Best Of

Best of 2023

January

Magnetic Miracle

Tuesday the 17th

About twenty years ago we discovered Easyclip glasses as a replacement for having a pair of sunglasses and a pair of glasses. Somewhere around a decade ago I moved to photochromatic lenses because I was tired of having to put the clips on and off. Donna still uses the magnetic Easyclip style because she hates the time lag when when moving from shade to sun and vice versa.

Two weeks ago when Donna went to put her magnetic clip-on sunglasses that came as a set with her regular glasses they weren’t where she expected them to be.

We looked everywhere for them. All her jacket pockets, her purse and the knapsack that acts her alternate purse. We checked in all the nooks and crannies in the interiors of the Miata and the Mini. We looked on the floor and every horizontal surface around the house, from the dresser in her closet to desk in the living room. We asked at our favorite coffee shop where we were the day before if anyone had turned them into their lost & found. They were just gone.

We hightailed down to Rite Aid to get an aftermarket set of clip-on sunglasses. They are spring loaded instead of the magnetic, but the fit is pretty good and were a darn sight cheaper than getting a real replacement. The only thing we could figure as they fell out of her pocket getting in or out of the car somewhere during our running around the day before.

While doing laundry today, what did I find at the bottom of the dryer after pulling out all the clothes? Right, her Easyclip sunglasses!

Had they been in a piece of clothing that got washed two weeks ago and the magnetic part stuck to somewhere inside the dryer drum? I find that that hard to believe, we do a load of laundry almost everyday and a couple times a week we two loads, those clip-ons would have appeared before now.

This was eerily reminiscent of the Easter Miracle of 2018.

February

Note To Past Self…

Wednesday the 15th

…I am not lazy.

Twenty years ago today I wrote a post called The Epitome of Laziness. Even though I have linked it here, there is no reason to go back and read it because it involved me whining about power recliners where instead of manually moving your arm to move the chair’s arm, a motor does it for you.

Currently we have a couch and a loveseat that raises and lowers using a switch. It is not lazy, but merely working smarter not harder.

March

Just Who Do You Think You Are Messing With?

Tuesday the 21st

This was really the genesis for Last Saturday’s post, Watching Family Trees Grow, but I got long winded there and I didn’t want it to get lost, so here you go:

As we powered through the episodes of “Who Do You Think You Are” we had a couple of instances weirdness. First was the 5th Episode of Season 9 about Molly Shannon. Molly’s maternal grandfather came from an island off the coast of County Mayo called Achill. Ms. Shannon actually travels to the island and meets folks who knew her grandfather and some cousins she never knew she had. Later that evening Donna and I were doing the crossword puzzle from that day’s newspaper when we came to a clue that read, “Western Ireland Island.” The answer was five letters long and we had the last letter already, an ‘L’…

The second time it happened was Episode 2 of Season 10 about Josh Duhamel. Josh discovers that his 12x great-grandfather, a man named Thomas Norton, held prominent status in 16th century England, and was an influential figure in the war between Protestantism and Catholicism at the time. When they were discussing this religious schism the names of Queen Mary the 1st (Catholic) who was succeeded on the throne by her half-sister Elizabeth the 1st who was Protestant my ears perked up. Earlier in the day I had started watching the movie Elizabeth starring Cate Blanchett which covers this very period. Unfortunately Mr. Duhamel’s 12x great-grandfather didn’t figure in the movie. Or maybe fortunately because Thomas Norton “interrogations” of Catholics in the Tower of London led to his being nicknamed “Rackmaster-General.”

April

What’s The Buzz

Saturday the 8th

Tell me what’s happening.

It’s Easter weekend which means it was time for my sporadic annual rewatching of my favorite rock opera – Jesus Christ Superstar.

Some folks have called this rock opera/stage play/movie blasphemes, but how about this for blasphemes, Marjorie Taylor Greene comparing Donald Trump’s recent arrest to Jesus’s arrest a couple of centuries ago.

Though having heard this comment earlier in the week while watching the movie it got me thinking, maybe she’s on to something, Substitute Jewish priests for the NYC DA’s office, the Donald for Jesus, Stormy Daniels for Mary Magdalene and Michael Cohen for Judas.

After the overture the first song is ‘Heaven on Their Minds’ and the first stanza works well unchanged:
[JUDAS]
My mind is clearer now
At last, all too well
I can see where we all soon will be
If you strip away
The myth from the man
You will see where we all soon will be

Now, in no way do I think that Mr. Trump is in any way worthy of adoration, but wow, as I was listening to the rest of the songs in the movie there were several that could also be slightly reworked to fit my analogy…

Anyway, try and have a Happy Easter.

May

Then Came the Last Day of May

Wednesday the 31st

It’s said the West is nice this time of year, that’s what they say

My favorite heavy metal band from the 70s was Blue Oyster Cult and the title of one of my favorite songs from them almost matches the title of this post – Days instead of Day.

This is a Public Service Announcement: If you ever need to stay overnight in Leesville, Louisiana do not stay in the Holiday Inn Express there. Stay at the rundown motel next door with the swimming pool that is 3/4 full of green algae water, it’ll probably be nicer. Here is a partial list of things that were wrong:

  1. The rug between the beds was not vacuumed, there was lint and what was possibly clothes soap powder on the floor.
  2. There was also a small round red squishy thing near one of the beds, possibly a cat toy.
  3. Inside the closet were the totally dry swimsuits of two small children on the hotels hangers.
  4. When you turned on the TV there was nothing but snow. It defaults to the cable input which is not connected. You have to hit the I/O button on the side of the TV to select the Component Input.
  5. The TV has Direct TV and no guide. Even if it did it wouldn’t help, there is no other way to select the channel except using the up/down toggle on the remote.
  6. Every other channel you scroll through is either an all infomercial our is not part of the package the hotel has bought.
  7. The screen on the window, which I didn’t even consider opening, was torn and the bottom third was gone.
  8. The shower head in the bath was not the typical HIE unit but a random brand thing that had a spray selector that wouldn’t change, so you ended up with a spray that resembled the pattern of Death Star ray.
  9. Surprise, the bathroom floor was dirty.
  10. The usually mediocre breakfast was shitty, fewer than usual selections, food not really hot and the sometime saving grace cinnamon bun was so dry as to be inedible.

Maybe just bypass Leesville entirely. A couple miles up the road from the hotel I found a coffee shop, so I thought maybe I can get a good caramel latte there. The last two I have tried on this trip, Green River, UT and Hammond, LA have been respectfully, awful and then sub-par. Well, the one from “Back To Nature” was worse than the other two, it was served in a Styrofoam cup and I can’t be sure, but the caramel shot I think was a squirt of Hershey’s caramel ice cream sundae syrup.

To top off the day just after crossing into Texas either the box truck or SUV following on its tail tossed a rock up and plunked the lower part of the windshield creating a nice star crack. It didn’t seem to spread any on the rest of the 300 mile drive, but I circled it tonight with a Sharpie so I can see if it does expand further.

At least we don’t end up like the three kids in Blue Oyster Cult’s song.

It wasn’t until the car suddenly stopped
In the middle of a cold and barren place
And the other guy turned and spilled
Three boys blood, did they know a trap had been laid?

June

Happy Summer Solstice

Wednesday the 21st

Although I’d be hard pressed to say summer was here. The last two nights there has been a freeze warning in Klamath Falls and this morning when I went out to run a quick errand I put the top up because it was still in the upper 30s…

Keeping in the spirit of the solstice, today’s Bing Wallpaper is of Stonehenge, on this last road trip we found a Stonehenge replica in Odessa, TX and 14 years ago we made a pilgrimage to Alliance, NE to visit Carhenge.

Ed Note: Exactly 2 weeks later we found this “Stonehenge” near the town of Maryville, Washington just off US97.

July

82,000 Points on a Chart

Tuesday the 18th

We are only a little over two weeks away from 7 years of ownership of the CTBNL and in that time frame we have driven it almost 35,700 miles. If you look at the chart above you will notice that there is a really noticeable change in the trajectory of the mileage numbers between the left side of the red line to the right side. During the first 38 months of ownership we put a good portion of 30,000 miles on the car, so that works out to an approximate average of 790 miles per month. That red line indicates when we moved from Aiken to Klamath Falls. Since then in 46 months we have added just under 6,000 making the average around 130 miles per month.

There are several reasons for the decline in miles for the Miata. First up is winter, in Aiken it got driven practically year round while here it is luck if it gets driven every 10 days or so and then for just a quick local spin. But probably the main reason is that we no longer take real road trips in it anymore. Since we have been here we took one 3 day trip to the coast in it. We’ve almost aged out of road tripping in entirely.

Now when we go somewhere we usually take the Mini. For comparison, during those same 46 months here in Klamath Falls the Minis have travel 19,000 miles or over 400 miles a month. That could have been higher too because we made three trips (2 to Santa Fe & 1 to Granite Falls) in rentals for various reasons.

Yesterday on a 30 mile morning drive, the CTBNL it rolled past the 82,000 mile mark.

Ed Note: Almost 2 months in the future, we do something about the lack of Miata mileage, see the upcoming September story.

August

1973 NBHS Class Will

Sunday the 27th

There were around 600 kids in my high school graduating class and with a circle of friends of maybe 1% of the that, I was practically invisible among those masses, except for this one thing.

In the fall of senior year our Current Events class made a field trip to NYC, about a 100 miles away, to see a couple of Broadway plays. Most of the details of the trip are lost to dying brain cells, but two of them are indelibly etched in my memory. The first play was Jesus Christ Superstar which I love to this day and I, along with 2 other classmates, were left behind in the Big Apple.

The two plays were at different theaters about 10 city blocks apart. We were told that after the second show the bus would be parked right outside the theater and to just get on it. After the wonder that was JCS rock opera, the second play was a real drag and the three of us, based on the Playbill listing, ducked out of that second theater at the beginning of the last song to get a good seat on the bus for the ride home. There was no bus!

In typical teenager fashion, none of us had really paid that much attention to the details, so we put our heads together and we decided that maybe the bus was parked at the first theater. We hustled back the 10 blocks to theater number one and of course there was no bus there either. Well, hell. So, we high-tailed it back to theater number two only to find no bus there either.

Obviously the bus was supposed to be at theater #2, but had yet to arrive when we ducked out early, so there we were 100 miles from home and no ride back. We walked a a few blocks over to Grand Central Station. I was broke, along with one other kid, but the third had enough money to buy three tickets for a Greyhound or Trailways bus that was bound for Boston with one of its stops being New Britain. Now with all of us penniless we had to call parents collect to let them know what happened so no one was panic at the other end when 3 less kids got off the charter bus. I think the three of us got a stern talking to from the vice-principal the next day at school, but I’m betting our teacher and any chaperons got it a lot worse.

September

The End of an Era

Saturday the 16th

This photo is from 2 days ago as I watched the new owner drive off.

For the first time in just shy of 34 years (or a little over a billion seconds) I don’t own a Miata. We just didn’t drive it much and if it got driven once a week it was lucky. Usually when it did go for a drive, it was short hops to pick up a pizza or a run to the cannabis store. We did take it a couple of times to get breakfast or a coffee at our favorite spot this summer.

We have probably been in Brevada over a thousand times in the four years we’ve lived here and are known by the owners and staff. It is not exactly like Cheers, where everyone in the place shouts our names when we come in, but close. Most of folks there do know what our usual order is and will start making our drinks while we are waiting in line to pay.

About a week ago one of the owners, David, was manning the register. He asked me, “How do you like your Miata?” I of course replied, “Love it.” “I’ve always wanted one”, said David. So I said, “Do you want to buy mine?” He responded with how much do you want for it and I threw out a figure that was a few hundred more than what I paid for it. “How many miles does it have on it?”, he asked. I told him it was 2002 with just over 83K. David said he’d have to drive it, but he’d have to run it by his CFO (his wife). I told him I’d drive it up on Monday, when we came in for breakfast.

Monday we went to Brevada for breakfast in the Miata. After eating, David broke away during a lull in customers and we went for a 15 minute drive. He had driven a Miata before, he and his wife had rented one on their honeymoon and both enjoyed the experience. The rental was of course a new fourth generation Miata. Mazda has steadily improved the car over the generations, without changing the essence of the car. David said that the second gen Miata, like the CTBNL, was his favorite looking one. He was smitten. Now if we can pass the wife test.

He mentioned that his wife’s car needed to go over the mountain to Medford tomorrow for some service and would I let him take the Miata and follow her over. Then they’d drive back to Klamath Falls together so he could get her to like it enough to let them buy it. Later in the day David texted me to say the wife’s car didn’t need to go over to Medford, but could he borrow the car to go on a dinner date with her. When they picked up the Miata that afternoon David asked politely could they take it the Lake of the Woods. Now, Lake of the Woods is halfway between here and Medford, so I didn’t have any problem. After all, I was willing to to let them take the car for 140 miles, so 70 was fine.

When they returned the CTBNL a few hours later, David’s “evil” plan worked to perfection. They wanted to buy it. Seeing how much they both enjoyed the car Donna said we would sell it to them a bit cheaper than my off the cuff price from before. So I sold it to them for a few hundred less that what we bought it for 7 years and 40,000 miles ago. Win, win for all concerned. David came over the next day with a check and we signed the title. I showed him how to use the cockpit cover, loaded up the trunk with a box of spare Miata parts, tossed in a couple of Miata coffee table books I had and, well the picture above tells the story.

