top of the gun’s slide, was now “taller” and there was no curve at all. It was a straight channel with a good amount of clearance. Furthermore, they cut the slide shell longer (it’s a hair longer than my original MTAC slide shell) so it’s covering the front sight with no chance of snagging. I even tried my stock XD-9 5″ and it had no problem on the draw. The magazine release is fully covered and fits nice out of the box; on my original shell I had to Dremel it slightly so it didn’t cut into my fingers when I gripped the gun. One minor nit is the “retention button” is a raised dot on the Kydex that “locks” over the trigger guard to help with retention… it doesn’t have as much “click” when fully holstered as the original does and I see why. But this is a minor point as it’s not really necessary for an IWB holster. Other shell changes, like that it sits just a hair higher above my belt and has that “lip” on the front edge supposedly to help with reholstering, they don’t seem to cause any practical problems.

All in all, I’m very happy with things.

The holster is currently disassembled, the leather having been conditioned, and in a few days I’ll reassemble and start to wear it to see how it goes.

This ranks as great customer service because they were fully responsive to the customer’s concerns. They made every effort to satisfy the customer, even going so far as to do a little custom work to get it done. I also can bet this had to cost them some money because essentially they made 2 holsters for me. I don’t know how much of the returned holster they can salvage for reuse/resale. But they certainly have a loyal customer in me, willing to tell the tale and spread the word about what a good company they are to do business with.

Comp-Tac. Good products. Great service. Happy, loyal customer.

Working homeschooled kids

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Oldest expressed interest in getting a job.

Hallelujah! 🙂

Since he is a minor, all sorts of child labor laws come into play. I found this summary of Texas and Federal law at the Texas Workforce Commission’s website.

Here’s one part that I’m not sure about:

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) a child 14 or 15 years of age may not work during school hours…

We homeschool. In Texas, the legal status of homeschool is a private school. So, what does “school hours” mean? My guess is the normal hours of operation for the public school system in the district in which we reside (I sent an email to HSLDA). But why must it be this way? One of the benefits of homeschooling is flexible scheduling. It allows us to better organize our family life. It can give an employer a work resource at a time when they might need the help (e.g. lunch rush), instead of only getting a glut of teenager help from 3-7 PM every day. Furthermore, that glut limits the number of teenage employees that can be had as there’s only so much work and wages to go around at that time of day.

I understand the intent of child labor laws, including the history of how they came about. The intentions are good. It is evident the laws are constructed around traditional notions of institutionalized schooling. Given the dramatic rise of homeschooling in the past some years, it makes sense to revise and modernize our laws to improve how homeschooling is legally regarded (e.g. HoNDA).

Updated: Well, maybe this will work out, at least here in Texas.

HSLDA sent me a summary of Texas child labor laws.

Q: Can a child work during public school hours?

A: Texas has no prohibition against a child working during public school hours.

I requested clarification regarding how Federal law would work in here. Since the Federal law does not specify what “during school hours” means, Texas law trumps in this case.

So it seems if Oldest was to be hired, he could work the lunch rush. So long as of course things didn’t conflict with his schooling, which we wouldn’t allow anyway.

Nevertheless, I could see employers not wanting to hire in such a situation. First, they may be unaware of the laws. In that case, best I can say is for Oldest to walk into the job application process prepared with paperwork showing the laws and legal take on things, because I’m sure an employer would contact the TWC but they may also be unaware. Second, an employer may just want to avoid the potential appearance of the situation. To see a child working mid-day will be strange to a lot of people, which could prompt phone calls to CPS or TWC, and an employer may just not want to deal with the hassle…. or it could count against Oldest in some way.

We’ll see how it all plays out.

911 is a joke – again

/ hsoi

Reading this article, all I could think of was the Public Enemy song, “911 Is A Joke”

GAITHERSBURG, Md. – A Montgomery County woman is demanding answers about a delayed response to a 911 call she placed from her home. She told FOX 5 she woke up at 5:49 a.m. to find her home trashed and burglarized, and she called 911—but help didn’t arrive until 7:09 a.m.

