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Gambling is alluring to most people and has gotten more popular than ever with high stakes poker shows on cable television and casinos sprouting up all over the place. But the biggest mecca for gambling isn’t Los Vegas. It is Wall Street.

Watching the markets claw their way to positive gains today, I’m struck by how addictive behaviors make their presence felt in even what should be the most sober of locations. There is no good economic news and only vague hopes of another stimulus or some such reassurance from the Fed. Speculation has lost what rationality it had at some point in the past and I’ll leave that to someone to pinpoint.

It eerily reminds me of partying before a disaster hits. Or in this case, during the opening stages of one.

Ah, well. One can’t live life without taking a few chances. I’ve made a few gambles in life that didn’t pay off, though for the most part they weren’t financial ones. My latest to go awry is an attempt to make my pistol accurate.

The Ruger P94 I have had since the late 90’s has never been accurate. At best, I could throw bullets with the same results. But through trial and much error, the problem has been narrowed down to sights that hit at least 6 inches too low.

I’d hoped adding Hogue grips would help. Today I finally got to test the modified pistol out with them. They did help in the horizontal, oddly. But the sights are still horrible. Even making a triangle with the dots only elevated shots to three inches low. Lining up the dots is supposed to be dead on at 7 yards but doing that took me completely off the paper 7 out of 10 shots.

Now I’m debating selling or trading in the gun and getting a different used pistol. With my friend’s Springfield XDM, I wasn’t just on paper on the first try but shot a nice fist sized group about two inches low. So my trigger technique does need work but it isn’t 6” plus bad.

I also broke the plastic head of my small crafting hammer while trying to remove the rear sights during an experiment to see if I could change them out myself. Insult to injury or injury to insult?

So $20 down the drain on the grips. It would be another $130 to get new adjustable sights and pay a gunsmith to put them on. I’m not enthused.