Its that time of year again – time to show off your most liked Instagram pictures. I posted about this two years ago when I used an app called Best Nine, but for some reason I didn’t do it last year. Maybe because that particular app is no longer available…
There is an app called Top Nine, but that is iPhone only. Searching the Google Play Store for “top nine” or “best nine” lands you on an app called Nine Grid Photo – Grid Maker which does basically the same thing. The app has a stunningly low rating of 1.2 out of 5 with reviews complaining about everything from not working at all to returning bogus results to too many ads.
I agree with the ad thing, but it worked flawlessly for me. It also let me go back all the way to 2018, so below are the last five years of my most like Instagram posts:
2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
Update: I just tried the Nine Grid Photo – Grid Maker again and it wouldn’t do anything but show me the two images I have posted so far this year with a heading of 2022. Maybe it warrants those low ratings. I’ve deleted the app and we’ll see what happens next year.
It’s a new year, so I’m picking new cars, well, new to me anyway. This is only the 6th Alfa Romeo 8C ever sold on Bring-A-Trailer and the first one I’ve picked. The Desert Dynamics Buggy is the first one ever listed on there. Almost 40 Silver Clouds have been auctioned off on Bring-A-Trailer but this is the only one with custom coachwork by Hooper & Co of London, England.
Yesterday where I named my Cars, Sport-Off Road-Touring picks I chose all white colored cars because it was Betty White’s birthday. Instead of writing (what I think are witty) captions for each car I just wrote under “In honor of what would have been Betty White’s 100th birthday please donate $5 to a local animal shelter in her name.”
Ms. White died New Year’s Eve, missing celebrating her 100th by less than 3 weeks. Because she was such a great lover of animals the interwebs created this “Betty White Challenge” thing and I thought it was a good idea to mention it. Having written that in my post, I needed to follow through and do that myself. I have some money in PayPal, I’m sitting at my computer, let do it.
There are a couple of shelters here in Klamath Falls, I’ll start with the local thing. The first one wouldn’t accept a donation of less than $10 and the second didn’t accept PayPal.
Alright, let’s try southern Oregon. Hmmm, only accepts mailed in checks, this one no PayPal, but will take your charge card and the next one didn’t have a link, that I could find, that even allowed donations.
How about nationally? I search the Google thing and found one or two news stories from around the country with links to their local shelters, but the first couple I tried ended in the same roadblocks I hit before. Next I went to the national ASPCA website and they wanted all my personal info up front before I could even see if they took PayPal.
I struck gold on the American Humane Association. They’ll accept PayPal and they will take my five dollars. They will also take another sixty cents to cover the processing fees and I almost cancelled the donation. But, I paused and thought to myself, “What would Betty do?” I hit the donate button.
February
Home Depot Shopping List
Thursday the 17th
When ever we head out to Home Depot to buy several items I will create a “shopping” list with what aisle and bay the items are in, because I’m a guy and you know how men hate to ask directions. And even if I’d didn’t mind, sometimes it is hard to find a orange vest when you need one. The list is created inside the Home Depot app that I have on my phone.
The first time I tried this method I was foiled by my lack of a strong enough signal on my Moto G7 from Cricket. It wasn’t just because I was in a giant metal building either, the store must be in a AT&T dead zone because I couldn’t even pull up the app in the parking lot.
The next time I created a list I thought maybe I’d just print it out, but unfortunately the app doesn’t have this function. This might have been a good thing because as I considered doing this I flashed on the Progressive commercial where a group is in the airport and Dr. Rick asks to see their tickets and they all have them printed on paper.
So my only real solution is to write down everything I wanted with their respective aisle and bay number on a post-it and put it my pocket. This feels just a little like Garndparentamorphosis…
March
Car-y Truck or Truck-y Car?
Friday the 18th
We have been tossing around the idea that we need a different vehicle to take advantage of the outdoor activities that abound in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. The lowered Miata is a no-go on anything but a nice smooth road and the Mini has a bit more ground clearance, literally like maybe an inch or so more than the Miata’s three.
