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A Few of My Favorites…

…of the 43 lines from 45’s Grand Rapids, Michigan campaign speech yesterday that caught the attention of CNN’s Political Reporter, Chris Cillizza. link

5. “This is the one we want. We want ourselves. We want us and that’s what we got.”

8. “They did it all because they refused to accept the results of one of the greatest presidential elections, probably number one, in our history.”

12. “Then it comes to a place called Michigan. Have you ever heard of Michigan?”

26. “China and by the way we are building that wall as you — we are building that wall. Build it.”

33. “You’d be doing wind, windmills. ‘Wind’. And if it doesn’t — if it doesn’t blow you can forget about television for that night. Darling I want to watch television. I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing. I know a lot about wind. I know a lot about wind.”

Aiken Spring Steeplechase

Once again we had a chance to go to the event of season through the generosity of a friend and fellow Miata Club member. Three years ago he offered the use of his railside spot for the Aiken Spring Steeplechase and 4 people took advantage of it, Donna and I and Dennis & Karol. Since then and now there have been 2 other spring events plus 2 fall events and there has been anywhere from 6 to ten people enjoying this hospitality, always including the original Gang of Four. This year it was only Donna and I. The following is a cross posting of the write-up I did for the Masters Miata Club website.

Seeing as it was just going to be Donna and I attending the Steepelchase, we concocted a plan to just walk over. This would make getting out at the end of the day much quicker, there would be no car to have to drive out one of the only three exits, along with the other 10,000 vehicles at 4:15 PM after the last race.

That plan promptly fell apart on Thursday afternoon when we realized that our Little Red Academy Sports Wagon was over 50% full with just our small gas grill in it. After stacking the two small chairs on top of the grill (the other two, optimistically for guests, would be carried by the person not dragging the wagon) there wasn’t any room left over to take all the other items we needed. There was still a tray of chicken shishkabobs, a bag of hot dogs, cookies, brownies, and chip & dip, and another bag with the tablecloth, condiments, paper plates, bowls, and utensils. Don’t even think about adding the styrofoam cooler with ice and drinks on top of that.

Plan B was implemented. On race day, Brian packed up the gas grill, the 4 chairs and the bag with the tablecloth, condiments, paper plates, bowls, and utensils into the Big Red Mini Cooper Wagon and drove over right at 9:00 AM, when the gates opened. He parked the car and walked the mile home. At 11:00 AM we walked over with cooler and food in the Little Red Academy Sports Wagon. Then maybe after the 4th race they would pack everything into the Big Red Mini Cooper Wagon and drive out the gate with maybe tens of cars.

After we walked over and set everything up, we started eating. Hard not to, with the once or twice a year treat of chips and dip staring right at us. Didn’t help that the tent next door was grilling chicken on their grill. After our pre-meal we walked over towards the finish line to the rail side spot of the company (ASCO) we used to work at, to bring them some of Donna’s chocolate cookies in trade for a drink and to sample some of their bountiful spread. When we got back to spot #471, its owner Tom Varallo, was next door chatting up with the the chicken grilling crew. He talked with us a bit and said he’d probably be done working somewhere between 2 & 3:00 PM and would stop back over for a longer visit. We promised to save him some chicken and a hot dog.

The rest of this timeline and details are hazy, might be old age or it might have been the Moscow Mule I got at the ASCO spot, but two women popped into our rail side spot and asked if we knew a so and so. They were supposed to meet them at spot 471. We of course didn’t because as far as we knew we were the only ones from the Club coming, so we told them maybe they got the number wrong. They hustled off texting madly.

A minute or two later a couple showed up and said their names were Renee and Allen. They had run into this nice man called Tom and explained that they had purchased Guarantor tickets to the VIP tent but were supposed meet someone, but those folks couldn’t get in to the VIP tent. Tom, knowing it was just Donna and I at his spot, told them to meet their friends at #471. At this point in the story we said, “I think they were just here.” “Two women, one older than the other?” we asked. “Yes” We said, “They just went that way maybe you can catch them.” But they didn’t.

Sometime after the first race, two women did show up, a mother, Shirley and her daughter, Kate. The daughter is Renee’s dressage instructor and was accompanied by her boyfriend Eric. They brought with them a couple kinds of chips, a couple kinds of dip and some potent potables. We welcomed them to stay. Eric and Allen were sent across the street to their truck to get some more chairs. Then another mother/daughter team joined our group, Randy and Katelyn. At this point I’m not sure which duo was the one that showed up first. The second pair brought some chicken wings and cookies to add to the smorgasbord. After the second race, Donna and Renee walked across the street to get a cooler that had wine and cookies out of their truck (stuff the guys should have brought)

This is where Plan B dematerialized. We were having too good of a time and the weather was too nice to go home early, so Donna and I stayed with our new found friends until all 6 races were through. Everyone pitched in to cleanup and started packing up. Renee and Allen left. Randy and Katelyn drifted off. Finally then Shirley, Kate and Eric left, leaving Donna and I to wait out the thinning crowd. To kill some time waiting for the roads to clear we made a loop of the inside of the track stopping in at the ASCO tent again for a few minutes. We then tried to stop in at Donna’s Yoga teachers spot to say hello again, but they had already gone.

I guess because this was (supposedly) a Masters Miata Club event, I should mention that Chip Cunningham dropped in for a bit of a chit chat and Tom Varallo did make it back in the afternoon, not to eat though as he was still driving around on a golf cart solving event issues.

Exercise in Futility


Both cars were covered in a layer of yellow powder, that is always around at this time of year. Pine Pollen. Around here it starts at the end of February and sticks around until the beginning of April, so it is sort of past peak, but still a nusience.

