Over? I Don't Think So.

I've had a little time this morning to do some reading and I found some interesting things. Most of them contradict the governments official mantra of it's getting better, it's getting better.
I have read and heard on the TV that a group has determined that the recession ended in 2009. WTF? Ended? What are they smoking? From my perspective the recession continues. The dollar continues to lose its value, worth and desirability. Countries around the world are dumping their dollar holdings and switching to gold or Euros (for some stupid reason) and some want to to create a "global currency". Here are some links to various articles that paint a very different picture as to the health of the US and it's failing economy.
They've been caught doing this before, The Fed is thinking of buying more bonds. This is interesting as the bonds they are buying are their own! They do it to manipulate the interest rate.
Most folks realize that when the dollar drops, gold prices increase. If you've been paying attention to the gold market for the last year, gold has steadily risen in price. On September 21 gold was pushing the 1300 dollars an ounce range. Add up the two previous sums and you get this.
There are various claims as to the total of the governments debt. But it generally falls in the multiple TRILLION dollar range. Yes, that's right, TRILLIONS. Now we find that the US is hiding debt. Lots of it. I'm talking a final number of somewhere between 60 and 200 TRILLION!
That brings us to this winderful little nugget. Get out your fingers and count up how many friends, family and aquaintences are out of work or underemployed. I generally come up with 50 percent. I know its better or worse depending on you location but here in Missouri the state percentage is running 9-11 percent but I still get a 40-50 percent range among my immediate circle.

Other News
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The rats are leaving the sinking ship of the Obama White House! Seriously, take a look around the internet and see how may of The Chosen Ones staff have retired or quit or are going to quit. Inspires confidence don't it?

What I've been doing or Why I haven't been posting

Wow! have I been busy! The owner of the little apartment building that I am going to manage lives in Kalifornia. He has been flying out, on what seems like, an every other week schedule. He spends 3-5 days here and wings it back to Kali. It's been very interesting talking to this man. He was born and bred in San Fran Cisco. He is amazed that, here in Missouri, marijuana is ....ILLEGAL. He says they have pot stores and pot shows in Frisco. I told him if someone had a pot show in Mo. the biggest attendees would be local and county cops, the State Patrol, DEA, ATF and some other alphabet soup agencies. He is also shocked that in this part of the state we don't have smog inspections for our cars. This was a half hour discussion. He could not believe we don't do tail pipe inspections.
The main reason the owner comes out is so we can rehab his building. Nearly 4 years ago he put 50 grand in this apartment building. You cannot tell it today. The low class "renters" his last "manager" let stay there just destroyed the place. That was in addition to not paying rent. So the majority of his 50 large is gone as well as over 20 grand in unpaid rents. He is self employed in Kali and his business is really down due to a major drop in business travel to his town. Basically he is busted. So he puts some stuff on a credit card, we work on the building, he goes home and tries to pay off the card, then he comes back again. Repeat as needed. It's slow going but we are making progress.
When I'm not working on the old apartment I'm working on my other house or mowing or working on a gun or cleaning house or working on the Harley or helping someone or any other thing that comes up. For instance, this weekend a friend is having a family reunion at her house. I'm doing the cooking for this event. She wants me to smoke a few pork butts and make pulled pork. She hasn't decided on the side dishes yet. Then I'm working on the apartment again for another week, more mowing on Wednesday and then more mowing on Monday. I have a total of 4 places to mow, 2 of mine, one neighbor and the apartment. Time and lack of funds has kept me from doing any shooting or working on our preps. The other house is pretty much eating up most of our income. One day soon though we will be living there and can sell this one. At that point we will be debt free. Then the fun begins.

Quitchyerbitchin' and some progress

Damn! I've been sanding drywall this morning and it's killin' my shoulders. Flat out sucks! Put it on, take it off. Repeat as needed. Back in the 80's I dislocated my right shoulder in a major fight. Then add in the years running jackhammers, sledgehammers and shovels, weight lifting and miscellaneous drunken sports such as full contact wiffle ball and you get a fucked up body. Well now all I have left to do today is mow 2 yards. I should say I'm only doing two today. Rain is coming in and I have to get my primary yard done and that of the paying customer. I usually have 4 to do on Monday. Any way I'm already beat and I'm not done yet. OK enough of the bitchin.
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I planted a few tomato plants this year and I have been getting 1-3 ripe ones every day. Now I'm waiting on the next round of little ones to grow up and keep me in 'maters for a while longer.
I bought a bunch of habenaro's at the farmers market. I'll use them to make up another batch of my honey habenaro sauce. Pretty good stuff. I even bought those little bottles (they call them woozies) to put it in.

