...waddling like a penguin

Those young guys outsmarted me.

"Come out and help us cut wood" they said.

So I did.

And I got the rear-wheel-drive Silverado stuck. The temperature has been staggering around the freezing mark like a drunk supported by a lamp-post. The ground is greasy.

The kids, who all have four-wheel-drives laughed at me. "You need to put a little bit of weight in the back-end of that thing so those tires bite into the ground."

The ballast that was most available was firewood, so the "kids" filled the box of the Silverado with firewood. It was mounded to the point that I had to put the chainsaw in the cab.

I guess they showed me that rear-wheel-drive is worthless!

The two kids let me help this time. Three hours, same amount of wood + the back of my truck. We would have been faster except we only had one working chainsaw (it happens) and the hydraulic wood splitter had not been taken into the woods. So it was a wash. One more guy helping (me) but less functioning equipment.

The pieces of firewood ran between 15 and 40 pounds, for the most part.

Then it took a half hour to get back to pavement due to the greasy conditions. The fifth-wheel trailer slid sideways into a ditch and it took some creative engineering to un-stuck it.

Then I took five minutes to throw a few rounds down-range. I had been asked to check out a Savage .308 Win that had been neglected and had a rusty barrel.

Shooting off of frozen sand-bags and in a hurry, I got a five shot group that was 2.5" high by 1.7" side-to-side. In retrospect, the swivel attachment on the forearm was probably camming the barrel upward under recoil. Bad technique on my part.

I am going to tell the owner that the firearm is fine. The rust is on the outside of the barrel and the .308 is plenty good-enough for the distances we shoot in Michigan.

And now, for some reason, I am tired and I am waddling like a penguin.