Three Foot Johnson

The factory that produces Trail Boss, ADI, lost the "Conformité Européenne Certification" for several powders, effective June 1st, 2018. CE certification is a safety, health and environmental protection standard in the European Union. There was enough "in the pipeline" that it was available for 2-3 years afterward, but there was no new production after July 31st, 2018 until they could reformulate powders, submit them for testing, and obtain a new CE certification. Trail Boss is a niche powder, so it wasn't very high on the priority list. I would have bet money it was gone for good, but apparently ADI finally developed and received approval for a new formulation, and Trial Boss is/was being produced again in small quantities. Maybe it's already been discontinued again...?

The blued ones are a bit hard to come by. I have four Ruger Birdshead .45 acp's, three came with blued top & back SBH hammers, and one had a full stainless hammer, go figure.

I bought a very basic dash cam from Walmart a few years ago for under $30, and have caught a couple interesting things. One was an impaired driver on the Interstate swerving across both lanes off the shoulder and into the ditch on each side numerous times. We called 911 and the county sheriff immediately responded in his personal car and civilian attire. Turns out he lived only a couple miles away. Another was a tire that came off a trailer house being towed down the Interstate behind a semi - you can see the semi and trailer at about the five second mark in this clip. The tire went down the Interstate, into the ditch, and back up into the oncoming lanes. The driver of the pickup that hit it started to pull over, then pulled back on the Interstate and kept going. The semi driver never stopped either - it's certainly possible he didn't realize the trailer had shed a tire.

These prices are a bit outdated, but I bought a TTN/Cimarron from Sportsman's Warehouse in 2009 for $399.99, and a second one in 2011 for $389.99, also from SW.

My Fitbit is showing an odd trace today - I don't know what to make of it. The doc said it's likely to be somewhat erratic for a month or two... or even three, and I may need another electric cardioversion on top of the ablation.

I survived the ablation procedure Monday, spent the night at my sister's house, and drove home yesterday. Hard to tell yet, but I think I feel a little better - the cardiologist says the "blanking period" can take up to 2-3 months before everything is healed and my heart "resets". My hearth rhythm has been a little flatter yesterday and today, with high & low spikes not as severe as they have been (52-112 BPM today). Blood pressure has been on the low side (105-110/65ish) but slowly coming back up, and O2 saturation has been a little low (88-90ish). The cardiologist says it's common to have to top ablation off with another electric cardioversion to finish the process, and that it's much more effective after ablation than as a stand alone treatment. I have a follow up evaluation with her in a month and we'll see what she says.

The inspiration for my present alias is a gold miner from Vermont named Henry Davis who struck it rich in the Cariboo mountains near Barkerville, British Columbia in the 1860's. He went there after going bust in California, but all the good spots along Willow Creek had already been claimed. He noticed one seemed to be more than the 100' prescribed by law, so he measured it that night and found it was 112'. Davis filed claim on the twelve foot overage, and took a small fortune off it. Naturally, he earned the moniker "Twelve Foot Davis". I sometimes shoot a pair of 18" Uberti .45 Buntlines, which is three feet of barrel, and also occasionally a 36" shotgun. Since my name is Johnson, I thought Three Foot Johnson was fitting. Some of the Wire's grade school fart joke mentalities vehemently disagree. Oh well.

I found a rather nice 1958 model locally in '05 for $300, EXCEPT somebody had drilled five crude holes in the barrel for a scope mount - not all the way through, but they looked like hell. In '06, I got a very nice barrel off eBay for $78 and rebarreled it.

Gunfighter rigs aren't mandatory either, a crossdraw setup is perfectly fine. As long as it meets the cowbell factor and the entire gun is below the top of the belt, you're GTG.

I bought a nice Model 12 shotgun from a law enforcement clearing house auction in Austin TX in 2019 that had "Bayside Police" electric penciled on the receiver. Looking online, the city of Bayside had a population of 400 in 1990 and has been steadily declining to 273 today. It was 315 in 2019 - maybe it became economically unfeasible to have a police department and it was dissolved. My little hometown of ~2100 has 5 officers, and 1 office clerk. We used to have a part-time judge who's full-time job was at a lead smelter about 350 yards away. No idea who the judge is now.

The rules say the shotgun must have a barrel length of at least 18", and pistol grip configurations aren't allowed.

I held a state job from 2012 - 2017, and spent a lot of time working out of town. Usually my motel stays were planned as part of multi-day jobs, but sometimes on day trips because I couldn't get back to the office before quitting time... ... weird way to operate, but if it looked like I would be a few minutes after 5:00 pm getting back, they absolutely wouldn't authorize overtime, but instead had me get a room, paid the meal allowance, and a day's per diem. So a couple hundred dollars instead of 10-15 minutes overtime. Anyway, the state rate at Comfort Inn was $120ish when I retired in 2017. Eight years ago, so it's probably gone up.

My second oldest granddaughter (18) graduated Saturday from the Montana Youth Challenge Academy in Dillon - think voluntary military school, light. She's a different person than she was 22 weeks ago, with a new sense of direction, self-worth, confidence, and self-respect. She's lived in numerous hovels on the Flathead Indian reservation growing up, comes from a broken home, was very withdrawn, a lot of emotional abuse from her parents, and she's still got some work ahead of her to finish high school or equivalency, but I think she's gonna be OK. Brigadier General Trenton Gibson, the Adjutant General of the National Guard, addressed the graduates, as did the past adjutant, Major General John Hronek, four Montana state legislative Representatives, proxy speeches from Senators Daines and Sheehy, and a few other dignitaries. https://www.mycacademy.org/ Salute to Cadet Reum from a proud grandpa.

I used to work in a noisy industrial plant, and we had the welders fab a pipe bumper air reservoir for one of the pipefitter trucks because we found a huge locomotive air horn in the scrap pile one day. We mounted it on the fender, rigged up a ball valve & T handle through the dash, aired up the tank, and drove around the plant looking for victims. There was plenty of background noise to prevent our mark from hearing the truck roll up on them, and they were wearing earplugs or muffs too, then about ten feet away, we'd pull the T handle. Good times.

To me, those boots look too plain for B-Western, but if your club has an "inspect each other" policy for costume categories and no one complains, so be it. Years ago there was a B-Western shooter here who claimed the small makers stamp his otherwise plain holsters & belt constituted "tooling", and so met the requirements for the category. The belt has a basket weave pattern on the back framing my alias. The 18" holsters have some light stamping, conchos, and slit braid leather pulls. Staged pic at my house - just me, so no need for eyes & ears.