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I dipped into my stash this morning and ordered a 6 speed tranny for the Harley. A buddy of mine has a shop and told me he'd sell it to me at cost. One of his vendors had an Ultima polished 6 speed for 599. It should be in tomorrow. Now I just need to rebuild the motor.

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I got the stock for the Ranger .22 sanded and stained. I'm of two minds as to how it came out. It is birch and birch stocks are notorious for taking stain in some strange patterns. This one came out with some broad tiger stripping on one side. In the light it almost glows around the edges of the dark bands. We'll see what the neighbor thinks. I receive the Oxpho blue from the Brown Truck Of Joy yesterday. So this project is coming together. It ought be pretty nice for a freebie.

I'm back again!

I've had a lot of crap going on lately. My brother came back from Kalifornia and I helped pack up his house for moving. That was most of a week. Then the following week I had a week long sale to get rid of the stuff he left behind. That didn't work out very well. Then the owner of the apartment I am going to manage flew in from Kalifornia and he and I worked on cleaning up the mess that the last pigs, sorry, I mean tenants left behind. Filthy,filthy animals. Based on what I have learned from this particular adventure I will never rent property to anyone. So any way, there are three weeks that I have lost in working on the Juniper property. Add into the mix the 4 properties that I have to mow every week, the p.o.s Caddilac that needed repair every time we turned around, a funeral and the general intrusions of life that affect us all and I have not had much time for anything at all. After having the opportunity to spend a grand on the Caddi in a two week period we chose, instead, to trade it in. Cherry Pie ended up with an '09 Chevrolet HHR. We got a great buy on a low mileage car with the remainder of the factory warranty left. So far it seems like we got the better end of the deal. The HHR has every single thing the Caddi had with the exception of 400+ horsepower, leather interior and some shoulder room.
For relaxation I have been working on the neighbors Ranger .22. I spent 4 hours one evening filing the barrel until it was free of pits and the file marks from a previous attempt at dressing it up. I then spent 3 hours the next night polishing the barrel , by hand, to a 360 grit. I also managed to fit the steel butt plate to the stock and straighten out the lines of the butt. I've ordered a new bottle of Oxpho Blue from Brownells to finish the barreled action and the little bits and pieces.
I even managed to squeeze in a little mudding and sanding over at Juniper or as Cherry calls it, Jupiter.
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A few weeks ago I went to a local estate sale and found, in a pile of crappy knives, a real gem. It is a Cold Steel Voyager X2 folding knife. Talk about a large size pocket knife! Thirteen inches of knife that fits in your pocket. 13! I had to remove the paint someone had applied to the blade and do a general clean up of the knife as well as polish the blade. This is an 80 dollar knife in most places. I got it for the amazing price of 3 dollars. After applying the Lansky to it, it is now razor sharp.
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I have to confess, In addition to all the stuff that's been going on, I have been a little out of sorts. I have realized that November will be 2 years of unemployment. 2 freakin' years. I have applied for everything from custodian to project manager and have gotten nothing. Zip. Nada. The apartment gig is very questionable. I only get paid when there is actual income from the renters and we just gave all of them the boot due to lack of payment of rents. And the owner is also unemployed and can't pay me for the work I just did. He did come up with some bucks to compensate me for past unpaid work. The place needs some work and the owner wants more work done to attract better tenants but I have a hard time working on a credit basis. I think my mom would call that a hope and a prayer. So Cherry and I have been racking our brains to come up with some cash making venture for me to engage in. If we can get the Juniper house done and sell the Kimball house we will have no debt other than the HHR. But those are two large things that have to happen quickly.

