Tag: shooting

A Good Friday

I have a very full day tomorrow. However, it is all stuff that is really good for me, in some way or other, and can produce very positive results. I have the workout at the gym at 7:30am – boy, do I want to sleep in instead(!), especially looking at what the workout is. Then shower and change at home to be ready at the gun range at 11am, so I can test out shooting a bunch of 9mm pistols (that TERRify me, mind you) and see if there is one we can find that doesn’t make me ball upon use. Then I’m rushing to a birthday party, where I’m hoping to be in time to take a professional level photo with my man (while he’s on his way to another rodeo shift, which is where he already is right now until 1am…), and then enjoy hanging out and meeting the other people at the party for this meet friend of mine. Then I’m going to the rodeo 1)to check up on my man and see if he needs or wants anything special for his shift, and also 2)to deliver and gift some hats to some of the police officers who work with us all at the rodeo and who make all the difference.*

Then, I guess, I can go home.

However, our committee has a club crawl happening from mid-afternoon into the evening and night…, so I might attend that or just part of that, after I deliver the hats, of course.

Then I can go home.

Now, a couple comments about today. 1)A security guy asked me how I was doing, when he was checking my bag at the rodeo. I answered that I was okay and ‘kinda hot and [something I can’t recall right now; ugh!]’. He, quite casually and calmly replied, ‘Well, that makes sense – I do believe you are rather attractive.’ Not even joking. I laughed, and told him it was a very good response, and I thanked him, too, I believe, before I walked away.

Now, I must sleep. Goodnight.

*I was talking with a couple of said officers today. The women, I noticed, had two sets of handcuffs on the back of her belt. The man, I then checked, only had one set of cuffs. What gives? So, I asked them why she had two and he only had one. Their response? A short pause, and then, “She works in the courts, and I work with corpses.”

I kid you not – he said that. And he meant it, too. Apparently, he does crime scenes for the main part of his job. And she said that, in her role, she genuinely uses handcuffs every day, and, even, multiple times a day.

Can you even imagine?(?????)(!!)

Post-a-day 2023

Sunday, Fun Day!

A new girlfriend of mine invited me to come watch a live pigeon shoot today. I went, and it was really cool and I wasn’t scared almost at all, though there were shot guns out the wazoo. Also, real pigeons were being thrown into the air and nailed with shot gun shot constantly. Though, plenty of them got away unscathed (for the most part). It was like nothing I’d ever seen. And, though it was killing a bunch of creatures for sport, I, somehow, didn’t really mind it. I was most bothered by the fact that they pull out the tail feathers when they take them out of the boxes, then by the fact that they then catapult them into the air with a discus throw and then shoot at the birds. As my girlfriend said, in a way, they are doing a service to nature. Pigeons reproduce and overpopulate quite easily, causing infestation problems in different areas. Those areas have groups come in to deal with the infestation. Those groups capture them live, instead of poisoning them all, and then sell the birds to pigeon shoot venues. It’s still kind of nuts, but pigeons very much are rats of the air, so I understand what my girlfriend meant about its being a public service.

This friend is great at shooting live birds, and I had a blast finally getting to see her shoot. She didn’t have a great day in terms of her usual, but it was still really good, and I was properly impressed, nonetheless!

After she finished shooting, she had me try out shooting some pigeons (clay for me, not the real thing!) with a couple shot guns, and I actually managed to hit a handful of those! That was especially fun to do, though I definitely had the initial terror of how loud the bang would be and how much the gun would kick. After the first couple shots, though, I was ready for it all and actually enjoyed it, though it still took a lot out of me emotionally and physically.

Later, she and their gunsmith had me try shooting a few pistols they had there that people often use for concealed carry. I cried after the first shot of the 9mm, but then was clear and good to go for all the rest – no more tears! And I did hit the small plate target on most of my shots! I only missed them for the Hellcat, which felt really weird to shoot and which I did not like. But I got the target even with that one after a few rounds.

One really positive part of shooting the pistols was that I got to see the importance of keeping a gun clean – trouble chambering the bullets and clearing the casings – and the value of high-quality magazines. If the gun is great and the magazine is cheap, the gun is cheap, possibly worthless. We could only load one billet at a time with a certain gun, because the magazine was so cheap it wouldn’t work beyond chambering a single bullet, at which point it promptly fell out of the gun and spilled bullets and parts all over the ground. That was silly and nuts.

So, I got to experience a new shotgun and how still it can be to open and close, compared to a well-used shotgun of s out the same size, easily snapping closed and open. I got to see magazines go wrong. I got to see bullets struggling to chamber. I got to see cases struggling to eject…

Oh(!), and I got to see my man fly over several times in a airplane. That was extra awesome. Just saying. ;P

Post-a-day 2023

Horses and Shooting

Today, I watched some mounted shooting.  At this rodeo, anyway, mounted shooting means that an individual rides his or her horse across the arena, following a sort of zig-zagged pattern, and then back in a straight line, all while shooting, in a specific order, ten balloons that are placed around the arena.  The average speed for doing this was 12-14 seconds.  I’m not sure I could even have sprinted from one end of the arena to the other in that time, or even made all ten shots successfully while standing still in that time, and these people were riding all around it and back, knocking out balloons with their pistols along the way.  Somehow, things like this make perfect sense to me, and I love watching them.  It made me, even more than ever, want to ride horses every week in my life.

Though, I’m more of a Robinhood type, and so I would want to do mounted bow-and-arrow shooting, myself.

Post-a-day 2018