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The Prodigal Miata Returns

The CTBNL is back in the garage tonight after exactly a month in the car hospital.

Knew it was going to be soon because I got a call from Emmett’s yesterday, they wanted to know where the key for the aftermarket lug nuts was. This afternoon at about 2:30 they called again to say I could come pickup the car.

They had to put the car on a battery charger because it wouldn’t start for them yesterday (that’ll happen when The car sits for nearly a month.) So, today when we paid the tab they left it running outside for me and suggested we take for a bit of a drive on the way home.

When I got in the car the windows were filthy. Kind of to be expected because it was parked outside while waiting to be worked on. But not only was the outside dirty, but the inside was almost worse (how that happens I don’t want to know.)

We caravanned home and I left the car running while I cleaned the windows so we could go for a couple dozen mile trip.

It does seem like they wiped the back of the car clean of all the vaporized oil, but I don’t think they cleaned the undercarriage because when we did park in the garage after our short drive, you could smell burnt oil. I will give the Miata a bath tomorrow, but I’m not sure how I will get the chassis de-oiled.

Mechanically Induced Coma

The CTBNL is very sick. Right now it is sitting at a local auto repair shop in a mechanically induced coma for the next week or two while awaiting an opening.

A week ago today on the way home from a shopping trip over in Medford we were only a couple of miles from home when calamity struck. Cruising along at 50 MPH behind a BMW 3 Series when what should appear from right underneath the back of this car, but a softball sized chunk of concrete! With zero chance to avoid it, I held my breath.

Boom Bang Crunch Clang! I looked in the rearview mirror and could see the chunk tumbling behind me, along with a trail of smoke leading back to it. I instantly knew what had happened. A busted oil pan.

We were in the left lane preparing to turn off towards home in about 100 yards anyway, so I eased on over into the turn lane right behind the BMW. We both pulled into an unmanned fuel center. I immediately shut off the car and we had been leaking oil for only maybe 10-12 seconds.

The BMW driver got out and looked under his car. I don’t know whether the concrete piece actually hit anything under the BMW, but if it did, it was just incidental contact because he got back in his car and drove off (he did ask if we needed any help first.) I looked under our car even though I already knew what I’d see and I wasn’t disappointed, it looked like I had removed the drain plug. Our only option was to call a tow truck.

After the BMW drove off I got out and pushed the Miata several feet forward because where I stopped I wasn’t totally into the lot. The CTBNL had left a nice sized oil spot behind and oil was still slowly leaking. I called a local shop that had done some work on the Mini for us and they said they could do the work, but it wouldn’t be until June sometime.

I then called for a tow and about 30 minutes later the truck showed up. Once the car was on the flatbed, there was another slightly smaller spot left behind there too. I thought for sure that was all 4 quarts of oil, but when the car was offloaded at Emmett’s there was a small slick of oil on the flatbed.

Now we wait to see just how much it is going to cost to fix the CTBNL. Trying to determine what the breaking point is where we say, @%#! it, and save that money for the Wrangler.

Jigsaw Puzzle Madness

It all started back in early December when we were at a local bookstore and Donna bought a jigsaw puzzle. We thought it might be a nice way to while away the hours during the cold winter days. If you follow my Instagram, you have noticed that it has become an addiction. I will usually post a photo of the completed puzzle or sometimes the work in progress. For the heck of it, I just went back and counted the puzzles we have done since December and came up with 55!

We have bought eight or nine new puzzles for ourselves, but most of the puzzles have come from scouring the three Klamath Falls thrift stores where we can get a used jigsaw puzzle for a dollar or three. If we didn’t shop frugally I don’t think there would be anyway to afford our puzzle habit.

You take your chances with used puzzles because sometimes they are missing a piece or two. This has happed maybe 25% of the time, so we just shrug it off as the cost of business, but this last spate of puzzles has changed our minds. It all started innocently enough when we bought 4 puzzles at one place and started doing them. The first one we started was a smaller 500 piece puzzle of a display of colorful magic markers. When we finished the puzzle it turned out to be missing one of its pieces.

While sorting pieces to find the border of the colorful marker puzzle, we found four pieces that didn’t belong at all, they looked like they came from a puzzle with hot air balloons as the theme. Well, as it turns out, one of the four puzzles we bought at the same time was a 1000 piece puzzle of hot air balloons. Maybe that is where those extra pieces go and if we are very lucky, the missing colorful marker piece might be in the hot air balloon box.