We don’t want to do serious off-roading like rock crawling or anything, but we do want the ability to turn down a forest service road and drive a few miles to a trailhead without poking a hole in some vital bit of our car.
Our first thought was Wrangler. We had a real nice experience with a Rubicon we borrowed from Crazy Dave’s Car Rental. So much so, that we currently have a ginormous 5-gallon water jug in the living room we have been tossing change into labeled “Jeep Jar.”
But the Jeep is probably more hardcore than we need. A mid level SUV is not the most desirable vehicle on my list, but would be a good compromise. Donna has always wanted a small pickup for its utility, but today’s small pickups are anything but small.
An intriguing option is a couple of new vehicles that are just appearing on the market that are a mashup of a small SUV and a pickup truck, AKA Trucklets (]What the Throttle House guys called them.) They are the Ford Maverick and the Hyundai Santa Cruz. Below is a video from my new favorite car guys comparing them both:
The Everyday Driver guys did separate reviews of the two crucks (What they called them.), so here are their takes on the Santa Cruz and then the Maverick.
April
How High is High?
Wednesday the 20th
When I first brought the rental CX-5 home, we went for a little drive around town to get familiar with it and to give Donna a chance behind the wheel.
After we had swapped drivers back to me, Donna said, “I really like being up high.” I replied, “I don’t like it all. I’m too high, I feel like I’m going to tip over. I like being low to the ground.” With a smile on my face I said, “I can barely stand the height of the Mini.” She countered with, “The Miata is too low.”
So when we got home I broke out the tape measure. These are plus or minus an inch or so because I was eyeballing from outside the car door. The Miata measured 8″ Butt To Ground, the Mini came in at 16″ and the CX-5 registered a whopping 25″ of BTG.
On Monday’s we took the Miata out for a drive around town to keep the battery fresh. Today, because it is 4/20, I used the Miata to run to the cannabis store and then later a trip to Jimmy Johns to quench the munchies (just kidding, I was not under the influence then.)
May
Adventures In Picture Hanging
Sunday the 29th
When shopping at Fred Meyers last week we started at the back of the store because we needed some stuff out of the Garden Department. On our way over to the grocery section we walked by the Home Décor area and right there on an end cap were these 40′ x 30′ photo prints on canvas for sale at 50% off.
As we leafed through the stack we saw a forest scene with a trail through it and Donna said, “Ooh, I like that one.” I said, “Me too!” Not only was it the scene, but it was the color too. It would fit perfectly with the greens of our bedroom colors and we did need something to hang on the wall behind the bed. When this type of synchronicity happens, we knew that this was a must buy. So we did.1
Yesterday I decided to hang it up. First up I hammered two sawtooth picture hangers into the back of the frame of the photo 5″ in from each edge to hold it up. Then I measured the wall horizontally and the space between the top of the headboard and the ceiling so that I could figure out how to put the picture in the center of the space.
The ceiling height was at 93″ and the top of the bed was 54″ from the floor giving me 39″. I then subtracted the picture height and divided it half to give me the height of the top of the picture to the ceiling, 4-1/2″ The wall was 102″ wide, subtracting the picture width of 40″ and dividing that by 2 gave me 31″ from the wall edges.
I dragged the bed away from the wall and got out my laser level and transferred my measurement to the wall and drilled two holes to mount the screws. As I held up the picture to hang it I quickly realized that the screws were no where near where the sawtooth hangers were. Doh! Homer Simpson head slap. I forgot that I had mounted the hangers 5″ in from each edge of the picture.
So, I measured five inches in from both wrongly placed screws and drilled 2 more holes. I placed the picture back on the wall and stepped back. Nice, got it two. I’ll spackle the extra 2 holes later. I pushed the bed back up against the wall, using the existing dents in the carpet to get it back exactly were it was. Stepped back again to admire my handy work and the picture wasn’t centered over the bed. #%$&#@!
