Month: July 2007

Spenser’s Crime Buster Tips

#31: If you have a name and no address, try looking in the phone book.

For some reason the first three of these I found, they were in the same book, were called Spenser’s Crime Buster Rules, but this one was called a Tip. I have decided to read all 35 (so far) Spenser books to chronicle all the tips/rules and collect them on a separate page here. I have now re-read two of the four books I own and tonight when we visited the used book store I picked up three more. They probably have another half dozen on the shelf still for later.

Today was a two-fer, breakfast and dinner out. Donna told me point blank this morning that we were going out for breakfast and because it was a weekday that meant Hardee’s. Biscuit & Gravy for her, Sausage & Egg Biscuit for him, O.J. and Hash Rounds to split.
Meal Cost: $5.71
Tip: None
Spent This Meal: $5.71

Dinner was out because it was the monthly Miata Club meeting, for July it was in Aiken at Olive Oils. Crab Bruschetta for appetizer, Seafood Ravioli for her, Hot & Sweet Sausages for him. We went whole hog and got desert, Chocolate Ice Cream for her and Key Lime Pie for him.
Meal Cost: $43.00
Tip: $6.45
Spent This Meal: $49.45
Year to Date: $1461.06
Meals out 82 of a possible 576.

 

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 270

Shrimp Wiggle

Sea LionThree months ago I wrote about a dish that Donna’s aunt used to serve to her kids when they were growing up – Egg Wiggle. An internet search came up empty on a recipe or any mention, so I thought that it was something Aunt Mary had made up. I was wrong, but only because there was no mention of seafood.

Tonight while I was re-reading Robert Parker’s “Cold Service” I was shocked to come across this passage:

Cecile and Susan talked about their respective practices, and I shared occasional thoughts on sex and baseball, which, by and large, were all I had for thoughts. As usual, Hawk said little, though he seemed to enjoy listening. I had been reading a book on the human genome. We talked about that for a while. Cecile served us a variation of a dish my father called “shrimp wiggle”: shrimp and peas in a cream sauce. Cecile served hers in pastry shells. My father didn’t know what a pastry shell was, and with good reason.

So I searched the interweb for Shrimp Wiggle and got lots of hits. Even got one return that was a list of other Wiggle recipes from Cooks.com that feature salmon, tuna, shrimp and chicken. Now maybe with four kids in the house at once Donna’s aunt & uncle couldn’t afford meat to put in there or maybe there was meat in there and the kids just didn’t remember it because of the overall weirdness of peas & hard boiled egg pieces in a cream sauce. Either way, mystery solved.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 268

All-Star Break

Horse's HeadThe top on the Miata is starting to wear out. There are several small spots on the inside where the cloth liner is gone exposing the rubber inner layer. And there are a few places on the outside, at places the top is folded, that are the same way. So far this year the top has made 266 transitions. In 2006 it made 525 and in 2005 there were 399 changes in state. I did not keep data for all of 2004, nor did I count any of the first month of ownership in December 2003. Using a complicated formula consisting of averages from prior years I estimate that for those 13 months it made 410 transitions, making a total lifetime of 1600 changes or 800 cycles.

I probably have a couple more months before an actual holes develops, but I’d rather not get that far, so I’ve started to research new tops. An OEM Mazda cloth top lists at a buck under a $900. An after market top starts around $630. Both these are cloth with defroster glass back window like the current top, but I could always “downgrade” to a vinyl top, they start around $450. The trouble with after market tops is matching the parchment color of the 2003+ Miatas. Most of the tans out there are darker and more compatible with the earlier year cars. So I’m contemplating going with a black vinyl top. But for now I’ve got samples on the way of the two canvas tans available from the place I bought my last top from. One is a stock color and the other is custom adding $50 to the cost.

They also have a custom color called dark ruby that is a wild card in the color selection. Donna hates the idea without even seeing it, but I’ve got a sample of that coming too. We will have to see, the Garnet Red has mica in it so it changes its color, from a sparkly red to maroon, depending on the light. This makes it awfully hard for that dark red canvas to look good at all times, but I can hope. If I really like it, I may try and persuade her.

