Soul Brother Number 1 and Gawky White Guy Number 38,776,391

1. Set trip odometer to zero
2. [odometer]
3. S
4. “South S. C. 230”
5. L
6. [car and “JACKETS STADIUM”] (NOTE: may be easiest to pull off on right for photo)
7. L at T
8. R
9. “CARETTA” {off course clue: traffic light}
10. R

Above are the first 10 instructions for this year’s Masters Miata Club Road Rally/Photo Scavenger Hunt put on by David & Ellie Brock. Guess which one we screwed up on?

The event was titled the “I Feel Good” Rally because instead of last year’s rural roads we were going to be treated to a more urban route around the Godfather of Soul’s adopted home town of Augusta, Georgia and three of the nine photos needed were James Brown related.

Did you guess number one? You’d be wrong and frankly we’re insulted, it took us all the way until number four before we went off course. And that was totally my fault.

We both saw #4, the SC230 sign, my navigator wanted to turn left, but I was locked onto #6 and was sure we needed a photo in front of the new Augusta Greenjackets stadium. Obviously the rally organizers must have missed this particular sign and we were supposed to turn left after we saw the next SC230 sign. About a mile and a half later, there was another SC230 sign. While thinking that it was still too soon to turn, it dawned on the idiot driver, i.e. me, that the North Augusta High School nickname is the Yellow Jackets. Doh! That meant that first left was the correct turn, so I made a u-turn and headed back.

Now, having traveled 3 miles too many, we were back on track. For the photo required for #6, I of course, didn’t pay attention to the note (may be easiest to pull off on right for photo) and navigated our lowered Miata at a sharp angle, so as to not scrape, through a fairly deep drainage ditch to park on the left side of the road and right under the sign. I had to repeat the process to get back out and then pull a u-turn to get back going in the right direction. We then successfully navigated instructions seven and eight.

It fell apart again at #9 though when the navigator mis-interpreted the word CARETTA as an off-course marker, not the next instruction, so we took the wrong right turn. We then spent way too many miles driving around a random subdivision trying to make every intersection fit our mistaken interpretation of instruction #11. When we finally made it back to the road we turned off of, turned right to continue in what we hoped was the right way, and then took what we hoped was the correct right turn. It wasn’t. We then drove a loop of Marion Avenue 3 times, twice in one direction and once more in the opposite.

Crap. We were about to just pack it in, when Donna said, look up in your phone for instruction #19, St. Joseph Hospice and we can get back on track by taking #20’s right turn. This was a great idea until we found #19’s sign. It was at a crossroads and because we weren’t sure which direction we were supposed to be approaching the course marker from we had 4 different possible right hand turns to choose from. So we grabbed a lifeline. Because this was the Brock’s second rally for the Club and they were familiar with the caliber of minds involved, this year they included a few course correction GPS coordinates throughout the instructions.

We didn’t have to use any of the other 3 course correction clues, but we did have to Google one location to get back on track. In a subsequent foray off course, we used some local knowledge to get back to where we needed to be. We started as the second car and were the third car to finish. Although the five cars were started 3 minutes apart, we passed our other four competitors, coming or going, at least once and a couple cars more than once. At one point there were three of us together on Telfair Street waiting on the passing of a mile long freight train creeping along 6th Street.

The object of the rally was to take the nine required photos while covering the course in as close to the baseline mileage of 19.0 as possible. Only four of the five cars made it to the finish line. We ended up in second place. The winners, like us, had all the right photos, but they traveled one tenth of a mile fewer than Donna and I did. Before you go, “Awww, so close,” our total mileage was 31.0! A full 63% further than we should have had, meaning there were twelve extra miles of opportunity to shave a couple of tenths off our total…like the big one, ignoring instruction #4 or even the little right hand side of the road note in instruction #6 above.

How’s Your Cholesterol Brian?

I’m glad you asked as it just so happens, I had a check up with my PCP on Monday and I have some fresh information for you. The results are from the usual lab, but they have changed up the Goal Range from this number to this other number, to a number preceded by either a greater than or less than symbol. Didn’t help my HDL any, as 39 is less than the old 40-110 range and it is not greater than the new 39 number either. I also lopped off about a dozen results from the last decade.

                                                        Goal Ranges
Date Chol <200 HDL >39 Non-HDL <130 Trig <150
04/03/18 154 39 115 132
01/05/17 169 40 84 225
09/29/16 189 40 119 150
03/31/16 170 37 95 180
10/10/12 196 36 128 160
04/10/12 193 39 121 166
10/10/11 162 43 88 155
04/04/11 155 38 96 107
12/06/10 176 41 114 105
05/18/10 151 38 91 109

62,000 Broken Sea Shells

Astrological Signs 04: Cancer the Crab. Cancer is the only astrological sign in Crystal Lake Mobile Home Park in Myrtle Beach, SC that doesn’t have a street named after it. (3/31/2018)

I haven’t written a blog post in a week, but in the week previous to that I wrote 4 posts (one of which was in two parts) and created 4 drafts. Tonight I’m going to combine 2 drafts into one post because I can barely remember the fully formed posts I was going to create from them…

For the the 3-day Easter weekend we took a trip to Myrtle Beach. One to get away for a bit, another to enjoy some beach time before the spring breakers get there and third to gather a few Moss Motoring Challenge points.

