Miata Mileage

55,000 Crappy Pallets


Like any manufacturing facility, the Valve Store brings in a lot of stuff to accomplish its mission and most of the large quantities of an item come on pallets of wood and occasionally plastic. Sometimes these pallets get damaged in some way shape or form and are no longer usable to ship our product back out the door.

That chain link fencing with the maroon slats behind that big ol’ pile is where on one side the broken ones are supposed to go and on the other the fresh new pallets get stored until needed. Almost always the broken ones just get get unceremoniously dumped next to, not in, the fenced area to await recycling. I haven’t seen the guy who comes to pick up the junk ones recently, so the pile has grown quite large. Because we are getting a visit from the President of ASCO next week, who is a stickler for neatness, somebody needs to clean up this mess just like I had to do for my desk.

Well, today Waste Management dropped off a 40-yard dumpster which the minions of shipping filled up in short order. It made a dent in the pile, but a couple hours later a truck showed up to drop off a second dumpster (and cart off the full one.) Those same people filled up the second one right after lunch. When I left at the end of today that second full dumpster was still sitting there. And scattered around outside the dumpster there looked like at least another dumpster full.

Yesterday when I pulled into the garage after work the CTBNL’s odometer read 50,002.

54,000 Garage Floor Ideas

Sixty-six Black Vented Ultra-Loc Tiles for the center where the CTBNL will sit, surrounded with a checkerboard border of a combination of Graphite & Gunmetal Diamond Grid-Loc Tiles, two tiles wide except three at the back that will be about where the car sits, 94 total. Finishing off the end near the laundry room with the ten of the 3″ edge pieces in red. Total, a little over $450. The only other expense will be about $20 of landscape fabric to quiet the plastic tiles on the concrete floor.

On the way to work this morning the Miata moved past 54,000 miles.

Another Mileage Chart

At the beginning of the year I made a quick spreadsheet of the CTBNL’s thousand mile points and created a nifty little chart. Trouble was I neglected to save the file, so I couldn’t just add on to it a month ago when we hit 53,000 mile mark. Instead of just recreating it, maybe I could make it better.

If some data is good, more is better right?! When we bought the silver car I said that it felt like going back in time 10 years, this made me wonder how the mileage we were putting on this car compared to how many we drove The Emperor 10 years ago (August 2006 to May 2007.) As you can see, in 2006 we started a thousand less, but by 8 months later we were 4,000 higher. It is not really a fair comparison though because in 2006-7 we only had the one car while now we have 2 to chose from any time we go for a drive.

Maybe I should chart the Purple Whale’s miles for the same stretch of time, from say 5 years ago, and add that on top of the CTBNL’s mileage to even out the playing field.

53,000 ng/dL of Testosterone

Better late than never. This post was supposed to written last weekend, but somehow I got on the write-about-bicycle kick and forgot it my drafts folder. Not that you are missing much as all it was was a CTBNL mileage update.

Last Saturday we drove up to Kershaw, SC to meet up with some other MMC members at the Carolina Motorsports Park. Club member John Haff is big in the NASA racing thing and he arranged for us fellow Miata owners to take some “parade” laps of the track during the lunch break. We of course turned that into a Motoring Challenge themed event as we needed a photo of a parade…

Somewhere, quite literally in the boondocks, the odometer clicked1 passed the 53,000 mark. I say literally, because we had just passed an intersection with a small country store on one corner that had “Boon Docks Store” painted on its outside wall.

52,000 Condo Dwellers

After lunch at Big Meats at the Mcleod Farms Roadside Stand & Pumpkin Patch Farm Museum Complex Donna and I left the members of the MMC behind to head down to Hilton Head Island for a couple of days. It was sort of a working vacation as we had to, along with kicking back on the beach, take some interior photos of condos to update the Hilton Head Condo Rentals web page.

Along with all the photo taking and beach walking we still found time to drive around and score a few points in the Moss Motoring Challenge. Because Hilton Head is sort of a playground for the well heeled it cost us money to take the photos. Donna found a street in the Sea Pines Resort that was worth over 30 points in the Scrabble Scramble, but if you want to drive onto the plantation, and you are not a guest or owner, it cost $6 to get a visitor pass. While six dollars sounds like a lot, because Mizzenmast is worth 32 points, it works out to less than 19¢ a point. Compare that with our other Hilton Head Island shot and it was a bargain. We needed a photo of a toll booth and the Cross Island Parkway was right there. The toll was a buck and a quarter and the picture is worth 1 point. The last photo we took was off the island on the way home and it was free.

On the way over to have dinner with Donna the Condo Queen on Sunday night the CTBNL passed by the 52,000 mile mark.

51,000 Miata T-shirts

I’ve got a Blipshift problem. Like a junkie looking for another fix I check their site nearly every morning hoping that I’ll like their design, I need just one more car related T. They’ve done about a dozen Miata related shirts and I have 6 or 7 of them. I’ve also got at least 3 other random design shirts too. I’ve submitted a Miata design idea, which they used. I also submitted a photo using the hashtag #blipshifted that they used on the site.

For the design idea, I got a free copy of that particular shirt & and a big gift certificate of Blip Bucks (or what ever they call ’em.) For submitting the photo of socks-in-a-jar I got an additional smaller gift certificate. So when the design(s) in the thumbnail showed up on Wednesday I knew I had to get one. I still had money left over on the gift certificate from my Pop Up Blocker suggestion and it was burning a hole in my pocket, so I splurged and got a hoodie and a shirt (and a sticker.)

For the hoodie I bought the silver NC because that is what color my current car is. Besides no one but probably a Miata purist will know which generation it is anyway (and even in the MMC there are probably only 3 or 4 who would know.) Then I bought the red ND on the t-shirt. The green NB was too dark on the dark gray shirt, if they ever resto-mod the shirts I’d get the NB version if it was lighter in color or green on a lighter colored shirt.

On the way over to North Augusta for dinner out with friends the CTBNL past through its 51,000th mile.

50,000 Data Points?

As you can see from the chart, winter has set in and the Miata gets driven a lot less. For the first 2-1/2 months we were racking up miles at an average rate of a little over 37 per day. It seems like just yesterday we bought the CTBNL with a mere 46,320 miles on it, but it has been nearly 5 months and we are averaging about 24-1/2 miles a day for the total ownership.

On the actual yesterday, the CTBNL passed the 50k mark on the way into work at the Valve Store.