It's Been A While

It's been a while since I put anything up here. Longer than I ever wanted to go with out putting something, anything up. What's going on? Life. That's what's going on. I've been working on the repo house we bought, mowing all the grass at 3 houses, and trying to hold my head high after a year and eight months with out any gainful employment. I believe I have well over 200 resumes floating around with the polite rely of "no thanks" from only 3 of them, the rest are mum on the subject of employment. I keep hearing the jobs situation is getting better but have yet to see anything resembling that statement. I have several income producing ideas that I want to implement but they all require an up front injection of cash. So I'll keep working on the house, mowing grass, getting the curent house ready to sell and keep my fingers crossed.

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Things I'm working on.

Repo House known from this day forth as Juniper House

Current House known from this day forth as Kimball House

My Harley, the motor needs rebuilt and the tranny needs replaced

A Ranger model 103-2 .22 rifle

My M1A pistol grip stock

2 lawn mowers so I can keep the grass mowed

So even though I don't have a job per se, I do have things to do.



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Now for the meat.



I found this over at Drudges place. The Health Care Bill has a slimy little secret added to it, now all small businesses and self employed will be required to submit a 1099 form listing all goods and services they aquire over 600 dollars. This is so the gatekeepers of the healthcare bill, the IRS can tap into a previously unknown resource. These bastards won't be happy until they have taxed every business out of existence.



Are you a menber of an HOA (home owners association)? Keep up on your association dues! I have never liked HOA's and now I like them less over this. Evidently if you fall behind on your dues they have the ability and the desire to foreclose on your home! And they will do it faster than a bank will. So if your are letting the dues slide by to satisfy the mortgage, the HOA assholes will slip up behind you and take your home.



Related to my intro, take a look at this graph. I think it's wrong though. I have been off for 20 months and I know a bunch of folks that have been off way longer than the 25 weeks shown on this graph. In Missouri they have 5 tiers of unemployment. Not any longer, 3, 4, and 5 have been discontinued. There are only 2 tiers until the State can get a federal cash infusion. As a result of this everyone in MO that's on tier two is on their last financial leg until the funds are boosted or they/we can find a job.



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Here's something I do very rarely. Post a picture of a woman. But as my header says I'll put anything I want on this site. I was watching Redeye the other morning and this goddess was a guest. Author, Imogen LLoyd Webber. I have a thing about attractive women with accents. Southern, Texan, Austalian...... Not only is Imogen attractive she has the most delightful British accent.

Obama The Great Job Killer

What more can I say?


WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: Barack Obama: The great jobs killer
WAYNE ALLYN ROOTMORE COLUMNS
"As former President Ronald Reagan might have said, "Obama, there you go again."
The current occupant of the White House claims to know how to create jobs. He claims jobs have been created. But so far the score is Great Obama Depression 2.2 million lost jobs, Obama 0 -- a blowout.

