How awesome is this?

To Glock or Not To Glock

After years of shooting long guns of every sort I hope to be in the market for my first handgun very shortly.

Here in Canada the red tape involved with acquiring a handgun (“Restricted”) license is a nightmare. I sent in my application on May 10^th and they finally conducted the phone interview with the second of my 2 listed references just this morning. The interview stage is the final stage before approval, so, with any luck, I should have my license within 2 weeks. That would bring the total wait for license approval to 20 weeks, but who’s counting… (our tax dollars hard at work, but I digress).

So, with all that bureaucracy behind me I can finally get to the good stuff – handgun shopping. The question now is: what to buy?

My first pistol will be for target shooting. I’ve thought about this a fair bit over the summer and in my mind I was always going to buy some type of revolver. That line of thought has really changed as I’ve read countless reviews on various types and models of handguns and watched enough small arms videos on YouTube to make my neighbours nervous.

I like revolvers because it seems like they’re more fun to shoot and more interactive than a semi. 3 months ago, if you would have asked me about my interest in Glock firearms I wouldn’t even have had a reply. BUT from all the research I’ve done the Glock 17 seems to be the weapon to beat (Dark Earth model pictured), especially in the new Gen 4 configuration.

Although .22lr is recommended for starters like me, I think I’d out-grow a .22 relatively quickly so that’s where the 9mm comes in. It’s got some jam and it’s relatively inexpensive to shoot (compared to other center-fire calibers anyway).

So the first question is: Revolver or Semi?

Thoughts?

Good Things Will Happen

As a Human Resources professional I’ve been asked many times how to get noticed at work/how to get promoted. Here’s my take in just a few short words.

Put yourself in your boss’s shoes – what kind of people would you like to be around? What kind of behavior would you reward?

Two characteristics that make managing people a drag are complaining and being unreliable. Every boss’s dream employee is someone who comes to work on time every day, does their job flawlessly and offers suggestions instead of complaints. It’s that simple folks.

Be positive, helpful and reliable and good things will happen.

I Fired Someone Again Today

I fired someone again today.

Selfishly, I’m going to talk about what it’s like to be the employer in that situation.

There are countless reasons that terminations take place and many different ways those situations unfold. A former leader once told me “Once a person gets used to firing people they shouldn’t be the one doing it anymore.” I remind myself of that every time I let someone go. Although I can carry out a termination pretty handily after doing them for nearly 10 years I’m still very deeply and profoundly rattled each time.

Because of the gravity of the situation, I do my best to carry out each and every termination coolly, calmly and with respect. I remind myself that this is a person, and people have families, bills, mortgages, self-respect and feelings. No matter what the reason for the dismissal I do my best to let the person leave the meeting with dignity. With the present bit of writing as the exception, I never even use the word “fired”.

As far as gaining experience goes, I’ve been “fortunate” to have been in all kinds of termination scenarios. Flown in to dismiss executives, having an armed guard in the room because of a possibility of extreme aggression, long term employees, short term employees, firings, layoffs – you name it. Probably a few hundred by now.

I’m surprised at how often someone who is being terminated it totally caught off guard. Regardless of how many warnings they receive more often than not they simply can’t believe they’re being let go. I suppose it’s quite a shock. We all love control I guess and being terminated is an extreme example of having all control of a situation being taken away from you.

Maybe this is a perverse thing to ask, but if anyone out there has a termination story I’d love to hear it.

Weekend Music

If you haven't heard Old Crow Medicine Show do "Wagon Wheel" do yourself a favor and kick back for the next 4 minutes. Enjoy!

Good-Bye, Old Friend...

This old beauty is a 1953 Marlin 30-30 lever action carbine, model 336. I've only owned it for a short while but to make some room in the old gun safe I put her on the market.

I hate saying good-bye to old guns, but I do love welcoming new ones into the fold!

The Secret of Freemasonry

Those who become Freemasons only for the sake of finding out the secret of the order, run a very great risk of growing old under the trowel without ever realizing their purpose. Yet there is a secret, but it is so inviolable that it has never been confided or whispered to anyone. Those who stop at the outward crust of things imagine that the secret consists in words, in signs, or that the main point of it is to be found only in reaching the highest degree. This is a mistaken view: the man who guesses the secret of Freemasonry, and to know it you must guess it, reaches that point only through long attendance in the lodges, through deep thinking, comparison, and deduction.

He would not trust that secret to his best friend in Freemasonry, because he is aware that if his friend has not found it out, he could not make any use of it after it had been whispered in his ear. No, he keeps his peace, and the secret remains a secret.

 

Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, Memoirs, Volume 2a, Paris, p. 33

This is a favourite of mine, painted by William Blake a few hundred years ago. It's called The Whirlwind: Ezekiel's Vision of the Cherubim and Eyed Wheels, based on a passage in the book of Ezekiel, Chapter 1:


"15 Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel on the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces. 16 The appearance of the wheels and their work was like to the color of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. 17 When they went, they went on their four sides: and they turned not when they went."

Art lovers and Ancient Alien theorists enjoy!