A while ago I speculated wildly about the cost of heating a jacuzzi. Since then, I got hold of an hour meter and fitted it, so I now know exactly how long the element is on for.

Turned the jacuzzi on on Friday evening, with the water at 10 degrees. On Saturday evening the temperature was at 46 (! — I modified the thermostat a little and my setting was obviously off) with the hour meter reading 12.17 hours. Since the element is a 4kW unit, that’s 48.68 kWh, which costs around R50 these days.

My original calculations worked out to about 28 kWh, but it did not factor in heat loss — i.e.  the energy to heat the water, not to keep it warm.

Well, the hour meter reports that the element was on for six hours from Saturday evening to Sunday afternoon (a period of 19 hours), keeping the water at 40 degrees and the cats happy (they discovered they can lie on the cover, their own hot-water bed). This work out(roughly) to 30 kWh (or R30) per day.

Bottom line: a jacuzzi loses a lot of heat to radiation, and it’s cheaper to turn it on as needed than to leave it on all the time.

So the other day I was at the range with my Rossi SRC in 38 Special / 357 Magnum and I short-stroked the lever and pulled the trigger. *click* — that was to be expected.

But the next trigger pull also resulted in a *click* — Hmmm, broken firing pin.

Of course these things are not available locally, but a question on GunSite put me in contact with  Adlow Engineering (speak to Leon), and R700 got me a new firing pin.

Of course some hand fitting (grindstone and file) was required. No, this is not a trick photograph, I ordered two, kept one for a spare.

The pin is still a bit long, gives a very positive strike. I might have to stone it down a bit more.

This man was one of the main supporters of the South African Firearms Control Act of 2000. He thinks firearms are “evil things“.

This man is responsible for ending smallbore rifle shooting at schools, collecting the rifles, and melting them down.

This man is guilty of corruption and, if all goes well, will end up in jail.

This lady and I have some serious celebrating to do.

From just about everyone in the blogosphere this morning.

“I’ll kill a man in a fair fight. Or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight. Or if he bothers me. Or if there’s a woman. Or if I’m gettin’ paid. Mostly when I’m gettin’ paid.” — Jayne Cobb.

This is the kind of thing I get up to when I’m home alone.

I had some leftover puff pastry, lots of eggs, and a tub of cream a week past its expiry date but! still good!

Started with half a kilo of spicy sausage, skinned, fried, with a coarsely chopped onion. Added to this some tomato, spices, and about half a cup of three chili chutney. While this is cooling down, blind bake the crust. Beat four eggs, add cream, mix with meat. Cheese. Don’t forget the cheese. Pour into crust.

Some people sprinkle flour on the crust before pouring the sauce in. It’s supposed to keep the crust dry or something. I did. Worked for me.

Bake until it looks OK (180 for 20 minutes worked for me).

Almost perfect (It needs bacon. With bacon, it would have been perfect. Everything’s perfect with bacon :-)

Random thoughts.

• Computicket is smoking their socks — They’ve been showing that all seats had been booked out for weeks, and when Tanya got tickets for us, there were only four available — yet at the venue about a third of the seats were empty. Block bookings?
• Got better seats this time. Off to the side, which means we probably escaped the brunt of the loud :-( but the view was good :-)

• Grand West has a serious problem getting lots of people in through security. Once through, the queue disappears.
• None of these guys have the voices they used to have. Ons word almal oud :-)
• Uriah Heep still rocks, even though only Mick Box remains of the band I grew up on.
• Bernie Shaw is Barney when he’s not touring with Uriah Heep.
• It should be illegal to have as much fun behind a set of drums as Russell Gilbrook has.
• Uriah Heep’s sound was awful — some kind of phase distortion in the middle of the keyboards. I suspect one of their floor speakers was beating with the main speakers where we were sitting — because after they re-arranged the stage for Deep Purple things were a lot better.
• We were seated in the middle of the Wildebeest migration. Seriously. Every three minutes someone else decided they needed to be somewhere else. It was like Jane Fonda with heavy metal. Fortunately all these fools settled down eventually.
• Deep Purple rawks.
• Don Airey plays a mean keyboard.
• Steve Morse mag maar ‘n kitaar tokkel.
• They did Lazy! Yeah! But without the bouncy bit from Made in Japan, I guess that bit belongs to Richie Blackmore or Jon Lord.
• Don Airey luves the right hand side of his Hammond organ. He must have a standing order for replacement keys.
• They didn’t do Child in Time. Yea, I know, last time they did was in 2002. One can hope.
• They did come back after leaving the stage and proceeded for another half an hour, with Hush and Black Night.
• Getting home at 2 o’clock on a week night is Not a Good Thing.
• Did I mention that Don Airey is incredible?

I opined that either option was low on common sense, and attempted to point out that all this fuss was over one single swallow. Had his mother been so obliging, perhaps our evening would have not been so marred, but I managed to bite my tongue on that point.

– Stingray, describing a conversation with a clear idiot.

Fsck me, all these old people are my age!

So we went to the Alphaville / Spandau Ballet concert at the Grand West Grand Arena last night.

This is the view from the Q row (hint: there are no R, S or T rows).

Being far away was good, because… it was loud. I want a hi-fi like that. Alphaville was great, lots of good loud noise and stuph. And strobes have certainly improved since the eighties, these must draw the power of a small third world country each.

Spandau Ballet? zzzzzzz. I mean, a very nicely put together show, video footage from waybackwhen, very well done but… it’s still Spandau Ballet :-)  OK, Barricades was great, but the rest was just a variation on the theme. Pick a line, sing it N times, cue a sax solo, sing the line a few more times, end of song.

Maybe I’m just not a Spandau Ballet fan (I’m not. I was there for Alphaville)

Down in the mosh pit golden circle the glow of cellphones has pretty much replaced the traditional cigarette lighter (although a few lighters did come out for Forever Young). In our day you had to smuggle a recording Walkman in to make bootlegs.

Next up: Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Wishbone Ash, on the first. If I can get the damn Computicket site to work right. Right now, it shows either “fully booked” or “no space available” — last night’s show was far from full, so I don’t believe that.

Three girls, lots of guns.

Some photographer friends wanted to do a photoshoot with guns. The range being a much better location for this than the beach (one probably needs a permit and a police escort on the beach these days…), we all hied off there at oh-dark-early this morning, to catch the sunrise.

I didn’t really know what they wanted to do, so I threw most of my rifles, revolvers, pistols, leather and camos in the back of the car. And we ended up using pretty much all of the above.

Savage ’99, Norinco JW-21, Winchester ’94.

Started with leverguns on the steps, then moved to the IPSC / IDPA “funhouse”.

Only one of the three gals had ever handled a gun before, so I started the morning by showing them how to keep their fingers out of the trigger guards, how not to point the guns at people, and the like. But to get realistic photographs, one has to break those rules.

Good thing is, this gal asked me if I was sure when I said “point the gun at me” :-)

I just know that if I don’t say anything, someone is going to run across this posting, Photoshop the above picture, and find out that yes, indeed, that Astra 44 Magnum is loaded for bear.

So before I get an email “Finger on trigger! Loaded gun! Sky! Falling!”… I made dummy rounds specifically for this, because this kinda picture with an empty cylinder is just silly, OK?

After all of this I took one of the gals to the target range, where she shot the Astra NC-6 22 revolver, the Llama XIV 22 pistol, the Norinco 22 levergun, my CZ 22 silhouette boltgun, and the Star DKL 9mm short pistol.

In other words, a Good Day :-)