Obama is as hopeless, helpless, clueless and bankrupt of good ideas as the manager of the Chicago Cubs in late September. This "community organizer" knows as much about private-sector jobs as Pamela Anderson knows about nuclear physics.
It's time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes -- rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and business owners -- Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI's Most Wanted List.
Meanwhile, he has kept the union workers of GM and Chrysler employed (with taxpayer money). He has made sure that most government employee union members got their annual raises for sleeping on the job (with taxpayer money). He made sure that his voters got handouts mislabeled as "tax cuts" even though they never paid taxes (with taxpayer money). And he made sure that major campaign contributors collected billions off government stimulus (with taxpayer money).
As far as the taxpayers -- the people who actually take risks with our own money to create small businesses and jobs and pay most of the taxes -- we require protection under the Endangered Species Act.
You won't find proof of the damage Obama is doing on Wall Street, but rather on Main Street. My friends are all part of the economic engine of America: Small business. Small business creates 75 percent of new jobs (and a majority of all jobs). I called one friend who was a wealthy restaurant owner. He says business is off by 60 percent. He's drowning in debt. He won't last much longer. His wealth is gone.
I called another friend in the business of home improvement. He says business is off 90 percent from two years ago. My contractor just filed personal bankruptcy. She won't be building any more homes. The hair salon where I've had my hair cut for years closed earlier this year. Bankrupt. But here's the clincher -- ESPN Zone just closed all their restaurants across the country. If they can't make it selling cheap food and overpriced beer with 100 big screens blaring every sporting event on the planet to a sports-crazed society, we are all in deep, deep trouble.
I've polled all my friends who own small businesses -- many of them in the Internet and high-tech fields. They all agree that in this new Obama world of high business taxes, income taxes, payroll taxes, capital gains taxes, and workers compensation taxes, the key to success is to avoid employees. The only way to survive as a business owner today is by keeping the payroll very low and by hiring only independent contractors or part-time employees provided by temp agencies.
The days of jobs in the private sector with big salaries, full benefits, and pensions are over. We've all seen where those kinds of jobs get you as a business owner -- in Bankruptcy Court or surviving on government welfare like GM and Chrysler. Or in the case of government itself -- completely insolvent, but surviving by ripping off taxpayers and fraudulently running printing presses at the Fed all day and night to print money by the trillions.
Unfortunately, small businesses don't have the power to impose taxes or print money. So unlike government, we'll just have to cut employees and run lean and mean.
It has now become clear that, outside of the burgeoning field of Census takers, there will be no major increase in new jobs for years to come. Outside government, Obama has created a wasteland of economic ruin and depression that looks much like the landscape of Mel Gibson's first movie "Mad Max." Without a printing press in Obama's world, you're just plain out of luck.
The days of believing the Obama propaganda about a jobs recovery are over. The trillion-dollar corporate handouts (neatly named "stimulus") may have kept big business in the money for the past 18 months, and artificially propped up the stock market, but small business is the real canary in the coal mine.
My small business-owning friends aren't creating one job. Not one. They are shedding jobs. They are learning to do more with fewer employees. They are creating high-tech businesses that don't need employees. And many business owners are making plans to leave the country. In a high-tech world where businesses can be run from anywhere, Obama has a problem. His one-trick pony -- raise taxes, raise taxes, raising taxes -- is chasing away the business owners he desperately needs to pay his bills.
So who is going to pay Obama's taxes? Not his voters. They want government to pay them. Who is going to create Obama's jobs? Not his voters -- they've never created a job in their lives.
So what is Obama going to do? Maybe he can get Pamela Anderson on the line."
Wayne Allyn Root, a former vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party, writes from Henderson. His column appears every other week.

Chicago Continues With Anti Second Ammendment

After the Supreme Courts recent ruling in McDonald v Chicago case, Chicago wasted no time throwing up roadblocks to the citizens right to keep and bear arms. The city council voted 34-0 to back Daley's plan to limit gun owners to one assembled gun in the house, no shooting ranges in Chi Town, a sharp fee for the carry permit, and requiring the applicant to pass a shooting test. Pass a shooting test with no shooting ranges to practice at? I know Chicago has a smorgasbord of small cities and towns that make up the suburban area and there is probably more than a few ranges to be found in them. But have you ever driven in the Chicago area? The traffic alone is enough to constitute an infringement on gun ownership. Let's see how long it takes for another lawsuit to be file against the Draconian Rulers of Chi Town.

McDonald Response

All us gun owners have surely heard or read of the US Supreme Court ruling in the recent McDonald v Chicago case. In a 5-4 ruling the Court affirmed that the Second amendment has nearly the same treatment as the rest of the rights. So, the Second is just like the First except for all the regulations, permits, fees, bans, lies and a small army of armed enforcers ready to kick your door in at the slightest provocation. Five to four. That means there are four traitorous agents on the Court. They are obviously working against the Constitution so who are the working for?
Chicago has wasted no time getting hard at work after the Supremes decision. This is Chicago's latest interpretation of " shall not infringe". Fees, permits, training, bans and restrictions. Isn't a "restriction" an infringement? Aren't fees infringements? And how do the locals get the required range time when shooting ranges are banned in Chicago? Oh, and you can only keep ONE gun assembled and ready for use in your home. And you garage and porch are not considered part of your home. Can you see the next round of legal challenges coming up?

