18 Holes

I bought the side sills from Trussville Mazda. They are a regular sponsor of Miata.net and they have real good prices on Mazda parts and accessories. Cheaper even than the local dealer who gives us Master’s Miata Club members 20% off. Still with all that discounting, the sills were more than twice the price, quasi-regular reader, Ernest wanted for a set of used one he had. I was scared off by Ernest’s for two reasons, first was they needed painting in my color and second he had no fasteners for mounting them. Ernest got them from a Mazda recycler in a trade that was as complicated as the Nomar Garciaparra deal because he was going to add them to his new Mazdaspeed MX-5. Ernest was selling them because he found out to mount them you had to drill holes in your car. Seven holes on each side that your mid $20k car didn’t come from the factory with. Well, Ernest, after reading the 12 page instruction book that came with my factory fresh sills, I can say you are wrong about needing seven holes, you need 9 or 18 total.

Painting Ernest’s side sills didn’t scare me as the front spoiler painting came out top notch, so they would have done just as good a job again, but the no fasteners thing really scared me. Turns out I had good reason, there are like 4 bits each per those 18 holes, plus a half dozen other screws, clips, etc per side. There is a mounting strip to hook the top front edge of each sills to. There are four different paper templates for locating the parts. There is a tube of some adhesive stuff. The bag of stuff you get is worth $100 easy.

For funsies I scanned all 12 pages and then combined them into one big ol’ 2-1/2 megabyte pdf file. So if you would like to see why I want to set aside a whole day for this project and have a fat pipe to the net: Genuine Side Air Dam Instruction (Installation) Manual

I Musta Missed Sumpin’

Did a female fan flash a tittie on TV during a Red Sox playoff game? An awful lot of people think so, because I’m getting a ton of search engine hits looking for “red sox fan boobie.” And of course the fact that I have this little referrer thingie on the right of the page makes it self perpetuate. Maybe the camera showed some fat guy shirtless for a second as it panned the crowd and somebody got confused (or wishful.)

Or do they mean to be searching for “red sox fan baby”?

I don’t have any Red Sox fans flashing, but so you don’t go away totally disappointed, here is a 4 year old video from the Today Show where a female on the street exposes herself for the panning camera: 2.2Meg Today Show Flasher Flick.

Miata Weekend Off

At noon on Friday when we got home from work Donna & I and her Mom and Aunt piled into the MSV and headed north, destination Cherokee, NC. After dinner in our favorite little Italian place in north Georgia we arrived at the Holiday Inn in Cherokee. Right after Breakfast on Saturday we dropped off the ladies at Harrah’s so they could spend a chunk of the day feeding the one armed bandits. Donna & I went back to the hotel and packed the car and checked out. We then drove 5 miles the other way to go for a walk in the woods. She had picked a nice little 1-1/2 one way walk to a waterfall.

The leaves are at near peak and the morning, though cloudy, was crisp and in the lower 60’s. The walk was basically all uphill to a nice waterfall, who’s name I have forgotten already, but worth the walk. We then came back down the same way we went up. What a great way to spend the morning. After hiking we drove into Bryson City to find some lunch. We stumbled onto the 4th Annual Chili Cookoff, so guess what we had? For $5 you got a bowl, a spoon and a napkin and could sample any of the chili’s you would like. It started at 10:00 AM so by the time we got there a few had already run out and we missed voting for the people’s choice, but we got our fill of some very interesting tastes. After about 7 or 8 different half ladles of chili Donna and had had enough and took a little walk around downtown Bryson City. On the way back to the car we ducked into an ice cream shop, Donna got a scoop of chocolate, but I only got a small coke, as I was still full of chili. Turns out she was too, as she could only finish 1/2 the ice cream.

Then we went back to the casino to pick up Mom and Mary. Cell phones don’t work inside the casino and they won’t page anybody, so your only option is to wander around looking for who you want. Amazing how hard it is to find two particular little old ladies amongst the thousand or so people hunched over all those machines. It was pure luck we stumbled on Donna’s aunt. We then split the casino in halves and made another loop before we found Mom sitting in one corner. I can’t imagine how the atmospheres we each spent our mornings in coul be any further apart. Donna and I out in the clean air of nature and Mom & aunt in the closed, dark, smoke filled, beer in the carpet smelling room. Next time, they have a certain time to meet us outside.

The UPS man had left the side sills from Trussville on the back deck as I asked. I was going to install them today, but realized that I need to mail a Master’s Miata Club newsletter out on Thursday and I haven’t even started it. So today will be spent working on that little item, maybe next Sunday I can get them installed.

Pigs Fly! Hell Freezes Over! Red Sox Beat Yankees!

For once in my lifetime the roles were reversed between these two teams that most sports shows claim to be the best rivalry in baseball, maybe all sports. The Red Sox looked confident in games 6 and 7 in Yankee Stadium. The Yanks looked scared. They made the inopportune errors. The breaks went our way. Has the Curse been reversed?

We’ll see about that starting Saturday in Fenway.

Will This Be The End?

Game seven is tonight. So will this be the last game of the Red Sox 2004 season? If we go by past history, they will lose in some spectacularly unexpected way. If for some miracle the do win, I still won’t able to celebrate because the only possibly reason for advancement would be to lose the World Series to who ever. I know most of you are hoping the Sox lose so I will shut up about them and get back to my usually witty repartee. My wife is hoping they lose so we can get to back going to bed at a normal hour again. Blogging early so I can watch the game on TV. I’m sure I will have something to say either way tomorrow.

Monkeys On My Back

I can’t stop rooting for the Red Sox just yet. I listened to the game on MLB.com until the 9th inning last night. Then I watched innings 10 through 13 on Fox. I turned it off about 10:30 thinking that they just might be at it all night. I’m watching or listening as long as it is convenient, I can seem to turn off the game and not worry about the out come. Maybe that is why the Red Sox keep hanging in there, they feel the same way, like they have nothing to lose, so what the heck. Of course it could be their master plan to fight back, forcing a 7th game, just so they can rip my heart out with a tragic loss on a walk-off homer by the unlikeliest Yankee (ala, Bucky Fucking Dent.)

Side Sills Coming

Walking back to the car, with the way the sun was hitting it, it made Donna notice the black lower body pinch seam and it looked ugly to her. It kind of does to me too, there is a spot where the flat black protective paint was kind of globbed on, so it is shiny, and a spot where the seam is bent slightly from sitting on jack stands, so it doesn’t look at all even under there. When I said that I could fix that by getting some side sills, she just collapsed from the weight of all the hints and said, “Buy them.” Called Trussville this morning and they will be here within the week.

It took about 5 years of modifying for me to get the ’95 Laguna Blue customized to my liking (and I was still tweaking it when I traded it in.) With this last modification it will have taken me just 11 months to get this car right where I want it.