Out in the Woods

Almost shot myself in the foot today. Went up in the Coast Range today with Jack. He wanted to see if he could hit anything with his new rifle. I went along for the show and to do some plinking with an automatic. I'd shot up a box of shells and I got to wondering if I could hit anything with my left hand. Never tried it before, had never occurred to me to try it when I actually had a gun on hand. So I did. It's a little difficult. I was able to hit a three inch rock at about 20 paces with my second shot. Then I lowered the gun to bask in my glory, and bang! The durn thing went off. Forgot one of the four rules of safe gun handling: don't put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot. Never had this problem before because my usual modus operandi is to blast away until I'm empty, and being as this was an automatic and not a revolver, it was all cocked and ready to fire when I lowered it. Lucky I didn't perforate myself.

So now I'm thinking about this business of safe gun handling, and not putting your finger on the trigger, and it's not that easy. Pick up the gun and my index finger goes right to the trigger. Not putting my finger on the trigger requires some deliberate hand contortions. For my right hand, I found there is a nub from the pivot for the slide lock that sticks out just above the trigger guard. Putting my finger on it lets me know that it's not on the trigger. For my left hand there is the end of the slide lock itself, not as prominent as the nub, but it's something. We'll see how well this lesson sticks.

Hitting that rock was the high point of my left handed shooting. I emptied the rest of the clip at a foot square target about 30 feet away and only managed to hit it twice. I am much better with my right hand.

Jack's scope mount wasn't quite straight. He inserted a copper shim under the left side of the front scope mounting clamp and that brought it around. Next time we will try for a longer distance.

Jack's target was marked off in one inch squares. A note on the bottom of the target claimed that these squares corresponded to one minute of arc at 100 yards. I just checked, and it does. 1.0047 inches, to be precise. Using the metric system, one minute of arc at a distance of 100 meters comes out to 29 millimeters, a nice round number if there ever wasn't. Another Victory for English measurements!

On our way to out of town we saw a tow plane towing a glider.

Somebody's chewing up old railroad cars near Timber. Can't imagine why they are doing this way out in the middle of nowhere. Why not just roll the old cars directly to the scrapyard? Hiring a locomotive to move them costs too much? No locos available?