CHIEF

We went to our local sushi joint last night. We know the whole family that owns it. We always sit at the bar to bullshit with them. They are from Hong Kong originally. Of course, they have Christmas music playing, and "Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly" came on. In true A Christmas Story style Mrs, CHIEF belts out "fa ra ra ra, ra ra ra ra ra ra". I gave her a kick, should have seen the look on her face when she realized what she had just done. Our buddies from Hong Kong just died laughing as she desperately explained that it was from a movie, then they told her to be sure and drink her Ovaltine. CHIEF

I can't wait for aggy to claim they are among the elite in college football, only for the Netflix narrator to say, "Elite? Aren't y'all slightly above average, usually 8-4, with no championship of any kind this century?" CHIEF

The only Lexus to get is the five liter. They are a dinosaur, which I love. The last N/A sport sedan built is the IS 500. I will own one till they don't make them anymore. When I bought the GS-F in 2019, I could have bought an M5 with about the same miles for a couple of grand cheaper. BUT, Edmund's has a feature that shows estimated repair bills, and estimated trade-in value at 100k miles. The Lexus was estimated to have almost $20k less of repair bills and a $20k difference to the positive on trade-in value. It is truly the most cost effective investment in a depreciating asset that I have ever owned. Boring? Probably to some, but not to the other 90% that have never been in a sub five second zero to sixty, 150 mph+ automobile. Ours isn't a garage queen weekend warrior, it's our everyday family hauler, momma's work car, and the primary transportation, to Austin, for football games. So for us, it is practical and dependable. CHIEF'

Yep, page 2. I use two of the oven bags, in case one breaks (they come in a two pack anyway). Drop it in the water till all the air is gone. Cold smoke 2-3 hours afterward. My smoker will still make a crust at a low temp. If yours doesn't may want to put it on a high temp grill and sear it on each side for a couple of minutes between turns. CHIEF

I thought the Earth was flat, but couldn't be a disc, because how can you banish anything or any one to the "four corners of the Earth." CHIEF

Here is a drone operator that says if it were civilians, there would have been arrests already, and a statement made by government officials. If it were aliens, or adversaries they likely would not have lights, and the government would be much more alarmed than what they are projecting. He 100% believes it is our own government operating them. But let's face it. A statement of "The drones are ours. Their mission is classified, but they are there for your protection" would never fly, especially in Jersey. CHIEF

To put this in prospective, I can remember where I watched the game the last time aggy won a conference championship. Mrs. CHIEF, and a six month old CHIEF Jr., and I had gone with my BIL and his pregnant wife to Tequila Texas at the bottom of the hill going up to Jester Estates. My niece, who my pregnant ex-SIL was pregnant with is now a degreed mother with an 18 month old of her own. CHIEF

That middle coin isn't very big. I guess its a "Little Caesars"? CHIEF

That is kinda the rule in rural America, you take what you can get. My F350 spare is still a Michelin take-off of a ranch truck. It is a highway tire, that was taken off of a 6666 Ranch truck in exchange for mud grips. You have a flat in Guthrie, Texas, and you will take anything. CHIEF

I've been guilty of running a harder compound when I want to get more mileage out of a tire. Mrs. CHIEF and I have had soft compound tires on our cars for nearly 30 years. The seller may have thought that you aren't gonna use it in tight corners and don't want you to come back on him as buying tires that wear too fast. This was a common practice in the 80s and 90s in the area where I lived. I remember buying 17" Z-rated tires for $234, a lot of money at the time, and getting 6-8k miles on them, so $2k worth of tires per year, over 25 years ago. CHIEF

Does the car run expensive tires? Maybe he is getting a car with the same tire size, the expensive ones had plenty of meat left, so he removed them and put cheap Chinese tires on it. That cheap bastard. Looking at only 12k miles on the first set, are they soft compound? I know from experience those fuckers ain't cheap. We usually get 10-12k on my wife's car before having to go pay $1200/set for new ones. CHIEF

If not, here is a good Christmas present for your youngest, my son's first gun: https://www.academy.com/p/heritage-rough-rider-22-caliber-revolver-200023427 That is even the same price that I paid for CHIEF Jr.'s twenty years ago. It has had about a million subsonic rounds through it. Pretty quite, and great for plinking. CHIEF

That's why I think there was a hangup with the FAA. Pilots and air traffic controllers would be panicking if they were seeing things on their radar with no visual confirmation. Military was put in a "no win" situation on that. You couldn't keep this under wraps, pilots and air traffic controllers aren't going to sit on that information. CHIEF

This is kinda where I'm at. But, I possibly think there could be something going on that they just can't tell the public, like a "for sure" dirty bomb threat that the intelligence agencies can't disclose without panicking the public. I mean, "radiation detection" has been floated out there. Maybe these drones have such good detection systems, they are scanning planes on final approach and taxiing. As for the lights? Maybe an FAA hangup. It could also be testing radiation detection drones for when Russia collapses and all of their arsenal gets pillaged and goes to the highest bidder. Run the drones in during the initial chaos and confiscate anything you can find. It may be a kinda like a MIB movie, where we come close to annihilation every day, and we are completely oblivious to it, as the intelligence agencies eliminate the threat and we never know. CHIEF

If frog legs are on the menu, my son is going to order them every time. We have access to a ranch with several large stock tanks on it, absolutely filled with huge bull frogs. He and the ranchers son don't use gigs all that much, but throw buzz baits and smaller frog imitations into the bull frogs territory which they attack. He brings them back, and I don't care how many frogs he has, will have his mom fry them up and eat the whole batch himself. I'm lucky to get one leg. If I make an online order to Cajun Grocer, I absolutely have to order frog legs as well. CHIEF

