What, again?

What a wierd dream.  I know, I know, dream post can get tiresome.  I only publish the ones with decent gun content.  Mea Culpa.

I was attending a blog shoot.

RobertaX, Tam, and Robb Allen were there.  They stuck out because they were bloggers I hadn't met before but there were lots of other familiar faces present.  It was like a Northcoast blogshoot, PLUS.  And not in Ohio.

It was on property Roberta knew and very wooded.  It might have been the X's ancestral grounds.  Roberta, it seemed in the dream, was land rich, but money poor, maybe?  The shooting lanes on the acreage were tight and narrow but the berms were very good.  It felt a little too open in other ways tho.  The lanes spoked out 180 degrees from a central area, and that just felt wrong.  But I was the only one feeling hinky about it.

It was here that I had a BIG shooting epiphany.  I was having my usual issues, exacerbated by the relatively long distance to the target than I usually shoot with a 1911.  Then suddenly everything seemed to slow down and all noise was shut out from my conscoiusness.  The target I was shooting at seemed to get magnified in my vision, like I was looking at it with a scope.  The front sight and target were both in focus somehow and it was as steady as a rock in my hands.  My trigger finger was sublime, and when the shot went off I could SEE the bullet's flight as it arced over to hit where I wanted it.  I remember thinking, "so THAT'S what shooting should be like" as it felt like I had gained some sort of Superpower.  Finally.

Then, my gun broke.  What looked like a pot metal M1 Garand receiver fell half out the back of the 1911 on slide lockback.  Odd.  That thing should be too big to fit in there.  It was bigger than the pistol frame.  The broken piece was easily pulled all the way out of the rear of the pistol so I could examine it.  I could see the two spots that had broken around a hole for a pin of some sort.  That's when I met Tam.  She walked up and said, "Let me see the patient... Oh yes, this happens a bit with this brand of pistol and I can get it up and running in a trice.  It's drop in, no real pistolsmithing needed.  Just let me get my box of parts."  I blinked twice and off she went.  It then occurred to me that the lockback may have been from the part failure and not that I was out of ammo.  The slide resumed it's normal position after the loose broken part was removed.  I didn't want to hand Tam a single action BROKEN pistol with a round in the pipe when she came back, but it was tricky to turn to a place to double check it was cleared.  I also decided that it's ok to sit there and look at the thing like a duck in thunder when an impossibly sized part falls off of the gun and doesn't appear, outwardly, to negatively effect its function.  

The dream continued the talk got around to a sorta Stanley #10.25 low-angle rabbet plane Roberta found.  Which is odd, because the company never made a low angle version.  Roberta and I knew what it was, and people asked why we were so impressed.  It's a quite valuable plane model normally, the #10.25 and with this low angle variant, and the obvious age of the thing based on the knob shape... it was probably worth half a mint.  It might be a one off or prototype and made by Mr. Bailey his ownself, and tool collectors, clad in spiked golf shoes, would step over their own mother for the privilege of buying it off Rx.  We talked about a weakness in the design where the cast iron was fragile and susceptible to breakage, and were encouraged that there was no evidence of a brazing repair.  For goodness sake, Roberta, don't drop it.  If you want one for yourself to use, they are made new.  The old ones are collector bait, only.  And I prefer the #289 rabbet plane for the job, at any rate.

Later, after the shoot, we were then at Robb Allen's place.  Which was definitely not Florida, plus Robb was definitely wearing pants.  And Robb was rocking his facial hair, which he call his "Pr0n stache," though it looked more like Clark Gable's stylish, thin, cookie duster.  He told a story about how he got out of the Marines and grew it, and was dating women before he met the woman that was to be his wife (for all I know, in real life, he got married to his wife before he even got into the Corps...)  One of the women hated the mustache and told him to get rid of it or she wouldn't continue to go out with him.  Instead of acquiescing, he fashioned a little puppet out of his mustache, with hands on the tips he could control with wire to make small (and rude) hand gestures, and the head in the center under his nose.  He used this puppet to make fun of the woman, tell her that the stache and Robb were a package deal, and that he would break up with HER if she didn't grow one herself.  And that's how he dumped her.  It was hilarious to everybody in the dream, but that was helped by Robb donning the puppet and re-enacting the scene.  The puppet had an outrageous French accent.

And then the alarm kicked off.