I survived another one, part the first...

Cycle Oregon, that is. I didn't have nearly the miles in that I should have had for the year, but then again this year's CO, cleverly titled "The Wild-Wheeled West", wasn't as hard as last year, either. This time we only did mountains on Day 3, from Baker to Halfway, and Day 5, from Halfway to Wallowa Lake, and Day 7, from Wallowa Lake to Elgin. But I digress...

Getting to the start of this year's CO was harder than actually doing the ride. Not physically, of course, but mentally and stressfully (is that a word when used in this context?). The day before CO started off well enough. I got my stuff loaded into my pickup Friday morning so I could go to Pendleton and do some stuff for Brett at his new leather shop. Of course I had to go to Pendleton by way of Mount Vernon, which those of you who know Oregon know is quite the scenic route. For those who don't know Oregon, let's just say I went about 200 miles and three hours out of my way. The things dads do for their kids. The reason I went through Mount Vernon was to pick up a couple of custom horse bridle type bits for Brett to put in his shop...

Unfortunately things went suddenly downhill from there. I'd decided to go back to Union to my dad's to spend the night before going on to Elgin for the start of CO on Saturday, but when I went to start my pickup, she no startee. Period. Crank, crank, crank, but no vroom noise. So that night I ended up at the Pendleton Travelodge, with the idea that I'd find a mechanic on Saturday morning. Yeah, right. Fortunately, Brett knows a guy who is a mechanic, and so my pickup found a temporary home. I finally got it back the following Sunday...

But once again, I digress. This is not meant to be a tale of my woes but instead a chronicle of my adventures on Cycle Oregon 2008...

Brett hauled me, my bike, and my bag over the mountains to Elgin. The start of CO was at Elgin High School. I arranged for my bag to be delivered there, hopped on my trusty Roubaix (which I believe is French for "a few days down the road your butt is really gonna be aching") and made my leisurely way to the check in area in the high school gym. At check-in I ran into my buddy Dave E., who is an annual CO volunteer and who made the transition from pedestrian to official cyclist quick and painless. Then I ventured outside looking for Todd's garbage can...

A garbage can may at first glance seem to be rather an odd thing to look for in relation to a bicycle trip. However, this particular garbage can is special. To the best of my knowledge, it has never held an ounce of trash, at least not on purpose. Instead, it serves as Todd's luggage. When I get into each camp at the end of a day of riding, I look for Todd's garbage can. Once I find it I know I have the right camp...

Todd's garbage can, his and Mike's tents and another tent basically identical to Todd's, were actually easy to find. I went and got my own mongo sized bag and drug it over to the tents and proceded to set up my own little piece of campster heaven. My tent is just big enough for my bag and my ThermaRest pad, and of course yours truly. And that's it. Makes it easy to set up. Once my home away from home was set, I beat feet for the traditional Widmer Brothers beer garden, where I was relatively certain I'd find Todd and Mike and the new guy, whose name turned out to be Craig, and who turned out to be just as much fun to hang with as those two...

Mike is on the left, Todd is in the middle, and Craig is on the right. This was Craig's first CO, but I don't think it'll be his last...

Before too long, Larry and Colleen and Jerry and Betty arrived and made our little company complete. Betty stayed with us for a while, but then she had to go home, thereby abandoning me to the company of evil companions who forced me to drink Widmer Brothers beer and Pendleton Whiskey and Crown Royal during the course of the coming week. My poor arms were nearly twisted from the sockets...

Day one dawned bright and sunny, and chilly. I was up with, well, not exactly the chickens, but I was up somewhere between 5:30 and 6:00, which is a good thing, because it usually takes me a while to make it through the blue room lines and the breakfast lines and back to my tent to actually put on bike clothes, take down the tent, and etc. in time to get my chubby hiney out on the road at a reasonable hour. This year I went the whole week without setting my alarm clock, for which my campmates were thankful I'm sure, and I still managed to get on the road by 7:30ish every day except the layover day at Wallowa Lake. But I hadn't planned on leaving camp before 10 that day anyway...

