Year: 2008

What Next?

The Home Shopping Network is going to start showing movies? First MTV, AKA Music Television, stopped playing music. Then CNN Headline News started doing stuff besides continual 1/2 hour news shows. The Weather Channel has stopped doing the weather 24/7. And now, tonight, the Cartoon Network is showing Jurassic Park 3. That’s not a cartoon. Although I guess some argument could be made that the CGI dinosaurs are and Bill Macy has a face that only a cartoonist could love…

We went for a nice walk in Hitchcock Woods this morning. It has only been a little over a week since our last visit and the woods have been transformed, all the dogwoods and the wild azaleas are flowering, plus all the other trees are budding and turning green. I took a couple dozen photos on our walk and I learned two things: 1) I suck at photographing flowers and 2) the add an image thing isn’t working in WP 2.5. Fixed.

Totally forgot about the FRS playing on TV this afternoon. Stumbled on the game in the top of the ninth inning and watched them go down in a ball of flames to the Jays for the 3rd straight day. Plus it just seemed so wrong to hear voices I associate with Braves baseball on a channel that used to do every Braves baseball game calling an American League game. Their record now stands at 3 wins and 4 loses, not a great start. At least the MFY are only 3 & 3 and we can blame the rocky start on the whole 3 country, 12 time zone road trip. Tuesday is the home opener where the players will get their World Series rings and the 0-5 Tigers are in town. Time to wake up and start looking like you want to repeat as WS Champs.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 100

Saturday Snippets

We were supposed to go to the Food Lion Auto Fair in Charlotte today with the MMC but the near guarantee of rainy weather made us stay home.

We went out to lunch at Firehouse Subs to use the coupon for a free sandwich we got in the mail yesterday.

Stopped at Lowes and spent another C-note on towel bars, toilet paper holders and such for the bathroom remodels.

The business card from Rhonda our “Showroom Consultant” has a nice picture on the left quarter panel of the exact faucets that Donna and I have picked out for the bathrooms (even though where she works doesn’t sell that brand…)

I did a nearly uneventful upgrade to WordPress 2.5.

UCLA got their butts whooped by Memphis crushing all hopes of me finishing in the money on the B-Ball Pool.

We watched the movie Premonition this afternoon. It took about halfway through the movie before I figured out what was going on and then with 10 minutes to go I knew how it was going to end.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 99

Help Us Rhonda, Help Help Us Rhonda*

* I bet she has never heard that before. 🙂

This morning we headed over to the plumbing showroom we visited on Monday afternoon with all intentions of buying the final pieces for our remodel job. The woman who spoke to us then, greeted us warmly and asked if we were her 10 o’clock appointment. Ahhh, no. We spoke to her a bit before her 10 o’clock arrived. As we started to leave she asked if we would like to make an appointment, “How’s Monday sound?” Not good we replied, how about today? She said she was all booked up, but could squeeze us in between 12 & 12:30. Donna said, “We’ll see you then.” Gee it would have been nice if this wasn’t the first time we heard the word appointment from her…

We left the parking lot and turned right, drove 20 yards and turned left into Aiken’s other plumbing showroom store. The first time we visited here a couple weeks ago we didn’t get much help because the woman who normally “manned” the showroom was out sick. Rhonda was back, fully recovered from the flu, and hovered respectfully as Donna and I and our little tape measure wandered the floor ever hopeful in our quest for a small short one piece toilet. Nothing fit (pun intended) the bill. There was one toilet that intrigued us though, it was tall, but very narrow and as a bonus it was a comfort height model. Of course, it didn’t match our existing sink which we were planning on keeping, but what a coincidence, right next to the toilet was the matching pedestal sink. Rhonda told us it was real reasonable, like maybe $200. Donna shrugged and said, “Let’s get it. What’s an extra couple hundred buck.” I’m thinking to myself all of the possible Miata accessories I could get with two hundred dollars, but say out loud with enthusiasm (and wisdom), “OK!” We then quickly agreed on the second toilet and a tub, pretty much sight unseen.

The two pieces for the small bathroom are from Mansfield’s Waverly Collection. You can see them in this picture stolen from the company’s web site. So caught up in the whole consuming thing we didn’t think to check how big the sink was. The Waverly toilet is a lot narrower than our current piece, but the sink is 4-1/2″ wider than the one we have now. We are now going to end up with about an inch and a half between toilet and sink. Moving the toilet rough in would be cost prohibitive, but depending on stud location maybe we can get the sink moved over a couple, three inches.

Rhonda will be calling me at work on Monday to give me pricing and availability. Hopefully we can get the first toilet and sink in a hurry because the contractor will be starting work on Monday.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 98

You Want Me To Go In That?

We are struggling to find the perfect new toilet for our small bathroom. Our major requirement is that the toilet not stick too far out from the wall. Our current one is only 26″ and most everything out there is 29-30. A short one-piece unit like we currently have would be nice and a comfort height toilet would be a definite plus as well. You would be surprised how hard it is to find a combination of all three.

I found what I thought was the perfect solution: the Kohler Purist Hatbox. Until I saw the price – $3198.80. Yikes! That’s for white, if you want it in black it is $1500 more.

I though I would show it to my wife and try and get a reaction when I sprung the price on her. Donna took one look at the picture and said, “Its ugly!” The price reveal had just lost all it’s punch.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 97

System Overload

Sometime last evening my web host pulled the plug on me. Apparently I was overloading the CPU on my shared server.

To try and prevent this from happening again I have installed a plug-in called WP Cache. What it does is hold pages from the site in a directory and serves them up from there instead of dynamically creating it every time some one shows up. The only real downside to this is that if you make a comment it might not show up on the site for 30 minutes.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 96

Even On The Net The Commercials Are Loud

Just got through watching the first segment of last night’s New Amsterdam and when it went to the Toyota Corolla commercial the decibel level jumped 4 fold.

So far my toying with WordPress 2.5 has not been very positive. The My Netflix plugin doesn’t work (no big deal.) When I did have it working, the new image uploading thingie didn’t place the alt or title tag in the linking image, so it didn’t have a title on the Lightbox2 pop up (I think I can hack that.) Now, tonight for some reason, I can’t upload an image at all, it uploads and then stops with this: An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later. (Deal breaker.) Then, once the upload fails, I cannot navigate away from the post page without getting a 412 Precondition Failed error. I will have to test this out as it may be just a plugin conflict. This blog remains the same for now as I’m testing the upgrade using the thumbdrive.

Toilet shopping is harder than you might imagine (at least for us.)

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 96

Do Not Attempt to Adjust The Picture

I just downloaded Version 2.5.0 of Word Press and I think I am going to update to it this week. Currently LOB is running on Version 2.0.4, so that means there have been 46 updates since I started using this version. I’m just kidding about the update totals, there have actually been only twenty.

Anyway, some or all of the plugins I use might not work and who knows if the current red stripey theme will work. I will try and make it go, but if you come here and you find something that looks generic, don’t panic, I will be behind the scenes working feverishly to bring it back to close to this look.

Version 2.5 has some sort of photo gallery built in which should be interesting to try out.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/08: 95