I’m In A Book Club

Not a sitting around in someone’s living room drinking coffee (or wine), but a virtual one, and one I’m not really planning on participating in. I’m just going to read the book.

The only news I read is the local stuff that Google feeds me. I don’t watch the nightly news, nor any of the 24-hour news channels, the only way I get my news is from our left-leaning late night talk shows. Colbert has the best slant on it for me, but he was off last week. Kimmel is a watch when he’s actually there, but I think he takes 2 months off for summer, so all I had was Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show.

All week he was on this we’re going to have a Tonight Show Book Club and narrowing it down as the days progressed. Friday he announced this year’s book, My Friends by Fredrick Backman. He then read the first paragraph of the book aloud:

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think that teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

Based on just that, I went directly to Amazon and bought the book.

Sunday Fun Day

Yesterday was a longer day, 300 miles and 8 post offices compared to today’s 240 miles and 6 post offices. But it sort of evened out because Saturday eastbound on I-84 was nicer than today’s westerly trip home. Although, if I could have swapped the order of I-84 and OR-74 which would have made the day finish up with some nearly zero traffic twisting and bobbing roads, today would have been a great drive.

This weekend’s haul took my post office tally to 252 out of the 390 total or about 65% done. There are around 90 or so left that are densely packed along the coast and the southern portion of I-5. The remaining 40-ish out east are widely scattered and will need several more long drives with more than just one overnight stay for each trip.

Been A While

It has been almost 4 weeks since I’ve gone post office hunting. I’m overnighting in Pendleton, OR and will head home tomorrow. Today I checked off 8 of them and have saved 5 for tomorrow’s drive home. Today’s list in order of capture went Hermiston, Stanfield, Echo, Milton-Freewater, Athena, Helix, Adams, and Weston. Almost missed Weston. Looking at the area map on the phone, the normal Google saved icon became dots, so I didn’t see it. I knew when I set out that today’s haul should have been eight, and when I had only seven photos, I zoomed in to make the icons larger and found my missing PO. Funny because I saw the town name when I passed the road to it on my way to the furthest one and wondered how come there wasn’t a post office there. Well, there was.

You didn’t think I forgot a Roadside America picture, did you? Turns out there is something called Cattle Drive, and it is less than a 1/2 mile from the hotel, so I walked over and took a few photos. While I was there I noticed lights on the ground, which possibly meant it would be illuminated at night. So, I went back after dark, and sure enough, it was lit up. The low-level lights made it difficult to capture a wide shot that wasn’t burnt out by light flare.

I Get Black Cars Now

All Lit Up

 
Historically I have disliked cars in black. I’ll admit that the color does look good on some vehicles, but on a Miata it kind of diminished its already small size and you lost a lot of the curves that made the car beautiful. I won the auction for Bucky because the year and its low miles not its color. I originally thought I might wrap it a bright color too, but living with the car I’ve come to appreciate it in black. And the truth of it is, a lot of my resistance to a black car was probably based on photographs of cars, so in real life I didn’t pay attention them. Turns out the car isn’t diminished and those curves still come to life.

Now, keeping one clean is a whole ‘nother ball of wax.

This Is Not Spinal Tap

After dinner I decided to watch one of the 100 or so movies I own while waiting on the dishwasher to finish. I opened up Plex and went to the movie page. As I looked at the first couple of rows of movie posters, I tried to decide what kind of movie I was in for. Really couldn’t. I’ve said this before in that I’ll see the title or the poster and I’ll be able to sort of speed watch the whole movie. And once I’ve done that, I literally don’t need to watch it … I’ve just seen it.

One nice thing about Plex is that there is a shuffle button at the top and if you click it a random movie will start. I’ve used it a few times with limited success, maybe twice out of the five I got something that I would be in the mood to see. Attempt number six was a win, Plex had selected This Is Spinal Tap. I hadn’t seen it in ages and just running the movie through in my head made me want to watch it again. I didn’t recognize the background image at start up, but there were our 3 main guys looking like they’d been dipped in gold, so the movie was right (the image was for the movie’s 41st golden anniversary.)

The movie was not right. First clue was the first image you see, the logo of the production company A24, that studio was way too new to be from the 1980s. Wait a minute, Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans getting married, I watched the trailer for this movie a way back and put the movie in my Apple TV+ queue. I did start to watch it back then too, but gave up about 20 minutes in.

Weird. I exited Plex, got back in, drilled down through the movie posters, found and clicked on This Is Spinal Tap again. It started up right where I just left off, 3 minutes into On The Rocks. What the heck, I’ll watch it again and see if I can at least get to the part where National Treasure Bill Murray shows up. I ended up watching the whole thing. It had very strong Lost in Translation vibes and with good reason, it too was directed by Sofia Coppola.

After watching the movie, I went over to the PC where the Plex sever runs on, found the .MKV file, opened it in a media player and it was the real “This Is Spinal Tap.” What the heck was going on. I scrolled back up in the directory and there was an .MKV video file for “On The Rocks” too. The file was dated in November of 2023. Did I download a copy of the movie less than 2 years ago and forget about it? I stopped pirating stuff way back in the twenty teens. Plus, I wouldn’t think so based on earlier this year’s starting and stopping watching it part way. Has someone hacked into Plex somehow on stored a copy of there? I mean I have it set up to allow me access to my movies while traveling…

I’ve deleted all the “On The Rocks” files and rescanned the library, but now when I got try and play “This Is Spinal Tap” Plex can’t seem to find it. I guess tomorrow I’ll try and uninstall Plex, clean up the registry, reboot and reinstall. Now, I really want to watch Spinal Tap.

Addendum (8/15/25): Nothing I did would let me play “This is Spinal Tap” on the PC using Plex. It wouldn’t play on on the laptop either, but it will play on either TV running Plex via the Roku box. “?” Side note, I just now stumbled on that there is a sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, coming out next month. This is where that gold image came from and since the movie came out in 1984 it also explains the 41st anniversary thing.

Evening Arrival

Evening Arrival

Last night at dusk I went out and drove around a local business park looking to take some photos of Bucky during the golden hour. Took a half dozen or so in a couple spots, but only two are post worthy. This is one and the other will show up in a few days in another post.

Oh…That’s What She Said

It happened again, see March 25th’s post, I got a ten-dollar haircut. It might have been the same stylist for all I know, but I never seem to get the same one. Of course because the haircut is every four weeks between visits and if I don’t get someone that is memorable for some reason it might be someone who has cut it before. I mean March was 5 months ago.

Today I got in the chair and the stylist said something, something, a great beard trim. And I replied, “Thanks I did it last night.” My normal buzz cut takes all of 5 minutes and I’m out of the chair. When I checked out she said, “That’ll be $10.” I tipped her five bucks because that is what she’d have gotten for the $21 Senior Haircut.

As I walked out to the car I looked down at the receipt and saw that it said: BEARD TRIM – $10. The stylist had probably said, “If any one asks, you got a great beard trim today.”