For the uninitiated, let me do some quick explainating regarding the blue room line comment. Cycle Oregon as an organization does its best to make sure we have all the amenities. You know, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place to drink beer, etc. Then, once one does all of these things, one needs a place to, well, pee. Enter the blue rooms. These quaint plastic shanties are variously known as Porta Potties, honey shacks, that stinkin' ... You get the picture. In the case of Cycle Oregon, they are, in my limited experience, invariably blue, therefore the name blue room. And again invariably, if the time comes when you really have to go, there will be a line. Probably a long line. If you don't really have to go that bad, every one for a quarter of a mile will be empty...

So anyway, there I was, pedaling up the highway that leads out of Elgin toward the turnoff that would take us up and over Punkin Ridge, down to Summerville, up to Hunter Road, and so on and so forth. The ride up the creek was a bit on the brisk side, which made me a bit thankful that I had, once again, slightly overdressed. At least I wasn't shivering the way some of those who had ventured forth wearing only shorts, socks, shoes and a jersey were shivering...

We had a small climb to do, during which my legs were whispering minor obscenities at me, but I just geared down until they shut up and spun my way up. It was a beautiful day to be on the road on a bike and there were hordes of colorfully dressed people of all descriptions zipping hither and yon. Or something like that...

At my brother's house on Hunter Road I stopped with the idea that I would say hello and possibly use their bathroom, even though I had made a blue room visit at the rest stop a few miles back. I found that there was no one home but Tonka, who is a very large dog of indeterminate breed who is normally friendly. However, on this particular day he had decided to take his house guarding duties seriously, and informed me in no uncertain terms that he would eat my legs off if I ventured any closer. Considering that I needed my legs more than usual for the next few days, I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and went on down the road to my sister in law Susan's house, which actually wasn't that much further. There was someone home there who was much more friendly...

A couple of years ago, I bought a camera small enough that I can carry it on the hip belt of my hydration pack, and whip it out and take candid shots along the way. Amazingly enough, it almost takes better pictures that way than it does if I stop and concentrate. Hence the following photo of a field of sunflowers alongside Hunter Road...
Lunch was in Cove, at about the 35 mile mark or somewhere thereabouts. Of course I had dawdled and meandered through rest stops and blue room lines until I arrived at lunch at, amazingly enough, almost lunch time. There I ran into Don B., Sue, Beth, Joe, and Patrick. I hadn't seen Don since last year, Sue, Beth, and Joe since my first CO in 2005, and I had never met Patrick, but we were soon all acquainted or reacquainted and I managed to kill almost an hour there. A very pleasant hour, I might add. Then it was off to Union, with a very nice tailwind to push me along. Once again I found the trash can and made myself at home...

Once I got my tent set up, I went over to Dad's house to borrow his shower. I try to take advantage of any normal house type showers that I can, because the alternative is the shower trucks that CO has along to keep us smelling sweet. Not that the shower trucks are necessarily bad, but that a real shower is so very good. Dad's shower came with a price, however. After I got out, I had to do some remanufacturing of his computer, which was making funny noises. I was pretty sure it was his old hard drive, which had been superceded by a brand new one recently, complaining about being left out in the cold. It turned out I was right. By then it was dinner time. Mom fixed tacos, which I ate several of. Obviously "starving wolf syndrome" was beginning to set in. After dinner I went back to camp, found the troops in the beer garden, went to dinner with them, then it was off to beddy bye to get ready for the pedal to Baker by way of Catherine Creek and Medical Springs...

As ready as I'm going to get...

For Cycle Oregon, that is. Yesterday I had Cheryl drop me and my bike off in Baker City on her way to Halfway to the fair. I had ambitions toward doing a 30 or so mile ride around Baker Valley, then riding home, which would give me between fifty and sixty miles. Little did I know...

On my way out Pocahontas Road I suddenly had the idea to call Kim and Janie, my local riding buddies, and see if they were home, so I stopped and dug my cell phone out of my backpack. They were indeed home. Unfortunately for him, Kim was on call (he's a vet) but Janie was more than happy to get in some miles. "Let's ride to North Powder!" was her reply.

"We can do that," I answered. Silly me...

