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I Got My Wish, Sorta

Back in Novem­ber I posted:

Terry Fran­cona, the ex-Red Sox man­ager, announced today that he was not going to try to man­age in 2012. Cool, maybe FOX will hire him to replace Tim McCarver.

Tim McCarver is still announc­ing on FOX, but Mr. Fran­cona has basi­cally swapped jobs with Bobby Valen­tine and he now will be broad­cast­ing on ESPN’s Sun­day Night Base­ball and will also serve as an ana­lyst on their Base­ball Tonight show too.

Whatever

They are now play­ing NFL games on Thurs­day night, but you can’t watch it unless you have the NFL Net­work. It wasn’t a big deal last week, but tonight I have a player going, Plaxico Bur­ress, a wide receiver for the NY Jets. How the heck am I going, be able to root for ol’ num­ber, er, hold on, let me look up his num­ber, 17, that’s it. Go seventeen!

Terry Fran­cona, the ex-Red Sox man­ager, announced today that he was not going to try to man­age in 2012. Cool, maybe FOX will hire him to replace Tim McCarver.

Hollywood’s next “new” idea, remake the Mun­sters. It will pos­si­bly be a sum­mer series on NBC and won’t be a tra­di­tional sit-com, but a visu­ally spec­tac­u­lar hour-long pro­gram. I’m guess­ing Brad Gar­rett as Herman…

I’m think­ing on open­ing a Face­book account so I get get some free porn because I can’t find any­thing like that any­where on the internet.

Pink, Purple, Tito & Missing Yankees

Enough already with the pink. I can relate to the sen­ti­ment, but when NFL quar­ter­backs star wear­ing hot pink shoes, it has gone too far.

The Pur­ple Whales bounced back from their loss last week by knock­ing off one of the two remain­ing unde­feated teams in the End Zone Entourage FFL, thereby pulling back into a first place tie in the West­ern Division.

Maybe because I’m a homer, but I thought ex-FRS man­ager, Terry Fran­cona didn’t sound half bad as a color com­men­ta­tor dur­ing the first two games of the Amer­i­can League Cham­pi­onship Series.

When I turned on the first game of the ALCS I thought for sure I had stum­bled onto some sort of wild­card game. Detroit? Texas? Where were the Red Sox, Rays or Heaven for­bid, even the Yankees?

122,000 Moments Of Disappointment

That is about how many times I’ve been dis­ap­pointed with the Red Sox this sea­son. There won’t be any more of them until next year though, as last night, as they have done most of all of Sep­tem­ber, they man­aged to grasp defeat from the jaws of vic­tory in the late innings to a team they should have beaten. This pretty much sums it up.

While on a short trip to top off the Emperor’s tank for a week­end trip, it passed through the 122,000 mile mark.

F&$!#% Red Sox

Right now, from where I’m sit­ting the FRS have really earned their F. They have lost the first of two against the Yan­kees today and Tampa Bay has won their game, so what once was a 9–1/2 game lead in the AL Wild Card 3 weeks ago is now just a 1/2 game. If the Red Sox lose the evening game they’ll be tied for the last play­off spot with just three games to go. And what with the way they are play­ing, I’m look­ing at my evenings being free after Wednesday.

Beckett’s Epic

The Sox are play­ing the Texas Rangers in Texas tonight and ESPN2 is kind enough to be show­ing the ball game. I have com­plained here before about the length of the Red Sox games, but tonight is one for the ages. Josh Beck­ett is on the mound for the FRS and he is what the announc­ers politely call delib­er­ate, but you and I would call it slow, a lot slower than the other Sox pitchers.

The game has been going for just a lit­tle under 2 hours and we are exactly mid­way through at 4-/2 innings. May be look­ing at a 4 hour game. Because it is in Texas the nor­mal start time was to be 8:10 East­ern, but was moved up to 7:10 for TV. Good thing too or I’d already be think­ing shower and bed, now I’ll prob­a­bly get to see another inning and a half…

Geez, Could You Speed It Up A Bit?

