Family

It’s a good day

/ hsoi

So far, it’s a good day.

It’s the Labor Day weekend. It’s been productive for me, despite my overriding desire to be lazy all weekend long.

I just came in from a workout. I’m so happy with where my martial arts work is going. The Kali, JKD, Silat, Muay Thai, and boxing stuff… it all blends so well with my defensive handgun work. I don’t expect a self-defense situation to be a pure gunfight or a pure empty-hand situation. It always could be, but chances are it won’t. It’s wonderful to have many options at your disposal, and for these things to blend well into making your own system. I don’t regret my Kuk Sool training at all, but some of those aspects don’t really lend towards my current goals. But I envison later in life that I’ll find myself studying different martial arts again just for the sake of studying some art; for instance, Baguazhang holds appeal to me due to its Taoist underpinnings.

But for now, I’m riding a high of everything coming together so well. Serendipity. 🙂

Hopefully later this morning the family will take a trip to the best Korean grocery store in town and pick up some things. Need my kimchi fix. They also have a little diner in the store, which should make for a good lunch. Not sure what I’ll have yet, but if nothing else my default of a bibimbap would be just fine.

Then home, relax, have a beer, and just enjoy the rest of the day basking in the joy of my family.

It will be an even better day. 🙂

I can has Nebraska carry now?

/ hsoi

Via Joe Huffman and the NRA’s news releases I find this welcome bit of news.

When Nebraska’s concealed handgun law went into effect back in 2006, there was no reciprocity. A lot of states, such as Texas, would recognize Nebraska’s permit, but Nebraska recognized no one elses. But now that LB 430 passed and just went into effect, the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office just published a list of the states whose permits they will recognize.

Nebraska will now recognize Right-to-Carry permits from the following states:Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota (class one permit), Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming

In addition, permit holders from the following states will be able to carry in Nebraska, provided the permit holder is 21 or older: California, Iowa, Maine, Montana, North Dakota (class two permit), and Texas

The following states do not meet the standards required by Nebraska’s concealed handgun permit statute and are not valid in Nebraska: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington

Illinois and Wisconsin do not permit concealed handguns by law-abiding citizens.

In my case, so long as the permit holder is over the age of 21 (which I am), my permit will be honored in Nebraska.

Awesome.

Relevant to me since I have family there.

Small incident

/ hsoi

Had a small incident tonight.

I’m chillin’ with Daughter in the house when Oldest rushes into the room and says, “Mom needs you, now.” Urgency there, I get up and go. Wife briefs me. There’s some dude hanging around the street-light a couple houses down. Gave Oldest the willies, and it was certainly odd behavior. Strange person, why would they just be hanging out at the street-light?

I head outside to check on things. I’m able to do a few things in the yard to look busy and otherwise occupied, but watching what the dude is up to. Then I see good neighbor across the street, who has a similar penchant for paying attention to the neighborhood goings on. I head over and we talk, as he too noticed the dude.

As we watched, dude’s behavior wasn’t too suspicious. Perhaps just waiting for someone to pick him up. But then it dragged on. We were standing outside talking about life, family, work, hunting, playing in band back in grade school, whatever topics. But dude was still there… hour went by, still there. It went from a concern, to probably nothing but we’ll keep an eye, to “this is just getting weird.” Why just standing there, doing nothing, for about an hour? Gave the police a call to have them drive by. I don’t know exactly how long it took them to show up, but I know I checked the clock and 15 minutes went by and it was some time after that before APD rolled onto the scene. Two cruisers showed up, they spoke with dude, eventually some people from a nearby house come out and there’s interactions with the police and discussions. Back and forth for a bit, APD seemed eventually satisfied and left. People from house brought a phone out to dude, and eventually he leaves in a car with someone (they had pulled up prior to APD arriving).

While the men were outside minding things, the women of the neighborhood were on the phone alerting all other neighbors. People were watching out their windows, noting things, taking descriptions, pictures, whatever. If something was going to happen, we were going to be prepared. 🙂 Plus, as everyone connected, it was evident that others had noticed dude too and had similar concerned feelings about the matter.

No idea what was going on, but it was still all very strange. We’re attempting to contact APD to find out the story.

