Tag Archives: wow thats expensive

Holemaking

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17

Went ahead and rented a mini excavator for the Independence Day weekend. The rental of the excavator itself was pretty reasonable. The delivery/pickup for it was another story. But…my small truck probably doesnt have the oomph for a twenty foot trailer, I dont have experience navigating goat trails with a twenty foot trailer, and the last thing I need is to go through the humiliation and expense of getting a twenty foot trailer stuck on some insane switchback on the way to the property. To me, it was worth it to just throw money at it and transfer all that risk and work to someone else. I agree that this is a talent or skill I will need to pick up at some point, but for now…time can substitute for money, and money can substitute for time.

A ‘new’ truck is in the future at some point….Ideally something with the formerly-common-now-hard-to-find eight-foot bed, and a bit more gravitas for hauling heavy loads. But thats at a later date. RIght now, today, I need to get things rolling a little harder and a little faster. Starting this week the days are getting shorter and I’ve done pretty much jack in terms of getting a small structure set up there.

My needs on this holiday trip are stupid simple – two holes about 5-6 feet deep to contain the 500- and 750-gallon Roth Multitanks that I’m purchasing. Dimensionally, they only differ in length…one is about twice the length of the other ….five feet long and nine feet long. This means displacing …hm….51x62x60….four cubic yards for the tank itself and that doesnt include the areas immediately around it or the depth on top of the tank to the surface. About seven cubic yards for the larger tank.

Since I have a three day weekend at that time, it seems like a good time to camp out there. That should be an adventure, what with the bears and all. I need to start getting my list of things to take up there together. If I forget something, the nearest shopping is almost 90 minutes away.

And , in other news, I’m dropping a cashiers check at the surveyors tomorrow. Final price was 66~% of what my ‘worst case’ price would have been. But, it’s worth whatever it cost. I now have a very high level of confidence about what is and is not mine, and, more importantly, what is and is not someone elses.

Which reminds me…gamecam caught another trespasser. I’m already in contact with someone to  install a panel gate across the main-and-obvious entry onto the property. I suspect this was simply someone who drove up my road thinking it was just part of the network of roads up there and then had no choice but to continue to a point where he could turn around. I haven’t detected an malice or criminal intent in the two cases. I think they were just cases of people not really knowing they weren’t supposed to be there. But, I didnt spend that money to not have privacy. So…gate. Gotta get the budget setup for that, get some bids, and get that on the calendar.

Looks like summer will be the expensive season.

Boundaries

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14

Heard b ack from the surveyors today. Theyre gonna start tomorrow.  I hope they know what theyre getting themselves into. I’ve managed to find all four ‘corners’ of the property but its a mix of official, semi-official, and I-think-thats-a-marker.

Corner #1: original marker from the  1915 Land Office survey
Corner #2: modern and official marker of recent installation
Corner #3: cairn of rocks with a sawed of t-post painted blue
Corner #4: fallen tree with a thin metal plate with notes scrived into it indicating border of property

Now, of those four only one could reasonably be considered definitive. Thus, the need for something beyond doubt. I have no intentions of doing anything close enough to the borders of my property that I’d be worried about encroaching onto my neighbor’s property. But I need to know so I can make sure the neighbors don’t encroach onto mine.

I’m hoping these guys will be done and have some info for me at the end of the week. Then its a matter of going up there, following the coords they give me, and seeing exactly where the boundaries of my property end and the neighbors begins.

Also, it’ll be nice to have a final bill as well. I’ve set aside a bunch of money in case of a ‘worst case scenario’ in terms of the amount of work they have to do. Hopefully, they can bring it in for less. But, until I know for sure I have to hold off on big spending so I have the money free to pay these guys.

Signing on the dotted line

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20

Signed the contract with the surveyor yesterday. Maybe now I can get on the calendar and get an idea of when this project will be done. Before I do anything near what I think are the borders of the property, I want to know. I am a very territorial critter and that cuts both ways…I want to know the borders precisely so I can make sure theyre respected, and I want to be twice as sure that Im respecting other peoples property.

Very much looking forward to the day I get the report back from the surveyor with a list of GPS coords to go find the markers with.

Universal currency

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So that happened……..

Normally I don’t buy these little divisibles because the premiums are way high. But, like the little 1-gram gold I bought a few months ago, these had a stupidly low premium … 1.25% over spot. And, thats actually a worse deal than I got on those 1-gram bars a few months back.

