Month: October 2009

Give me a J! Give me a Z!

What’s that spell? Nothing, but it does finish up Alphabet Soup – South Carolina Style.

I mapped out a loop that took us almost to Columbia because that is where the closest Z cache resided. We also needed a J and there were two of those within a couple miles of the Z. SC302 to I-26 to US1, there were 14 caches within a 1/2 mile of the route and we did 6 of them.

Cross off one more county, Lexington and one more DeLorme page, 37.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 412

97,000 Calories

This morning we took a little trip downtown to St. Mary’s School’s Annual Chocolate Festival. We didn’t consume anywhere near the 97,000 calories that were on display at the bake sale tables. It was probably somewhere between 97 and 970 because all we spent on cookies and brownies was a buck and a quarter.

We spent $11 dollars on used books. Donna bought 16 kids books for nephew James at a quarter a piece and I bought 3 hardcover books. The one book that cost the most, nearly 50% of our book expenditures was Lee Child’s 2007 Jack Reacher tale, Bad Luck and Trouble.

I’m 150 pages into the 370 page book, it’ll probably be finished before tomorrow night. Chapter 13 starts like this:

At six the next morning Reacher went up to Neagley’s suite. He found her awake and showered and guessed she had been working out for an hour. Maybe in her room, maybe in the hotel gym. Maybe she had been out jogging. She looked sleek and pumped up and vital in a way that suggested there was a whole lot of oxygenated blood doing the rounds inside her.

After the festival we took the long way home via the bypass so we could drive by and look at, quite literally, the biggest thing to ever happen to Aiken. It has been the talk of the town since last weekend when the 300 foot long 1.89 million pound transport carrying a giant generator parked along the side of the road east of town. There is a photo in this article from the local paper, but you cannot get any idea how big this thing is from it. Plus in addition to the transport rig there is about a 1/4 miles worth of support trucks parked along with it.

Somewhere during our excursion the Emperor passed the 97,000 mile mark.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 412

I'm Glowing Again

Give Me A JayA confluence of events last week led me to purchase something that I’ve wanted for a while and had given up on after my last attempt.

I was catching up on reading some long neglected linkage on my sidebar when I ran into a post from August 26th on Darth Mojo. Wow this is what I was hoping for back in November of 2006, but that unit disappointed and didn’t get used too long before being exiled to a closet.

Then a day or so later I saw that very same keyboard listed in a Gadget & Gear Deals of the Day post on Lifehacker for a killer price, $55 with a twenty dollar rebate.

It arrived Wednesday.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 412

Book Excerpt

I just finished reading Too Close To Home by Linwood Barclay, the cover shouted at me in the used bookstore, “IF YOU LIKE HARLAN COBEN (I do,) YOU’LL LOVE LINWOOD BARCLAY.” So I picked it up. In the beginning it had that HC feeling, the plot was almost worthy of the statement, but in the end Linwood Barclay is no Harlan Coben. Not that I won’t read any more of his books, it was a mostly entertaining ride that is probably worth repeating.

As I went to color in the zero on page 101 (my way of ensuring I don’t pick up the same book more than once at our favorite used bookstore) I noticed that there was a page corner turned down. Ah, that’s right, I loved a little passage on page 182 that I wanted to share. Here you go.

In the years since she’d moved here from Hollywood, Ileana had gotten the small town college president’s-wife thing down pretty well. Expensive, but tasteful clothes, heels that were high but not towering and no longer made of clear plastic, a blouse unbuttoned far enough to draw your eye in, but not enough to give any real kind of show. But under all that upstate New York respectability there was still something of the tart about her. Like she was chewing invisible gum, making high-frequency snapping noises detectable only by the true hound dogs of my gender.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 412