I have been hunting Mr. Pace on ebay for the longest time, but my $15 was never enough. In frustration I went hog wild and upped the limit by a buck and a half – we have a winner.
I spent most of the evening erasing all traces of Ubuntu Linux off the laptop (I never did get the wireless card to work) and reinstalling XP. Then coincidentally I had trouble getting the wireless to work under Windows as well. But that was just a security issue and semi-easily solved. This left little or no time and motivation to blog, so here, enjoy a sunrise from our HHI weekend a couple weeks ago.
We made the trip east this morning for Breakfast With Laurie. For grins I decided to look for an easy geocache in Florence somewhere near the Cracker Barrel where we meet to maybe entertain us after eating Pecan Pancakes and Eggs in a Basket. Much to my surprise there was one real close, like so close it was actually at the Cracker Barrel. Q is for Quackers. How did I know? For one, its location on the map placed it right at the intersection of I-95 & US52 and secondly this phrase from the description: No rocking chairs were injured during the making of this cache. Looks like we wouldn’t even need the GPS for this one.
And it was a good thing we didn’t need it, as for some reason this morning I couldn’t download the data from the web site to the unit. I tried from both geocaching.com and the Garmin site with no luck. I tested the plugin and it said it was fine. I rebooted the PC. I turned off the GPS a couple of times and it still didn’t work. When we got home from breakfast I finally got it to work by reinstalling the firmware on the Venture HC.
About 4 miles east of the thriving metropolis of Salley, SC the Emperor crossed the 89k miles in service mark.
Oh, yeah, about that cache, we found it no problem. Thanks to the clue – Let this not wash you up for the day, the description of the cache – You are looking for a black magnetic key holder and the logs – I had to get over my shyness about sticking my butt up in the air. It was under an old timely washing bucket with a mechanical wringer in between two rocking chairs on the porch of the restaurant.
Taken just outside the restaurant the MMC was meeting at a couple of Thursdays ago. The frugal owners of the this dining establishment have taken to illuminating alternate words on their sign each night, tomorrow BUFFET will be lit and ASIAN will be dark.
OK, you got me, I just made that up. All the neon has probably leaked out of the bottom word or a transformer is bad or whatever.
I just can’t do books any other way than holding bound paper in my hands. I’ve tried audio books, fortunately I didn’t buy any, only to be disappointed, but I’ve sampled some free choices from the corners of the web (LibriVox, LearnOutLoud, etc.) and it is just not for me. I can barely pay attention sitting, listening in front of the PC, let alone try and listen while driving. Another reason is I haven’t found a voice I enjoy listening to.
A couple times in the last week my daily dose of SciFi site directed me to some free electronic books, one was Suvudu Free Book Library with pdf files that look like a scan of a book (other formats are available) and today’s site was Baen Free Library which has been around since 2002 and offers downloads in various formats including HTML. So far none of the formats I’ve tried have been comfortable to me. The second place offers books in a Microsoft Reader format, but I’m not sure I even want to install the software for it.
Guess I’m going to keep patronizing the local used book store…
On our little tour of Daufuskie Island there were several historic sites and a couple of art “galleries” that were highlighted for us to stop at.
When we left the General Store and Cart Rental place we started out following the recommended tour route. The first stop was a spot that held two historic places, an old church and an old school. Of course there were two other golf carts stopped there too, so we hung around until they left and instead of continuing on the “tour” we took the first left we could. From then on we almost never saw any of our ferry mates again. Hey we came here to get away from people.
We eventually rode on most of the tour route just backwards or coming at it sideways. There were a couple of historic cemeteries that we wanted to check out and in spite of traveling down the roads they were on, never did see any. We did find one of the artist galleries, The Iron Fish, and parked our golf cart under the tree in the side yard. It is a 100 year-old original island house that has a front porch that serves as the gallery and the front wall is covered with funky, yet appealing schools of metal fish. The are also metal crabs and mermaids mixed in. There was a note on the front door with purchase instructions: If you see something you like take it and slip your money under the door. For credit card purchases, leave a note saying what you bought and your phone number. A nice school of four small fish would be an awesome decoration on a living room or bed room wall, but at $85 per fish they were a bit rich for our blood.
As we got back into the cart to leave we both noticed several large metal squirrels stuck to the trunk of the tree and both of us went, “Coool.” I checked the price and they were $45 a piece and both of us went, “Naaah.” Just before turning the key to start the cart Donna said, “You sure?” I hesitated and then said, “Why not?” Chase, the artist, was in his backyard, so I walked over and gave him the cash. He offered to wrap it up, but we declined just sticking it in the bottom of our black travel bag.
It has been 1870 days (5 years, 1 month, 12 days) since taking the first Post Office picture of Summerall Station in Aiken to this one, the last, from Daufuskie Island last Saturday. In that time frame I have taken pictures of 453 Post Offices with the Emperor (or some portion of him) or his Mini-Me somewhere in the frame.
I started out with at least six more to do, those on the military bases in the state, but have decided that if I couldn’t get them all I wouldn’t do any of them. My out is that although the bases are physically located inside the state’s borders they really are on U.S. Government property. The two Marine Corp bases near Beaufort have no problem with visitors as long as they get a visitor’s pass. Fort Jackson in Columbia probably wouldn’t have been an issue either as it is a boot camp for the Army and they are used to visitors. The two Air Force bases are stricter and I would have needed to have been escorted on base by someone stationed there (only one of which I would have had someone to do that for me.) The Naval Weapons Station in Goose Creek was going to be the deal breaker anyway. Just the name of the place doesn’t sound like the kind of place they let civilians wander about, with a camera no less. Plus they used to keep the nukes for the subs at the Charleston Navy Base before it closed down and for all I know they still house the ones the Air Force needs.
There is still a slight controversy as to whether to include the second Hampton PO. It looks for all the world like a backwoods county home with pickups out front and it has no outward indications of any postal activity, no blue box and no signage. All I have is one small photo I snapped from inside the car because Donna didn’t want me to get out. So when we got home from that trip I wrote to the Postmaster of that zip code. A couple weeks later I received a reply stating that it is a Community Post Office, but I’m still not so sure I should include it.