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Emotional Support Vehicle

A few weeks ago while wasting time on the Insta I came across a sticker that someone I follow had on the their Miata. I just had to have one. So I ordered one. It arrived in the mail a few days later.

It has taken 2 weeks for me to put it on the car though. I hesitated because I thought it was kind of “girly.” Which is kind of funny because the Miata I drive is considered a hairdresser’s/chick/gay car by roughly 75% of the male population and I have zero f**ks given about what people think about it.

Was I afraid that this would confirm that they are right? Whatever, I don’t care, it’s on there because that’s what the Miata is to me. If you’d like one of your own you can get one from Push to Start Design.

Every Husband’s Dream II

Recently my wife has been randomly demanding I pull her pants down!

Okay, get your mind out of the gutter. Now that it is winter she is back to wearing her calf high boots and every time we leave the house to go out she asks that. She doesn’t like tucking the pant in and it is a lot easier for me to reach down and yank the pant legs over the boots and down.

If your mind is still in the gutter, you’ll enjoy an earlier post from 2005 – Every Husband’s Dream.

Miata Moves

Eleven months ago I created a tag called “Miata Moves” to mark when ever the Miata was driven. Because it was wintertime it driven very occasionally and the battery would be dead or nearly dead when we got in it to take it for a spin. I used it to keep if it hadn’t been driven in a week because that was the amount of time the battery needed to drain down so it wouldn’t turn over. I record every drive faithfully and even kept up with it once the weather warmed and it got driven more regularly. But I tired of keeping track and stopped in July with this:

171.2 miles on 5 drives since last Monday.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 52

 
Well, it is that time of year again, so I think I will resurrect the tag and start using it again. But, I won’t record the mileage because that is irrelevant, I just need to get it up to operating temperature and drive for a 15-20 minutes to keep everything loose. Unlike last year though I have learned that the best thing to do with the Miata is to just go ahead and hook it up to an IV of electrons all the time. This way it is ready to roll when a 40° day with clear roads appears.

Today was one of those days. Because the weather has been kind of awful already this year this was the first time the CTBNL moved since the day I mounted the Mini’s all-season tires on it back around Halloween (40 days ago) and then took it around the block to make sure they still fit okay.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 2

 

Indoor Cycling

Last Friday the sun was shining and the weather told me it was 45 degrees outside, and with that sun shine it felt more like the mid 50s. So, for the first time in around 4 weeks, I actually went for a bike ride outside. And looking ahead at the weather it looked like this would be my last time outside riding until spring.

I put on my tights and a long sleeve undershirt with a short sleeve jersey over it and took off. Between the time I decided to ride and actually riding the sun had disappeared behind some clouds and it felt every bit of 45°. I would get warm climbing a hill and be chilled when going back down, but still enjoyed the fresh air.

We bought an inexpensive indoor exercycle for Donna to work on strengthening her drop foot so she could rejoin me in bicycling again and when it got chilly in October I actually used it a couple times too.

A couple of decades ago I tried indoor cycling to keep in shape, but never really took to it. We tried one of those where the rear tire ran on a shaft connected to magnets for resistance, but it felt so sterile. Then I borrowed a set of rollers from another bike club member thinking that because rollers required you to use your balance it might seem more like actually riding. That was marginally better, but still boring as hell. Both these were setup in the garage and all I could look at was the wall. I added a fan to simulate movement. I tried adding music to listen to, but nothing worked, if I made it 15 minutes into a workout it was a great day. After a month or so of trying, I returned the rollers, donated the mag trainer to Goodwill and resigned to limited cycling over the winter.

Here in Oregon there will not be limited cycling because, while a few folks around here do ride year round, I’m not hardcore enough. The indoor exercycle is it. But I can stand it a lot better than those earlier attempts back in South Carolina. Firstly, the bike is indoors in the family room downstairs. Secondly, we have turned the 55″ TV so that it faces the bike nearly head on six feet away. And thirdly, we have found a YouTube channel called Indoor Cycling Videos so I can pretend I’m actually bicycling outdoors.

The videos range from 30 minutes to a couple of hours and are mostly from over in Europe. There are road bike rides and mountain bike ones as well. Almost all of them have a readout along the bottom showing time, speed, distance and hill gradient. Because this exercycle has a heavy flywheel where you control the effort by twisting a knob on the downtube I try to make the resistance larger when going uphill and less when the gradient reads negative.

Most of my outdoor riding around here was right was around an hour in duration. Riding indoors on this type of bike really can’t do coasting because the pedals are connected to the flywheel unlike outdoors where coasting down hills is a nice respite. Also I can’t really stand up on the pedals and spin like I can on the road bike. Indoors I am really sitting and pedaling all the time, so for now the 30 minute indoor rides are enough. I may try and move up to 45 minute ones, but probably won’t go longer than that because just sitting for that long won’t be fun.