The bed itself was not in the middle of the wall. One side was further right to allow Donna an easy path out along the side wall without having to turn sideways. The main bath is behind the wall the bed is on, so that my side has almost four feet of room to the other side wall.
I took the picture down and stood it up against the wall it has been leaning on for the last week and a half. Sometime later this week I will try and get the photo mounted correctly. You know what they say, “The third times a charm.” Keep your finger crossed…
June
Gyros
Tuesday the 7th
Today the Miata made a 5.7 mile dinner run to the only “Greek” restaurant in town, that’s right Arby’s, for gyros.
We needed to cleanse our palates after last week’s attempt to make our own at home following a recipe Donna found online. It turned out very, very disappointedly. It used a mix of beef and lamb like a gyro should, but it was using ground meat of both in an oblong patty fried in a pan, unlike the traditional vertical rotisserie method. The meat turned out tough. 🙁 The pita wasn’t that great either, we couldn’t find them anywhere in Fred Meyers, so we bought what we thought were the best ones on the shelf at Walmart. The pitas fell apart after warming them up. Our tzatziki sauce was from a premade tzatziki yogurt dip we found and even after adding feta cheese pieces to it, was not really that great.
Having had good luck with Arby’s gyros before and after our home disaster we figured that these tonight would just blow us away, but for some reason they just didn’t hit the mark. I think we’ll give them another chance, but two strikes and they’ll be out.
We have tried a gyro at a place over the Cascades in Medford and it was a bit different, but not worth going back there for one. On a trip in Washington state we found a chain called Pita Palace or something like that and had a similar experience, meh.
When we lived in Aiken we were regulars at a family run restaurant called Acropolis that did a real nice gyro. There was a nice little Greek place in the French Quarter that we ate gyros at semi often when we lived there after discovering this wonderful food at the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition.
Toward the end of June I took the road bike out for a ride for the first time in a while. I was going down a small hill not far from home slow with hands on the brakes because of the stop sign ahead and because of the cracks in the road. Halfway down I heard the distinctive “PING” of a spoke breaking and I could see the front wheel wobble in a singular spot. I opened the front brake so the rim wouldn’t scrape against them and turned for home.
I dropped the wheel off at the the local bike store to get it fixed and they said it would be done later that day or at worse tomorrow for a total cost of $37 ($36 for labor and $1 for the spoke. True to their word, early the next day I received a text to let me know the wheel was ready. I brought it home and stuck on the bike, but things were busy, so I didn’t take the bike out for a spin.
A couple days later I had time for a ride, so I got all dressed and ready to go, but when I went to roll the bike out of the garage the back tire was being tugged at by the brakes. I lifted the back wheel off the ground and spun it. The rim was contacting the brake pad in one spot. Sure enough, there was another broken spoke! I only heard one “PING”, did the two spokes, on different wheels, break in sync?
I took the second wheel down to the bike store. This time the repair was going to take week because they were backlogged. I bought this bike, used, in 2016 and from my research it was actually brand new in the year 2000 based on the color, so probably these rims are 22 years old. Wondering if this broken spoke problem will continue because of their age, I asked how much it would cost to have the wheels rebuilt using all new spokes. So, the total would be: 32 spokes per wheel, 2 wheels $64 plus the labor of $90 per wheel equals $244. This makes it, based on the fairly inexpensive group set of the bike, a better to just buy a new set of wheels.
The back wheel was ready yesterday afternoon, so this morning I got to go for a ride. I didn’t break any new spokes so maybe that whole conversation about new spokes or wheels is moot.
August
828 Days In The Making
Sunday the 7th
The Blipshift T-Shirt of April 29, 2020 was called AsteRISK and I thought that maybe I’d buy one. But, I hesitated, so I missed out on it and it came to be called my biggest regret of the year.
Sometime early this year Blipshift started selling a bumper sticker with that statement on it and I thought maybe I should buy that. But, on second thought, the black bumper sticker just wouldn’t look good on the CTBNL’s silver bumper, so I didn’t.