October

42,000 Dust Bunnies

Friday the 20th

This post has been sitting in the drafts folder for a bit over three weeks now for one reason or another. It has been so long long that we are more than half way towards the forty-three thousand mile mark…

In preparation for our big move we have been packing up little used stuff and cleaning every nook and cranny of 4 years of accumulated dirt and dust that we don’t really need to take with us. We are both fairly neat people and we have no pets, so it is amazing how much dust could be found in the house. I’m blaming it on the dry high-desert climate.

While running errands around Klamath Falls, the Mini rolled over the 42,000 mile barrier.

November

The Definition Of Insanity

Tuesday the 14th

It’s often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This has been most commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, but the quote is much more contemporary. Some research done by Michael Becker, an editor at the Bozeman (Montana) Daily Chronicle, discovered that it is really from the 80’s.

Neither Klamath Falls or Medford had a Popeye’s, but in our new hometown of Fairview, there are couple of them within 3 miles of us. In spite of our checkered past with the franchise we do remember their food fondly.

A couple weeks ago we headed over to Gresham to restock our cannabis supply and what was right next door, but a Popeye’s. It was a little past 11:00 AM, but we opted to head over and get our lunch to take home. Donna ordered a couple of chicken strips with a side of red beans and rice while I went for the chicken sandwich combo. Most of our troubles in the past with these guys was order related, but the drive-thru experience wasn’t too bad. Trouble came when we got home. While her chosen meal was good, but mine no so much, the chicken was obviously left over from the day before and dropped back in the fryer. The breading was very dark and the meat tough and chewy.

Today we decided to try the one that is actually 1/2 mile closer to our front door even though it was not a stand alone store, but inside a truck stop off I-84. We took it as a good sign when there were 3 people in line ahead of us and no one in line at the Subway it shared a spot inside with. The line moved fairly quickly and it didn’t take long to get our food. This was a dine in meal and we ordered a combo meal of popcorn shrimp (for me) with 2 tenders (for her), a side red beans & rice (for her) and a biscuit (for me.) The shoe was on the other foot today, my shrimp were hot and fresh while her tenders, not as dark as my sandwich from before, was either double fried or cooked several hours ago and bathed by a heat lamp for hours as the breading was rock hard and the meat tough.

Call us crazy, but in a couple weeks we’ll probably try the Gresham location again at lunch time and see what happens.

December

Holiday Viewing

Friday the 29th

Did you know that Iron Man 3 is a holiday movie? I didn’t and I have watched it, albeit several years ago, and don’t remember any Christmasy stuff in it. Well, Plex remembers. When I open the app there on the home page was a section entitled “Home for the Holidays” and Iron Man 3 was right there.

I cued up the movie and watched it. Sure enough there are several scenes that have Christmas decor in the background. In my humble opinion there was not enough to push this to be classified as a holiday movie. I probably last watched it on DVD way back in 2013 when it first came out. Maybe I even got the DVD as a Christmas present that year…still not a Christmas movie.

There were 3 other titles, of the 150 or so movies I have digital copies of, in that “Home for the Holidays” category. And one of those is also a controversial pick, Die Hard. I say no, but the listing gave me an excuse to watch the movie again. Yippie-ki-yay.

Movie number three was definitely a Christmas movie, Elf and this movie is a yearly watch. And we watched it on Thanksgiving weekend when Donna’s brother and family were here.

The last of the four, but not least, was Bad Santa. And I didn’t watch this one this year.

What was conspicuously missing from that list, it even has the word Christmas in the title, was A Moody Christmas. There are two possible reasons for its non-inclusion in the “Home for the Holidays” list. IMDB lists its title as The Moodys without the C word. But probably it is because it is an Australian TV series and TV is already home viewing. This is also a yearly must watch for me during the holidays. There are just six half hour shows with each one covering a dysfunctional family’s annual Christmas lunch in 6 consecutive years.

Best of 2022

January

Betty White Challenge

Tuesday the 18th

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.

Ed Note: Donna swears it was at the 1982 Knoxville World’s Fair!

July

Broken Spokes

Friday the 15th

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.

Best of 2021

January

I Feel A Little Bad About It

Friday the 8th

There is nothing really finer than drinking coffee from than a thick walled ceramic mug. The only downside to it though is that it draws a lot of the heat into the mug from the liquid. Recently, I was becoming tired of having to reheat my cup of coffee, sometimes more than once, before finishing it, so I ordered a metal double-walled 12 ounce mug from Amazon earlier this week.

It arrived today and when I pulled out of it package it looked too thin. The metal of the cup was the same thickness as the strap handle. Crap, this thing was supposed to be insulated. I immediately went into the Amazon account and started the process to send the mug back and try a different one. When asked for a reason, I typed in, “Not insulated.” When I was offered the option of credit the charge card or get it faster on an Amazon gift card, I picked gift card.

The next screen surprised me:
Refunded
There’s no need to return your item.
Your refund has been issued.

Okay, cool. Free mug. So before ordering something else, I thought I’ll try it out anyway. Made my usual afternoon cup, placed the plastic cover on, and sat down. A minute or so later I took a sip and it was so hot I burnt my tongue. Huh. Felt the outside of the mug and it was cool to the touch. Hmmm, this thing is insulated. The cup walls must be pretty dang thin…

I went back to the Amazon order page to see if there was anyway to take back my refund request. Nope. I’m sure Mr. Brazos is not going to miss that $12.99, but I still feel a little bad about it.

February

Dang Deer

Wednesday the 17th

Back in South Carolina we had some bird feeders out. But we had to worry about the wildlife getting to the seeds. We had a squirrel proof feeder that, at least, one squirrel figured out how to defeat. I finally figured a way to keep the squirrel out, but keeping a local raccoon out was much harder. You can read about the battles here.

Here in Klamath Falls we have seen very few gray squirrels, our yard and immediate neighbors don’t have any nut bearing trees, so none have discovered the bird feeders. We did see one raccoon cross the street at dawn a week or so ago, but it wasn’t the problem.

About three weeks ago the two bird feeders that are out front (one ours and the other the neighbor’s) were getting emptied out practically overnight about every 3rd or 4th day. At first we thought maybe a flock of birds were showing up and just gorging themselves. But then one day the neighbor’s bird feeder was laying empty on the ground and while ours was still hanging, it was empty as well and one side had the spring-loaded perch broken off.

I filled them both up again and the next morning they were completely empty. It had snowed lightly overnight and there was a half inch of accumulation on the ground and in that snow were a set of deer tracks leading right up to the bird feeders. Aha! A clue. One real reliable way to keep deer out of a birdfeeder is to place it high enough that they can’t reach it, about 8 feet up, this is not really an option I wanted to take.

The other one sure way is to take the darn thing down every evening and put it back up every morning. This is the way I have chosen to go. I go out early 4 days a week to get the local newspaper anyway… To help me not forget to do this1 I have downloaded an app that allows me to set an alarm for sunrise and sunset.

March

Are You In The Loop?

Saturday the 13th

In the beginning of this pandemic with everyone stuck at home, people were heavily using streaming services to watch movies and TV as a way to pass the time indoors. For some, pandemic themed movies are what they wanted and those started shooting to the top of the most watched lists. Contagion, 28 Days Later, 12 Monkeys, and Outbreak all had a nice little resurgence. I was not interested, COVID was scary enough by itself and I wasn’t getting promised that guaranteed feel good Hollywood ending that they had.

As shelter in place, stay way from people, don’t go far recommendations persisted, a lot of days started to seem a lot like all the others. Almost like being stuck in a time loop and being doomed to repeat the same day over and over again. Seeing that I’m a sucker for time travel movies, this was the stuff I could watch.

I went back and rewatched Edge of Tomorrow. I also love Sci-Fi so this one is a favorite movie for me, and what’s not to love, Tom Cruise gets killed a dozens of times. Back in 2019 Netflix produced a little show called Russian Doll that used this Live, Die, Repeat2 trope as well. I watched it then and have recently rewatched it.

Because I just remembered it, today I went back and watched again something from another favorite of mine, The X-Files. Specifically Season 6’s Episode 14 entitled Monday, that involves Scully and Mulder3 and a bank robbery with the same we die and come back on the same day plot line.

In July Hulu premiered a new movie called Palm Springs with this theme as well, but puts a slight comic spin on it. It starred Adam Samberg and Cristin Milioti, but J.K. Simmons almost steals the show for me from the “guest star” role. It got a lot of well deserved buzz and I enjoyed it so much I watched it twice, about a month apart. Not to be left out of the temporal anomaly band wagon, Amazon Prime premiered The Map of Tiny Perfect Things just last month. This one is a sort of teen romantic comedy and it works. And for my money has the tidiest resolve of any of these things.

Speaking of rom-com time loop movies, this brings us around to the gold standard of this genre, Groundhog Day. Although I have seen this 1993 movie starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell movie a few times already, I think it is time to schedule a rewatch before too long. But first I’m off to Google “time loop movies” to see if I’m missing any hidden gems.

April

Hope Springs Eternal

Sunday the 4th

2018 seems so long ago.

For 2019 I just listened to the Red Sox play baseball and was glad I hadn’t coughed up the hundred bucks or so for the video because they were just a mid-level team finishing mid-division and out of the playoffs. For 2020 I bought the radio package again expecting more of the same. COVID put a damper on the season, limiting the season to a mere 60 games, but the FRS did not disappoint me and lost 60% of those games, finishing last in the division.4

With our move to the west coast I though listening to the games in the afternoon would be more fun that late evening, but I was wrong, I probably listened to maybe a quarter of those 60 games. Just wasn’t the same. So this year I thought maybe I’d try watching the games. I’d have two options, watch them live at 4:00pm or watch the replay of the game at 8:00. I cancelled the audio package and signed up for the TV package.

Because it is April and still chilly in Beantown the first 3 games of the season, at home against Baltimore, were 1:00pm games meaning that they stated at 10:00am here. Morning baseball, mmm, weird, but okay in a way. But not fun as the Sox lost all three games, including an 11-3 shellacking in the finale that was over by the 3rd inning. There are like 3 players left on the the team that I remember from 2018 and now I’m sort of regretting paying that much money to watch a team that looks destined to finish dead last in the division again.

Fortunately I signed up for the free 7 day trial to start, so as of yet they haven’t hit the charge card. The Tampa Bay Rays come to town for the next three games and if they don’t win at least 2 of those, I’m going to just cancel and not be out the money.

May

Mechanically Induced Coma

Tuesday the 5th

The CTBNL is very sick. Right now it is sitting at a local auto repair shop in a mechanically induced coma for the next week or two while awaiting an opening.

A week ago today on the way home from a shopping trip over in Medford we were only a couple of miles from home when calamity struck. Cruising along at 50 MPH behind a BMW 3 Series when what should appear from right underneath the back of this car, but a softball sized chunk of concrete! With zero chance to avoid it, I held my breath.

Boom Bang Crunch Clang! I looked in the rearview mirror and could see the chunk tumbling behind me, along with a trail of smoke leading back to it. I instantly knew what had happened. A busted oil pan.

We were in the left lane preparing to turn off towards home in about 100 yards anyway, so I eased on over into the turn lane right behind the BMW. We both pulled into an unmanned fuel center. I immediately shut off the car and we had been leaking oil for only maybe 10-12 seconds.

The BMW driver got out and looked under his car. I don’t know whether the concrete piece actually hit anything under the BMW, but if it did, it was just incidental contact because he got back in his car and drove off (he did ask if we needed any help first.) I looked under our car even though I already knew what I’d see and I wasn’t disappointed, it looked like I had removed the drain plug. Our only option was to call a tow truck.

After the BMW drove off I got out and pushed the Miata several feet forward because where I stopped I wasn’t totally into the lot. The CTBNL had left a nice sized oil spot behind and oil was still slowly leaking. I called a local shop that had done some work on the Mini for us and they said they could do the work, but it wouldn’t be until June sometime.

I then called for a tow and about 30 minutes later the truck showed up. Once the car was on the flatbed, there was another slightly smaller spot left behind there too. I thought for sure that was all 4 quarts of oil, but when the car was offloaded at Emmett’s there was a small slick of oil on the flatbed.

Now we wait to see just how much it is going to cost to fix the CTBNL. Trying to determine what the breaking point is where we say, @%#! it, and save that money for the Wrangler.

June

Reader’s Choice

Unlike back in the early days of the blog when I was writing in it every day and sometimes more than once, I had trouble picking out a best one. Now a days, after 20 years of blogging, I’m finding it hard to get anything written at all. In June of this year there were a grand total of seven posts. Four of them were me picking a dream garage of 3 cars on Bring A Trailer and 1 was a reprint of an article from a 25-year old Miata Club of America magazine. That leaves two posts I actually really wrote on my own. Of those two, one was about the return of the Miata from the repairs needed in the May “Best Of” post above and the other was a second post about getting something else for free from an internet purchase like January’s “Best Of.”

So, take your pick from The Prodigal Miata Returns or Adventures in Online Ordering

July

430,000 Acres of Scorched Earth

Thursday the 29th

The country’s biggest wildfire (so far) this year has burned nearly 430,000 acres of eastern Oregon. Fortunately for us it started about 40 miles north and east of us and because of the prevailing winds that generally blow in those same cardinal ordinates, we were never in any danger from the fire.