Lessons learned:

  • Don’t blow off gut feelings. If something feels wrong, act on it.
  • You don’t know when ugly will strike, so always be prepared. I have all my everyday gear on me (including my flashlight), every day all the time. Wife needed me now, I was able to go and was ready (well, didn’t have my phone on me… still trying to work out a good “gotta keep it charged but need to keep it on me” strategy). I didn’t have to take time to get all my stuff together, I was ready and could act immediately.
  • Ensure all your neighbors know each other and have each others contact information. You don’t have to be friends, but you are neighbors. Even if you might not like your neighbor, there may come a time where there’s a bigger evil that will require you to come together.
  • If you’ve got a team, ensure you’ve got a plan. My wife and I? Team. Kids can be involved too. Then have plans, and ensure people know their parts; practice. Wife knows one of her primary roles is communication: she calls proper people, gathers information. I didn’t have to walk out the door and tell her to do any of this; she knows her role, I know mine. Kids even do to, for instance, they know that yeah sometimes in life you might be able to argue with Mom & Dad, but when something serious is going on you must obey… and they know that.
  • Don’t count on a fast police response. I’m not surprised they didn’t come blaring in with sirens within 2 minutes, and I expect if they had to get two cruisers/officers and coordinate a bit that that would require a little more time too. I wish they were a little faster in their response but in the end it was acceptable response time. Still, it was quite a long time for the response…. you can only count on the police for so much, and your immediate safety isn’t necessarily part of that equation.
  • If you believe in self-defense, your training shouldn’t be in only physical skills such as punching or shooting. You need to know street smarts, mental skills, and other such things. That will take you further.

I believe the world is a generally safe place. I believe the world is filled with good people. But evil can come in any form to any place at any time. Nothing is immune. If you don’t want evil to harm you and your loved ones, it’s good to be prepared to deal with it when (not if) it comes your way.

Some thoughts on socialization

/ hsoi

Heather, the Swiss Army Wife, points out an interesting article in Psychology Today magazine.

Here’s a direct link to the article.

The article is about how, at least here in the United States, we’ve built a cultural and social structure that created this thing known as the teenager. A state where they have a lot of freedoms and abilities, but yet they don’t. Where mentally and physically they are capable of many things, yet we’ve put massive restrictions and burdens upon them. As a result, we’ve created a lot of the “teenager vs. parent” conflicts and generalized teenager angst. It’s an interesting read.

One reason Wife and I choose to homeschool is because of the breadth of people our children are exposed to. Our kids are not locked in school rooms with 25-35 other kids about their same age and development level, day in and day out for the majority of their young lives. In fact, much of the time you go through each grade in school surrounded by the same people. Then many of them are involved in after-school activities, and often those involve the exact same people the kids see during the day with perhaps some specific variance but still generally divided by age/grade. So it’s really just this small slice of folks that the kid interacts with, all around the same age and development. It’s the blind leading the blind with sometimes far too often the only external guideance coming from less desirable sources like TV, movies, and other bits of popular culture. Granted you can expose children to folks of other ages and development levels, but “with our busy lives these days” that doesn’t often happen.

Homeschooling tends to lend itself to children being exposed to a cross-section of people of all ages. My children attend Daily Mass, which is mostly attended by elderly. When doing things in their 4-H program, they’re working with kids from ages 8 to 18. Even just in daily schooling the 3 kiddos are with each other, all of their different ages and development stages. There’s much to be learned from this, especially exposing kids to older folks (role models) and allowing your kids to sometimes be the older folks (role models). From the article:

Teens in America are in touch with their peers on average 65 hours a week, compared to about four hours a week in preindustrial cultures. In this country, teens learn virtually everything they know from other teens, who are in turn highly influenced by certain aggressive industries. This makes no sense. Teens should be learning from the people they are about to become. When young people exit the education system and are dumped into the real world, which is not the world of Britney Spears, they have no idea what’s going on and have to spend considerable time figuring it out.

This isn’t to say that homeschooling is the only way to get kids exposed to the right people, but it does show what homeschooling can offer, especially when the biggest concern folks have about homeschooling is “socialization”. Regardless of how your children are socialized on a daily basis (homeschooling, private school, public school, etc.), don’t worry so much if they are being socialized; if the children interact with other humans on a regular basis, they’re being socialized… even us homeschoolers let our children out of the dungeon once in a while. 🙂 Instead, concern yourself more with the quality of the socialization they are getting.

I guess I was lucky

/ hsoi

Back from our shopping day. I guess the gods were smiling upon us.

