I finally coughed up the twenty five bucks to get a pro account on Flickr! I turned my orig­i­nal account where all the South Car­olina Post Office pho­tos to the “pro” level so all of the 390 I have taken so far can been seen, not just the lat­est 200. I was also bump­ing into the 200 photo limit on my sec­ond free account, so instead of cre­at­ing yet another free Flickr account I just went ahead and turn Pro.

This pic­ture is on the other half of the squadron’s page in the cruise book. These are the guys that were respon­si­ble for keep­ing the air­plane in fly­ing shape — scary huh?

In case you have been liv­ing under a rock, gas prices have been creep­ing up and now the aver­age price of reg­u­lar gas nation­ally is just a tick under four bucks. Inter­nal com­bus­tion engines are at their least effi­cient when start­ing from a dead stop, so in the inter­est of help­ing Amer­ica throw off the shack­les of depen­dence on for­eign oil I pro­pose that we now treat stop signs and red lights as yield signs — if it is clear, just keep on rolling.*

* the Legal Depart­ment here at Mr. Miata want you to know that while this is advice is patri­ot­i­cally sound, it may vio­late local ordi­nances, so fol­low it at your own risk.

I’m not one myself (although I do try and treat my god­son Gnorm like real fam­ily) so I sure hope I didn’t vio­late any laws of the uni­verse by treat­ing it like one, i.e. sleep­ing in late and laz­ing away the after­noon on the couch watch­ing baseball.

Mal: “Jayne, how many weapons you plan­nin’ on takin’? You only got the two arms.“
Jayne: “Well I just excitable as to choice, like to have my options open.“
Mal: “I don’t plan on any shoot­ing tak­ing place dur­ing this job.“
Jayne: “Yeah well, what you plan and what takes place ain’t ever exactly been similar.”

I put the Seren­ity movie back in my rental queue. It was there before, but I pulled it after I pulled the DVDs of the TV show. I watched like the first 15 min­utes of the pilot and turned it off. Turns out I really needed a Brown­coat to guide me through the bumpy begin­ning, because I ended up really lik­ing the show.

Besides the Blue Sun Travel Posters I bought with my scrap of the Eco­nomic Stim­u­lus Pay­ment, I also pur­chased a Grantec PC to Video EZ. Both items arrived today. I had just enough time to run a trial of the Video EZ on the small TV before get­ting called to dinner.

My ini­tial ver­dict is it seemed OK for video, but it sucked for text, so surf­ing the web is a blurry affair. Tomor­row I’ll hook it up the the big TV in the liv­ing room and do a more in depth check there. Don’t know when we will use it in the near future though, as we still have 4–1/2 discs of House: Sea­son 3 to watch, 4 more episodes of Due South on Disc 1 of Sea­son 1 that arrived in a red enve­lope today and there is a Net­flix movie that will be here tomorrow.

Celtics Woohoo!

I have to admit that I didn’t watch any of the play­off games all the way through — they were on too late. OK, now that you ask in that man­ner — I didn’t watch much more than bits and pieces and prob­a­bly never fin­ished a whole quar­ter all the way through. But go Celtics. NBA Champs. You rock!

Maybe it is more of a re board­ing of the band­wagon. As I said the other day, I grew up in New Eng­land, so my nat­ural sport team alle­giances were to those from Boston. Grow­ing up my mom would not spring for the more expen­sive Con­verse All-Stars (after all, I was just going to tear them up), so I always wore Bob Cousy sneak­ers from the local dis­count store (they did have a cool Celtic green sole though.) With the first pay­check from my first job I went out and spent $20 on a pair of high top black can­vas Con­verse All-Star sneak­ers and tossed the nine dol­lar Cousy’s aside. But it was too late, some of the green of the soles from those dis­count sneak­ers through osmo­sis had entered into my bloodstream.

I bought one of those shiny Starter jack­ets, back when if you wore some­thing like that gang mem­bers might rob you and take the coat, but leave your wal­let (some­where in the early eight­ies.) Celtic life was good then; Parish, Bird, Mchale, DJ and Danny Ainge. While liv­ing in New Orleans in 1985 we even went to a Celtics — Atlanta Hawk game at the then new Lake­front Arena to see those guys play. Larry Bird scored a team record 60 points (just nine days after Kevin Mchale scored 56 to take the record from Larry) that still stands 23 years later. The Glory Days.