Both cars are covered in it. It is not like we are alone either, everyone’s cars are covered, especially those who live outside like the Mini. Donna was getting embarassed to be seen driving around in the Mini as it really shows on the red car. The Miata on the other hand didn’t look bad until you got about 6 feet away from it. Today both cars got washed.

The Mini got its bath first and then the Miata and by the time the second car was finished there was already a fine coating on the first car. You couldn’t see it yet, but you could feel it if you wiped your hand on the surface. We’ll see what it looks like in the morning. The CTBNL was dried and pulled immediately into the garage (not a total shield, but maybe 95%.)

I’m Turning Into Howard Hughes

Not in money, that’s for sure, and not in almost all of his psychoses, like for instance I don’t wear Kleenex boxes on my feet or my urine isn’t stored in bottles. But for the last week, at least once a day, I tell myself that I need to trim my toenails, and each and every night I go to bed with them still untrimmed.

The fingernails I’m keeping trimmed, but probably because those get broke every once in a while in day to day living, while the toenails are usually protected from shattering by being covered by a pair of socks and occasionally shoes.

Back Home

For those of you who read everyday and also glance at the Instagram feed, you’ll be happy to know that the CTBNL is home tonight safe and sound tucked away in our garage. Turns out, that ugly noise was a crack in the exhaust pipe near the resonator and a loose clamp on the exhaust. While the mechanic was trouble shooting the exhaust he noticed that I had some severely deteriorated motor mounts, so those got replaced too.

I didn’t ask if the cracked exhaust pipe was because of the loose clamp or the broken motor mounts, but either way the car is now ship shape. To celebrate, Donna and I drove over to the Pink Dipper in North Augusta and had some ice cream.

Event Calendar 3.1.4

Over on the Masters Miata Club Website I have been using a calendar plugin Event Calendar by Alex Tingle to keep track of the Club’s events since the very beginning of the site’s WordPress era, circa 2008. Coincidentally 2008 is the year of the last stable release of the plugin, Version 3.1.4, and I have been using it ever since. It was tested to work with WordPress Version 2.6.3 and it was still working with its current version 5.1.1 ( a whopping 220 updates.)

It would probably still be working except for one thing, PHP. PHP is the server scripting language that WordPress runs on and like WordPress it has been going through its updates and version numbers too. The Club’s website is hosted on GoDaddy and when it first started there it was running on PHP Version 5.2.6. PHP is up to Version 7.1.26 which is somewhere around 200 updates as well, but WordPress is barely ready for that new a version yet and quite a few of the plugins aren’t either. But WordPress has been nagging me to update to a minimum newer version of 5.6 (105 updates from 5.2.6) that at least has included some more modern secure scripting to keep it stable.

Last Monday I broke down and updated the hosting server to run PHP5.6 and sure enough, doing so broke down the whole Club website. I finally managed to get logged in to the WordPress dashboard and deactivate the 30 some odd plugins used to make it pretty and functional and the website came back online. It looked ugly and was barely usable, but it was back up. I then started activating plugins one by one until it crashed. The one that did it was the Event Calendar. This was bad, there were quite a few stylization plugins we could have lived without, but an event calendar is kind of integral.

I headed over to the WordPress Add a Plugin page to find another event calendar plugin. Searching for the phrase event calendar results in 605 items. Now, not all of these are actual event calendar plugins, quite a few just have one of the words event or calendar in their description. In the block showing each result there was a line listing how many active installs of the plugin there were, ranging from over 700,000 for one all the way down to numbering in the tens.

I had four requirements: 1) event posts integrate seamlessly into the site’s temple, 2) be able to display a monthly view calendar on a separate page, 3) have a sidebar widget that could display a list of upcoming events and 4) have the ability to leave comments on the post. I started installing plugins one by one, entering a couple of events that were actually upcoming and looked for my four criteria. Below is a list of all the plugins I tried (in alphabetical order):

  1. All-In-One Event Calendar
  2. Calendar
  3. Calendar by WD
  4. Calendar Event Multi View
  5. Event Calendar – Responsive Calendar
  6. Event Calendar WD
  7. Event Organizer
  8. Events Made Easy
  9. Events Manager
  10. FooEvents Calendar
  11. FT Calendar
  12. Modern Events Calendar (Lite)
  13. My Calendar
  14. Simple Event Planner
  15. Spiffy Calendar
  16. Sugar Calendar (Lite)
  17. Super Simple Events Calendar
  18. The Events Calendar
  19. Tokify Events
  20. WP Event Manager
  21. XO Events Calendar

There were a few that wouldn’t work at all for one reason or another. About two-thirds of them wouldn’t meet the first one. The club’s site has a dark green background and the template worked by overlaying a lighter color for the posts and other information displayed and most of these plugins created a post that was somehow outside the normal WordPress “loop” so that light color didn’t display leaving the post information unrecognizable against the dark background. The only one I found that did display the posts correctly failed on generating a readable monthly calendar.

Eventually I came to the realization I was going have to modify the look of the site by making the background lighter. Once I did that I started going back through some of the more popular ones and finally ended up with the All-In-One Event Calendar. I’m not real thrilled with the look of the sidebar widget, I can’t modify it, but after installing and uninstalling 21 plugins, many multiple times, I’m done looking.

You know, now that I have slightly changed the template colors once, maybe I should do it again turning everything else blue to match that widget look…

Whole Lotta Tapping Going On


There are like 5 guys walking around up on top of the house right now. And 4 of them have air powered hammers.

That’s right, we are getting a new roof.

They arrived at eight o’clock and it took them until 1:30 PM to get down to just the roof decking. After about a thirty minute lunch break they started throwing up bundles of shingles. A couple hours later and they are almost finished laying them down.