With much of the day off yesterday, I decided to continue a multi-stage chore I started earlier in the week: cleaning and reorganizing the garage. Years ago I accomplished this task quite impressively, but in the years that followed, my parents both passed away, Abby’s father died, and our adoptive mother-in-law Dorothy moved into assisted living. All of these personalities owned things that Abby and I wanted to keep for both practical and sentimental reasons, but that left of little choice but to stack and pack.

The impetus for this round of cleaning was a combination of excellent weather (cold, sunny and dry), and my desire to use one of the work benches in the garage as a gun bench. It was becoming insufferable to move drills and boards and gasoline cans off the bench onto the floor, clean our firearms, then pile it all back onto the bench.

Another factor was that I am good at cleaning and organizing, and I have fun doing it. You would probably laugh if you saw me toting a bookshelf to the shed with my iPod on, belting out Walking on Sunshine.

Abby joined me for the second round of this task, mostly to organize her father’s tools. Her father was a machinist, and had about a grillion of every tool you could imagine.

When we got to a stopping point, Abby went inside to warm up, but with nice, cold winter light, I wanted to be outside, so I decided to shoot a little.

Shooters know that after a period of inactivity, a self-defense tell is not how well you shoot overall, but how well you shoot at the start. After all, no criminal lets you have a warm-up period. I dove right in, and my first rounds downrange were pretty close to the mark, and I delivered them confidently. I shot my two Ruger .22 pistols, my 22/45 MkIII, and my SR22. The 22/45 is more accurate, but the SR22 is more fun, more tactical, and a better training and practice pistol.

I set up a seven-yard paint can challenge (because I had a couple of spray paint cans) that involves walking away from the targets, turning and drawing while I keep moving. It was a real confidence builder because I always hit the cans with the first couple of rounds. At one point I double-tapped one of the cans and it shot across the pasture, ejecting green paint as it flew, and making a terrific “fffshhhhh!” sound as it did. After that the whole shoot smelled like paint.

So if you come by on a sunny day and see me dancing around with a broom to Rainy Monday by Shiny Toy Guns, or shooting some shiny not-toy guns, you’ll know what’s going on.