Donna always had to have pop­corn when we went to the movies, even if it was nor­mally crappy and way over priced, and most times on week­ends when we watched a DVD too. Unfor­tu­nately she can’t eat pop­corn any­more because of the UC, so we don’t keep it in the house any­more. Every once in a while she would offer to buy some just for me because she felt I was being deprived. But I’m not a real pop­corn lover. I don’t have to have any to enjoy a movie. I don’t dis­like it and would never turn it down when offered at the movies or at home, but haven’t missed it all.

Until this morn­ing. I was up front of the plant to go with Donna for our morn­ing break walk and I could smell that some­one in the cafe­te­ria had just popped some. The lure of the Siren’s song was too great. After the walk, on my way back to my cube, I broke down and bought some microwave pop­corn. I ate about a third of the bag before I couldn’t eat any­more, so I placed the bag on the con­fer­ence room table as the 10:30 NCMR meet­ing was just starting.

Next time you pop up a bag of Pop Secret Movie But­ter microwave pop­corn take a peek at the “Nutri­tional Facts.” They are bro­ken down into two sep­a­rate type of serv­ings, 1 Cup Popped and 2 Tbsp Unpopped. Raise your hand if you eat unpopped popcorn.

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a pro­fes­sor of human nutri­tion at Kansas State Uni­ver­sity, ate one Twinkie every three hours, instead of meals. His premise: That in weight loss, pure calo­rie count­ing is what mat­ters most — not the nutri­tional value of the food. The premise held up: On his “con­ve­nience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

Now that’s a diet I can get behind. Read the rest of the arti­cle on the CNN web site.

I rarely speak of pol­i­tics here, even around elec­tion time, but this year is an excep­tion because I actu­ally voted in a mid-term elec­tion. Usu­ally only pick­ing the Grand Poobah will make me leave my cave and high speed inter­net con­nec­tion to min­gle with the masses, but this year there was a local issue that I wanted to put my 2¢ into (literally.)

I had high hopes for being able to pick Cal­i­for­nia as the state I wanted to retire in, but my hopes were quashed when the vot­ers there defeated Prop. 19. Oh, well, there are 4 or 5 more elec­tions between now and then. Also as a geo­cacher I was dis­ap­pointed that the Board of Super­vi­sors in San Fran­cisco have banned giv­ing away toys with “unhealthy meals.” Most of the cool schwag that I have found in ammo cans came from a kids meal at a fast food restaurant.

Closer to home South Car­olina voted in its usual Repub­li­can man­ner and in doing so elected the state’s first woman Govenor (wel­come to the 20th cen­tury SC) and defeated in the US Sen­ate race, my favorite crack­pot can­di­date, Alvin Greene. But the defeat was actu­ally a vic­tory of sorts, Alvin’s got a new job as a crack­pot com­men­ta­tor on of all places, Fox News.

Back when Donna was in the hos­pi­tal and they were aggres­sively work­ing at heal­ing her ail­ing colon she was being given 40mg of Pred­nisone a day and she was very hyper with signs of ADD. Her favorite pas­time was to cut up paper and mag­a­zines to make bows and rib­bons. She loved to tape things to other things with the hos­pi­tal sup­plied clear dress­ing tape. Thirdly she hated clut­ter and was for­ever rear­rang­ing and clean­ing up. She used a food tray to keep all her sup­plies on and it moved with her from bed to chair and some­times the floor as she worked on her “projects.” As a con­se­quence of the med­i­cine and the zero humid­ity air of the hos­pi­tal her hands were always dry and chapped. This led to a lot of apply­ing of hand cream.

Early in her stay she removed her wed­ding ring and the birth­stone “engage­ment” ring we bought for her after the glass chip feel out of the real one early on in our mar­riage. I kept them on my keyring to return to her when she got out. As the the hos­pi­tal stay length­ened she asked for them back. You know where this is lead­ing right?

Some­where around Day 8 the rings went miss­ing. We weren’t even sure when they actu­ally dis­ap­peared because time was very fluid for some­one tak­ing that much steroid. Best guess is one of the times she took them off that day to put on hand cream, they were laid on the craft tray and some­how got thrown away dur­ing a clean­ing up of scrap paper. The staff was very upset and helped tear apart the room look­ing for the rings, even look­ing in the clean­ing per­sons trash col­lec­tion, but they were nowhere to be found.