I rode on to their house. By this time I had about 11 miles on the odometer. It was chilly even while riding and I had several layers on. Actually several too many. While Janie finished getting ready to go, I shed the top layer on my upper half. Much better.

By the time we left their house the wind was kicking up more than it had been and it was shaping up to be a bit of a headwind. Wow, did it ever...

By the time we got back to Pocahontas Road, which pointed straight into the wind, the wind had started to become serious. Just past the old Pocahontas School site we saw Janie's friends John and Cindy coming out of their driveway for a short ride. We rode with them to the Rock Creek turnoff. I had a nice visit with John, who is retired from the Forest Circus. Janie and I went on toward North Powder while they turned up Rock Creek Lane.

By this time, the wind was getting really into its playful mode. I was pulling, and managing to keep my cadence up most of the time by doing a virtuoso performance on my shifters. The wind would drop a little, then kick back up. Some of the gusts made me feel like I was starting to go backwards. Interesting feeling. Janie stayed tucked in behind me most of the time. She did get out and pull for a couple of miles, but since she is only about half my size drafting behind her wasn't the rest break it could have been though she did her best. It did help though. On the leg back toward Baker, I decided that the wind had to be at least 20 mph because I had to be going that fast to get any breeze in my face...

Then, we made the turn back toward Baker. Ah! The joys of a tailwind. I led off and suddenly found myself pedaling easily and a glance at the bike computer told me we were cruising along at just under 25 mph. Cool!!! We made the 8 miles to Haines in just about 20 minutes. More Cool!!!

Janie cut off back toward home when we got to Wingville Road, and I went on into Baker, hit Subway for a foot long Prime Rib and Pepper Jack cheese sub with all the veggies and a double helping of blue Powerade from the soda machine then headed for Durkee myself, anticipating the long downhills from Pleasant Valley to Durkee...

Ride stats: 76.3 miles
16.9 average mph
Max speed 41.64 mph
Just over 4 hours ride time

So it appears that the horsepower is mostly there, so the engine is pretty much ready, but the engine mount , as my friend Don Bolton so aptly put it, is a little shaky. The legs are fine, mabye a little tired this morning, but the sit bones are more than a tiny bit tender. I don't think I'll get on the bike today...

"Crash miles"

...or how I decided that maybe I'm not quite as bad off as I thought I might be...

So yesterday after work I took my trusty mountain bike out on the road for some more "last minute miles" before Cycle Oregon gets here. That won't be too long from now, as CO starts September 6th. Or at least check-in does. We don't actually start riding until the 7th. I've been thinking that I really need to get in some miles, and I was right, so I've been doing them on my heavy mountain bike...

Yesterday was 41.5 miles, which I actually did in about the same time as I did 35 miles last week on the same road, so maybe it's paying off. I looked at my training diary last night, and with trainer miles, CROC ride miles, a few miles on the treadmill, and my mountain bike miles, I have 956 miles for the year. I'm going to be doing some more riding on the mountain bike, so maybe I'll survive this year's Cycle Oregon after all...

A friend has told me that this year's CO is "laid back enough that you should be able to ride yourself into shape by day 5" which is the day we ride from Halfway to Wallow Lake via the backcountry. I sincerely hope he's right. Nonetheless, I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of praying along the way...

Night shooting in Baker City

This video may not look cowboy, but for you western movie aficionados, this video will remind you of something...



So now on with the show...

Shanghai Noon, aka Clint, and I went to the Vigilantes of Virtue annual night shoot and BBQ the evening of July 26th. It was a blast in more ways than one. I of course was shooting Frontier Cartridge loads, or black powder, which made for some rather smoky scenarios, and the occasional fireball...


This gent goes by the alias of Bullett. He was making plenty of smoke with his shotgun, eh? The pictures below are of me. I think I contributed my share to the pollution...
The baby fireball in the picture below came from my Henry rifle...
But this is the cool, or should I say hot one. This is my shotgun shooting FFg Goex real black powder. Note the streamers of fire...
Shooting at night with black powder makes for some interesting pyrotechnics. A lot of the shooters were using black that night just because of the fire and smoke. It looks pretty neat under the lights...

