" I don't know, I'm making this up as I go."

Yeah, slow times 'round these parts. The weather is great though.

Last week skipped a class on Friday and went to the shooting range with a couple of the guys. Shot a pistol and a rifle for the first time. I've always wanted to get into range shooting but never really had anyone to teach me. My buddy Mike is a certified range safety officer and is heavy into military surplus shooting, so he's really helped me along. After firing his 03A3 Springfield a few times I was hooked.

So there's this rifle I've been interested in for about a year now. It's called the Schmidt-Rubin K-31. Its a Swiss rifle from the 1930s thru 1950s. The straight bolt and Swiss design grabbed my attention the first time I saw it. I literally fell in love with it. Its quite affordable too. Prices range from $90 to $200. So this week I finally bit the bullet (pun most definitely intended) and went to the Florida Gun Exchange to order my K31. Price is a bit higher then I expected, but thats because I paid for an "Excellent" condition rifle. I'm not sure when it will arrive but hopefully its before spring break. Now I've got to start buying all the accsories for it.

Finally, over the past few weeks I've been dwelving through some of the excellent asian art books I have. As of late my inspiration to draw has returned. College had effectively taken away interest in art, especially since this school offers no drawing or painting classes whatsoever. This also meant the style in which I drew became so simplified that it was basically cartoon to the max (kawaii anyone?). So, using examples from the artbooks to redevelop techniques, and some practice, I pumped out a drawing of a character I've had floating around in my head. I'm happy with the line art, now I'm just stuck on colors. If anyone (if anyone reads this) has any ideas on what colors to use, let me know. Mostly they just can't be blues or black. Anyway, I'll end with the linart.

"Aim careful, and look the devil in the eye. "

Been a while, eh? Let's see if I can sum up about the last 2 months.

Ended up doing alright in all my classes. Mostly C's and a B. Mostly just glad to get that semester the hell over with. Nothing more boring then general ed. Then I went back home for winter break. Spent time with the family, got to see my dog, tolerated the cats, turned 21. The best part about being home was that I got to spend a little time with my friends, high quality time. Even managed to earn some dough working. Seemed like break was over before I knew it and I was back on a plane to Florida. Thats alright though, I was happy to get back.

The new semester is interesting. Finally back in an Air Traffic Control class. As usual its pretty challenging, but so far I'm averaging a solid A. Also started work on my minor which is going to be Space Studies. Pretty interesting, and somewhat boring, course material. This last week I had 4 tests. I beleive the end result was 3 A's and a B. 100 out of 100 on the math test much to my utter astonishment.

Free time seems to be nill these days. We haven't had time for paintballing at all. No time to go to the shooting range either. Both are planned for next weekend but who knows what will happen between here and then. One thing we did have time for was some races. With speedweeks going on things are pretty hectic in Daytona, but one should always find time for a race or two. Especially when something as high quality as the Grand Am is in town. We went to the Grand Am Cup and the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona.

The rest of the photos can be found right about here. I had good fun taking the shots, so much fun in fact, that I decided it was high time to upgrade my camera. So after some research on what was best for my specific camera, I ended up with this:

What you see is the base camera, which I've had for about a year now, its a Fujifilm S7000. Attached is what I bought, a 55mm Adapter Tube, a UV Filter, and an Olympus TCON-17 Teleconverter. The TCON gives me 1.7x zoom, increasing my effective optical zoom from 6x to 10.2x. Good stuff.

I built my brother a computer. No just any computer, the most amazing computer I've ever seen. Found that building a computer system (once all the proper research is done) can be quite fun. Needless to say its a fast machine. Fastest computer I've ever seen, and thats exactly what I built it for. Parts list looks something like...

AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Processor

ASUS A8N-SLI Motherboard (best mobo EVER!)

eVGA Geforce 7800GT 256mb PCI-Express Graphics Card

Antec 550W Power Supply

1 Stick of Corsair 1 gig DDR RAM

Western Digital 250 gig Serial ATA Hard Drive

Anyway, thats just the main components. Its a very nice machine, I'm rather proud of it. Pity I forgot to take pictures of it.

Well, I think thats everything I can really remember to say about the last couple months. Getting ready soon to start looking into whats going on next year what with living arrangements and so forth. Yeah, definitely gonna do the apartment thing. Just need a roomate I'm not going to kill. But other then that, times are good. Weather could be warmer but s'all good.

Later.