We are snowbound, so it’s been a quiet few days. I’ve done chores around the house and brought in firewood a few times, but except for the occasional gust of wind, it’s pretty silent out there. I guess most of the North East and parts of the Mid-Atlantic are in the same situation.
I saw tiny footprints in the snow heading out from under our front porch. Tiny as in chipmunk sized. Not sure why some little creature ventured out and back; maybe he needed some firewood too. He was headed that direction.
We have not had any mice in the house for months, but I did catch five in the garage not long ago. That must have eliminated them because the traps have been empty ever since and the cat no longer shows a strong desire to sneak through the garage door.
Lead and Brass, the New Precious Metals
Spot Silver seems to have dropped back down to the trading range it was in before the Reddit silver short stories hit the news. I am sure some people made money and others lost it. Looks like the wind left those sails pretty quickly. Gold and Silver will probably continue to head upwards as people seek to get out of a dropping dollar and avoid the impact of inflation.
Brass and Lead (ammunition, that is) continue to head upwards. I saw a brick (500) rounds of Remington 40 grain Thunderbolt .22LR for sale for $185. This is just shockingly high! I dug through my old cache of ammo and I found a brick of 500 thunderbolts that I bought in October of 1998—no doubt in the run up to Y2K—for the grand price of $10.99. So back then basic .22LR was 2.2 cents per round and it is 37 cents each today. Unfortunately, that price is consistent with the price I wrote about a few days ago. So much for cheap plinking.
Checking some online sources, I saw some 5.56 selling for $1.50 to $2 per round. That’s far higher than the $1.20 per round I reported on the 29th. Of course, so many sellers are out of stock that the folks who have it can just keep raising prices.
That raises the question: Who are these desperate people that are paying such outrageous sums for ammo? And why didn’t they plan ahead?
The Man Who Never Missed
In the past few days, I’ve been reading a series of books by Steve Perry that I first read in the late 1980s. I am currently on book 5, but the three most important are: The Man Who Never Missed, Matadora, and The Machiavelli Interface. Some of you may recognize the author’s name. Perry later wrote books in the Star Wars universe, the Alien series, and for Tom Clancy’s “Net Force” series.
All my Steve Perry books were in a box with books by Stephen Hunter and William C. Dietz that had been put away for safe keeping. These are books I didn’t want to part with before I read them again, and so far, it was a good call. They are fun, a good read.
The Matadors series is a story about one man who decides to take down the Confederation, a government that spans 56 planets and 89 space stations, and the people and processes that help him achieve this goal. And while that is interesting in and of itself, aspirational even, seeing the signs of decay in the Confederation echoed here in the U.S. is even more interesting.
I should note that I didn’t pick this book because it was about the overthrow of a government that was experiencing moral decay; that was just a coincidence, but the parallels are hard to miss. If you are a fan of the martial arts, you will enjoy these books.
