OGIM… and the week’s workload beckons.
So, on with the show:
And on that note, someone named Kaitlin Bennett (no, I don’t know either, but she seems nice):
Oh… that Kaitlin Bennett. Predictably, she has the Left in full attack mode, which means she’s on our side.
New Wife and I were chatting the other day about men and women — and specifically, how in the “old days” (in our case, the 1950s and -60s) men went out to work, and women stayed at home, managed the household and raised the children. The roles were clearly defined, and because of that, there seemed to be little angst, the way there is today, about “women’s roles” and all that. Most especially, the traditional role of the “stay-at-home mom” has been belittled, and worse still, seen as some kind of oppression. Even uglier is the attitude which said that women, having got the kids off to school in the morning, sat around and ate bonbons all day, maybe (and reluctantly) doing housework and preparing the evening meal, in the Donna Reed manner.
That was not the case for our mothers, and I’m going to talk about mine (because I don’t know that much about New Wife’s mother — who, it should be said, disliked me for obvious reasons).
My Mom was always working. Far from being lazy and lounging about on the couch, she was so busy that, in retrospect, I have no idea how she got through the day without passing out exhausted at the end. Here are some of the things she did.
She went to England with my father on one of his business trips, but he was going all over the place — to Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester and Newcastle — and she, stuck in London, got bored on Day Two, with another two weeks to go. So she found a beautician school somewhere in Soho, enrolled, and was able to get a certificate in those two weeks which took other students over a month. When she came back, she started a cottage job, giving facials and nail treatments at first to her friends, and then to a much larger clientele.
But that wasn’t enough. She took up yoga for exercise, and got so good that she was invited by her teacher to become a teacher herself. So for over a decade, she taught yoga to women, two lessons a day each workday week. (It started off as a single class for the neighborhood women, and by the end, she had a waiting list of over a hundred. My father had to build her a studio on our property because she outgrew our living room in a couple of months.)
Like in Britain, South Africa had branches of the Women’s Institute all over the place. My mom joined the local branch, and after a couple of years she became the chairlady, a position she held for nearly twenty years. (For more about the WI, here’s the story.) Under her leadership, that branch went from a recipe-swapping club to an institution which created sub-branches that taught traditional (but forgotten) household skills such as gardening, flower-arranging, household decoration and, outside the house, public speaking and bookkeeping. Also under her auspices, her WI provided caregivers for a daycare center for severely-handicapped children under age 5, and she was in charge of its annual fundraising drive — which after two years enabled the center to move from someone’s house into their own building (incidentally built by my father’s engineering company, gratis ).
Mom was also an indefatigable rose-gardener. While we had a live-in gardener to take care of the main (two-acre) garden, the forty-odd rose bush garden was her own fiercely-guarded domain, and she watered, pruned, dug out and weeded the beds daily. (The ever-present smell of fresh roses in our house stays with me to this day.)
In addition, she was in charge of family entertainment. As a senior business executive (and later owner of his own engineering company), my father hosted formal dinners at least twice a month; and when there wasn’t a business dinner, it was a dinner party for their huge circle of friends — dinners which invariably ended up with everyone dancing in my mother’s yoga studio. (My job was to take out the yoga mats and clean the place, and to restore it to its proper function after the party.)
And the meals. Good grief, the meals. Dinner was a sit-down affair every night, and Sunday lunch was a State occasion. Mom designed and planned out every single meal — needless to say, she also did the supermarket shopping once a month. She was also a peerless baker, to the point where my sister Teresa and I, spoiled brats that we were, could not only identify a store-bought cake, but would refuse to eat it. The only variation to this was confectioneries — Napoleons (custard slices), petit-fours and donuts — which were bought from Gallagher’s Bakery in the city (the only one which met Mom’s exacting standards), where she would take us every Saturday morning, as a treat.
Granted, we also had a live-in maid to help with the cleaning and laundry work — my Black mommy Mary Madipe, who carried me around on her back as a baby in the African manner, and who alone could discipline me with a single word — but all the time that Mom saved from those chores was not spent in idleness and indolence, as can be seen above.