Random Randomness

I would assume the oil spill is still spillin'. Right? Well, if it is then the Southern coast is well and truly fucked. "Cause that means the oil company has not come up with a plan and the .gov still has no clue, as if it was really any of their business. Unless you have lost your livelihood due to this accident or are in line for a job or in line to provide supplies or services then you really need to pay attention to more of what the government is doing and maybe even use some of the non-tv -viewing time to review your various lists or do an inventory of your supplies or even, say, here's a real neat idea, read a book. Ya know they still print 'em? Read a history of government and see how they all eventually fail when the leaders get visions of grandeur in their heads. You can even read something about how to can food or raise a garden or fix a gun. It's amazing what you can find in an old fashioned book.

We are still working on the second house but we have finally depleted my "retirement" savings. We are now to the point where it nickle and dimes you to death. We have a whole list of things that we want to do as opposed to things we need to do. We have most of the need to to do's done or nearly done. Here is a list of some want to do things:

• apply security film to the lower window
• install wrought iron "storm" doors
• remove the two sliding doors and install regular entry doors in their place
• replace the fence with heavy duty chain link or even wrought iron

There are a couple of other things we want to do but I'll not be discussing those.

With all the thoughts of wrought iron this and that it brings up a sore point with me. I see ads, quite frequently advertising "rot" iron for sale. What really puts the icing on the cake is when they have "rot" iron for "sell". Crap! Did any of the folks retain any of their, say grade 1-12 education? That one really gets me. For sell. Not TO sell but FOR sell. Maybe those folks could read a book to improve their grammar.

He said what?

Egytian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit claims that, in a one on one conversation with The Chosen One, it was revealed that Obama is a Muslim. Who woulda guessed? What with all the islamohugging going on and all the judeobashing happening and all the christiandenying being tossed around.

No Hawaiian Birth Certificate.

I couldn't pass this up! A past employee of the County of Honolulu says .........there is NO Hawaiian birth certificate for one Barack Hussein Obama. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Kenya is still happy to claim him as a creation of their country i.e. a citizen of Kenya. Complete with birth certificate and road sign. Oh yeah, and his old granny says she was present at his birth in .....Kenya! His wife even says he is a Kenyan man. What more do the courts and the libtards need? The courts, in their infinite wisdom have decreed over and over that Citizens of The United States have no standing to bring forth a lawsuit regarding this issue. No standing? Every freakin' citizen in this country is affected by everything this guy does! How can we have no standing? This usurper has spent nearly a million dollars or maybe more now, to conceal his birth record, his college records, his passport, his scholarly writings and who knows what else. If he is truly a Citizen of The United States, wouldn't it be easier and a hell of a lot cheaper to prove it than to hide it? He has proven over and over he hasn't a clue in his head of how to govern a nation or even appoint knowledgeable people to his various cabinet positions. Yet there a millions of people who still support and back this liar. 'Nuff said.

The Young Shootist

When our only child became mobile he also became fascinated with my guns. Always watching me clean them, work on them and shoot them. When he turned 5 we made a conscious decision to give him a gun for Christmas. A real firearm gun. It was a Chipmunk .22. It was a sweet little thing. Before we gave it to him, I took it down and gave it a real nice linseed oil finish over its walnut stock and then waxed the living hell out of. Talk about shine! When he opened that present on Christmas morning, the look on his face was unforgettable. We included a hard case for it that would hold the diminutive rifle as well as eye and ear protection and a few boxes of ammo. I had taken the time to cut out the foam to custom fit all the items. This led to a youth full of practice, lessons, hunting, shooting and responsibility. When he became old enough to walk a full day with me in the field, he carried an empty gun for a whole season. The next season he could only load the gun when we encountered a sitting rabbit. The next season he could carry a fully loaded gun. By the time he graduated from high school he had several deer to his credit with one nice buck hanging on the wall. By the age of nine he was shooting my .40 caliber Star FireStar. Today he is in the Navy, married to a Navy woman and is still interested in firearms and shooting. As soon as he became of age he acquired his CCW and we gave him a Glock 36 in .45 acp. With out time or a place to hunt near his duty station he has gravitated to handguns. He does have a pistol caliber carbine as well as the other guns we gave him while growing up. It is just easier to shoot the handguns with a range just down the street from him. If my economic situation improves, I plan on gifting him a couple of nice firearms. And it is well known that when it's time for me to go to that shooting range in the sky, he is to take possession of my collection. With the exception of a few stolen ones and one trade for others, I have every gun I was given or bought since I was 12. He should make out all right indeed.