Our air has been smoke filled, mostly not from the Bootleg fire, but from others in northern California. Last summer I took a picture of the smoke filled skies in the direction of Mt. Shasta (25 miles south and west of us) and commented that the mountain was invisible because of the smoke. I thought that it was unusual, but apparently it is an every summer occurrence during our 5th season here in Oregon, Fire Season.

This morning on the way to our weekly shopping trip to Fred Meyer the Ladybug turned over 1/10 the number of those scorched acres…43,000 miles.

August

Found It

Thursday the 5th

Thursday is grocery shopping day for us. As usual we take the Mini so that no one has to ride home with any groceries on their lap

On the way to Fred Meyer she went to put some hand cream on and realized her small tube of the stuff wasn’t in the the bag. We spent the next few minutes guessing as to where the tube of hand cream might be. Back home on her desk? In the smaller alternate yellow knapsack? Maybe it was in dedicated Geocaching knapsack?

When we got back home, she started all the unpacking and I headed back out in the Miata to fill up the car with gas. As I backed out of the garage I head a cracking noise. I looked back and saw several dead leaves had blown into the garage and figured they were the source of the noise.

When I returned and opened the garage door I noticed something else on the garage floor along with the leaves that I didn’t notice before. So I stopped the Miata and got out to see what it was.

I found the hand cream, broken and oozing cream all over the garage floor.

While standing around in garage getting ready to go grocery shopping this morning Donna’s knapsack had slid off the the trunk of the Miata onto the floor. She picked it up and we got in the Mini to head to Fred Meyer. The tube must have popped out and slid under the Miata where I ran over it as I went back out.

September

What Could Go Wrong?

Wednesday the 15th

This headline in my news feed caught my attention big time – A New Company Wants To Resurrect The Woolly Mammoth

First, haven’t these people seen Jurassic Park? Hint, it ends very badly for a lot of people.

Secondly, this creature thrived in the Artic Tundra and by the time they work out all the issues with DNA editing, and more importantly, creating an external artificial uterus for gestating the embryos, will there be any artic tundra left with the current global warming situation?

At least they didn’t want to start with velociraptors…

October

Here We Go Again

Thursday the 14th

Like our trip all over the state of South Carolina to capture an image of every Post Office in the state, we’ve decided to do the same thing in our new home state of Oregon.

The one for Oregon will differ in a few ways. 1) We are thinking that we aren’t going to chase every single one in the bigger towns, like for instance, Portland’s 2 dozen. 2) Every single one of them may not have the same automobile in the photos, the Miata might just be a Mini Cooper or maybe even a Jeep Wrangler. And 3) I’ve taken a state map and highlighted all the places there are Post Offices where we’ll put a pin in each spot we take a picture.

By my count there are 364 actual Post Offices in Oregon or around 90 fewer than in South Carolina, but that doesn’t make it any easier than the 454 in South Carolina because Oregon has 98,466 square miles, or roughly 3 times the area to SC’s 32,020. In South Carolina we could reach any corner of the state on a weekend jaunt. The furthest Post Office from Aiken was a mere 216 miles away from home, the furthest away here, Imnaha, is 300 miles more than that.

Also adding to the challenge here in Oregon is that dirty 6 letter word, Winter. Back in South Carolina we could drive practically year round, here there are going to be about 4 months where the weather will keep us home. On the flip side of that is in SC we were still working, so most of our trip were confined to weekends, but now we are retired, so if we wanted to we could take a month and just get a big bunch of the Post Offices. And if this COVID thing clears up we just might do several couple week trips next spring and summer.

Either way, we figure it is going to take us at least the next 4 years to finish the project. And because we actually started with some local P.O.’s last June it will take us 5 years total which is the same amount of time it took to finish South Carolina. You can keep abreast of our progress by checking in here on the blog and all the photos will be in the Oregon Post Office gallery.

November

Coincidence?

Thursday the 11th

Shortly after moving here we wanted to take a trip to Washington state to see the family. But just before we left to go, almost 2 years ago to the day from the present, the Mini started acting up. It was misfiring and unfortunately the local place we took it to couldn’t get to it until after our scheduled departure, so we had to rent a car.

Fast forward to this year and Donna’s friend for life Sally Lewis has retired from the State Department and has bought a home in Santa Fe, NM. She would like us to come down and help her settle in to the new home.

The Mini has had a Brake Warning Light on in the dash for a bit, but we thought we should get it looked at before taking the 1,300 mile drive to the New Mexico capitol city. We took the Lady Bug to our friends at Emmett’s yesterday morning so they would have a couple of days to sort it out. We got the call last evening that it was going need some new front brake pads and sensors. No big deal, those are the original brakes and at 44k that seemed about right. But the big bugaboo were the calipers, both sides were showing very uneven wear meaning that one side was sticking. These were the parts that they couldn’t get locally, so the had to order them and they won’t be here until Monday next.

In 2019 the Mini was all we had here at the time, this year we do have the Miata as a back up, but we don’t want take it because it is nearing winter. Our travels will take us through several mountain ranges and ultra high performance summer tires do not go together well with cold temperatures and any kind of winter precipitation. Rather than put off the trip, we opted to do what we did in 2019, rent a car.

December

Don’t Forget Step 15

Thursday to 23rd

On Monday evening Donna called me into the kitchen to listen to the garbage disposal. It was making a strange noise and she thought that there might be something stuck in there. Cleaning out the disposal, like killing spiders, is man’s work, so I turned it on and it was making a very metallic noise, nothing like something stuck inside, but more like bad bearings.

Tuesday morning we headed off to Home Depot to buy a nice shiny new one. In the afternoon I swapped out the old Badger with the new Badger 100. Because I had swapped out a garbage disposal before back in Aiken I know how to do it, so it took about an hour and the hardest part was holding the unit up straight so I could lock it into place under the sink.

On Wednesday evening I was again summoned to the kitchen. Not garbage disposal this time, but dishwasher. The dishes were clean, but not rinsed and the the bottom of the dishwasher was full of water. Off to the internet to see what I might do about this. Looked at several pages of info and tried the easiest first, rerun the cycle and see if it drains. While it was running we tagged teamed the the dishes, I washed off the rinse agent and she dried and put away. Unfortunately the second cycle still left water in the bottom. Next and most obvious would be hose out connection to the garbage disposal, so I asked my wife if there was water in the bottom of the dishwasher after she washed on Tuesday and she said there wasn’t.

Every other solution I found I could check easily enough and dismiss or didn’t apply, leaving calling a repair person or buying a new dishwasher. You know, I don’t remember popping out the the dishwasher drain plug in the disposal, but Donna said there wasn’t any water in the bottom of the dishwasher after her first run on Tuesday. Did the disposal come with it already knocked out?

This morning, Thursday, I removed the dishwasher drain hose from the disposal and stuck my finger in the pipe and sure enough it was stopped dead. That is why the dishwater wouldn’t drain, it had no where to send the water except 6 feet down a plastic pipe where it got promptly turned around. Luckily there was enough room under the sink that I could get a screwdriver into the drain outlet pipe and whack it hard enough to get the plug out with out to much drama.

I forgot Step 15. I was lulled into a false sense of my own home repair acumen by having done the same job previously that I didn’t even read all the installation instructions, but I didn’t take into account the decrease of fine detail memory brought on by advancing age and the fact that I had done this job only once before a couple of decades ago.

Best of 2020

January

Magnetic Mini

Thursday the 2nd

On New Year’s Day, we ran a quick errand to Home Depot and on the way back we stopped at Albertsons for a couple of items. As we were walking towards the store from the parking lot, a lady pushing her cart out of the store, waved us over and asked, “What year is your Mini?” When I told her it was a 2013, she said, “Oh, too bad, I have a car cover for a 2007 Mini and I was going to ask if you wanted it.” I told her that in fact it would fit our car as the 2nd generation Minis ran from 2007 to 2014. She said, “Well, I’m giving it away because I sold the car a while ago and it is just taking up space in my garage. Do you want it?” Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, we said, “Sure, we’ll take it.” She then said, “I live just up the street, when can you come get it?” We said, “We are just picking up a couple items. We could be there in 15 minutes?” She then explained where she lived and she wasn’t kidding about the just up the street thing, it was literally a half mile along the same cross road as the store…

After leaving her promising to see her in a few minutes, maybe two steps closer to Alberstons front door another lady comes up and says, “Did you just get out of that Mini?” We nod in the affirmative and she says, “How do you like it?” We both launch into how much we like the car. She said, “I have a older Ford Escape and I have trouble seeing out of it when trying to back up especially.” She was about Donna’s height, if not maybe a little shorter, so Donna told her about selling our bigger car, just to get this to be able to see more. So Donna said, “Would you like come sit in it?” “Sure,” she said. So we walked back over to the car and she sat in it and marveled at the view. She said she saw one at a used car lot and was going to go down with her husband to see about buying it.

We finally got to go inside and buy what we came for. After leaving there we stopped at lady number one’s house. When we finally got home we unloaded a step ladder, 2 gallons of distilled water and a car cover for the Ladybug.

February

We Are True Oregonians Now

Friday the 7th


Not long after we got here we went to the local DMV office to pick up info on getting a driver’s licenses and registering a car in the Beaver State. We both studied the driver’s manual so we would be ready to take the knowledge test. Of course there would be a quick vision test, but what worried us was on the website one of the listed items said: Pass the drive test;. And on the back side of the application PDF was the Driver Test Score Sheet. But, when looking at the requirements for taking a drive test, near the bottom was this caveat: You may not have to take a drive test if you’re new to Oregon and give us your out-of-state license. It can be expired up to 1 year. The words may not were still slightly ominous…

To get a license we needed a permanent address, so we had to wait at least until we closed on the house. By then it was the holidays, so we waited until January. Then we had a big snowstorm. Then pretty soon it was the end of January. By this time we were pretty sure we wouldn’t have to do Drive Test and vowed to go get our licenses in February. Early this week we read through the driver knowledge test booklet again figuring on going Wednesday. We found another excuse not to go then, but today was the day.

Donna was worried about the knowledge test, she was confident she knew the stuff, but she is terrible test taker. Me, I was not worried at all, most of it is common sense and you could miss seven out of the 35 total questions. When Donna came out of the booth she wasn’t sure she passed. She lost track of how many she missed, but the machine didn’t throw any red X’s on the screen. Well, she did pass and got her driver’s license. Me, I had my confidence shaken from the git go, I missed the first two questions! Then I aced a few sign recognition ones, before missing another one. I had now used up almost half my allowed misses in the first 6 questions, yikes. I tiptoed through the rest of the test and I passed missing 5 questions. Comparing notes afterwards we both had the same sort of experience, acing the signs and lane marking stuff, missing questions we were sure we knew and getting lucky on ones we guessed at.

Sixty-five dollars each later, we are proud owners of a gray scale temporary paper Oregon driver’s license. The real one comes in the mail in about a week.

March

I’ve Got A Screw Loose

Friday the 6th

Because yesterday afternoon was sunny and lower 60’s, when we headed out to run some errands, we opted to do them in the Miata. About 2 blocks down the road a fairly loud rumbling started and the front end of the car was doing a small wobble. Donna went, “What’s that?” I answered, “Might have a flat.” A couple of seconds later I said, “I know what it is,” and did a quick u-turn to head back home.

This post should really have been titled “I’ve Got A Few Lug Nuts Loose.” For what has to be at least the sixth or seventh time in my career I have not fully tightened down the lug nuts on a wheel or two (or four) after rotating the tires or doing some brake maintenance. Including one time in the early 80’s that happened with Donna driving and having to stop at a place to have them diagnose the rumbling sound the car was making.

This is why I was getting the stink-eye from her as we returned to the Pacific Terrace driveway. Because just before turning around I had said, “I forgot to tighten the lug nuts.” On Wednesday afternoon I installed the new front license plate mount, which had caused me to remove the front wheels and I missed the final step.

About the second time this happened in Aiken, I devised a way to make sure not to forget this step by taking the torque wrench and placing it right at the entrance to the garage. There was no way for me to miss it and I sure as heck couldn’t drive the low clearance Miata over the wrench. To my credit, I did something similar here too, but because I was working close to the garage opening, the torque wrench was mixed in with all the other tools I was using, so it got put away with everything else. I think a new safeguard is required. Possibly I should buy a baseball cap from the Lansing Michigan minor league baseball team to wear when working on the car. Or, perhaps putting the torque wrench on the driver’s seat might work.

April

Living in the Recent Past

Monday the 20th

With the 2020 Major League Baseball season on hold, possibly forever, MLBTV has opened up the 2018 & 2019 archives for viewing. Because I am subscribed to MLB Audio and my $20 yearly subscription was automatically renewed on the 1st of March I can watch any of the approximately 4,800 games, regular and post-season, from the last 2 years. From what I can find, this treat is available to all users. You may have to create an MLB account, which if I know these guys they will require a credit card and this will mean that if they do start the season, they will probably hit your card and sign you up for $100 package.

