I’ve been shooting a lot of skeet though recently. I’ve lost track of how many rounds I’ve done… maybe 15 or so. I started out horribly. My first round ever I hit 4. It was really disappointing, and the next couple rounds were about the same. A couple weekends ago I went Saturday and Sunday and something finally clicked. I told myself when I headed out Saturday, “I’ll be happy if I hit 10.” That’ll be 2 better than my previous best.

Unfortunately, when I got there, it seems a bunch of kids were shooting with their parents…and taking FOREVER about it. Also, one of the mothers should not have been holding a gun. She would consistently shoot, then swing the muzzle down, turn and face the group of people and start blabbing about how she missed/hit/chipped a target….all while pointing the gun at them…. Range Officer kept yelling at her about it, and she kept doing it. I’m quite glad I was not on the field with her. So while I waited for them to be finished, a couple other guys and I sat in the range officers office and chatted.

Finally it was our turn. We had a group of 6, but were all fairly efficient about getting through our stations. At the end, I totaled up my scores and had hit a 13! Whoa, maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this We went back inside to warm up (it was about 35 degrees out), and then went and shot one more round before it got dark. This one went even better with a personal score  of 17! I started feeling a lot better about the game at this point, but it was dark and it was not one of the nights they turn on the field lights so we could shoot into the evening.

The next day (Sunday), one of the members of the gun club I am going to be joining invited me to go out shooting at that club. Drove up there and shot 3 rounds of skeet, all of them in the mid-teens. I think they were 14,17,16 if I recall correctly.

About a week and a half later I went back to the ORSA club again with Bob Hedrick from church and we shot 4 rounds and I didn’t really keep track of my scores, just focused on improving my form and learning what I could from the other much more experienced shooters.

Now we’re somewhere around Christmas… Jeanette wrote something about our days of shooting on her blog. Won’t touch on that too much right now. Maybe I’ll write another post.

Today (Jan 2nd), I was invited by yet another person I’ve met locally to go with him and a few of his friends to Chilhowee Sportsman’s Club to shoot Sporting Clays. That field has a large Sporting Clays field consisting of 14 stands, with various presentations and either report pairs, or true pairs. A single round is 100 shots, although there is some way to do a 50-shot round, though I’m not sure how. Anyhow, it was a lot of fun and a great learning experience. Downside is it’s fairly expensive. Average cost for 100 rounds of skeet or trap is about $20… member prices at ORSA are $2.50/25 for a cost of $10/100 which is as cheap as I’ve ever seen clay rounds. The 100 round Sporting Clays at Chilhowee are a steep $37 for non-members, and $27 for members. This is somewhat understandable given that Chilhowee is run as a business, whereas JSHEC is funded by the TN Wildlife Resources Agency, and ORSA is a non-profit organization. Regardless, it’s about the only field like that I know of in the area, so it’s worth the extra cash to shoot such a unique collection of targets once in a while. I can’t see myself going more than a few times a year though at that rate.

Anyhow, I think I’m done with this post. It may not read very linearly as I’ve written it over about 2 weeks, forgetting about it over most of the Christmas break, but I tried to fix the time-sensitive wording to make more sense.

This book (which I recently learned is actually an article that appeared in The New Yorker) is stunning. At first I was taken aback by the flat tone of the writing, but was quickly drawn into the report because of it. The absolute horror of the atomic bombing is sandwiched between the normalcy of the six survivors’ early morning on August 6th, 1945 and the rebuilt lives after the bombing. The matter-of-fact report of the Hiroshima bombing is a must-read.

Anything more that I write would be trite. This book speaks for itself.

-Tiff