Episode num­ber 9 of 82 — Sayid-centric where he gets his come­up­pance for last episode’s tor­ture of Sawyer and his past as an Iraqi inter­roga­tor from the mys­te­ri­ous (or per­haps just plain crazy) French chick. But the choic­est bits come from Hur­ley. Best episode quote comes from a con­ver­sa­tion where Hur­ley is lament­ing to Jack that peo­ple are argu­ing amongst them­selves over triv­ial things because every­one is stressed. They need an out­let, some­thing to bring a lit­tle fun into their lives.

Jack: We’re sur­viv­ing here, Hur­ley. And that’s my main con­cern is keep­ing us alive. Things could be worse.
Hur­ley: (slowly look­ing around) How?!

So he builds a “golf course” in the val­ley con­sist­ing of two holes. Sec­ond best quote comes from Sayer. After Kate finds out that Jack is play­ing golf and asks him if he wants to go watch, he declines saying:

Sawyer: Doc­tor playin’ golf? Whoo! Boy howdie, now I’ve heard every­thing. What’s next? Cop eatin’ a doughnut?

We walked down­town and back this morn­ing to visit a cou­ple of fes­ti­vals, cov­er­ing about 5 miles.

First stop was the Farm­ers Mar­ket for their annual Apple Fes­ti­val. Last year they didn’t have many apples and blamed it on the poor har­vest (which in turn was blamed on the dry weather.) This year there was even fewer apples. As a mat­ter of fact I didn’t see any of the fruit at all, just some apple but­ter and maybe an apple pie. We looked around and were tempted by some­thing, but had no way to carry it home.

After that we walked down the street about a half dozen blocks to the Choco­late Fes­ti­val. We were a bit early for the offi­cial start, but one of the rea­sons we were there, the used book sale, was already under­way. The real attrac­tion is of course the choco­late, tables chock full of home baked good­ies with choco­late as an ingre­di­ent, and a lit­tle cost. We bought a big ol’ piece of cake, a giant brownie, two choco­late chip cook­ies a piece and some choco­late cov­ered pret­zels for two bucks.

Episode #13 is about the half brother and sis­ter combo of Boone and Shan­non. Both of them are pretty pathetic loser types and are some of my per­son­ally least favorite char­ac­ters. “Trag­i­cally” they are the first two main char­ac­ters to die on the show. Awwww.

For­get about this, a good episode of House is on (guest star­ring Eliz­a­beth Mitchell, AKA Juliet from LOST, who is prac­ti­cally unrec­og­niz­able in short red-ish hair in a nun’s out­fit) and I want to get back to Appaloosa.

Sea­son 1 Episode 14 gives us some back story on Michael and his son Walt. Michael ranks right up there with yesterday’s sur­vivors, Boone and Shan­non, on Brian’s unlike­able Lostie List. Walt, the spe­cial the title of the episode alludes to, is alright and in the begin­ning very mys­te­ri­ous, like they were set­ting up some­thing for him, but it never really went there.

Here is Rea­son #2 why I need to stick with get­ting even dol­lar amounts back with my debit card. First, for those of you just tun­ing in, I’ll remind you of Rea­son #1 (go read it now, it’s a lit­tle long, but I’ll wait.)

On our way to get our monthly hair­cut Donna wanted to stop at Walgreen’s, she had a cou­ple coupons that were burn­ing a hole in her pocket. Of the three, there was only one we ended up using, eight Hal­loween themed pen­cils for a buck With tax, $1.07. Donna asked for five or ten dol­lars cash back because she would need a few bucks in a cou­ple days when she went out to lunch with her depart­ment. I fig­ured if I just rounded up the bill to $10 that would do it. Donna agreed because that would give her some sin­gles for a tip. I skill­fully guided myself to the other amount screen for cash back while sub­tract­ing a dol­lar seven from ten. I typed in the amount I wanted back, hit OK and OK again. The cashier handed me my receipt and change and we headed for the door. When I looked down at the receipt total it was then that I real­ized the math tutor­ing from Jethro Bod­ine might have been a mistake.