Hmmm, now what. Before starting either of the 2 puzzles we still had left from that store, we went back there to look for a hot air balloon puzzle. Sure enough, there was a 500 piece one, so we picked it up. There were also two more different 500 piece puzzles from the same company and series, chocolate candy and a street scene, so we bought them too, just in case. And here is where it gets really interesting.

We, of course, did the hot air balloon puzzle first. Those 4 extra pieces fit right in like they belonged, because they did. But the puzzle was missing three different pieces. And, as a “bonus”, there were four different dark brown pieces that didn’t belong at all. We thought we knew just where they would go too.
 
 

So we did the “Life is a Box Chocolates” puzzle next. Sure enough, those four extra pieces in the hot air balloon box belonged right here. As Forrest Gump’s mom said, you ‘never know what you were going to get’, but if you are following this, you can guess what we got, two more missing pieces and, surprise, one that didn’t belong.
 
 
So we started the last of our trio of puzzles hoping that this extra extra piece might go into our street scene one. While also hoping to possibly find any of the other missing pieces from the previous 2 puzzles and maybe even the one from the puzzle that started it all, Colorful Makers. Yippee, that last extra piece did go into this puzzle, but unfortunately, there was a totally different piece missing.

As usual though, it did have two extra pieces that didn’t belong in the puzzle, or anything else we have here right now…

42,000 Grains of Salt on 7,000 French Fires

This morning we drove the Mini over the Cascades to Medford to have our leaky water pump fixed and a few miles from home the Lady Bug passed 42,000 miles on the odometer. The 75 mile drive was pleasant and didn’t take as long as the Google maps estimate, but that was because even though the speed limit is posted as 55 MPH I cruised along without an issue at 65 most of the way. I wasn’t worried about a speeding ticket because I was passed by several cars and pickups along the route like I was standing still.

I told the car place I’d be there a little after 10 and had the rental car reserved for noon. We pulled into John’s Auto Care Center right at 9 AM. Instead of our planned leisurely 1 mile walk over to the airport to pick up the car, the folks at John’s said they’d give us a ride over there, as crossing the street to get to the airport was kind of tricky/busy1, so we excepted. This put us at the rental counter by 9:15, way earlier than expected. The lady manning the desk said, “No worries, we’ll fix you right up.” and true to her word, by 9:30 we were exiting the airport in a 2020 Audi Q5.

So far, our being early had not been an issue, but because we planned to eat lunch in Medford, we needed to waste a couple of hours. We didn’t want to head right back because we wanted to eat at a fast food spot that we missed from Aiken and didn’t have in Klamath Falls. At first I drove around aimlessly, then we said lets drive into downtown and see if there was anything to see, Somehow I didn’t really make it. Then we thought, let’s find a donut place. We found a place, but you could only use the drive up and because we like to look before making a choice we got back on the move again. We then reconnoitered where our lunch choices were, but it was still too early to eat or for them to even be open. To kill some time I said let’s go check out the town of Jacksonville. It is a little town east of Medford that has a lot of historic buildings. We drove over, circled the center of town, went hmmm, and drove back to Medford and had our lunch.

There was a Chick-Fil-A and a Five Guys in the same little strip shopping center and these were two of the places we wanted to get food from. A plan was devised that I would go to Chick-Fil-A and get the sandwich portion of the meal and Donna would go to Five Guys and get an order of fries and we would have the best of both restaurants. But you could only get the chicken by going through the drive-up, so we said forget it. We’ll do Five Guys now and save Chick-Fil-A for the return trip when we get the Mini back. While we certainly enjoyed the salty abundant fries we so missed, but it turns out they just didn’t measure up to what our memories made them out to be. Certainly not a 150 mile round trip for.

A few miles out of Medford on the way home the Q5’s odometer changed from 6,999 to 7,000.

79,000 Drops of Something or Other

A couple of weeks ago when I pulled the snow tires off the Mini the inside of the front wheel on the passenger side was all coated in a icky gunk. Back when I had put the snows on, I put the Mini wheels on the Miata and I certainly didn’t see anything like that on any of the wheels. This leak issue has to have come about in the last 3-1/2 months.

My first thought was an oil leak. When I looked at what I could see of the engine and suspension bits they appeared coated in the same grimy stuff as the inside of the wheel. Now I can do some minor car repair stuff on the Miata, but the front wheel drive Mini is a nightmare for the novice me. The engine, all its related subsystems, and transaxles are stuffed into an area the size of a Navy seabag, meaning you would probably have to remove the entire front body works to do any repairs. I decided to call for professional help.