Making up for lost time...

So here I am, almost a month down the road since my last post. How time flies when one is having fun. Let's see, since my last post I've gone to two cowboy shoots, a video cattle auction in Winnemucca, and a family reunion in Sisters, OR...

First off was the first of the cowboy shoots, which was the annual night shoot in Baker. I have some pictures to post on that one, so I'll write it separately later, even though it happened before everything else...

Then there was the video auction. Our calves sold on Thursday, so we (Cheryl, Clint, Jean, and I) drove down to Winnemucca on Wednesday. We had dinner at the Martin Hotel, which is famous for its Basque grub, and played a few machines. I think I came out about $40 or so ahead for the couple of days we were there, playing penny machines. The calves did okay on the auction. Not great, but okay...

We left Winnemucca at about 8AM on Friday, drove back to Durkee, hooked Jean's travel trailer to our pickup, and drove to Sisters, getting there about 8:20 PM. Long day...

The following Wednesday, which was, incidentally, last Wednesday, Clint and I packed up the guns, gun cart, etc. in his little car and drove to Nampa to Cheryl's cousin Bill's house. This would be our headquarters for competing in the Idaho State Championship of Cowboy Action Shooting. Neither Clint nor I have been practicing especially, so we were there more because it's fun than because we figured we'd win anything.

Thursday was the warmup match. Clint did well; I ended up somewhere in the vicinity of 56th out of 63 shooters. I think I may have beaten 2 kids and some old men and old ladies. I hoped to do better in the main match, which started on Friday. After all, hope springs eternal. However, by the time that the smoke cleared, so to speak, the springs were getting pretty wimpy. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Thursday was hot. The Black's Creek Range is in an old gravel pit. A very deep gravel pit. The sun bakes down on the gravel and with the berms there ain't a whole lot of breeze stirring there most of the time. Fortunately the sponsoring club, the Oregon Trail Rough Riders, had almost literally tons of water in coolers in the shooting bays, and folks were sucking down lots of hydration...

A video company from Nampa or Boise or one of those places had some mirrors set up so they could take videos and pictures of the shooters from the front without actually standing down range where the lead bees could buzz around their ears. It made for some interesting photo ops.
That's Clint on the left and a gentleman who goes by the name of Fernley on the right...

Thursday was also side match day. I tried my hand at long range pistol caliber rifle shooting with my 1860 Henry, but to no avail, although I did have that steel chicken standing out there at about 100 yards surrounded. It was so confused it just stood in one place and watched the bullets kick up rocks and dirt all around it...

Friday was equally as hot, if not hotter. It was also the first day of the main match. I managed to have enough of a brain fart to miss two shots at a huge and very close target on the first stage due to trying to shoot too quick, then I did the same thing on two more a couple of stages later. I am proof positive that there is no such thing as a target too big or too close to miss. I did manage to shoot the other four stages clean. Somehow...

Friday afternoon, after a nicely done lunch of burgers, beans, potato salad, cookies, and soda, was the team shoot. Shooter numbers were drawn in groups of four. Clint ended up teamed with Belinda Belle, Texas Slick Willy, and Willie Killem. I was teamed with Wogg, Kuna, and Pinto Smith. The object of the team shoot was somewhat as follows: the four team members were chained together at the ankles. The guns were staged on four tables out behind the jailhouse. The team would run outside as best they could, run to the first table, and the first person on the chain shot the rifle targets while everybody else stood behind them. Once that was done, the remaining three went to the second table, where the next person on the chain shot two pistols. The remaining two went to the next pistol table, and the next person on the chain shot two pistols. Then the last person went to the shotgun. The whole thing was pretty entertaining, except for the fact that Clint's team beat ours. And everybody else's. Clint was heard to say that "It'll probably be the only time in my life that I beat Wogg!"
That's Clint in the blue plaid shirt. He was the shotgun guy on his team and he did a dandy job of getting his 97 loaded quick and knocking down the two targets he had to shoot.