Bicycle Tires

Last week’s Tire Juggling post got me thinking about our collection of bicycles and their tires. We currently own five bicycles, one tandem, two road bikes and two mountain bikes. Every one of those bikes have different size tires on them. Our tandem has 26″ tires. My mountain bike because it has a large size frame it is mounted on 29″ tires and Donna’s being a size small frame came with 27.5″ tires. My road bike has 700c tires while her road bike has 27″ rubber.

Whenever we go for a mountain bike ride I carry two different size spare tubes and trust me, those 29″ & 27.5″ MTB tubes are big. At least with the road bikes, a 700c or 27″ tube will work with either size size and for the tandem a 26″ tube is all it takes.

If 5 bikes sounds like a lot for two people, ha, at one time in the 90’s we had seven. We had a pair of dedicated club ride road bikes and a pair of road bikes set up for commuting to work. We had a pair of Bridgestone mountain bikes and a Santana Sovereign tandem. But those 7 bikes required only 3 different tire/tube sizes, the tandem and road bikes were on 700c tires, the commuting bikes sported 27″ tires and the mountain bikes rode on 26″ tires.

Tire Juggling

The last couple of years when it came time to put snow tires on the 2013 Mini for the winter I would take the all-seasons off and mount up the non-studded Blizzaks and MSW wheel package we bought from Tire Rack. Because the Miata and the Mini both had 15″ wheels with the same bolt pattern I could take those all-seasons and put them on the Miata. I’d then take those ultra high performance tires off the Miata and store them. You don’t drive on them when the temperature is below 40 degrees because they turn rock hard and stop handling/riding well.

Even though the Mini’s tires fit on the car they weren’t a perfect fit, they would scrape against the plastic inner fender liners when I turn the steering wheel almost all the way in either direction. This was really okay, because it was not like I was going to drive it in the snow or take a trip in it. This was just so the Miata could be driven on dry roads about once a week to keep the battery charged and give the car a little exercise keeping from having to winterize it while it sat for 4-ish months.

Well, the new Mini has thrown this routine into disarray. The 2013 was a 2nd generation of the “new” Mini and the 2016 we just bought is a 3rd generation, besides growing a few inches in all directions they changed to a 5 lug wheel. So, now what do I do about putting an all-season tire on the Miata in the winter? Turns out the solution was relatively easy.

After test driving the 2016 Mini we realized that we were going to need new tires for the car. CarMax put on two new tires because they were worn down enough as to not be safe and replaced them with a bargain Chinese brand that were very noisy. Maybe the 6-year old OEM Michelins contributed to the sound some too. I went to TireRack and found a Grand Touring All-Season that was the quietest of all the options, the Kumho Majesty 9 Solus TA91. We still wanted to maintain the ease of wheel swapping that we had previously, the Kumhos were ordered mounted and balanced on their own set of rims.

While the lug count on the 2016 Mini changed, the wheel diameter stayed the same at 15 inches, so that meant we could keep using the 2-year old Blizzaks, we just needed some 5-lug wheels to put them on. Those wheels were literally right in front of us, the current wheels that on the 2016 Mini. All I had to do drive to a local tire store in the Mini with the old Mini’s winter tire package and have them flip flop them. So, now the new Mini sports the Blizzaks on the OEM wheels and the crappy tires are on the MSW Type 22T rims, that as you can see above, I’ve put on the Miata as its winter wear.

29,000 Shuffled Items

Our go to grocery store here in Klamath Falls is a Fred Meyer, a Kroger brand store. Because of our previous relationship in Aiken with an actual Kroger, we fit right in. Didn’t even have to get a new loyalty card. Over the last couple of months they have been updating the store, they’ve refreshed the outside paint, added a Starbucks, totally revamped the Pharmacy, updated the interior signage, etc.

Of course the biggest thing was updating the shelving which involved moving all the items from one place and temporarily placing them in seemingly random spots around the store. Then this stuff was placed back somewhat near where they were, but not always. This constant shuffling made our weekly shopping grocery shopping trip an adventure to say the least.

On yesterday’s shopping trip it seems like they are getting pretty close to finishing up shuffling around the twenty-nine thousand grocery items in the place. Now have to finish up updating the the clothing, shoes, garden, electronics and hardware sections, but at least those won’t directly effect our weekly trips on Thursdays.

On the way home from Fred Meyers the new, to us, Mini shuffled past the 29,000 mile mark.