Forgot to blog about eating out last night. Went to Maria’s for carnitas, we both had water to drink so we got out for cheap.

Meal Cost: $9.58
Tip: $1.42
Spent Today: $11.00
Year to Date: $1405.90
Meals out 80 of a possible 573.

 

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 266

Game 6

Natural BridgeWe have been to Virginia’s Natural Bridge several times and I have a bunch of pictures showing it’s grandeur from underneath on my hard drive. This time we didn’t stop in, but we passed right over the top of it on US11. Donna was driving so I got the camera out and took my first picture of the top of the Natural Bridge. Breathtaking, isn’t it?

There were several things I should have been doing this evening, but didn’t do, because I watched Le Tour on the boob tube. Every year I think we won’t spend the extra $25 bucks (or what ever it is) and get digital cable for these three weeks in July. It is so predictable. The first week is all flat stages and you know what will happen. Three, four, five, etc break away from the peleton at 20 kilometers in. They work courageously together for 150 kilometers. In the last 20k the sprinters lead out men come to the front and the peleton rapidly catch the breakaway in the last 5k leading to a mass sprint at the finish. The middle week is the mountains and again there is usually a small breakaway, but once again they are reeled in on the last climb and the tour leaders battle for the win. By the last week, the race leader is usually determined and once or twice the early break succeeds because there are no threats in it. On the last day the winner rides into Paris sipping champagne surrounded by his remaining teammates. Then the sprinters teams come to the front and battle to lead out their guy for the win all for a flashbulb’s worth of glory. Every year I find myself in line at the cable company and every year I spend two hours every afternoon glued to TV listening to Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen.

After the bike race I stayed on the couch with the laptop, while Donna napped, and didn’t do those things I should have been doing, because I watched Game 6 on Netflix’s Watch Now service. Interesting movie that was close to be being good. Maybe it was because I just didn’t believe Michael Keaton would be a Red Sox fan, LA Dodgers maybe…

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 265

Target Shopping

Comstock Covered BridgeWe’ve got an old Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner that is starting to show it’s age. All the tools are cracked and it isn’t picking up stuff well even after a bag change. Plus that sucker is loud, so we went out today to get Donna a nice new fangled bag-less picker upper. Target had a couple in this week’s ad that looked promising.

After the blue law mandated 1:30 PM opening we headed out to Target. Allow me to interject an observation from my cubicle neighbor Jim:

Here in the Bible Belt don’t you find it odd that the blue laws will allow you to go into a grocery store on Sunday morning and buy a 6-pack of beer, but you cannot enter a book store and buy a Bible?

There were three to choose at the $129 price point, a Bissell, a Hoover and a Eureka. I pulled them off the shelf one by one and Donna pushed them around a bit, lifted them and generally got a feel for which one she liked the best. She liked the Hover the best, for a couple reasons, but the auto retractable cord thingie sent it over the top. As a bonus the price tag on the shelf said you got a $20 gift card with it’s purchase.

We had one final request, what did this puppy sound like? We looked all over for an outlet, but couldn’t find one. We corralled a sales team member and asked where we could plug it in. His reply was that he didn’t think they were allowed to do that. We insisted and he called on his walkie talkie to a higher up team member and got the same answer, can’t do it. What’s up with that? I’m sure a legal department team member had something to do with that rule. I was briefly temped to roll the display vacuum over to the TV section and plug it in, but decided to just buy it. If it turned out to be louder than our current unit (highly unlikely) we’d just bring it back.

When we got to the check out it rang up as 129 + tax. No gift card mention. We pointed it out to the cashier team member and she proceeded to thumb through the flyer. In that ad the $20 gift card was shown with a $169 vacuum. We told her that the card on the shelf said this one got a card as well. So she called over a higher up team member, whose response was the gift card automatically shows up, if it doesn’t, no gift card. We asked her to come with us to the shelf and we would show her and her response was, “I can’t leave the front.” Our response was, “Fine, we don’t want this vacuum.” I hit cancel on the credit card thing and we walked away.