Having exhausted all the Brit TV we could stand, MLBTV becomes a perfect TV time waster in these times of #stayonyourcouchtoflattenthecurveandsavelives. So, I figured it would be cool to watch a Red Sox game a day, on the date the game was played. Well, guess which which season I’m going to pick? A) Last year, 2019, where the Sox finished just 6 games over .500 in third place in the division, 19 games behind the Yankees or B) 2018 when they won the division by 5 games and ended up winning the World Series. No-brainer huh?

Yesterday’s game was the finale of a 3 game shellacking of the Angels in the their home stadium where the FRS outscored them 27 to 3 to move their won/loss record to 16-2. For all of the entire 2019 season, I remember about this April series and the fact that they won the Worlds Series, everything else will be “new” to me.

May

It’s Super Bowl Sunday

Sunday the 3rd


Not only that, but every Sunday in May is going to be Super Bowl Sunday. So, not only has Major League Baseball opened up their archive of games to watch for free, but the National Football League has too. From now until May 31st you can get NFL Game Pass for free and watch any football game from 2009 to 2019. You want to watch preseason games? Sure, why not? Every regular season game? Check. Playoffs? Absolutely. The Super Bowls? You got ’em! You can even watch the Pro Bowl games, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why you would.

The nice thing about Game Pass’s football games, is unlike MLBTV, they have nicely edited out all the commercials1. They have even chopped out half time as well. Three and a half hour football games come in a little over 2 hours.

The bit of papercraft above is called Papercraft Propaganda and was created by someone who called themselves PaperTom and it is supposed to put you in mind of an old school Soviet statue. His web site doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so if you want to create your own, download the PDF here.

June

Schrodinger’s Lottery Ticket

Friday the 19th

For practically forever, we have been buying a Mega Millions quick pick ticket that gets us into the bi-weekly drawing for 5 weeks at a time. We routinely end up not winning squat, so every month and a quarter we get an Andrew Jackson out of the ATM, and place that money down on a chance at winning mega-millions.

Thursday last week, we when out for an evening drive and in the middle we stopped at Fred Meyer to use the lottery vending machine and bought our next Mega Millions Lottery Ticket.

The bought ticket hangs on the upper shelf of my computer desk and earlier this week while watching a movie on the PC I noticed there wasn’t one there. My “prop” Mega Lotto Jackpot ticket with the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 & 42 that Hurley won $114 million with was still there, but no real life Mega Millions ticket. By the time I finished watching the movie I had forgotten all about the lottery ticket.

Yesterday, while I finished watching the last episode of Devs, I again noticed the missing lottery ticket. This time I clued Donna in, so we commenced to searching for it. The last time I remember seeing it, it was in the center console of the Miata. That was what we were driving that evening. I put the ticket in there because I didn’t want to put in my pocket where it would get wrinkled. We started there. Not in the center console. It was also not in the glove box. Or the trunk. For thoroughness we looked in the Mini too. We came back upstairs and while I searched every pocket in every item of clothing that I could have been wearing when I bought the ticket, Donna was busy searching in the living area where any piece of paper could be laying. We both came up empty.

Thus we became owners of a Schrodinger’s Lottery Ticket. Because I didn’t think to memorize the 6 numbers on the ticket and there has been two Mega Millions drawings since then, right now we are both winners, and losers, until we somehow happen to find that ticket.

Not wanting to not find the ticket and then read in the local paper of a Klamath Falls individual who purchased a jackpot winning ticket and never coming forward to claim the prize, we went out this evening and bought another ticket.

July

Long Long Short Long

Friday the 17th

We live about a third of a mile uphill from some railroad tracks. They are not just any old railroad tracks either, if you are traveling by train from Seattle to Los Angeles you will pass thru our fair city of Klamath Falls. These tracks are kind of like I-5 in that they are the main north-south route along the west coast, so freight trains also pass through here every day. There are probably ten to twelve trains total using those tracks per each 24 hour period.

A direct line along that third of a mile crosses three regular surface city streets, a bike path and one 5 lane US highway before you get to the tracks. Not too far that direct line is a street called Portland that those tracks cross. This is the only street crossing on this side of town, the rest have bridges over the tracks. This street crossing doesn’t come into play on any of our trips, so we really don’t have to worry about waiting for any length of time at the crossing when any of the long freight trains pass thru town. What we do have to contend with is the train’s engineer signaling his approach to the crossing.

It wasn’t until we moved here that we knew that any train approaching a street crossing, whether it has automatic gates or just flashing lights, the train’s engineer has to sound the train’s horn in a series of blasts – two long, one short and a final long. Because we can actually see the train through the trees and gaps in between houses in the winter from our front porch, we have no trouble hearing these blasts of 96-110 db sound. When we first moved into our house those horn blasts could be startling because our living room faces front towards the track. After a few months though, we got used to them and we are to a point that we almost don’t hear them anymore. Almost.

I have noticed that different engineer’s each have a different way of sounding that signal, some have longer longs or a shorter short blast. Because we are a stop on the Amtrak route and have a very large rail yard south of town there are probably several of this engineers who live in town. I am convinced that the different variations in the horn blasts lengths is similar to the pilot whose landing pattern took him over his house and wagged his wings as a greeting to his family, these distinctive horn blasts let their family know they are coming home.

August

I Looked

Wednesday the 5th

When we moved into our house in Aiken in 1989 there was a metal mailbox attached to the side of the house for the mail carriers to put your mail in. We unfortunately were not allowed to use it, we needed to put a mailbox on a post out at the street. The city had transitioned from walking carriers to using trucks to deliver the mail a few years earlier, but the previous owner was grandfathered in and she could still get her mail at her door. The neighborhood carrier had to hop out of their truck and walk up to the porch for them, for us they just cruised down the street and stopped if required.

When we moved into our house here there was no mailbox at the street and there was no metal mailbox attached to the house, but there was an honest-to-god mail slot next to the front door. Klamath Falls uses a walking mail carrier still and our mail comes right inside the house!. We of course have got to know him a bit as he will knock on the door if he has a package for us. We will wave when he is doing his route and we are out for walk around the neighborhood. Donna makes sure to give him some fresh baked cookies if she has made some.

Now that the weather is nice we are often sitting on the front porch when he is doing his delivering. We will go several days running getting mail and then we might go a day without. If we don’t get any mail and he passes by, Donna will say, using a sad voice, “What no mail for me today?” A couple weeks ago we went a couple days with no mail. On the third day, Donna said, “If you don’t bring me any mail tomorrow, I’ll never bake you cookies again.”

The next day he came up the stairs as we were sitting on the porch with no mail in his hand, but he did give Donna what you see to the left here.

September

Random Little Library

Wednesday the 16th

Back in the days of sunny skies and breathable we were on a walk around the neighborhood when just a couple blocks from home we stumbled on a couple boxes of books on the front wall with a sign that read “Free. Take Some.”

It was a varied assortment of kids to young adult books. Donna picked through and selected several books that she thought were appropriate to send along to the nieces and nephew in Washington and I selfishly picked out three books, that spanned 3 centuries in publication dates, I might like to read. All of them were made into movies, only one of which I have seen, so maybe I’ll read the books, then watch the movies, just to compare them.

Published in 2010 was I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore and all I knew of this book was that it had been made into a movie. A not very successful one if I recall correctly. It was fairly entertaining book about an alien race that looks just like us living on earth until they can return to their home planet and reclaim it. But it turns into teen romance with monsters and hero aliens. Because it turns out to be the first book in a series of seven it doesn’t so much as conclude, buts just stops. The movie is available on IMDB for free (with adds), but after I watched the trailer, I won’t watch the movie because I’m not a teenager any more.

Published in 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick, AKA Bladerunner, was the source material for one of my favorite movies of all-time, but I have never read the book on which it was based. I am a voracious sci-fi reader and have actually never read anything by PKD. Though I have seen more than a half dozen or so of the movies or TV shows based on his writings. While the book is different from the movie in many ways, the core plot is the same and I can see where the cinematic choices made for a better movie.

First published in French in 1864 A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne wasn’t translated into English for publication in 1871. According to IMDB there are three movie versions, 1959, 1988 & 2008 to go along with numerous TV series, TV mini-series, TV movies and a video game based on this material. I have seen none of them and I have also not read the book. Now is my chance. Wow. I couldn’t read it. The language was, well, different. Was it the translation, was it the language of the time, was it a combination of the two? I don’t know, but I couldn’t finish through the second chapter.

But as I was hungry, I sallied forth to the dining room, where I took up my usual quarters. Out of politeness I waited three minutes, but no sign of my uncle, the Professor. I was surprised. He was not usually so blind to the pleasure of a good dinner. It was the acme of German luxury- parsley soup, a ham omelette with sorrel trimmings, an oyster of veal stewed with prunes, delicious fruit, and sparkling Moselle. For the sake of poring over this musty old piece of parchment, my uncle forbore to share our meal. To satisfy my conscience, I ate for both.

The old cook and housekeeper was nearly out of her mind. After taking so much trouble, to find her master not appear at dinner was to her a sad disappointment-which, as she occasionally watched the havoc I was making on the viands, became also alarm. If my uncle were to come to table after all?

Probably not going to watch this movie either. The 2008 movie with Brendan Faser is three bucks to rent on Amazon and the 1959 movie with James Mason & Pat Boone is a dollar more at $4. The 1988 version is free on Amazon, it has 3 one-star ratings only because they couldn’t give it a zero. But to top it off, here is a quote from the listed director, Rusty Lemorande: “Only the first eight minutes of this film were directed by me. The rest of it is the sequel to the Kathy Ireland vehicle Alien from L.A. (1988) directed by Albert Pyun, which was tacked on by the producers and renamed “Journey to the Center of the Earth” in order to fulfill contracts with foreign distributors.”

October

Happy Election Day

Sunday the 18th

Oregon was the first state to exclusively go to voting by mail by passing a measure in November 1998 by a 70% to 30% margin after starting with optional for local voting in the late eighties.

Our ballots came thru our mail slot along with a flyer for Bed Bath & Beyond on Friday afternoon. We had planned on filling them out on Saturday, but got to watching college football and didn’t get it done. So we did it this morning.

Even with all falderal from a certain President, we have zero qualms about the process because of this state’s long history with voting by mail. Still, we won’t actually mail our ballots, we dropped them into an official collection box like we did for the primary back in May. Unlike back then though, today we rode the tandem instead of walking.

When we rode into the parking lot where the drop box was, there was a young couple with their toddler standing next to it. We circled the lot a couple of times while they unloaded, then loaded back, their kid so the child could put their ballots in the slot. And all the while they snapped photos of the process to post on social media. I didn’t have a problem waiting this out at all, because I planned on that same sort of exercise for us too (see my InstaGram account.)

As we were loading back up onto the bike to leave, a fellow in a pickup truck cruised up to the box to drop in his ballot. I said to him, “Happy Election Day.” He looked at me sort of quizzically and replied, “Yeah, you too. Have a nice day.” Come to think of it, Happy Election Day does sound a little strange, but what would have been a more appropriate greeting anyway? Merry Election Day? How about “Go Democracy?” Maybe a golf style cheer, “In the Slot!”?

The only downside to the whole Vote by Mail deal is I don’t get a little “I Voted” sticker to wear around all day…

November

1st First To Find

Tuesday the 3rd

A little over a week ago we took a drive up to the Lake of the Woods because it was a nice 35 mile trip to somewhere besides to the grocery store or some local restaurant to pick up a bit of take out. But mainly to take hike and do some geocaching.

Wouldn’t you know it, two days later, somebody published a new cache very near where we were. Donna wanted to go right back up there to try and be the First To Find. I talked her out of it to concentrate on the Friends of the Children scavenger hunt. I told her if that cache hadn’t been found after the hunt, we would try to be the 1st.

In over a decade of caching with over fourteen hundred caches found we have never been the First To Find on a cache.

We didn’t even try back in Aiken, because around there, there was a regular squad that would drop almost anything, including work, to rush out and look for newly published caches.

We were close once, really close, a second to find, on a random happenstance in Colorado. We were passing through on one of our driving trips and I had picked out some caches along our route, one of which had no finds. But, by the time we got there someone had beat us to it.

By today no one had found that Lake of the Woods cache yet, so this was the day for us to go up there and see if we could. Last time we drove up we took the Mini because it needed the exercise, but this time we drove the Miata because today was the last day it will be near a high of 70 until probably 2021.

After a little bit of searching around we found the cache. When I unfolded the log it was empty. Our 1st First to Find.

December

Giant Penguins Rule

Wednesday to 30th

I can not explain it, but out of all the Christmas decorations around my neighborhood (big, small, gaudy, tasteful) this, for some unknown reason is my favorite.

When I voiced this sentiment to my bride a couple weeks ago, she said, “See how much they cost.” I replied, ” I bet those folks have had that for awhile and you probably can’t find it anymore.”

She did a quick search and didn’t find, so I tried “10 foot tall inflatable penguin”, and found it at Home Depot for $79. We both agreed that that was too much.

I told her I’d check for after Christmas deals and see if it is half price. I looked on Sunday morning and sure enough it was marked down to $35, but it was sold out online and no store around had them either.

This not a disappoinment at all, as while I really like it, I don’t want one of my own for a few reasons.
1) Our front yard is just a small sloping patch and this thing would overwhelm it.
2) Can’t go in the driveway because there wouldn’t be any way to anchor it down.
3) If we put it on the front deck you wouldn’t see the bottom half of it because of the railing.
And most importantly
4) The house this one stands in front of is only 4 blocks up the street and it would violate the neighborhood IPDA (Inflatable Penguin Density Allowance.)

