Miatatude

The car is pretty dirty and today would have been a nice day to give it a bath. The Emporer doesn’t look too bad from further than 30 feet away (see yesterday’s Rural photo), but it has got an under layer of road grime, and believe it or not a sprinkling of pine pollen on top of that. Plus the wheel wells and the tires now have a orangish dirt covering in spots as a result of yesterday’s Rural picture. But I refuse to wash it because the Weather Channel is calling for rain tomorrow night and Monday, with more in store for Wednesday and Thursday.

It really is too soon for pine pollen, but that is just what it is. I’m thinking the 30-35 MPH winds of early this week shook it out of the trees prematurely. Our company’s property is littered with pine trees and every spring for three weeks we get a major dusting of the yellow powder.

I don’t really like the Japanese license plate on the front of the car, but I don’t want to take it off. I posted a thread over on the Miata.net Forums asking if I should keep it or lose it yesterday. So far the yeses and noes are running about even.

Chinese and Japanese share the same lettering scheme, but the “letters” have different meanings in the different languages. The kanji characters along the top is supposed to represent the location of the plate owner (like our states) and possibly reads Ueno, a prefecture of Tokyo. A couple of Chinese speaking members of the forum noticed the kanji characters are reversed giving them an unintended meaning. In the Cantonese dialect they represent a slang for ‘long dong’!

If I parked in the front row of a glass walled Chinese restaurant I might get very good service from the waitresses, but the plate will have to come off for sure now as it is a blatant misrepresentation of the truth. 🙂

I had a dentist appointment for cleaning this afternoon and I put the top down and left it that way. I didn’t bring the cockpit cover, it was at home on the workbench in the garage, so it felt really strange to leave the car sitting outside unprotected. There wasn’t any chance of rain, but I’ve gotten so into the habit of putting the cover on, even for short spans, that I was uncomfortable the whole time I was in the dentist’s office. Turns out I had good reason, I’ve developed a couple of small cavities requiring a revisit for filling. The car on the other hand was fine.

When I got back to work I left it down again. I did think about putting the top up, but in the end I left it down. The weather was clouding by quitting time, but it was still warm enough to ride home topless without my usual light jacket. Seeing as we had no commitments this afternoon we turned the 6 mile ride home into 26.

Got up this morning and finally took some photos of the Japanese plate on the front of the car (obviously, looking at the previous post.) I guess now I can take it off the car. Trouble is that even though I don’t really like the way it looks, I like it’s look. (huh?) There was all the money, time & effort it took to get the plate on there, especially by my friend who actually fabricated the trick mounting bracket. On top of that, and maybe the hardest to swallow, there is the fact that I would have to admit to poor judgment in conceiving the mod in the first place.

After the breakfast bagel and skimming the newspaper we went over and took a fairly long hike in Hitchcock Woods. First time we have done that in a while. We have long since given up trying to keep track of the miles, but we walked for real close to 2 hours, so I figured we covered 5-1/2 to 6 miles.

This afternoon we watched, well mainly me, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. OK movie, but in typical Hollywood fashion it was over blown and derivative.

Speaking of derivative, I’m kind of watching the Stupor Bowl and I’ve seen commercials for 3 upcoming films from Hollywood so far; a new Batman flick, War of the Worlds and The Longest Yard. The Longest Yard? Adam Sandler? Chris Rock? Heaven help us, because it will probably make millions…