Halloween Is Getting Close

That means it is time for another Wintercroft paper mask. All the photos below are from the Wintercroft website, so they are copyrighted, but they probably won’t complain as this is sort of a free ad for them. 🙂

In the past I have made 5 of these. The skull was the first in 2014 with the pumpkin following in 2015. After a year off I did the fox in 2017. I didn’t do anything in 2018 because I had retired and back in Aiken we typically only had a handful of Trick or Treaters so it wasn’t worth a costume. In 2019 we were in Oregon, but living in an AirBnb while looking for a house.

In 2020 I absolutely had to go back to doing something because our new house is the epicenter of Halloween festivities in southeastern Oregon. They close our street down from 5:00 pm until around 10:00, and hordes of trick-or-treaters are given free range of about 8 blocks. So that year I made the Devil mask. Last year I went with the gas mask and it turned out fantastic. But, the only problem was it didn’t breathe very well and after 2 hours of wearing it, the paper was getting soft from my exhalations. And two hours was all it took, to give away about 1200 pieces of candy.

I’m not sure which one I’m going to make for this year, but I’ve narrowed it down to the following five. The first three below are half masks, meaning they have no backs, and are easier to make and a bit more comfortable to wear. So I’m kind of leaning towards those, but the enhanced skull mask, which fit around your whole head, are just so awesome looking.

What a problem to have…

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Enough With The Signs Edition of SORT
As of Monday, September 12, 2022 at 6:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
1972 Porsche
914		 2006 Jeep
Wrangler Rubicon		 1989 Rolls-Royce
Silver Spur
Pretty much back to the greatest hits this week with the Porsche in the sports slot and a Wrangler for off-roading. The only outlier is the Rolls Royce for the touring category instead of a BMW 5 Series. Maybe I’ll just hire someone to drive us around in it.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: Lamborghini Dealership Sign Sold for $3,700 on 9/8/22
Off-Road: Mercedes-Benz Service Sign Sold for $5,200 on 9/8/22
Touring: Alfa Romeo Dealership Sign Sold for $7,900 on 9/7/22

Jurassic Overload

We sign up to get Peacock so we can watch the Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana bicycle races. We even opt to spend the ten bucks a month to have the no commercials option.1 One of the big banners that show up at the top when you open the Peacock app is for the new Jurassic Park movie – Jurassic World: Dominion.

Hey, what the heck, I enjoyed the first movie way back when and its free, so I thought I’d check it out. I lasted 15 minutes before turning it off, Chris Pratt on a horse roping dinosaurs like a wild west cowboy… So this past Monday while the Vuelta cyclists were on a rest day, I talked Donna into watching the 1993 original movie.

Wow, amazing how much you forget in 30 years. Not the main bits that have become pop culture touchstones, the water class vibrations as the T-Rex approaches or the lawyer in the out house, etc, but the acting. Jeff Goldblum’s over the top smarminess, Lora Dern’s poorly acted wide-eyed innocence, Sam Neil’s character arc of kid hating to kid loving and Wayne Knight’s whatever.2 I did forget that Samuel L. Jackson was in it though and I kept waiting for him to drop a Mofo, but alas I was disappointed.

Anyway, turned out the first movie wasn’t as great as I remembered it was, so I thought I’d give to new movie one more try. This time I made it to right around the hour mark when the movie sort of morphed into the Star Wars cantina scene and then flipped immediately into a Jason Bourne movie which where it lost me…again.

Along with the latest Jurassic World: Dominion, the first 3 Jurassic movies are available for watching on Peacock right now, but The Lost World & The Lost World: Fallen Kingdom aren’t for some reason. I have a copy of The Lost World that someone gave me and I probably watched it back in 2015, but I can’t remember anything about it. I have seen the third movie, Jurassic Park III, and I seem to remember thinking it was OK, but that was 20 years ago.

That left the second movie, The Lost World. Jurassic Park, left to see on Peacock. Guess what? This one is another steaming pile a dino droppings. I made it about 45 minutes before hitting the stop button. The only thing remotely noteworthy about this movie was there was a young guy that plays a photographer that goes to the island with our core group of Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Richard Schiff that sounded a lot like Vince Vaughn. I had to stop the movie and check IMDB. Holy Crap! It was a 27-year old Vince Vaughn.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign, Blockin’ Out The Scenery, Breakin’ My Mind Edition of SORT
As of Monday, September 5, 2022 at 6:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
Lamborghini
Dealership Sign		 Mercedes-Benz
Service Sign		 Alfa Romeo
Dealership Sign
Bored with picking cars…

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: 1950 Allard J2 Bid to $242,500 on 8/30/22
Off-Road: 1976 Mercedes-Benz Unimog Sold for $220,000 on 8/30/22
Touring: 1962 Lincoln Continental Sold for $43,000 on 8/30/22

Everything Old Is New Again

The Old: When we bought our first Miata back in 1989, I was automatically sent a copy of something called Miata Magazine that was the main benefit of the Miata Club of America. If I joined the Club, I would start getting the magazine quarterly, so I did. As the Club grew, so too did the magazine frequency, from 4 times a year to five to finally six until it came to an end with the 2003-III Sep/Oct issue.