Of course, there were the kids to look after. Fortunately (for her), at age 11 I went off to boarding school, but before that, while waiting for my lift to primary school, I remember that each Monday Mom would give me a manicure before going to school. (I’ve looked after my nails in similar fashion ever since: emery boards, cuticle clippers, the lot.) From Mom, I learned about being a gentleman: table manners, etiquette, proper dressing, the lot — all rigorously drilled into me for as long as I can remember. (I recall, at age eight, holding the door open for one of my mother’s friends, and her astonishment at what was, for me, everyday behavior.)
So yeah, those were the days of the stay-at-home mom that I remember. This was not a life as portrayed in the sneering manner of today: it was a time when “housewife” carried all the responsibilities of home management — and in those days, microwave ovens, TV dinners (and in South Africa, TV at all) were as yet unknown. Everything was made from scratch, and an “out” meal was perhaps a monthly trip to the roadhouse or fish ‘n chip shop, all treated with the greatest excitement by us kids.
It was work, I think, which would absolutely devastate the Modern Ms. of today.
If you’re not bored by all this, I invite you to read further. It’s personal.
…or at least locked out of my own house.
New Wife does not want me to be present today at the moving of our stuff from the garage back into the apartment because reasons. (Mostly because I fly into frequent rages at the recalcitrance of furniture to fit through doors etc. and am likely to break things when it doesn’t. Also, I hate packing stuff away, and she absolutely loves doing it.)
So I’ve supplied the movers (strong young backs) from a company that I’ve used many times before, and that’s all there is to it.
And no, she’s not going to rearrange our stuff so that I’ll never find it again — she is actually more a creature of habit than I am, so when I’m eventually allowed back in, sometime this afternoon, I should find the place almost ready for human habitation.
My sole responsibility is the packing away of guns into safes, and buying the groceries we’ll be needing to resume our former life, such as it was. And that’s only scheduled for tomorrow (Sunday).
It could be worse. Like it was back in mid-February.
Earlier in the week, I had a long lunch with the Son&Heir, during which we discussed our usual breadth of topics — we have long lunches together — and among the common topics of career advice, lifestyle updates and so on, we spent considerable time talking about guns.
He admitted that he wants / needs a 1911, and despairing of my good health and (for the moment) unlikely demise, realized that his chances of inheriting mine anytime soon were not good. So he’s going to get one soon on his own account, and being his father’s son, most likely a no-frills version like the Springfield Mil-Surp:
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about here. This is.
We discussed the impetus behind yesterday’s post, on the kind of rifle that I would want to own, given my failing eyesight and disenchantment with hunting, and he summed up my situation thus:
“Exactly what shooting are you planning to do from now on?”
It’s a good question. Obviously, there’s the self-defense issue (quite adequately addressed by the current selection between my Springfield 1911, High Power and S&W 637 Airweight), and the extension thereof, delicately labeled “street occasions” (AK-47 and M1 Carbine). All that’s a settled situation, with maybe a .357 revolver as the final addition, at some point.
As far as plinking is concerned, my needs are few — the Taurus pump .22 for fun, and the Marlin 880SQ and its .22 WMR counterpart for targets.
Then came the crunch question:
“If you’re not going to go hunting again, why get a new bolt-action rifle at all?”
I have to admit that it stumped me. For starters, the very thought of my life not including a hunting rifle is like contemplating a life without, say, books. That kind of gun has been part of my persona for so long that being without one quite literally makes me feel nervous.
But there it is. I’m unlikely ever to go out into the field again or, more likely, go to the rooftops for one of those “social” occasions, because I’m too old for both activities. I do have a few older bolt-action rifles that could be pressed into service, in a pinch, for an emergencies of either kind. And the followup question:
“Other than plinking and handguns, what kind of shooting would you be likely to do?”
And the answer is: clay pigeons, e.g. as I have done on a number of occasions Over There:
Which of course begs the question:
“If you love it so much, why don’t you do that Over Here?”
I have no answer for that. I regularly visit more than a few indoor ranges scattered around Dallas and the Plano area, but there are far from that many opportunities for shotgunning.