80 minutes from call to arrival.

[Captain Paul] Starks says an officer was finally dispatched at 6:54 a.m.– more than hour after the initial call.

65 minutes before an officer was even dispatched. 15 minutes from dispatch to arrival on scene.

Granted, this is likely a rare occurrence — but rare means it still happens. When it’s your life on the line, do you want to be that statistical anomaly?

I’m not saying to not call 911 when you need them; you still should. What I am saying is you should not rely on them to save and protect you. They just can’t.

Leslie Cochran in critical condition

/ hsoi

Leslie Cochran is Austin’s most famous homeless person. If you know who Leslie is, you’ll know why. He certainly does his part to Keep Austin Weird.

It’s being reported that Leslie is in the hospital in critical condition. Reports here, here, here. Looks like he received a blow to the head, found unresponsive. The really odd thing is, this happened 10 days ago… why is this only hitting the media now?

I recall the first time I saw Leslie. Moving to Austin. Got a full U-Haul, we’re driving into town to our apartment. We pass this Albertson’s grocery store and see this ramshackle cart outside on the sidewalk and some person holding up a sign in protest of Albertson’s. And we see… it’s a grizzled man wearing a bikini.

Welcome to Austin.

And so that was our introduction to Leslie. First day in Austin and there he is, all leather-skinned and bikini-clad. I never actually shook the man’s hand, but I’ve seen him on and off throughout the city, mostly downtown. Always an interesting guy.

I hope he’ll be OK.

Updated: New story. Sounds like Leslie will live but likely in some sort of assisted facility for the rest of his life. It’s sad to hear, since it’s not really the way he chose to live. I hope all works out OK for him and his family.

Updated 2: Another story. Sounds like he had a brain aneurism rupture, so likely the blow to the head may have been when he fell. Reports however are mixed. That one story says he’s pretty much brain dead and that’s that. Other stories are saying he’s out of ICU, improving, will survive but assisted. Of course, the two stories aren’t totally irreconcilable against each other. We’ll just have to wait and see what else comes to light.

Productive

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

I’ve been fairly quiet today since I’ve been away from the computer most of the day.

The garage has been bugging me lately. Junk has been piling up, hard to get around, and I can’t do things in there. Biggest thing? All that reloading equipment from exodus still sitting there, unused. It’s been getting to me. I took the Speer Reloading manual into the house a few weeks ago and have been reading it. And I think with hunting season upon me I have lofty dreams of my own hunting load. So… before I went to bed last night I decided I was going to revamp the garage.

Off to Home Depot. Buying wood screws, brackets, wood, sundry other things. I also picked up a new Makita cordless drill and circular saw. Some years ago I had a Porter-Cable cordless drill but when it died a couple years back and I couldn’t get replacement batteries I opted to get a corded drill. I made the wrong decision to save a little money and the drill I got lacked important things like a brake and a clutch. So while I was happy with the corded drill the rest of the drill sucked. So the Makita was a great purchase and is very cool, but the battery didn’t seem to last very long. Supposedly it’s a fast recharge tho, but when I put the battery on the charger it flashed the “bad battery” lights at me. Hrm. Not good. I’ll contact Makita in the morning. Never owned a circular saw, but it’s one of those things that the past some whiles I’ve had enough times when it would have been nice if I had one (always managed to get by), so I figured now was as good a time as any to finally buy one.

My ceilings are high so I put the shelves up high all around the perimeter of the garage interior. Just simple brackets, plywood, and wood screws. I was then able to store all the boxes of holiday decorations, coolers, and various other things up high. Threw away a bunch of crap, rearranged a bunch of stuff, and then I was able to give the reloading table a proper home. Ahhhh… 🙂

The garage looks good. Motorcycle looks happy in there (tho it’d look happier out on the road of course). There’s room to move, better organization, and again… a place to reload. That’s the important thing. 🙂

Quirkology

/ hsoi

Quirkology. A term coined by author Richard Wiseman to refer to psychological research that is quirky. Much of this work uses mainstream methods to investigate unusual topics, or unusual methods to investigate mainstream topics. Read more about it here.