We were not that upset, things hap­pen and even though there is that line in the vows, nei­ther one of us felt that los­ing the ring had any sig­nif­i­cance in the over­all scheme of our mar­riage. We have been mean­ing to look into buy­ing a nicer set of rings, maybe even do a major upgrade in qual­ity from the set we could afford when we first started out, but as time passed we came to the con­clu­sion that there was not much sense in that. Donna has started to feel funny with­out any rings on, so we have been keep­ing our eyes out for some­thing that would quasi-match my ring when­ever we went in a store. Last night as we were pok­ing around in Dillard’s look­ing for a pink sweater for Donna we came across a table with some jew­elry on it, includ­ing some rings. Hey look, here’s some­thing that’ll fit the bill, its gold and has a bunch of shiny lit­tle bits around the cir­cum­fer­ence. The size 6 was too small, but the 7 fit just right. And at twenty bucks the price was right. Wait a minute, here is a size 9, I won­der if that will fit my skinny fin­ger. Yep, sure did, we have match­ing rings again. As a bonus the rings came a sets of two, so we have a backup in case one of us mis­places one. Behold, the Tivoli CZ Eter­nity Band Set.

We got up halfway early for a Sat­ur­day and had a nice roman­tic break­fast at the Waf­fle House because noth­ing says love quite like greasy short order food.

Once again, at our clos­est WH, there were more employ­ees than cus­tomers and they were quite bois­ter­ous, but we didn’t let that detract from the expe­ri­ence. When the wait­ress brought over just our dou­ble order of scat­tered and smoth­ered hash browns, as the cook in the back­ground mum­bled some­thing about the waf­fle iron being unplugged, we didn’t let that spoil the mood either (we did get the pecan waf­fle while we still had half the pota­toes left, so really, no harm.) We have vowed that next Valen­tines Day we will drive out by the Inter­state, the Waf­fle House nat­ural habi­tat, to see if we will have a nicer time.

I kid, but Waf­fle House really is on our short list for favorite break­fast places and it should be for you too.

I was clean­ing out some old doc­u­ments from the early 90s on my work com­puter this after­noon. There were even let­ters of res­ig­na­tion from the BMG and Colum­bia House CD Clubs. I came across this that some one had sent me way back when we moved from New Jer­sey to South Car­olina. Repub­lished here as a pub­lic service:

• Save all man­ner of bacon grease. You will be instructed later how to use it.
• If you for­get a Southerner’s name, refer to him (or her) as “Bubba”. You have a 75% chance of being right.
• Don’t be sur­prised to find movie rentals and bait in the same store.
• Do not buy food at the movie store.
• Peo­ple walk slower here.
• If it can’t be fried in bacon grease, it ain’t worth cook­ing, let alone eating.
• The proper pro­nun­ci­a­tion you learned in school is no longer proper.
• Don’t be wor­ried that you don’t under­stand any­one. They don’t under­stand you either.
• Get used to hear­ing, “You ain’t from around here, are you?”
• Remem­ber: “Y’all” is sin­gu­lar. “All y’all” is plural. “All y’all’s” is plural possessive.
• The first South­ern expres­sion to creep into a trans­planted Northerner’s vocab­u­lary is the adjec­tive “Big ol’”, as in “big ol’ truck” or “big ol’ boy”. Eighty-five per­cent begin their new south­ern influ­enced dialect with this expres­sion. One hun­dred per­cent are in denial about it.
• Be advised: The “He needed killin’” defense is valid here.
• If you hear a South­erner exclaim, “Hey, y’all, watch this!” stay out of his way. These are likely the last words he will ever say.
• If attend­ing a funeral in the South, remem­ber, we stay until the last shovel of dirt is thrown on and the tent is torn down.
• Most South­ern­ers do not use turn sig­nals, and they ignore those who do. In fact, if you see a sig­nal blink­ing on a car with a south­ern license plate, you may rest assured that it was on when the car was purchased.
• As you are curs­ing the per­son dri­ving 15 mph in a 55 mph zone, directly in the mid­dle of the road, remem­ber, many folks learned to drive on a model of vehi­cle known as John Deere, and this is the proper speed and lane posi­tion for the vehicle.
• North­ern­ers can be iden­ti­fied by the spit on the inside of their car’s wind­shield that comes from yelling at other drivers.
• The win­ter wardrobe you always brought out in Sep­tem­ber can wait until November.
• Just because you can drive on snow and ice does not mean we can. Stay home the two days of the year it snows.
• If you do run your car into a ditch, don’t panic. Four men in the cab of a four wheel drive with a 12-pack of beer and a tow chain will be along shortly. Don’t try to help them. Just stay out of their way. This is what they live for.
• If there is the pre­dic­tion of the slight­est chance of even the most minus­cule accu­mu­la­tion of snow, your pres­ence is required at the local gro­cery store. It does not mat­ter if you need any­thing from the store, it is just some­thing you’re sup­posed to do.
• Florida is not con­sid­ered a south­ern state. There are far more Yan­kees than South­ern­ers liv­ing there.
• In south­ern churches you will here the hymn, All Glory, Laud and Honor. You will also here expres­sions such as, “Laud, have mercy”,“Good Laud”, and “Laudy, Laudy, Laudy”.
• You can ask a South­erner for direc­tions, but unless you already know the posi­tions of key hills, trees and rocks, you’re bet­ter off try­ing to find it yourself.

