American’s Love Stuff

We have way too much of it. A majority of the people I know have two car garages and it is rare that any one uses them to park even one car inside. Those are really 20′ x 20′ storage sheds connected to the house. They are a place to keep toys, old exercise equipment, boxes full of old books, the lawnmower, whatever, just not cars. Once your garage is too full to even walk through you can drive, usually, less than 2 miles and for a small monthly fee, rent another 10′ x 20′ space to put the overflow. What is so amazing is that these places are hives of storage rooms, hundreds per location. Man we have too much stuff.

While watching TV this weekend I saw an ad for the latest in American storage solutions, PODS. now you don’t have to drive two miles to the hive, these people bring a cell of the honeycomb to you!

198 Miles

Because we filled up at the Inn on Friday, didn’t drive the Miata at all on Saturday and drove right home this morning, we still have a half a tank of gas left over. Mileage from the Pisgah Inn to 778 Boardman Road, Aiken, SC is 198.

Spent the afternoon catching up on Barndoor Fan Club business, washing 4 loads of clothes and catch up blogging.

While taking the bear pictures yesterday I just had to snap a picture of this Office Supply store, Sinclair’s.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $830.88
Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 133

The Wave Is Dead (Thank God)

It seems for some reason that my life has been somehow thrust into the same orbit as 9 year-old boys’ baseball teams. Tonight’s entertainment involved a trip to Asheville (most of the whole 30 miles on the parkway) to see the Asheville Tourists play baseball. No they are not 9 year-olds, but about 10 or 12 years older, the Tourists are the Single A farm club of the Colorado Rockies.

In attendance for tonight’s game was the Buncombe County 9 year-old All Star team having just won their regional tournament earlier in the day. Somewhere around the 7th inning these guys got a little bored and decided to start the wave. They managed to get a good response from the first section (probably because that’s where their parents were sitting) but each successive section saw fewer people participant until the “wave” died a speedy dead. The drop off was almost exponential, by 3 sections away it was maybe 2 people joining in. They even tried splitting up and getting a couple kids to stand in front of a section as leaders. Much to my pleasure that didn’t work either. Sorry boys, go back to playing the game.

Oh, yeah I got to drive to and from the stadium as long as I promised to go a reasonable rate of speed, determined by the passengers. Before we left the Inn’s lot I pulled out the Windex from the trunk of the Miata and gave the inside and outside of the windshield a nice bath.

Bears Oh My

We drove around all day in my sister’s Protege so we wouldn’t have to take two cars. first we went into downtown Hendersonville, NC. This is the town Diane and Allen have picked to retire to in 7 seven years. They have a neat and thriving downtown. One attraction currently running is along the lines of those artistic cows they did in Chicago several years back, only because of their locale here, they used life-sized black bears. Diane and I decided that we would take a picture of every one of the 26 bears. We got the one inside the locked bank and we got the one inside a clothing store and we snapped the one on the awning of a restaurant, but we couldn’t locate bear #5. It was not where it was supposed to be. Maybe Animal Control had to capture it because it attacked a tourist. 🙂 I’ll try and get my gallery online in the next couple of days.

That night we went out to watch some minor league baseball. The Asheville Tourists, class A farm club of the Colorado Rockies were tangling with the Capital City Bombers. The Bombers won the game 3 to 1, but the evening wasn’t a total loss. It was free cap night. The first 1,00 fans got a really nice Tourists’ ball cap (the ads were small and tasteful.) Plus, Donna’s name was pulled in a drawing so she won a throw blanket donated by a local mill. I won an oil change because we had one of the player’s signature on the right page. We gave away that prize to the couple behind us, as for sure we weren’t driving all the way back up there just for an oil change.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $830.88
Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 130

How Can You See?

Donna and I are up in North Carolina visiting with my sister and her husband who are down on vacation. We hooked up this afternoon and have a couple of things planned. Friday night’s entertainment was to go out to eat and go see the Music On Main Street concert in Hendersonville, NC. We are staying at the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway and Hendersonville is a 30-mile trip. Donna likes for me to drive and my brother-in-law graciously agreed to let me drive his car (actually it is my sister’s Mazda Protege.) It was that or take two cars because the Miata can’t seat more than two.

I love the Blue Ridge Parkway, it winds along the crest of the mountains, dipping and dodging through some very beautiful country. Plus the best part is dropping of the ridge into the valleys on roads packed with switchbacks. 🙂 It was lightly raining as we took off for our trip and the windshield wipers were kinda old so they left ugly streaks. To top it all off the inside of the window had never seen a drop of Windex in it’s life (I think it is a 2000 model) making me drive a bit slower than I could have had the roads not been wet and you could see down the road.

My brother-in-law Allen said to go slow through the windy roads as this car didn’t handle as well as his Acura. Actually it did pretty darn good, so good that he wanted to drive back. I think I might have scared him a little with my driving. I didn’t even get any tire squeal or anything.

I was kind glad he volunteered to drive back even though it took twice as long. It was dark for the return trip and the glare from oncoming cars was tough stuff. Better him than me.

Now That’s Italian

On our way up north to meet sis and hubby in North Carolina. The most interesting thing of the whole drive occurred just outside of downtown Aiken on Laurens Street. Just as we were passing the post office a small gray object fell rapidly from the sky above us and hit the road a few inches in front of the nose of the car with a splat. As I looked in the rearview mirror I could see the squirrel dash towards the side of the road. I guess he missed a branch. Just imagine if I was 2 secs earlier leaving home or a light changed on a different schedule or the squirrel paused a beat longer thinking about the gap between those branches? I wonder what kind of havoc a squirrel landing in the cockpit of a moving convertible might cause? Would not be pretty!

In our increasingly harder to accomplish task of finding a different way north we crossed into Georgia for a bit of our trip. As luck would have it we were in the small burg of Clarksville, GA around lunchtime. We stopped in the center square and walked around looking for like candidates for a nice meal. We ended up going into the Zanzo Side Door Deli. It was on one side of a building and the regular Italian restaurant was on the other. Donna had a chicken salad plate on some greens with fruit on the side and I opted for the lunch portion of baked ziti. Man it was good. Almost worth the 100 mile drive it would take just to go back. This food was so Italian good and we were so in the middle of nowhere, backwoods Georgia that the folks running the place had to be witness protection relocatees.

Purchased Today: $26 in gas
Money spent since 03/03/03: $830.88
Started down, went up, went down, went up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 130

Close, But No Cigar

The Aiken 9 year-old All Stars lost tonight 7 to 5 and North Augusta took home the slightly bigger trophies. They played well, but the other team just made fewer errors. Our friend’s son started and pitched the first 4 innings. When he was pulled after the 4th, Aiken was ahead 5 to 4. Unfortunately North Augusta had the number of the 5th inning starter and jumped on him for 2 quick runs. NA scored scored one more on the 3rd Aiken pitcher and the damage was done. When Aiken came up in the top of the 6th for their final shot, they went down 1-2-3.

Off to the mountains in the morning. If you are on the Blue Ridge Parkway west of Asheville on Friday and see a blue Miata flash by; wave, its me.

I’m going to take the notebook and do some analog blogging this weekend. When I get back on Sunday I’ll post the entries from each day.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $804.88
Started down, still down.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 127