I can’t prove it, but I think Donna feels threat­ened by Alexan­dra Steele. She is an On–Camera Meterol­o­gist at he Weather Chan­nel and seems rel­a­tively new. I think she is on mostly week­ends, but has occa­sion­ally showed up in the morn­ings. When­ever Alexan­dra Steele comes on Donna picks that time to change the chan­nel. I know it might be coin­ci­dence, but my Man’s Intu­ition tells me otherwise.

While Alexan­dra is an attrac­tive woman, Donna has noth­ing to fear from her. Now, Kristina Aber­nathy or Sharon Resul­tan, that’s a dif­fer­ent story.

Let us tell today’s story by recap­ping all the posts this week so far by mak­ing some cor­rec­tions and/or observations.

Fri­day, Novem­ber 07, 2003 — Lunchtime Fun
At lunch today Bob Smith was the last per­son to get his salad deliv­ered to the table. This led to him recount­ing a meal out with friends in the past where he never actu­ally his meal. This led to, you guessed it, he didn’t get his ham­burger today.

Thurs­day, Novem­ber 06, 2003 — Hey That’s Wet
The inte­rior of the car got soaked today. Read about it over on the Diaries and then come back.

Wednes­day, Novem­ber 05, 2003 — OCM Pho­bia
While watch­ing the Weather Chan­nel to get the fore­cast for today I real­ized that I was wrong about the name of the On–Camera Meterol­o­gist. It is Hillary Andrews not Alexan­dra Steele. Hillary is so new she doesn’t have a bio page over on their site yet, so I can’t link a pic­ture. While watch­ing Hillary do the fore­cast for the north­east Donna came in and changed the chan­nel to a local sta­tion say­ing that their weather would be more accurate.

Tues­day, Novem­ber 04, 2003 — Maybe I Need To Write This One First
True to form, I wrote the Diaries story first tonight and now I’m resort­ing to this cheap trick to gen­er­ate a post.

Mon­day, Novem­ber 03, 2003 — This May Be It
There was a TV in Salsa’s, our lunchtime restau­rant, today. To be fair it was aimed at the bar and not the reg­u­lar seat­ing area.

On this morning’s errands I tired of con­stant clas­si­cal music from my MP# player, so I ven­tured onto the radio dial. One of the local sta­tions was hav­ing a con­tin­u­ous Christ­mas music week­end. There are almost 3 weeks until Thanks­giv­ing already! It was only a mat­ter of time I sup­pose, we are now used to see­ing Christ­mas mer­chan­dise make lim­ited appear­ances on store shelves along side the Hal­loween dec­o­ra­tions. There is already a “hol­i­day movie” play­ing at the­aters near you, Elf.

Mak­ing mat­ters worse is that today I com­piled and burned a Christ­mas Music CD for a swap…

This week­end I did not watch a DVD all the way through of the five attempted.

1) The first of the Sopra­nos, Sea­son 4 discs was ejected after 2 of the 3 episodes it con­tained. Maybe it was the long lay­off between sea­sons or maybe I finally fig­ured out it was just a soap opera with cuss words, killing and an occa­sional naked breast. The rest of Sea­son 4 discs were then removed from my Net­flix queue.

2) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Tow­ers was turned off after 47 min­utes. I con­sider this a major fail­ure in my Sci­ence Fic­tion fan­hood. I could never read past the first cou­ple of chap­ters in the books. I tried sev­eral times in my youth to do it, but failed. I did man­age to watch the first movie all the way through and fig­ured now that I got all the char­ac­ters down and was some­what inter­ested in them I would make it through the whole series. Nope.

3) The Emperor’s Club lasted 16 min­utes, 17 sec­onds. I went into this with a bad atti­tude. I can’t stom­ach Kevin Kline, I’ve almost never liked him, A Fish Called Wanda was the excep­tion. And I knew that it was going to be some­thing like The Dead Poet’s Soci­ety going in, but I just couldn’t get into the story.

4) Read My Lips. This one was the third movie I attempted to watch Sun­day after­noon and it stayed play­ing the short­est 5:25. Per­haps if I had given it more time…I cringed at what was hap­pen­ing to this poor woman in the begin­ning, but for what ever rea­son I didn’t really care. I didn’t find her lik­able, sorry. I started paint­ing the kitchen cab­i­nets instead.

5) I did eject The X-Files Sea­son 1: Disc 4, but that was after watch­ing Episode 1x14, Lazarus and this disc will go back in next Sun­day to watch the 4th and last episode on it. Disc 5 is #2 in the queue and will be here shortly.

Our old tow­els had turned to sand­pa­per these last few months, so last night when we went to replace them I insisted we get some real soft ones. Donna had some nice ones in the cart when I joined them, but I thought we could spend a lit­tle more than the $10 each and get some­thing more cushy. I jok­ingly said let’s spend dou­ble that oughta do it. Lit­tle did I sup­pose that they actu­ally had $20 each bath tow­els. Well we picked up 2 a piece and that shot pretty close to a whole Ben Franklin. But man, they are soft as velour and suck up the water bet­ter than a Bounty paper towel.

Ear­lier in the week I signed up on the web­site for them to send me a Mini brochure. It arrived in the mail today. I am begin­ning to think these guys are too cute. The brochure was about the Mini, but it was also a mini brochure. It mea­sured 3–1/2″ by 3–1/2″. When unfolded, its 10 pan­els mea­sured over 3′ long.