I had asked for $8.83 back mak­ing my total debit pur­chase $9.90!

Oh, so close.

We tried to watch another episode of Fortysome­thing and just couldn’t do it, made it 15 min­utes in before eject­ing the disc. The humor just didn’t hit us the right way. And just maybe because we were exposed to House first, and although we do know it is exactly the oppo­site, it seems like Mr. Lau­rie is an Amer­i­can actor who has adopted a bad British accent to play this part. This screen cap­ture from the show is for my thou­sands of female and gay read­ers — Hugh Laurie’s Hiney.

This sec­ond screen cap­ture is for the mil­lions of my comic book geek read­ers — Iron Mon­ger. From a lit­tle known 2008 sum­mer film call Iron­man that I watched again this after­noon while Donna took a nap on the couch. I even sat through the 10 min­utes worth of cred­its just to see the 5 sec­ond teaser of Samuel L. Jack­son as Nick Fury. It was so worth it too, because as the song cred­its scrolled by, I learned that either Ozzy Osbourne’s real first name is John or there was a ter­rific coin­ci­dence with the song­writer for Black Sabbath’s song Iron­man.

This morn­ing was a MMC morn­ing. First up was break­fast at a place called Just Fresh in Mar­tinez. Donna and I picked this place early this year when we were over that way on a Sat­ur­day. I guess we should have rechecked because the place looked awfully dark we we arrived 15 min­utes before the sched­uled meet­ing time. Walk­ing up to the door we saw why, they had adjusted their Sat­ur­day open­ing time to 11:00AM. For­tu­nately for us there was a Sonic just across the park­ing lot and Miata folk are very flexible.

After break­fast one of our mem­bers had planned an excur­sion to nearby Edge­field. Stacey grew up there so knows all the cool places to visit. First stop was a first for our Miata Club, a grave­yard. This one was behind the Edge­field First Bap­tist Church and is the final rest­ing place of per­haps South Carolina’s most famous cit­i­zen, Strom Thur­mond. From there we vis­ited the Dis­cover Cen­ter of the South Car­olina National Her­itage Cor­ri­dor which turned out to be a nice lit­tle museum and well worth the visit. After there the Club headed over to visit an ante­bel­lum home, Oak­ley Park and Donna and I headed back to ASCO.

Today was the annual com­pany Fun Day where the com­pany hosts a ham­burger & hot dog lunch on the front lawn. We also had an employee tal­ent con­test, a kids Hal­loween cos­tume parade and a ton of door prizes. This year Donna and I both won a door prize, an umbrella and a bath­room scale, which doesn’t sound too excit­ing on the sur­face, but in years past we have usu­ally given away what we’ve won to some­one who might use them. As icing on the cake each employee (and their depen­dents) were give a Mega Pass to the West­ern Car­olina State Fair that is right across the street from the plant.

Episode num­ber 24 was the two hour Sea­son 1 finale and we got excite­ment aplenty. Artz the high school sci­ence teacher blows him­self up, Locke nearly gets eaten by the smoke mon­ster, Claire’s baby gets snatched tem­porar­ily, Walt really gets snatched off the raft which then gets blown up and finally, three sticks of dyna­mite blows off the door of the hatch, all wrapped around images of the main cast board­ing the Oceanic Air­lines’ Flight 815 in Syndey.

 
Up for the last time, because the Emperor is hav­ing a sleep­over at Redmond’s Uphol­stery in Augusta where tomor­row he gets a new top after approx­i­mately 2,235 tran­si­tions. I say approx­i­mately because I didn’t keep track of the tran­si­tions for the first 13 months of own­er­ship, so I took what it did do for the year before and the 2 years after to get an aver­age count per day (1.03), then mul­ti­plied it by the num­ber of miss­ing days and added that to the counts I did know.