Looking For Rachel Wallace

Looking For Rachel WallaceResponding to some primal urge buried deep in her DNA to eat protein to help awaken from winter’s hibernation and prepare for the arrival of spring, Donna decided she wanted beef for dinner. We didn’t have any in house, so off we went to Moe’s. She ordered a John Coctostan with beef and pinto beans. I opted for a Joey Bag of Doughnuts with chicken and black beans. We split a bottled water. Because we had a buy one, get one free coupon dinner was major cheap.

Meal Cost: $6.97
Tip: Zip
Spent Today: $6.97
Year to Date: $558.71

After my last Spenser book quote I realized that it might be better if you had a little background first, so here’s the setup for today’s excerpt. Spenser is hired to protect radical feminist and lesbian author Rachel Wallace. Linda Smith is the publisher’s media rep and Shirley is the morning news talk host. This takes place partway through the interview where Shirley is busy trying to goad Rachel into a sensational quote about her sexual inclination instead of actually discussing her latest book:

The guy crouching below the camera lens made a gesture with his hand, and Shirley said, “We’ll be right back with more interesting revelations from Rachel Wallace after this message.”

I whispered to Linda Smith, who stood in neat tweeds beside me, “Shirley doesn’t listen to the answers.”

A lot of them don’t,” Linda said. “They are busy looking ahead to the next question.”

“And she hasn’t read the book.”

Linda smiled and shook her head, “Almost none of them ever do. You can’t blame them. Sometimes you get several authors a week plus all the other stuff.”

“The pressure must be fearful,” I said. “To spend your working life never knowing what you are talking about.”

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 72

Save Radio Paradise

..and all the other smaller Internet Radio Stations. No money required, just a little bit of your computer time.

The US Copyright Office has released their new set of rates for the payment of royalties by Internet Radio — royalty rates so high that they will put Radio Paradise and every other US-based indie webcaster out of business.

What can you do? Sign the online petition and open letter to the US Congress. My signature number is #10423. Then please send an email message to your Congressmembers. You can use the suggested text, change it, or write your own message. I also suggest that you print your email (you’ll get a copy) and mail it to your Representative and Senators and, to show them that you really are a committed geek boy, call their offices. You can look up their addresses and phone numbers here.

Cold Service

Quirk glanced at Hawk and turned slowly and looked at me. His back was to the window now.

“Being a veteran police investigator, and a deep student of human character, I’m going to hazard a guess. You went to see Boots.”

“Incredible,” Hawk said.

“Yeah, it is,” Quirk said. “You hang him out a window.”

“Nope,” Hawk said. “I put a gun to his head.”

“Jesus Chirst,” Quirk said. “Boots Podolak?”

“That sort of how he felt,” Hawk said.

You know, now that I look at that, it would be a lot better in the whole context of the book. So go read “Cold Service” by Robert B. Parker.

Pretty sad huh, came here here looking for entertaining stories of my trials and tribulations and all you get is a book quote. Better luck tomorrow.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 70

Ischial Tuberosites

After work today I went out into the garage and removed the cobwebs from the tandem, aired up the tires and rolled it into the sunshine. That’s right, for the first time this year, we went for a bike ride. Just cruised around a bit before ending up at the Municipal Building where we paid our water bill.

At about seven miles there came a call from the back seat to start heading home because the ischial tuberosites were starting to bother her. Mine had been letting me know I hadn’t been on a bike in a while for a few minutes already, but being a man I didn’t complain, verbally anyway.

As a reward for burning a couple hundred calories cycling, we went out to Outback and promptly consumed 4 or 5 times that many for dinner. Twin lobster tails with mashed potatoes and a salad, water to drink was what Donna had. I opted for the grilled salmon with broccoli and a salad, which I washed down with iced tea.

Meal Cost: $41.62
Tip: $6.38
Spent Today: $48.00
Year to Date: $551.74

Routing Transit Number

When I filed this year’s taxes like I have for the past several, I filed electronically. I also have what I owe or my refund automatically transfered to or from my savings account. This year our state refund was about twice what we owed Uncle Sam, so I had the state money go into savings and scheduled my payment to the IRS for April 2nd, figuring that would be enough time for the refund to get there first.

Today, in the mail, was a refund check from the State of South Carolina. What? I logged into my bank and checked to see if a refund had been deposited and I was getting double refunded. Nope. I broke out my copy of the state return and looked to see if I messed up the account number. Nope. What about the Routing Transit Number? I remember looking up on the web what my banks RTN was, maybe I mistyped it. Nope, I typed in the right RTN for Carolina First, but unfortunately I used the one for the North Carolina region, not South Carolina. Great, what is going to happen when George Bush wants his money on the 2nd of April?

