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We finished watching Season 1 of Mad Men last night and returned the DVDs today. When I first started watching the shows I thought they had the period down pat, the clothing, the furniture, the attitudes towards women and the smoking, everyone lights up…, but the characters and the drama was as superficial as the advertising that they did for their living. The lead, Don Draper, is an interesting character because they have taken great pains to show it to us, but now after viewing 13 episodes I see that he is surrounded by others that are just as intriguing and I hope we start to explore them in the coming seasons. As we speak I’m downloading season two torrents.

I am watching baseball in the cold Philadelphia rain and have seen a couple of interesting commercials (one of which is not Ryan Howard of the Phillies schilling for Subway’s Philly cheese steak sub.) First up was an ad for chemistry.com an internet “dating” site, it shows two people holding hands in the produce department and discussing how nice it is to have found someone so compatible. Both individuals are men. Two commercials later was one for the new Seth Rogan comedy called Zack and Miri Make a Porno. At the end of the commercial they called the movie just Zack and Miri.

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.

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.