And gather we did. We tallied at total of one point shy of me being able to use the number in the title of of the post (61.) Nearly half of that total was for getting a sign with the name or symbol of each of the 12 astrological signs. One point each for the first five, 3 points each for the next five and five points each for the last two for a total of thirty.

This turned out to be easy pickings because Donna found a mobile home community in southern Myrtle Beach with streets named for constellations, including 11 of the 12 zodiac signs. Guess what one sign was missing? I’ll give you a hint, would you want to live on a street named for something that causes an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of your body?

After getting eleven of the twelve needed signs within 15 minutes, it seemed too easy and because for some reason we enjoy making these challenges, well, a real challenge, we decided to see if we could replace the eleven street name signs we have now with signs or objects that depict the logo, like we did for Cancer the Crab. By the time we had finished the weekend we had 7 of the 12 taken care of.

Somewhere between Columbia and Florence the CTBNL passed the 62,000 mile mark.

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed the Mini (Part II)

When we last left our intrepid hero, he had just nudged the plastic case of the socket set enough to knock it off it’s convenient resting place and spill the entire contents into the engine bay…

Go back and read Part I first, I’ll wait.

After putting everything back in the case, turns out most everything had tumbled right through to the driveway below, but I was still missing the the 3/8 to 1/4 adapter and the 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9mm sockets. I could see a glimmer of one socket underneath the padding of an A/C line at the bottom of the engine compartment, but of course I couldn’t reach to get to it from the top. I was going to have to jack up the car to get underneath to look around, but that was going to have to wait as it was past suppertime and would soon be getting dark.

The next day I dropped Donna off at the gym in the Miata so I could have a couple hours to try and retrieve the missing socket set pieces. Of course the Mini has a whole different jack point configuration to prop it up. Minis have a heavy plastic walled open square thing to place your jack onto, but it isn’t shaped to hold the top of a v-shaped jack stand, which I have two of, nor is it the right size to accept to flat pad jack stand which I also have two of.

To get the Mini up in the air, I used the same method I use jack up the Miata. By placing an 18″ length of 2 x 4 centered under the door mirror and placing the pad of the hydraulic jack in the middle of the wood piece you can the the whole side of the car up in the air enough to place the jack stands. To keep the Mini up I placed the flat topped jack stands under the 2 x 4 near the front. When I was finished doing this to both sides, the car was resting on the back wheels with the front end of the car some 10 inches off the ground.

This nose high attitude shook loose two of the missing sockets and a quick crawl underneath let me retrieve the one socket I could see along with another one that was right next it. I discovered a couple of small panels behind the bumper that were held in by threes screws, so I removed them to see if that would help locate the rest of my missing pieces. Nope, nothing from one and all I got from the other was several ounces of car wash water. I crawled back out from under the car and placed the found sockets in their respective holes in the socket set case. I was still missing the 5mm socket and the 3/8 to 1/4 adapter. As I looked at empty spots in the case I realized that the 5mm space has been empty like forever, so really all I was still missing was the adapter.

I removed the grill hoping that it might help, but that just let me see the A/C condenser and radiator better, no other obvious nooks or crannies that would hide a shiny chrome adapter. I dropped the car off the jack stands and started it up.When this did not result in any loud metallic clanking I put it in reverse, dumped the clutch, roared back 20 feet and slammed on the brakes. Then put it in first gear to repeat that process going forward. I had the windows down and didn’t hear metal hit the ground, but got out and looked the length of the driveway in case. No adapter. The next step was a quick jaunt around the neighborhood throwing the car into several 90 degree turns with abandon. The windows were still down and I never did hear any rattles or see anything fall off.

My guess is that the adapter is wedged somewhere really good and the next owners will discover it in a far future engine rebuild or the damn adapter was, like the 5mm socket, AWOL before this whole episode started.

Briefly A Citizen Again

In 2014 I renounced my citizenship in the Red Sox Nation. I was going to watch the games on MLBTV instead of listening to them on the radio (which was a perk of RSN membership.) The first year I watched the TV games in between innings they would have silence with a screensaver style image in the background. Coming from radio where you heard the actual WEEI commercials, the lack of that “entertainment” was jarring. It actually bothered me. The quiet made the three minute breaks seem like ten. By year two I was used to it.

During year three they started throwing up random MLBTV highlights in between innings. I now found the sound from these images jarring, especially since the volume level for them was 30% louder than the game audio. Compounding the misery was there were only 4 or 5 “highlights”, so over the course of a nine inning game you’d see them each about 25 times. Up until now I was just listening to the NESN TV broadcasters do the game and while Dave O’Brien was a decent voice, he didn’t have the chemistry with Jerry Remy that the newly departed Don Orsillo had, so I went back to listening to the radio announcer sound over the TV pictures.

