Really damn hot. I honestly can’t remember a summer this hot… though I’m sure I’m wrong. It just seems to be exceptionally hot.

How hot is it?

It’s been hitting around 108F – 110F at the peak, but it’s not cooling off significantly at night. When I got home from work at 8pm tonight it was still 103F. My thermostat is programmable. I have it set to start out in the morning at 75F and then, after we’ve left for work, allow the temperature to rise to 85F. It kicks back on a half hour before I get home, but lately it’s been 85 degrees in the house when I get home. Indeed, it’s been running steadily for two hours now and it’s only just hit 82 degrees in the house.

It’s been like this for nearly two weeks straight, and there’s no end in sight.

I’m ready for a break from this heat.

It’s making me cranky. I haven’t done any yard work since June…

Of course, maybe it’s just me. A year ago I worked outdoors in the field all the time. For years I worked outside all summer long. It never seemed this bad. Maybe I was acclimated then, and now I’m just not used to it anymore.

Still… Fall and winter cannot come fast enough.

See? No scarring on the heart or lungs... What? You can't see it? That's OK, I've no clue what I'm looking at either.

Liberty has been with us for a month now and is looking much improved. Her mange is disappearing, and her hair growing back in. She’s still very shy and extremely cowed, but she’s getting better. We’ve been able to go out on some field trips and have taken her out to the park and to friends homes where she’s gotten to mingle with other people and pets. It seems to be helping.

We took her in to the vet for the first of her heart worm visits two weeks ago. The vet took some chest X-Rays to check for existing scarring on the heart and lungs. There was none, so she was declared to be a good candidate for the heart worm treatment. The actual initial heart worm treatment would take place in two weeks after she’d had a pretreatment.

Heart worms carry a bacteria with them, and when you kill the heart worm the bacteria also flood the body, so the vet wanted to put her on doxycycline, an antibiotic, first as a pretreatment to kill all of the bacteria before starting her on the actual Immiticide. When she does go and get her first Immiticide treatment she’ll have to be in the hospital at least overnight so that they can monitor her for any blockages that could cause a potential heart attack, stroke, or organ damage.

She’s almost done with her antibiotic treatment, which means it’s almost time for her first heartworm treatment. We’ve so far raised just over $600 to cover the $1,600 it will cost to complete the treatment, which covered the pre-treatment and a little extra, but we’re still almost $1,000 short of paying for her total treatment. I feel bad asking for money, but that’s $1,000 we really don’t have.

And seriously... Who can say no to that look?

Any funds received in excess of the amount of her vet bills will be donated to a local animal charity or no kill shelter.

Other than that, the Vet said she only had some mild tartar and gingival pockets. A bit of cleaning and scraping will fix that right up.

Liberty has an appointment on Sunday Friday to get chest X-rays to see how far the heartworms have progressed, which will help us to figure out how aggressive the drug treatment can be. If the parasites have already invaded her heart or lungs, the treatment will have to be much slower and drawn out. As the heartworms die, their little pieces can clog arteries and cause all manner of problems from a heart attack to a stroke, even liver or organ failure if they block blood vessels supplying crucial oxygenated blood to that organ. The more invasive the infection, the slower we have to go with the treatment and the longer her hospital stays will be to monitor her for complications.

It’s not a pretty picture, but we’ve raised enough money to get started. All told we’ve raised $500 towards her vet bills. We’ve still got a long way to go, but I’ll keep ya’ll posted on her health as we find out more.

Any funds received in excess of the amount of her vet bills will be donated to a local animal charity or no kill shelter.

Walking out to my truck late at night, I heard a rustling in the bushes planted in a garden in our front yard. Emerging from the shadows walked another odd looking shadow. It was dark, and late at night, and this creature made a bee-line for me, initially giving me a fright. But I soon saw the head down/tail down posture and recognized a horribly submissive dog. She came right up to me and sat down at my feet, looking up at me with these sad, deep brown eyes. We named her Liberty.

