Its a whole ‘nother cul­ture out there.

1. There was one of those lit­tle drive-thru coffee/expresso huts every 1/4 mile or so out there (there are 2 in all of Aiken.)
2. They are right proud of their gaso­line because they think it is worth about 70¢ more than here.
3. Nobody was in a hurry. I drive the limit +5MPH and around here I’m a road haz­ard, out there I passed more peo­ple than passed me.
4. Not a lot of trash can sized chrome “muf­flers” dis­turb­ing the peace. Come to think of it, there was not a lot of trunk rat­tling hip-hop being played either.
5. I could under­stand peo­ple with­out hav­ing to turn on the south­ern to eng­lish trans­la­tor machine.

I think it has to do with the lower tem­per­a­tures and humid­ity, it calms peo­ple. I admit I prob­a­bly need a big­ger sam­ple and might want to go back in Feb­ru­ary after it has rained every day for 2 straight months.

Back some­where around 2000 I added some funky “Alley Gator” plas­tic teeth to the 95 Miata. When I traded the car in in Novem­ber of 2003 I pulled the teeth out and gave them to a fel­low Miata Club­ber to use or trash as he saw fit. I also gave him the silly “Wab­bit” teeth I bought in 2002 and had on the car for all of a month or so.

A cou­ple three weeks ago some one on the Miata Forum was look­ing for a set of the rab­bit teeth and I asked John if he still had them. Sure enough, they were still tucked away in a dusty cor­ner of his garage. He gave them back to me and I mailed them off to the fel­low for just the cost of postage. I guess while he had teeth on his mind John broke down and installed the alli­ga­tor teeth on POS, his highly spe­cial­ized race car (shown above in a recent hill climb event.)

That reminds me, it is Octo­ber and Hal­loween is com­ing soon, time to put the vam­pire teeth on the Emperor.

After enough strug­gling to hold my digi­cam steady in low light con­di­tions I decided it was time to get me a mini tri­pod. A search of the web led me down the usual paths and uncov­ered the usual sus­pects. I then zeroed in on low cost ones and got a cou­ple of under ten dol­lar ones with lit­tle flex­i­ble legs that seemed like they might fit the bill. I don’t know how I got there, I can’t for the life of me repli­cate the search, but I ended up at Joby.com. Behold! Goril­la­pod. If you order one right from the maker right now, they offer free Fedex Ground ship­ping. If you use the coupon code “Goril­lapodLOVE” dur­ing check­out you can 10% off too, so the unpacked ver­sion comes to under $20 delivered.

Played a lit­tle prac­ti­cal joke on a co-worker (Hi Mark) and he liked it so well he, with my help, is going to spring it on his wife (sure hope she doesn’t read this.) I got it from “The Ban­ter­ist” — Your New Mon­key. When he opened his he was dis­ap­pointed that it didn’t have the promised refrig­er­a­tor mag­net, so I made one up for inclu­sion of ver­sion 2 of the joke. Click on the “LOOK! There’s more!” link to see my mag­net art.

Con­tinue read­ing Mon­key Business

Nearly per­fect fall week­end. Low 40’s in the morn­ings and mid 70’s in the after­noon with nary a cloud in the sky.

Sat­ur­day morn­ing the lawn got mowed for pos­si­bly the last time this year and the dri­ve­way was blown off of leaves for the first of many times this year. Lunch was at the Greek Fes­ti­val in Augusta. Gyros with baklava cov­ered ice cream for desert and sip­ping an Athen­ian beer while lis­ten­ing to a group called “One Night in Athens” play­ing music.

For Sun­day, we tossed the hike in the woods and a bike ride to break­fast into the blender and ended up walk­ing a mile and a half to Atlanta Bread Com­pany for bagels. Donna made some of her famous choco­late chip cook­ies to give to a co-worker (not before I ate a half dozen of them, of which 4 were still hot and gooey from the oven.) After lunch instead of the planned after­noon nap, Donna sug­gested a car drive, ever the duti­ful hus­band, I agreed. She needed some of those candy sticks she loves, that we can only seem to find at Cracker Bar­rel, so we had a des­ti­na­tion. A hun­dred and ten miles later we had her candy.

…for last night’s post. It was not very well thought out and not researched properly.

I had a rant all worked up, but my wife quashed the idea by remind­ing me that cer­tain peo­ple read my blog and they might have been offended by my mak­ing fun of a par­tic­u­lar subject.

So I went with Plan B and I just grabbed a cou­ple of thread titles from the Miata Forum that sounded kind of stu­pid and didn’t check inside. If I had, I would have found out that the rea­son I still read the forum every day is because a lot of peo­ple that con­tribute have sharp wits and are not afraid to use them. Some of the com­ments in the 0–60 times thread were LOL funny.

Daily, I am emailed a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion with a chart on it that shows how as a plant we are doing towards our goal of ship­ping out prod­uct. Weekly, I get another Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion with 3 lines on it, man­u­fac­tur­ing, assem­bly and total, track­ing our ser­vice lev­els (on time deliv­ery.) The rea­son I get these pre­sen­ta­tions is not because I need to be keep­ing abreast of this sort of stuff, but in my capac­ity as the Arts & Crafts Engi­neer at ASCO.

