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Shoot, I Still Need A Chute

In Aiken, we used to be able to pile our yard waste at the curb and the city would come around with a truck armed with the Jaws of Death to remove it. In Klamath Falls, Waste Management takes care of the yard waste along with the trash and recyclables. But here you need to bag the waste and put it out on the curb with your plastic trash & recyclable bins. You get three 30 pound bags a week for free. The first few pickups we used some bio-degradable lawn bags, but when we ran out we bought some paper ones from Home Depot. They are kind of tall and hard to get to fully open. And once you do, they don’t stand still or stay open while loading them, but still nicer than the plastic bags.

A couple weeks back we noticed that our neighbor uses the same Home Depot bags too, but to go along with them she had this cool green plastic chute that fit perfectly inside the bag. It both held it open and standing up straight. It also made it easy to make sure the debris got into the bag…

I just had to have one of those. It was Sunday afternoon and we were in for the evening, so I figured we would just go to the store early on Monday and do Store Pickup. I checked for local availability and the web site said there were 43 of the Plastic Leaf and Lawn Chutes on hand. Since I was paying by charge card online and the chute is a mere $8.97 I thought maybe I should order something else to make it come to something over ten bucks at least. We were down to just one yard bag, so I added a 5-pack of the bags, of these they had over of thousand in stock, for a whopping $2.47 more.

I placed the order and my confirmation came within seconds. A few hours later I received another email from Home Depot, they were cancelling part of my order, the Leaf and Lawn Chute. I guess their inventory was off, way off. So now I had a charge on my credit card and a Store Pickup for two dollars and forty-seven cents.

When we finally made it to Home Depot on Tuesday morning, I almost pulled into the “Pandemic We’ll Bring It To Your Car” parking spot, but my not wanting to be not rude about it made me go ahead and enter the store. When I arrived at the the Customer Service Desk there were two representatives working and both were helping people. So I stood back my six socially distancing feet and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally someone came free and and helped me, but it seemed like it took so long it might have been quicker if I had walked back outside, moved the car, called the number and had them bring it to me.

I still need a chute, but I guess I can hold off until fall when maybe they actually will have some in stock (the web still says 43 on hand in Klamath Falls.)

Busy Bee

Yesterday afternoon I decided to wash both cars. First up was the Mini. I backed it out into the driveway, unfurled the hose and filled up two 5-gallon buckets (one with soap and water and the other with plain water.) After I finished washing and drying Ladybug I let it roll further down the driveway to pull out the Miata.

As I walked back into the garage I noticed that right smack along the middle seam of the RaceDeck flooring it was buckling up an inch or so. The sun was beating down on the first few feet into the garage and I guess the heat was causing the plastic tiles to expand. Odd that it was right in the middle, there is at least and inch gap between the wall and flooring on both sides for it to move into.

So I moved the Miata out and tried to stomp on and slid the edges outward to flatten the floor in the middle. Not that it really is a problem it would only happen on a sunny warm day with the garage door up for more than a few minutes, but it did upset my uncontrollable need for order. I have been thinking about moving the 24 carpeted tiles from between the two designated parking areas for a while. The carpet gets dirty from car tires hitting the edges and debris being blown in by the westerly breezes running straight up the driveway.

Now would be a good time to do it. Instead of washing the CTBNL I spent the next few hours rearranging the interlocking plastic floor tiles. First I started by basically breaking the floor in half, right up the seam where it was buckling. This gave me access to the middle “aisle” of carpeted flooring. Then I broke apart the inside extended section where the RaceDeck flooring stops by the second door, this was the replacement for the 2′ wide by 12′ long section of carpet. The carpet was then formed into a 3′ by 8′ area to fill in where the CircleTrac style tiles were.

 
This afternoon the CTBNL received its slightly delayed, but much needed, washing. I just started using the 2 bucket wash method here after I bought an orange Home Depot bucket to compliment my blue Lowes bucket I brought with me. It is probably overkill for the 18-year old Miata, as it came with plenty dings and scratches all over. And I’ve added more. But the paint on the newer and fewer miles Mini is in better shape and might benefit from it. I don’t think I’ll go as far as buying grit guards, but this should protect the finishes of the cars some.

Post Office Picture Book

Decades in the making!1 A book about Donna and my traveling the state of South Carolina taking pictures of every Post Office. Back in the mid 2000’s we poked our head into every nook and cranny of SC taking pictures of the Miata in front of Post Offices, the results can be seen right here on Life of Brian by going to the PO Galleries here.