Then in February I did buy one, just to have it before they stopped selling them. And you never know, our next car could be black. Which is exactly what happened. Not one we bought, but When we took our trip to Santa Fe we rented a Mazda CX-5 and it was black. I put the sticker on its back bumper and left it there for the 2 weeks we had the vehicle. Since then it has been stuck to the top of my tool box.
Occasionally Blipshift does reprint a particular design, usually in a different color, but they never did. This past Thursday and Friday, plus all next week, they ae celebrating their 10 year anniversary by reprinting the best designs from the past decade. Guess which one made the cut? AsteRISK did!
This time, 828 days later, I didn’t hesitate, I ordered one.
September
Jurassic Overload
Thursday the 8th
We sign up to get Peacock so we can watch the Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana bicycle races. We even opt to spend the ten bucks a month to have the no commercials option. One of the big banners that show up at the top when you open the Peacock app is for the new Jurassic Park movie – Jurassic World: Dominion.
Hey, what the heck, I enjoyed the first movie way back when and its free, so I thought I’d check it out. I lasted 15 minutes before turning it off, Chris Pratt on a horse roping dinosaurs like a wild west cowboy… So this past Monday while the Vuelta cyclists were on a rest day, I talked Donna into watching the 1993 original movie.
Wow, amazing how much you forget in 30 years. Not the main bits that have become pop culture touchstones, the water class vibrations as the T-Rex approaches or the lawyer in the out house, etc, but the acting. Jeff Goldblum’s over the top smarminess, Lora Dern’s poorly acted wide-eyed innocence, Sam Neil’s character arc of kid hating to kid loving and Wayne Knight’s whatever (every time he was on screen I heard Jerry Seinfeld hiss, “Newmannnn.”) I did forget that Samuel L. Jackson was in it though and I kept waiting for him to drop a Mofo, but alas I was disappointed.
Anyway, turned out the first movie wasn’t as great as I remembered it was, so I thought I’d give to new movie one more try. This time I made it to right around the hour mark when the movie sort of morphed into the Star Wars cantina scene and then flipped immediately into a Jason Bourne movie which where it lost me…again.
Along with the latest Jurassic World: Dominion, the first 3 Jurassic movies are available for watching on Peacock right now, but The Lost World & The Lost World: Fallen Kingdom aren’t for some reason. I have a copy of The Lost World that someone gave me and I probably watched it back in 2015, but I can’t remember anything about it. I have seen the third movie, Jurassic Park III, and I seem to remember thinking it was OK, but that was 20 years ago.
That left the second movie, The Lost World. Jurassic Park, left to see on Peacock. Guess what? This one is another steaming pile a dino droppings. I made it about 45 minutes before hitting the stop button. The only thing remotely noteworthy about this movie was there was a young guy that plays a photographer that goes to the island with our core group of Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Richard Schiff that sounded a lot like Vince Vaughn. I had to stop the movie and check IMDB. Holy Crap! It was a 27-year old Vince Vaughn.
October
Thanks Mike
Sunday the 2nd
Today is Sunday and I took my usual Sunday morning ride out to the end of Lakeshore Drive and back. This gives me a nice little 15 mile ride, but today I only made it about 4-1/2 miles. At first it sounded like I sucked a tumbleweed into my back wheel, but when I looked back, there was nothing visible, but audible was a different story – hisssssss. I had a puncture.
I did a quick U-turn thinking maybe I could ride a ways back towards home, but that wasn’t happening. As soon as I got going in that direction the air had all escaped. I walked a few steps to get out from in front of someone’s driveway and settled in to see about patching my new hole in a tube.
I’ve been carrying around a modified water bottle with flat repair stuff inside just for this occasion. It used to be on the tandem so the spare tube in there wouldn’t fit the road bike, but there was a quick patch kit, 3 tire irons and a CO2 inflater with a couple cartridges so in theory I should be able to fix my problem.