I print these charts out on in full tech­ni­color on an 18 x 24 piece of paper and post them out­side the cafe­te­ria. These are placed there in the hopes that my fel­low asso­ciates will be inspired to work harder towards our com­mon goals, but mostly they are ignored by the troops as they file in and out dur­ing breaks and lunch.

For the first year or so I sprayed some artists adhe­sive to the backs of the charts and stuck them to a larger piece of card­board sup­ported by an easel. About six months ago man­age­ment decide that the card­board thing just wasn’t pro­fes­sional enough, so they com­mis­sioned a very nice set of wooden frames. The frames even have a, hinged at the top, sec­ond frame with a piece of Plex­i­glas in the mid­dle to pro­tect the charts from out­side dam­age and keep them look­ing nice. These were hung on the same wall that the easel used to sit in front of with the tops of the frames about 6′ off the ground. Inside the frames I have some mir­a­cle of mod­ern sci­ence mount­ing sys­tem, it is made of a sort of rub­bery sheet that has the same low tack long last­ing stickum that is on post-it notes.

My daily rou­tine is to print out my chart and go out to the frame and lift the hinged cover and prop it open on top of my head while I peel the old chart off the sticky mount and care­fully smooth out the new chart while bal­anc­ing the lid up with my head. Because I do this usu­ally at mid morn­ing break for a lot of peo­ple, I get some weird looks and com­ments from folks on their way to the cafe­te­ria for break. Every chance I get I tell them that my mother would be so proud because she was always say­ing to me, “I wish you would use your head for some­thing besides a hat rack.”

Every Mon­day I print out two images on the depart­men­tal color printer and push­pin them to the out­side of my cubi­cle. The first is the eleven year old Calvin and Hobbes Sun­day car­toon and the other is a pho­to­graph I have taken over the week­end. For the last cou­ple weeks I have been post­ing Can­non Beach pho­tos, but last Fri­day my wife said, “No more.” See­ing those images has become to painful because we had such a good time in our two days there that it seems as if our nor­mally “excit­ing” life here has lost some of it’s lus­ter. So, today, to go along with Calvin and Hobbes I posted a pic­ture from our walk in Hitch­cock Woods on Sat­ur­day morning.

We are already plan­ning a return trip to the Ore­gon Coast in May. To tide us over until then, we will have to set­tle for a trip back in time to there: A 1940 Ore­gon Coast Tour

This morn­ing, as I passed by the front door of ASCO with my ice and water filled mug, I noticed the sun­rise was very vivid. While I stood and watched, the Plant Man­ager walked up to me on the way to his office and asked what was up. I pointed to the sky and said, “Nice sun­rise. You’re the Grand Poobah, announce on the PA sys­tem for every­one to stop work and report to the front lawn to watch this.” He paused a sec­ond, as if think­ing about the pos­si­ble ram­i­fi­ca­tions, and replied, “I wish I could.”

Our crowd of two attracted the atten­tion of the Res­i­dent Engi­neer who came over to see what we were see­ing. He knew I take pic­tures as an afflic­tion, so he asked where my cam­era was. It was in the front of my lunch bag, I told him so, fol­lowed by, “See ya.” I went back to my desk, grabbed the cam­era and went out to the side door to snap a cou­ple images. Across the street was the, now quiet, West­ern Car­olina State Fair with an orange sky as a backdrop.

Let me apol­o­gize to the legion of Goonie fans out there, the title to this post is where I hit the eject but­ton on the DVD of “The Goonies” tonight.

As is my hol­i­day tra­di­tion, I am lis­ten­ing to the The Mer­cury The­atre on the Air’s 1938 Hal­loween radio pre­sen­ta­tion of the War of the Worlds. Its avail­able, along with most of the rest of the Mer­cury Theatre’s works, here: mercurytheatre.info

I didn’t lis­ten to my next favorite ver­sion of The War of the Worlds, Jeff Wayne’s 2 CD rock musi­cal ver­sion with nar­ra­tion by Richard Bur­ton. Maybe I’ll take the CDs to work tomor­row. There is an upcom­ing CGI movie ver­sion com­ing out… Just watched the trailer for it and it gave me goose bumps.

I’m typ­ing very qui­etly with all the lights off (except for the cyclops of the TV) because for the first time in his­tory we are not hand­ing out candy to kid­dies. Nearly all the kids in our neigh­bor­hood are now too old for trick-or-treating. The only ones of proper age we have seen in recent years are dri­ven into the area by their par­ents from far flung sec­tions of the city. With the pro­lif­er­a­tion of church spon­sored “fall fes­ti­vals” and the mall, down­town busi­nesses, city rec cen­ter candy give­aways, we didn’t think any­one would miss our one lit­tle house­hold. Even the local col­lege cam­pus is hold­ing a fam­ily friendly trick-or-treat event. And now we won’t have to deal with the too old trick-or-treater.

While talk­ing of Hal­loween plans at work today, I men­tioned most of what I said in the pre­vi­ous para­graph, my boss related a story of how sev­eral years back he had two, prob­a­bly 16ish, teenagers dressed in their typ­i­cal baggy pants plus ratty t-shirts hold­ing plas­tic Wal-Mart bags ring his door­bell. One half heart­edly mum­bled, “Trick or treat.” The other didn’t speak because he was to busy exhal­ing cig­a­rette smoke.