I got back last night from having spent almost two weeks in Phoenix, helping out around the house while my father was in the hospital. He was close there for a bit, but he pulled though. At least he's not going to lose his leg.

I've found that when I go to PHX because there's a family member in medical trouble, it's important to have something to do mentally. If you don't occupy yourself with some personal timewaster, you'll wind up rattling around that big empty house like a pea in an empty cereal box. It can drive you nuts. Hell, that house at the best of times can drive you nuts. So I tried to stay active and not sit around moping.

To that end, one of the things I wound up doing was building a new PC for my uncle John out of old parts he had laying around. UJ knows that it's too easy to get morose if you've got nothing to do, so he took a couple days off work and came over to hang out and distract me. After we built his PC, he suggested that we go out to Scottsdale Gun Club and do a little shooting. Any chance to get behind the Thompson is one I take -- same as for a chance to hang out with my uncle. Both at once is a double bonus.

I've had problems with my Thompson wherein the screws which hold the rear site onto the top of the frame continually come loose, so I used some red loctite to set them in permanently. Even though it's a fixed site I assumed that it would still change the aiming point of the gun, so I was keen to do some shooting as accurately as I could. Here's my second to last target:

(I should note that this target was made while shooting from the offhand position.)

The gun is shooting a little to the left, which is why my group tends toward the right a bit. I was overcompensating slightly. But 30 rounds fired and one hole in the target ain't all that bad. Especially considering I don't wear my glasses and 40 feet is a little past my myopic range of vision (the trick is to aim for the middle of the black blurry spot).

My last target was a human silouette, and it had this 3" orange dot at center mass. I had two full 30 round magazines to go through, and UJ was already packing up. So I sent the target out to 30 feet and tried to shoot out the orange area for lack of anything better to do with 60 rounds. I didn't know it, but UJ was watching me the whole time while he swept up brass. I shot out all the orange except for this one little sliver and when I turned around, UJ yelled (in his best faux carny voice) "Too bad, son... you almost won the stuffed bear on the top shelf! Step right up and try again!" The guy at the next lane down was also watching (the lanes are separated with lexan) and he was cracking up too. I almost dropped the gun from laughing. Maybe you had to be there...

Anyway, I'm glad I went and lent a hand. But I'm awfully darn glad to be back to normal life.