Year: 2009

I Got Nothing

The bright yellow bananas that I bought last Friday that weren’t ripe on Monday, I ate the last one this morning and it still wasn’t ripe! We went grocery shopping tonight and I bought some more bananas, I’ll report tomorrow on their ripeness.

If you, like me, don’t think Netflix’s recommendation engine is all that smart, try Jinni. Sorta like Pandora for TV & Movies. Sorta. You can search by entering keywords, themes, mood, place. I’ve tried it a couple of times and my conclusion is they need a bigger database and maybe that be helped along by more people joining… Interested? You have to drop them your email so they can invite you into their “private” beta testing. If you try it, let me know what you think.

If you need a T-shirt that is newsworthy the day you buy it, I have just the shop for you: CNN Shirt. Those short little scrolls at the bottom of your TV screen like “Octopus pulls plug, floods aquarium” can be immortalized in your choice of 6 colors, 2 styles and 5 sizes. How can you resist?

The Big Picture (fast connection a plus for this)

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 132

4 Month Update

OK, we’ve had the new Robbins Streamline Top on the car for 4 months now, time for an update. The top has made well over a hundred transitions and it has stretched out just fine, making the raising and latching of the top a cinch. But putting it down is not the simple unlatch and throw it over your head the OEM was.

I still have to reach back and help the top (front) of the glass window down, by pushing slightly back and down. Doing the maneuver has become almost second nature and doesn’t slow down the operation (unless I fumble it, like I’m apt to do every dozen times or so.) My concern is to what this will do to the longevity of the top. I can’t help but think in a couple, three years that that extra push along with the aging of the fabric is going to cause a rip along the top or bottom of the glass.

One other little nitpick (and it really is a nit) is that the original top had a short strap that went from the edge of the top between the first and second ribs and attached to the frame which the Robbins Streamline top lacks. The purpose of this was to pull on that bit of the top, tucking it inside the well when the top was lowered. With the Robbins, the top folds up fine, but there is a little ear sticking out of the well that needs poking under when putting the boot on. I think I need a picture to better illustrate my point, but to do so might elevate the nit to a full blown bother.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 131

Cost Cutting?

We received our ESPN Magazine in the mail today. Strange thing, all the usual crap cards that are stapled in just fell on the counter. That happened because there were no staples in the magazine.

You can buy 25,000 staples for $5.49 at, where else, Staples. ESPN Magazine has a monthly circulation of nearly 2 million. Eliminating two staples per magazine means they are saving about $10,500 a year.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 129

Mother, Jugs & Speed

Every time the MMC goes out for a breakfast run I take a few pictures, usually shots of the cars in the parking lot, people at the tables, the place we are eating at, what we might be eating, etc. While standing outside the restaurant lining up one more photograph of a row of Miatas I decided no more generic photos. This picture is the result. Fresh & New? Or Lame & Amateurish?

Stumbled on the last half of M, J & S on Fox Movie Channel tonight and instead of watching the news we opted for classic cheese. The cast included a Battle of Network Stars Dream Team: Raquel Welch, Bill Cosby, Dick Butkus & Larry Hagman. The soundtrack listing was fun too, the only mid-seventies band missing was Geronimo Jackson.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 128

88,000 Genetic Manipulations

We went grocery shopping on Friday afternoon and I bought a small bunch of 4 bananas. Buying bananas always seems to be a chancy proposition, invariably they are either bright green or so ripe they are fit for nothing but an ingredient in banana nut bread. Friday was my lucky day (or so I thought), as the bananas on display were the very definition banana yellow.

Saturday morning I went to peel one of the bananas and I knew I was in trouble because the skin was thick and hard to tear. Ever hopeful, I took a bite, big mistake, it was tough as shoe leather, I spit it out and threw the rest away. Using all the brain power I could muster I determined that these pieces of fruit were not ripe and decided to skip Saturday’s banana and wait until Sunday before eating another.

By Sunday the peeling process was slightly better and the banana was almost al dente, but I choked it down anyway. No banana this morning and I am hopefully that by tomorrow they will be really ripe.

The only way I can explain it is that these bananas have been genetically altered so that they turn yellow when they really should still be green.

The Emperor flipped past the 88,000 mile mark on the way home from Augusta on Saturday.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 128

One For Three

It was cold and windy in the morning so we did the sensible thing and stayed indoors eating Girl Scout cookies. But the call of the wild was too great and by afternoon we just had to go outside and try a couple local caches.

The one in Hopeland Gardens sounded pretty simple and we could get a short walk in wandering around the place before finding the cache. We got the short walk in, but the rest eluded us. Both Donna and I took runs at the location and we narrowed it down to about 20 foot of ivy covering just off a trail, but after a little more than 15 minutes we admitted defeat and headed back to the car.