Liberty literally came to us begging for food, water, and a safe place to sleep. This took a lot for such a timid dog. While we don’t know her history, she had been spayed at some point before she found herself on the streets. She’s very shy and cowers at the slightest touch, and yet she’s incredibly affectionate and wants nothing more than to be pet and cuddled, though it takes her a while to warm up and relax.

After taking her inside and letting her get accustomed to our other rescue dogs, Espresso and Rascal, we inspected her and found her covered with fleas and ticks, her hair falling out, and her ears infected and filthy. Her claws had not been trimmed nor worn down for some time – they were so long that her toes for forced to splay out. That couldn’t be comfortable. First step: grooming and bathtime!

I can’t recall the last time I saw water that brown. She was a very dirty girl! We also washed off and killed literally hundreds of fleas and a half dozen ticks. It took a couple of treatments of permethrin based dips to kill all the fleas, but after successive baths she was finally flea free. We took the time to trim her nails, being careful not to trim too far and nick the overgrown cuticle.

Finally, it was time to take a trip to the vet for a checkup. Everyone at the vet’s office immediately fell in love with our shy little angel. But the news was not good. Her ears were inflamed and possibly infected from the dirt and grime in them. They found tapeworm evidence in her stool, and the skin problems looked like more than just a flea allergy. It was very likely that she has demodectic mange as well.

Then came the worst news. She tested positive for heartworm. It wasn’t so long ago that heartworm was a death sentence for a canine, and my heart sank when I heard the news. The Dr. said that it wasn’t a death sentence, that there were cures, but they weren’t cheap and would take weeks, even months, before she would be cured. Costs could exceed $1,600 just for the heartworm.

My head dropped. I was prepared to spend hundreds of dollars to get our little angel healthy and happy, but we just don’t have the thousands it would take to cure heartworm. The vet told us that starting her on a heartworm preventative would reduce the lifespan of the parasitic heartworms that made their homes in the blood vessels between her heart and lungs. While that would reduce the amount of damage they would do, it would not prevent it all, and she could still suffer horrible damage to her heart and lungs. Damage that would seriously impact her health and quality of life, or possibly even kill her.

We’re determined to find a solution however. I spent the few hundred dollars we could afford for the vet services and started her on a flea treatment and heartworm prevention regime. In the meantime I put the word out to friends of ours across the internet and across the nation. We’re exploring our options right now, but time is limited. Every day and week that goes by is more damage that is being done to her heart and lungs.

Edit: OK. Too many people are asking to help, and as much as my pride says not to, I’m going to open this up for donations. I feel bad doing it, so here’s the deal: If you donate $50 or more, I will host a website for you for free for up to two years at my webhosting company. If you are in the Dallas / Fort Worth or North Texas area and donate $100 or more, my wife’s catering company will prepare and deliver a custom designed cake (serving up to 30 people) to the event of your choice.

Any funds received in excess of the amount of her vet bills will be donated to a local animal charity or no kill shelter.

This paypal account is linked to my Web hosting company account, so that’s the email you’ll see if you choose to donate.

The two songs REALLY work well together!

I took my Howa 1500, my primary hunting rifle, out of it’s case where it’s been since deer season and fired off a group of 5 shots rapid fire, beginning with a cold bore, just to see where it was at. I was not disappointed. 7″ high at 100 yards (exactly right for the 300 yards it’s zeroed for) and 1″ right from the slight breeze.

Group measured exactly 1 1/16″ (1.0625″) 0.979″ center to center. Ammunition used was Remington Core Lokt .308 Winchester 150 grain PSP. Not bad for an average rifle I paid $350 for shooting off-the-shelf hunting ammunition.

Update: I ran the image through On Target, and it looks like what I measured with a ruler as 1.0625″ is actually a 0.979″ group.

I have a couple of 4 GB thumb drives that I picked up for less than $20

The ranch is heavily populated with deer and hogs – overpopulated in my opinion. On a spread around 600 acres, we counted more than 60 individual antlerless, and one small buck. The lack of bucks seems to reflect that most of the hunters on the ranch target large bucks and ignore the does and antlerless or spikes. This doesn’t bother me so much… I’m pretty much out there to enjoy the sport and fill the freezer with fresh meat.

