38,000 Flashing Lights

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eu3kKd9-vI

This is my first video uploaded to YouTube. Go watch it a hundred times OK? Next, I need to figure out how to add some cheesy Christmas music.

We left Hendersonville early this morning to avoid the really nasty line of storms marching their way east. For the first dozen miles or so it looked like we didn’t make it. But once we got down the hill in South Carolina the dense fog cleared and took the heavy rain with it. We drove through some light rain on and off for the middle third of the drive, but last third, while cloudy, was dry.

Just north of Greenwood the Emperor passed through the 38,000 mile mark.

A Christmas Wonderland

Christmas Lights

My brother Paul is down in Hendersonville, NC visiting with my sister and her husband for a week. Since we didn’t have any vacation left the only time we could visit was this weekend, so we drove up last night and spent the day with them. Unfortunately it has been kind of a messy rainy day, but it didn’t prevent us from our usual downtown Hendersonville shopping stroll.

After dark we drove a few miles up the road from the SMH to the same place we went the last time we were here, the Western NC Agriculture Center near the Asheville Airport. In September it was NC Mountain State Fair, but this time it was a Christmas Wonderland. Twenty bucks a carload for 20 minutes of driving around a giant circuit filled with pulsating lights while “synchronized” is piped into your car’s radio.

Would have been awesome in the Miata, but the Emperor was back in his Throne Room in Aiken and it was steadily raining with intermittent bursts of heavy stuff.

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1282

The Turner Housesitting Service

When one of our engineers heads back up north to visit family this time of year he gets programmer Mark to look after his house. Mark checks the mail, waters the plants and feeds the household menagerie. Last year when Tom and family returned they found all the light bulbs in the dining room hanging fixture were pink. As a bonus he placed a pink princess nightlight in the master bedroom.

This year Mark decided to elevate the madness just a bit. The night before they returned he placed a 18″ x 24″ yard sign on the front lawn. On the inside he placed a life size poster of himself in the master bath. And if that wasn’t enough, he placed a couple of the ThinkGeek Annoy-a-trons set to cricket strategically in the kitchen and in the upstairs bonus room.

The yard sign got an mildly amusing chuckle, the poster elicited a scream from the wife and the crickets almost prompted a call to the local pest control guy.

I’m thinking between this year and next, Tom will make friends with a neighbor that he can convince to house sit for them in 2014.

Behind The Green Door

Green Door

We finally broke down and bought a new front door.

The old one (left) has been serving as the axillary entrance for us since we moved into the house 24 years ago. For all we know it was the primary entrance for the 34 years prior. It had a crack in the upper right wood panel that when the sun was going down it would cast a thin bright line on the back wall of the living room. When the summer humidity set in the door would swell up making opening and closing a job that required a lot of force. The top hinge on the storm door in front of it was broken so that closing it required lifting on the handle to get it to line up with the frame. Because we normally come in and out of the house using the garage door it didn’t bother us too much, but the effects of the newness of the kitchen has made us realize that some other things really, really needed updating too.

The new door (right) is made of foam filled fiberglass and weighs about half of what the wood door did. It will keep the winter chill at bay much better and only allow the setting sun to sneak in through the very small peep hole. The storm door is a neat full view door that has one bar across the middle, so that when the top half of glass is lowered and screen unrolls from the top. In spite of the kitchen remodel we bought and had the door installed through Lowes. This time it went off without a hitch.

What goes on behind this green door is nothing like what happens in its famous movie namesake from 1972. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you can read about it here. And if that peaks your curiosity, you can watch the first 53 or so minutes of the 71 minute film here.

Horsing Around

Horsing Around

Just trying new stuff with the blog. Bigger pictures for one. And I may just do a restyle for the new year…

Started up, went down, still down.
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Resurection

While updating a blogging software plugin this evening it some how crashed and took the whole site down. I restored the database from a weekly backup that runs on Sunday nights. Everything previous came back, but things are just a little off.

The top transition text has changed and weirdest of all is when I try to edit a post, the text box where everything is entered, is blank. There is nothing to edit, yet the post still exists. And now I also have a yellow bar across the top of every backend page telling me that an automated WordPress update has failed to complete – please attempt the update again now. When I try, nothing happens, and the bar remains.

And if you would like a different take on the resurrection of the dead, I highly recommend a French (oh, no, subtitles) eight episode TV show called Les Revenants, or The Returned for us English speaking types. Very creepy story of the dead come back to life in a small mountain village, but not as shuffling zombies, but as exactly as they were just before they died with no recollection of the passage of time.

Started down, went up, still up.
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