The Wandering Minstrel

Image courtesy of The Better Half.

Passing the Bermuda Dunes airport near Palm Desert, CA along Interstate 10, The Better Half took a picture of this biplane offering rides climbing out on the upwind leg. I don’t recognize the type for sure, but it might be a Kinner radial powered Waco Biplane. Does anyone know what it is? Clickable image.

DrJim found this very aircraft on the web. Thanks, Jim!

I removed our guns from the California safe today to pack them up for the move tomorrow. I also packed three shotguns, gun cases, holsters, magazines and what seemed like a TON of ammo.

Clickable image - a pair of S&W 908 pistols, a S&W 686 revolver and The Better Half’s Para Warthog.

The other shotgun and one of the Glocks are already in the Arizona safe. Our carry guns, my compact Glock 26 (Little Boy) and The Better Half’s little S&W 442 (Rosie), will be riding in the truck with Scratch and Sniff (our dogs) and us. We should be at the new house by nightfall tomorrow and will unload the trailer the next morning and turn it in to the U-Haul yard in Wickenburg.

Given California’s weird law limiting trailers to 55 MPH, it will be a long day tomorrow.

Other than a couple of errands we needed to do today, we are in hold mode before going after the U-Haul tomorrow. We will load the trailer tomorrow and will travel on Sunday. That takes up the weekend so we decided to grill and prepare our meal today.

I grilled a couple of pork loin chops and The Better Half served up homemade apple compoté, steamed broccoli and her wonderful béchamel pasta shell side dish. Damn good dinner with a Samuel Adams Winter Lager on the side. Clickable image.

We have been finishing up our new home for the past six weeks or so. Meantime, the California backyard responded to the lack of attention and a lot of rainfall with this armpit-high array of weeds. I think these grew faster than the Federal Deficit. Now, I know I should have hosed down the small weeds (then) with RoundUp.

Weed killing is a ritual I carry out every winter between rain storms but this year, due to our excitement and eagerness to occupy the new home, I overlooked it. Today, I paid the price by getting out there and pulling a bunch of these “Sequoia Redwoods” of the weed world. I also sprayed several gallons of RoundUp on the entire back yard except for some of The Better Half’s garden treasures.

I still have some cleanup and disposal to do but I ran out of motivation. Clickable image.

A while back, I wrote a post on the other blog about the U-Haul® Migration Theory. I posted yesterday about staging the items that need to go to Arizona this weekend. Today, I signed up for a 5×8 U-Haul® trailer to transport this stuff. Here is a paragraph from that other post that compares the one way rental in both directions:

I remember someone blogging about U-Haul® being a good indicator for migratory trends. Because of the law of supply and demand, it should be less expensive to rent a one-way trailer (or truck) in the direction that is less popular. Sure enough, when I reversed the route on the website, the rate dropped from $101 to $67 for the three day period to go from Wickenburg to the L.A. area.

The same drop in price seems to hold for the larger trailer we’re renting this time. The cost to drop off the trailer in Wickenburg is $133 while the cost to drop off in the L.A. area is $98. It appears that the Migration Theory is still testing positive. It looks like more are fleeing California than are eager to come in (aside from illegal aliens of course).

This is the area of our California house where we are “staging” the stuff going to Arizona in a few days. The Better Half (who did most of the work) and I have been placing some of the things that we want to transport to the new home in an area of the living room.

Clickable image courtesy The Better Half

We’re planning to take his, hers and ours items. Examples: His telescope, her jewelry, our arsenal. I’m taking tools and things to start setting up a shop in the garage. She’s taking cutlery, kitchenware and household decorations. We both will be taking our gun cleaning stuff and an ample supply of ammo.

There will be several more waves of transporting “stuff” to the new house. We keep a checklist and add to it whenever we think of something else that needs to head out of California. Like Larry the Cable Guy (whose show, “Only in America,” we’re now watching) says, we’re gonna “Git ‘R’ Done!”

About a year ago, I posted a photo of a “gun mouse.” Today, I found another version of a computer mouse in the shape of a pistol:

The article I posted was about a mathematical analysis of the so-called “lethality” of a firearm. Interesting stuff.