First stop was JC Penny’s. They’ve come a long ways and overhauled their image and merchandise. We actually managed to knock out most of our shopping there, racking up a hefty bill. When we got to the car I took a moment to look at the receipt to see how much we didn’t spend (note: not “save” because this isn’t saving, it’s just not spending as much) and I noted that we were charged tax! I knew we’d have tax on a few little things, but I checked the math and we were charged tax on everything! That’s not right. I went back in and pointed it out. Seems they had some problems with a bunch of registers charging tax. They thought the register I checked out on was working, but apparently not. In comes the manager. The only way to fix it was to totally void the transaction and start over. So, on the faulty register she voided it all out, then we had to haul all our stuff to a register in the back of the store at the exchange/returns counter and have everything rung up all over again. Yeah, a pain… but, no big deal.

You see, here we go again with the InSights ABC’s: Always Be Cool. Smile on my face, taking it easy, no big deal. And it really wasn’t a big deal. Sure it was a bit of an inconvenience, but the manager kept apologizing and I just looked at her and said “Hey, shit happens… no big deal.” and smiled and relaxed. I could have pitched a fit, but what good would that have done? Frankly, I was in a great mood, I had no desire to complain, so ABC was just natural. Just be cool. And what did I get for being cool? Well you see, there was a coupon in their sales flyer: spend $50 and get $10 off, or spend $75 and get $15 off. That should apply to the whole transaction. Well, for whatever reason (I can only assume good customer service, and because I was so understanding and cool about the problem), the manager opted to ring up the whole of my purchase in $75 increments and give me the discount each time. 🙂 Score! That’s not a normal thing and not how things are to be done, plus it’s a lot of little transactions, but hey… Always Be Cool. It pays off.

In the end, I we didn’t spend about $120 due to the lack of sales tax and then the nice manager. That was well worth it… both shopping today and well, being cool. 🙂

Went to a couple more stores.

Let’s just say Burlington Coat Factory aims for a different demographic. The sort of clothing they sell… nothing really there for my kids in terms of style.

Old Navy still has a store. I thought they were closing up and Levi’s was eliminating them for Gap stores or some such. But we went there and were able to round a few things out.

In terms of how much we truly didn’t spend, that’s hard to gauge. The original JCP receipt said we saved a few hundred bucks. My guess is that’s totalling the actual sticker prices vs. the price we paid. There was a lot of sales, 30% off, buy one get one free, buy one get one 50% off, clearance discounts (about 75% off original price). So yeah, I feel we did OK on things. But if I walked into the store during an off day, I’m not sure they’d still be selling any of that stuff for sticker price. So how much we really didn’t spend I don’t know, but the sales are aggressive this weekend and compared to what else I’ve seen I think we fared OK. Frankly in total we spent a little less than we normally do for kid clothes shopping, but I know we came home with more clothes for them and even Wife and I picked up a few things for ourselves. Plus then the flat out non-spending on the sales tax, the bonus discounts and such…all in all I think in the end we did alright.

And to boot? Had to run a little errand when I got home. Walking back past the grocery store I poked my head into the entrance just to try to buy a Coke from the vending machine. The Coke guy was filling up the machine and I asked if I could get one while he was filling it. He handed me a bottle. I asked how much I owed, he said “nothing… it’s cool.” Really? Yup. Wow… that was nice.

Always Be Cool.

Today was a good day. 🙂

Wish me luck

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Texas has a “sales tax holiday weekend” designed to help with back-to-school shopping.

It’s this coming weekend, Friday through Sunday.

We’ve never bothered with this. The main reason is we don’t want to deal with the crowds and chaos. And unfortunately, we fear people are going to be petty, rude, and ugly because they all want the best deals for themselves. We’ve experienced this during “big shopping weekends” before,  and we just choose not to deal with it. Plus since we homeschool, we don’t always need to be on the same clock and schedule as the rest of the world.

However, we decided to give it a try this time around. The kids need clothes, we know every retailer in Texas will be stocked up and prepared for this event (I even got an email from Waco Harley-Davidson promoting this weekend), and there will be sales and lots of aggressive pricing and discounting and so on as retailers jockey to attract customers. Then the sales tax alleviation on select items. The kids need the clothing they need so buy it now or later, they still need it. If we buy it now, I expect we’ll be able to lower our total bill. By how much I don’t know yet, but I expect any reduction in the overall bill will be welcome. 🙂

Being the planner I am coupled with my desire to get in and get out as fast as possible, we’ve figured out all that the kids need. We know what pants, shoes, socks, skirts, shirts, underwear, and whatever else they may need. We figured out what sizes of everything to get to minimize the slow down that comes with fitting rooms. Plus we figured out quantities. I think that’s a key factor at keeping cost controlled… you know you need 5 shirts, you get 5 shirts instead of saying “gosh at this price, we can get 7 shirts” which then just jacks up the total bill. If last night before you saw the prices 5 shirts was enough, then today after seeing the prices 5 shirts is still enough.