A short drive up Whiskey Road led us to the library and a small park where objective number two was hidden. The GPS led us right to a back corner of the park, but when we came to the boundary fence we still had 13 feet to go, which would have put us quite literally playing in the traffic (if there was any on a Sunday afternoon.) Looking down there was a nice little pile of bricks. AHA! Sure enough there was an ammo can under them. TNLNSL.

The third cache was a 1/2 mile walk down Colleton Ave called Ye Olde Tire Swing even though the swing has been missing since like 2006. We found the marked Long Leaf Pine Tree mentioned in the instructions and the GPS led us right to what looked like a perfect place for hiding a cache, several minutes spent poking around a couple of shrubs left us with nothing but dirty fingernails and a small scratch on my cheek.

So far we are 2 for 6 in Aiken and 3 for 4 out of town, giving us an .500 average. Terrific if you are a baseball batter and not too bad for cache catching, but if we are going to find a lot of these things we better get better. Both finds in Aiken were ammo cans and on the other finds we were accompanied by Larry & Rita from the MMC, so it appears that we will have to only search for ammo cans or the Garners will have to come with us every time we go geocaching.

Started dow, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 127

A 35mm Film Canister Well Intigrated Into The Enviorment

The MMC had a breakfast rally to Waynesboro, Georgia. We went, ate and instead of driving back with the group, we went, that’s right, geocaching.

There were four located in and around downtown, three were listed as easy and one was a difficult, rating 4 out of 5 stars. Based on our results those ratings were pretty much dead on.

Donna was really interested in the difficult one because we had to solve a puzzle, which looked like fun, to get the final coordinates and that was our first planned stop, but when after breakfast the group made a short drive to a local Mennonite bakery we passed right by the location of an easy one. Because it was on our way to the puzzle one, we stopped at the Confederate Cemetery first.

Being recent converts and flush with excitement for our new endeavor we did what any other neophyte might, convert others to our way of life and managed to get two other couples to join us down the rabbit hole. This cache is actually rated 1.5, but we had read the logs (which often contain spoilers) so we had a pretty good idea of what and where it was, so it turned into a 1. Neither Donna nor I found the cache, Rita did. It was literally, the title of this post, and all there was room for was the rolled up paper log. Because we are still novices at this we learned one of the hard and fast rules of geocaching, bring a pen. The only person who had one was Rita’s husband Larry, but it has been traveling, unused, for several years in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing, so was not the best, but we skipped our names and date on the paper. After re-hiding the cache Rudy and Patti (couple #2) had time constraints, so they hightailed it back to Augusta.

Larry & Rita had no other real plans, so they came along with us to tackle the hard one, Historic Fob. Because of the description we knew we needed to visit the courthouse, so we ignored the coordinates for the parking and just found a spot on the street right there. There were 8 questions that the answers to made up the places after the decimal point in the minutes of the coordinates. A couple were head scratchers and one must have been interpreted differently than the four of us did, but an educated guess as to the misinterpretation and we headed to the hiding place of the cache (right across the street from the courthouse.) That’s went it went from bad to worse. The GPS lead us right to one side of the park right near where the Public Works department was working on a water meter or something, a hole in the ground that looked like it had been there awhile. We were there awhile too looking and poking and poking and looking, but with no success. We were disappointed, but shrugged it off because right there at the top of the directions it mentioned that you possibly might not find it.

There was another cache less than a quarter mile away, the Brown Fob, so the four us started walking. We cut through an alley and with about 500 feet to go came to an empty lot and when we looked through it and across the street all four of us simultaneously knew exactly where to find it.

Plugging in the numbers for the fourth, and last cache in Waynesboro, turns out it was 1.17 miles to the south of where we were standing. It was a nice day, so we opted to take a walk. We walked and walked and walked and I checked the GPS, .56 miles left. We walked some more and some more and I checked the GPS and it said .53 miles left. Walk, walk, walk, .49 miles left. The group told me to stop checking or we’d never get there. We walked and walked and walked and we walked so far that we came across the restaurant the Miata Club had had breakfast in. I checked the GPS and it said .36 miles, now we are getting closer. There was some bad news though, the directional arrow was now pointed perpendicular to our southerly route and it was aiming right at the lake the Lakeview Restaurant sits on.

I checked the map and sure enough we in the same situation Donna and I were in last week in the woods, a really long walk to get to the cache after we had already been on a really long walk. The four of us agreed the best thing to do would be turn around, walk the 3/4 mile back the cars and drive to find the the Red Fob. It turned out to be an easy find, only one u-turn required, and because it is still winter so the patch of woods it is hidden in was still barren of leaves.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 127