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After About 31,000 Minutes

We went up to Hendersonville, to the SMH to visit with my sister and her husband the weekend before Christmas. They had just moved in and wanted our help in hanging all their paintings, prints, diplomas, bits of memorabilia and whatnot. We originally planned on spending two nights, but by late in the second day, having finished hanging everything up, having not slept well on night one and me starting to feel a little sick, we opted to pack our bags after dinner and leave. This got us home early enough get a full night’s sleep in our own bed and not have to drive on the roads on Christmas Eve.

Part way home, Donna decided to put some hand cream on. As she always does, she removes the wedding ring from her hand and places it on the pinkie of my right hand to hold while she completes this task. Trouble was, there was no wedding ring on her left hand. A quick search of her purse and immediate passenger seat area turned up nothing. When we got home we made a more thorough search of the car interior and every nook and cranny of our luggage, but still no ring.

We figured the most likely spot the ring was left was on top of the dresser, in the bedroom we spent the previous night in. Donna does remember putting hand cream on shortly before we made the decision to pack up and go. She texted my sister to go in the bedroom and see if she could find it. The reply came that the ring was not anywhere to be found in there. Our speculation was that it probably fell off the dresser and hit the carpeted floor so it wasn’t heard and one of their pesky cats has batted somewhere not easily visible. We asked for a second check around and they still didn’t find it.

After a couple weeks, or about twenty thousand minutes, Donna felt funny not having a wedding band on, so we took her retirement watch that has been collecting dust for the last year and a half down to a local pawn shop and sold it. We then took the proceeds and walked next door to one of those perpetually Going Out of Business jewelry stores and bought a wedding ring as similar as we could to my band.

About 31,000 minutes after the wedding ring disappeared, it magically reappeared. My sister texted Donna that she had looked down, and there it was. Obviously our cat theory was right and now one of them had batted it back into the daylight. Yesterday we made a day trip to North Carolina to retrieve the wondering ring. While motoring along I-385 not far from Gray Court, SC the Lady Bug passed the 31,000 mile plateau.

Putting 67,000 Items in Moving Boxes

When we left Robbinsville this morning, instead of heading due south, we headed the other way towards the Gap. When we got to the Gap start point, instead of running through it, we just hung a hard left and turned onto NC28 south to enjoy that very windy road. For the first couple of miles it is as twisty as the Gap, but then the curves straighten out slightly to create a very entertaining drive along the north shore of the Cheoah Lake. NC28 to east on US74, a brief stint on the Blue Ridge Parkway, US276 and then US64 into Hendersonville.

We are headed home tomorrow after an overnight stop here first. My sister and her husband are moving from the Stricker Mountain Home to the new Stricker Golf Course Home a few miles away and we are going to help them get close to finished with the packing up. They close on the new house Wednesday and the quicker they can get moved into the new, the quicker they can get the old staged and for sale.

We were up a couple of weeks ago and spent two days with them packing most of the things from the kitchen, the craft room and the garage along with wrapping in plastic their seemingly 100s of framed prints. Today we helped them finish those rooms up and all that is left is really their clothes and their DVDs.

Somewhere along NC28 last night, between Deals Gap and Fontana Village, the CTBNL ran through the 67,000 mile mark.

It’s Beginning To Look

two-xmas-trees

We piled into BIL’s CX-5 and drove to downtown Hendersonville to see them light the two big Christmas Trees that flank the old Henderson County Courthouse. I brought my camera along to capture the moment when Santa flipped the switch. But I left it in the car when we pulled a last minute evacuation drill at the intersection nearest the festivities to let Allen find a parking spot. He found a spot 3 blocks away so that when we were driving back to the SMH I snapped a photo of the back of the courthouse and trees as we went by. Here is a better photo of them from 5 years ago – Twin Christmas Trees.

52,0000 Snowflakes

Somewhere just south of Spartanburg, with Donna at the wheel, the Purple Whale swam past the 52,000 mile mark.

We are up in Hendersonville today at the SMH to have turkey dinner with my sister, her husband and my brother Paul who is down from Connecticut. As we drove the last couple miles up to the house and for a while after arrival it was snowing lightly, well not really snowing, not even flurrying, more like about 52,000 randomly spaced snowflakes drifting down over the space of an hour.

Like we did a couple of years ago, we had a pot luck Thanksgiving meal at the Clubhouse of Diane & Allen’s gated community. There are about 100 folks eating in one big ol’ room, in the middle of which are 8 folding tables arranged in a cross that are piled high with food. This arrangement segments the room into four quadrants of three or four tables each. For the first pass at the food we are instructed to only select from our L-shaped serving area and to go in a predetermined direction. To eliminate any long lines the social director calls out table numbers one at a time for each quadrant.

Some people, move way too slow, fill their plates from the wrong direction and/or reach across over to the other tables, but it mostly works OK. It sure is a darn sight better than letting everyone loose at the same time and to go wherever they think the best looking food items are.

A Christmas Wonderland

Christmas Lights

My brother Paul is down in Hendersonville, NC visiting with my sister and her husband for a week. Since we didn’t have any vacation left the only time we could visit was this weekend, so we drove up last night and spent the day with them. Unfortunately it has been kind of a messy rainy day, but it didn’t prevent us from our usual downtown Hendersonville shopping stroll.

After dark we drove a few miles up the road from the SMH to the same place we went the last time we were here, the Western NC Agriculture Center near the Asheville Airport. In September it was NC Mountain State Fair, but this time it was a Christmas Wonderland. Twenty bucks a carload for 20 minutes of driving around a giant circuit filled with pulsating lights while “synchronized” is piped into your car’s radio.

Would have been awesome in the Miata, but the Emperor was back in his Throne Room in Aiken and it was steadily raining with intermittent bursts of heavy stuff.

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1282

35,000 Cloggers

Jump

The Purple Whale ticked past the 35,000 mile mark on one of the many trips up to the SMH.*

We are in western North Carolina visiting my sister and her husband this weekend. This morning we went into downtown Hendersonville to visit the Mast General Store where you can buy all sorts of candy by the pound and spend lots of time looking at spendy outdoorsy clothing. I bought cheap knock-off of a sort of Tilley Hat. It is a distressed wide brim cotton hat that sort of looks cowboy-ish to keep the sun out of my eyes and off the back of my neck at the same time. We promptly removed the leather strap that loops under your chin to keep the hat from flying off your head as you hunt rhinos from the open back of a Land Rover or while galloping across the north 40. Probably have to put it back on when I wear it while driving the Miata.

This afternoon for entertainment we went to the North Carolina Mountain State Fair. We were going to go see the pig races at Hogway Speedway at 3 o’clock but, we were too early, so we headed over to the Got To Be NC Stage to watch clogging. There were several hundred seats under the awning, but no real place to sit because all the chairs were taken by cloggers, their support staff and families. Diane and Allen managed to talk one lady into allowing them to sit in some empty seats as long as they promised to vacate them when her kids came back.

*I want to say it was Donna and I that nicknamed Diane and Allen’s southern retirement place the Stricker Mountain Home, but they have made it official with a carved wood sign to that effect next to the sidewalk leading up to their front porch.