I had just removed the rear wheel (why is it always the rear wheel?) when a fellow in a Honda CRV stopped next to me and zipped down the window, “Need some help?” I replied, “Not sure, but I might.” I told him I thought that I had the stuff to fix the issue, but hadn’t really checked yet. He pulled over, walked back and asked if it would be easier if he just gave me a lift home. It took me roughly 38 milliseconds to run through the hassle of doing the work on the side of the road in my head and the possibility of failure before I said, “If it isn’t too much trouble, I’ll take that ride.”
Turns out, he is also a cyclist and knew first hand the hassle of trying to fix a flat on the side of the road and the indignity of walking several miles home pushing, not riding, your bike. And one time when he had a flat someone stopped and offered him a ride home, so this was his way of paying that fellow back and leveling the cosmic score.
Later in the morning, for a test I attempted to fix the flat with the stuff inside that water bottle. I could, but in 10 minutes in my garage, who knows how it would have gone out there in the wild.
Thanks Mike.
November
Bicycle Tires
Saturday the 5th
Last week’s Tire Juggling post got me thinking about our collection of bicycles and their tires. We currently own five bicycles, one tandem, two road bikes and two mountain bikes. Every one of those bikes have different size tires on them. Our tandem has 26″ tires. My mountain bike because it has a large size frame it is mounted on 29″ tires and Donna’s being a size small frame came with 27.5″ tires. My road bike has 700c tires while her road bike has 27″ rubber.
Whenever we go for a mountain bike ride I carry two different size spare tubes and trust me, those 29″ & 27.5″ MTB tubes are big. At least with the road bikes, a 700c or 27″ tube will work with either size size and for the tandem a 26″ tube is all it takes.
If 5 bikes sounds like a lot for two people, ha, at one time in the 90’s we had seven. We had a pair of dedicated club ride road bikes and a pair of road bikes set up for commuting to work. We had a pair of Bridgestone mountain bikes and a Santana Sovereign tandem. But those 7 bikes required only 3 different tire/tube sizes, the tandem and road bikes were on 700c tires, the commuting bikes sported 27″ tires and the mountain bikes rode on 26″ tires.
December
Indoor Cycling
Thursday the 1st
Last Friday the sun was shining and the weather told me it was 45 degrees outside, and with that sun shine it felt more like the mid 50s. So, for the first time in around 4 weeks, I actually went for a bike ride outside. And looking ahead at the weather it looked like this would be my last time outside riding until spring.
I put on my tights and a long sleeve undershirt with a short sleeve jersey over it and took off. Between the time I decided to ride and actually riding the sun had disappeared behind some clouds and it felt every bit of 45°. I would get warm climbing a hill and be chilled when going back down, but still enjoyed the fresh air.
We bought an inexpensive indoor exercycle for Donna to work on strengthening her drop foot so she could rejoin me in bicycling again and when it got chilly in October I actually used it a couple times too.
A couple of decades ago I tried indoor cycling to keep in shape, but never really took to it. We tried one of those where the rear tire ran on a shaft connected to magnets for resistance, but it felt so sterile. Then I borrowed a set of rollers from another bike club member thinking that because rollers required you to use your balance it might seem more like actually riding. That was marginally better, but still boring as hell. Both these were setup in the garage and all I could look at was the wall. I added a fan to simulate movement. I tried adding music to listen to, but nothing worked, if I made it 15 minutes into a workout it was a great day. After a month or so of trying, I returned the rollers, donated the mag trainer to Goodwill and resigned to limited cycling over the winter.
Here in Oregon there will not be limited cycling because, while a few folks around here do ride year round, I’m not hardcore enough. The indoor exercycle is it. But I can stand it a lot better than those earlier attempts back in South Carolina. Firstly, the bike is indoors in the family room downstairs. Secondly, we have turned the 55″ TV so that it faces the bike nearly head on six feet away. And thirdly, we have found a YouTube channel called Indoor Cycling Videos so I can pretend I’m actually bicycling outdoors.
The videos range from 30 minutes to a couple of hours and are mostly from over in Europe. There are road bike rides and mountain bike ones as well. Almost all of them have a readout along the bottom showing time, speed, distance and hill gradient. Because this exercycle has a heavy flywheel where you control the effort by twisting a knob on the downtube I try to make the resistance larger when going uphill and less when the gradient reads negative.