Best of 2019

I’ve Got A Screw Loose

Saturday January 5th
Geez, just three weeks after the desktop PC wouldn’t turn on and we replaced it, the laptop refused to start tonight. I tried holding the power button down for over 15 seconds in case it was just in sleep mode, but nothing happened. So I tried pushing several button combinations with the same no results. I did notice that when first pushing the power button there was an adjacent light that would blink 3 times then no more, so I went to our new desktop and Googled For Answers(TM).

Best I could find said it was a possible battery issue, so I should remove the battery and plug the laptop in using the power cord to see if it would start. I was kind of hoping this would be it, as the battery is pretty much shot from use, as it can be used untethered for only about 45 minutes with having to be plugged in.

As I flipped over the laptop to get to the screws on the back, I heard something rattle around inside the case. That rattle has been there for a couple of months, but I’ve ignored it, because, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well guess what, it’s broke. Maybe something broke off and was shorting something out?

After removing the eight screws and snapping the edges loose, there was still something holding the case together. I pried the edges apart some and could see a boss that looked like it was under the space bar that might be the culprit. That can’t be right? Flipping the laptop over, that boss was probably right under a rubber footing strip. Bingo, there was that pesky screw.

When I got the back completely off, a little black screw fell onto the desk. Hmmm, all the ones I removed were silver, this must hold the motherboard or some component in place. I looked around all the visible places a screw could go, mentally lined them up with the ones I removed get inside and that left one likely looking boss in the upper right corner. I put the screw in and it screwed right down, holding part of a circuit board in like it was made to fit there.

Turning the laptop over I saw that on the other side was…that’s right, you guessed it, the power button. The laptop powered right on now. Note to self: if something rattles, something is loose somewhere, find it and tighten it.

12 Rules For Miata Life

Wednesday February 13th
A few days ago I blogged about the “12 Rules” phenomena and I mentioned I thought it would take a while to think about the subject before I could create my own set. So, off an on since then, I have been plugging away at doing just that with a little Miata spin. I had a good start, Rule #1, but then it all fell apart. It ended up more like 12 reasons to buy a Miata, so anyway…

  1. It’s a Convertible – Put the top down as often as possible.
  2. It’s Inexpensive – Until you start adding options, every new Miata is priced below the $34,000 average cost of a vehicle in 2019. Nice 5-7 year old ones can be had for $15-20k. Of course there are cheaper cars to be had, but nothing can touch it on a cost per mile of fun.
  3. It’s Reliable – Well taken car of early models are still going strong at over a quarter of a million miles. And not so well taken care of examples can easily be brought to life without breaking your bank.
  4. It’s a Sports Car – On any giving weekend at SCCA, NASA and autocross events there will more Miatas than practically every other make of car. Even if you just drive on the street, do not buy cheap tires, they limit the fun available.
  5. It’s a Slow Car – And it is leaps and bounds more fun to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow.
  6. It’s a Small Car – Always park at the end of a row so at least one side will be free of large vehicles to make it easier to back out.
  7. It’s a Great First Car – The open cockpit will make your teen driver feel vulnerable, so they will be paying attention to trying not to get crushed by the typically much larger vehicles around them, plus it is small, light-weight and maneuverable making it easy avoid them. As a bonus it is a two-seater thereby reducing the peer pressure to do something stupid by 66% as compared to the typical sedan.
  8. It’s as Good as a Pickup Truck – On a sunny day. With the top down it is amazing what can be carried in the passenger seat sticking up and/or back.
  9. It’s More Fun with Friends – So join a local Miata Club, they’re everywhere.
  10. It’s Infinitely Customizable – While some consider them perfect right out of the box, there is an aftermarket for these things that is staggering, from every possible performance modification you could think of to all manner of cosmetic stuff to nice things that Mazda probably should have put on one to begin with.
  11. It’s Photogenic – Like babies and pets.
  12. It’s not a Collector’s Car – So drive it…

I’m Turning Into Howard Hughes

Wednesday March 20th
Not in money, that’s for sure, and not in almost all of his psychoses, like for instance I don’t wear Kleenex boxes on my feet or my urine isn’t stored in bottles. But for the last week, at least once a day, I tell myself that I need to trim my toenails, and each and every night I go to bed with them still untrimmed.

The fingernails I’m keeping trimmed, but probably because those get broke every once in a while in day to day living, while the toenails are usually protected from shattering by being covered by a pair of socks and occasionally shoes.

I Found The Problem With The Red Sox

Sunday April 7th
A week ago I was worried that they were going to repeat the first-to-worst trip they took in 2014. That feeling continued. By Saturday they had gone from 1-3 to 2-8!

They have been playing on the west coast, so I haven’t really had an opportunity to listen to a game. Finally, today, they had an afternoon game in Arizona that we listened to while on the porch. They won the game!

Ergo, because I listened, they won. So, now, all I have to do is listen to every game for the rest of the season and they will finish with 154 wins and only 8 losses.

Where’s That Confounded Blimp? Act II

Sunday May 5th
Two weeks ago we missed out on the Goodyear Blimp that was covering the RBC Heritage Golf Tournament in Hilton Head Island because we didn’t know what airport it was based out of. This time we knew exactly which airport it would be at.

Wingfoot 3 was scheduled to provide TV coverage for the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, NC. The official Find the Blimp page didn’t list the golf course like it did for the Hilton Head Island event, it listed the town of Chester, SC. As it happens there is a Chester Catawba Regional Airport just north of town. Donna searched Facebook for “Chester Catawba Regional Airport blimp” and there were pictures of the blimp there in May of 2016 and May of 2018.

We got up this morning, loaded some snacks in a small cooler, had breakfast at Dunkin’ and headed north. We dodged rain showers for most of the 100+ mile drive, even putting the top up for a stretch and arrived at the airport at around 10:30 AM. I pulled up to the spot that was clearly where those Facebook photos were taken and…

…No #%$&ing Blimp!

First Class Ride

Friday June 21st
For only the second time ever, we have flown somewhere 1st Class. The first was 40 years ago and the only reason we had the privilege then was because we were flying from Guam to Connecticut because my Mom was very sick and that was the first flight out. This time it was intentional.

And for the first time in a long time we opted to fly out of Augusta instead of Atlanta or Charlotte. This was intentional too, as the additional cost of the extra hop was a lot cheaper than the cost of gas for the drive, the 2 weeks of parking and the hotel stay near the airport at the bigger city.

The experience didn’t start out too first class though. When we scanned Donna’s boarding pass for seat 2D, the gate agent said hold on, we have to move you, that seat is broken. So we stood around for about 15 minutes while most of the rest of the passengers loaded. Finally, her seat was changed to 3C which was right behind my 2C. When we boarded, she said, “You take 3 and I’ll sit in 2.” I guess she figured, that way she wouldn’t have to sit next to some stranger. Turns out, she needn’t have worried, seat 3D was broken too. While not ideal, we both did get a little extra room to stretch out on the 1-1/2 hour flight. The 1st class pluses were both the seats and snacks were a lot nicer than coach, also your drink came in an actual glass instead of plastic. No real minuses except for the broken seat snafu.

On the Dallas to Portland leg there were no seat issues, so we did get to sit next to each other this time. Because of the longer trip and larger cities served the plane was substantially larger, so the seats were larger and nicer. Our included meal service was served in real dishes with real metal utensils. While the food wasn’t restaurant quality it was pretty good. The pre-meal snack was a serving of mixed-nuts, but not just a little foil packet of them, it was a small ceramic dish of heated ones.

The nicest thing about 1st Class experience is the boarding. It is great that you get on first, but the only having to wait for like maybe 6 other people to move before you are on the jet way heading into the terminal is the bomb.

So, all in all, was spending 1.7 times the cost of a coach ticket to get nicer boarding, snacks and seats worth it …. maybe.

Brian Versus The Giant Lizard

Saturday July 13th
This morning we were enjoying the screened porch and watching the Tour de France on the laptop, when Donna noticed something moving in her peripheral vision. When she saw what it was she jumped up. I turned to see what she saw and it was a giant gecko (or maybe a skink) crawling along on the screening, inside the porch.

It was requested that I remove the offending reptile. I went out to the garage and grabbed a pair of work gloves, a one quart pitcher (normally used to water plants) and a clipboard. My plan was to corner the sucker, force it into the pitcher, cover the top with the clipboard and escort this huge, Godzilla-like, beast outside.

I have exaggerated the size a bit, but this thing was more than twice the size of any we have seen around here before. It was probably 6-1/2 to 7 inches long, tip to tail, and it had a body diameter about the size of a Marks-A-lot.

After a couple of misses trying to get the lizard into the pitcher it became clear I needed something with sharp corners, not something round, because it kept evading me by slipping between the lip of the pitcher and the screen. Back inside. This time I returned with a rectangular piece of Tupperware. On my first attempt I almost had him (or her) but then he (or she) abandoned the screen and took to running along the floor hugging the back wall.

I side stepped around it and opened the door to the porch. I tip-toed back around where it was hiding, under the table that holds the portable gas grill, came at it from that direction, hoping to force it outside. We chased each other back and forth a couple of times until, surprisingly, it climbed the wall and ducked under the wood wall that closes the porch off from the old roof line.

As yet, our enormous lizard interloper has not reappeared.

Most Likely For The Last Time

Sunday August 25th
We went away for the weekend to Hilton Head. Most likely for the last time.

Way back in 1997 when a shop supervisor was wondering aloud to his production planner how to list his and some other owners condos for rent on the internet, a side hustle for yours truly was born. The supervisor was Jerry, the planner was my wife Donna and because I was dabbling in coding HTML she volunteered me.

Jerry and I hashed out a simple design for a front page with just a sub page for each individual condo. It started small, with just his condo and a few others of owners he had befriended. Over the next couple of years Jerry would add a few more condos as word spread. He and his wife Donna would go down to HHI from Aiken practically every weekend remodeling places and his business of managing condos took off.

In 1999 Jerry retired and he and Donna moved down to Hilton Head and at its peak they managed a couple dozen condos in the one complex and they personally owned three of them. All the while me and my Donna were going down a couple three times a year to take pictures for updating the web site. We always got comped a weekend in a condo and always a nice dinner out. What started as an acquaintance and business relationship had blossomed into friendship.

When Jerry the Condo King passed away in 2007 at the age of 71 his wife continued on with the business. And for the past dozen years Donna the Condo Queen has continued our, at least, yearly trips down for web page updating. But because it was just her doing the managing, the booking and some of the cleaning, the 25 condos has slowly dwindled down to nine. This summer Donna, having turned that same 71 years old, has decided it is time to smell some roses and will no longer be managing condos starting January 2020.

With no real web page updating left to do, other than a thanks for the business place holder page, and our possible move to Oregon, we went down for one last free weekend in an ocean front condo on the beach and a nice meal and visit with Donna the, soon to no longer be, Condo Queen.

We are not beach people at all and probably would have never set foot on Hilton Head Island at all, but we will be eternally grateful to Jerry and Donna for giving us the opportunity over the last twenty-two years to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic. To walk along the wide sandy, usually uncrowded, beaches. To watch the dolphins frolic in the surf and the pelicans glide gracefully overhead. And most of all we will remember fondly the joy of their company.

Hey, Ho, Saint Joe

Sunday September 1st
A person we had met at the Spring Steeplechase wanted to see it the weekend before it went on the market. She was looking for a place in this neighborhood and wanted to get in it because every time she noticed a house for sale around here it sold before she could get in it.

Our realtor said that it would sell in a week.

Our across the street neighbor said, “You’ll have no trouble selling it.

A random neighbor we really don’t know well, saw us outside a couple weeks ago and said, “I’m surprised. I expected a Under Contract sign by now.”

As of last Thursday the house has been for sale for a month. In that month we have had less than 10 people come through to look at it. Our realtor held a Realtor Only open house and maybe 10 folks showed up (all from her company…) and no one has of yet stepped forward big sacks of cash.

While having dinner with some friends, who coincidentally have their house for sale too, they mentioned that they had ordered a statue of Saint Joseph from Amazon to help them sell their house. Donna and my response was, “Huh?” Turns out this is a whole thing.

Of course their house has been for sale for 3 months and they have reduced the price a couple of times, so they might be getting a more anxious than we are. I’ll let you know in late October if we buy our own statue of Saint Joe.

Its a Small World After All

Tuesday October 22nd
On our last day of driving we went 283 miles from Carson City to Klamath Falls, 211 of those miles were in California and for the most part were on very rural forested roads. The biggest town we passed through was Susanville with a population of around 18,000. The rest were small little places, I hesitate to call them actual towns they were so small, named Hackamore, Newell, Ambrose and Buntingville.

Just outside one of these kinds of places, Adin, population 272, we stopped at a little gas station called Juniper Junction for a nature break. There was one other vehicle there too, getting gas, but we didn’t really pay attention to it. We both went inside and Donna asked the clerk if they have a restroom and was given the key, attached to a small plunger so it wouldn’t wonder off in a pocket, and pointed around outside to the other end of the building. As we were leaving the store we could hear another individual ask about a restroom as well, so I turned and said, “Follow us.”