And going with the fact we aren’t on the same clock as the rest of the world, the plan is to go at the time we feel will have the smallest crowds: first thing Friday morning. Most people will have to be working, most people aren’t morning people. So if we can be on the road at 8 AM and done by lunch, awesome.

The geek in me is also wondering if the iPhone will come into play. If I’ll be able to comparison shop, look up prices, product reviews, or any other sort of on-the-spot information gathering.

Finally, I suspect there will probably be a man with a gun wandering through all these crowds, through all these retail establishments, being around lots of children…. and I’ll betcha nothing will come of it. 😉

So, onwards we go. Hopefully tomorrow won’t suck. 🙂

Sometimes violence is the answer

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Matthew, over at Straight Forward in a Crooked World, has an entry titled “Failure to Comply.”

It’s a compelling read, and you’d do well to take a few minutes to read it, then a few minutes more to think about what he wrote.

There’s one thing he wrote that really caught my attention:

We are taught early on and reminded as adults constantly that violence is bad and that it never solves anything, and that no one wins in a fight. This is simply untrue. In fact it is horribly untrue. This is the result of political correctness infesting everything. It skews how we set and train our minds to win.

Violence does solve problems.

Reactive violence can and does routinely stop evil offensive violence. When you are left (regardless of your sex) on the ground and fighting to win to keep your life violence is the answer…and it is the only answer. And you should not apologize nor back peddle for that.

It made me think about my children and what I teach them.

When I started my parenting career, we opted to do the “no hitting” thing. There was no spanking, we taught Oldest not to hit, period. Basically, violence was completely frowned upon for any and every reason, in every context, every angle, you name it.

It didn’t take long before we abandoned that to a small part. Spanking came around. Why? Because you can’t reason with a 2 year old; they just don’t know enough about life to understand greater things. We didn’t and don’t beat our children, but all living things respond in a simple manner: seek pleasure, avoid pain. We saved a swat on the behind for those times when you really needed to enforce a negative consequence to some action. That is, spanking was not the general punishment; it was reserved for times when you needed to make a strong negative impression because there was no natural negative consequence of the action. For example, child runs into the street; that could warrant a swat on the behind because there’s no question there could be tragic consequences of that action — it must not happen again. However, the action itself has no natural negative consequence (apart from the undesirable of the child getting hit by a car), so you must impart a negative consequence so the child will not undertake that action again. The child must know that action leads to painful consequences so they will avoid partaking in actions that lead to pain. Political correctness compells me to say that we also are into positive reinforcement; frankly that garners a lot more compliance and a happier household. But sometimes, a spanking is the right and only answer. Heck, even my old college roommate just went through a little “my son got whacked” situation. He’s still of the “no spanking” camp, but there’s no question the little whack his son got straightened him up and made for a better long-term experience.

When I started getting serious about self-defense, martial arts study, firearms study, I realized that when our kids hit each other, to condemn them and lay down a rule of “no hitting, never” was not correct. Here I was studying all sorts of violent things because I know that sometimes violence is the answer, and now I’m telling my children never to use violence? That didn’t jive, and I had to correct myself.

I teach my children differently now. I teach my children that yes, sometimes violence is the answer, but you must know when that is. If your sibling took your toy or is being annoying, violence is not an appropriate response. If someone is attempting to harm you, abduct you, your sibling, your friends, your Mother… then yes, violence can be an answer. I do what I can to teach my children the proper contexts, to know how to respond in these contexts. I wish my children to live peaceful lives, and while I know the world has mostly good people, there are enough bad people out there that we have to take care and be prepared.

Some months back I posted about guns and church and reconciling Christian doctrine against violent activity. It doesn’t preach it, it doesn’t desire it, but even it acknowledges that sometimes yes, violence is the answer.

It’s not pretty to think about, and it’s far from politically correct. But where do you choose to live? In fantasy or reality?

