Happy remaining Independence Day

Wow... no posts since May? I'm slipping. Or not slipping, and just heinously busy.

I can confirm it's the latter, actually. I'm in holding pattern; next week starts a different schedule for me, because I've elected to take myself down to one afternoon a week at the gun shop, and that only to keep "updated" and to give the top brass a night when they can both go home early.

What happened? Job #1 increased in activity and difficulty by a couple factors of ten. And, I'm enjoying it... I'm always up for a challenge. But there were so many days when I was busy enough to not get out until 6, and then a mad rush to the gun shop to work all of 2 hours, and the extra activity meant that when I got home I was so wired I couldn't sleep... weeks where there was at most 15 hours of sleep total, it started affecting my health, as well as driving me back into nicotine for a short while (hence stopped again, I thank the power above that I don't have strong withdrawal symptoms and only get the urge to smoke when I'm severely sleep deprived).

Result? Save for those Mondays, I'll have at least a couple free hours to myself at home daily, and they won't be wasted... I have a clipboard (soon to be an excel file) full of the kind of little home projects that leave you satisfied after an hour's work. Prime example: after a short hunt, I came home with some plastic garden hose shutoff valves yesterday. They were for the tanks on my dehumidifiers, which have always been right bastards to empty without spilling water everywhere. A little time with a 1/2" drill to the molded-in "sprue" on the tanks (they cast in a threaded hose blank, and left the ends closed), tighten the valve on, viola... instead of walking over to the sump pit and turning the tank over to dump, getting water everywhere and upping the humidity in the garage, I can neatly walk the full tank upstairs, park it next to the kitchen sink, flip a valve and walk off to do something else. PERFECT afternoon project, and I've got at least 30 of those marked down.

Firearm acquisition will suffer, unfortunately. That's ok, I have plenty, and still need to work on several of them (re: 3 complete AK kits with full complements of parts for 922r compliance are sitting jumbled in a plastic bin waiting for me, as well as a perfectly good .45 1911 slide assembly that needs a frame parked under it, sighting in the .444, degreasing some of the war horses, etc.) I'll save some money though, with time means I can cook again, though it'll likely be a wash. I may have enough time to me to sit down and draw out some ideas I've had, the ones I haven't been busy blabbing all over thefirearmblog.blogspot.com.

I'm probably going to re-assume my old schedule when the holidays roll around... by then the primary job will have settled a bit, and I should be well rested and recovered and ready to bust my hump again.

I just have to remember to not feel lazy because I've decided to not work a 60+ hour week for the first time in half a decade, you know?