Month: February 2014

Postcards from Big Bend

It has been a whole year since we were in the middle of the BKR and took a week off to visit west Texas. And it has been nearly as long that this post has been in my blog’s drafts folder awaiting completion. I don’t know why I didn’t ever finish it in the beginning, but I do know why I didn’t for the last 6 months or so, out of sight is out of mind. On the site’s backend admin page there was a spot that listed your drafts front and center when you logged in, but on one of the updates to the WordPress software that item for some reason disappeared. I recently discovered this during another update and now the drafts are listed again. Anyway…

Whenever I go on a big vacation I try and send back a postcard to each of my co-workers along the way to let them know I’m having a good time not at work while they are having a not so good time at work. This time when I mailed out the 6 cards, instead of writing something different on each card as I went, I took a blurb from the Big Bend National Park website and an explanation as to why the cards all came from the same spot this time, divided them into 6 somewhat equal chunks, one for each postcard and sent them off. I was hoping they would get the card, read the partial phrase, scratch their heads, compare notes and then put the cards together like a big jigsaw puzzle and marvel in my creativity. I put a #1 at the bottom of the card that had the beginning of the phrase to get them started.


[spoiler]No one comes to Big Bend by accident and most would say it is a big effort just • to get here. Once here, many decide that it is just big enough for them to want • to stay for a lifetime. Big Bend National Park encompasses over 800,000 • acres. You could stay forever and not see every nook and cranny. It’s a little • piece of paradise that most are unaware of. This is one of the least visited • parks in our National Park system. So even the solitude and the quiet are big here.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]We usually don’t have any • trouble finding postcards from all • the neat sights we see • on vacation, but Texas proved • the exception, so everyone gets • one from the same place.[/spoiler]

So much for curiosity and/or teamwork, each person got their card, looked at the pretty front, read the back, wondered if I might have been tired, drunk or just plain crazy from the heat, and pinned the postcard to their cubical wall. It wasn’t until I got back, gathered everyone’s cards together and showed them what I had done that they went, “Ahhhh.”

This year I may buy a post card, write out an individual sentiment on it, then cut it into 16 pieces, throw that into an envelope and mail it to them. Oooh, I just had an even better idea, but I don’t want to spoil it here…

Wall Street Journal

I’m not sure if it is a local franchise owner thing or corporate wide, but the two Dunkin Donuts in town have a Wall Street Journal delivered to the store for the customers to read. Donna and I take advantage of this and enjoy reading it on the mornings we eat in the store. On the week days we are usually the ones to unwrap it as we are there by 6:15, but on Saturdays we are often much later and sometimes it has been read, is being read or completely gone.

After several Saturdays in a row of it not being there we asked what happened to the WSJ and one of the employees said somebody comes in and takes it. No further explanation was forthcoming, so we speculated; it was the franchise owner and it was really “his” paper or they were just afraid to say something or they just didn’t care. After a couple more Saturdays of it being there, the next visit there was somebody already there reading it. The nerve of him. Not only that, this fellow was sitting in our usual spot.

We sat down at a table on the other side of the store and made light conversation all the while thinking evil thoughts about the interloper. Part way through our breakfast that fellow got up, tucked the WSJ under his arm and walked out the door like it was the most natural thing. We mentioned it to an employee and she said, “Oh, he pays us for it. After all most mornings it never even gets taken out of the wrapper.” This didn’t sound right to us, but we figured if we wanted to read the Saturday Wall Street Journal we would just have to get to the store earlier.

A couple of Saturdays ago when I made a DD run and had to go back inside to get my coffee, I noticed the Saturday Journal sitting there at the condiment station right by the door. On my way back out I should have picked it up and taken it with me, no one would have been the wiser, but my warped sense of right and wrong wouldn’t let me.

Sneak Peek #1

Sneak Peek 1

One month after deciding to take the challenge we shot our first photo. We wanted to start at our starting point by taking a photo in front of the official City of Aiken entrance sign, but that didn’t work out so well because of all the broken tree limbs from last week’s ice storm piled in front of it. We also needed a Sneak Peek Photo for Jan 1 to Mar 1 and it was worth two points, so we started by taking a picture in front of the new Aiken train locomotive.

