Always chamber check

We were watching TV the other night and saw this State Farm commercial.



The commercial wasn't even over before Shorter Half emphatically stated, "And THAT'S why you always chamber check your pistol!"

Guilt

I got up this morning and went to check on the results of the overnight storm. It looked like I’d been stood up. Maybe a half inch of fluff on top of a quarter inch of icy slush. This wasn’t a bad thing, as I’d left my snow boots in the car. I shoveled off the steps, retrieved my boots, and contemplated the fact that I’d forgotten to pick up bird seed yesterday. I had a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a Blue Jay, two Cardinals and a Cedar Waxwing looking pointedly back-and-forth from the empty bird feeding to me. I’ve got thistle seed coming out of my ears (no finches this year, for some reason), but I only had a little songbird mix left. I pried off the frozen roof of the feeder and dumped the last of the birdseed in. And I felt bad because I was sure they were counting on me.

This is all rather ironic considering I have little bit of a phobia of things that flutter.* Flapping wings whether they’re birds, bats, or butterflies instantly puts me in fight-or-flight mode. It’s a challenge not teaching this response to Sweet Daughter, but I try. So I feed the birds because it seems like the right thing to do, and I do like watching them from the other side of the glass, and for some bizarre reason, we don’t have a squirrel problem. It could be that the starling and crow problem we have (greedy buggers) keeps the squirrels away, but whatever.

Then I went inside to fix breakfast. Sweet Daughter requested waffles, and since the guilt quotient wasn’t high enough for the morning, I made these. From the 1961 Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook, I bring you:

Richer Waffles

3 eggs
1 ½ cups buttermilk or soured milk
1 teaspoon soda
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup soft shortening (fresh bacon fat is good)

Heat waffle iron while mixing batter. Beat eggs well. Beat in remaining ingredients with a rotary beater until smooth. Cook according to whatever works best for your iron, but I find I don't have to grease the iron first with this batter. (Ya THINK?)

Perfect fuel for shoveling out the driveway. Especially when the weather wienies are calling for another couple of inches of white stuff and 30 – 40 mph winds. Sorry, birds. Maybe I'll toss the leftovers your way.

*While looking here for whatever “flutterphobia” is called, I found this.

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia - Fear of long words.

That's just mean.

Son of the Snowpocalypse: The Return of Snowmageddon

So, our first snowfall of the season occurred at the end of Autumn. We got about 18” or so and the weather gods were kind enough to dump it on the weekend. It was novel. It was fun. We still had enough snow at Christmas to build a snowman. It was perfect.

Sweet Daugher and "Mr. Shivers". Yes, that's a belly-button.

Then, the last weekend in January, another little storm swept through. Probably about 7” when all was said and done, it was light and fluffy, and shoveled easily. The roads were passable by the next day, and our road had so much salt on it, it looked like the rim of a margarita glass. The novelty had not yet worn off

Then, a mere seven days later, it hit again. Snow. Then a layer of sleet. Then another layer of snow. We got a good solid 18” – 20” layer of winter, depending on where you measured. That, to put it mildly, was a bitch to shovel. Roads took longer to plow (due, no doubt to all the downed trees), and there was a dearth of salt and sand.







Now, a mere three days later, it’s sleeting. It’s supposed to switch to snow, and snow all day tomorrow. It’s not a weekend and I’m not amused. I got enough snow when I lived in Minnesota (13 years, and 2 weeks) to last me the rest of my life.

The bright spots? Sweet Daughter LOVES playing in the snow, and we have an awesome neighbor with a tractor and a blade who scrapes the end of our driveway for us. And I can think of worse things than spending a day at home with SD. I’m actually looking forward to it.

So THAT's what you call it.

In an effort to not be a total sloth, I try to have some sort of project going on while watching TV. The Great Coat project took place in front of the boob tube and kept me warmer than a Snugli while I was at it. I’m currently trying to knock some knitting projects out of the queue.


Now keep in mind I don’t consider myself a “knitter”, but rather a reenactor who knits. My personal stereotype of a knitter involves projects made out of colorful esoteric fibers, “Celtic Women” playing on the MP3, and cats raptly watching the needles as they dance together, tip-to-tip. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not my thing.  95% of anything I’ve ever knit has been an 18th century design, in colors found in nature, from 100% wool. The cool thing about knitting these small projects (mittens, caps and the like) is that I found I can sit here with the laptop, cruising my favorite blogs, all the while knitting in the round. Shorter Half calls it “interknitting”.

I’m enjoying this way too much.