As we walked by the car gassing up I noticed a familiar looking license plate. Donna went into the bathroom leaving me and the guy outside, where upon I asked him, “Is that SUV yours?” He replied, “Yes.” So I pointed at the back end of our Mini and said, “Small world.”

I launched into our story of selling our house and moving to Klamath Falls and that it has been a long and scenic trip, but were happy to be near the end. He told me that it sure is a pretty drive, but all his family and friends said he was crazy to drive all this way instead of flying. He lives in Duncan, South Carolina and was returning there from Klamath Falls. He was in K Falls because he had just attended the funeral of his father, who was a lifelong resident there.

I apologize for the earworm, if in fact the title of this post effected you like it did me.

30th Miataversary

Thursday November 7th
Thirty years ago today on a cool November evening Donna & I drove over to Augusta after work in our 1981 Honda Prelude (which looked remarkably like this.) Donna drove the Prelude home alone. I drove home in our brand spanking new 1990 Mazda Miata (which looked remarkably like this.)

Ever since that day we have always had a Miata in the garage. Except for this year. Tonight the Miata is in someone else’s garage. Back in Aiken awaiting our summons. Thank’s for babysitting David.

Weekend Wrap

Sunday December 1st
On Black Friday, we, along with quite a few Klamath Fallsians, went shopping. And while most everyone else was looking for bargains at all the retail stores, we went to Fred Meyers to do our usual weekly grocery shopping.

On Small Business Saturday we walked the mile and a quarter into downtown. Not really to shop though. We had purchased some advanced tickets to participate in the city’s Annual Chocolate Walk, a fund raiser for the Disabled American Veterans organization. A total of 30 downtown businesses were participating. After getting our wrist bands we visited a couple of places on the way to the furthest spot and the place we were going to have lunch.

That out of the way, we started the trek of visiting as many of the 30 businesses as we could to collect chocolate treats. A few places were handing out just store bought chocolate candy and we certainly didn’t turn any of it down. The businesses are in competition to be voted best treat and some places go above and beyond to make some delicious homemade treats, this the real draw. The both of us agreed that the fresh made truffles offered by an Avon store were the best of the best. Some of the other yummy treats included several barks from pretzel to peppermint, fudge, popcorn covered with white chocolate and a thick drink made with heavy cream and shaved Italian chocolate. Oh my. Felt like trick or treating for adults.

We visited several businesses that we never knew were there. A few of which we will be returning to for any help we need for decorating our new house once we are in it. About two thirds of the way through we stopped eating the chocolate treats and started putting them in the small paper bag they gave us at the start. For various minor reasons we missed just 4 places.

Along with the Chocolate Walk there were 15 places doing something called Shop Small, several of which were on the walk too. For every $10 you spent you received a raffle ticket to be entered into a drawing for several prizes ranging from gift baskets to a seven day trip. We ended up with just 4 entries, which pales in comparison to the 2 folks who stopped into the bike store and bought high-end bicycles netting then over 200 entries…

As we walked back up the hill to our rental spot the weather turned much cloudier and cooler. And after changing into comfy clothes, we looked out the window and were treated to a windy white out of snow. By sundown we ended up with about an inch of the white stuff that covered up everything we had shoveled off on Wednesday.

On Football Sunday, where we typically watch 3 NFL games back to back to back, before we even got to the early game we had to go outside in the snow and do some cleanup. Yesterday’s 1″ of snow was followed up by another 2″ overnight. Donna started by shoveling off the sidewalks and a path to the Mini and then I took over by sweeping snow off the car and cleaning up our make-shift driveway to the street.

Donna looked at me during this and said, “I’m still not as tired of doing this as I was raking leaves in Aiken.” To which I replied, “I don’t remember complaining about raking leaves for the first few years we lived there. Give it time.”

More than likely all this snow will be gone before the end of this coming week anyway, after tonight’s upper 20s low it is supposed to be above freezing, even at night, until next Sunday.

Best of 2018

January

Empty Can with an Exclamation Point Inside

Tuesday the 2nd

The Miata resides in the garage while the Mini sleeps outside. Monday night it was cold as all get out, so I was not really surprised when Donna called me from the gym to tell me she had a light on the Mini’s speedometer that looked like an empty can with an exclamation point inside. The small info screen on the tachometer also indicated that the right front tire was low.

It was obvious that the tire wasn’t flat or she wouldn’t have made to the gym, but I asked her to take a look at the tire and see if it was noticeably lower looking. It wasn’t, so I told her I’d fill them up when I got home.

The sticker inside the driver’s door said the tires were supposed to be set at 33 p.s.i. The right front had 28, the right rear had 30, the left rear had 29 and the left front had 30 p.s.i. I dragged out the long extension cord and my little air compressor and filled all four tires up to 34 pounds.

After I rolled up the 50′ extension cord, stored away the air compressor and was nice and warm inside the house I realized I didn’t check the tire pressure in the spare. I wonder if it has ever been checked since October 4th, 2012 when the car rolled off the assembly line. Better put that on my list to do tomorrow.

February

I Just Want To Remember How It Was

Friday the 9th

I was a big fan of the X-Files from back in the day. My interest dipped sharply in 2000 when Season 8 started without Mulder. But, I hung in sporadically because I still enjoyed the format of the mystery/monster of the week. While I didn’t care for the UFO mythology shows anymore, they had come completely nonsensical by then, it was still better than TV than any “reality show” clogging the airways. Of the 19 shows in season 9, I probably watched all of 5. Including the tiresome show finale which really soured me on the franchise.

So needless to say, I wasn’t too thrilled when they dragged the show out of retirement in 2016 for a 6 show special event miniseries. And I was not disappointed, it was pretty bad, expect for maybe one show, “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster” and that was merely alright.

April 2017 rolls around and Fox decides that they can milk the dead cow once more and produce 10 episodes for an eleventh season in early 2018. So, like a moth to a flame on January 3rd I tuned into Fox to watch the first new episode. Can you say hot mess? The Cigarette Smoking man was still alive? Wasn’t he killed in a helicopter rocket attack back at the end of season 9? I didn’t even make it to the series title sequence, I turned it off.

I recorded the show anyway figuring I’d gather all ten shows and maybe binge watch them, so once I got going I would get into them. After about 3 weeks, there was nothing else to watch, so I tried to re-watch the first show again. This time I got past the intro and maybe 10 more minutes in before giving up in disgust.

When I learned the fourth week’s episode had been written by Darin Morgan, I decided that I was going to watch that particular show. Mr. Morgan has written 5 other X-Files episodes, 2 of which are among my top 5 favorites (Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’), 2 are in the top 20 (Humbug and War of the Coprophages) and the 5th was the only barely watchable episode from season 10 (Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster.)

Well, unfortunately, The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat was a lot more like the last one Mr. Morgan wrote and not the other four. Even though there are 6 more episodes left in this season, this is the last one I am going to bother to watch.

At the end, Scully and Mulder are sitting together on a couch (in his place I guess) and they are about to dig into a batch of Goop-O ABC (think Jell-O 123) that Scully remembers fondly from her childhood. She had molded it in Mulder’s fake Sasquatch footprint maker because that was all she could find. As Scully scoops up a spoonful and brings it towards her mouth, she pauses, shakes her head, puts the spoon down and says, “I just want to remember how it was. I just want to remember how it all was.” Fade to black.

A pitch perfect ending for me to go out on. And apparently for the actress who plays Agent Dana Scully, Gillian Anderson, to go out on too, because at the very end of last year she announced flat out that she was through playing the character.

If Fox wants a season 12 of The X-Files it will have to be without the two of us.

March

Ailuropoda Velox

Wednesday the 14th

Because it was a little after 1:00 PM as we got back to Aiken, after Saturday’s Coffee and Cars we thought maybe we should get something to eat before going home. As we were verbally ticking off places that we might like to eat at, Donna suggested Panda Express as it was about 500 feet right in front of us. I said sure.

The Panda Express is our fair city’s newest dining experience. As with any new restaurant in town, the place is packed for the first two months because everyone in the entire city has to eat there as quickly as possible so they can brag to their friends that they have done so. And true to form, whenever we have been over that way, be it lunch or dinner time, the parking lot has been jammed and the drive-up line practically circled the building.

Neither of us had eaten at a Panda Express before, so we wanted to check out what was meant by Chinese Fast Food. The Aiken store had been open since around the first of the year, so it had been awhile, but we were still surprised to find that there was nearly no one in the drive-up line nor in the dining area.

As it turned out, fast Chinese food is another way to say “controlled portion” buffet style. All the dishes are pre-cooked and sit in warming trays behind a display case and an employee dishes out a measured spoonful of the meal of your choosing. Donna selected chicken and green beans, I picked the Peking beef, we got fried rice as our side and we added one egg roll to split.

Let’s just say, this is the first and last time we will eat at a Panda Express. Our food was dished up by a less than enthusiastic employee and the food matched. Everything tasted like 3 day old leftover take-out where all the flavor had been absorbed by the baking soda at the back of the fridge. It was luke-warm in temperature and the rice was so dry you were lucky to keep more than a dozen grains of it on the fork at a time. The egg roll was hot enough, probably by random chance, but there was no hot mustard or orange sauce packets anywhere to be found.

This probably explains the uncrowdedness of the place on a Saturday at lunchtime. Everyone else in town had already eaten there, had a similar experience as us and discovered that eating here once was more than enough?

April

Easter Miracle

Saturday the 28th

Cleaning up the drafts folder…
Somewhere in the middle of March, while doing some laundry, one of the socks from Donna’s favorite pair of yoga socks came up missing. We looked in every nook & cranny of every item of clothing that was in the wash load with no success. I retraced our steps to the laundry room, I looked beside and behind the washer and the dryer, I looked inside the dryer to see if it was stuck somewhere and then retraced our steps back into the bedroom where we were folding the clothes. No sock.

Donna repeated what I just did and she didn’t find the missing sock either. While she was doing this I looked under the bed we threw the clothes on to fold thinking maybe it fell off and got kicked under there. Nope. When Donna got back she looked under the bed too. No sock. We shrugged our shoulders and figured it would show up in the leg or sleeve of someone’s in the near future.

Two weeks later, on Easter morning when I got out of bed in our hotel in Myrtle Beach and turned on the light in the bathroom, there in the middle of the tile floor was the missing sock. How the sock got there is a total mystery. The suitcases with all our clothing were kept in the room. Any clothes brought into the bathroom wouldn’t have included socks or anything that a sock could hide in. It was just there.

Of course we weren’t really sure that it wasn’t the non-missing sock until we got home on Sunday afternoon and Donna looked in her closet and saw the other sock sitting on the shelf right where she left it waiting for its mate. Still not sure how the resurrected sock made it to Myrtle Beach and to magically appear on a bathroom floor.

May

Where The Locals Eat

Saturday the 26th

Day 27 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Minden, LA to Hammond, LA. Last night’s hotel clerk recommendation for a good breakfast where the locals eat was to drive just up the street a bit and go to Hamburger Happiness and Southern Maid Doughnuts. We were worried a bit as there was only one other vehicle in the lot when we pulled in.

The one guy sitting by himself didn’t seem too friendly, but the nice old lady at the counter where we placed and paid for our order was very pleasant. I think it was literally a mom and pop shop because I could see an old man through the saloon doors to the kitchen.

Soon the rest of the locals started arriving one by one and they greeted each other by name. The same lady brought our food to us pipping hot and it was delicious. The portions were correct and the price was right. We could hear the locals in background discussing the weather and the size of farm tractors. When we finished up and stepped outside I knew I needed to snap a picture. Take a guess, which one of these things is not like the other.

June

Wendover Will

Sunday the 3rd

On Day 12 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip we spent the night in the town of Wendover, Utah. The town sits right on the border between Utah and Nevada and just across the literal line in the sand sits the town of West Wendover. In 1952 West Wendover, Nevada replaced a bright light on a tall pole that State Line Service (a cobble stone service station), right on the border, had used to attract visitors with a 64″ tall mechanical cowboy outlined in neon lights.

Probably hundreds of thousands of people have taken pictures of Will and even themselves with Wendover Will over the years, but now the town has created a page where if you submit a selfie photo with him they’ll post it with a digital pin on the map of where your from. I, of course, thought it sounded like fun, so I took a picture. It is not a very good picture overall and shows that I need a lot more practice at the selfie thing. Take a look and see if you can find me: Wendover Will Visitor Map

July

Miata Maintenance Day

Thursday the 19th

Seeing as the CTBNL hit the 65,000 mile plateau on Saturday, the other day when Donna went off to the gym, I jacked up the Miata, rotated the tires and changed the oil.

I was going to give the car a bath too, but after eating lunch I didn’t want to go back outside. Besides I did not want to violate Russ’s Rule for Retirement. To wit: Do one thing a day. You have all sorts of things you need to do and have been waiting until you more free time, there are all the things you want to do for yourself and then there is all to things your wife wants for you to do. It can overwhelming, so pick one thing and do just that one thing, don’t try to do too much.

