08:04 – I made up chemical bags for both chemistry and biology kits yesterday, enough to build another two or three dozen kits on the fly. Today and tomorrow I’ll work on addressing the items that keep me from building more. Barbara is taking Friday off, and will be working with me on more. By this weekend, I hope to have enough of everything on hand to build another four dozen or so of each kit.
I wonder how much longer normal people are going to continue trying to talk with progressives. By now, it surely must be obvious to anyone with even a grain of sense that talking with progressives is not only useless but counterproductive. Letting them define the rules is foolish. I was just thinking back to the bathtub scene in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, where Eli Wallach is in a bubble bath when an armed assassin enters the room and threatens him verbally at length. Wallach just sits there listening to the threats until he fires his pistol from within the bubbles, blowing the assassin away. Wallach then calmly says, “When you’re gonna shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” I’m thinking that the time for talking with progressives is long past.
12:21 – Boy, am I looking forward to September 30th, Barbara’s last day of work. The big issue is that she’ll be here at home rather than spending her days downtown. She’s a lot safer around here than walking on downtown streets and the parking deck. The other issue is that I can get a whole lot more done with her helping me. When we work on stuff together, we get about three times as much done in a given time, rather than just twice as much.
When she got back from running errands the other day, Barbara commented that she’d seen a civilian carrying a pistol openly, which she didn’t remember ever seeing before. North Carolina is an open-carry state. There’s no permit required. Barbara wasn’t at all put off or nervous about the guy carrying. Like me, she understands that someone who’s casually carrying openly is almost certainly a good guy. He’s not likely to shoot the place up. If anything, he’s likely to come to the defense of unarmed civilians if a bad guy does start shooting.
But I do understand that openly displaying arms makes a lot of people nervous rather than reassured. That’s obviously their problem, but it’s also the reason I’ve never carried openly. Well, that and it makes it easy for a bad guy to know who to shoot first. If the social situation continues to deteriorate, I may rethink that and start carrying again. For years, I literally put on my Colt Combat Commander when I put on my pants, and if things continue going downhill the day may not be far off when I start doing that again.