Year: 2012

New Kitchen Too

Well, the often rumored and occasionally threatened kitchen renovation project has come to life. Saturday we popped into our bank and filled out the application for a home equity loan. Afterwards we perused the 2 BBHIW in town eyeballing kitchen displays, grabbing free brochures, samples of flooring (wood & vinyl) and counter tops.

Saturday afternoon and evening was spent brainstorming ideas, surfing the web and sketching ideas for the new room.

This morning we chatted with a kitchen designer at the Lowes in North Augusta and ended up scheduling an appointment for him to visit the house tomorrow after work.

Fiscal cliff be damned, we aren’t planning on hanging over the edge by our fingertips, we’re sailing off the edge like Thelma & Louise.

New Shoes

For the Emperor.

I have been shopping around for awhile for new tires for the Miata. Looking for deals on some Ultra High Performance Summer tires. This time to go along with the rubber I wanted some new round metal parts that hold the tires too. I have had my eyes on the Chaparrals that R-Speed sells for a long time (I even mocked up some in black 8 years ago) and turns out they were having an online Black Friday sale. I hemmed and hawed over color, the black looks sharp, gold would be a stylish add, but ended up going with gun metal as that fit better with the grayed-out headlight housings. Two hours after I entered my order, I got an email back from R-Speed saying that all they have, and are still stocking*, are the wheels in classic silver. I canceled the order.

*Might want to edit the web page to reflect that guys…

Headed back to the web to do a little more shopping. I found something completely different from the Chaparrals that I liked at Tire Rack, the ASA AR1, but it only came in silver and black and now I’m kinda set on gun metal gray. For the heck of it I price them out with a set of my preferred tire, the Yokohama S.Drive, and it is a little more than I was spending at R-Speed, but do-able.

Discount Tire Direct was doing a Black Friday/Cyber Monday Weekend with $50 off a set of 4 tires or wheels. Turns out they have a wheel pretty similar to the ASA AR1, the Drag DR-19 and it comes in Gun Metal. The tires are $10 more than Tire Rack, but the Drag wheels are 10 bucks cheaper than the ASA’s so that was a wash, but subtract the deal savings and their free shipping it was over a hundred bucks cheaper from Discount Tire.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1182

Look! A Big Turkey!

We did a little geocaching this morning.

We have pretty much cleaned out everything in our local area where we can go to a park, state or local, and get in a nice walk while having the opportunity to find several caches while we are at it. Last night I expanded the search area just a bit, we didn’t want to drive more than an hour one way and I found a place west of Columbia and near Lake Murray called Saluda Shoals Park that fit the bill.

We found 9 of the 10 we searched for. The only one we didn’t was a micro in the woods, but it was one of those decoy caches. The owner hides a cache and then hides 6 to 10 decoys that look like actual caches, but when you open them up instead of a log to sign there is some that says “This is not the cache.” We don’t really like this kind of hide, one reason is because this is third one we’ve attempted and are 0 for 3. The other, is more philosophical, if you’ve got this big ol’ place where no one will stumble on your cache why do you have to hide that sucker so well?

Walking 5.6 miles around in the woods can make a person hungry. For lunch Donna mentioned that she’d like a hamburger and the first place I thought of was Pawley’s Front Porch in the Five Points area of Columbia it’s only 12 miles away. Trouble is, it probably would be a suicide mission because the University of South Carolina was playing football today only a couple miles away from there. I thought it would be smart to avoid going to Five Points, but Donna talked me into it saying, that if it got crowded as we got close we could turn around and find another place to eat.

Well, as it turns out, arriving at Pawley’s was a piece of cake at 1:30 and had I come in the right way I could have parked right next to the side door. Probably because 80,000 Gamecock fans had been in their seats at Williams-Brice Stadium for at least a half an hour as kickoff time was at 1:00PM.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPJbun3kJYY

Oh, and that giant inflatable turkey we saw on the drive home turned out to be Cocky. Honest mistake for the non fan considering the season and all.

Oh, You Temptress

Got a letter in the mail the other day from my old friends at SiriusXM. They are turning on my satellite radio for 2 weeks starting today, running until the 27th. Hoping that if I like it I will renew for 6 months for the low sum of $25 (of course that doesn’t include taxes and fees) They are also they are hoping that after the six months you will forget to call and cancel and the price will automatically jump to the regular price of $15+ a month.

I’m not really tempted as all they have to offer me is the one channel in their line-up I did like, The Coffee House. Sorry Ms. XM I’m already married to the lovely and eclectic RadioParadise and I’m quite happy. I will probably listen in for the fortnight though, a guy can listen, right?

Prometheus

Finally watched Prometheus on Sunday. I’ve wanted to see this thing since the trailers starting showing up at the end of last year.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1byZkbNB3Jw

I would have gone to see it in theaters, but Donna is not a fan at all of scary things that go bump in space. After watching the movie, I liked it, not nearly as much as I anticipated, but it sure was marvelous to look at. Will I watch it again? Maybe. Just to see if I missed anything that might make the movie make more sense. Will I buy a copy of the DVD to put on my shelf next to Alien? Probably not.

Yesterday via, io9.com I found a link to the original script, before Damon Lindelof “polished it up.” Not too surprisingly, I think I would have liked that movie better. Because it is a script, not a book, it helps to have seen the movie to aid in the visualization of the characters and the world they inhabit, but not a requirement. You can read it online or download a PDF to read at your leisure later. Alien Engineers written by Jon Spaiths.

Oh Deer!

The wily and masterful deer hunter that is my cubicle neighbor (Hi Mark!) has placed his trail camera in a small patch of woods out behind the Valve Store(R). He goes out and checks it a couple times a week and each time the camera has captured some white tailed deer, both during day and at night. Here are some samples from the last batch:

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 1181