I also have been check­ing out the Miata.net equiv­a­lent for the car, Mini2.com. They even have an active forum for shar­ing the love with other Mini nuts.

After a bit of read­ing in the forum it seems that the path to Mini own­er­ship is fraught with obsta­cles. A lot of the same things tran­spired when the Miata came out in 1989. Things set­tled down for the Miata in a year or so, but the Mini has been for sale since Feb­ru­ary 2001 and the car is still not that read­ily available.

Blew out a turn sig­nal bulb yes­ter­day. We were on our way to a Miata event at our spon­sor­ing dealer, so when the first parts store I stopped in didn’t have what I needed I fig­ured I could get it at their parts counter. The bulb is a pretty stan­dard auto­mo­tive bulb, an 1157NA. 1157 is the type, 12 volts, two fil­a­ments, one brighter than the other and the NA means it is amber. The parts store had plain 1157s, but because the Miatas turn sig­nals are mounted in a clear lens I needed the yel­low bulb.

When I asked the parts counter guy for two 1157NAs he didn’t move, he just looked at me like he was wait­ing for more infor­ma­tion. None was needed, but he asked any­way, “What kind of car is it for?” I sighed inter­nally and said out loud, a Mazda Miata. Off he went to the bulb draw. He rum­maged around for a few min­utes and came back with two bulbs. When he put them on the counter they were clear. I said, “I wanted NAs, I need them to be amber.” Back to the drawer he went. More rum­mag­ing, lots more. Finally after what seemed like 5 min­utes he returns with two yel­low bulbs. I checked the part num­ber just to be sure. As I’m walk­ing away I heard him say to him­self, “I always won­dered what NA meant.”

I guess basic auto­mo­tive knowl­edge isn’t a pre­req­ui­site of work­ing at a part depart­ment in a car deal­er­ship. To be some­what fair, this deal­er­ship sells both Mercedes-Benz’s and Mazda’s so maybe he needed to know how much to charge me. I paid $2.87 for the pair, I won­der if a Benz owner would have had to fork over $8.59 for his?

We are in the mid­dle of a kitchen spruce-up. Fresh paint on the cab­i­net doors and new shiny sil­ver hinges and knobs to match. We have a yel­low tile counter top which was stan­dard in that era and the cab­i­nets were painted a pale yel­low to get every­thing to blend in. This time we have decided to embrace the fifties in some spirit by paint­ing the bot­tom cab­i­net doors in what could only be called glossy avo­cado. The top ones will be painted in another 50’s inspired color, glossy mus­tard. Tonight we got the bot­tom por­tion fin­ished, some­what. Although the hinges were the same style as what was removed, when reusing the pre-existing holes a few of the doors don’t close nicely any­more. And with the extra coats of paint a few of the draw­ers don’t slide as well as they used to…

Went ahead and traded in the 8 year old Miata on a shiny new one tonight. We briefly con­sid­ered offer­ing on the Splash Green as it had started to grow on us dur­ing the 4 days we had it. We thought if it grew that well in 4 days after about a year we would love it to death. Then simul­ta­ne­ously we went, “Nah.” More than likely we would regret it after a month as it would not have grown any nicer, but prob­a­bly would have back slid into repulsiveness.

That means we bought the maroon and tan one. Actu­ally, its more for­mal name is Gar­net Red Mica and Parch­ment, but who has time to type that all out? On Sun­day we vis­ited the Mazda dealer on the SC side of the river and he had a Gar­net car with the black top and inte­rior. It was OK, but not enough con­trast maybe. (Remind me tomor­row, as I’ve got a good rant about this place.)

Right after that we went to the GA Mazda dealer where the one with the tan inte­rior sat. On sec­ond look I real­ized it was a nicer combo than the maroon/black combo and actu­ally a very nice look­ing car.

With this move there will prob­a­bly be some changes. This site is hosted on the domain I use for the fan club for 1st gen­er­a­tion Miatas, now that I own a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion, I’ll be giv­ing up the domain, if I can find a care­taker, in Feb­ru­ary when the rights and my host­ing agree­ment expire. May move back to, shud­der, Blogspot. Got a while yet before this become a press­ing issue.

When Donna went to get in the car this morn­ing she said, “Hey, what’s this.” I went over and looked and there are about 8–10 lit­tle scratches on the top of the door. Looks like someone’s dog either rode around in the pas­sen­ger seat with its paws rest­ing on the door top or it spent a few min­utes lick­ing the face of a pas­sen­ger. We do not own a dog and when we drove the car home last night we pulled it straight into the garage. They must have been there from an ear­lier test drive. When we looked at it Sun­day on their lot when we decided to buy, it was cov­ered in dust, etc from being out­side. The car was washed but who ever did the job didn’t notice or didn’t want to say any­thing. When the sales­man or who­ever (maybe even the per­son who washed it) parked it under the awning for deliv­ery didn’t see them because they are on the pas­sen­ger side.

When I called the sales­man he was very apolo­getic and said bring it back and we’ll make it right, no mat­ter what it takes. He did say wait until Mon­day though, with the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day they won’t be able to get to it until at least then.

Had there only been a cou­ple or maybe if they were in any other spot besides the top of a door where it is really notice­able, I’d have said noth­ing. I mean the car is going to get a scratch or two or worse even­tu­ally, why not just be done with it.