Rants

Ouch

This afternoon while cutting through a department in the back to get up to my office I got an owee. There was a stack of palettes in the “aisle” and I dodged left to go around them. I moved a little too far left and scrapped my arm on the wall. After about 10 step further along I thought to myself that hurt. When I looked down I was bleeding pretty good from a silver dollar sized scrape on my left forearm. I stopped in the next restroom I passed and ran it under a faucet. Ooooh. Wet some paper towels and pressed hard for a while. Still bleeding, I guess I better go see the nurse.

She took a look, hmmm’d, donned the rubber gloves and spent the next 5 minutes spraying on some sort of “Stop Bleeding Powder” and did manage to get it down to just weeping. Covered the crater with a big gob of antibiotic cream and wrapped it in gauze, all held in place by a magenta piece of that crinkly stretch bandage. It took about 40 minutes before the red spot on the gauze stopped expanding.

Because it happened at work there were forms to be filled out and now because I admitted that I hadn’t had a tetanus shot since sometime in the 80’s I get to have her drive me to the “company” doctor tomorrow for said shot.

We went out to Chinese buffet for lunch today.

Meal Cost: $12.31
Tip: $1.69
Spent Today: $14.00
Year to Date: $1746.78
Meals out, 102 of a possible 654.

Finished my tenth Spenser book today, Playmates, and didn’t find any Crime Buster Rules. Although in chapter 13 there is a statement that might have been called one: When in doubt do something, and hope if you keep doing it you’ll come to understand what it is. Later in the book Spenser gets called into the Boston Police station where there are an assortment of agencies represented (a couple being reoccurring characters) and is asked if he knew why he was called in. To which he replies,”I assumed you were holding a crime stoppers seminar and wanted me to lecture.”

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 317

Over the Limit

Cameron, SC With this past weekend’s excursion we now have 204 Post Offices. Not yet half but getting there. I have them all up in my gallery, but I don’t have any captions for the last dozen or so (yet.) I have also been posting the photos on Flickr! to give them a little more exposure and they have that neat-o map thing. Plus there is a group dedicated to just U.S. Post Offices that I’ve been adding too.

When I uploaded the last of the photos to Flickr! today I went over the limit, seems that all you get is 200 photos with the free membership. When you add a new picture, one falls off the back. The photos are still there on the site, but you can’t see them unless you know the photo’s URL. They also don’t display on my map anymore (I really liked that feature), but remain visible in the U.S. Post Office group.

The cost to upgrade to the Pro level is $24.95 a year. If it was more like ten bucks I’d jump at it, but I’m not so sure I want to spend that much. I’ll probably just quit uploading the Post Office photos there. There is the option of adding another free account, but I’m going to have to end up with 3 of them to do all the 460 South Carolina Post Offices. Of course if some one were to give me a Gift Upgrade…

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Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 316

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeal

The Emperor had it’s 60k mile service last week. Not only did they change the timing belt, but while they were in there they changed out the two accessory belts. We picked it up Thursday evening and all was well until Saturday morning. We had a MMC breakfast date, so we left the house at about 6:15. Less than a half a mile away from home in our quiet neighborhood is a 4-way stop. When pulling away from the stop the Emperor started to squeal like a stuck pig. I felt about 2″ high. I was sure that lights were going on in the houses around me as the people tried to locate the Siamese cat in heat. The sound went away after about 5 seconds and didn’t reoccur. I figured a little condensation from the car coming out into warm moist air from the air conditioned garage, so the belt slipped a little bit.

Nice theory, but how do I explain what caused the same squeal this afternoon after work. It lasted longer than Saturday’s episode, about 10 seconds. I had time to cycle the A/C a couple times and when off the first time the squeal stopped and restarted when the A/C was turned back on. When I turned off the A/C the second time the squeal continued, but stopped shortly there after. Donna said lets take it back to the dealer. I would have, but the place is over 60 miles and an hour away. If they were less than half that I probably would.

So, what causes belt squeal? Too tight? Too loose? Either? Bite the bullet and take it back? Is this fixable by a novice knucklehead? Learn to live with a random dying pig noise?