Most of my outdoor riding around here was right was around an hour in duration. Riding indoors on this type of bike really can’t do coasting because the pedals are connected to the flywheel unlike outdoors where coasting down hills is a nice respite. Also I can’t really stand up on the pedals and spin like I can on the road bike. Indoors I am really sitting and pedaling all the time, so for now the 30 minute indoor rides are enough. I may try and move up to 45 minute ones, but probably won’t go longer than that because just sitting for that long won’t be fun.
After buying a couple of new sweatshirts with my self gifted Christmas bonus I still had a wee bit of money leftover. I thought maybe I would get our local bookstore to order for me the latest Jack Reacher book, No Plan B. That way I could pick it up on our every four week visit that coincides with our haircut. The next of which was on the calendar for the 29th.
Donna said go ahead and get it from Amazon, so you could have it for Christmas. So, on the 18th I placed an order. At checkout my estimated delivery date was listed as the 28th, so much for that expedited Prime delivery. In the end they did get it to me earlier than that and even earlier than Christmas to boot, the book arrived on Christmas Eve.
The first few books every story was more or less direct, as if you were walking in Reacher’s shoes, but as the series progressed the stories would occasionally give the point of view of the villain in the story, but still it was very Reacher centric. This last novel written with his real life brother, who will eventually take over by himself, was with four different points of view. Of course Reacher was the center point and there was also the main bad guy, a CEO of a for profit prison that was up to no good. That really was enough, but we also got a thread about a father out for revenge because of his sons death. There was also stuffed into the narrative, the story the story of a teenager boy who is running away from home. Both of these last two story lines were left until the end to fit into the main story and done in such a way that seemed jarring to me. And while both of them were, in some way, used to further the plot along, in the end they both were wrapped in about a paragraph each and they really weren’t really needed.
So, this time I mean it, No Plan B was the last Reacher book I’m going to buy. I’ve got digital copies of the first two dozen books and I’ll probably go back and read each one as they get adapted for the Amazon Prime TV series.
It is coming up on the end of the month so we needed to finish using up our Fred Meyer Fuel Points that are left over from November. We filled up the Mini last Wednesday, but we still had a touch over 800 points to use or lose by the end of the month. so this morning I unplugged the battery tender, put up the top and drove to Freddy’s and bought 6.858 gallons and saved $5.49.
It wasn’t really snowing, I just added it to the picture for fun. The snow on the roadside is real and left over from the last snow storm.
We planned on pizza for lunch and when I called our usual place around noon no human answered the phone after about 10 rings. This is not unusual as they can get busy at lunchtime and sometimes I hang up and call again and someone will answer almost right away. As I was about to try this strategy when a machine picked up, they were closed for the Christmas holiday and would reopen on Tuesday. Dang.
Plan B was implemented. I called Papa Murphy’s, a take-and-bake pizza place, and they were open. We have used them a couple of times before and while they are no comparison to Rodeos, this seemed our best option. I opted to take the Miata because the roads were finally almost entirely clear of snow and ice from our post Thanksgiving storm.
Plus I wanted to test my fix for the front tires scraping when making sharp turns. Yesterday I had finally decided to see what the tires might be hitting. Turns out it was just the driver side and it was hitting on a bent down area on the inner fender liner. It was missing one of the plastic twisty fasteners that held the front part of the liner to the middle section. I didn’t have an extra one, so I stole one from an area that had a couple close together.
This helped, but did not solve the problem totally because the plastic liner pieces were still bent down enough to hit the tire on full lock, so I let loose my red-neck engineering side. I drilled an eighth inch hole inside the engine compartment through the inner fender and through the liners. I found a small flat head screw and screwed it through the liners from insdie the fender to hold them tight against the fender. Then I sprayed both sides of my “repair” with some black Plasti Dip to kind of seal it from the elements.
Success, no more ugly sounds when making sharp turns.