Donna said, “Come on, let’s go back and look.” We did and sure enough we hadn’t imagined the $20 Gift Card sign. Trouble was that offer expired 7/7 (yesterday.) Some one had obviously forgotten to remove the promo shelf tag. Fifteen, twenty years ago the retailer would have apologized for the confusion, sold us the vacuum and given us the Gift Card. Now they’d rather just do without the sale and jeopardize future purchases. Sigh.

We came home and I bought the same item from Amazon for $95, no tax and free shipping. Hoover U5507-900

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 264

Aiken

Concord, NC to Aiken, SC. We managed to ride with the top down until we got to Chesterfield, SC to visit Donna’s cousin Laurie and her husband Ted. When we left them at around 11:00 it was already over 90º. After passing through a rain shower with the cloud cover still intact we finished the last 30 miles with it down again. It sure is fun visiting places, but it is great to be back home. Some trip notes:

  1. When I got in the car this morning the odometer read 62005 for the 3rd milestone of the trip, didn’t notice it last night when we parked.
  2. Total mileage for the trip: 2,637.4 for an average of 240 miles per day. Even though it didn’t move at all for a day and a half in DC and our hotel in CT was only 6 miles from the house.
  3. I filled up with gas 11 times or about once a day. The highest price paid for gas was $3.40 in Yorktown Heights, NY and the lowest was $2.88 in Clear Brook, VA. Average cost for the whole trip $3.15 (premium fuel.)
  4. Don’t ask about mileage because I don’t track that. I will do some quick math and see if it over 27 MPG. If it is, everything is OK.
  5. Signs on the side of the road in Connecticut warned that the fine for littering is $219. Why the odd figure?
  6. We took money out of a free standing ATM machine in a hotel lobby and the fee for using it was $3.05, not the usual two bucks. I can understand $3, but why the extra nickel?
  7. Public restrooms are scarcer up north compared to around here. So sometimes we had to get creative.
      a. The first floor in hotels will always have restrooms, just walk in like you belong there.
      b. We used the restrooms just inside the entrance of the Newton, NJ hospital when asking around downtown failed to turn up any place to go.
  8. At one hotel restroom break we even grabbed a banana off the breakfast bar, because the place we had stayed at didn’t have them. So if you are bold enough you should be able to walk right in and get a whole breakfast at most places.
  9. I bought a hooded sweatshirt at Furman U in Greenville on the way up. It served me well at altitude on the Blue Ridge Parkway and in the unseasonably cool CT weather, but will now be exiled to the back of the closet until November.
  10. I managed to finish one paperback book on the trip, good thing I was a quarter of the way through when we started.
  11. High-speed internet access was free everywhere we stayed and ranged from very marginal in a middle of the hall room in the Farmington Inn to excellent in a room at the end of the hall at the same place.
      a. Last night’s started good and got crappy later in the evening. Even tried the Cat-5 cable which professed to having a 10Mb connection wouldn’t do crap. Maybe there is a download throttle…

I didn’t take any pictures today, so for your entertainment, I present a shot of the Colonnade at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA from yesterday.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 263

Concord

Rat Toes

Hagerstown, MD to Concord, NC. Today’s plan was straight down I-81 to I-77 and we stuck pretty much to it. Boy is this corridor busy during the week.

We stopped in Lexington, VA to take a leg stretch. We used to have someone to visit when we came to town, but now that the Lewis clan has pretty much scattered, we were left to our own devices. So we decided to do the Sally Lewis Loop Walk, about 2 miles around the outside, then through the middle of the campuses of VMI and W&L.

Couldn’t hardly stand the traffic I-81 any longer when a warning sign let us know the right lane was closed at mile marker 127. We ducked off the Interstate at Exit 132, following US11 into Christianburg before turning south on VA8 to pick up another stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway. With today’s 34 mile segment it meant that we had driven a total of 220 miles out of the possible 469.

I-77 was just as busy as 81 and once you got about 40 miles north of Charlotte the road surface started to reflect the heavy usage by becoming very rough and potholed. Making us very happy to get on a secondary road east to make it to our overnight stop destination. we probably could have made it all the way home tonight, but decided to stop here in Concord, so that when we get up early tomorrow morning, we can ride home with the top down.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 259