Seized Up

Yesterday, I'm working away at the plumbing in the new house, happy as a pig in mud. I had to make several trips up stairs, not as many as normal but still a few. By the time I left around 3:00 my junk knee was really acting up. By the time I got home I had to walk in a really strange way. Either I could twist my foot inward and walk stiff legged or I could do the high step with the bad leg. Both of those allowed me to move around the place pretty well. I looked like a moron in both cases and it was a pain in the ass but let me get around OK. I ate dinner and then sat on the lawn tractor and mowed the grass. Went to bed and this morning, no moronic gait, no hobbling around(no more than usual anyway), no sideassed limping. What ever was out of place evidently went back into place. Any one got 60 or seventy grand laying around available for loan? I under stand that's the going rate for a cash payment knee replacement.

No change in profession.

Now I'm a plumber. Who knows what I'll be next week. Oh yeah, a flooring specialist.

As someone who has been out of work for a year and a half I found this very interesting. WTF? I know employers are free to hire whoever they want but to disqualify everyone who is currently unemployed makes no sense to me. Nearly everyone I know that is unemployed is unemployed involuntarily. As in through no fault of their own. My employer of 20 years made me Employee Of The Year for 2005 and persona non grata in spring of 2006. Nothing changed, I was still doing my job and doing it well. My theory is that my previous rate of pay increases and bonuses put me out of the acceptable pay range for a lout with no college education. I actually saw my new boss choke when she saw my pay rate during my last employee evaluation. Two months later I'm on my ass. I took me 9 months to get a job after that. That new job lasted 10 months before I moved on to what I thought was going to be a great job(if things get better I would go back to work for them in a heartbeat). The employer was going to open an office in KC and I would sell and run jobs from that office. Then came the great collapse of 2008 followed by the greater collapse of 2009. The new office never became. I then had no job again and it continues today. I/we have several ideas for self employment. All of them will require money we don't have at this time.

Bring on the Cool!

We got the air conditioning running in the new house this morning. It's been installed for a while and we had the furnace portion working this winter but we had not ran the electrical to the compressor unit. I got the disconnect installed and the conduit and such in and my retired electrician father in law did the wiring. This would have been nice LAST week when working in the master bath in temps up to 110. The attic temps were near 125. A little cooling would have been nice then. We just keep moving on a little at a time. It appears like we will be moving during the month of July. That's when the work really begins.
That's all for now.

All the goin' ons

Well, it's been a busy week. What with painting, counter top installation, shower building, sheetrocking, mowing, buying and insulating I have been a very busy man indeed.

We are going to pay the insurance company what they are asking for the returned pistol. It's turning out to be a pretty good deal. I finally did a good comparison to the color prints in the Blue Book of Gun Values and it seems to be a solid 90-95 percent gun.

I don't pay much attention to the news any more. It's all about spilled oil and an ineffective response to it or job loss records. So I know all I need to know at this time. When the news outlets actually do some REAL investigative reporting about real issues then I'll pay more attention to them. By real I mean, oh, say a true and definitive investigation into the actual birth place of Barry Sotero or maybe why Barry has spent so many millions hiding his school records as well as his birth certificate. This is getting to be a habit with this guy, I read that his pseudo administration is considering concealing the papers of the latest SCOTUS candidate, Kagen. So, when the news outlets start doing real news type work I'll start paying more attention to them. Or FOX gets their female anchors back in short skirts. Which ever comes first.

For now, over and out. I leave you with this......

Cool, eh?