5–1/2 innings or only 61% of tonight’s game and it has taken 2 hours and 20 min­utes to play. The score? One to one. This puppy is going to be over around mid­night or approx­i­mately 1 hour after I’m in bed because I’m tak­ing a shower as soon as this half inning is over.

Brief Glimpse

As noted yes­ter­day, FOX did show the Phillies — Giants game here locally. I can under­stand it though, as the “local” MLB team of inter­est is the Atlanta Braves and they are in the same divi­sion as the Phillies, so the Braves fans could watch and root against them (they bet­ter root hard as the Braves trail the Phils by 9 games in the standings.)

So I lis­tened to the game on the radio, all except for an inning of the Sox — Yan­kees game that FOX broad­cast as bonus cov­er­age. That bonus cov­er­age was due to the dif­fer­ence in the style of play in the two dif­fer­ent leagues, the National League tan­gos and the Amer­i­can League waltzes. The Phillies and Giants are in the NL and those guys play like they have some­place that they want to go to after the game. Their game was fin­ished in 2 hours and 14 min­utes. The Yan­kees & Red Sox play are in the AL where it seems like they have no place they would rather be than on the base­ball dia­mond, so it took them 3 hours and 25 min­utes to play those same nine innings.

The FRS scored first, 2 runs in the bot­tom of the third inning. The MFY came right back and scored 2 in the top of the fourth to tie the game. I almost turned off the broad­cast because because I had a feel­ing that the Red Sox were going to lose this game too. Lucky for me their atti­tude was bet­ter than mine as the Sox then answered back in the bot­tom of the 4th with 5 runs. The Yan­kees never got close again and lost 10–4.

Donna and I along with friend Joan went for a 4–1/2 mile walk in Hitch­cock Woods this morn­ing. We were in the Woods for a lit­tle over two hours and saw 2 dif­fer­ent peo­ple walk­ing 2 dogs each, three high school cross coun­try run­ners and three folks on horse­back. Busy day.

Am I Fan Enough?

Its a show­down at the Fen­way Cor­ral and I can’t stand it. We went gro­cery shop­ping tonight and when I got home the Sox were up 2 to 0 on the Yan­kees. My wife said, “Your team is win­ning, you should be happy.” But as a life­long Red Sox fan I know that doom is just around the cor­ner and sure enough, the very next inning the the MFY scored three runs and are now in the lead.

I gave up on the FRS last night when they were down by three with three chances to make it up against the Indi­ans. I’ll hang on tonight with three innings left because they are down by one and because it is the Yan­kees, but I don’t know if I can stand it much longer. The pitch­ing is killing me. They just walked the num­ber 9 hit­ter after get­ting two outs. Come on, the #9 bat­ter is in that part of the order for a rea­son, he’s the weak­est hit­ter in the line-up, quit nib­bling the cor­ners and throw the ball in there. The offense isn’t help­ing mat­ters either, in the fifth inning they had the bases loaded and the “best” hit­ter in the Amer­i­can League, Adrian Gon­za­les, struck out. In the sixth the tying run was left on sec­ond base and in the seven they went down one — two — three.

After tonight’s audi­ble tor­ture, I’m in for some visual tor­ment­ing the next two days as the games will be on TV, FOX on Sat­ur­day after­noon and* because the game will be ESPN on Sun­day night.

* Just checked the TV List­ings online and it looks like the local FOX affil­i­ate will be show­ing the Phillies — Giants game. Maybe it will be rain­ing in San Fran­cisco tomor­row afternoon.

Baseball All-Star Ballot

Ever since, like the end of the first two weeks of the sea­son, when­ever you visit the home page of your favorite Major League Base­ball® team there has been a sec­tion ded­i­cated for vot­ing for the All Star Game. This is long before you know if any­one is going to have a good year or not, but any­way it might shake out, great, good, aver­age or sucky, they want you to vote a straight ticket of home­town players.