I have absolutely no doubt that someone is scrambling to make a post about how I shouldnt be spending money on this sort of thing and should instead be focusing resources on the land acquisition. Dude..use your head: this gold is part of those resources for land acquisition. If a deal like this comes up, I’ll convert some of that cash into gold. Net effect? $0 difference. $200k in cash, and $150k in cash and $50k in gold is still….$200k. Except theres the likelihood of the gold being worth more by the time its time to make the purchase. And, yeah, could go down too…but thats not really something I’m worried about these days.

Heavy metal

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So here’s the thing about gold. If youre in the gold buying and selling gold business, one of the things you try to avoid is buying a large amount of gold and holding onto it. The reason is obvious – if you buy 100 ounces of gold from a customer and the price drops $20 overnight, you’ve just lost two grand. Now, yes, the market could go up $20 overnight and you’d be ahead two grand… but thats not a chance you really want to take in the metals business. I asked my buddy about this and asked why he wouldn’t simply refuse the offer and take a pass on the deal. His answer, which made perfect sense, was that in the buying/selling business (of any product) you don’t last long or get a good reputation if you turn away people who want to sell you stuff.

So, what does this lead up to? Well, my buddy at the coin shop texts me and tells me that a rare opportunity to get a supremely good deal on gold and silver is available.

Apparently, he bought out an estate and wound up with several thousand one gram Valcombi bars, and a whole mountain of 100-gram divisible Valcombi silver bars. How good a deal? Well, I was told not to say, but it was an exceptionally good deal. Good enough to the point that I moved a good chunk of cash into them. He did not want to get caught holding the bag if the market shifted, so he almost immediately turned around and sold the whole thing to a wholesaler. BUT….he knows that Im always willing to buy gold if I can get a good deal on it.

So, I beefed up my gold and silver holdings. I usually prefer 1 oz. bars for my silver, but the Valcombi bars are always interesting and the price was too good to pass up, so I got a big stack of them as well.

Expensive day.

Steyr calling

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Well, the year is approximately 0.8219% over and I haven’t bought a gun yet, so that’s progress.

However…..

My final gun of 2024 showed up today. The conversation at work went like this:

Me: Ok, I’m outta here for lunch. I need to go hunt down FedEx.

Boss: Picking up a gun?

Me: Yup. Want me to bring it by and show it off to you?

Boss: Absolutely!

And that how this monster wound up sitting on the table in the conference room.

It’s a Steyr HS50M1. A five-shot .50 BMG bolt action.

I suppose you’re asking “Hey Zed, don’t you already have a .50?” Yes I do. The Barrett is a long-recoil action, much like a Browning A5 shotgun or Rem Model 8/81 rifle…the whole barrel recoils back and forth with each shot. This is not a recipe for accuracy. But, for what the Barrett was designed for, anti-materiel, it’s just fine. You don’t need a huge degree of accuracy to hit a parked plane, a fuel bladder, a microwave dish, or pipeline manifold…the sort of targets anti-materiel guns are designed for. But if you do want precision in a .50, you’re probably going to have to lean towards a bolt action. My first choice was a Barrett M95 since I already had the 82A1, but finding one was a stretch. Plenty of M99’s out there for about $3500-4000, but I wanted a repeater.

I almost bought the first version of the HS50 when it was still a single-shot gun. Was about $3000 at the time and I just couldn’t swing the deal. Different story nowadays.

This is yet another five-foot gun thats gonna be expensive to top off with glass. But, if I can keep myself from buying any more guns for a while, maybe I can afford the glass something like this deserves…thats gonna be a research project all on its own.

And…I still have to buy the reloading gear.

Another smart question would be why get a .50 ‘long range’ rifle when the .338 Lapua will have similar range and be logistically easier to feed? Well, three reasons. The first is that I just like the idea of having something that .gov doesn’t like people having. Or, in other words, “Because I Can!”.  Second, it’s just dang cool. And third, the .50 has something that the .338 does not – comparatively better availability of AP, API, APIT, Tracer, and Raufoss ammo. And while I will happily go to my grave without ever needing AP, API, APIT, Tracer, and Raufoss ammo, they are all a hoot to shoot at the range at steel. And you never know what the future will bring. When Skynet starts cranking out T-800’s, a little API could be handy.

I have gone __3__ days without buying a gun this year.

The Ruger P-series fetish continues

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Been a good boy and not bought any guns in a couple weeks. But….gun accessories, on the other hand…

I was doing well until an email landed in my box asking if I was interested in some factory mags for the Ruger 9mm P-series….you know…P95DC mags.

Me: How many do you have?

Them: *sigh*

Interesting thing is, this works out to about three mags per gun.