Another Sure Sign Of Spring

     This morning, I made myself a nice cup of steaming-hot coffee -- cream, sugar, one teaspoon of each -- stirred it and three ants floated to the top, all deader than a nail or a pop star past his prime.  (Now that's good coffee!)

     Checking, yes, the Sugar In The Raw, with its handy (but hardly hermetic) metal pour spout, was thoroughly infested with tiny ants.

     The coffee area next to the stove is a new place for them to show up; in previous years, they have preferred the sink and microwave side of the long, narrow kitchen here at Roseholme Cottage.  But I shouldn't have been surprised; after all, sugar, ants.

     I have backup sugar, because of course I do; usually there's a box of sugar and a jar of coffee creamer warming up on the sidelines.  It just so happens that I hadn't picked up the next box of sugar yet but I always have a box of 10X confectioner's sugar in the cupboard and usually one of brown sugar, too.  That's just how it's done.  (Thanks, Mom!)  I went with the confectioner's for this morning.

     Time to rig the kitchen for summer.  It's a good excuse to go through it and straighten things up.

Cauliflower Rice?

     "Cauliflower rice," consisting of that brassica chopped fine, turns out to be something I should only consume in moderation.

     Made a big wokful of "fried rice" using the substitute last night: steak tips, mushrooms, carrot, onion and celery with a nice sesame-ginger sauce.

     I like rice.  A big old steaming bowl of rice with some veggies and meat in it is one of my favorite ways to make a meal, anything from Thai-spiced tuna and steamed soybeans over microwave brown rice* to good old Sino-American fried rice to Hoppin' John.  So when big packages of "cauliflower rice" started showing up in the produce section at the grocery, I knew it was only a matter of time until I was going to try it.  After all,  Tam's avoiding carbs, I like rice dishes, what's not to love?

     The next day's effects, is what.  Oh, nothing dire; but I had a plate and a half of the stuff and that translates into a lot of walks down the hall to the porcelain office.  It tends to get in the way of accomplishing one's work.

     I'll stick to real rice in the future, thank you all the same.
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* This is a fancy-looking one-bowl meal you can make with some deli "edamame salad" or microwaveable shucked green soybeans, Bumblebee or Starkist spiced tuna in tiny cans, and one of those little nukable plastic rice cups.  Set the skinny red pepper to one side unless you like it hot.

Oh, NRA Board...

     So, the NRA Board elected a new President.  You might expect they would choose a real Boy or Girl Scout type, squeaky clean and inoffensive; after all, the group's many opponents would start digging just as soon as the name came out. 

     At that level, the likely candidates are going to be civically and politically active; that's normal.  NRA's Board runs to conservative people, and that's normal, too.  We just had Oliver North as President and....  His was not an untarnished reputation.

     With the ongoing issues with Ackerman McQueen and the investigation launched by the hostile New York Attorney General Letitia James, you'd expect the Board to proceed with caution.  Indeed, new NRA President Carolyn Meadows is active in her state's Republican Party and on the board of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC.  Unfortunately, as Media Matters gleefully points out, she's also the chairperson of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association -- yes, the great, big nationally-divisive carving of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis on the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia.

     I am not interested in refighting the Late Civil Unpleasantness Between The States on my blog.  It ended a long time ago and as a nation, we have been coping with the aftermath ever since.  Part of that aftermath is that people have heated, divergent -- and often unrealistic -- opinions about it.  Northerner, Southerner, conservative, liberal, no matter where you are on those lines (and many others), there are plenty of people who disagree with your fool notions and will yell at you about it all day long.  It's a third rail and the NRA Board has apparently decided to bite down on it.

     Oh, it may not matter; they could have elected a saintly aesthete with no political ties and an entirely bland personal history, and Mother Jones and The Trace would still run multi-part articles about that person kicking dogs, jaywalking and buying caviar from a babushka with a suspicious accent.  Still, is this they best they could come up with?

     Man, they'd better get shut of Ack-Mac and set their finances in order in a genuine New York minute, and perhaps President Meadows, retired from a fiscally-responsible position with the Lockheed-Martin employee store, is just the woman for the job.  I sure hope so.

NRAAM 2019: Impressions And Afterthoughts

     "It's all over but the shouting," is just about literally true of the 2019 NRAAM: there's a Board meeting today, which will likely include some serious discussion of finances, NRA's relationship with their long-term PR firm and the ongoing State of New York fishing expedition investigation into the organization.  Oliver North's departure is a symptom, not a cause; the name to watch for is the PR firm, Ackerman McQueen.  Information from the Board meeting will likely be slow-developing, but it's the real news of the NRAAM.

     The exhibit hall was briskly busy Sunday and the only protestors reported outside yesterday were protesting, of all things, circumcision. Maybe they had confused NRA and AMA?  Whatever, several friends and friends-of-friends reported run-ins with them.

     Inside, several technical developments caught my eye:

• An affordable (under $1000), electric, automated AR-15 magazine loader, literally rounds into a hopper, magazine seated at the bottom, push the button and step back!  

•  A fully (and I do mean fully) configurable, mostly-aluminum Glock clone: grip, frontstrap, backstrap, magazine well, dustcover and slide all changeable, with the "serialized part" a little sliver of frame -- and you can buy the whole kit.  Zro Delta makes it.