I’m enjoying this on so many different levels. First, as someone that sews way too much 18th century clothing, the costumes didn’t make me want to poke myself in the eye with a hot soldering iron. This is a good thing. As a reenactor, I love the whole concept of this piece. As a descendent of one of the Signers, I’m glad to see their message presented memorably. As someone who had a stint as a “nightclub” DJ in the 1980s and remembers when MTV played music and not reality TV, I love how this evolves. As someone who loves the movie “Last of the Mohicans”, I loved the scene with violin on the promontory. And as someone who has read bit about Franklin, I could SO see him shredding the guitar were he alive today. As Shorter Half put it, “He did not live life by halves. If he was going to have the circus, he would have all the clowns there.”

Without further ado, I bring you:


Lyrics

Halfway across the globe
And we're standing on new ground
Screaming 'cross the waves
You can't hear a sound
There's no fair trials, no trade, no liberties
No tea
We've colonized America; we won't stand for tyranny,
Oh king

And it's too late to apologize
It's too late
I said it's too late to apologize
It's too late

We've paid your foolish tax, read the acts
And they just won't do
We want to make it clear, we believe this much is true
All men were created with certain
Unalienable rights
Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
Of happiness

And it's too late to apologize
It's too late
I said It's too late to apologize
It's too late

It's too late to apologize
It's too late
I said it's too late apologize
It's too late

I said it's too late to apologize, yeah
It's too late
I said it's too late to apologize, yeah

Halfway across the globe
And we're standing on new ground

John Hancock has the pen. The really long pen. That’s he’s stroking in an odd manner. Thomas Jefferson is singing, John Adams has the hair that makes him look like a Cocker Spaniel, Sam Adams is sloshing the ale around, Ben Franklin is the one that looks like, well, Ben Franklin. And if the gaze George the III doesn’t make you want to put a couple of rounds through your monitor, then I don’t you hanging around me or my daughter.

Original website here.

Interesting comments here.

And if you haven’t see the One Republic video that sparked this, go here. It explains the self-combusting portrait of GIII.
 
H/T to CTone!

"Where a goat can go …"

William Phillips, born a commoner, was admitted as a gentleman cadet into the Royal Artillery Academy at Woolwich, England, at the age of sixteen. Unlike the British army and navy at that time, one could not purchase a commission in the Royal Artillery. He was one of very few British officers to be advanced by his ability alone.

Phillips rose to the rank of Major General, and he is said to have conducted one of the British army's most successful campaigns during the American Revolution. When he was in Petersburg, VA, in April of 1781, one of his standing orders to his army was that the “private property and the persons of individuals not taken in arms, are to be under the protection of the troops.” Thomas Jefferson described him as “the proudest man of the proudest nation on earth.”

For anyone who has ever hauled a gun around in Rev War reenacting*, he is perhaps best known for the quote he made as his men hauled their guns to the top of Mt. Defiance in 1777: “Where a goat can go, a man can go; and where a man can go, he can drag a gun.”

During the Second Boer War in South Africa in 1899, the Royal Navy landed guns from HMS Terrible and Powerful to help in the relief of the siege of the British garrison in the township of Ladysmith. The guns were transported inland, and for the the final part of the journey, sailors from the Naval Brigade manhandled the guns over very difficult terrain.

All that, to bring you this.



108 years have passed, and Ladysmith belongs to the Zulu Kingdom of KwaZulu-Natal. But the feat of the gunners from Powerful and Terrible has never been forgotten.

H/T to Dr. Mike for the link.

* Back in a previous lifetime, when I was in my early 30’s and just starting in the Rev War reenacting hobby, I had the opportunity to serve on a gun crew for a little 3-pound field piece. That is where I developed my affection for things that go “boom”, and *that* is a post for another time.

Reworking a Great Coat, Part 2.

So, if you care, here's Part 1. I'm reworking an "off-the-rack" 18th century great coat to look more appropriate. So far I've changed the buttons, opened up the pockets and cuffs, trimmed off the seam allowance and top-stitched so there were visable raw edges. The next step was to add a "cape" to update the coat to a more 1780’s silhouette. My copy of Beth Gilgun’s book, Tidings from the 18th Century* had a GC pattern in it, so I scaled up the collar pattern to fit this coat and pinned on one cut from a scrap piece of fabric.

It didn’t have enough flare, so I cut slits, measured the gaps, and transferred this to my next practice piece.

The next one looked pretty good. I transferred the alterations to the pattern piece,

and I cut out two new cape pieces, top-stitched around the edges, sandwiched the collar in between, and sewed them to the neck edge.

I added two buttons (the coat came with two spare buttons, yay!), and worked two buttonholes. Now I just have to redo the other 38 buttonholes by hand. But not today.

More good information on great coats/watch coats can be found here.

*This book has many valuable ideas, but parts of it are woefully outdated. Please don't use this resource without additional research.