When that core group hung up their short shorts and knees socks, the Celtics and my fan­hood faded. I still kept my eye on the scores and stand­ings, but couldn’t name a player. Last year they totally stunk up the league with a record of 24–58. Then a cou­ple of guys from the old fab five, in the off-season, had a hand in form­ing this years cham­pi­onship team. Min­nesota traded 2004 league MVP Kevin Gar­nett to Boston and things started to come together. Minnesota’s Gen­eral Man­ager? Kevin Mchale. Boston’s GM? Danny Ainge. Thanks guys.

A local hospital’s mobile mam­mo­gram bus vis­its the plant every year. The nurse makes a sched­ule of when each per­son is sup­posed to go get their test done. She makes up a lit­tle spread­sheet, but gets me to print it out at 18 x 24 on my plot­ter. It gets posted on a stand in the main entrance cor­ri­dor between her office and HR.

When we walked by it the other day on our way for one of our walks on break, Donna com­mented that maybe that shouldn’t be there because maybe the par­tic­i­pants didn’t want every­one else to see it. I quipped some­thing about HIPPA and she said, “Well my name isn’t on there, so I’m not going to worry about it.”

Later that morn­ing as I was walk­ing by the sign, a woman who was on the list, won­dered aloud, like me, if maybe that didn’t vio­late HIPPA (feel free to try and fig­ure that out, here is a link to the 101 page PDF.) She must have said some­thing to Human Resources because the next time I passed that way, the sched­ule was gone.

That after­noon as I sat in my cube work­ing, I heard that same woman pass­ing by and she must have came upon a friend going in the oppo­site direc­tion because she announced to her (loud enough to be heard over a 100′ radius), “I can’t talk now, I’m off to get my mammogram!”

So much for tak­ing down the sched­ule so peo­ple wouldn’t know…

Bet you thought I for­got about the whole “take a pic­ture of every Post Office in South Car­olina” thing didn’t you?

I haven’t, it is just that they are all so far away and in places we don’t really want to visit and because it is sum­mer they are too hot and too crowded. Today on our trip back from vis­it­ing Donna’s cousin Lau­rie we were going to be near a stray PO that some­how got over looked when we in that area before.

Behold! Rem­bert, SC, post office num­ber 390 of 461.

We did our weekly gro­cery shop­ping yes­ter­day and as our cus­tom I load the con­veyor and Donna moves to the end and will start bag­ging if there is no one there. I have the coupons in my pocket (Donna hands them to me as we buy the item the coupon is for) and the loy­alty card for the store in my wal­let, plus I have the debit card for pay­ing, so I stop oppo­site the cashier.

When the cashier was done scan­ning our items and deduct­ing the coupons, I swiped the debit card. At this point, know­ing my wal­let is empty, Donna says, “Take out a cou­ple extra bucks.” This is unnerv­ing because I am used to requests for spe­cific amounts. I ask Donna what she means by a cou­ple. Her answer was even more unset­tling, “Just round up the total.” Our bill was at that point ninety-four dol­lars and four­teen cents. Crap! She expected me to do math under pres­sure, the cashier was wait­ing, the woman behind me had her stuff on the con­veyor belt…I couldn’t do it, I just knew I’d sub­tract wrong, for­get­ting to carry the one or some­thing, and the bill would come to $101 or $99.

I punted, fig­ured I would just take out ten bucks, that should be easy. I push the other key, hit the 1 and the 0 and hit OK. Your total is $94.24. Damn that’s ten cents! Can­cel. Back. Can­cel. Panic.

I just know every­one around is star­ing at the doo­fus who can’t oper­ate the card con­sole. In my head I imag­ine the kid at the ser­vice desk is mak­ing an announce­ment, “Atten­tion Kroger shop­pers. Gather around Reg­is­ter #5 and watch an old guy try to oper­ate the credit card reader. Grab a latte at the Star­bucks counter and come on up front because next he’ll be try­ing to pay using the change from one of those lit­tle rub­ber things with a split in it that even your grand­fa­ther is too cool to use anymore.”

Mirac­u­lously all my but­ton push­ing has brought me back to the “Would you like cash back?” screen with­out hav­ing to swipe the card again. Alright, I want ten bucks, not ten cents. I push the key oppo­site other and push the one and the zero keys, then the big green Yes but­ton. There. That wasn’t so hard was it?

Appar­ently it was hard, because the cashier hands me my receipt and my dime change.

And while I’m sure she was try­ing to be help­ful by point­ing me to the ATM machine near the ser­vice desk, I wasn’t lis­ten­ing to the cashier, I mum­bled rudely, “No thanks. I don’t really need it.” I just wanted out of the store.

My very sup­port­ive wife waited until we got out­side in the park­ing lot before she started laugh­ing at me…