The public lands are another matter entirely. During general deer season, you may as well forget about it. The land is useless for deer hunting. On one lot that spans more than 26,000 acres, I’ve hiked probably 50% of it scouting and looking for ANY deer sign, and come up with bupkis. Nada. On the other hand, it’s pretty well infested with wild hog. They are EVERYWHERE – problem is, on a piece of land that big, figuring out where they are and at what time. I’ve got their habits down pretty well. Well enough to the point that I can pretty much head out at any given time, temp, and moon phase and know where they are going to be. But that scouting took a lot of time to go over the land. But the time paid off and I harvested a nice boar last week. He weighed probably 200 pounds live weight.

Which brings me to the other downside of hunting public lands. You’ve got to hike a good way in before you get to where the game is. This guy was about 1.5 miles from the nearest vehicle access (they don’t allow ATVs, and I don’t have a mule or horse), meaning I had to hump 200# of meat out by myself over rough terrain. Not fun. I’ve got a little sled setup that I assembled out of a tarp and some rope that works pretty well. It packs in light and compact, and slides over the rocks and undergrowth with (relative) ease. In it’s cinched up “haul” mode, it also wraps up around the carcass and protects it from limbs and twigs.

I’m heading back out with a buddy of mine who is new to hunting. He’s been out once before with me early in the season, but I hadn’t had time to scout the land, and there were a couple dozen other hunters out there when we went, making our attempts unsuccessful. Now that general deer season is over (and the fact that the Superbowl is on when we’re going) I expect we’ll have all 26,000 acres to ourselves. Hopefully we’ll come back with a couple of nice boars.

I’m putting pics of the boar I took on public lands and the doe behind the cut for those gentle readers to find such things disturbing.

I know, I know, Best Buy is teh eeeeevil. But they’re also cheap.

I’ve already got my copy, but for your friends who don’t have it, it’d make a nice stocking stuffer.

Major Chuck Zeigenfuss gave his right nut for Project Valour-IT (literally)… surely you can give just a little. Project Valour-IT works to provide laptops, voice recognition software, rehab technology, and other IT related items to help injured and paralyzed soldiers from all branches be able to recover and adapt to their injuries.

Click the link to donate!

The fundraiser runs through November 11th.

Let’s put this in numbers we can easily wrap our heads around.

Let’s say you are the head of your household, the sole breadwinner, and you make $45,000 a year. You also have a mortgage. It is $168,000, with a monthly payment of $1344. But, one year, you decide to take out a second mortgage. Now you owe $217,000. And your monthly payment goes up to $1736. And your income hasn’t changed (in reality, federal tax revenues are likely to fall, but let’s disregard that for the sake of argument.)

If you’re making $45,000 in take home pay, that gives you a budget of only $3750. Your large but not unaffordable monthly payment of $1344 is now almost half of your monthly budget. But that’s not all. Every year you continue to take on more and more mortgage debt. By 2014, you owe $309,269, and your monthly payment is $2,474, leaving you with only $1276 a month for electricity and grocery. See where we’re going here?

The above example is exactly what our nation is doing.

Our nation’s debt is increasing at the same rate as our hypothetical homeowner. The numbers are bigger, but the relationship is the same. The housing bubble is just foreshadowing what we are doing on a national scale. Every year we are spending more than we take in, leaving us with even MORE debt to service. By 2025, we will have to take every dime we take in as tax revenue (based on current rates) and spend it just to service debt. We will have none left over. At that point, every dime the government spends will be borrowed.

The only solution is devaluing the dollar. Oh sure, we COULD stop spending so much and start saving again… but we all know that won’t happen. We’ve got a government that is convinced that the best way out of debt is to spend more, and a citizenry urging them on hoping to get just a little more milk from the government teat. Stop spending? Please… I can hear the whining already.

We could raise taxes too… but how likely is that? And even if taxes are raised, through the implementation of a Euro-style VAT or some other similar program, if spending isn’t reduced, we’ll simply be delaying the inevitable.

