Month: June 2003

Is That All?

Donna and I went for a hike in Hitchcock Woods this morning. We got in early, 8:00 AM, and it was actually cool in the beginning, because of the hills and trees it was still a little dim as well. After about an hour the sun was penetrating enough that I needed to put on my sunglasses. After about an hour and a half I pushed up the sleeves on my shirt and by the time we exited the woods 15 minutes later I had worked up a nice little sweat. Very pleasant little walk. Probably around 4 miles, but we have stopped keeping track. The only downside was walking though the webs of industrious spiders hoping to catch a morning meal.

The entrance to the woods is probably 2 miles from the house and that is all exercise the Miata got. The drive to and from the walk was about the same amount of miles we covered while in the woods.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $718.52
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 127

To Boldly Go…

…where nearly every sci-fi movie has gone before.

We watched Star Trek: Nemesis this afternoon. I think this is supposed to be their (The Next Generations) last movie together. After 4 of these I think they believe it is time to hang up the phasers and tricorders. I second that emotion, its about time.

When watching this movie I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen this all before. To go along with the bald face copying of other movies: Data walking Picard down the hall as a prisoner – Star Wars. Ditto the jumping down a little chute to escape a laser battle.

We have also lapsed into the standard movie cliches of good guys in white and bad guys in black, even down to drinking from white or black tea cups. The bad guys fire 6,000 laser blasts and only manage to create sparks and charred walls, while the good guys fire 6 shots and kill 12 baddies.

Why is it that we can pick out 6 distinct little pieces of an android from light-years away, but when several bad guys beam aboard our spacecraft we have to grab some guns and search around corridors for them?

I used to be a Trekkie back in the day. I watched the Original Series when they first came on and later lived on reruns. And enjoyed the movies (even the lame-o first one) until about the 6th one. I watched all the ST:TNG episodes and now have semi-enjoyed their movies. But please no more.

Pink Elephants On Parade

Or actually, 8 gaily colored Miatas on parade.

Donna and I misjudged our arrival time to the meeting place, we were 25 minutes too early. After sitting a bit she suggested that we take a little drive to kill some time. We ended up being the last to arrive.

The parade was a short little event that wound its way trough a small section of town and then around the square that the rest of the Peach Festival was being held. There were only like 30 entries in the parade and to make it seem bigger they split us into 2 groups of four. There were also a couple of fire engines, several tractors and of course a half dozen horses, thankfully at the end. To help us have fun and make the kids along the route happy we got to throw candy.

After the parade we all went and did the festival thing. Shopped the craft booths, ate sausage dogs, funnel cakes and of course peach ice cream on top of peach cobbler for desert.

Purchased Today: $13.50 in gas
Money spent since 03/03/03: $718.52
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 127

Makin’ Magnets

Short post tonight, got to get busy making the round Master’s Miata Club magnets as loaners for tomorrow. The Club is participating the the Peach Festival Parade in Johnston, SC. If you are in the area 🙂 come out and watch us, the parade starts at 10:30 AM.

Purchased Today: nothing
Money spent since 03/03/03: $705.02
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 127

Isn’t It Ironic

My Blogger Shirt arrived today. As a matter of fact I have it on right now. I wanted one a long time ago, way back when I started this blogging gig, but the were closing out the shirts and didn’t have my size. They never re-stocked. I guess flush with some new Google money they made up some more shirts, so I got me one. Kind of ironic though, I just moved one of my blogs over to Movable Type and I’m work on converting the other.

Purchased Today: nothing
Money spent since 03/03/03: $705.02
Started down, went up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 126

Titles

Moving all the blogger entries over here was real easy thanks to the folks who wrote MT. I’m now in the process of moving The Miata Diaries over to MT as well. This one will be more time consuming, but just because I’m more anal retentive than most I guess. When importing to MT if you don’t have a title, like an indigent blogger, one will be appointed you (the first five words of the post or something.) For the rant I had been giving each post a title, but no so for the diaries. So instead of just letting it do the work I’m going back and writing titles for all the posts, like 500 (I started on January 1st, 2002)

It was fun pretending to be a newspaper headline editor, then I started picking out possible double entendres for possible high search engine hits then I got bored and cut and pasted random phrases from the text. I’m about a third of the way through and my resolve is fading fast. I am going through and fixing some of the outdated links. I’m going to try and fix the pop up windows for images too. I was using a java script thingie, but want to take advantage of the one built in to MT. Oh, well, it will keep me off the streets….

Frog Strangler

Went out at lunchtime to walk around the parking lot for a bit of exercise and fresh air. Two steps out of the building it was apparent that it was going to rain big time any minute. As a matter of fact it was raining lightly as we pulled the cockpit cover off and raised the top. Lightning was visible to the south as we walked back in. Smug with the satisfaction of dodging a bullet, we returned inside. Well Mother Nature doesn’t like smugness, so she made it not rain at all over our company’s property all afternoon.

When we left work it still looked like rain in spots so we left the top up. Good thing too as at about the halfway mark on the trip home we ran into literally a wall of water. With the windshield wipers on high a forward speed at 20 MPH was too fast. The lightning was flashing all around us like we were Madonna and Guy Ritchie entering an LA eatery. Then about a block from home it throttled back to just a normal light rain. I bet we had 3″ of rain in the 20 minutes it took us to drive 3 miles.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $705.02
Started down, went up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 125