This person is a shooting coach.

Holy crap, that was some meet.  Not only was this the biggest match I’ve been to (508 shooters) but it attracted so much of the top talent.  Seriously, the guy that finished in 180th place had to beat several Master class shooters to get that far.  I am not one of those, so I had my lowest finish EVER, including one Nationals match in which I was disqualified in the third stage (there were only 298 people in my division that time).  And to get to our area, you had to drive through some sort of trap meet that apparently had a thousand shotgunners (one of whom picked their shotgun up off of the back of their tailgate and brought it directly across my face as I drove by, but I hear that’s typical of shotgunners.)  I have been interested in shotgun sports, but apparently the equipment outlay is considerable between the gun, the F450, the $250k travel trailer (at the low end, there were a few straight-up luxury tour busses out there), the golf cart/ATV for getting around at the venue etc. A highlight was meeting Grummun and his lovely lady (though unfortunately only briefly.)  Here are some pic that the boarding lady sent me of Lily while I was away.

The Frenchies belong to the boarder-lady. No idea who the others are.

 

 

 

 

Lily and unidentified gun dog in the kiddie pool at the resort.  Can’t tell if I know the Berner or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This week starts off with absolutely nothing going on, planet-wise.  By midweek, things start looking downright pleasant, with the Mars-Venus conjunction coming into greater prominence.  On the 7th, the moon is also involved there, which could be a good sign or could mean something more akin to a change in romantic status — whether that’s good or bad depends entirely on your personal situation.

Rak gets its typical early-season boost with the appropriate lucky influence from Mercury.  Leo is hoarding Venus and Mars all to itself, though if seafood feels like challenging the lion for those planets I can only hope the attempt is posted to youtube.  Sagittarius says this is not a good week for the shooting sports.   Sorry there’s so little to report, have another pic by way of apology.

 

This is a VERY popular daycare/boarding The Aussie center-top is Toby. He’s a very good boy, but will sadly be moving to Raleigh.

 

Cancer:  9 of Cups reversed – “Making it rain” might be expensive, but it’s still a good time.

Leo:  Weaselly little backstabber… but he’s on your side.

Virgo:  Wheel of Fortune reversed – Is it really good luck if you keep getting stuff that you don’t really want?

Libra:  8 of Coins reversed – If you were expecting to realize profits, I’m sorry.

Scorpio:  8 of Swords – Oh woe is me.  Look at how much I am suffering.

Sagittarius:  The Star reversed – Amber Heard (or equivalent).

Capricorn:  King of Wands reversed – A burly dude with a large truck opposes you.

Aquarius:  8 of Wands reversed – Jealousy and petty things that slow you down (rock in the shoe, long train at a RR crossing, etc.)

Pisces:  Temperance – Boring but effective.

Aries:  6 of Cups reversed – This card has an unusually particular meaning:  “Two long-term acquaintances having completely different memories of a shared event.”

Taurus:  3 of Coins reversed – There will be strong urges to halfass things.

Gemini:  Ace of Swords – When you redline the engine, sometimes it explodes.  Don’t do that.

Back to the match results, it is remarkable how “shooting to win” differs from “shooting for a good score.”  Since I was doing the latter I wound up with some very interesting relative finishes.   On the Beretta side match, since there was only one prize and there was no way I was going to get it, I wound up in the top half.  All the guys who had a legitimate shot at winning it went all-out and since the rules are just brutal for any mistakes, many of them finished below me.  “Hero or Zero” winds up with a high percentage of zeroes here.  Ditto stages where I placed a healthy respect for the difficulty of the shots — I wound up beating some national/world champions that shanked a one-handed shot at speed taking the shot off of the designated target and onto the no-shoot placed low left (extra grief for it being Virginia Count).  But what I found particularly fascinating was one stage that I finished over hundred places higher than any other one:

In the final arrangement, T7 was between the poppers and the barrel. It made for a nice dramatic finish.

…I have no idea why. There is literally nothing weird or wacky about this stage.  It’s completely normal.  I mean yes, this is one of the few stages I didn’t fuck up by leaving targets too early (a bigger problem when dot-shooting than I realized) but WTF tripped up all those Ms and Gs that ended up below me?  Did they try some exotic stage plan (I shoot it in the obvious way — popper-popper-paper-swinger-swinger then clockwise to the other two shooting positions) to shave off a few tenths of a second?  Did I luck out such that my shooting cadence caught the swingers just right and saved a cycle?  I did rip the last six shots off fast enough to get a “woo!” but that’s nothing that a much better shooter couldn’t have also done.  I’d like to believe that this represents my true ability if I can keep my head out of my ass, but the other 19 stages tell me otherwise (though there was much assheading on those).