Some of the flowers in the bouquet we brought home last weekend are still beautiful. The bouquet was prepared with a pink and purple color theme. This is a subtle pink compared to the hot pink from another flower from the same bouquet. There was also a purple rose, but it wilted a day or two ago. Click on the image to enlarge.

Our ISP lost an entire block of servers this afternoon. We were off for a little over an hour. Seems to be fine now.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

This is a reprise to the shooting session at our range last Sunday. Midweek seems like a good time to pick out a video (I take several each session) and post it here.

The videos come in handy for a couple of reasons. One purpose is to critique our form and style, another is to document anomalies and a third is to post here on our blog for our mutual amusement.

This is one of Damsel’s several runs on the bullseye target with her Warthog. We scored some ‘bargain’ .45 ammunition last weekend, so we took the big caliber pistols to the range.

She loves this little Warthog. It’s been performing quite well as of late, and so is her shooting.

Our S&W 686 guns clean up real purdy. I took this photo after cleaning up the revolver that we shot at Sunday’s practice. Clickie Biggie.

This amaryllis opened up over the weekend. I got this shot this afternoon in between doing loads of laundry and reading the blogs. Busy busy busy. Click image to enlarge.

Today’s trip to the range went very well. Although the range was fairly busy, we got right in and had our lane within minutes of arrival. We set up the first target at seven yards - a bullseye pistol target. We initially took out the S&W 686 revolver and shot about 50 rounds of .38 special to warm up.

After the target became fairly perforated with our warm up shots, we reeled it back in and patched it up with several adhesive spots and resumed with our .45 pistols - Damsel’s Warthog and my Glock 30. We fired some more rounds at the patched-up target and retired it in favor of a silhouette target.

Image - Gunography: Glock 30, Warthog and S&W 686

We brought the .45s today because we scored two hundred rounds of Remington UMC .45ACP yesterday at the sporting goods store at a bargain price. Interestingly, they had NO 9mm Luger ammo. We still have 9mm on hand in the safe, but decided to take the bigger guns this week because of the availability of the .45 ammo.

The range gun shop was also out of ANY reloaded ammo. They did have a palette with 500 round cases of .40 and 9mm for a nominal price. We would have purchased a couple cases of the 9mm, but we’re saving up for our visit to Phoenix and the 2A Blog Bash in a few weeks. We can wait for the ammo until we get back.

The session concluded with shooting the shotguns. I don’t have video to verify, but we each had a satisfying time by blowing a silhouette target in half. We shot 25 rounds each of 12 and 20 gauge.

There was one event to report in connection with today’s session. We saw several parents with their old-enough-to shoot children in the range today. We like to see the kids shooting with their parents. However, there was one youngster - about 14 or 15, who was in the range WITHOUT PROTECTIVE EYE WEAR. I spoke with the young man and asked him where his goggles were. I got a sort of a blank look from him when his parent took over with the line of questioning. The group he was with quickly rustled up a pair for him. I got hit with a fragment in my shoulder today and I shudder to think what would have happened if it had hit the kid instead. Even ejected brass can be very dangerous.

Folks, take your kids to the range - but make sure that they - and you - are using the maximum safety practices.

The server update from yesterday is complete and we’re now back to full capacity. We now have unlimited bandwidth and storage with only a very large limit on the number of objects (files, images, videos). We should have plenty of room for years to come.

So with that out of the way, here’s one of the flower pictures that Damsel took this morning. This is a mum in a bouquet that she got on Friday. The light is indirect mid-morning sunshine from the staircase window above. Click the image for full-sized.

We’re currently backing up the website files and database. When that is concluded, we’re going to be off line for a while while our Internet Services Provider (ISP) moves us to a bigger and faster server. Hang in there if things aren’t working since there will be an IP address change that will result in the Domain Name Servers having to re-associate the IP with the URL. We might be gone for several hours while that is happening.

We have gone to Catalina Island many times over the last ten or eleven years and just last year, we looked up and saw a bald eagle in flight high over Avalon. That was in September of 2008. Prior to that, the eagles were few and far between on the island, but these days they are making a comeback.

I was just thrilled today when I found a link on the Daily Breeze that took me to a live web camera of a nest of Bald Eagles. I watched for a very long time and could see one of the parents in the nest and could see the wobbly eaglets bobbing around - they were so CUTE!

Go here and watch them in the nest - disclaimer - daylight hours in California are currently from about 6:30 AM to 7:30 PM PDT (13:30 to 02:30 GMT).

Google Earth

The actual location of the Four Corners Monument is off a bit, but not by the 2.5 miles reported by the Associated Press and a Salt Lake City newspaper.

However, legally (and symbolically), the Four Corners Monument is, indeed, on the spot where the borders intersect, since the Supreme Court of the United States decreed it to be so in 1925. Political boundaries are, after all, at the behest of politicians and judges.

Google Maps

However, the actual intersection of the defined longitude and latitude may be as far away from the monument as six hundred meters.

I found the Four Corners monument using both Google Earth and Google Maps. Even between the two Google sources, they disagree. They both show a segment of border that runs slightly west from the monument. I could find no reference to the anomalous segment.

I checked several other on-line map sources and no two agree. Some show the anomalous border segment and some do not.

The Arizona Geology Blog has a brief post about the confusion.

Wikipedia has already picked up on the cause of the erroneous report:

The Four Corners Area is generally defined as a circle around the Four Corners Monument located at 36° 59″ 56.31532′ N by 109° 02″ 42.62019′ W. A series of news stories from April of 2009 indicated that more recent surveys had determined that the intersection of the corners was not where it was intended to be.

However, the news stories used whole degree co-ordinates, not accounting for the fractional degree offset between the Washington Meridian, standard used at the time, and the current standard, the Prime Meridian. In addition, general U.S. land principles, law, and the Supreme Court have determined that the location of the monument is the legal corner of the four States.

Click on either image to enlarge.

This picture shows Damsel standing on the Four Corners Monument the last time we were there.

Otherwise known as “Orchid Cactus,” this epiphyllum flower is of the “Frühlingsgold” (Spring gold) variety. Light yellow inner petals and darker yellow outer petals that started out red. There will be several more on this plant before spring ends. We hope to have some red and white epiphyllum flowers later this spring.

Click on the image to enlarge.

I don’t think I’ve ever had both of our Remington 870 shotguns apart at the same time. Something made me field strip all of the guns after Sunday’s trip the the range.

Damsel’s 20 gauge ‘youth model’ is on the left and my full-sized magnum express 12 gauge is on the right. The barrels are more or less centered between the two.

Scattered along the table, you can see the stock, receiver and magazine assemblies, magazine springs, spring caps, spring stops, magazine caps, trigger assemblies and retention pins for the trigger assembly. The only further field breakdown is to remove the choke tubes from the barrels - which Damsel did when she cleaned the barrels.

If you saw yesterday’s post about the range report and watched the video, then you saw how much we enjoy using the shotguns at the range. Maintenance, cleaning and inspection are all part of the fun of shotguns.