Splendid Isolation

The day started off ungood, in that I woke up at 3.30am (no reason) and couldn’t get back to sleep.  So I got up, made coffee and a piece of toast, and read the papers (which only pushed my mood of morning irritation to anger).

Then it was time to get out of the chair to make New Wife her morning cup of tea and prepare her sack lunch (all stuff I do every day of the work week), only I first managed to knock the breadcrumb-loaded plate off the side table, which meant calling on Mr. Dust Bug to come out to play.

Did all the Wife Spoilage things, but dropped my second piece of toast onto the kitchen floor — and proved the Jam Side Law yet again.  Mopped up, made a fresh cup of coffee without further incident.

Saw Wife off to her day at the salt mines  school, went back to the news, which just kept the bad mood simmering.  However, what stopped me from rage, RCOB etc. was the prospect of range time looming at 10am (their opening hour).

It was going to be SHTF Rifle (AK and M1 Carbine) Day, so off I went to Rifle Gear Indoors.

You know how some people say that the worst day at the range is better than the best day of the office?  Well, “some people” are fucking morons.  To whit:

• For some reason, the Carbine liketh not the expensive Hornady hollowpoints — won’t chamber the round out of the mag, won’t close the chamber even when I slam the bolt.  So I give up on that.  Had a dozen or so rounds of Korean mil-surp, which works fine in all the mags (I was also testing the mags to make sure they were still fit for purpose).
• So I pull out a couple boxes of Wolf Black Box — beeeeep!  — range master informs me that the Wolf ammo is persona non grata  at their precious range because bimetallic boolets can spark and set fire to the backstop.  Range policy (which I know about — I just didn’t know that the Wolf .30 ammo was The Wrong Stuff).  So:  no more M1 Carbine practice for Kimmy, then.  (Longterm problem:  I have a shitload of Wolf .30 ammo because of a good deal some time ago;  not much other .30 boolets because I have so much Wolf — you all know the situation — which means I have to find non-Wolf replacement ammo, in this, the Time Of The Great Ammo Drought Of 2020.  Aaaaargh.)
• “Never mind,” says I, “I have the AK in the car.  Let me fetch it,” and I do.  You know what’s coming, right?  Five mags and 200 extra rounds of… Wolf 7.62×39.
• End of range session.

That’s not the end of it.  I’m driving home, and I always try to avoid taking the 121 toll road because of road-widening construction — the day they opened the 121 tollway it was two lanes too narrow, a rant for another time — and I’m chugging along surface streets.  This is no great hardship;  it’s a lovely day, I have David Allan Coe playing at 11, I’m starting to forget all about the range fiasco, when… orange cones in the road because MOAR ROAD REPAIRS, and the normally-ample three-lane Headquarters Drive is down to a single lane.

Which is when a fucking MAMIL (middle-aged man in Lycra) cyclist gets in front of me, on the uphill, which means I’m screaming along at 5mph, if that.  But I bite my tongue, and follow this two-wheeled twat as he crawls up the hill.  (There’s pretty much only one hill in the whole of Plano, and this is it.)  Fortunately, he turns right just before Legacy West where, surprise surprise, the road is still only one lane wide because there’s construction of yet another block of overpriced apartments/stores at the 80% completed stage.  Still, the lights at both intersections are green, so with Bike Boy gone, I accelerate…

…whereupon an oncoming car makes a left turn right across my lane.  Too late, he sees me and slams on the brakes, stopping halfway across the street.  Fortunately, there’s nobody coming up behind me on the right, so I can make a little jink around the stopped car and carry on.

I should probably say at this point that this being Plano, the car I nearly hit was a black Rolls Royce, which figures.  Only later do I realize that I should just have run into the moron, so as to get a new car from his insurance.

I’m still shaking when I get home.

Only one thing to fix that:  gin.

As I’m sucking it down, I think that the day is a total fuck-up of a day, and the only thing I need to do now is embark on a totally fruitless search for inexpensive .30 Carbine ammo, just to round things off, so to speak.

And wouldn’t you know it?  Two thousand rounds of cheap, clean-burning  Korean FMJ mil-surp at J&G Sales, at a bulk discount price, even.  (I know, I should have waited until National Ammo Day, but who the hell’s going to risk that, in these times?)

All I had to do for the rest of the day was try not to burn the apartment building down, or similar.  So I watched a combination of Jay Leno’s Garage, Jeremy Clarkson and Ian McCallum’s Forgotten Weapons.

I finished the day in something approaching a decent mood, in that I might only have winged a passing BLM rioter instead of blowing his fucking head off with my 16ga.

Anyone up here in N. Texas know of a decent outdoor range where I can shoot off all that verboten  ammo?