Rants

Ghost Bugs

I don’t know what else to call them. Drove over to Augusta this evening to buy some more wheels for my inline skates and before we left I cleaned off the dead insect residue from our last trip. About 1/2 way there I ran through a cloud of invisible bugs, you can’t see them in your headlights, but when they impact the windshield they leave behind a little puff of dust no bigger than a couple of millimeters in diameter.

When we came back out of the store I got out my bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and cleaned the windshield again. It lasted about 20 minutes before another swarm of bugs peppered the windshield again. I used the washer jets and the wipers to clean up this time, only to get another dusting within 5 minutes.

Squirt, squirt, wipe, wipe and this time we made it home without another encounter with the mysterious ghost bugs.

Swiming In A Sea Of Estrogen

Or “Where The Boys Aren’t.” Having spent the last couple of weeks following boys little league baseball I now know where all their sisters are, doing gymnastics.

A cousin of Donna’s from NJ (Exit 14) has a daughter competing in the YMCA National Gymnastics Championships being held in Savannah, GA. So we drove the 3 hours down to see her compete.

Kristen is 11 and is on the Madison Rosettes Novice squad or the level 6 division. Age doesn’t matter, just skill, in determining what level you compete at, the girls ranged from 8 to 14. Also going on in the same arena were the levels 7 & 8, (Developmental and Championship.)

A veritable sea of glittery hair and even more glittery lycra. I watched as long as I could and then I pulled a play I learned from my sister, I had brought a book, so I climbed to the top row of the arena and read.

You’ve Got To Move Fast…

…in this fast paced world. Finally got my CafePress stickers I ordered June 14th. I bought two for the Rant and two for the Miata Diaries. They look pretty good, but in the 2-1/2 weeks that have passed between ordering and receiving I’ve moved the blogs. Both URLs printed on the stickers are wrong.

New & “Improved” Paper Towel Holder

Several months ago in a fit of anger some chucklehead smashed the paper towel dispenser in one of the Men’s Rooms at work. Today the replacement was installed.

With the old dispenser it took 3 pulls of the lever to get what I felt was the perfect amount of towel to bring my hands to the proper dryness level, 2 feet. With the new dispenser, 3 pulls gets you close to half that total or about 1 foot of paper. Maybe this is government mandated like the 1 gallon per flush toilets or maybe everyone thinks that this will help save the planet, i.e. less trees cut down, less energy used to make the paper, less trash generated etc. As a bonus I’m sure the company feels it will save money on buying the paper towels.

Ah, Mr. Smarty-pants, wrong answer! I still need 2 feet of paper to dry my hands. The same amount of energy and waste will be produced and you will now lose money as it takes twice as long for me to dry my hands. Say an extra 30 seconds at a time. 2 trips to the bathroom a day, times 1/2 minute. times 5 days, times 52 weeks, equals 4 hours and twenty minutes. With my exorbitant salary that’s a lot of dough.

American’s Love Stuff

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

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

The Wave Is Dead (Thank God)

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

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

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

How Can You See?

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

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

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

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