It's just been too dang cold to do any serious testing - I'd just have to retest everything when it gets warmer. But the offhand rifle practice is doing me a lot of good. 2 1/2 years after spinal fusion I can finally get down into a proper offhand stance again with my left arm down against my ribcage to support the rifle and I can hit clay birds on the target boards and hanging plastic balls at 100yds with no problems.

Has anyone tried one of those Magpul angled AR forends and what do you think of it? The AR has been challenging to find a comfortable offhand position with anything bigger than 5 or 10rd mags. I don't like hooking my fingers around the mag/mag well as I don't find it stable enough for precision shooting. I was thinking one of those forends might help. Thoughts and comments?

At least half of our gongs are under the snow until spring, but there is still one at 25yds and one at 50 that are still shootable. We also have a 25yd clothesline system and some stick-in target stands that we can place anywhere but it's hard to find the motivation to leave the heated shooting house (we have a 55gal barrel stove right next to one of the shooting stations and it stays around 80 degrees even with the shooting window up as long as the stove is cranking). Going out to change targets involves putting on 27 layer of warm clothing as the temps have been pretty much in the single numbers and teens and the wind is too lazy to blow around - it just goes right through you. I thank the shooting gods (and my buddy) for that stove though.

One note of interest: You know those orange self sealing plastic targets of various shapes that you can shoot at and shoot at and they last forever? Don't use them when it's below zero. They get too hard and you blow big holes in them, or they shatter. Live and learn. We only destroyed two before we realized what was going on. The .30cal cast bullets blew 50cal holes in one and a jacketed bullet from the AR disintegrated the other with one shot. We thought we had simply knocked it down, but going out to check we found it in dozens of pieces. Too bad, they are perfect reactive targets in warmer weather and we have a bunch of them.