We came home from work, packed our bags and packed them in the car because we were head­ing off to HHI for the week­end right after the MMC monthly meet­ing. This month we were meet­ing at Rae’s Coastal Cafe in Augusta and because the food and atmos­phere are so good there we always get a big turn out. Tonight was no excep­tion, there were 15 peo­ple in atten­dance. The Club was no the only large party in the place at that hour either, there were two more (with one right behind us), so the nor­mally quiet place was boom­ing. So much so that con­ver­sa­tion was only just pos­si­ble with your imme­di­ate neigh­bor and only by prac­ti­cally shouting.

Large groups equals long wait for ser­vice and an extended din­ing time, crowded restau­rant equals too much noise to hold a meet­ing, so by the time every­one had fin­ished eat­ing, we regrouped out­side and had a short meet­ing it was well past 8:30. We knew we would get to HHI late, but with at least a 3 hour drive from Augusta we were look­ing a very late night.

Because we were in Geor­gia and the eas­i­est way to get to where we were going was to go back into South Car­olina and pass close by home we chick­ened out and decided to sleep in our own bed.

(28/82) In the flash­backs we see how Hurley’s life changed when he won the lot­tery and on the island we see how it changes when he is put in charge of the food stash found in the hatch.

The MMC’s August monthly break­fast gath­er­ing was at Sweet Lou’s on Broad St. in down­town Augusta. The cof­fee shop nor­mally opens around 9 AM, but our Rally Mas­ters had con­vinced Lou to open up at 7 just for us. He arrived at quar­ter after to find a dozen or so Miata types jonesin’ for some cof­fee. After he opened the shop and start­ing mak­ing cof­fee, we made our­selves at home and dragged his four “out­side tables” onto the sidewalk.

Pic­tures, with more words are in this Flickr Set.

The food was good, but on the way home Donna asked if we would ever eat there again, to which I replied, “Nope.” But I qual­i­fied my answer by say­ing that it was only because it would be a long drive to Augusta just for break­fast, if it was in Aiken we prob­a­bly would add Sweet Lou’s to our rotation.

Today was the MMC’s annual Pool Party and as always at these Miata Club func­tions I con­sumed a lot of food. And even though I par­tic­i­pated in (and won) the Biggest Splash Com­pe­ti­tion, heavy­weight divi­sion, Can­non­ball style, I didn’t expend as many calo­ries div­ing as I took in eating.

I didn’t even break out my cam­era, but some­one else took a bunch and promised to email them around. If any of them cap­tured me mak­ing big splashes in full glory, I’ll post them here for your enjoy­ment, until then, please enjoy this lit­tle ani­mated gif file from the turn of the century.