•  A semi-auto handgun with a whole new take on toggle-locking.  Tam's looking into that.  Bore axis is low and the barrel doesn't move much as it cycles, both of which may do very good things to felt recoil.

• Trijicon's SRO red dot sight is exceptionally nice in person.  I became a fan of red dot optics about five shots after getting the inexpensive and fairly early red dot on my Ruger Mk. III .22 pistol sighted in: they work, and with my middle-aged eyesight they work far better than iron sights.  The SRO's big ring is more "sight-like" than the long tube on my Ruger and should the three-year battery life run out on you, you're still okay: at most practical handgun distances, if it's in the ring, you will be able to hit it.  (If not, more range time might be a good idea.)

     I have photos of a few things but I've got an appointment this morning and there's not time to post them.  Maybe tomorrow -- and perhaps by then, we'll be starting to find out what went on at the Board meeting.

Downtown Patachou!

      Patachou On The Park, within spitting distance of our State Capitol building — not that you should.  Endless coffee and wonderful food!

The Last Camel Died At Noon

     ...But the press room wi-fi seems to have lived on.  I have multiple photos to edit and post and have seen amazing things and met amazing people.  Lunch next, I think.

     No actual camels were harmed during this event.

NRA 2019, At Last

     Ollie North is out and I’m in....  In the press room.  I made a beeline for the coffee, Tam made a beeline for the show floor (wrong, food court: no breakfast today) and I am headed to the big hall next.

     May liveblog if I can — the press room shuts down early.  I don’t know if they’re taking their wi-fi when they lock the door.

Annnd I'm Sick

     No hamfest or NRA today.  Scooter battery?  Maybe.  If the room stops spinning.

Idiots, Misinformation

     IMPD or reporter error?  Either way, a local media outlet is misstating Indiana firearms carry laws:

     "Individuals must have an Indiana license to carry a handgun in public."

     Nope!  Indiana recognizes your carry permit from anywhere.  Any state, any country: if they trust you to carry, the government of Indiana trusts you to carry.

NRA, Reaching Out

     Seems some of the demographic outreach of Gun Culture 2.0 is even registering with the mainstream media!

     Of course, the article also mentions the possibility of "hundreds" of protesters on Hudnut Plaza across the street from the convention center (oooh, clowns for the kids!).  That's against the 87,000-plus attendees at the 2018 NRAAM, or 75,000-plus when NRA was last in Indy in 2014.  It's the United States, after all, and there's plenty of room for everyone to make their opinions known -- even if those opinions are risible.

     Today is a work day for me and I am hoping to dodge the road closures associated with Executive Branch visits.  It should all be well south of the Skunkworks where I toil.  --Should be.  I don't know how far north they have welded the manhole covers* and occupied the rooftops, and I don't suppose I want to know.
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* Embarrassingly, our local power company's transformer pits occasionally blow their tops, sending manhole covers skywards.  What happens if the cover's been welded down?  I don't want to know that, either, and neither do they.

Working Press! Comin' Through!

     Tam and I headed downtown about 1:30 p.m. to pick up our press credentials.  We just got in under the wire at one of the nearby parking garages -- $10 for the first hour, though the rates ramp down significantly after that.  The garage was under renovation, with a couple of floors propped up by a dense and unnerving grid of scaffolding and girders.

     NRA's press room is in the same place as last time they were in town, off the north side of northernmost hallway, about three-quarters of the way west from the entrance.  They've got good wi-fi but alas, the iPad Mini isn't signed into my blog.

     So here's what I wrote:
     Here we are, in the exciting (and well-provisioned) Press room for NRA 2019!  Even though the exhibitor hall is not open until Friday (some booths are still frantically setting up), there are already a lot of people in the Convention Center; the NRA Store is up and running (and looked to be doing a brisk business), as are the food concessions.  Tam wants to keep moving, so off we go; next stop, the camera store.

 *  *  *

     As it turned out, the people in the camera store were anticipating seeing plenty of "NRA people" over the weekend.  The event is definitely photographer-heavy, so that's hardly a surprise.

Heard About The Buggy Windows Update?

     I heard about Microsoft fouling up people's Win10 machines with the most recent update, but thought I'd dodged that bullet.

     Guess not.  Firefox (another source of bugginess but I'm fond of it) started getting weird last night and this morning, it was far worse.  Well, okay, thinks I, Edge will work--

     Edge wasn't much better.  Looking at local TV station sites for a short article on the foolishness of fretting over "an influx of people carrying guns" in a county with one of the highest proportion of firearms carry permit holders in the entire United States, Edge started to flake out badly.

     Malwarebytes just finished scanning and gives the machine a clean bill of health; I did a restart and it seems to be hung up.

     So I'm writing this on my "toy computer," a Raspberry Pi running Raspberian, their Linux variant.  Chromium (essentially a port of Google's snoopy Chrome browser) comes with the operating system and works perfectly well.

     What is it the high speed/low drag types say, "One is none and two is one?"  Yeah.  "Have a backup" applies in plenty of situations.

     And that Windows desktop is still trying to restart.  It may be time to push the developer switch.