34,000 Pounds of Thrust

This Friday and Saturday was the 43rd Annual Aiken’s Makin’ Arts and Craft Show. Two rows of tents along three blocks of downtown full of hand made knickknacks, gewgaws, bric-a-brac, trinkets, trifle, baubles, gimcrack, whatnots, thingamajigs, tchotchkes, doodahes and whim-wham. Also about a dozen purveyors of fair food for your dining pleasure.

Because we are people of leisure, we thought a good idea would be to beat some of the crowds and go on Friday, but by the time we did the usual morning stuff it was too hot outside to deal with it. So today we went with Plan B, we walked the 2-1/2 miles up to it, timing our arrival for the official 9:00 AM start. After walking the whole thing and finding absolutely nothing we wanted to buy, except a “fresh” lemonade and an ice cream, we checked out all the food vendors and decided that we would drive back later to get lunch.

Halfway home Donna said, “Oh, I forgot, we were supposed to go to the Indie Arts Vintage Market.” I said, “We’ll do that at lunch. We can even park there and walk the 2 blocks back to Aiken’s Makin to eat.” The vintage market is every other weekend and this one coincided with the big one. After seeing literally 6 blocks full of crafts in the morning we breezed through the market, right until we got near the other exit. Both of us stopped and went, “Cooool!” There was one guy1 there with these vintage cameras turned into lamps. They were sitting on old wooden tripods with an LED bulb in the metal flash reflector.

But the cameras weren’t what we were looking at, it was a couple of Flash Gordon spaceship looking lamps made from explosion-proof light housings and other found metal objects. We just had to have one.


On Monday the Ladybug passed through the 34,000 mile mark.

Hey, Ho, Saint Joe

A person we had met at the Spring Steeplechase wanted to see it the weekend before it went on the market. She was looking for a place in this neighborhood and wanted to get in it because every time she noticed a house for sale around here it sold before she could get in it.

Our realtor said that it would sell in a week.

Our across the street neighbor said, “You’ll have no trouble selling it.

A random neighbor we really don’t know well, saw us outside a couple weeks ago and said, “I’m surprised. I expected a Under Contract sign by now.”

As of last Thursday the house has been for sale for a month. In that month we have had less than 10 people come through to look at it. Our realtor held a Realtor Only open house and maybe 10 folks showed up (all from her company…) and no one has of yet stepped forward big sacks of cash.

While having dinner with some friends, who coincidentally have their house for sale too, they mentioned that they had ordered a statue of Saint Joseph from Amazon to help them sell their house. Donna and my response was, “Huh?” Turns out this is a whole thing.

St. Joseph and Home Sales

Of course their house has been for sale for 3 months and they have reduced the price a couple of times, so they might be getting a more anxious than we are. I’ll let you know in late October if we buy our own statue of Saint Joe.

Most Likely For The Last Time

We went away for the weekend to Hilton Head. Most likely for the last time.

Way back in 1997 when a shop supervisor was wondering aloud to his production planner how to list his and some other owners condos for rent on the internet, a side hustle for yours truly was born. The supervisor was Jerry, the planner was my wife Donna and because I was dabbling in coding HTML she volunteered me.

Jerry and I hashed out a simple design for a front page with just a sub page for each individual condo. It started small, with just his condo and a few others of owners he had befriended. Over the next couple of years Jerry would add a few more condos as word spread. He and his wife Donna would go down to HHI from Aiken practically every weekend remodeling places and his business of managing condos took off.

In 1999 Jerry retired and he and Donna moved down to Hilton Head and at its peak they managed a couple dozen condos in the one complex and they personally owned three of them. All the while me and my Donna were going down a couple three times a year to take pictures for updating the web site. We always got comped a weekend in a condo and always a nice dinner out. What started as an acquaintance and business relationship had blossomed into friendship.

When Jerry the Condo King passed away in 2007 at the age of 71 his wife continued on with the business. And for the past dozen years Donna the Condo Queen has continued our, at least, yearly trips down for web page updating. But because it was just her doing the managing, the booking and some of the cleaning, the 25 condos has slowly dwindled down to nine. This summer Donna, having turned that same 71 years old, has decided it is time to smell some roses and will no longer be managing condos starting January 2020.

With no real web page updating left to do, other than a thanks for the business place holder page, and our possible move to Oregon, we went down for one last free weekend in an ocean front condo on the beach and a nice meal and visit with Donna the, soon to no longer be, Condo Queen.

We are not beach people at all and probably would have never set foot on Hilton Head Island at all2, but we will be eternally grateful to Jerry and Donna for giving us the opportunity over the last twenty-two years to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic. To walk along the wide sandy, usually uncrowded, beaches. To watch the dolphins frolic in the surf and the pelicans glide gracefully overhead. And most of all we will remember fondly the joy of their company.

Dead Woofer

Last night, Donna calls out to me to say, “Hey, I can’t get any sound out of the TV.” Well the first thing I thought of I might of knocked a plug out of the power strip. I was behind the TV a little while previous to see how come our vertical blinds can’t be opened fully. You can open the two halves to the ends fine, but the rotation of the vanes gets stuck at about 75 degrees. That is really fine with us, but the prospective next owner of this house might have an issue. Well, whatever is wrong3 it wasn’t readily evident.

I followed the power cord down to the strip and it was plugged in. The first troubleshooting step with electronics is to reboot, so I yanked out the cord. Dang, wrong one. I pulled out the Cable/TIVO box cord. So I had to sit contemplating my stupidity for 5 minutes while that rebooted. Unplugged the right cord, and plugged it back in and still no sound. Using the TV remote I changed back to the TV’s speakers to make sure that wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t. Next step is to get out the instructions for the VISIO sound bar. Turns out there is a setting on that remote to reset to everything to the default setting. After that I used the speaker test setting to see whether I was getting anywhere.

“Left Speaker”________________________”Center Speaker”_________________________”Right Speaker”

Then silence, no sub woofer and no rear surround speakers. The sub is connected to the sound bar via bluetooth, so the manual suggested that I try to re-pair the two. You have to press a button on the back of the sub down for 5 seconds, a small light would start blinking. You then go to the bar and hold the power button for 5 seconds. The lights on the sound bar would flash back and forth until the two units hooked up. Problem was the sub woofer light never came on. Turned the sub off and back on. Tried the pairing routine again and once again the sub never lit. It was pronounced dead at 7:17 PM on August 20, 2019.

Although I bet it was electrocuted dead way back in April when the house power was abruptly disconnected. We didn’t notice because we rarely watch anything that has surround sound. So for now we we are going to go with the just the sound bar.