We didn’t watch the Macy’s Thanks­giv­ing Day parade. We didn’t watch any of the 5 DVDs we bor­rowed (thanks Mark.) Instead, we watched 10 hours of the USA Law & Order marathon with alter­nat­ing episodes of Crim­i­nal Intent and Spe­cial Vic­tims Unit. See as each hour of net­work TV con­sists of only abut 42 min­utes of show, we really only watched 7 hours of L&O with 3 hours of pro­mos for the movie Elf which USA will be show­ing for the next three nights in a row.

Finally over­com­ing our iner­tia, and pos­si­bly pre­vent­ing bed sores from that much time on the couch, we went to the new Wal­mart in town around 8:30PM. We did some pre-post-Thanksgiving Sale shop­ping. Bought presents for the Florida wing of the fam­ily, some stuff that Donna needed (socks and a purse) and some­thing that I didn’t need (Ratatouille.)

Because this Wal­mart has been open for less than 4 weeks, it is still clean and bright. Because we don’t get out much, we mar­veled at the 10′ tall inflat­able San­tas for $29.87 at the gar­den shop entrance. Because this is a new greener Super Wal­mart, in the sec­tion they have those ver­ti­cal frozen food freez­ers with the motion sens­ing lights inside. The high­light of our shop­ping expe­ri­ence was walk­ing down each of the two long frozen food aisles and hav­ing the lights pop on just for us as we approached each unit. Now that is some­thing to be thank­ful for…

…that and we got about a 1/4″ rain this evening.

We were on vaca­tion and did not seek out any Post Offices, but this hap­pened by pure chance. We went into the food store in the same shop­ping ceter.

We expected a Sebring for our con­vert­ible rental in Seat­tle, but ended up in a PT Cruiser. Not a lot of trunk room in it, more than a Miata, but no where near as much space as in a Sebring. It was a smaller car than we nor­mally get, so you would have thunk it would be eas­ier to maneu­ver in tight spots, but you would be wrong. It had the turn­ing radius of a bus, which I guess goes right along with the very high seat­ing posi­tion. I’ve always kind of liked the looks of the PT Cruiser and the con­vert­ible has only 2-doors which I think looks even bet­ter than the stan­dard 4-door ver­sion, but appar­ently it is not as dis­tinc­tive as I thought. On one of our ferry rides we were stopped next to a car load of twenty-something females and the dri­ver asked me what kind of car we were in. I replied, “PT Cruiser.” “Oh,” she says, “I thought it was a Beetle.”

Just over a week ago I was read­ing Ain’t Chicken where Carol was talk­ing about her first spawn and I was sort of jeal­ous. I’ve been blog­ging a year and a half longer than her and I’ve never inspired any­one to start blog­ging. Well, I’m jeal­ous no more, CT started What Do You Drive? last Fri­day and cred­ited me with “inspir­ing” him. I’ve of course linked it in the Miata Blogs sec­tions in the sidebar.

A hazy long term mem­ory made me think that I might have actu­ally inspired another one, but my ini­tial search didn’t turn up any evi­dence. Deeper prob­ing resulted in a con­fir­ma­tion of my orig­i­nal thought, it hap­pened way back in May of 2004 with Rick’s Obses­sion (that link to me in his post is dead by a cou­ple gen­er­a­tions though.)

I’ve also added another cat­e­gory of links for folks who blog that also live in South Car­olina, appro­pri­ately titled, SC Blogs. So far there is only one link, Ran­dom Con­nec­tions, an upstate blog­ger who stum­bled onto me via my SC Post Office page on Flckr. I will prob­a­bly go Googling for oth­ers in the near future.

I know I’ve got way to many loy­alty cards and I’ve only got four. I bet some of you have more than that. Well, I think I have found a solu­tion — Just One Club Card.

1. Choose 8 or less of your favorite clubs cards.
2. Find the bar­code on each club card (usu­ally on the back)
3. Locate the num­bers right under the bar­code and type them into the bar­code num­ber box.(Make sure to include any num­bers to the right or left of the bar code itself, even if they don’t line up with the main row of num­bers.)
4. Choose a store from one of the choices in the “Store” drop­down.
5. When you have fin­ished fill­ing out the boxes, click the “Cre­ate your card” but­ton.
6. Print out the gen­er­ated card and fol­low the instruc­tions to cre­ate a new card con­tain­ing all of your favorite club cards.

I now have my Food Lion, Kroger, Bi-Lo and CVS cards all one one. All that remains is to try it out.

