In the morning we got up with every intention of doing some hard manual labor. Unfortunately once we arrived at the farm we got distracted by some old watermelons and oranges that need to be shot up before going in the bin ;-) So we took care of them with my new rifle:
Once the fruit had been taught a lesson we had a go with a target on a bale. As it happens Laura is pretty good at hitting the bulls eye (don't think I'll be having an argument with her any time soon)!
This driving down to the ranch to spend the whole weekend shooting is becoming quite the tradition for us! This time though Mark had dusted off his Winchester 30-30, which in his own words is the "gun that won the west"! For everyone back home it looks exactly like something Clint Eastwood used in most of the films! So we took the truck out and started firing at some targets we had:
Once we'd fired about half of the ammunition Matt's uncle Bill showed up in the 4-wheeler with what looked like a modern Czech version of an AK-47 with a jar of stuff called Tannerite that promised an explosion once hit! So we wondered down the field and placed the jar on top of an old printer box. I think we all had illusions of a smoke flare going off in a lengthy plume of harmless smoke.....what we got was a bit more exciting than that!
Bill took a couple of shots at the jar with his AK-look-a-like until something on it jammed and ended play. So it fell on us to hit this target at about 100 yards with the 30-30.
Both Matt and Mark had a go at hitting the jar.....they were pretty close (Matt even managed to graze it enough to crack the plastic). Eventually we were left with just 5 bullets for Mark's 30-30. He loaded the 5 remaining bullets and took aim. The first 4 were all close but no cigar so we were all starting to think that it just wouldn't happen. Mark took his 5th and final shot and what followed was pretty unexpected. There was an enormous explosion; big enough to shake the ground under your feet, accompanied by a huge plume of white smoke in a 30ft wide ball. Once it cleared a little and the initial shock had passed we took some photos and wondered up to take a look at what was left of the jar and the printer box we had used to raise it up enough to shoot at. Unfortunately we didn't manage to get any great photos of Mark in his moment of glory because our camera operator (Laura) freaked out as a field mouse fled the scene via her foot after the explosion.
As it happened there was very little of the box left and nothing of the plastic jar! Once we got back to the house it turned out that everybody had heard the explosion and were worried what we'd been up to!
The ranch was also home to a new piece of equipment (tractor) as the old one had broken and been sold. We took it out with the mower on to hack down some patches of long grass:
Laura seems to have quite the natural talent when it comes to these things!
Having busied ourselves for much of the day it was time to eat a brilliant spread of food that Becca (Matt's sister) and Rhonda had prepared. We then settled down with some beers played another game of White Elephant (the Christmas present swap / steal game) and a board game. This was also interspersed with some throwing of my new football courtesy of Rhonda and some sampling of different types of pancake syrup courtesy of Laura's White Elephant present giver!
Today (Sunday) we made the long drive back to Houston ready for the start of another week!
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