I thought of a good hobby I could take up: sharpshooting. Like with a rifle. Like most preadolescent boys, I am fascinated by guns, and I read and reread the big book about the history of human weaponry in the intermediate school library while I was there. Our ability to kill things has progressed from the typical brute strength / hard, sharp protrusions method more common in nature, to a unique tools-based capacity. I like technology and especially metal things. Things that no one human could ever manage to put together, working alone. Maybe it makes me feel like people actually work together pretty well, overall. So, somehow someone gets a bunch of metals and things and someone else makes them into a good material to make rifle barrels out of, then someone designs one and someone ELSE makes the barrel (or barrel making machine) and on and on. There are many, many people involved! Anyway, all these highly specialized humans wind up working towards the same thing. When they are finished, you have sniper rifles, or cars, or moon landers. I'd like to benefit from that in the weaponry arena. I'd want to be one of the guys with the swords if I lived in medieval times. Since I'm alive now, I want to be the guy with the corresponding contemporary weapon. And hey, you can make a pretty accurate rifle for about $1000. A Remington Model 700 PSS and a Leupold Vari-X II Tactical 3-9x 40mm scope. That will reportedly shoot within 1/2 MOA right out of the box (meaning shots hit in a 2" group at 400 yards. Four football fields.).

Also, thinking about the reasoning behind that second amendment makes me think I should have one anyway. So far, I've enjoyed all experiences I've had with handguns, and fairly good accuracy for someone with no training. There's a NRA instruction school somewhere around here...

Well, I'll learn to drive first. I'm attending Seattle / Bellevue Driving School, cause I have to get a license for THAT.

After practice today, Nate, Laura, and Le'a hung out with us around [King Zoo]. Talking with Nate, I realized that he, like many of my cohorts in the computer field, started out in tech support, and has the full complement of tech support stories to trade. In fact, he worked for an ISP in Hawaii which competed with the one I worked for, so he even has stories about unintelligably chinese people calling in and screeching at him. Nate is possibly easier for me to relate to than I had quite realized before. And then there was the small matter of a link I noticed on his desktop when I glanced at his computer. "Nate's Online Journal". Heh heh heh