On the wall of the living room is a display rack. My family got it for me for my birthday. It has an American Flag motif and holds four rifles and has a small cabinet at the bottom for ammo and other accouterments.

On the bottom is a Henry Golden Boy in .22LR. Squirrel gun.

Above that is a Rossi R92 in .357 magnum. Raccoon rifle.

Above that is a Winchester ’95 in 30-30. Deer rifle.

At the top sits a Henry in 45-70. Bear rifle.

The .22lr is mostly a showpiece. It is fun to run, but it is not my go to for taking squirrels. The R92 is the rifle I’m most likely to pick up when things go bump in the night. The 30-30 is too big for small game. The 45-70 is there for when it is needed.

The 45-70 is firing +P rounds. When the first round hit the 8in steel, it knocked the plate off the chains. The 30-30 is firing cast bullets, and I’ve not had any luck with the new mold. I haven’t made the time to cast, and it is too freaking hot to do casting right now. I did source 300 Hornady FTX bullets, so I’ll be loading some rounds up shortly.

Which brings me to the dumb. I’ve been shooting cast bullets out of the R92 loaded over 5 grains of TiteGroup. Nice load. In .38 SPL, 5gr is a +p load behind a 125GR HDY XTP, which is what I loaded up over the weekend. I only shot it out of the Ruger GP100. It did what it was supposed to. Felt pleasant in the hand.

Subsequently, I went to load up some .357 magnums. I checked my notes a few times, wrote down the recipe. Double-checked here and there. Did one final check and then started loading 158gr Hornady XTP over [REDACTED] grains of Alliant 2400. Loaded 50 rounds. Went out to the range and sent 5 rounds down range.

Nice punch. Recoil was there. It even left a small ache afterward. It made the steel ring and swing. Then I cleaned everything and was getting ready to shut down for the night when it occurred to me to check another number.

Yep. The amount of 2400 for a 125 gr XTP was what I put under that 158 gr XTP.

Yeah, those rounds are hot.

I checked the primers for over pressure. There might be some signs, but nothing really stands out.

Today I decided to check the loads out in the Ruger.

Now that was a kick. It RANG the steel. When it hit the box with the spatter target on it, the box jumped. Lots of energy being transferred.

I should have stopped the first time I tried to cock the hammer and the cylinder didn’t want to rotate freely. A little help, and it rotated into position for the next shot.

After we were done, I went back in and went to dump the cylinder. The cases didn’t fall out. That’s ok. I’m told it happens. I pushed on the ejector rod. Nothing. The cases didn’t even budge a little bit.

In the end, I took to tapping the ejector rod gently until the cases ejected.

The pressure was high enough to pressure from the cases to the cylinder walls. Those rounds are not going into the revolver again. They are far too hot for that hand gun.

I’m torn. What I should do is pull every round. What I want to do is just send them down range through the R92.

Do as I say, if you make a hot load and you know it. Don’t mess around, just pull them. You can save the bullets. So what if you lose a bit of powder.

That’s what I felt like, working issues yesterday. There was always another problem to fix.

It is 2100 and after 6 hours of working with our cloud provider, everything is back.

There was a hardware glitch that caused a node to fail. The website automatically moved to a new node and attempted to restart. Unfortunately, that hardware glitch caused the cluster to believe that the node was still there and still working. Since it was there and working, none of the resources (disk space) used by GFZ was released.

Because the resource did not release, the website on the new node would not start.

Linode took 8 calls from me, 22 ticket updates and worked the entire 6 hours to get things working again.

I’m sorry the site was down for so long. I’m working with Linode management to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Furthermore, I’m also looking at options for shared file systems so that a pod can move from node to node seamlessly.

AWA