What got me about it was this video on the color-changing card trick.

Just watch it. I don’t want to spoil the trick. After you watch it, go read about the trick and see another interesting video that supports the original.

I’ll just say, it has interesting implications for eye-witness accounts.

He’s got a lot of other interesting videos and studies on the Quirkology website. Check it out.

Where will this journey lead?

/ hsoi

I remember going to “horse camp” a few summers as a kid, and I did some one-off horse rides at other times in my youth. It was fun to ride horses, but I never developed a passion or developed much interest in them. Heck, as a young child somehow I got to be part of a National Geographic book on pets (me and 2 of my cats were photographed for it). One thing I recall from that book was a chart discussing each type of pet in the book. The chart contained things like the food they would eat, care required, activity level, housing needs, etc.. There’s one row in the chart that always stuck out in my mind: cost. I will also never forget that of all the animals listed in the chart, only one was listed as high cost.

Horses.

Continue reading →

How disheartened should I be?

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

Last night, Wife had a workshop to attend so it was just me and the kiddos.

We had dinner at home, then opted to go out for ice cream. The particular shop we went to has a place outside where you can sit, kids can run and play, and you can just enjoy the evening. The weather was fantastic last night, so outside we went. Being a gorgeous Friday night, lots of other people were out and about, many kids running around, chasing each other, playing. A good night.

As soon as we found a spot, we sat and started to eat. Not a few seconds later did I look over and see a little girl maybe 8-10 years old lying in the grass on her back, crying pretty hard, holding her head. One of her friends was kneeling over her asking if she was OK. I could hear the crying girl affirming she was OK, so as I watched for a few seconds I was observing a few things: was she in fact OK? give it a few seconds to see if she shakes it off, gets up, and keeps on playing? Parents coming over to check on her? Well, I saw none of this. Little girl remained on the ground crying, no adults whatsoever coming around. In fact, there was a lady sitting on a rock between me and the little girl (i.e. right there not 10 feet from the girl, closer than I was) and the lady never made a move to check on the girl.

After a few seconds, I opted to go over and check on the girl. I asked her if she was OK, she continued to nod yes and got up off the ground, sill crying, but I could tell she was OK. She ran off to go find her parents. I watched the girl run off, over the hill, down to another restaurant then lost track of her. A minute or so later I noticed a couple of the other girls that were in the same pack were pushing each other with mean looks on their faces and one got knocked to the ground. I was “this close” to stepping in but as soon as the one girl hit the ground everything broke off on their own. As I saw these girls throughout the evening, they were all still playing with each other so who knows what the social dynamic was.

So what bugged me about this?

That no one cared.

The place was swarming with adults, but there’s a little girl… crying… lying on the ground in pain. And no one noticed. No one (but me) cared. If anyone did notice, they didn’t feel any motivation to check on her and help her. I’m not painting myself as a saint, but rather an observation of how oblivious people are.

As my own children played and ran around, I kept an eye on them but also watched all the other people. Task fixation was rampant. People minded their own children to some extent, but then there was little mind paid to what was going on around them. I was just a bit appalled. Why is this? What has come of our society?

Furthermore, I watched other children on the playground. I saw the general lack of manners, turn taking, consideration for others. Then I saw their parents, and the role model was evident. Not all were this way, but many were.

Then we walk through the parking lot and I see people just walking out in front of moving cars. I don’t care if you have a legal right of way, if the driver doesn’t see you, you will lose the battle with the ton of steel hurtling towards you. Why do people do this? Sense of entitlement? Ignorance? An “I’m right and fuck you!” attitude? I don’t get it.

Just how disheartened should I be in my fellow man?

I am no saint. I used the opportunities from last night to talk with my children to reinforce some valuable lessons (teachable moment). Yes sometimes you have to resist, but sometimes it is better to yield. Pay attention to the world around you. Be polite. Treat people as you want to be treated. Be the change you want to see in the world.