Tried a KFC Double Down on a whim last night.
Win.
Tasty, delicious, original recipie, win.
I’d like to give thanks to all the people that are pitching a fit about it. You gave KFC tons of free press and “buzz generation”. I’m sure their PR department thanks you as well.
A motorcyclist survives a collision with a deer.
He hit the deer at 70 MPH and was thrown over his handlebars and slid 100 yards… a football field.
He wasn’t able to walk away — he fractured his ankle — but that’s really the worst of things for him. Why did he survive?
The back of his heavy duty protective jacket was completely shredded, while the road cut deep grooves into the side of his helmet.
He was wearing gear. Proper heavy jacket, and a full-face helmet. I don’t know if he was wearing any protective pants or gloves, but likely so.
This is why I’m a fan of ATGATT — All The Gear All The Time.
When you ride in a car, you’ve got a giant steel cage to protect you. When you ride on your motorcycle, you have nothing to protect you except for your riding gear.
I happened upon a motorcycle accident a couple of years ago, before police and EMT arrived. Guy and his girlfriend were thrown off their Harley when a car pulled out in front of them from a side-road. They were pretty messed up, I helped on the scene with first aid, and after EMTs arrived I left. I assume they survived. But based upon what I saw, if they had at least helmets on — even DOT-approved half-helmets — they would have fared a lot better.
I’ve gone down. I’m glad I had gear else I would have been hurting afterwards. The gear took the brunt and I had little more than sore muscles and a bruised ego.
I totally understand not wanting to wear gear. It’s a pain to suit up. It’s bulky. It’s not always comfortable. It can be restraining. And damnit, it’s just not as free! It feels awesome to ride without any gear. Especially here in Texas where there’s a long riding season, and it’s hot… very hot… and gear doesn’t always help with that. So I do understand.
And while the best way to avoid going down is to ride defensively and conservatively, sometimes things just come out at you and there’s nothing you can do… like hit a deer. There’s so many whitetails here in Texas that when I’m riding on the backroads in the mornings, I’m always nervous about deer. I’ve encountered a lot of deer as I’ve been riding, but thankfully no close calls. I’ve hit a couple of birds (they were in the road eating something, didn’t get off fast enough, one bounced off my knee and the other off my windshield). I had a very close encounter with a buzzard on the side of the road that decided taking off right in front of me would be smart… you don’t realize how big those guys are until they’re right upon you. Point is, shit happens.
How does the motorcycle saying go? There’s two kinds of riders: those who have gone down, and those who haven’t gone down yet. It’s not “if” you’ll go down, it’s “when”.
To wear gear or not is a personal choice. It can’t stop everything, but it can prevent a lot of things. My personal choice is ATGATT.
Going to the bank today to open an account (more on this eventually).
Wife and I had a little verbal exchange as I was going out the door.
The end result?
I’m now “Glock Smurf”.
That’s the Smurf I want to be.
Glock Smurf.
😉
Look what I did.
I harvested a water buffalo. It wasn’t in the plans, but here we are. Read on.
Frequent readers know we have a lot of muscovy ducks around our house and neighborhood.
A few weeks ago one of the hens that really likes our house set up another nest. She’s nested here before. This nest has maybe 12-15 eggs in it now. She was a very dedicated mother. And of course, the kids grew very attached to her (named her “Nessie”).
This morning we checked on the nest. Nessie wasn’t there, which is unusual. I saw a lot of feathers around the nest, not just down, full feathers. I looked around a bit more and saw more feathers in a line going back to my neighbor’s backyard gate. Then you could see how the dirt was moved, indicating something was dragged/pulled under the gate. I opened the gate, saw an egg shell, but no more “line” of feathers. But as I got towards the neighbor’s back fence, I saw a mess of feathers in an area. At this point in the back fence there’s an obvious area under the fence that something can squeeze under, and sure enough there were more feathers on the other side of the fence… off into the greenbelt.
So as far as I can tell, Nessie was attacked, dragged off, and eaten last night. 😦
Of course, this is life, this is nature. Kids understand that, but it’s still a sad day as Nessie has been around for quite a while and been a dedicated mother. Plus now the kids wonder about the nest of eggs… will another duck adopt them? We actually have a second nest from another hen also at the house and we’re thinking about moving the eggs to her nest. We’ll see. Still to be determined.
The bigger question is…. what could have taken her?
This is where I’m requesting your help.
Raccoon? Maybe. Fox? Maybe. While my reading says they could take a duck, it’s unlikely they would. Muscovy’s are larger ducks. They have claws in their feet (they are perching ducks). They can make noise and put up a fight. These are not the sort of targets for a raccoon or a fox, especially when there’s a ton of eggs for easy pickings.
Possum? No.
So… what? Could it be a coyote? Possible. We do hear them howling every so often, but haven’t in some time.
Bobcat? That’s my father-in-law’s guess.
If that’s the case, I’m not happy about that. I don’t need a bobcat around.
I have a game camera. I’m going to set it up. Maybe too late for that, but my hope is whatever it was will know this is a spot with food and will come back within the week to try again. Hopefully I’ll catch something on film.
Updated: Game camera set. We’ll see if it turns up anything.
The area under the fence gate measures about 4″. Not a problem for some things to wiggle through.