The Prodigal Gun Returns

Back in 2003 our home was broken into and when the tally was completed I had several guns and many switchblade knives missing. I know no safe, yadad yada yada..... Any way, the local PD couldn't lift any of the clearly visible fingerprints from many of the articles the thieves chose to carry around and bang on other things. The best they could do for us was to tell us file an insurance claim. Really? My insurance agent wife and I weren't aware of that. Some other things we learned were that there are several known thieves in this area, my step brother, kind soul that he is, claimed to know one of the asshats in question but wouldn't give him up, and once stolen it's highly unlikely that you will ever see any of your stuff again. This type of crime occurred to two other home owners that I am aware of in a very short time. The other two lived in the next county in a rural area. One of the guys has a son that my son ran around with occasionally. This particular Dad found information that that said one of his neighbor kids had done his break in. Dad trots his angry self down the road and calls the kid out and soundly thrashes him. Parent of miscreant kid appears and is understandably mad as hell. Until he hears the story of the theft. The kid gave up the information that he and a couple other young men were in good ole KC at a pool hall where a couple of Latino gang banger were. The gang bangers took this one kid outside and roughed him up, took his drivers license and told him to steal guns from his neighbors and give them to the gang or they would come to his house and kill everyone there. Is that what happened in my case? Who the fuck knows. The point here is that Thursday the police called my house and left a message for us to contact them. We did. The parties we were to speak with were not available. Friday we did make contact with the right officer and lo and behold I was told to come to the station to reclaim some of my stolen property. What I found in the box was the Ruger Single Six that was stolen from me. The best part is that is looked like it had never left my house. Other than needing a good cleaning it was damaged in no way. It's still an early model flat top Single Six without the late model conversion in a solid 95-98 percent condition. Evidently the Kansas City police had it in their possession since.....2003! It was used in a robbery, collected as evidence and has been in the evidence locker since 3 months after the gun was stolen! What I have to do know is buy it back from the insurance company. It seems the cops called the insurance company before they called me. The day I picked the gun up there was message from the insurance company saying some of my property had been reclaimed and they would like to set up a time for someone to come and collect it from me OR make arrangements to receive payment for the item. Man they're fast. They want 397 dollars for it which is what they compensated us with. Fine. I looked it up and it's now worth about 500 dollars.

M14 Stock II. E2 modified.

Today I got pictures of the M14 stock I'm working on. It now appears to be a real E2 stock that has been trimmed up and patched up a little.




Notice the M16 A1 shape to the buttstock as well as the contoured pistol grip. This is a very good feeling stock.

Just above the pistol grip you can see a vertical line and a faint horizontal line. This is where a wooden patch has been installed. The dark blob is a filler of some sort.

In this picture you can see a narrow horizontal line that delineates the front of the patch. You can also see the selector switch plug on the right. Unfortunately the existing patch appears to be something other than birch or walnut. The stock itself appears to be a light colored walnut.
I think when I'm done this will have a DuraCoat finish in a tiger stripe pattern. In my eyes, waayyy cooool. There will be more to come as I get further along.

M14. E2?

Last night I was re-reading my copy of "Bostons Gun Bible" and that got me to thinking. What I thought was, I bought a unique M14 stock at a gun show a few years ago. So I went and dug the thing out and found I had already given it a camo job. So I dug out the M1A and put it in the "new" stock. Damn it looks good! It has the appearance of an M14 E2 stock but without the bulbous buttstock. As purchased it had a thick black coating over the entire stock. Some kind of paint or something. I had smoothed it up and did a camo job over that. The stock has a nicely formed pistol grip and the butt actually resembles an A1 style M16 butt. It's all wood and has all GI metal. When I took it to the shed to start working on a clearance issue with this stock I found that it IS an issue stock as it had a filled selector switch. Then I found that it may be a Frankenstein of sorts unless the E2 stocks were pieced together. The grain of the grip runs vertical and that of the stock runs parallel. And the wood forward of the grip is different from that of the butt/grip. Any way, the previous work had left the rear portion of the upper stock too low to make contact with the back of the receiver. What I'm doing is cutting the low portion of the stock out and will epoxy in a block of birch and make it all fit right. In the end it looks like someone took an E2 stock and trimmed it up nice and neat in the butt area, contoured the pistol grip and morphed it onto the front end of a regular M14 stock. It looks and works so good I would like to try and get a fiberglass version of this made in the future. I'll get photos of the stock posted as it comes along or maybe a complete series in one posting. We'll see what comes.

See What I Mean?

As mentioned earlier, If a few students started an WA Lunch Bunch and went on a whites only field trip, how many kinds of hell would have been raised? But it's apparently OK for the AA Lunch Bunch to go on a blacks only field trip.