Rants

Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom?

We had dinner with the MMC tonight at a Mexican restaurant in Augusta. Throughout the entire meal there was a baby crying/vocalizing loud enough to be sort of annoying. From where I was sitting I could see the mother rocking the car seat that the baby was in. The mother was doing this in an absent-minded way while staring at her smartphone.

Maybe, just maybe, if she picked up the baby it might have quieted down.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1132

A Night At The Spa

The Purple Whale is spending the night at Taylor Hyundai getting his 15,000 mile beauty treatment. Because we learned our lesson last time (call and schedule in advance a couple weeks) we have a loaner car from the dealer.

It is a 2011 Hyundai Azera with 2,222 miles on the clock. I don’t have the greatest relationship with loner cars (examples: 1 & 2) and this one is no exception.

Or maybe it is just me, because I’m sure this is a very fine automobile, but it is severely lacking in quite a few categories compared to its cousin the 2011 Sonata. The styling leaves a lot to be desired, both internally and externally, the front leg room is less than an Elantra we tried, the leather seats are rock hard, uncomfortable and slippery, and it wallows down the road like a mid-seventies GM sedan.

On the plus side it has a bigger engine, a V-6, that puts out about 30% more HP than the Sonata (but the gas mileage is 20% less.) The only other thing that is nicer than the Purple Whale is that it has Dual Climate Control.

The sticker was in the glove box and the MSRP was over $4,000 more than the Sonata. To be fair, I’m sure the esthetics, both inside and out are much better in the newly redesigned 2012 Azera. But it is no wonder they had to turn this into the Service Dept Loaner, they would never get want they wanted for this wallflower with all the new Fluidic Sculptured, larger and cheaper Sonatas on the lot.

Pine Pollen

So far it doesn’t bother me physically, but it sure does make a mess of anything externally.

Back the last week of January we had a warm spell and the yellow dust made a slight appearance. Then it got cold, real cold for a few days, then it rained hard. The back driveway near the plant was littered with a mess of the pods from the pines that hold the pollen. Several weeks of warm weather went by and no new pollen appeared, so I thought that we had dodged a bullet.

Not so, last week the pine tree branches were filled with more of those pollen pods and they have now started to give away those fine little specks that give everything a yellow tint. I used the California Duster on the Miata Saturday before the MMC breakfast and by the time we finished eating pancakes there was a light coating.

Don\’t even ask about the Purple Whale, from being parked way out in the Valve Store’s parking lot, surrounded by pine trees, it is well covered in yellow.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1120

Personalization

When we moved to Aiken we started banking at the Aiken County Bank. They had a whopping two branches, but one of them was right along our drive to and from work, so it was convenient as heck. Ten years ago they sold out to a larger regional bank called Carolina First, same two branches in town, but occasionally we would stumble onto another Carolina First while traveling and could save the ATM fees when we needed some cash. Middle of last year Carolina First was sucked up by the 15th largest bank in the US with assets of just over 200 trillion dollars, TD Bank.

When TD Bank loaded up their software into my old friend the ATM at 142 Chesterfield Street they added a nifty little personalization step that allows users to set what amount they want as their default Fast Cash withdrawal and whether you want a receipt with each transaction and I can’t really remember, but maybe one or two other things. This is really nice because 9 times out of 10 I just want $20 cash, but they left out one important setting.

The first screen that is displayed after swiping your card is one asking you to choose one of the eight different languages you could use to communicate with the machine. Oh, today I think I would like to practice my Arabic, no, no, French, nah…maybe Japanese. Come on, don’t you think that the language should be one of the things you could personalize?

Oh, Crap!

When we got home from work the PC wasn’t on. Hmmmm, the power must have gone off again? Yep, all seventy hundred LED clocks in the house were flashing the wrong time. For whatever reason this seems to be becoming a regular happening. I bet it has occurred on average every 6 weeks for more than the last half year.

I hit the power button on the new Dell Insipron 620 and was greeted after several seconds by a singular, stationary underscore style cursor. This is bad, I’m not even getting the Dell boot screen. The power supply wasn’t hosed or I wouldn’t have even gotten that. I tried turning it off and on a couple more times with the same results. Visions of a fried motherboard danced in my head. Oh, Crap!

Donna was so mad she got on the phone to SCE&G to read them the riot act and asked whether they were going to buy us a new PC or not. The CSR took down her information and promised a call back with on 24 hours. She then headed out the door for a power walk around the block a couple times to blow off steam.

Me, I followed the guy code to the word, i.e. even if you have no clue and so, probably no chance of fixing something, you still open it up and wiggle things around. Then you can shrug yours shoulders and in all honesty tell the woman in your life you tried.

I took off the side cover. The good news was it didn’t smell inside of burned electronic bits, so I wiggled some wires, spun the cute little fans on the CPU & back panel before turning it on one more time. And wouldn’t you know it, but it booted smoothly back up into Windows 7.

As an extension of the above section of the guy code, sometimes you get lucky and the thing fixes itself and the woman in your life thinks you are a genius.

Happy Valentines Day dear.

Bye Bye Powerball

Early on after we moved south, Retirement Plan B has been trying to win millions in a lottery drawing. At first we had to drive all the way to Georgia to buy our $1 Mega Millions ticket. Because we were over there at least once a month with the Bike Club and/or Miata Club we would buy a ticket for the next 4 weekly drawings.

Somewhere along the line they increased the number of drawings to twice a week, doubling our monthly expense to eight bucks. Then in 2002 South Carolina started selling tickets to the other multi-state lottery Powerball.
it was also a twice a week drawing meaning we were doubling our “investment” again.

Then two years ago we started saving gas because SC started selling tickets to both of the multi-state games and we could get them both on our weekly shopping trips. We would get a fresh Andrew Jackson as cash back at the check out and step over to the Service Desk and buy 5 weeks worth of plays in both lotteries.

Through all this time of buying tickets we never had a payout that amounted in the two figures. That’s right, we probably had about a dozen winning tickets of either 3 regular ball numbers or 1 regular number and the money ball, netting us about $100 total return.

This last time we went to get our group of tickets we were told that we couldn’t go past 3 weeks on the Powerball draws. Later we found out why, they were changing the game to make it easier to win. The total number of money balls were being reduced from 39, all the way down to 35, thereby reducing the odds of winning from 1 in 195 million to 1 in 175 million. But the buy in was increased to $2 of a draw.

We have decided that that was the straw that broke Brian’s wallet and have opted to just start buying just the MegaMillions tickets.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1099