08:56 – Why More Men Are Sitting Down to Pee In my case, it was training by women, starting while I was in college. One girlfriend dumped me after about the third time she got up to pee in the middle of the night and sat on bare porcelain. Well, actually, it was worse than that. She got wet. It took years for me to retrain myself to sit as the default option.
I fell back into “power reading” mode last night and blasted through two of the novels I’d gotten from Kindle Unlimited–510 pages worth–as well as about half of a non-fiction title. Call it 700 pages total. For decades, that was pretty routine for me, maybe 400 to 500 pages of fiction a day. Some weekends I’d go through a dozen novels or more. But for the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve been spending a significant fraction of my reading time on the web and averaging only maybe a couple hundred pages of fiction per evening, or even less. And a lot of that is repetitive because there just isn’t that much new fiction that I want to read. Much better to re-read something I liked.
Kit stuff today. I need to get a dozen or two biology kits built and get started on more chemistry kits, which are starting to run low. One weekend soon we also need to get a bunch of components shifted from their shipping boxes to the inventory shelves and get solid inventory numbers on them.
I also have some longer-term stuff to work on. I’d like to ship at least one new type of kit this autumn, and ideally two. That requires groundwork and time. And of course I’m still putting in serious time on the prepping book.
12:23 – I continue to be impressed with these Ultrafire Cree flashlights. They’re focusable by sliding the front barrel in or out. At tightest focus, the beam becomes square rather than round, as the lens is actually focusing the LED. Walking Colin last night, I pointed the light on tight-beam at the house across the street, which is 50 yards away. The beam at that distance was smaller than the pattern of a 12-gauge shotgun with an 18-inch open cylinder barrel, and it was bright enough to read by. Too bright, in fact, to be comfortable for reading. So I turned it toward a house down the street that’s about 150 meters distant. At that range, the tight-focus beam was still far more than bright enough to aim by, and I suspect it would have been sufficient out to 200 meters or more. I think I’ll clamp one to Barbara’s Ruger Mini-14. The only modification I’d make is to tape the focusing collar in place to keep it from sliding under recoil.