Now you might think that changing the oil and rotating tires is two different items, but to me, I have always combined them. This is because to only real easy way to get to the oil filter in the Miata is to remove the right front wheel. And while I guess quite possibly you could jack up that front side and remove the one wheel, but then you would need to make sure the car is level to allow all the oil to drain out. That and you are now already 1/4 of the way to rotating the tires anyway…

August

Bagels For Breakfast

Saturday the 11th

We like bagels and really miss the ones we used to get when we lived in New Jersey for those two years. After living in South Carolina for several years we adjusted to just live with the ones from Dunkin Donuts. Whenever we would travel we would seek out a shop that sold “real” bagels, so now we have gotten kind of snobbish about them and will only eat those.

For a while we were satisfied from the one we got from a chain called Bruegger’s that had a store in Lexington, SC a mere 50 miles away. These were fine until we discovered a place called Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC on a trip to see my sister. The bagels from there elicited memories of those from Jersey, so we have stopped going to Bruegger’s.

A hundred mile round trip to Lexington and back for bagels wasn’t bad, but a 330 mile round trip to Hendersonville and back would be nuts. So we started looking for someplace closer that had “real” bagels. We found a place in Greenville, SC (a 220 mile round trip) called Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli. It is really too far away for frequent trips to just get a bagel for breakfast, but we’ve combined it with looking for some Motoring Challenge points and have been a couple of times.

Yesterday we decided it was time for some bagels this weekend. We were planning another Greenville trip, but I decided to look around for something else in the state that might be closer. Charleston and Hilton Head on the coast had promising bagel bakeries, but they were both further away than Greenville. Then I found a place called Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC. This place is a little under a hundred miles away one-way, not that many miles savings over Greenville, but Anderson is a much smaller town so traffic will be better and we won’t have to get on the Interstate at all.

We each got a toasted bagel and one each in a bag to go at the Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli. I thought it was not too bad, but Donna said it was barely Bruegger level. “Well,”I volunteered, “Greenville and Greenfield’s Deli is only about 30 miles away. You want to go there?”

So that is what we did. Because we had our own bagel in Anderson, we just split a toasted one in Greenville and then also got a couple more to go. I told Donna that I thought that this bagel was better than our previous gold standard, the Joey’s in Hendersonville. She informed me that I was nuts, Joey’s was better. “You know,” I said, “Joey’s is only about 40 miles away?”

“Let’s go,” she said. So we did. Here we split another toasted bagel and had them bag up a couple more to go for each of us. While eating in Joey’s NY Bagel’s store Donna decided that just maybe I was right about which one was best. We brought home at least one bagel from each place, so maybe we will have to figure out a way to do some back to back blind taste testing…

The triptych above shows the interiors of all three places we ate a bagel at this morning. From left to right: Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC, Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli in Greenville, SC and Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC.

September

Smile, There Are Cameras Everywhere

Tuesday the 25th

On Saturday’s return pass of the Gap, just a little after dawn, at around mile marker #5 we passed one of the ubiquitous photographers set up in one of the corners. As I went by I entered the corner too deep and crossed the white line. Knowing the photos wouldn’t be very good, I found the next pull-off so I could make a u-turn to make another portrait pass. I went through the corner a lot better this time, drove until the next pull-off for another u-turn. The third pass wasn’t for photos, it was because that was the way we need to be going.

Maybe a mile and a half further along towards the end of our return pass I surprised another photographer who was just setting up his awning. He quickly grabbed his camera and started shooting. I just made the one pass and continued on our way back to the hotel. I thought for sure he probably didn’t get a good look, plus I figured the first guy had enough chances to get a great shot of us already.

The first Dragon photographer had his vehicle wrapped with the company logo and name, 129Slayer.com, so I knew where to go to see those pictures. In the span of the 2 minutes it took me to make my 3 passes he snapped 42 exposures. I needed a Google search of “deals gap photographers” to find our second photographer, US129Photos, and our brief 20 second encounter with him netted just 6 exposures.

In the end, the best shot, came out of those 6. I did also purchase 2 out of the 42 from 129Slayer too and it was a good thing I did go by him 3 times, as both of the ones I bought came from the last pass.

October

Mmmm, Derby Pie

Saturday the 6th

Today was the Annual Chocolate Festival at St. Mary’s Church which is used as a fund raiser for their school. There are fun and games for the kids, a small vendor area, a silent auction, a couple of spots for lunch, a bake sale, a used book sale and a plethora of chocolate goodies for consumption. As we do almost every year we dropped in for a brief visit to look at the used books, check out the silent auction and eat some chocolate based food stuffs.

We actually bought a few books this time after having not for the last couple of years because of becoming Kindlized. Donna picked 8 books to mail off the munchkins in Washington state for a quarter a piece and a couple of paperbacks for herself at a half a buck each (one of which she is reading by flashlight on the back porch as I write this.) I bought 5 for myself, so for eight bucks we came away with 16 books. Which is pretty good considering the 8 we got for our reading pleasure were “trade” paperbacks that retail for like $15-17 each.

We hit the bake sale where we spent a bit on some cupcakes and cookies before heading outside to buy some other chocolate goodies. Donna found some chocolate covered pretzels for herself and I snagged a slice of Derby Pie. We found a shady spot to sit and enjoy our treats. As I took my first forkful of pie and brought it up to my mouth I was bopped in the hands by a volley ball. I did manage to save the bite on the fork, but the rest of the container of pie hit the ground. Neither one of us saw it happen, but a ball somehow got loose from the octagonal corral where a couple of kids were hand batting it around. One of the older kids who was running the game was very apologetic, but the other one just hung her head. I brushed myself off and went back over and spent another 75¢ for a second slice. This time I kept my head up while eating.

November

69,000 Yellow Leaves

Sunday the 4th

We had 5 Miatas from the Masters Miata Club scheduled for the weekend trip. One of our Miata club members is also a member of a local Corvette Club and he invited some of his fellow ‘Vette guys to join. We had two who wanted to come, but neither was going to drive their Corvette. One was going to drive a Miata and the other was going to drive a Porsche. At the last minute, the Miata driver backed out, leaving just the mystery Porsche driver to meet us in Elberton, GA on Friday. Trust me, it was fairly easy to spot his Lava Orange 911 GT3 RS in the McDonald’s lot.

Our Porsche guest was a great sport about just loafing around with us slow poke Miatas and rode mid pack on the trip up. He had been as far up into North Carolina as Highlands, but had never driven into these western parts, so he was just happy to be with us and soak up our knowledge of the area.

After driving the 200 miles to get Robbinsville, no one wanted to drive the 50 extra miles total to do a Dragon run, except for our Porsche driver and me. So instead of the two of us driving, I asked if I could ride along with him. “Sure,” he said. While the cost of the Porsche was roughly equivalent to the cost of all of our 5 Miatas put together, he promptly justified the high cost of the car to me by demonstrating how it would feel to do the trip in a low flying Blue Angels jet.

And let me tell you, this car gets some respect on the road. On the way up to the start of the Gap going up US129, we came across a tight 3 pack of cars, traveling 60 MPH or so, going the same way. The stock looking Civic SI in the back surrendered first, approximately 1/4 mile after we came right up on his rear. The middle car, an older model GTR, withstood about two miles of him having this orange beast filling his mirror before he hit his flashers and slowed on a short stretch of straight. The lead car, a late model Mustang that looked a bit modified, hung on leading for about the next three miles (he was doing pretty good), but after we past a small tangle of cars turning into the Tapoco Lodge he finally gave in on the first wide spot after the sharp uphill turn past the dam. He quickly disappeared in our mirror.

For a minute I was afraid this trip would make the same drive in a Miata feel pedestrian, but on Saturday morning on our early morning trip through the gap and back, it actually was the opposite, the Miata felt almost more fun, for a lot less work, so I probably won’t be cashing in my 401k to buy my own GT3 RS.

Somewhere around the lovely town of Cross Anchor, SC on the way home today the CTBNL reached the 69,000 mile mark.

December

Hide and Seek

Monday the 3rd

Back in October Donna and I went to the Fall Steeplechase with a couple of couples from the Miata Club. Our house was the meeting point so we could walk over to the field together and all our “tail-gating” stuff could be carried over in one pickup truck. We had an exciting time at the track and one last bit of excitement once we got back to the Bogardus Estates at the end of the day. I wrote about it on the Masters Miata Club site, here is the final paragraph of the event wrap-up there, reprinted below with the permission of the author, me:

The truck riders and walkers home arrived at Boardman Road at about the same time and when Donna entered the code on the remote garage door opener – it didn’t open. Thinking she may have fat fingered a number, she tried again. It didn’t open. She waited about 15 seconds, cycled the cover open and then closed before trying the code again. Still nothing. Brian then tried it and got the same no response. We even told Jennie and let her try. Time for Plan B, open a regular person styled door with a key. Well, Brian carried his Miata key chain but it has no house key. Donna’s key chain does have a house key, but she didn’t take her purse, it was inside the house. Spare key hidden outside somewhere? Nope (that is a whole other story.) Fortunately a local locksmith was happy to come out and do the rescue.

This is the whole other story. I was lying when I said nope to having one of those Hide-A-Key things with a spare hidden outside, we did, we just didn’t know where to find it.

It used to be inside the old gardening shed, but when that was torn down in August I took it and hid it somewhere else. The six of us wandered all over the back yard looking for any place a magnetic key holder might be hidden with no luck. Somewhere in there I had what I thought was a eureka moment and checked under the bird feeder only to be disappointed. I tried it there, but Donna couldn’t reach that high, so it had to go somewhere else. I even looked under a bunch of old leaves alongside the stairs to the deck, because this was one of the spots where we had hid a key before it went into the shed. After about 15 minutes of looking without success we called that locksmith.

Fast forward to today. The temperature climbed into the upper 60s so Donna and I went out to the screened porch in what will probably be the last time to enjoy it until next spring. As we made our way to our chairs Donna noticed some strange dust in several places on the table we have our portable gas grill sitting on. When I started to look around to see what I could see, what should I spot stuck to the bottom of the grill, but that missing Hide-A-Key. I must have stuck it there after taking it off the bird feeder.

The best part of this whole story is, that all the time we spent looking for where I had hid the key, the whole time we spent waiting around for the locksmith to show up, what we needed to open a door was right at our feet. The gas grill had made the trip to the steeplechase races and was off-loaded from the back of the pickup truck. It was sitting right there on the driveway in front of the garage door.

So now we have one Hide-A-Key hidden somewhere entirely new (which I promise I have committed to memory) and one back up set in a drawer in the house.

Best of 2017

January

Awwww Mom!

Sunday the 29th
Even though this morning’s temperature was borderline freezing, Donna and I still bike rode over to our usual Sun-day breakfast spot, Ridgecrest Coffee Bar for a panini. We were the only folks in the place until we were just about finished and a family of five came through the front door.

It was a man and woman probably around 30-years old, two boy kids maybe 5 & 6 and a infant in one of those car seats with a basket handle. The parents had on puffy vests, car seat infant was under a blanket, but the kids were just in flannel shirts. As the group approached the counter, the younger of the two kids, noticing the sliding window behind it, said, with as much exasperation as a person that age can muster, “They have a drive-thru!”

I’m not sure whether his annoyance was because he had to get out of the car and walk 15 feet to the door (in the cold) or because this was the first time in his life he had ever been in a restaurant that had a drive-thru and and they hadn’t used it.

February

Decades Old Fantasy Fulfilled

Friday the 3rd
BACKGROUND:
In the early Aughts when the X-Files was on TV every Sunday night I developed a little crush on Gillian Anderson. Somewhere in there I started a minor little gallery of photos that I culled from the internet. Everything from her early modeling days to then current magazines to show screen captures. If any of you were around then, and I can’t fathom that any of the tens of people of might see this now were, at one time I thought it might be fun to add one of her pictures to each of my posts. There was no correlation to whatever I was writing about to whatever picture, but anyway, it was fun for a while.

I would point you to that era if I could, but in a move from one blogging platform to another or one server to another I opted not to put the pictures back in place. The picture collection is long gone too, probably dumped in the bit bucket on a PC move or due to hard drive space requirements. I don’t have the compunction to blog stalk her with photos anymore, but somewhere deep inside my addled brain is the thought that if I wasn’t married to Donna and she wasn’t married to whoever, I’d have a chance.

THE EVENT:
I got to sleep with Gillian Anderson. Not in the same bed. Well, I don’t know, it might have been in the same bed, but it definitely wasn’t the same time. It was the same house though, well, it might have been the same house. It was on the same property, well, maybe it was the same property, but I definitely slept in the same B & B that had an autographed picture of her on their brag wall downstairs.

Using the same logic, I also got to sleep with Shirley MacLaine & Hugh Jackman. It is kind of hard to tell, but that is Shirley in the pink jacket in the photo above and to the left of Gillian and Hugh is the photo above and to the right.

March

Who’s Guarding The Fort?

Thursday the 23rd
My sister and her husband live in a gated community so to deliver her the breakfast bagels we reminded her to call down to the gate house and let them know we were coming to visit on Sunday. So, when we turned into the access road to Carriage Park I drove right up to the left gate to identify myself to the person on duty. To my surprise, at 8:30 AM, it was empty. Hmmmm, now what?

I backed up 50 feet to the call box and tried to figure out how to get to their name using a keypad and no scroll bar. Donna said, “Just call the house.” Ooh, that’s right, I have a smart phone of my own now. I call the house phone. No answer, so I leave a message, “We are at the gate, but there is no one to let us in, what’s the code?’ ” As we are idling there waiting for any sort of response, another car pulls in the access road and stops a few feet behind us. They must not live in the sub-division either or they would have driven up to the right-hand gate where their little transponder would automatically cause the arm to raise letting them in.