More iPhone tales

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Today we had to travel across town to visit the kids’ dentist. Oldest is going to be getting braces, and this was the consultation… for my cash-ectomy. 😉 It’s going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt him, but thankfully his braces will be “routine” and not any major ordeal. The big hope is improvements in well… attitude and long-term outlooks on the part of Oldest. As you can guess, he’s not thrilled about getting braces, but it’s one of those teenager rites-of-passage so here we are. How long? Dentist said 18-24 months, but ultimately it depends how his body responds to the treatment. Wife did braces a couple years ago and she was over the top with her oral hygiene during the process. As a result, she was able to get hers off a lot sooner because her mouth was in fantastic shape. Oldest has observed this and at least mentally has acknowledged that the ordeal will end sooner if he takes good care of things. Of course, that will still require over a year of dedicated every day work on his part. So, we’ll see what it leads to for him in terms of longer-term goal accomplishment and such. That is, Dad looks at this not just as a way to improve Oldest’s smile, but also a lot of other things for him too. 🙂

But that’s not what this is about. This is about my new iPhone!

I knew I’d use this thing more for data than phone. That I can be just about anywhere and do things I need to do is awesome. I was working on my news feeds while in the waiting room. I’m rather behind on things due to the way the weekend was, so it was great to be able to catch up and not be further behind. I use NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and they have an iPhone app version of the same. Cool thing? If you sign up for their NewsGator service, it will keep all your subscriptions and read/unread information on their server. So I was reading things while on the road, but didn’t complete all the reading. Get home, get things synced, and I can pick up where I left off using my MacBook Pro and the desktop client. Very nice to have not only the ability to do what I want where I want, but to be able to keep various devices and mechanisms in sync. Cool!

I’m still adjusting to how the iPhone does things. I wish there was a more direct way to flip around between apps than to always have to click the Home button then re-navigate to the app. That is, some apps will launch other apps (e.g. NetNewsWire might let me view a page in Safari), then I can’t just easily switch back to NNW but I have to go back Home, refind NetNewsWire, then get into it. Granted the app doesn’t lose its state, which is nice, but it’s still one of those navigational annoyances.

One thing I really would like is a better way to access Facebook. The Facebook iPhone app is nice, but 1. doesn’t support landscape typing, 2. is really just an accessor for Facebook itself. To play games I found I have to use Safari, ensure I bypass the mobile login for Facebook, then work from there. It’s rather cumbersome, but at least I can toodle around on Facebook games if I want to while on the road. 🙂  Gotta mind the important things in life, right?

And yes… Wife has bigtime envy. I’m sure I’ll be getting her one soon. 🙂

New Kitteh update

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

On Friday, Wife noticed new kitteh has worms. This morning was the first time we could get to our vet.

She got her checkup, shots, de-wormer, the whole treatment. She’s quite fine and healthy.

The big news?

She’s only about 9-10 weeks old. So much for our Internet armchair kitten aging technique. We’re about a month off.

Wow.

So she’s quite young, which changes things a little bit. Not much, but a little feeding and other care differences to do. Plus, it does mean that spaying will be further off (maybe late Fall, early Winter time), which is just fine… one less expense to deal with right now.

I’m an educated hunter

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

To hunt in Texas, you must pass the Texas Park and Wildlife’s Hunter Education course. It tends to be only offered prior to Fall hunting seasons, so to hunt like I did I had to get my license with the course deferment then ensure I took the course within a year. So, that’s all now out of the way. All done, don’t have to take it again.

I wanted to give a review of things, both of the course and my experiences.

The Course

I took the course as offered by the Austin Rifle Club. It consisted of two days: Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of the material is classroom, and there is a live-fire event.

I took the class with Daughter. I asked Oldest if he wanted to take it, but let’s just say that he’s learning about priorities. It so happened that foo.c was also in the class too. A good number of students were minors; probably a slight majority.

The course itself is overall a good one. It discusses a wide range of topics related to hunting. From firearm basics (e.g. types of rifles), to safety (gun safety, hunting safety, rudimentary first aid), hunting ethics, game identification, and even things like how to field dress a deer. I think the material covered is useful because they can’t know what level of experience people will have coming into this, so they have to start at the beginning. The problem of that however is it then requires a lot of material to be covered. There’s only so much time in the course, thus to be so broad it cannot go very deep. If any topic was explored in-depth, it was hunter ethics, and I think that was a worthwhile thing. Another problem with such a wide amount of topic coverage is if you already know the stuff, it makes the class boring. While I understand some aspects here, it’d be nice if there was a way to place out of this. For instance, me being an NRA Certified Rifle Instructor, it’d be nice if I would have been able to bypass a fair portion of the course material. But again, I understand the course construction and it’s generally fine how they do things.