I had the entire collection, but started to toss them out one at a time in late 2014. I was doing something on the Masters Miata Club website that on the 25th anniversary of an issue I would pick an article or column and republish it. Once finished with that magazine it went into the recycle bin. When I left the Masters Miata Club, they folded the website and I continued that twenty-five year schedule here on this site. Luckily I had a backup of that website, so while bored during the height of COVI-19 pandemic I recreated the first 5 years of those early articles. You can read these “highlights” of the roughly first half of the Miata Club of America magazines here.

The New: The other week on Instagram someone I follow posted a picture of something called Miata Motoring, Issue 1, 2022. He mentioned that it was published by Moss Motors, so I went over to their website to see about subscribing. Nothing. I have a kind of Love/Hate relationship with Moss, so I let it drop and moved on. Well, what should show up through the mail slot Monday but said Miata Motoring magazine.

And this is not fully a magazine per se, there are articles on the first few pages and more on the last few pages, but the middle is full of a Miata parts catalog. To be fair, if we compare the amount of advertising to content in the new one, it is probably similar in percentage in the old Club magazine. Moss knows where I live, because I have bought stuff from them before (with limited success), so that is how I received this publication and probably will for the future.

To go along with the old is new theme, all four generations of the Miata make an appearance inside this new Miata magazine. Also, for old, there is an article on the development of the original Miata by one of the engineers who was there in the beginning and who was also one of the founders of the Miata Club of America with that first magazine. And for new, we get an article about one half of my favorite YouTube car reviewing duos who has a 4th generation Miata, James Engelsman of Throttle House.

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Donna’s Birthday Eve Edition of SORT
As of Monday, August 29, 2022 at 6:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
1950 Allard J2 1976 Mercedes-Benz Unimog 1962 Lincoln Continental
Leather helmet? Check. Goggles? Check. Silk Scarf? Check. Okay, start ‘er up. Roads? We don’t need no stinkin’ roads, this thing makes its own roads. If you can’t be comfortable touring in this thing, you need a better chiropractor.

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: 1997 Panoz AIV Roadster Sold for $51,000 on 8/24/22
Off-Road: 1959 Willys Jeep FC-170 Bid to $30,000 on 8/26/22
Touring: 1970 Cadillac Eldorado Sold for $11,000 on 8/24/22

Third Times The Charm

We have been ordering Donna Celestial Seasonings DECAF Green Tea K-Cups from Amazon since before we moved to Oregon in 2019. There have been several different K-cup quantities over that period, but sometime late last year or early this year we started buying them in 96 count boxes. A few of months ago we couldn’t get the big boxes anymore so we found a seller that was selling the same thing, but they were listing it as 4 boxes of 24. This worked out well until early this month we repeated the usual order and when it was delivered it was a single box of 24…

We contacted the seller and they told us they even though they were the seller, the order was fulfilled by Amazon and we needed to contact them. Well, as you might expect, with Amazon there is no way to contact a real person by phone. Returns are dead easy, but because the tea is food item, returns were not allowed. After fumbling around their help center, I finally found a bot thingy and it took a couple of wrong selections before I did find a way to get it to refund our money or more accurately, added the total purchase price to a virtual gift card and we even got to keep the single 24 count box.

After the money showed up as a gift card in the Amazon account we reordered the 4 boxes of 24. It wasn’t two day delivery, but it was still free, so a few days later the order arrived. As you could tell from the title of this post, this second order once again contained just one box of 24 K-cups where we ordered and paid for ninety-six. This time when I found the bot there was no option that I could find to pick that would give us the purchase price and keep the money. I did find a way to have it put me in a queue to chat with an actual human. After a few minutes I was connected and after repeating my problem in a couple different ways, I got the same results as the first time, keep the 24 and the full purchase price in a gift card. Plus a guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again.

This time, thinking that the problem was the Amazon fulfilling part, we opted for a seller said that it was fulfilled by them not Amazon. We waited with baited breath to see whether we would get 1 or 4 boxes of 24, but when the packed showed up on our doorstep several days there was a large box that contained 4 boxes of 24 K-cups.

Was it the different seller or that guarantee from a chat bot? I don’t know, but we’ll see in a couple months when we order tea again from Amazon.