That's a quick look in my deep freeze. It's almost all venison. There is one frozen turkey on the bottom shelf, a bag of rice on the top shelf and a few bags of various beans on the 2nd shelf. You can't see the door but it is filled with venison summer sausage and home made venison jerky, both vacuum sealed.

That is the better part of three deer, one each for myself and my two oldest boys. That is the 9yo's fourth deer and the 7yo's first.

Hunting may not be the answer if the economy goes totally in the tank, and certainly isn't all of the answer, but if you don't have to pay a fortune for a lease and hunting license then you can lower your grocery bill quite a bit.






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Shoe Goo is one of those things everyone should have at least a little bit of. Of course it can make a pair of shoes last a lot longer, but I have another use for it. I fix holes in the pockets of my pants with it. I'm a guy and I often have a bunch of stuff in my pockets and a lot of it has sharp edges that I don't notice until they go through the pocket and leave a hole. A bit of Shoo Goo and the pockets are as good as new. Actually, better. I've worn holes in pockets that I repaired with Shoo Goo but I've never had the Goo let go or fail. The last pocket I repaired took less than one minute of my time and then I let it dry overnight. I could sew it but it would take me much longer. Shoe Goo also makes for sturdy repairs on leather work gloves and coats of any sort.

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I didn't get my new chicken coops built, didn't get the rabbit hutches built, and didn't get the garden planted. My better half had things to do so I had to take care of the kiddos almost the entire weekend. I did get the droppings out of the chicken cage. I've got a nice big pile of it now and I think I'll just spread it out in the area where I will expand the garden if we need to.

I put several pickup bedfulls of mixed chicken, goat, horse, and cow manure on the current garden and plowed it in. This stuff was old and was more soil than manure. Some of it had been on the pile for maybe 4 years and we had to pull grass out of it, so the garden should be in good shape when we get it in.

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I spent some time after the kids went to bed resizing brass. I'm trying to get all of one caliber sized and decapped before I have to get out the trimmer. I've got a power trimmer so the chore isn't so bad once it is set up. Then I'll have to get out the primer pocket swager because I've got a pile of once fired military brass and I'll have to get rid of the primer crimps. Then, I'll get out the little tool to deburr the case mouths and I'll be ready to load them up again.

I have found that RCBS Case Lube 2 is a slicker lube than One Shot spray lube. The One Shot works fine for sizing most rifle cases, but I've got a batch of LC .308 brass that was aparently fired in a machine gun as almost every case is huge. Using the RCBS lube I can force the cases through a small base sizer die with an effort, but most of they were hopeless with the One Shot lube. Sizing cases that were fired in rifles the One Shot works great and is easy. However, if you come across once-fired military cases you may have to use the RCBS lube. My dad had the same experience and his answer was to size the cases first in a regular full length resizer, then put them through the small base sizer, but that seems like too much trouble to me.

The other problem is that all that swelling of the cases and sizing them back down makes the cases longer. In this case something like .030" beyond the max case length which is a lot more than with cases fired in rifles with a tighter headspace. I've thought about spending the money on an X-die with the idea of reducing or eliminating case trimming, but I really don't deal with once-fired military cases that often, and I'm not sure that the X-die takes the cases down to the minimum dimensions like a SB sizer does, so there would be another step in that case.

Happines is not having to worry about where your next box of ammo is coming from.