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 287

Being Prepared

YemasseeLast weekend I mapped out a bunch (20) of Post Offices in the northeast part of the state because that is where we would be. I covered all the POs we hadn’t already gotten from I-77 on the west to I-95 on the east, and between North Carolina on the north to I-20 on the south. The first thing Donna did when we got in the car to leave was open the South Carolina map and say, “If we go this way we can get these Post Offices.” Well, she was pointing to a section of the state that I didn’t have close up maps for the PO locations inside the actual towns. This is the second time something like that has happened, so my new project is to go ahead and make maps up for the remaining 277 Post Offices.

I’ve got 40 done so far…

Tonight I washed off the filth that had settled on the Emperor when he spent the night Wray’s place. Which reminds me, when we got to the shop to pick up the car the Service Hostess told me that the car would be out in just a few minutes as it was in Clean Up. Twenty minutes later they pulled the car up in front and gave me the keys. As we loaded the trunk and climbed inside I noticed that the car was dirtier than when I dropped it off (no doubt because it did spend the night outside.) So what did they clean up?

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 286

Target Shopping

Comstock Covered BridgeWe’ve got an old Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner that is starting to show it’s age. All the tools are cracked and it isn’t picking up stuff well even after a bag change. Plus that sucker is loud, so we went out today to get Donna a nice new fangled bag-less picker upper. Target had a couple in this week’s ad that looked promising.

After the blue law mandated 1:30 PM opening we headed out to Target. Allow me to interject an observation from my cubicle neighbor Jim:

Here in the Bible Belt don’t you find it odd that the blue laws will allow you to go into a grocery store on Sunday morning and buy a 6-pack of beer, but you cannot enter a book store and buy a Bible?

There were three to choose at the $129 price point, a Bissell, a Hoover and a Eureka. I pulled them off the shelf one by one and Donna pushed them around a bit, lifted them and generally got a feel for which one she liked the best. She liked the Hover the best, for a couple reasons, but the auto retractable cord thingie sent it over the top. As a bonus the price tag on the shelf said you got a $20 gift card with it’s purchase.

We had one final request, what did this puppy sound like? We looked all over for an outlet, but couldn’t find one. We corralled a sales team member and asked where we could plug it in. His reply was that he didn’t think they were allowed to do that. We insisted and he called on his walkie talkie to a higher up team member and got the same answer, can’t do it. What’s up with that? I’m sure a legal department team member had something to do with that rule. I was briefly temped to roll the display vacuum over to the TV section and plug it in, but decided to just buy it. If it turned out to be louder than our current unit (highly unlikely) we’d just bring it back.

When we got to the check out it rang up as 129 + tax. No gift card mention. We pointed it out to the cashier team member and she proceeded to thumb through the flyer. In that ad the $20 gift card was shown with a $169 vacuum. We told her that the card on the shelf said this one got a card as well. So she called over a higher up team member, whose response was the gift card automatically shows up, if it doesn’t, no gift card. We asked her to come with us to the shelf and we would show her and her response was, “I can’t leave the front.” Our response was, “Fine, we don’t want this vacuum.” I hit cancel on the credit card thing and we walked away.

Donna said, “Come on, let’s go back and look.” We did and sure enough we hadn’t imagined the $20 Gift Card sign. Trouble was that offer expired 7/7 (yesterday.) Some one had obviously forgotten to remove the promo shelf tag. Fifteen, twenty years ago the retailer would have apologized for the confusion, sold us the vacuum and given us the Gift Card. Now they’d rather just do without the sale and jeopardize future purchases. Sigh.

We came home and I bought the same item from Amazon for $95, no tax and free shipping. Hoover U5507-900

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 264

Asheville

Pearson's Falls, Saluda, NCAiken, SC to Asheville, NC. We stopped and mopped up a half dozen PO’s that we didn’t get to when we were in the Greenville area two weekends ago. Boy did we ever take the circular route to them too. We got turned around at the start in the search for the Furman Post Office and I’m not sure we knew where we were most of the time, but we still managed to get all of them.

We chose Asheville as a destination partially because we like the town and we also planned on attending a Tourists baseball game. When we got here we decided we didn’t want to go to the game after all. After the no attendance at Greenville we have come to the conclusion that we don’t know that we like attending minor league games anymore.

