Cosmic Dog Run

How far would you drive for a hot dog for lunch? 135 miles? We would.

Saturday we are going to take a road trip to Mt. Pleasant, SC to visit Jack’s Cosmic Dogs. Now the timing of our trip may be a mistake, this place was recently featured on the Food Network’s The Best Thing I Ever Ate (which is the reason we are going), so there might be a crowd, but after driving that far we will probably even wait a bit before giving up.

You know now that I look, if we were to swap the rotation of our loop, we could hit a second place featured in the same show, a BBQ place in Orangeburg. But we won’t be doing that, we’ll just save that for another day.

Of course we will be doing some geocaching too. I’ve picked out almost 40 along the route, but 3/4 of them are if we feel like it on the way there and back. The important ones will be in the middle around Charleston where we hope to get 3 Delorme pages and 1 county for the SC Challenges.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 527

Unobtainable Goal?

We are fast approaching the end of year one of looking for tupperware using satellites. Our first find was called Up Sand Creek in Hitchcock Woods on February 15th and since then we have found another 312. The other day when we were talking about this milestone I foolishly said, “Hey, why don’t we try and get to 365 caches by then so we can finish up the year averaging one a day.”

Right now we are averaging .95 caches found per day, so it sounds like we should have an easy time of it. Not necessarily so. There are only 25 caching days left until the 15th and we need 52 to reach the goal, that means we would need to average a hair over 2 a day until then, or more than twice our average so far. Considering we mostly cache on weekends and there are only 4 of those left, we will need to find an average of 13 on each of those Saturdays and Sundays. Our best weekend ever was in August with 14.

The goal is not impossible to reach though, we have had 2 days with 11 finds and one with 10, so we just have to get busy and hope for nice weekend weather until then.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 526

I’m Such A Loser

Yesterday I received 2 pieces of comment spam on my post about Saturday’s adventures in MMC land. You know what I did? I stripped the fake email address and the referring link to the junk and approved them, they just seemed so nice (and complimentary)…

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 524

The Muppets On Dharma Island

T-minus 15 days and counting down. The publicity machine has been cranking out all sorts of LOST stuff. Thanks to the internet and TDTVS’s global appeal we can now see promos from not only the good ol’ USA, but Israel and Spain as well. This week we are getting cast interviews that reveal nothing to go along with always present spoilers and plot line guesses from the rabid fan base. Today’s big news was that Entertainment Weekly had a third “last supper” cast image and it needed over analyzing.

Last week we had speculation that ABC/Disney was not going to let this successful franchise just fade away, this story line with these characters will be over after Season 6, but perhaps they might do a prequel or alternative time line stuff exploring the Black Rock or maybe the whole ancient civilization/four toed statue. But a new image leaked from the basement of ABC headquarters might just give us a glimpse of that new direction:

It really is just a promotional still from something called LOST Untangled which is put on by ABC to “explain” what is going on with the show if you are just tuning in, but won’t that be kind of cool, Muppets on Dharma Island?

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 522

What Have You Seen Lately

In the last month we have watched 12 discs from Netflix. They fell evenly into 2 groups of six, one group of British TV show discs and 6 movies. In that same time frame we also watched all 17 episodes of Season 5 of TDTVS and all 8 episodes of Series 4 of Doc Martin.

At yesterday’s MMC gathering when it came time to swap movie recommendations with the usual suspects, I could only come up with one of the six movies, Doubt. Looking back on the list, it was the most memorable, but there were a few more that deserved a good word. Here are a half dozen twitteresque movie reviews in the order of my appreciation of them:

  1. Doubt – Did he or didn’t he? The nun thinks she knows for sure.
  2. (500) Days of Summer – a pleasant light-hearted comedy that is not really a love story. Pay attention to the numbers.
  3. Priceless – Sort of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with a French accent.
  4. Charlie Bartlett – Take one cup of Rushmore and mix with 3 cups Harold and Maude.
  5. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs – Funny animated movie for the first 30 minutes and I might have finished watching it if I was 12 or under.
  6. My Blueberry Nights – Rent a Norah Jones music video disc instead.

Addendum: Also yesterday we got a tip that we should try a new this season show on CBS, called A Good Wife. It’s a lawyer show with a case a week, but what makes it different is the lawyer’s back story and its continuous repercussions on the current. Thanks Patti. <- Here is where I’m sure if I need to use the new sarcasm punctuation mark or not because we just spent the entire afternoon and evening mainlining the first 7 episodes…

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 521

Onions Are Like Underwear…

…you gotta have ’em. Or so said a contestant on Chopped this evening.

