A new Start

[dvw86]

Some of you know that I travel a lot for work (mostly out of country). This makes it tricky to work on guns and makes it plain hard on the family with a wife and six kids at home. I have a work laptop and cell phone so my home office became a neglected mess as well. The last two weeks I have been in Portland OR, Vancouver BC, Calgary Alberta and Quincy WA. I leave here in about an hour to go back to Calgary again for six days.

So as of March 1st I start a new job that has a lot less travel (almost none). I'm really excited about it!

In preparation to loosing my "digital tools" and to having more time at home, I cleaned up my home desk and made it multipurpose. My old Dell was powered up for the first time in a long while and boy was it slow!! Windows 7 had hundreds of updates to install and felt like it was trying to crunch calculations that were meant for the Titan Supercomputer. So a quick virtual trip to download the latest version of Puppy Linux and my old machine is running like a champ once again. It took some tweaking, but now I have two screen working and I can watch the Steve's Gunz video and research the forum at the same time.

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On the side I started gathering up some tools to work on the Rossi 92's. I have 4 of them to finish and I really enjoy it, so I figured that I may as well invest a little time into setting up a work space. As all the odds and ends started cluttering things up, my wife had a good idea and took me to the craft store. This is what she came up with. It's meant for beading, but works pretty darn good for light gun work.

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I can't wait to get back from my last trip and start spending more time at home.

[GasGuzzler]

Nice!

[akuser47]

Nice, I bet the family is excited to. Glad to hear your happy.

[Ranch Dog]

Great to hear that you will have more time at home for your family and your interests. Your wife sounds like a great gal in my book! Nice of her to pitch in with ideas!

[NavyDoc76-80]

Heck, with you home more, i cant wait to see what you come up with! Enjoy!

[btoran]

I used to travel lots for work amd am very thankful I don't anymore. Nice to see the world on someone else's dime, but way too stressful and not good for the family.

[dvw86]

Thank you all. I'm back home!

RD, you are correct, she is the greatest!

The 16" SS 44 is coming apart this week.

[dvw86]

Well, even more new things. My phone was provided by work so I ordered a new one yesterday. $200 later, problem solved.

My wife and I would sometimes watch movies on our Apple TV. One of the old original ones. It was dieing so I picked up a Roku streaming device. $80 later, problem solved.

My wife has decided that she now needs a new computer. The kids need to use her's for homeschooling. $800 bill coming.

Then this morning I turned on my laptop (about 6 years old). The wireless network adapter has failed and I'm getting disk errors. I tried Windows and two versions of Linux. Same errors and symptoms in all three operating systems.

As fun as it is to get new electronics, I would much rather spend the money on a new gun. I may just decide that I can go without a laptop and buy a gun anyways.

[GasGuzzler]

I kept a 2007 XP laptop running with three keyboards, a backlight and transformer, three chargers, four batteries, etc. I just replaced my four year old iPhone 4 with a 6 because it was tough to charge only after disassembling it a few months back to repair the lock button with some BMX inner tube repair patches. Yesterday I replaced a leaking water solenoid on my 3 year old $3K Kenmoore (LG) refrigerator. I disassembled my 2005 double oven control panel a couple years ago to resolder a popped connection. I've replaced the door latch on my 2005 Maytag dishwasher twice and the control knobs on the same year and make glass stove once. Back in the fall I replaced the cracked screen on my 11 YO's tablet (I broke it due to his negligence so I covered it under Daddy Warranty) with parts from a DOA eBay unit.

I feel your pain. I fix other people's crap all day for pay and when I get home there's usually something broken at my place at the table. Four kids 13 and under will do that.