We ended up downtown to get dinner. There were two restaurants that we remembered from previous visits that we wanted to eat at. The choice would depend on the availability of parking near them. First up was Tupelo Honey. It is near a small park that seems to have been taken over by Asheville’s homeless population since our last visit. Fortunately there was no parking close to the restaurant, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable leaving the top down there for fear people would rifle through the interior like any other street side trash can. We had better luck at Doc Chey’s, a truck was just leaving from across the street and it freed up two primo parking spots.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 229

Bad Glen Campbell Song

Norm & Queen CharlotteWell we did get the 30% off the room making it almost worth staying the night. We woke up earlier than the alarm and just got moving. We checked out at 6:00 a full half hour before breakfast started, but when Donna went back into the lobby to get a Charlotte area map we had seen, she coaxed the front desk guy to let her snag an apple and an almost warmed up Cinnamon Bun. The drive to the airport took us right by the same shopping center that we got ice cream at last night and it had a Panera Bread place, so we stopped in for a bagel and a banana.

We pulled into a long term lot but it seemed like every spot was taken. We wound our way further and further back where we parked against a back fence or as Captain Barbossa would say, “You’re off the edge of the map Jack.” Our shuttle bus driver was a hoot and made whatever we pay for parking out there worth it. She stopped the bus to pick up one group of five, three women and two men. The guys were in the back and the women were up front and started stacking the luggage inside the door of the bus and the driver yelled out at the guys to come forward and put the bags on the rack as they were big strapping fellows and she was just a bitty older women. Once loaded up all was forgotten and she gave them the same spiel as she did us. “To get back here you have to get on a bus for Long Term One, but a short bus and tell them you are in the north west corner. Remember a short bus, like this one, not a long bus as it couldn’t make the tight turns.” We stopped and picked up one lone woman and when she asked what airline of her, she just sighed when the woman answered Jet Blue. Everyone so far had answered US Air. She told the new woman that she would have to get off at the US Air stop as the one she wanted was always backed way up with rubes. She could just walk back to it, it wasn’t far.

Trouble started when I tried to check in using the self service kiosk, it didn’t know me. Not by name or flight or swipe of the credit card. I flagged a clerk and he couldn’t find us in the system either. Off he went to find someone with a clue. She arrived and fingers flew. Seems that US Air stopped flying the morning non-stop to Seattle months ago. They were nice enough to offer us seats on the 5:55PM non-stop, a mere 11 hours later. When we expressed displeasure at that, her fingers flew around the keyboard in a blur (obviously she done this a few million times before.) She could get us on a flight to Phoenix

By the time I get to Phoenix she’ll be rising
She’ll find the note I left hangin’ on her door
She’ll laugh when she reads the part that says I’m leavin’
‘Cause I’ve left that girl so many times before

where we could change planes and hop one to Seattle. One 4-1/2 hour flight just became a 3 hour flight with a 2-1/2 hour layover followed by a 2-1/2 hour flight. “Oh, you want to sit next to each other? Impossible,” she says.

For the first flight we were placed 3 rows apart and the second we were 6 rows apart. But for both flights we managed to find a nice person to swap places, so that we sat right across an aisle on one flight and next to each other on the other. With the amount of other seat hopping that was going on, this seems to be standard flight operations on US Air. Judging by the long lines at the service counters, everyone last one of them, canceled, delayed and changed flights I guess I shouldn’t expect anything less.

Our next surprise was at the car rental desk. Seems that if you rent through Travelocity or Orbitz or some other intermediary company and miss your selected pick up time the quoted price doesn’t need to be honored. Our ridiculously low price for the car jumped by about 100%. After what we had dealt with so far yesterday and today we didn’t put up a fight. Plus it was still lower than the price quote we got directly off the rental car site.

Now everything is just fine. The weather was great for driving with the top down, the Seattle traffic was not nearly as bad as expected, the B & B in Snohomish is nice and new nephew James is as cute as a button. Although he took to me right away about 5 minutes into the visit he decided he didn’t like me at all (no problem, because now I won’t have to change any diapers.)

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/07: 177

Started up, went down, back up, back down, up again, still up.
PT Cruiser Top Transitions since 05/25/07: 4