I’m doing something today that I don’t normally do: I’m not buying a new gun.
It’s not that I always buy a gun on the 4th of December, it is just that I could have, but didn’t.
You see, there is a sale of estate firearms going on today at the Central Whidbey Sportsman’s Association range today that a month ago I had full intentions of being at. In fact, seeing as how it was listed as ‘First Come, First Served’, I had planned on arriving over two hours early to make sure that I was the first person there and would therefore be able to pick up the particular firearm I wanted.
Like this one
I have coveted the Remington 513T Matchmaster since my childhood when my father decided that I wasn’t allowed to shoot the one he had inherited from my grandfather. Even at that time, these rifles were quite sought after and nowadays are some of the most expensive 22lr bolties around, some of the military marked ones going for around $800.
The one at the sale was only at 60% so it was being sold for $250, which I was fine with. I didn’t care if I had to replace the barrel and spend another hundred or so more to refinish the stock, I wanted my very own 513T.
Well, then I got pneumonia and I can’t really travel for an hour and a half without stopping to violently hack and cough eight or nine times at five minutes a pop. That and I decided that I wanted one that I wouldn’t have to spend a couple months rebuilding before I could shoot it.
The other deciding factor was the Analog Wife. Not that she wouldn’t let me buy the rifle, it is, after all, my money. It was more to the point that she has been coveting something that pertains to her favorite hobby.
Her hobby is watching TV. Not the most productive task, I’ll give you that, but at least she isn’t frittering away her time at one of the many local casinos or downing a fifth of vodka a day, so I can’t see too much harm in it. Especially since my hobby is putting small holes in paper from long distances. She claims that her tube addiction comes from the fact that she grew up on a military base and never had cable. I don’t know if I believe her or not as I grew up surrounded by firearms, yet that is all I want to do.
She had been coveting one of the ‘New and Improved’ HDTV sets and she spent weeks before Thanksgiving learning all about the different types of HDTV’s and their features and read all the consumer reports about which ones worked the best and had the better reliability rates. She picked a couple that suited her and went through all the ads for a couple weeks and watching the prices drop as Christmas approached. Her problem was that she still needed close to $300 to be able to buy a model I was particularly impressed with her description of at a price that was getting near half of what the thing was going for before Halloween.
Well, I just so happened to have a shade over that amount and after taking the above mentioned factors of the rifle purchase into account, I donated it to her ‘New TV Fund’.
We went out yesterday and picked it up, and since my only involvement in its purchase was donating the truck needed to bring the damnably large contraption home, doing the heavy lifting required to bring it into the house, setting it on the entertainment center and hooking it up, I haven’t the slightest clue as to what it is. I know it has a 34 inch screen because she kept saying that on the way there while bouncing up and down and clapping her hands, though the stereo speakers on the side of thing probably add another six or seven inches to its width and that it wasn’t one of those “HDTV Ready� jobbies as the converter is inside its rearward girth. Oh, and it is a JVC, just like the rest of our entertainment equipment. That was my one stipulation, since my money put her over the top.
It now dominates the living room, which is making her happy.
And this news that I may soon be able to dump close to half of my worthless cable channels if this legislation goes through is making me very happy because I may start watching TV again.
Of course, it is making the lefties pull their hair out and wish death upon those on the right. Because it is “A Right” to some idiots to make us pay for channels we will never watch.
(Links found at LGF)
BTW, I’ve decided that I’ll just wait until I pay the truck off in the next couple months and use my non-existent truck payment dollars to buy my 513T. Unless, of course, I get sidetracked by something else. Which is entirely possible, just not very probable.