The local place we have used before is very busy, so we had to wait until yesterday to get the car in to have it looked at. We dropped it off after breakfast. Donna drove the Mini and followed me in the Miata so we could leave it with them for as long as needed. The folks at the repair shop didn’t call us back yesterday, but we know it is a popular place and figured they just hadn’t got to it yet.

They did call back this morning and apologized twice. Once for not getting back to us sooner and second for not wanting to fix the problem. From their troubleshooting they determined it wasn’t oil leaking, but coolant coming from around the the water pump. The one guy who was the real Mini expert no longer worked there and the other mechanics there were as excited about tackling the job as I was. They recommended a place over in Medford that was better equipped for Mini work, John’s Auto Care Center.

I called and made an appointment to drop off the Mini next Wednesday. Medford is 75 miles away, so we won’t be doing the follow the leader thing over, we’ll drive the Mini, drop it off, pick up a rental car to have for a couple days. We used to drive 50 miles one way to get the Miata worked on back in South Carolina, so this is not too big a deal, plus this will give us a couple of chances to eat in some chain restaurants that we miss and don’t have here in Klamath Falls.

So the 79,000 drops of what I thought was oil was actually a mixture of coolant, brake dust and road dust from the traction stuff they put on the roads around here in the winter. On the way back home yesterday we stopped and filled up the Miata with gas and when I went to reset the trip odometer I noticed that the main odometer read 79,001.

Discovery+

We each have our own set of favorite channels on the the TV and they fall pretty much along the stereotypical gender lines. I could live with just a few, Motortrend, MAVTV, NBCSports2 and WE tv3. Donna needs literally just two, HGTV and the Food Network.

We both could do with out all the commercial interruptions while watching TV. I can tune mostly tune them, especially if I hit mute, but Donna really despises them. You would have thought we would have jumped on the Discovery+ streaming service when it first became available, but we held out. We are already spending a fair amount on cable TV and while the base rate of $5 a month isn’t much, it seemed a bridge too far. But when we discovered4 that they offered an ad-free version for just 2 bucks more we decided to give that 7 day free trail a go.

So far, two days in, the jury is still out. Very little of the Discovery+ originals have been worth anything extra, so whether we stick around after this coming Sunday is going to come down how long we can be entertained by watching the older shows from Donna’s favorite two channels.

I thought it might be fun to watch one of her favorite shows from the beginning and watch them in order, sort of like the Law & Order marathons on WE tv. Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives has 419 episodes, roughly the same amount as Law & Order’s 456, but if we did that what would we watch on Fridays because Food runs them all day long.

Today we went back and watched the first episode of Love It or List It from HGTV, their mere 154 episodes seemed less daunting. We are used to seeing the later episodes and were surprised how different everything was. The real big difference was instead of the two stars do the setup dialog, there was an announcer doing it, that sounded like the same voice that does House Hunters. Both leads had aged pretty well in the 8 years the show ran and looked only slightly different. When I asked out loud, “Aren’t they married?”5 Donna said no, but went to look it up on the internet. We discovered that they were not ever married to each other, but we did discover6 that the woman, Hillary Farr, was actually an actress back in the 70s & 80s. She even had a small part in that cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Hope Springs Eternal

⚾ 2018 seems so long ago.

For 2019 I just listened to the Red Sox play baseball and was glad I hadn’t coughed up the hundred bucks or so for the video because they were just a mid-level team finishing mid-division and out of the playoffs. For 2020 I bought the radio package again expecting more of the same. COVID put a damper on the season, limiting the season to a mere 60 games, but the FRS did not disappoint me and lost 60% of those games, finishing last in the division.7

With our move to the west coast I though listening to the games in the afternoon would be more fun that late evening, but I was wrong, I probably listened to maybe a quarter of those 60 games. Just wasn’t the same. So this year I thought maybe I’d try watching the games. I’d have two options, watch them live at 4:00pm or watch the replay of the game at 8:00. I cancelled the audio package and signed up for the TV package.

Because it is April and still chilly in Beantown the first 3 games of the season, at home against Baltimore, were 1:00pm games meaning that they stated at 10:00am here. Morning baseball, mmm, weird, but okay in a way. But not fun as the Sox lost all three games, including an 11-3 shellacking in the finale that was over by the 3rd inning. There are like 3 players left on the the team that I remember from 2018 and now I’m sort of regretting paying that much money to watch a team that looks destined to finish dead last in the division again.

Fortunately I signed up for the free 7 day trial to start, so as of yet they haven’t hit the charge card. The Tampa Bay Rays come to town for the next three games and if they don’t win at least 2 of those, I’m going to just cancel and not be out the money.