This morning we met the MMC for breakfast in Augusta and Donna and I left a bit early with plans to do a little geocaching on the way. Well it turned out we weren’t that early and didn’t stop anywhere. There was a cache that was located right behind the shopping center where breakfast was to be, so we walked around to grab it before going inside. With the title and the hint we think we found a part of the cache, but the actual container didn’t appear to be around. Dang.

The eleven of us finished eating by 8:15 and we were then stuck, the bowling alley, our post breakfast entertainment, didn’t open until 9:00. We stood around outside the door of the restaurant chatting and watching someone in a truck in the parking lot tossing bread out of his window feeding seagulls. After the novelty of that wore off, we trooped down to Kmart (the only other place that was open in the center) and shopped for blue light specials. Tiring of this Donna and I said, “We’ll meet you there.” There was geocache right down the street. Found it, yeah!

A couple of games of bowling was quite enough (my wrist was sore by frame 5 of the second game) and most of the group were busy picking out a lunch place while Donna and I and another couple walked 2/10 of a mile to behind a restaurant to try and find a cache that was hidden there. It was sprinkling slightly and GZ was between the back of the restaurant and its dumpsters, it wasn’t the tidiest place, so we gave up looking after about 3 or 4 minutes. Darn.

After our failure the 4 of us went our separate ways. Donna and I were going home, but couldn’t agree on what we wanted for lunch, so when we drove by the place the rest of the club had picked, we pulled in. It was BBQ place, not atypical as they had other meat items and seafood on the menu, called Flyin’ Cowboy. The food was slightly better than good and I could probably eat here 2 or 3 times a year, but probably won’t because it is 25 miles away. One of our group ordered a “Manhandler” which consisted of 6oz of pulled pork piled on top of a softball sized loaded baked potato. John was up to the task and finished the whole thing, along with both his side dishes, earning himself the title of “Potatohandler.”

To recap, on today’s Miata Club event, we all drove separately to a restaurant and had breakfast. Afterward we did some shopping together followed by driving to a bowling alley separately. We bowled a couple of games together and then drove separately to another restaurant and ate lunch. Well, at least some of us actually drove Miatas…

Here is the top count from yesterday, the first nice day since it seems like Thanksgiving. Today it was cold in the morning and now hasn’t stopped raining since this morning.

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Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 521

Gonna Need A Bigger Garage

We have been virtual wishful car shopping recently, maybe it is because we are under a year in the countdown to a New Miata or maybe it is talk of taking this year’s trip out west in a car instead of a plane or maybe it is because automakers are offering great deals at this time of year (Mazda is offering $4500 off left over 2009 Miatas), but I have been hitting the web and having fun.

If you had told me 4-1/2 years ago that I might be driving anything other than a Miata I would have told you you were crazy. But now I’m not so sure. It all harkens back to our first ride in the current generation Miata back in October of 2005, we were underwhelmed, so the seed of doubt has been planted. The Miata is still at the head of the list, but there are a couple of other contenders on our radar, cars that are in our cost comfort level, around $25k and are convertibles and are available in blue. From worst to first they are:

  1. Sebring. This only makes the list in that it fits all three criteria, but its faults are many, chief among them is that it is as ugly as sin.
  2. Mini. High fun to drive factor, but we were underwhelmed when we drove one back in 2003 and the convertible version takes a big hit in the looks department, both up and down, over the closed car.
  3. VW Beetle. Donna has always liked the looks of these, I have to admit that I do too. Downsides include no manual transmission and cockpit wind with that big an opening.
  4. Mustang. The base V-6 falls in our price range, but the blue is kinda odd and it is 7″ wider and over 2 feet longer than a Miata, contributing to the title of this post.
  5. Miata. Needs another test drive and to take advantage of the the current deal we would have to accept a color that sucks.

Now let’s go a little further out there, what if we don’t get a convertible at all. Wild huh? Suppose we consider a little larger “sporty” car instead of a convertible. The car would have to be in the same price range and it would have be a coupe (I may be getting older, but I’m not ready for a 4-door Buick just yet.) From worst to first they are:

  1. Accord. We were Honda folks (2 Accords, 2 Civics and a Prelude) before the Miata revolution, but my how this car has grown. It weighs as much as a Mustang and is a foot longer than one too!
  2. Gensis. The front look leaves me cold and there is that still lingering Hyundai crap car association.
  3. Altima. Really like the looks of this and the blue is a terrificly bright shade, but I know nothing else about it.
  4. Mustang. With the convertible we were stuck with the V-6, but a coupe means we can squeak a GT with a V-8 in under our spending cap.
  5. Mini. It has lots of techno gizmos to go wrong and doesn’t have the best reliability record, but it is fun to drive, good looking and will fit in the garage.

A wild card in the coupe class would be a Miata with the detachable hardtop, leave it on nearly all the time and just pop it off for nice weekends.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 519