… but not so much right now.
Squeaky and I were watching “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” together on Saturday night when the phone rang. It was my sister, calling to let me know that one of our grandmothers had just suffered a stroke and was in the ER.
The news has all been bad since then, and she’s not expected to live more than a few days at most.
So… I’ll be scarce for awhile.
It’s barely worth mentioning, really. The big 9.3 felt about like a bolt-action .30-06. Yeah, it kicked, but I wasn’t bruised or battered, despite shooting from the typical hunkered-down benchrest position which usually makes recoil more painful.
Why was it so mild? Good stock design, for one thing. CZ’s American-style stock is nice and straight, with plenty of area at the butt to spread the recoil force across your shoulder. CZ also wisely capped off that well-designed stock with one of the excellent Pachmayr Decelerator recoil pads, which spreads out the recoil impulse over time so you get a push instead of a sharp jolt. And while I haven’t weighed the gun since scoping it, it’s probably a good 8 1/2 – 9 pounds now; that helps, too.
… and then there’s the fact that my other big gun is a .416 Rigby, which permanently warped my notion of what REAL recoil feels like 
Rolled out to Island Lake Shooting Range this afternoon to get the CZ zeroed. I’d boresighted last night, putting me on paper and about 6″ low at 25 yards. Three rounds later I had a rough zero and moved out to 100 yards. My first three-shot group was a few inches high, so I dialed the scope down 2 MOA and shot this:
Three rounds, 100 yards, .65″. The Czechs damn well know how to make rifles. Keep in mind this was shot with the absolute cheapest ammo available in this caliber, off of a dubiously-arranged stack of sandbags, by a very mediocre rifle shot. I have no doubt it’s capable of better.
The Island Lake range is a very nice facility, btw. There are some silly, politically-correct rules (no human-shaped targets, no more than 6 rounds in the gun, at least 3 seconds between shots), but it’s a very pleasant place to spend an afternoon.
More to follow… gotta go try to wipe the big grin off my face so I can eat dinner!
Okay, I left you all hanging after last week’s teaser. Here’s the payoff:
It’s a CZ 550 American in 9.3x62mm, which I picked up about 4 years ago from my late and dearly-missed old FFL. I don’t know how he ended up with the gun, but I do know he had a very hard time selling it; your typical Michigan shooter apparently has little use for rifles chambered in overpowered, obscure German calibers.
So he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I got the gun for a song… and about $300. Of course, I promptly stashed it in the back of the closet and forgot about it, since, well… I had little use for a rifle chambered in an overpowered, obscure German caliber. But hey, it’s a CZ! And it was cheap!
Fast forward to two weeks ago and an unexpected invitation to a deer hunting trip. I quickly surveyed the arms at hand and found I didn’t have a suitable deer rifle ready. Time to dig out the still-unfired CZ and get it set up for whitetail-bustin’.
A little more digging in the back of the closet turned up another forgotten bargain, a Leupold Vari-X II 3-9x40mm scope. I’d gotten it at a steep discount when Leupold phased out the Vari-X line and set it aside for… uh, now, I guess. A 2-7x or a fixed 4x might be more appropriate for the caliber, but the 3-9x is a well-proven classic and the extra magnification will be appreciated at the range.
Scope’s now mounted and boresighted (after the usual hour-long game of “is the reticle crooked?”), trigger’s tweaked to just over 3 lbs (the set pull is about a half-pound, but that’s another story for later), and ammo is on hand. Tomorrow it gets sighted in and with a little luck it’ll tip over a deer next month.
No, I’m not talking about Squeaky’s upcoming visit.
I’m talking about this:
Two recoil lugs. A bad omen.
A few bright spots in an otherwise relentlessly grim week:
The Breda Herself sent me some wind-up sushi, which tastes terrible but still amuses me greatly:
And The Squeaky Herself is coming to visit for part of her fall break!
Oh, and remember when I used to be a gunblogger? Yeah, me too. I’m gonna try to get back into that, assuming I can find an outdoor rifle range in my timezone. Here’s a teaser:
Apologies for the crappy pic; as you can see, Clancy was “helping” and it turns out he’s not terribly helpful.
We now return you to your previously scheduled financial meltdown and pending electoral disaster.
The blogging’s been nonexistent because, basically, I haven’t been in the mood (“not tonight dear, I have a headache…”). Frustration and anger all around, from the election to the economic crisis, the bailout, inane nonsense at work, everything.
And no one really wants to read me pissing and moaning about it, so I’ve been avoiding the blog and redirecting my energy to things I can actually *fix*. A considerable chunk of my free time has gone into learning the ins and outs of the pf firewall, which is a seriously impressive piece of software (and I’ve only just scratched the surface).
Tonight I spent the better part of an hour puzzling over a strange keyboard mapping issue. The delete and backspace keys were working properly on the console and X.org reported the correct keycodes, but in xterm both delete and backspace were generating ^?, which meant both keys were working as backspace. I eventually traced the problem to the not-exactly-obvious deleteIsDEL option. Adding
XTerm*deleteIsDEL: false
to my .Xresources file fixed it. Annoying and a little frustrating? Sure, but it’s something I could actually troubleshoot, research, test and SOLVE. Unlike most of the shit that’s been bothering me lately.
On the bright side: sushi tomorrow, maybe a party on Saturday night, and a warm little kitten curled up on my lap. It ain’t all bad.
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