After a lot of classroom instruction, there is a 50 question multiple choice knowledge test (closed book). Then there’s a short round on the gun range, which appears to be more about evaluating safe gun handling than it does marksmanship or anything else. There is no instruction on the shooting portion… you need to know how to shoot. The only instruction given was if you borrowed one of their rifles, they of course showed you how it operated (e.g. safety here, magazine release here, etc.).

All in all, I thought it was a good course and, while it was long, I was glad that I took it. A lot of the information was stuff I already knew, but I know Daughter didn’t know a lot of the material so it was certainly good learning for her. For me, seeing the video on how to field dress the deer was probably the most informative. I wish that was on YouTube (went looking for it via my iPhone during a class break, couldn’t find it).

I will say, there is apparently a home-study option for this course. If you are a long-time hunter and shooter and know your stuff, you may be better off doing the knowledge portion via home study. For instance, to hunt via the lotteries of some states you must have an education certificate so some folks that normally don’t need to take the course may need to take the course so they can do such things. So if you’ve the long-term experience, that may be less painful for you to do; then just find a way to do the field course. If you have less hunting knowledge/experience, especially for all young people even if they have gone hunting, they certainly should take the classroom course. There’s a lot they will get from it.

Personal Experience

The hardest part for me in the course was just that it was long. The gentlemen teaching the course were very knowledgeable and friendly, but they weren’t the best teachers. They just weren’t that engaging, mostly reading from their notes or the handbook. Every so often they’d break off and talk about things, tell some stories, or some such, and that would be good. But they just didn’t feel like the most engaging of teachers, especially for all the young folk in the class. This isn’t to say they were terrible; they did just fine and obviously the kids got the needed information as I think most everyone passed the test. So, the job was done.

For Daughter, it was tougher. The first night went until 10:00 PM and that’s way past her bedtime. Then having to get up very early the next morning to head back was tough as well. I also wish they could have done the shooting portion first thing Saturday morning instead of at 2:00 PM, when it was 100º+ outside. But they did it how they did it, and thankfully the outdoor portion didn’t last too long in this oppressive heat.

What also made it tougher for Daughter was the test. I recall looking over at her and seeing her holding back tears. At the time I wasn’t 100% sure why she was breaking down, but I just put my arm around her and kept encouraging her to do her best, to go to the next question if that one was stumping her, and just trying to continue to encourage her and support her through the test. I spoke with her afterwards, and the main issue was just testing overload. She just wasn’t sure about some questions and that number of “I don’t know” seemed to stack up against her. She didn’t want to fail the test, so she built herself up a lot of pressure. I will say that was one tough thing about the course (especially for the kids). There was a great deal of information presented in a limited amount of time. Often times the answer to one question might have been covered in the span of 5 seconds and if you missed it you missed it and there’s just no way you could reason your way to the right answer. Furthermore, some questions would be things that were of questionable merit. Does she really need to know what a percussion cap looks like (not is, looks like)? It’s arguable, but I’d say questions about hunter safety and ethics were more important. I watched her mark her answers, and I noticed that the questions that really mattered she did just fine on; maybe not knowing the answer right off the bat, but was obviously able to reason it down and mark the correct answer. She had the most trouble on more esoteric knowledge. But, since you don’t need a perfect score to pass, such questions are able to be missed and still produce a passing score. Daughter did pass, so no real troubles. Once she found out she passed, all her stress over the test was gone. 🙂  In fact, the gentlemen running the course complemented her on her tests (hey, she shot a better group than I did…. she used our scoped Ruger 10/22, I used one of the club’s Winchester bolt action .22’s with open leaf sights).

As an aside, looking back on things, I realize that during our lunch break (written test was after lunch) I should have gone back over the course handbook with Daugther. Problem was simple: with the new iPhone we were both wanting to play around with it and so we did. I’m sure if we spent time reviewing prior to the test, she would have fared much better.

Anyway, long days, but good days. I learned something. Daughter learned something. We’re both certified. And Daddy and Daughter had a lot of good time together.