Rants

I try to be polite by taking my hat off while eating. It is kind of like not putting your elbows on the table, not always practiced anymore, but just a small nicety that I hope people appreciate. I either hang the hat over the back of the chair or try to hang it off my knee and invariably it falls to the floor in the normal dining movements. Most of the time I remember it and search the floor or I don’t remember and get lucky by accidentally kicking it when getting up to leave. For the second time in 3 months I left my Palmetto Cycling Coalition hat behind in a restaurant. The first time we were near Charlotte, NC so we could go shopping at a big ol’ mall. When I got back to the hotel and realized that the cap was gone we called them and they had it. Rather than make a return trip that evening I told them I’d get it the next day when we were over there again. This time we were in northern Georgia following a bicycle race. We had dinner at the fine establishment of Pruett’s BBQ, so I didn’t even really need to take it off, but did. When I got back to the motel this time and realized I’d left it behind again, I just said forget it. It was raining and I didn’t want to drive back the 10 miles to get the hat. Tomorrow we were leaving town early and weren’t coming back, so that option was out. Figuring it must be fate that I don’t have that hat, I abandoned it in rural western Georgia. Anyway, I’ve got a spiffy new Master’s Miata Club hat to start wearing around waiting for me at home.

You know those 6″ high things that are there to prevent you from pulling to far in? Well because of the lowered stance of the Miata I have to be very careful how close I pull in and park anywhere. This one snuck up on me in a restaurant parking lot. It was the first in a line in the middle of a run. The usual visual clues were misleading as the car to my left could actually pull up closer because of the staggered shape of the sidewalk. Fortunately this one was short enough that it only scraped the bottom of the spoiler on the way in. On the way out, because that was now against the shape of the spoiler it made an ugly noise, but didn’t do any more damage. Luckily all these bits are made of flexible space-age polymers, if they had been custom fiberglass parts I’m sure shards of my front end would still be lying there in the parking space.

After living with the 4-Way Stop at the end of our street for 6 days and having passed through it a couple dozen times I have come to the conclusion that people here in Aiken don’t know how a 4-Way Stop works. It is not just because they are unfamiliar with this particular one, they just plain don’t know how to deal with one. As a public service here is the section on 4-Way or Multi-Way Stops from the South Carolina Driver’s Manual:

Another situation is at an intersection where all streets have stop signs. When this occurs, a sign reading “4-way” or “Multi-Way” is added to the stop signs. A motorist arriving at the intersection must yield the right of way to motorists who arrived before him, waiting his turn to enter the intersection. If two motorists arrive at the same time, if on different streets, the driver on the left should yield to the driver on the right; or if on the same street, a driver desiring to turn left should yield to the driver from the opposite direction.

This is one of those things that is remembered long enough to pass the test and then forgotten if you never use it. This may be part of the problem, my wife and I racked our brains trying to locate another 4-Way Stop in town and couldn’t do it, Aikenites never get to practice this art.

Our cordless phone/answering machine went weird on us about a week ago. You would pick it up and it would just beep three times when trying to use the handset. I checked the owner’s manual and all that was mentioned was two beeps and that meant you were too far away from the base, which wasn’t the case, unless 2 inches is too far away. One thing the owner’s manual said was if it wasn’t working at all was to reinitialize the handset to the base. This procedure involved unplugging the battery in the handset and unplugging the power supply to the base for 5 minutes. That worked once – the very first time I picked up the phone I got a dial tone. Hung up and tried again right away and three beeps were it. Bought a new battery for the handset and charged it overnight. It too worked once and then beeps. While in Target this afternoon we figured we should go ahead and replace the phone, the answering machine portion still worked, but we really use the cordless phone too.

Picked up this snazzy looking 2.4Ghz phone for only $55. Got it home took it out of the box and plugged it all up. Broke out the manual for it to see how to set up the answering machine portion and couldn’t find any mention of it in the papers. Read them again slower, still nothing about answering machine. That’s when I looked over the box and it didn’t say anything about an answerer. The picture sure looked like it would be an answering machine, but looks can be deceiving, it was a speaker phone, That is why it had a speaker in the base. Doh! Boxed it back up as best I could and back to Target we went. This time I made sure it said Answering Machine on all 6 sides of the box. Different company and different looks, but $5 cheaper. Got to find a neat recording to put on there, guess I’ll go Googling for a wav file.