Personal stuff
Okay, WordPress has finally allowed me access to my own website again, and about bloody time. (Thanks to Tech Support II — I imagine — for putting things right.)
As it’s the weekend, there’s only one post today — a two-parter — but it’s about a subject near and dear to my heart.
Enjoy.
My kid sister done posted a pic of herself and me on my 21st birthday party, back in the summer of ’69 ’75:
Kim, the rock star… [snort]
Two years later, I was in the Army:
Sheesh…
Man, that was a stinker of a head cold. New Wife got it first, no doubt from one of the little petri dishes at the school, and it took her a week to get over it. On her last day of recovery, I came down with it and it kicked my ass all over the place.
Only yesterday did I feel anything like in decent shape to go out in the car and run errands, and today I feel ready to take on the world, albeit in somewhat-enfeebled fashion.
Thanks for putting up with the reduced and, if I may say, mediocre content of the past week, and my bad / indifferent mood.
Normal programming should resume as of today. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading off to the range.
Longtime Reader Newt F sends me the following question:
Yesterday I was online and followed a link to “Top Gun Blogs,” and I was surprised that you weren’t even in the Top 50. Given that a lot of your readers (including me) would think that you should be, why is that?
Thankee for the compliment, but I don’t think that I can call myself a “gun blogger” anymore, and probably lost the appellation when I switched over from the Nation of Riflemen to The Other Side Of Kim; and certainly, this latest manifestation of mine, Splendid Isolation, is even further away.
Although if you click on “The Gun Thing” category on the right hand side of this page, you will find over 90 pages of gun-related posts (about five posts per page, good grief), it’s worth noting that jokes and such (“Funny Stuff”), cars (“Drive Time”) and booze/food (“Food & Drink”) have 80, 30 and 23 pages respectively. Clearly, there’s a lot more than just guns over here, nowadays.
More to the point: volume doesn’t count as much as quality, and I’m not sure that my recent fevered scribblings about guns are even close to the quality of some of my earlier gunny posts.
None of this matters, of course. I have no interest in popularity, nor recognition of my writings. I write for myself, on topics which interest me, and any following I may accrue in so doing is simply a happy concidence.
And you’re all welcome on this back porch of mine. Just mind yer manners, handle yer guns with respect, don’t spit baccy juice on the floor, and all will be well.
Cheers, y’all…
ZA, of course, being the international acronym for South Africa.
Cape Town is one of the world’s most beautiful cities:
The people somewhat less so, but that’s true of just about any city.
Durban looks like Miami Lite:
The Drakensberg range is quite spectacular:
They were named thus by Boer settlers who thought the mountains looked like dragons’ teeth.
The Wonderboom (Wonder Tree), a fig tree that is over a million years old:
…which is why you need to prune your fruit trees. (It’s that thing in the center that looks like a bush.)
South Africa has its own version of the Grand Canyon, called the Blyde River Canyon:
Not as deep, but then again it’s a couple hundred million years younger.
Now for some other size comparisons:
Relative to the U.S. Lower 48:
Relative to Texas:
And here are the Big Five:
Anyway, those were some of the slides I made for New Wife’s “Where I Came From” presentation to the kids at her school.
New Wife just came out from an Omigodicron episode. As she described it: “Three days of a bad flu”, and I knew she was better on Day 4 when she did the washing and ironing, and made me clean the kitchen floor and take out the trash.
Of course, she had the Covid vaccine in December (as did I), so there we go.
And despite us living together, sleeping together and all that stuff, I haven’t got sick (so far).
BFD.
Update: Just had a chat with Doc Russia. Apparently he’s recently diagnosed scores of patients with Covid at his ER, but hasn’t had to admit a single one.