The Auxiliary Wing of the ROMEO Club

Atlantic Rainbow

Today I was invited along to the meeting of the Palm City ROMEO club and because I don’t actually have all the requirements of membership I was made the first member of the Auxiliary Wing.

A small group of Paul’s friends come over once a week and give him a break from his caregiver duties and take him out to lunch. Because one member of ROMEO is an ex-Marine helicopter pilot that served during a couple of our country’s armed conflicts, he is a member of the local VFW and can get everyone in. The guys like to go here because draft beer is a buck and a half and mixed drinks are just two and a quarter. My lunch fish sandwich lunch today with chips, a pickle, a side of potato salad and a beer cost $5.00. Compare this to my $17.95 fish tacos plus $2.50 for a soft drink yesterday at Conchy Joe’s in Jensen Beach and you can see why this is the default spot for the Club.

If you haven’t already Googled “ROMEO Club” to see what I’m talking out, it is an acronym for Retired Old Men Eating Out. And if you did Google it, you found out it is actually a thing sort of, but this isn’t in anyway affiliated with either that website or the Young Adult fiction book. Anyway, I’m in the Auxiliary because I have not yet retired.

The above photo was taken this evening off the 5th floor balcony of the Marriott Courtyard on Hutchinson Island. It wasn’t until I resized it for posting here that I realized it was actually a double rainbow.

Caution! Crab Crossing

Crab Crossing

Donna and I had lunch in Jensen Beach and because of the roundabout way we found ourselves there, I needed the GPS’s help in getting us on the right track heading back to Sandy and Paul’s house. After a short time I knew where I was and how to get home, but left the GPS on anyway.

As we crossed the St Lucie River from Stuart into Palm City on the Monterey Road Bridge the GPS said take the first left onto Cornell Ave instead of the usual Mapp Road. What the heck, I took it. A couple of streets down along on Cornell Ave I could see how it was going to take us, but because we needed something at the store, after a couple more streets, I turned right on 34th Street to go over to Mapp Rd where the local Publix was.

34th was a residential street and there were some traffic calming tables that needed to be driven over. As I approached the second one I could see a small crab using the table as his own personal crosswalk. I slowed down to let him cross (and get the camera out), so he slowed to see if I was going to run him over. I stopped to take the crab’s picture. He noticed me not moving, so he finished crossing the road. I put the camera away and we both continued on our respective ways.

47,000 Outlet Store Customers

I-95 Exit 318 in Florida would take you into St. Augustine if you could make it by the two competing Outlet Malls located there. They are on opposite sides of the Interstate and the only difference that I can see is that the one on the west side has the word Premium in its name, but I can tell you this, both parking lots were chock full of cars on a Sunday early afternoon. Probably about 47,000 of them, which coincidentally matched the number on the Purple Whale’s odometer as we drove by.

It is the season opener for the football team the Purple Whales this weekend and unless Payton Manning picks up his game quite a bit (without involving Demaryius Thomas too much, who is on my opponents team) they are going to go down in defeat. It is going to be partly the fault of the owner (that would be me) because one of the wide receivers I had starting for me, did not start for his real team (that would be the Jacksonville Jaguars) and it was announced that he wouldn’t play on Saturday. I should have checked…

Thanks For Nothing

We got a letter in the mail a couple of weeks ago to let us know that there was another 2 week free trial of XM Satellite Radio coming up. Cool, I thought, that would give us something different to listen to in the Purple Whale on the weekend trip to Florida. The Friday before Labor Day on the way to work I punched the button marked XM and turned it to my favorite (and really only) station, #31 – The Coffee House, and got a few seconds of song, a few seconds of static, song, static, song. I punched the AUX button to go back to the USB drive.

In the past we have had issues with reception around home because of the copious tree cover, so I figured we’d try it again once we started the trip and got out into the farm land near Barnwell. Well, it wasn’t any better out there, so I went back to the recorded stream of Radio Paradise. I tried it one more time along flatland I-95 and this time it never even locked on the station, the display just showed “LOADING” for a a minute. Then I just gave up on it.

I don’t know where the problem was, my end or theirs, but where ever it was, getting 14 days of one channel of satellite radio was not reward enough to call anyone.

This Is It

2016 Miata Front View

145,000 New Parts

As I pulled into the Valve Store(tm) parking lot the Emperor’s LCD odometer twitched past 144999 to 145000.

Tonight is the unveiling of what might be our next Miata. There is a live reveal on YouTube of the 4th generation car that is going to happen any minute now. Looks will have something to do with whether we buy one in a couple years, but most important will be if they return the passenger leg room back up to something resembling the driver’s. We do road trips in the Miata and when I’m not driving I need to be able to somewhat stretch out.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1418

Et tu Georgia

On the way back from Florida we stopped in Statesboro, Georgia for lunch. We ended up at an Olive Garden (where everyone is family.) While I waited on the whole settling of the check thing, I suggested Donna go across the parking lot to Cracker Barrel to get some more of the candy sticks we keep in the car for road trips. She had a Gift Card for there with $5 left on it and because that isn’t enough for a meal it would buy an awful lot of candy sticks.

I finished up and walked over there to see how she was doing. Donna was just walking over to the checkout with a nice sized plastic bag full of the sticks. There was just one cashier open and about 5 people ahead of her in line, so I said I’ll go wait outside instead of clogging the counter area more.

She had spent quite a bit of time going through the jars full of the 4 or 5 flavors we like, getting the sticks that weren’t already broken into pieces inside the wrappers. So what do you the cashier who waited on her did? She took the bag and turned it upside down from a foot above the counter and dumped the sticks out to count them. Donna just looked at her incredulously, thinking to herself, “Idiot, after I spent the time to get unbroken ones…”

The sticks sell for 15¢ a piece and the sign also says that if you buy 8 you get that amount for a dollar. Donna did the math and picked out 40 of them. The cashier counted out forty and multiplied that by fifteen cents, so the total came to $6 and change because of tax. Donna had the $5 gift card and I’d given her a buck to cover any tax, so she was short the total. Rather than try to explain the quantity discount thing, wait around for her to have the sale voided and then re-rung up, she told the cashier forget it and walked out.