Trying to keep the enthusiasm up; for me it has gotten a bit hard after all the time and money I've put into it--but I'm not giving up!
I printed 10 targets today and continued to have problems getting beyond 3 good hits on the top row. I fluster easy, so while taking the shots if 1 missed I got kinda angry and just tacked another target over it--or just concentrated on grouping on one target dot to reaffirm that I still knew how to shoot. This tended to have a bit of negative reinforcement, not to mention eats up your printer paper supply--and expensive 22lr bullets--pretty quickly.
So I had an idea that instead of abandoning the target and going for another, I would just "backsweep" the dots I missed and score the best I could in as few as shots as possible. Here's my best "backsweep" where I hit the two I initially missed, so 7 shots to get all five. Somehow that makes the notion of getting all 5 eventually seem more attainable rather than starting over again at the end of 5 shots.
One of the interesting outcomes of my discovery of the joys of 22lr shooting--my rifle set-up is exceptionally sensitive to slightest variation of technique. It's the only rifle I've ever installed a trigger on that has less than 1.5 lb pull--and even at 8 ounces that seems quite heavy! It probably won't come as a surprise--but I found if I replicated everything
precisely with each shot--the shot would hit almost exactly at the POA. If even the slightest variation in the trigger pull technique, pressure of cheek weld, change of weight distribution in the rests etc--then the following shot was absolutely
not going to hit the POA. Another statistical curiosity--I can hit the 30 point dot more often than the 22 point dot. I haven't the slightest idea why that is.
On the subject of scope power--obviously I brought a bazooka to a knife fight in that respect with a 5 x 35 Leupold top tier scope, but what I found was even though I could zoom in with exceptional clarity on the target, as nice as it is the image was subject to shimmer and "dancing" at close range at the highest powers, all my best shots have been taken at 10x to 12 x power.