4 November 1810
Bahía Malaga, Cauca, New Granada.

For not having shoot a weapon before I guess this was not too bad.  Anyhow I have to practice my aiming skills, but this felt nice.   Powerful I should say.

Having these rifles in my hand I begin to thing if shotguns would be a better choice, or at least desirable in certain situations like close combat or fighting in the interior of a fortification.  rifles are nice enough if we only learn how to aim properly.

I have been trying to avoid questions about how I met James Dahl and, specially, how we made these arrangements.  I only said that I met this Cascadian in California before the revolution and have exchanged some letters with him, then I begun to mumble and finally I keep quite.  Anyhow the way they ask questions make me thing that they are suspecting there is something weird I hide in my backpack.  Anyhow that tragic story of my wife dying giving birth is the excuse I use for not wanting to talk about Cascadia.  I have still not told them that this Cascadian is vice-president James Dahl.

Except for my laptop I had not met James before.  It was weird.  As an Uptimer there was things we could share that I could not with the Newgranadians, but after all these days together I feel these guys were more of my kind than James.  Anyhow they are Newgranadians and I am Colombian and we can share the language, the faith, the ideals of a independent country... No.  There is actually little we share but they are my kind even if I am not theirs.

On the other hand James is a foreigner.  A nice guy, a different set of things that we share, but a foreigner.  Cascadia is an alien nation for me, much as New Granada.

James asked me on uptime news, and seem to be a little shocked about these guys crashing a couple of planes on the Twin Towers in New York as the most relevant thing that was happening uptime before I got ISOTed.  I wonder if we could ever prevent this kind of things from happening but skyscrapers and jet planes are a little too away now.

But this is not time to complain on a future that has been butterflied away, and more immediate problems had to be dealt with.  James gave me the requested amount of rifles and basic instructions on how to charge, how to aim, how to shoot and how to clean them.  Confirmed that the only motivation he had was to help me build a liberal country here and to have some Spanish asses kicked.

I do not know it these are his only motivations, but I am gambling the real debt will not become a burden for the new nation.  Anyhow he told me again and again that nobody is supposed to know that he was helping me.

James had also no problem bringing on board Caldas,  Camacho and Pombo.  This is people that will do many things in the new born nation and I don't want them the fate they all had in the history I learned.  A whole generation of enlighten men that were executed when the Spanish conquered us back.

Anyhow I had begun to love these people.  Our conversations in the nights both in the evenings at Caicedo y Cuero's property and during the trip.  Details on the parliamentary system of Britain Camacho was fond on, on the better way to build a nation from a series of provinces that the Spanish held as colonies, the potential of Antioquia for pushing forward the industry of a new nation.  The pros and cons of free labor versus slavery, etc.

I have Lozano left, and some workers of Caicedo y Cuero that he allowed to come with us to plan the revolution.  We all have shoot already our first rifles.  There are not enough men to arm yet and 300 hundred rifles with ammunition is too much for seven guys to carry.

I had proposed to bury them, but it is late tonight.  So we plan to get up tomorrow morning to carry the boxes to some secure place we can find them later.  Then took three rifles each and all the ammo we can carry, bury the rest, and go North to the Caribbean, finding the most of the people we can recruit for an army.

The adventure had begun.  Time to play soldiers.

-- Carlos E. T. Pinzón G.