It was -1 degrees on the back porch this morning, and while some subset of Montanans probably think that's just peachy, here in the saner latitudes it feels a little like the world outside is a single frozen block.

We heavily insulated the house after we bought it, but temperatures like this are rare up here, and the heat pump steadily lost ground during the night.

By morning, it was 50 degrees in the house, and because the previous owner had installed a set of pipes that ran down an outside wall to the basement (a truly bad idea), they'd frozen and there was no water in the kitchen.

Life in the mountains.

Because I have excellent plumbing karma, all I had to do was get the fireplace burning (to help the heat pump) and setup a heater alongside the frozen pipes. A couple hours later we had water (no pipes were burst in the making of this blog post).

Then I was cleaning up a few spam comments on the Underground when I found a post in the "Draft" pile I never finished, and promptly forgot about.

Apparently, old age is treating me about as well as I thought.

The Sporting Clays Shoot (or, embarrassing myself with a shotgun)

While my prowess with a shotgun generally leaves people speechless, what defined this year's sporting clays charity shoot was the wind. Great big gusts of it blew the clay disks on improbable routes -- like UFOs in those eyewitness reports where they change direction at improbable speeds.

Hunting UFOs...

On one station, the birds were launched from a bank behind us and in the steady 15 mph wind, dropped so quickly in front of the stand you had to sweep your shotgun down about as fast as you could move it.

I hit the first four birds (how, I don't know), but the fifth and sixth caught a draft and hung in the air, so I shot under them by a good ten feet.

(Remember, I said "speechless.")

Sadly, this wasn't an exception. The stations were set for the kind of shooter who -- and I'm sure you share my sense of outrage here -- fire a shotgun more than once a year.

At one station, you picked up the bird at 35 yards while it was moving at Warp 7 away from you. All you could see was the edge, and trying to hit it with my 20 gauger felt about as effective as flinging a handful of gravel at it.

I always walk away from this shoot itching to stop in Redding and spend upwards of $2500 on a real sporting clays shotgun (30" barrel, lots of heft), but sadly sanity usually sets in.

There are no sporting clays courses near Trout Underground/Man Cave World Headquarters, and two grand is a lot to spend on a toy you drag out twice a year.

See you with my nose pressed against the glass, Tom Chandler.

These were easy..