Sixty Percent Water

According to wikipedia the human body is 60% water by weight, I had always thought it was 70%, but whatever. I do know that given the right set of circumstances, like say a stomach flu, you can come to believe that nearly all of that water has been expelled from your body under extreme pressure (from a couple different openings) in a little under an hour…

That was Thursday morning and I am just now returning to normal.

Spring Is For The Birds

I think.

Last week at this time the freezing rain was still falling, now seven days later we drove home from work with the Miata’s top down in the upper 70’s with the sun shining.

The weather is certainly springlike and there must be birds singing out there, but you can’t hear them over the sound of the whirring of chainsaws. Every street in town is lined with pile of upon pile of fallen tree limbs and broken branches like hedgerows. Some streets in our neighborhood have been narrowed down to a single because of the tree debris lining both sides.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1294

Winter Is For The Birds

Winter Is For The Birds

On Thursday while we waited for Joan to pack her “Go Bag” I stood at her patio door gazing out at the ice that had accumulated on the patch of trees on the other side of her backyard fence. Suddenly something large and brown landed on a limb. Unlike the other 99.9% of wildlife that surprise me when I have a camera handy, this bird stayed posed while I had time to pull the camera from my back pocket, turn it on, zoom in, focus and press the shutter. It didn’t stay long enough for a second picture though.

There was no sign of winter around here anymore today, it was a nice sunny, warm afternoon, so I washed the gray road film that accompanies any snow or ice event off the Purple Whale. I was going to do it the easy drive-through-car-wash way, but there was a really long queue at Lulu’s and because I hate waiting in line more than physical labor I returned home and broke out the bucket and sponge.

Back

We’re back and so is our power.

Every few hours or so on Thursday evening and throughout the day Friday we would dial our home phone to see if we had power. We knew that if the answering machine picked up, the power was back on, but all we ever got were rings.

After we returned to the hotel from visiting Savannah on Friday I managed to get my buddy Mark (Hi Mark) on the phone. He had just gotten his power back and was in town restocking supplies. He was at a store not too far from the Dunbarton Oaks estate so I asked him if it wasn’t too much trouble, to run by the house and see if in fact we still didn’t have power. He called back a few minutes later to say he was parked in front of the house and the light at the end of the driveway was not lit. But he did say that there was an SCE&G bucket truck right there with him and that he passed a few more such trucks as he started down our street. He also said that if he were me he’d stay where we were for another day as the area was still littered with downed trees and power lines.

I reported this to Donna and suggested we stay until Sunday morning, but she said 2 days in a hotel by the interstate were plenty and to man up because we we leaving Saturday morning, power on in Aiken or not.

When we pulled into our neighborhood this morning we knew that there was no way in hell we had power and we were right. We opened up the house and promptly opened the blinds, shades and curtains to let in the bright sun. It was actually about 5 degrees warmer outside at 55 degrees than it was inside. Spent the next 3 hours with a bow saw, a wheelbarrow and a rake cleaning up what we could from near the front of the house.

We went out for lunch and when we got home we could see a power crew just 2 doors away. Donna went down and asked about how long they would be before they got to us. They told her it would be real soon as our transformer was next in line. While they worked on our group of 4 houses, Donna and I spent about another hour and a half cleaning up the side yard.

We finished at about the same time as the light at the end of the driveway illuminated. So I went over and shook the hands of the two guys working the bucket truck and thanked them profusely. They were from Henderson, KY, about 600 miles away just to help out. Really, thanks a lot guys.

They were in the neighborhood doing the easy ones, trying to get as many folks as they could back online quickly. They would check to see how many houses were connected to a transformer and if there were no issues they would turn it on. One of the 4 houses we shared our transformer with, had had the line to their house knocked off onto the ground. That was going to a problem, but Donna told them that the owner lived in Florida and didn’t occupy the place, so they rolled up the power line and disconnected them from the transformer.

I guess it is a good thing that Donna overrode my wanting to heed Mark’s advice and stay another day down south. Because had we not been around to tell them about our across the street neighbor, the power crew might have skipped our transformer all together because of the downed line and we might have had to wait a lot longer until we got power.