So, we’ll take the only solution left: print more money. Folks, inflation is coming, and it’s coming very soon. The Fed has opened the taps and is selling bonds to anyone who will bid, but bidding has slowed almost to a crawl. Long term bonds aren’t selling at all, so we’re selling short term bonds. This is akin to living off of a credit card instead of a cash taken out of a second mortgage. It’s crazy – anyone who can balance a checkbook should know that, but it’s exactly what our government is doing.

If you don’t already, you need to start moving your money to hard assets: Real estate, gold, silver, etc. Even the Euro and Asian currency markets are safer than the US markets right now. Deflation may be the word of the day right now, but it’s just the tide going before the tsunami hits.

This about sums up how awesome this weekend is.

EDIT: Quotable quote of the night – Alan Gura: “I still don’t know what you call the shoulder thing that goes up.”

EDIT2: Photo Evidence

I’ve got a couple of rifles I need to sight in, and I need to make sure my gear is ready for an up-coming 3-gun match in October. I’m going to be running my AK-47 SAR-1 with iron sights for the 3-gun, along with my Remington 870. Nothing fancy, very old school, no optics at all. We’ll see how it goes.

Managed to miss shooting this month’s E-Postal as well (barring a deadline extension)… gonna have to make doubly sure to shoot it for September. Heading out to the range on Labor Day with the guys – I’ll take that time to fine tune the gear for the 3-gun.

In reality, this lack of range time is just the lull before the storm – got a lot of shooty goodness coming up soon.

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact, that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation—”It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”

Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

It appears that the proponents of Cash for Clunkers were not students of history nor were they philosophers familiar with the laws of unintended consequences.

The cash for clunkers program is not stimulating anything. In fact, it’s actually making things worse. The program is successful if the goal is to get inefficient vehicles off of the road. It may even be successful if the goal was to take money that the average consumer would have spent on car repairs and other necessities and instead give it all to the car companies. But as important is the fact that the program is putting thousands of consumers deeper into debt. Debt restricts freedom, and this program is horrifyingly effective at increasing the levels of personal debt for those trading in their car.

With our economy in the dire situation it is, trading in cars that run fine for new cars and a pile of debt is not the smart move, but the impact does not just affect the mechanic who is no longer paid to maintain the family sedan. As our parable shows, the money spent on monthly payments is money that the consumer is no longer able to spend on other goods and services, and it is also money that is not being put aside into savings, retirement, or other investments.

Money and transportation provide one thing very well: freedom. Without money total freedom is difficult to attain. But even without a steady income, if you have enough money for fuel and insurance, then you can hop in your car and head on down the highway to where opportunity abounds.  The freedom that the car provides quickly evaporates if the consumer is unable to make the car payment and the car is repossessed. A person laid off from their job may soon find their car repossessed, and without that car their ability to travel to work is seriously curtailed.

The majority of the people trading in their car under cash for clunkers are trading in a functional and, more importantly, paid off car for a car that puts them (deeper) in debt at time when most people should be actively reducing the amount of debt they carry. If money brings freedom, debt brings slavery.

PapaDeltaBravo says it best here:

To own a car is to reduce your personal limits and restrictions. You no longer are limited to the mere distance you can comfortably walk to seek a job or food or entertainment. A person with a car does not have to make do with what’s next door. A person with a car has hope, real hope, because as long as he has the keys and enough money in his pocket for a tank of gas, he can go anywhere else if it’s not working out here.

It is no coincidence that America is the country of the personal automobile and thus Leftists have always hated cars. They’re too wasteful, they permit too much consumption, cars allow people to escape the miserable inner-city hellholes leftists inadvertently create as they try to mold the new Soviet man.

It is human nature to seek the most gain from minimum effort, and nothing can be more minimum than having someone else do it for you. These are the people who turn to Mommy Government to solve all of their ills.

This is why so many people opt for any kind of soft slavery rather than hard freedom.

– Last Refuge of a Scoundrel – This Time the Union Can Keep the Slaves