Last year, the fourth, the MLBTV highlights were replaced by those annoying Chevrolet “Real People, Not Actors” commercials. They were made even more annoying by the fact that there was just one of them played like three times during each break so you got to see the same thing like 50 times a game. The radio sound with TV picture worked pretty well against it until somewhere in the second half of the season while watching the games on the Roku box they figured out how to override the radio commercials with the audio from the Chevy commercials (along with the typical volume increase.)

This year I decided to to drop MLBTV entirely and go back to the Gameday Audio. I just couldn’t abide by paying $120 and still having to listen commercials. Well why not join the Red Sox Nation again? For the same $20 it costs just for the radio broadcasts I can get that and a few other perks, so I signed up on March 20th. I didn’t get a chance to listen to a broadcast for several days and when I did I could hear it on the radio but, when I tried using the At Bat app on the phone I couldn’t get access. I could hear using the Roku box, but not on the Kindle.

I contacted MLB Customer Service via email to ask what the problem might be. The first email told me to go to settings and login with my credentials – well, no shit Sherlock, already tried that. Next email from them told me to uninstall the app, restart my phone, install the app and sign in. Even though I already done this once, I did it again. Emailed back to tell them that it didn’t help. MLB emailed back with, “We will contact you via phone.”

The actual customer service person I spoke to started to run me through some corrective attempts, but he must have been in training because at nearly every step of the way he would have to put me on hold for a minute to find out what was next. It was an excruciatingly slow process and when I realized we were doing the same two emailed scenarios again I hung up in frustration. While I was on hold with the CSR I went online to the Red Sox Nation web site and found a contact phone number there. It wasn’t an 800 number, the area code was 617 (Boston, MA), so I dialed it and got an answering machine.

I got a call from that same phone number a few minutes later and when I told the woman what my problem was, she explained that the Red Sox Nation Gameday Audio thing only applied to computers, not mobile devices. She could offer me my money back because I was unsatisfied with my membership, so I took it. Then waited a day and purchased the At Bat app on my phone and not only can I use it on the phone, but on both computers, the Roku box and the Kindle too.

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed the Mini (Part I)

Last week I mistakenly thought the falling pine pollen was through for the season, so I decided to wash the several levels of yellow that had accumulated on the Mini. When drying the car off afterwards I raised the hood to towel up any water that might have settled under there and might drip down the exterior when next driven. Because this is like only the third or fourth time I have had the hood up, the first couple were battery related, I looked around a bit.

The battery sits on the left side up against the firewall, under the windshield, and to see it you have to lift a plastic flap. Well, there is another little plastic flap on the driver’s side too. Hmmm, I wonder what’s under there. I unsnapped the top and there was a small reservoir. Looks like it could be for windshield washer fluid. I unscrewed the cap and as I was lifting it off it slipped out of my hand and dropped down. It wasn’t for washer fluid, it was for brake fluid. This became obvious to me when I looked down to find where the cap was, it was tucked neatly underneath the brake booster.

In every other car I have owned or worked on this would not be a problem as the master cylinder and booster have been there in the wide wide open space in front of the firewall. In the Mini there is an enclosed area that runs along the whole firewall that hides the battery on the left and the brake componentry on the right. There was no way to retrieve the cap through the small opening of the flap, there was barely enough room to unscrew the cap.

The plastic cowl cover is in two pieces. The passenger side piece where the battery sits is about 1/3 long while the driver’s side piece covers the remaining 2/3. It tucks under the windshield at the back and at the front it snaps into the plastic front wall of the enclosure and a rubber gasket is pressed onto that to seal the elements out. This picture is not of the Ladybug, but it close enough to show what I’m talking about:

To get in there I needed to pull off the rubber seal, undo the two nuts that hold down the cowl on the driver’s side, separate the top plastic piece from the front one by pulling up hard to unsnap them, then squeeze my arm down in between to blindly poke around hoping to find the errant cap. There was just enough room to get in there, but not enough to get to where I needed. To do that I was going to have to remove the driver’s windshield wiper.

Try as I might it wouldn’t come free. So instead I pulled the passenger side of the cowl off hoping to free the left end so I could get just a little more room. That is when I discovered that the front plastic piece could be lifted off enough from the left side that I could actually slip my arm in to grab the cap. At this point I was bleeding in a couple of places on each arm from scratches with only one requiring a band aid.1

With the cap back on I was no longer swearing under my breath, and occasionally out loud, about selling the %#$!@% car. Then, when I went to reach for the 13mm socket wrench to put everything back together, I nudged the plastic case of the socket set just enough to knock it off it’s convenient resting place on the exhaust manifold shield and spill the entire contents into the engine bay. Double %#@$!

To be continued… in Part II