The TRPC

The TRPC is the Tallahassee Rifle and Pistol Club and that is where I spent my morning.  Over the weekend my dad gave me a .22 caliber pistol and showed me some basic gun safety. 

Remember how I said I wanted to learn how to shoot?  Well today I got that opportunity to start learning how to handle a gun.  My uncle took me over there and began to teach me how to hold, load, aim, and fire a weapon. 

Let me tell you this: shooting a gun is fun!  It is hard, explosive power coming out of your hands and I want to do it again.  It is a rush of adrenaline for sure.  Additionally, I don't know about other people's experiences but I had never been around a gun before.  My father does not hunt and I did not grow up around weapons.  I remember that my dad had a shotgun in his closet when I was younger but my brother picked it up, and under the weight of it promptly dropped it, ripping a hole in my parents' comforter.  That gun was gone by sunset and never graced our door again.

Anyways, being able to shoot a gun today was kind of like being in a movie.  All of my previous experience with guns was seeing them in cinema or on television, almost in a mythic way, always seeing, never handling.  Today that changed.  I now know for myself how heavy they are and how difficult it is to hold a gun out in front of you for more than a few minutes.  I saw the smoke, smelled the gun powder, heard the loud crack of my gun as well as other people's.  Today I got to interact with something that few people in my social sphere get to experience.

As far as the rest of the day, things went really well.  I met with a friend, Meghan, who looked over my syllabus, my two lectures, and talked with me about my expectations as well as those of my students.  I really appreciated her taking the time to give me some advice.

I won't bore you with the details of my diet but I will tell you that I managed to stay under 1700 calories.  I experience significant hunger in the afternoon and did give in to the temptation of quick sugar but I worked it into my day's eating.  I did not get home early enough to go for a run but I did take Jackson on a 35 minute walk around the neighborhood.