Went looking in the greenbelt for more traces. Oldest found something that looks like scat and could be bobcat scat, but we aren’t 100% sure.
Present signs are pointing to a bobcat. Just what I need….
Wife made me a bouquet of bacon “roses”.
That is love.
My wife r00l3z.
When you make a mistake and flub something, what do you do? Do you stop and start over? Or do you just keep going?
Whatever you do, it’s been my experience that most people always do the same thing no matter the context. Today I write to say we need to consider how we recover from mistakes and choose the right approach based upon the context.
For example, I was doing dry-fire practice working on drawing my pistol from a concealment holster. Typical ways to flub the draw are the shirt doesn’t get out of or remains in the way, or your strong hand gets a poor initial grip. What do you do? As soon as you notice the flub do you stop and start over? or do you acknowledge the flub but proceed and work to recover from it to still reach your end goal? I used to stop and start over, but now I want to keep going. My reasoning? If the day comes and my life is on the line, I could well flub things. In a situation like that, what should my ingrained response be? Recover and move on? Or go “damnit! I screwed up!” reholster and ask for a do-over? I don’t think the latter is reasonable for the situation, so the only option is to recover and move on. Thus I must train myself to acknowledge the flub (must know what went wrong so I know what course of action to take to recover) then immediately recover from it, keeping my cool the whole time. This is the response I would want to have if my life depended upon it, so that’s how I must train.
Let’s consider my martial arts practice, specifically working on forms. If I was working on a form because I was entering a competition, I’d probably want to train myself to recover and move on. You’re performing, and the show must go on! But these days I do not participate in martial arts tournaments, so if I’m working on a form it’s because I want to get it correct, because there’s something in my own body and soul I wish to feel. Plus I’ve been away from Kuk Sool for almost a year and I admit some things are slipping my mind. Thus stopping and fixing is fine for me here because the context may dictate it (i.e. I forgot) or perhaps because I came to a point in my practice where I realized something and wish to focus on it. My goals here are different, and how I contend with mistakes must serve the end goal.
This reminds me of when I was in undergrad and played in a rock band. We were doing some basement recordings. We only had so much tape, so when we’d screw up I’d tell the guy running the board “Rewind and erase that.” But he never listened to me and kept tape rolling. In my mind there was no point in keeping bad takes, especially when we had a finite amount of tape. However I’m glad he kept the tape rolling because it captured some gems. Looking back I can say we should have handled it both ways. When we’re working out a new song, sure we have to stop when mistakes are made because we’re still learning. But once the song is known, when we’re doing rehearsals for gigs, just keep going… unexpected things could happen during the gig and we wouldn’t come to a halt on stage, so practice accordingly.
Be clear on your end goal(s) and ensure you work towards it. One part we overlook is how we handle our mistakes. The way we handle our mistakes may need to change based upon the context, so be sure to analyze, figure out the plan, and behave accordingly… especially as you practice. Train yourself to handle your mistakes as the context dictates. Your life may depend upon it.
I’ve had a Weber kettle grill for gosh… 12 years? 15 years? Quite a while. It’s actually served me quite well. It handles grilling needs, and some years ago I added a 3rd party thermometer to the lid and so I’ve been able to use it as a smoker with pretty good results.
But… she’s at her end. The “vanes” in the kettle are no longer moving. One of the vanes has worn so much there’s a hole. There’s just no more ability to control the air flow. I can make a fire in it, but controlling it is pretty much gone. It then becomes an art of just controling the fire itself to keep the temperature right.
Furthermore, I’ve known for a long while that while from time to time I want a grill, most of the time I want a smoker. As well, while the Weber has enough space to say feed a family or enough hotdogs for a neighborhood cookout, it just doesn’t have the square footage on the rack to hold what I cook these days. Plus when I smoke or otherwise indirect cook, there’s even less rack space available.
It is time for a new setup.
There’s a guy I’ve spoken with that makes custom setups. I’m going to talk to him, but I fear it may be too costly. On the flip side, the quality should be good enough such that it will last me the rest of my life with proper care.
The main things I want?
I may have to go the custom route to get what I want. But if any good readers have suggestions towards what fits my bill, please comment.
(BTW, the Big Green Egg has always been curious to me, but it’s just not big enough.)
I realized the day was half-way over and I hadn’t written anything here.
Why?
I’ve been buried in documentation on the concept of treemaps. Lots of reading, studying of code and algorithms. It’s neat stuff.. at least to a geek like me.
I’ll be working on my own implementation soon. For what? Well… just can’t say. 🙂
Today has been good. Today has been bad.
The bad? Normally I work from home, but recently my company opened an office in Austin. Today I had to do a bunch of things in that part of town so I figured I’d work from the office…. I don’t want to be a stranger. Going in just tells me why I’m so happy to work from home. Not just the traffic to get in and out of here, but all the office-isms. Like right now as I type this someone’s on a conference call… on their speaker phone… and while they have a door they could close, they aren’t closing it and thus disturbing everyone else in the office. *sigh* So, I shall just close my door. That’s OK tho… I have a great view out my window. I know… really these are rough problems to have . No place to gripe, but it’s little things that add up to appreciating my work-from-home situation more and more.
The good? Well… you’ll just have to wait to see. 🙂 Have to write about it later.
Stuff From Hsoi 