10:00AM – Sports Reporters on ESPN
10:30AM – end of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on AMC
11:00AM – Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC
11:30AM – Inside the Actors Studio on Bravo
3:00PM – come up for air to go to the grocery store
According to the idiots who started me on this quest, there are 367 Post Offices in South Carolina. After today’s 160 mile, seven PO trip we are 13% of the way towards the goal of getting a picture of everyone.
We stopped in Greenwood after getting both Post Offices there for some lunch at a place called T.W. Boon?s. We split a Shrimp Po-boy, Onion Rings and a Sierra Mist.
The Postal Gallery Database site says 367, but I can not get a definitive list from the US Postal Service site. If I search from Columbia (which is pretty much in the center of the state) with a hundred mile radius I get 488 results. This probably isn’t accurate because it may include surrounding states, when I search from Aiken for a 100 miles it starts to list Augusta, Georgia POs.
Wikipedia lists 541 Zip Codes in the state. When I went through that list and removed the ones that said PO Box after the name I end up with 404. But I know that isn’t right because there are only 2 Post Offices in Aiken and I was left with 4 zips. Plus there were 5 or 6 names I removed that I recognized as having buildings (because I have pictures of them), so I’m thinking that the PO Box designation means there is no carrier service in those locations.
The USPS site may not even be 100% accurate as to how many it has either. When we first started this quest it listed a Post Office in the micro-town of Snelling, SC and no amount of driving the few streets in that town using the USPS site’s map resulted in a find. Same thing happened in Hilton Head where we could only find two of the four the site had listed for there. Searching today lists no P.O. for Snelling and 3 for Hilton Head.
Anyway, we may never know if we get all of them, but we sure are going to try.
Tonight we had dinner out with friends at Olive Oils right here in Aiken. Grilled Chicken Breast topped with Proscuito and Cheese for him. Seafood Ravioli for her. Water to drink. All the salad and breadsticks you can eat included.
This afternoon was our half day off for working 9 hours for the last 4 days. Our intention was to go to the Stoplight Deli, but we ended up at Ferrando’s for pizza instead. 14″ pie with pepperoni, sausage, onions, green peppers and banana (pepper) rings. Two garden salads a Sprite and a water. Plus a little cup of marinara sauce for crust dipping. The good thing abut this meal is that we only eat half the pie, so Sunday’s lunch is already taken care of…
Our neighbors across the street are a charming old retired couple that we have come to know well in our 18 years here in Aiken. During the 5 years that Donna’s mom lived with us we had Oliver and Nancy over for dinner several times. Oliver is the talker of the two and he would regale us with tales of early life in Aiken and all manner of subjects. They moved into Dunbarton Oaks in the middle 50’s when the subdivision was first built. Oliver was an engineer that came to town to work at the newly opened top secret bomb plant south of town and Nancy taught school. Both have long since retired.
But in all the time we’ve known him, he never once mentioned his acting days with the local playhouse, so we were quite surprised to see this picture in the Aiken Standard’s “Portrait’s of the Past” section this week. I cut it out and laminated it for him. When I gave him the picture I told Oliver that the next time I come visit his house I’d like to see his award. He told me it is probably in the attic somewhere gathering dust. I’m sure 38 years ago it held a place of prominence on his mantle though.
We are planning a dip into Canada in May when we next visit the Pacific northwest in May. Donna has a long lost cousin that lives near Vancouver and we, along with her big brother and his wife, are going to say hello. As of January 23, 2007 you need a passport to get into Canada (and more importantly, back into the US) if you are traveling by boat or plane. If you are driving you won’t need one until next January. We are taking a ferry, so are we driving or boating in? We are not going to take any chances, so tomorrow we are going to the post office to get some new passports.
We already have passports, but they are a little out of date, they expired almost 24 years ago. To get a new one you need proof of US citizenship and our old passports fit that bill. When I filled out the application I checked the box saying that we would surrender our old passports. Everything was fine until tonight and besides having a hard time finding where we put them last, Donna got a little misty eyed about them as souvenirs of our honeymoon. Almost didn’t want to give them up. I got her to grudging agree to turn them in, but to make nice, I scanned all the pages into the PC.
We had a coupon to buy one, get one free as long as you bought two large drinks. Donna ordered a Billy Barou that looked big enough to split, so we did. I’ll have my Joey Bag of Donuts for lunch tomorrow. It was still nice enough at 6:30 that we ate outside on the patio and watched the traffic go by on Whiskey Road (although by the end of the meal I wished I had a jacket on.)
There was pine pollen on the car when we got off of work this afternoon, but I ain’t complaining, it was 69° outside. So I went rollerblading when we got home, had to. I did my usual 3 mile circuit and it felt pretty good to stretch it out, but I bet tomorrow morning I’ll feel it in my lower back and legs. The high temps are headed back towards fifty again by the weekend, so I’ll be back to hibernating ’til spring, but it can’t be far away now.
This afternoon I had the sudden urge to get a bag of chips or something from the gedunk machines in the cafeteria. I usually don’t need a snack, but today for some reason I just had to have something. This unnatural craving must have come from some leftover subliminal suggestion implanted during my watching of Super Bowl commercials.
Mixed in between the three soft drink machines, the coffee machine, the change machine and a sandwich machine are two snack machines filled with a selection of salty or sweet or salty/sweet choices. Even though the 2 machines have a nearly identical mix of products, before choosing an item you have to look over every item in each machine before buying something. Almost everything is a national brand, but there are usually a couple of regional selections. Today, if I wanted (and I didn’t) I could have had a bag of Danny’s Pork Bits, AKA pork rinds, AKA the skin of a pig with a layer of fat still attached that has been deep fried to a crunchy consistency. The nutritional information proudly displayed on the front said that a serving of this snack would have 7.5 grams of fat and 70 calories.
I opted for something I thought might be a healtier, a 1-1/2 ounce bag of Lay’s Sour Cream & Chive Potato Chips cooked in sunflower oil and advertising no trans fats. As I sat at my desk enjoying my chips, I read the back panel’s nutrition label and discovered that one serving of these chips had 15 grams of total fat and 240 calories. Wait a minute, how could this bag of chips have twice the fat and 3 times the calories of a larger 2oz bag of pork rinds (which are essentially fat fried in fat?)
I went back over to the machine and re-read the pork skin’s nutrition label again. Yep, 7.5 fat and 70 calories. Oh, here it is, serving size 1/2 oz, servings per bag 4, so if you ate the whole bag yourself, not sharing with 3 of your buddies as expected, you’d get 30 grams of fat and 280 calories.