This is Clint with his trophy for the team shoot. He appears to be just tickled to death with himself, doesn't he? My team ended up fifth, quite possibly mainly because Wogg missed a shot with the pistol. We're going to blame him any way. Otherwise we would have been second. It probably would have helped if I had shot faster on the rifle targets, too, but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any of them...

Saturday wasn't quite as hot as Friday, but almost. The humidity level was quite a bit higher, which made those of us who shoot Frontier Cartridge (myself) and Frontiersman (Rockhouse Ryan) quite popular with the RO/timer, the spotters, and the rest of the posse. The way I look at it is that if all and sundry are complaining about the smoke, I've accomplished at least a part of what I set out to do. Unfortunately, I had four misses on Saturday mainly due to not being able to see the targets and just firing for effect. Again unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the smoke. At least not yet. Sweet Violet is supposed to e-mail me some pictures of me shooting, and if there's any smoky ones there I'll post 'em...

So Saturday after lunch clouds moved in and a minor monsoon ensued, right during the dart throw. It actually felt good standing out there getting soaked, up until the breeze came up and I was wet enough I actually started to get a little chilled. Of course the sun came out again and took care of that...

The banquet Saturday night was good, although the drinks at the no-host bars were way overpriced. One of the high points of the evening was the fact that I ended up with a trophy for third place in Frontier Cartridge, which was totally unexpected. It turns out that I beat the fourth place guy by .63 seconds. I would have actually beaten him by more except I had 8 misses and he had none...

Over all, this was a great shoot. I was at the first one in 2005, and this one was way much better. Better organized, better presented, more interesting stuff going on, etc. It was just an all around good time...

This has never happened to me before...

(Deep, gravelly Rod Serling voice) Picture a man on a journey through time and space...

(flashback) His trusty steed, his Diamondback mountain bike, has carried him many miles through broiling summer heat and freezing autumn fog, with nary a complaint or flat tire...

(fade to recent past) On Wednesday, our intrepid hero mounted his trusty steed for a ride, trying to get in some miles before he embarks on Cycle Oregon in September. He had no idea how the ride would end...

(Serling fades quietly into the background)...

So. I left mom in law's place about 4:15 on my mountain bike. The reason I rode it is that I didn't feel like taking my road bike off the trainer the night before, and with the mountain bike I don't have any qualms about just laying it in the back of the pickup. The down side of that bike is that it has Specialized Armadillo kevlar belted tires and tubes filled with Slime, which makes the rolling weight a bit on the hefty side. Character building, right? The wind, as usual for this time of year, was essentially howling, blowing small pets and patio furniture across the ground. And also as generally seems to be the usual when I go abiking, it was a headwind. Not to worry, though. I've been told over and over that riding into the wind is also character building as well as good training.

I gave myself a time limit, because I had a meeting to go to later in the evening. I turned around exactly at the appointed time (well almost), snarfed down a "Sweet and Salty Peanut Bar", and began to pedal back toward mom in law's. Did I mention that the trip out was generally uphill? It was. I was pretty happy with myself, because I found myself up on the pedals on most of the hills instead of spinning along. That at least tells me that I'm not totally unprepared for CO.

Of course going back downhill was bonus. At one point I was tucked down on my bar extensions and looked down at my computer and was told that I was doing 40+. Cool!

Now, picture this chubby body pedaling merrily along chased by the wind. I've managed to get up enough speed to have a breeze in my face, so I'm a happy camper. Suddenly there's a juicy farting sound and my rear tire goes flat. Instantaneous departure of the inflationary medium (the air) to another location. This is not a good thing, as I'm somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 miles from my starting location.

I lay the bike on its side and make an attempt to pump up the tire, reasoning that with the amount of Slime in the tire, if I can get some air in it, I may be able to finish the ride, albeit slower. Pump, pump, pump. The tire appears to be accepting the air. Eureka!

Mounted once again, I try a few pedal strokes. In less than 20 yards, the tire is flat again. I instantly brake and look down just in time to see the valve stem make an unsuccessful attempt to travel into a different space/time continuum. It's laying on the asphalt alongside the tire. It now resides somewhere in a clump of grass alongside US 30...I had a nice walk, and finished the day with 24.5 pedaling miles, which is better than nothing, I suppose...

