While my wife attended the morning funeral of a family friend, the younger spawn and I camped out for a while at our favorite gun shop. We chewed the fat with the manager, as usual, talking guns and politics and weather and whatever else crossed our minds.
I'd brought my range bag along, fully intending to log some trigger time at the shop's indoor setup, but I was enjoying the conversation so thoroughly that I never got 'round to it.
Mrs. KintlaLake joined us there after lunch. We spent a few more hours in the cozy confines, long enough for the independent garage next door to silence an undercarriage rattle on our Yukon XL. My wife, who practically grew up at the gun shop, even pitched-in to help with sales, advising a female customer about concealed-carry options.
I, of course, commemorated our visit by buying a knife.The Benchmade #10115 Salmon Creek Folding Fillet is part of the maker's "Red Class," a line of inexpensive (and mostly imported) knives discontinued after 2009. Its "Sliding Tail-Lock with Blade Guard" is one of the oddest mechanisms I know of.
I don't even fish, but I got to thinking that it might make a good light-duty knife around an outdoor kitchen. When the gun-shop manager offered it to me at half-price, I made it mine.
On our way out of town, we made our traditional stop for Morgantown comfort food before heading north and west toward home. The setting sun was blinding, the mood was peaceful and our day, all told, was damned near perfect.
Ravelings
There's a handful of subjects that I'd like to raise on KintlaLake Blog but I probably won't have the time, at least not enough time to cover them in any depth. Take the tug-of-war between public-employee unions and state government, a struggle that's become especially bitter here in Ohio.For now, a bottle of Labor's Choice Whiskey -- the image clipped from an ad in a 1903 issue of The American Federationist, edited at the time by American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers -- will have to do. Infer from that what you will.
And then there's Libya. In principle, the U.S. has no good strategic reason to be involved with the popular uprising -- we have no compelling national-security interest whatsoever -- but we can't seem to quit our role as the world's cop.
We're defending a mob, an anti-government mob. It's a brave rabble, certainly, but beyond that we don't know who they are or what the they might want when the smoke clears.
The Obama administration, after weeks of dithering and delaying and chatting it up with everyone across the globe except the People, now has us firing missiles and risking American lives -- all without being able to say just what we plan to accomplish.
Screw the U.N. and screw NATO; screw War Powers and screw Dennis Kucinich. We have no military, economic or moral dog in this fight. It is, without a doubt, one of the biggest foreign-policy Charlie Foxtrots I've ever seen.
The President of the United States will address the nation on Monday -- nine days after our missiles started flying.
Behind in my reading
The December 2010 issue of American Rifleman included an article that preceded a couple of my posts (here and here) about teaching marksmanship in Scouting. As its title suggests, "NRA & BSA: 100 Years of Partnership" marks the centennial of the National Rifle Association's involvement in Boy Scout shooting programs. It's typically self-congratulatory but worth reading anyway.
