Sorry y'all, life has been abnormal lately and in that, I didn't make time to post. The van has been in the shop for a few issues with the brakes. Glad we got the extended warranty cause the factory warranty just went out two thousand miles ago. Oh the things we tolerate as consumers. Three thousand dollars in major safety repairs just a few years out of the factory.
Anyways. We were at the inlaws for a few days waiting it out and gave up when they said for the third time that it'd be "a few more days."
Came home to nothing new. I missed a couple of rain storms, but that's all. Everything's doing great.
Corn seed ready for the freezer
I looked up if it's safe to store corn seeds in the freezer, and found the it's actually good for them. Who knew?! A podcast that I listen to has a monthly episode about seed saving, and they recommend cool, dark, and dry conditions for their seeds. They say that they keep theirs in the freezer, but I was weirded out by that. After looking it up, others recommend it as well, so that's where they went. That small jar full of seed now lives in the freezer til spring.
Datura pods opening up
The datura pods I harvested have all opened up. Isn't that a cool thing to see? Datura in small doses induces deep sleep and lucid dreaming. In moderate doses it induces delirium and hallucinations. In too high of a dose, it can be toxic and deadly. Like anything, the poison's in the dosage. I'm not working with datura yet, but when I do, it'll be from a place of caution and respect.
Cops across the street
They're tearing up our road again. Our city got some big shot grant money so they're tearing up perfectly good roads while the shitty ones just get worse. Ain't bureaucracy grand? So they've got Lanes closed down and a cop outside enforcing it. Because having enormous machines with bright flashing lights isn't enough. You need a copy there to offset the cost.
Of course, I had to go have a beer on the tailgate to watch, and it was a great day to do so with my rifle and armor. 👍 I don't know if she noticed me, but before my delicious fine pilsner she was checking out the house a lot. Lesson learned for Nate: increase the situational awareness. Her situational awareness was good at the start, but only fifteen minutes later, she was comfortable and complacent. Things to learn from a lot of people in a lot of situations.
A new project
Speaking of guns! I started my first gun print today. It'll be done tomorrow. I'm making a Glock 19 frame, a compact semiautomatic 9mm pistol. Pretty excited about that. It's in a type of material called PLA+, which isn't optimal for fun prints, but it'll do. Plenty of folks have thousands of rounds through their own PLA Glocks. Eventually, when I've got more print experience, I'll go with a zytel frame material, but I'm not there yet. That's a picky material, and I don't have experience to know how to run it optimally.
This won't be my truck gun: PLA doesn't handle that kind of heat well. It'll be a practice print mostly, and if it turns out awesome, it'll probably be Melissa's gun. They take about $200-400 in parts after the frame is built, but that will get you a gun that'd retail for $500-1200, so it's a significant price savings.
It's cool looking at all the guns I can make with this thing. They're all legal in the capacity that I'll be working. In the US it's legal to make guns at home so long as the serialized bit (usually the receiver) isn't ever transferred or sold. I'd need an expensive manufacturer's license for that to avoid breaking federal law. Being someone's pretty little jail wife isn't anywhere on Nate's list of things to do in his life.
But with this new tool, I can learn a lot about guns. How they work, how they're designed, and of course how to make them. I'm gonna be the gun but I've always wanted to be 🤣 I expect my personal collection of guns is going to grow a lot soon and I'm pretty excited with that. There's guns available that I've never heard of, and they're really cool and relatively inexpensive to make too.
I'll try for a garden update tomorrow. There's a new project I'm finally getting to work on (what else is new?) and it'll be fun to share. If I get it done.
Love from Texas
Nate 💚