And the name of that cheap, generic, Chinese tire? You guessed it, Bang Ding Ow. A wholly owned subsidiary of Sum Ting Wong. CHIEF

I've been lucky enough to see three. Two smaller ones and a "muy grande" sitting on the side of the road in a snowstorm south of Post, Texas. I was driving a small car, and his eye level was higher than mine. I have not seen the ones, here, in my neighborhood. But our Nextdoor page has probably a dozen photos of them that I do not know how to cut and paste. One of the photos is a big mountain lion sunning on one of my good friend's back porch, in the middle of the day. Someone took the photo of it from the 7th fairway. CHIEF Jr. and one of his buddies used to hunt in some really rough country across the river from us back in junior high. They were young enough that his buddy's dad or myself would drop them off and pick them up. I picked them up after an evening hunt one day and asked them if they saw anything. CHIEF Jr. saw zip, but his buddy said he watched a mother mountain lion and her three cubs play under his stand for over an hour. I was really proud of him as he didn't want to shoot the mother and leave the cubs to starve. I told him that he may be the only person alive to ever get that opportunity in the wild. I've posted this story before on another thread, but can't remember which one. CHIEF

Yes, he was the first to use them, here, in Texas, and was credited with introducing them to the state. He had kennels and about 40 dogs for sale all the time. He never had problems with coyotes but every few years, he would lose a dog or two when they got in a scrape with a mountain lion. As far as melanistic mountain lions, they do exist, I watched one for about 15 minutes walk up our driveway at the ranch. The local game biologist for TPWD told me "black panthers" don't exist, but I know what I saw. It wasn't huge, but probably still weighed 60 pounds. That was about 35 years ago. CHIEF

When I and Mrs. CHIEF first met, we still owned the ranch in Bosque county. It was Angora goat country, so there were plenty of mountain lions. We went to go sit in a blind for an evening hunt. As we got close to the blind I could smell a goat carcass across the fence. We hoped over the fence to inspect it. It was about half eaten and had cat prints all around it, and the tracks were huge. The neighbor had Commodore dogs and some donkeys for guarding the goats. But cougars are smart, they appear in the front of the goat herd, and when the dogs and donkeys run up to protect the front of the herd, they will sneak around to the back of the herd and pick off a goat. Mrs. CHIEF was a young, naive, city girl, and had never much heard a donkey bray, so when one of the donkeys went off about a hundred yards away, I had her convinced that it was the mountain lion upset that we were near his kill. She was absolutely mortified. She was in tears thinking we were gonna get attacked on the way back to the truck. I felt so bad, I finally fessed up that it was a donkey. Still cannot, to this day, believe that she didn't know what the sound was. CHIEF

We have a huge deer population and multiple mountain lions in our neighborhood. CHIEF

That was the joke on the way there. Might get the Lexus Land Cruiser as a bonus. Still laughing about it this morning. CHIEF

Well Mrs. CHIEF's GS-F went out of warranty, and its possible the transmission cooler had antifreeze leaking into the transmission, so things were about to get really expensive. I once thought Lexus parts and labor would be cheaper than European cars, but no. Not really. Got almost $35k for it after driving it for five years and almost 70k miles, it is a nine year old car. It was in decent shape, but the carbon fiber accents were delaminating and cracking, it had a few dings. I'll take $14k depreciation over five years and those miles. We basically bought the same car, but a bit of a smaller package. IS 500, it is one of 53 ever built with the Incognito exterior and red leather gut interior. It is dated, but nothing I love better than a sport sedan with a naturally aspirated V8. There are only 150 IDS 500s exported to the US each year. It is about the last of it's kind. So Mrs. CHIEF had her "December to Remember." We both absolutely hate those commercials. CHIEF

If he is gonna shoot a big boy gun, he is gonna shoot big boy pills. I got him a couple of boxes of 50 round 200 gr. FMJs for plinking, and a box of 230 gr. JHPs for business. CHIEF

If you want a cheap infrared set up, and don't want to spend a shit ton of money on a thermal. You can get set up for less than $130. CHIEF Jr. and I did something like this, but with a set of infrared binoculars that cost much more than this pair, and not near as good of reviews. You can take this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCNKDGVW/ref=sspa_dk_detail_3?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B0DCNKDGVW&pd_rd_w=QzKKS&content-id=amzn1.sym.8c2f9165-8e93-42a1-8313-73d3809141a2&pf_rd_p=8c2f9165-8e93-42a1-8313-73d3809141a2&pf_rd_r=350T79PFHKVDWNK7ZPHV&pd_rd_wg=097rf&pd_rd_r=b90364de-503e-4c73-a2e8-9e5e0bba66f5&s=photo&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9kZXRhaWw and see out to a hundred yards or so. But you add this $20 infrared flashlight, and you can see out to 400-500 yards: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FJ3F54T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 It has worked well for us. I didn't want to spend the money for a thermal monocular, so we glass with this set up, get a bearing and then switch to the thermal on the .300BLK. You can also use an infrared scope and use green/red lights as an instant on and lay waste as well. CHIEF

Well, CHIEF Jr. almost got ran over by a 350 lb. boar the other night, at the lease. He kinda acted lighthearted around me. But Mrs. CHIEF and my nephew said it kinda rattled him. He is a bit tough to buy for, for Christmas, but he told me he wanted a 10mm, as his 9mm Sig just doesn't have enough lead in it's pencil. Looking like it will be an FN 510 Tactical. Looks to be running $899 at Palmetto State. It is a big ol' bastard. https://fnamerica.com/products/pistols/fn-510-tactical/ CHIEF