I called up the toll free IRS Help Line and after about 4-5 minutes listening to classical music on hold I spoke with a very helpful lady and she told me that I messed up. There isn’t any policy to amend an electronically submitted return. When the IRS attempts to get their money, the bank will rebuff them because I don’t have an account there. In essence I will have bounced a check to the federal government. When I asked her what would happen then, she replied I would get a bill in the mail for taxes due and a $15 fee for the bouncing. That doesn’t sound to bad, I just hope it doesn’t land me on some “Let’s Audit This Bozo” list.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 68

459

There are currently 68 photos in the Post Office gallery. That means Donna and I have driven into 68 towns in South Carolina and parked the Miata in front of their Post Office, gotten out of the car and snapped 2 to 4 pictures. Sixty-eight sounds like a lot, but it is not many when you think of how many Post Offices there are. But just how many are there?

The original number from the Postal Gallery site that started this for me was 367, but I recently got a list of SC Zip Codes from Wikipedia and they list 541 of them. I didn?t blog yesterday because I was too busy. I was gripped by my latest obsession (used without permission), I needed to find out how many Post Offices there are in South Carolina. From about 6:00PM until nearly 10:00 PM, I was at the usps.com web site using their Post Office locater. I found quite a few zip codes on that list that don?t have their own Post Office, but I also found a few towns that had more than one post office per zip code.

I now have a number to shoot for ? 459. Here is the excel spreadsheet if you are interested: South Carolina Post Offices.xls I?m sure my total of photos will be somewhat less. There are approximately 20 Contract Postal Units (a CPU is a station or branch operated by a contractor, typically in a store or other place of business) and unless there is an obvious sign out front proclaiming Post Office!, I won?t be taking pictures of those. South Carolina has 3 or 4 universities that may have Post Offices that mainly serve the students and are walkup in nature, so I might not be able to get the Emperor in the photo. Plus there are 5 military bases and I?m not so sure they will let me in, especially after I explain what I want to visit their base for. I already have two Post Offices I couldn?t find, so there is bound to be several more before I finish. My guess is when we are all done there will be 425 photos posted in the web gallery.

Four hundred twenty-five photos with 20 on a page means 22 pages. Sixty-eight so far, divided by 425 total, equals 16% complete. Plus there is the time issue to take into consideration; I?m due a new Miata in 1364 days and I need to have the same car in each photo, so I will need to add a average of one new photo every 3 days until November 2010. The task seems kind of daunting now that I?ve written it all down.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 66

Winter’s Last Gasp

Are You Looking At Me?We went to a local book fair yesterday and picked up some used books. I snagged a couple of Spenser hardcovers for $4 a piece and a couple of early paperbacks with some retro cool cover artwork. The quote below is from one of the hardcovers, School Days, and sometimes I feel just like Spenser does.

“Why would the parents want to discourage an attempt to find their son innocent of multiple murder charges?”

Don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know shit,” Rita said, “do you?”

“No,” I said. “But it’s okay, I’m used to it.”

When I get into the paperbacks I’ll scan the cover of one. I’ve compared the Spenser books to potato chips here before, but with this week’s eating pleasure, maybe I should compare them to a box of Girl Scout Cookies: They are extremely tasty with no redeeming nutritional value and once you start eating a box you just can’t stop until they are gone. Which is exactly what happened to a box of Samoas today.

I’ve uploaded yesterday’ post Office pictures to the gallery. Look for Barnwell, Fairfax, Olar, Sycamore, Ulmer and Williston.

This morning we hit our favorite downtown breakfast spot for a veggie quesadilla, a breakfast parfait (granola on the bottom, vanilla yogurt in the middle and hot blueberries in syrup on top) with a low fat raspberry bran muffin for a kicker washed down with a bottled water.

Meal Cost: $8.75
Tip: 1.25
Spent Today: $10.00
Year to Date: $503.74

Today’s high didn’t make it into the 60’s and tonight’s low will be around 30, but I’ thinking this is the last of the “cold” weather around here for this winter. Next week we will be in the low 70’s almost every day. Some of the Bradford Pears are starting to bloom and the dogwood next to our house has buds. Even though we tried hard to talk ourselves out of it because of the chilly temps, we still ended up spending an hour or so walking in Hitchcock Woods. The weather didn’t scare a lot of people off either, we probably spotted more folks enjoying the woods this afternoon than we have in the past 6 or 7 times total.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 64