But there is Elm Fork Shooting Sports a few miles southwest of where I live, which caters for just such a pastime:
It’s an expensive place to shoot, but so what.
Which leads me, at long last, to the question of equipment.
While I yield to no man in terms of the quality of my other guns, I will admit that my shotgun (note: singular) is, to put it mildly, not fit for purpose.
It’s a Spanish-made no-name brand side-by-side of dubious quality, and I think I last fired it in the single-digit 2000s. Maybe 2004. Worse yet, it’s in 16ga [okay, you can quit that derisive laughter] but all is not yet lost. Because when tidying up Ye Olde Ammoe Locquer prior to leaving the flooded apartment, I happened to come across a couple hundred rounds of 20ga (don’t ask, I don’t know either).
So: instead of replacing the stolen CZ 550 6.5 Swede with a rifle, might I… get a decent shotgun instead? (I will give you all a few minutes for the smelling salts to take effect.)
Now I know that in no other part of the Gun Thing can one’s bank account be emptied more quickly than in the world of shotguns:
That’s an A.H. Fox FE, and I put it up here not to consider buying it ($28,500 second-hand, uh huh), but to show the essentials any prospective purchase would have to have: 20ga chambering, side-by-side barrels at least 28″ long, double triggers, splinter fore-end and a straight (a.k.a. “English”) grip stock.
And I want it new. The problem with sporting shotguns like the above is that they’ve generally been used hard — not that this is a Bad Thing, of course — but I don’t want to buy the thing and have the action fall apart because after 200,000 rounds, well, that could happen. (Mr. Free Market, for example, has “shot out” not one but two Berettas in his time.) And a shotgun rebuild / repair is expensive, bubba.
So after some fairly extensive research, there are really only two shotguns which satisfy all my criteria.
First, there’s the Iside (by I.F.G. — Italian Firearms Group, more on them here), and for well over $2,000 it looks like the business:
But that’s right at the top of what I want to spend — actually, quite a bit over the top — so is there anything else of similar features and quality?
Ho yuss there is and, surprise surprise, it’s made by CZ — okay, actually made by Huglu in Turkey but distributed by CZ-USA.
It’s the second-generation (G2) Bobwhite, and it retails for about $650 (where you can get it — I might have to wait awhile…).
Now granted, the Bobwhite’s finish is not exactly ornate, but that’s fine by me: fancy engraving and carving is what really drives up a shotgun’s price, and as those who know me can attest, I’m not the kind of guy who cares for ornamentation. But I have to tell you, the G2 model with the case-hardened finish has me fondling Ye Olde Credytte Carde:
Even though it’s brand new, it looks old… it could have been made for me. Hell, I might just consider getting two, because at that price ($1,300 ) it’s about the same as I’d spend getting a decent rifle plus scope. Because it’s going to get well used, so to speak. And the ammo cost doesn’t look too bad, either.
Don’t blame me; blame the Son&Heir.
The usual mix of bullshit, assholiness, stupidity and government tyranny [some overlap].
…thus rendering it unwatchable, and unwatched.
…probably using the same process he used for designing Vista.
…yeah, putting synthetic chemicals into your body was always risk-free. [/sarc]
…which means that we probably need to worry, because China is a bunch of lying asshoes.
…let’s hear it for !SCIENCE! — and incidentally, that makes the score: Climate Predictive Models 0, Reality 10,000. You have a better chance of winning the Powerball than they have of getting the forecast correct.
…using the Left’s previous argument in a different cause: if they’re old enough to die in battle, they’re old enough to vote carry a gun. And speaking of underage:
…so he could pork her without getting arrested? [/Jerry Lee Lewis]
…I should point out that the vibrator was first powered by electricity in 1880 (twenty years before the invention of the electric iron and vacuum cleaner). Here’s kinda what they looked like:
And now for even more INSIGNIFICA:
…as Mr. Free Market said, when I sent him this article: “Ah, summer.”
Which reminds me of this Summer (Monteyes-Fullam), looking all summer-y:
…because that’s just the way my mind works.