This has never happened to me before...

The first round of haying is about to be finished...

It's been a hectic few weeks. We've had two swathers going full blast, the baler going from early in the AM until things get too hot and dry, and the loader tractors pushing bales, loading bales, unloading bales, all that sort of thing, and the first crop alfalfa, such as it was, and the meadow hay is all cut and baled and most of it's stacked. Then it's a short break until the second alfalfa crop comes on...

Last Saturday we went to a wedding in Boise. Interesting wedding, actually. The background music while we were waiting in the sun for the bride to get herself together was pretty much wedding standard. The "bring in the bridesmaids" song was "Puttin' on the Ritz" which was definitely different. I don't remember what the groomsmen's song was, but it was contempo also. The happy couple's vows were a departure from what I think of when I think wedding. I generally think of God, and pledging to honor Him, and so on and so forth. This didn't happen this time. Maybe I'm just old fashioned...

Of course any trip to Boise is an excuse to get in some shopping at Costco on the way over. Since they put the new Costco in Nampa, it's nice because now we don't have to go clear out the other side of Boise to get there. And the Nampa Costco is right across the street from the new Sportsman's Warehouse, too. I went there while Cheryl and her mom and sis were at Costco. Amazingly enough, I went to SW for two specific things, and found one of them. This is somewhat unusual...

Life is moving along. I need to get parts for one of Clint's pistols and have Bowen Valley Kid (Keith) look at the other one before the 26th, which I'm assuming is the annual night shoot at Virtue Flat. I need to get ahold of Lever Action Louie and see for sure. With the price of fuel, he may decide it costs too much to run the generator. I hope not. I've got some shotshells loaded up with real black powder that should put out some pretty good fireballs. Hopefully we can get some pictures to post...

So that's about how life is going on Sisley Creek at the moment. Remember, boring can be our friend...

Training in the hot, hot, hot sun...

But not on a bike, or at least not a pedal powered one. Saturday morning somewhere in the vicinity of 9:30ish Cheryl, Clint and I headed upcountry on a pair of fourwheelers for a thrilling day of fence repair. In the lower country it was hot and dry. Higher up and on the other side of a ridge, it was hot and green. Hot and green remained the order of the day right up until I started working my way uphill following the fence.

At the corner at the top of the first hill I actually got to sidehill for a ways. Of course part of the sidehilling was through a couple of brushy swales, which for some unknown reason were the focal points for fence breakage, and in both cases it was all four wires. Got those fixed and went on. It was now back to hot and dry. Then I got to the corner on the top of the next hill. At this point I was wishing I had the camera I bought because it was small enough to take with me when I'm wandering around. The view down the canyon was phenomenal. Sunflowers, lupine, mallow, Indian paintbrush, all were blooming around me, and the air was quite redolent of flower fragrances. Unfortunately I didn't have the camera, so I had to get back to work and I started down into the canyon.

At the bottom of the canyon, where according to Cheryl the fence is usually bad, the tiny creek was chuckling and gurgling over the rocks and the breeze was rustling the cottonwood leaves. It was really hard to make myself leave the inviting shade and start back up to, yes, hot and dry. The fence was good there besides, which made it even harder to leave.

At the top of the first climb out of the creek I could see Clint at the top of the ultimate ridge, but I still had another down, then a climb, to get there. I could also see some of the cows that were supposed to be in the rented pasture next door in our rented pasture. I counted noses so I could tell somebody how many there were. I made it to the bottom of the down and while crossing the relatively flat bottom of the draw a blue grouse jumped out almost under my feet and nearly stopped my heart. Fortunately the fence was good there.

The climb to the top of that last ridge was, shall we say, interesting. I was extremely glad that I have been climbing tons of stairs lately. Occasionally a small breeze would meander through and cool me enough to let me crawl up some more sagebrush hill. Then, finally, the summit and the bikes. And the cooler. And a cell phone call from Cheryl for help on another part of the fence that a herd of elk had apparently drug for a goodly distance down the slope at some time in the relatively recent past. Clint and I did some rockhopping with the fourwheelers and finally got to where she was, helped her get that hole fixed enough to confuse the cows and hopefully keep them in, then she went on and we went back and around to the top to pick her up...