As Donna and I are discussing our options the car behind me loses patience and whips around me in a big hurry and sudden stops at the gate house to display his anger at my inaction. About this time a resident pulls slowly up to the right gate causing the arm to start to go up to let them in. I throw it in first and time my run to hit the opening at the same time as the back end of the resident’s SUV. We’re in! Leaving frustrated man stuck outside, now possibly even more so.

April

WWJD

Sunday the 16th

From the song “Trial Before Pilate” on the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar:
-Pontius Pilate-
Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction.
Die if you want to, you misguided martyr.
I wash my hands of your demolition.
Die if you want to you innocent puppet!

Friday I watched Jesus Christ Superstar on the TV in the living room. Donna poked in a couple of times as she like the music, but doesn’t really care for the movie. Last year I watched the movie on the laptop and the video quality was not that great, but my rip of the 720p resolution DVD which in of itself was made from the 1973 movie film really looks fuzzy only 9 feet away from a 52″ TV. I’ve read there is a blu ray version of the flick available, but I have also read it wasn’t remastered in any way so I’m not to keen on buying it. There is probably a torrent out there of it. What Would Jesus Do? Would he download the torrent to see if it worth maybe buying it?

Today we watched the totally forgettable movie The Intern. From the title I thought it was that stupid Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson thing, but the trailer had Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway and it seemed kind of fun. And it was, but at 2 hours it was about 15-20 minutes too long. We didn’t need the interns Ocean’s Eleven side trip, Ben at the kid’s birthday party and we didn’t really need the whole infidelity sub plot.

In between we had breakfast out with a small contingent of the MMC, lunch out with a friend, a three mile walk in Hitchcock Woods and plenty of screened porch time. The 3-day holiday weekend is winding down and tomorrow it will be back to work for me and back to the grind of retirement for Donna.

May

Another Exciting Day at Work

Tuesday the 16th
Two of the Valve Store’s engineers were standing outside my cubical discussing a housefly problem. The engineer with the problem had tried a couple things with little success, so the other says, “Have you heard about air-power gun that shoots salt that kills them.” “Nooo..”, came the reply. “It is sort of like a shotgun water pistol that fires table salt.”

I hadn’t either, so I looked it up. It’s called Bug-A-Salt, cute, huh? So, the housefly host says, why don’t you get a couple of them and bring the boys over (non-fly guy has 5-year old twins) and they can hunt the flies down. I’ll offer up a bounty. At this point I jump in with, “Hey, I want in on this bounty. How much is it?” The answer is $50 a ton. This is a perfect answer because the kids will jump at the size of the bounty and not really have a sense of how much a ton is.

I on the other hand know how big a ton is and how big a fly is, so I’m no longer interested in hunting houseflies. But I am now curious as to just how many flies it would take to get a ton of them. A quick search turns up these figures in a couple places, so they are going to be accurate enough for our little math problem.

Typical housefly: Adult size: 5-7 mm = 0.005-0.007 m Adult mass: 12 mg = 0.000 012 kg

1 Imperial Ton = 1016.05 kilograms, so we divide 1016.05 by .000012 = 84670833.333, or just a mere 84.7 million flies in a ton. Not nearly as many as I originally thought, I would have guessed some number followed by about 10 or 12 zeroes.

Next I guess we will also need to figure out how big a bucket we are going to need to hold ton of flies. I couldn’t find a volume for a house fly, so I’m going to take a SWAG and say if the fly is 6 mm long and it is roughly cylindrical shape of about 2.5 mm in diameter. This gives me, fudging for wings and legs, let’s call it 30 cu/mm per fly. So the 84670833.3333 x 30 = 2540125000 cu/mm. Converting to cubic feet gives us 88.90437499965 or a slightly overfilled 3-yard dumpster from California Waste Services.

June

Jedi Mind Trick

Wednesday the 14th
This morning Donna went along for a ride in the Miata, which she misses, to the local Dunkin Donuts for a quick breakfast. She wanted to go this particular morning for two reasons, 1) the a fore mentioned Miata ride and 2) be-cause the local DD has free copies of the Aiken Standard for customers and Wednesday is the day there are grocery coupons in the paper.

We are getting away cheap because we bring our own drinks and all we buy are a muffin for me and some doughnut holes for her. When the girl waiting on us asked what we wanted I said, “I’ll have a Coffee Cake Muffin and my wife will get 4 Munchkins.” As I was about to say, “Two glazed and 2 chocolate glazed’, as that is her go to order for the doughnut hole variety when Donna said, “I want 4 chocolate glazed.” I repeated to the server, “Four chocolate glazed Munchkins”, all the while thinking, “She usually gets 2 glazed and 2 chocolate glazed.’

We sat down and when Donna opened her little bag and showed me – 2 glazed and 2 chocolate glazed.

*The force is strong with this one.*

July

Cicada Siren Song

Thursday the 27th
Remember last Friday when I said I had two things on my honey-do list before I put down the garage floor tiles? The tiles were installed on Sunday and those two items are done, but for the life of me I can’t remember what day I did them. Might have been Saturday afternoon or heck even Monday after work, I do remember it was during the day.

I don’t have my own little shop to work in, so I often do little projects either in the driveway or on the back deck. For cutting up that junk wood, the deck was used, because this way I could lay the long pieces of wood on the seat that runs around half the deck, stick the wood out about a foot, step on it and use the circular saw to cut segments off the the end.

The 12 feet of junk wood from behind the plant started life as a box top, so along with the 1/2 thick pieces I needed for my test, there was a border of 1″ x 3″ wood strips as support that had nails spaced about 4 to 5 inches all around. Rather than try and remove the approximate hundredty-million twisted nails from the 24″ of wood, I just hammered the bent ends down flat. Because of the nails I had to cut the 1″ x 3″ wood into about 60 pieces total.

After a little while I got a nice rhythm going; cut a couple pieces, release pressure on my foot, slide the board for-ward, repeat until done. About halfway through cutting up the second 6″ piece of wood a very large black bug dive-bombed by the front of my face and angled down towards my right hand. I let go of the trigger on the saw and dropped it to the deck.

There was a female cicada trying to mate with still spinning blade. After a few seconds the insect realized its mistake and flew back whence it came. I finished that board and started on the third 6″ piece and wouldn’t you know, my horny cicada took another shot at the saw. I dropped it on the deck again. This time when the bug flew back into its tree, I went inside the house and got my can of Raid Wasp & Hornet spray for the next time.

Sure enough, as I was finishing cutting the third piece, my love struck bug returned. I dropped the saw, grabbed the can and fired off a stream of insecticide at her. I’m not sure if I hit the cicada with any of the stream or she finally learned that the sound of a circular saw rhythmically cutting 1″ x 3″ pieces of wood was not a male of her species, but I cut the full 6″ length of the last piece without a return fly-ins.

August

Second Saturday in a Row

Wednesday the 30th
We have led a Masters Miata Club Event…this week was the annual Bug Splat.

When Donna and I put on this event for the very first time way back in 1999 I had devised it sort of like a rally style start, I would send each car out at 3 minute intervals to guarantee clean air in front of the cars for maximum exposure to bugs. When I tried that the next year everyone balked at it, so I handed out the maps and sent them all on their way. I had underestimated the Club’s love of driving all in one long line (which as it turns out is second only to the love of all eating at one long table no matter how big the group or small the venue.)

By the third year everyone wondered why Donna and I weren’t playing along. When I explained that we didn’t want to steal anyone’s chance at a prize, they all went, “Pshaw, you should have some of the fun too.” We have been leading the line of cars around the route ever since.

It took me a couple of years to figure out the group had ulterior motives for this. They just wanted someone to lead so they wouldn’t have look at a map and/or not get lost, but probably the most likely reason was to decrease their odds of winning the Biggest Bug Trophy which is so ugly it is kind of cool. You either love it or hate it, with the haters having the larger numbers.

As we were loading the trophy in the trunk to bring to the starting point on Saturday, Donna was looking over the list of names of those who have held it in the last 18 years and asked, “How come we haven’t ever won it?”

“Alexa: play ominous music”

That’s right, we won the trophy this year with a silver dollar size splat on the nose of the CTBNL right next to the Mazda logo.

September

Caffeine Has Flavor?

Tuesday the 12th
I’ve made no secret here that my drink of choice is Diet Dr. Pepper, usually the regular stuff, but I have come to enjoy the cherry vanilla flavor too (even though I sort of made fun of it at my first exposure.) There is always about 6 cans chilling in the fridge at all times. There is always a 12-pack box (at least half full) in the cabinet next to the fridge. Whenever the 12-packs of Diet Dr. Pepper goes on sale we buy a couple to stock up.

Weekend before last we bought a couple of 12-packs and when I went to put some new cans in the fridge I noticed that I had picked up Caffeine Free Diet Dr. Pepper. Eh, I figured, it wouldn’t make a difference. Caffeine withdrawal would usually cause a headache, but now that I’m drinking a coffee in the morning, that would prevent the headache. And it has, but…

The caffeine free has a slightly different flavor the the regular stuff and I’m not sure I like it. Who knew that the caffeine would affect the taste? The Internet did apparently, just not me.

I can’t tell the difference between caffeine free and regular coffee. Why should the soda be any different? I’m betting that it is because I’m not drinking just straight coffee like I am the soda. I like just a bit of coffee flavor in my sweetened cream breakfast drink.

October

Who Likes Who Better

Friday the 13th
When I sat down at my desk at work this morning I looked down and noticed a bruise forming on the back of my hand at the knuckles of the middle and ring fingers. Took me a second, but then I remembered.

It is an immutable law of the universe that whenever there is a couple, each of the individual satellites surrounding them will seem to gravitate more to one than the other. Daddy’s little girl or the dog will come when called by one, but ignore the other. And it is not just people or pets.

Last night we went out for a drive in the Miata to grab a couple of Motoring Challenge points locally. The Miata was in the garage with the top up. I went to the driver’s side and Donna was on the passenger side and we both reached into disengage the top latches on our respective sides. Mine went easy, but Donna was having a hard time getting it to unlatch. She got it partially open and it snapped back closed, pinching outside of the hand between thumb and forefinger. Not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to turn the skin red and to hurt a bit.

Yesterday I drove the Mini to work to 1) show it off, 2) see how many people would think I’d bumped my head and got rid of the Miata and 3) see how many people don’t pay attention at all. The answers are: 1) a half dozen wanted to know about the car while one wanted to actually see it and sit in it, 2) two people, both today and 3) the other 250 or so.

My lunch box goes in the trunk of the Miata and went in the trunk of the Sonata too, but the Mini does not have an actual trunk per se, it has a hatchback with a spot behind the back seats and a little lid thing to keep stuff out of sight. When closing the Miata’s trunk lid I grasp the loop that goes into the latch mechanism and “throw” the lid down. The Sonata had a nice handle for this purpose molded into the underside of the lid. When I closed the Mini hatch before leaving home I just pressed down on the outside of the hatch and pushed. When I got to work, I noticed that the Mini, like the Sonata, had a handle for grabbing to close the hatch. When I tried it, it was sort of awkward to reach and when I “threw” it down I didn’t get enough force on it to totally overcome the upwards pressure from the 2 struts. The hatch went down 6 to 8 inches and bounced right back up and hit my hand. Hard.

This must be the cause of my bruised hand. And we now know for a fact that the Miata likes me better and the Mini likes Donna better.

November

Sorry Soda City Minis

Saturday the 18th
A couple of weeks ago, to compliment our MMC membership, we poked around looking for a Mini Club. The near-est group to us was a facebook group called Soda City Minis. They were going to have a meet and greet on Saturday, November 18th. The meet up spot was Sesquicentennial State Park and end up at a Red Robin for lunch. We were back and forth about attending for a while, but opted to go after the Miata Club event that day was going to a breakfast spot we didn’t care for.

The trip to the Soda City1 was two-fold, the Mini Meet-Up and a bagel for breakfast at Bruegger’s. We got up at our usual 6:00 AM to make the hour drive to Irmo to have breakfast. Before we left we checked the Soda City Minis page to double check the 11:00 AM start time and noticed that the event was called off because of lack of participation. There were only 4 people who had responded “Going.” I asked Donna if one of them was her and she said, “No. I don’t like to post on Facebook.”

Sorry about that Soda City Minis. Although I doubt that our one more, making 5 total, would have made the mini-mum participation level that had been set by the organizer. If it was me it would have been around 10…

December

Good News/Bad News

Monday the 4th
Good
Somehow, through no fault of my own, the Angry Ladybugs have slipped into the EZEFFL Playoffs. I won the last game of the season by beating the only team in the conference with a worse record than me1 and was helped out by having the only combination of two teams, who I held the tie-breaker over, losing.

Bad
Another “I Really Am Old” milestone was passed today when I signed up for a Wheel of Fortune Spin ID number. Most nights at 7:00 PM we’ve finished eating and are parked comfortably on the couch, so after watching the net-work news, watching Pat & Vanna are the perfect mental pallet cleanser and blood pressure lowering tool. If you happen to be tuned in and see the Spin Id Number of BB6861302, let me know, I’ll split it with you.