I’m using my old friend Shutterfly which I used to make calendars of Miata photos and other picture books of our travels. This book will include photos of all 456 Post Offices and will be over 90 pages long when I get done with it. All my previous books were 20-25 pages and cost around $25 dollars, this baby will be right around $100. That is if I decide I want to spent that much… Or this might just end up as a really nice way to kill several days while I practice our “Stay at Home, Stay Safe” COVID-19 lock down. Right now, after 3 days, I’m about 60% done adding photos and their captions to the book. Her is a little sneak peek:

It’s August in May

So, 3-1/2 weeks ago I started reliving the the 2018 Boston Red Sox World Championship season. I down loaded the schedule from that year in CSV (comma separated value) format and edited the year from 2018 to 2020 so I could import it into my Google calendar. I also changed the start times to 6:30 AM because, so far, almost all of the games have been watched with, or after, breakfast.

I was not sure when “real” baseball would return for 2020, or if ever, so I planned to just keep watching 2018 games on the day they occurred all the way through the World Series in October. This was assuming that MLBTV would keep offering free access to their archives. I was also basing this assumption on that they wouldn’t be playing baseball in 2020 at all, because I’m sure if they did, access to the 2018 archive would disappear.

This past Sunday I read an article in the paper that they are proposing to start an 82 game season on the 4th of July weekend. Uh, oh! The regular season ended on September 30th, so now I probably need to finish watching the season by June 30th. This morning I edited my CSV file by eliminating three month’s worth of games. Today’s game I watched was an inter-league game against the Philadelphia Phillies and originally played on August 14, 2018.

The downside to jumping ahead 3 full months and MLB does shut off my access when they start playing ball in July is that I won’t see any of the playoff games. The final World Series game was played on the 26th of October, so to see these games I would have to had jumped ahead 4 months and that would left only 2 weeks worth of regular season games. I do remember that they beat the MFY in the Divisional Series, the Astros in the ACLS and the Dodgers in the World Series, but I don’t know how many games it takes in each of those match ups. If the 2020 season doesn’t start in early July or they don’t shut off access to the archive I’ll watch those games.

71% More Commercials

Last evening at 5:30, having already seen, and probably more than once, anything that was available on our go-to channels (HGTV, Food or Motortrend) we wandered over to TV Land to watch a couple of episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond. Troubling thing was we joined smack in the middle of a show. A quick peek at the electronic guide revealed that the episode started at 5:10 and would finish at 5:45. What the heck? The following show ran from 5:45 to 6:20. Next was 6:20 to 6:55, etc.

There was 35 minutes between episodes. I’m fairly sure there wasn’t an extra 5 minutes of unseen footage that could be added back to the original 23 minute prime time run. TV Land had found a way to add more commercial time to the syndicated shows, in addition to slightly speeding up the video of the show and running the credits at the bottom while the top is showing the beginning of the next episode. Five divided by seven equals 71% more commercial time they could sell.

Having exhausted all the British crime shows we could enjoy, I though maybe it was time to try a much heralded show from a decade ago, Sherlock. But it turns out we just couldn’t take Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance. He was like an over the top and unfunny, Sheldon Cooper. He spoke so fast (and quietly) at times we really couldn’t make out what he was saying. So we turned on the closed captioning to see if that would help. Nope, sometimes the dialog was even faster than it could be displayed on the screen.

With all the marathons of Law and Order running on WE and Sundance, we are now on the second viewing of their episodes. While we do enjoy revisiting this show every once in a while, we’d like the gap between re-watches to to be a lot longer than 30 days…

We are now on the home stretch of watching Cheers having started the 11th and final season on Monday. We are getting tired of the show and are ready to move on. The idea of canceling Netflix and moving to Hulu, so we can smoothly segue into Frasier after Cheers, is a good one. Not only would we save a buck a month, but we could also see another Thursday night NBC comedy of that era as well, Wings.

Cubist Corvette

I was thinking that maybe my papercraft obsession was starting to fade, but the current edition of Car and Driver arrived in the mail today to rekindle it again. Featured on Page 7 was a papercraft Corvette. If any car could actually look good in a one sheet, low tech rendition, or what I’ve taken to calling cubist papercraft, it has to the 2020 Chevrolet Corvette.