So, what’s in your wallet?

We had our usual quiet New Year’s Eve planned, din­ner with friends early and then return­ing home to watch “The Wiz­ard of OZ” before get­ting into bed, before mid­night. Din­ner was great and if you are ever in Aiken and have a han­ker­ing for some fine Ital­ian food you can do no bet­ter than Olive Oils. The Wiz­ard will wait one more day, because it turns out “My Cousin Vinny” is on FMC right now, in all it’s uncut and uncen­sored glory.

Vinny Gam­bini: What about these pants I got on? You think they’re okay?
Mona Lisa Vito: Imag­ine you’re a deer. You’re pranc­ing along. You get thirsty. You spot a lit­tle brook. You put your lit­tle deer lips down to the cool, clear water — BAM. A fuckin’ bul­let rips off part of your head. Your brains are lying on the ground in lit­tle bloody pieces. Now I ask ya, would you give a fuck what kind of pants the son-of-a-bitch who shot you was wearing?

I just noticed I inad­ver­tently had a streak going and in a lame attempt to keep it going…

Nice drive from Muk­il­teo to Can­non Beach. We took a side trip that resulted in run­ning into a sign that said “No Out­let” on the Kit­sap Penin­sula, but did result in a great break­fast at Aun­tie Barb’s Cafe in Seabeck. I didn’t get to fur­ther test out my Moon=Good Food the­ory in Asto­ria, OR because the Wom­bat Moon Cafe was closed on Sun­day. We ended up at the Sil­ver Salmon instead and while it was not bad, it isn’t worth a spe­cial trip. After lunch we climbed the 164 spi­ral steps of the Asto­ria Col­umn for great views of the mouth of the Colum­bia River area.

We actu­ally made it our home for the next two days, The Ocean Lodge (the photo above), in time for an after­noon nap. We did man­age to wake up in time for a nice lit­tle sun­set behind Haystack Rock and “The Needles.”

It rained. A lot. It rained hard from early morn­ing ’til mid­day, can­celling our plans for walk­ing or rollerblading.

It didn’t can­cel plans for the MMC’s Pool Party. Mainly because the food was already bought and side dishes were already made and lucky for us the peo­ple who have the pool also have a house where we could eat said food. The rain finally quit, but the unsea­sonal cool tem­per­a­tures kept all but 3 out of the pool. Most stayed on the porch play­ing Scrab­ble or just yakking away.

This evening’s wed­ding of a co-worker was indoors so it didn’t mat­ter whether it was still rain­ing, but it wasn’t. After overeat­ing grilled hot dogs, ham­burg­ers and desserts at lunch, the thought of another food extrav­a­ganza quite lit­er­ally turned our stom­achs, so we skipped the recep­tion and went to Chick-Fil-A for din­ner. As luck would have it we saw a cou­ple peo­ple we knew in the restau­rant and when they asked about our natty attire, we replied, “We always dress up on Sat­ur­day night and go out to Chick-Fil-A for dinner.”

Tonight was the August edi­tion of the MMC Monthly Meet­ing. We met at a NASCAR themed restau­rant, Kinsey’s Auto Grille, in down­town Augusta that would like to be known as a BBQ joint. They have been in busi­ness since May and are still some­what behind the learn­ing curve when it comes to run­ning a restau­rant. The food was ter­rific when it got to the table…

We told them that we would have 12 to 20 and we split the dif­fer­ence with 16 peo­ple in atten­dance. They only had two wait­resses to run the whole restau­rant and it wasn’t enough because there were about 2 dozen other folks there to go along with us. The was a big buf­fet set up in the back and we had to plead with our server to tell us about it. French fries arrived cold. Orders arrived back­wards from when they were placed and one got lost entirely. We might give them a try in a few months and see if they have got­ten better.

Thanks folks. We appre­ci­ate the thoughts…and know if you were closer would prob­a­bly be like some of our co-workers from Human Resources and Account­ing who showed up last night with enough food to feed the incom­ing fam­ily (and then some.) Tonight we expect the sec­ond wave of rela­tions and the sec­ond wave of food from the the peo­ple who work in Donna’s department.

Through the mar­vel that is the Inter­net: Bar­bara Morrinson’s Online Obituary