I got home finally about 6:30 to the shower. When I got out of the shower and stepped on the scales I weighed five pounds less than I did a couple of weeks ago which is the last time I checked...

The new reloading press works great...

As I mentioned earlier, my new Dillon 550 reloading press showed up a week ago last Friday. I was spraying weeds at the time, which it seems like I've been doing since the dawn of time, so I just packed the boxes into the reloading room and left them on a chair for the moment.

My fourwheeler has been having issues with the heat the engine generates when I'm spraying, mainly I'm sure because of the slow speeds I'm moving at which aren't especially conducive to much cooling. It could have something to do with the fact that the pump on the spray tank sucks enough juice from the battery that it's running almost on a direct feed from the alternator. As opposed to walking back to the house every so often because the beast dies and won't start until it's had some cooling time, I've started a routine of spraying out one load of chemical then parking the bike at the house for twenty minutes or so before I start mixing the next load. That seems to be working. So far I haven't had to walk back to the house once since I started doing that.

What does this have to do with me getting my new press, you might ask? Everything or nothing, depending on your point of view. What this routine does is give me time to work on setting up the press, etc. while the bike is cooling off.

So, this last Friday I finally had both toolheads (.45 Colt and .357) set up, the dies adjusted, and so on and so forth. That shiny blue piece of machinery was sitting there doing nothing so I decided, "What the hey, let's see how it works." And how does it work? It works extremely well. I had a box full of already primed .45 Colt cases sitting there and I've been wondering if the Dilloon powder measure would reliably feed the fake black powder I've been loading for cowboy. The stuff's pretty coarse.

Obviously there's no time like the present to answer one's own questions, so I got out the bottle of powder and dumped some in the measure. It took a couple of casefuls to get the powder bar adjusted to the right load, then away we went. In seemingly no time at all, I had half a binful of loaded shells and I didn't have to dip a single grain of powder. The measure did it all as long as I did my part. The learning curve is actually rather gentle with this press.

A couple of weeks in the life...

Of whom? you might ask. Well, of yours truly. Nothing earthshaking has occurred, but life does indeed go on. The weekend after Memorial Day was high school graduation in Baker. Of course, since we've known large numbers of the kids since they were munchkin sized, we got approximately a zillion graduation announcements. Enough so that we had to pick and choose whose we went to. On the other hand, neither Cheryl nor I had to cook dinner for about four days. That was kind of nice.

Last Tuesday, a week ago, we were revisited by winter. Winter? you ask. Yes, winter. I was in Baker picking up my totally nonstylish, frame type required by my employer new glasses. When I left the spectacle place and turned toward downtown it was raining. Then suddenly the rain drops had bones in them. By the time I made it to Safeway it was snowing hard. On June 10th. When I topped out on the hill west of Pleasant Valley, at about 6 PM, it was snowing so hard that I had my headlights on, the transfer case in 4HI, and was driving about 50 so I could make sure I stayed on the road. Interesting trip home.

I now have a Dillon reloading press sitting on my reloading bench in place of the two Lee presses that used to be there. I had originally planned to buy a new set of pistols for cowboy shooting with the money from the sale of a different pistol. This plan was about to come to fruition when I decided to load up some .357 shells. It then took me two hours to load 200 rounds on a progressive press. It should have taken about 45 minutes. At that point I started shopping for reloading presses.

I posted on the SASS wire asking for opinions on presses. I happened to mention that I was getting rid of two Lee's. Almost immediately I had an offer to buy one of the Lee's. A day later it took about twelve hours to sell the other one. That night I ordered the Dillon, which arrived last Friday. It's mostly set up, except for adjusting the .357 dies in the toolhead, then taking them back out and putting the .45 dies back in so I can load some .45's. I can hardly wait.

So, as I said, nothing earthshaking has been happening. I have gotten some writing done on the third book in the Deputies series, but not much else is happening. Cheryl started cutting hay this afternoon, so summer busyness is about to kick off...