About 2 weeks ago they added this lit­tle image to the back­ground of the home page. So not only do they want you to vote for every­one on your favorite team, whether they suck or not, they now want you to vote for every­one on some other team in the other league no mat­ter their worth too. And how did they deter­mine the pair­ings? Red Sox & Giants? I checked about another half dozen teams home­pages and no oth­ers have this ban­ner align­ing them with an oppo­site league team. Is this an exper­i­ment to see if has any appre­cia­ble dif­fer­ence in the vot­ing for either team’s players?

Well, for the first time in recent mem­ory, I decided to vote for the play­ers to go to the All Star game. I did not vote the straight Red Sox ticket (although 3 FRS play­ers did make the cut), nor did I vote the straight Giants ticket (I voted the No Giant ticket.)

Sunny Day

It was a sunny day here, but it is a rainy night in New York, so the base­ball game is in a rain delay. I just checked the radar and it looks like it will clear up enough to play ball start­ing after 10:00 PM. That means the game should get over around 2:30 AM. Guess I’ll be read­ing about it in the morning.

Watching The Sawx

The FRS and the MFY are play­ing a three game series in the House That George Stein­bren­ner Built. Tonight’s mid­dle game of the set is being shown on ESPN. Usu­ally I like to watch with the game muted and lis­ten to the home­town WEEI radio broad­cast off the net, but tonight one half of the usual Red Sox announc­ing team, Dave O’Brien, is doing the play by play, so I’m keep­ing the TV sound on (even though I can’t stand the color guy, X-Sawx player, Nomar Garciaparra.)

Like last night, the FRS started out with 3 runs in the first inning and then built on it. Last night they won the game 6–3 and it was inter­est­ing to the end. Tonight they built a 7–0 lead, but then gave up 4 in the sixth. To quote an ex-Yankee, Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over”.

I wish I could quote a cou­ple of stats that were men­tioned ear­lier in the game by the announc­ers, but they went some­thing like this: In the last 500 games these two teams have played the wins stand at Red Sox, 250; Yan­kees, 250. Total runs, Red Sox, 840; Yan­kees, 841. Another hall­mark of this rivalry is the length of the game in time and I bet there is some­body in the ESPN TV that knows the fig­ure, but tonight we have played 6 inning (2/3rds of the game) and it has been 2–1/2 hours since the first pitch.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 1031

I Still Got Nothing

But if I don’t post for more than 2 days I get angry letters…

The above pic­ture is from last Sunday’s Geor­gia geo­caching adven­ture and tonight after the MMC monthly meet­ing we walked a block over to find a newish cache and drop off the Travel Bug we grabbed near where that pic­ture was taken, all we took from the cache was a plas­tic coin that looks a lit­tle like pirate trea­sure, which reminded me that last night I watched the mid­dle two thirds of TDPM, com­mer­cials and all, on the ABC Fam­ily Chan­nel and the day before, Tues­day, my man­ager told me he had seen the fourth install­ment, On Stranger Tides, over the week­end and it was the best of all the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, but I can’t really trust his judge­ment because he is a New York Yan­kee fan and because the FRS have lost the last three games in a row after tak­ing over first place in the Amer­i­can League East Divi­sion the MFY are now back in first by two games.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 1025

Sorry I Said Anything

I guess I was right last night when I said the only thing keep­ing the Angels from beat­ing the FRS was the rain because after the rain delay the Angels ended up win­ing the game in 13 innings at 2:38 AM this morning.

Today it would have been mer­ci­ful if MLB had the 10 Run Rule as Los Ange­les beat Boston 13 to nothing.

The Emperor got a work­out tonight as we took it over to Augusta for the monthly MMC Din­ner where a brief meet­ing broke out.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 1008

1,000 Raindrops

The Sonata passed the thou­sand mile mark on its way to DD this morn­ing in an inter­mit­tent rain.

If you stick around on a page here for more than 10 sec­onds you will notice that I have indeed added a photo of the Pur­ple Whale to the ban­ner. I cheated and just “pho­to­shopped” it over the top of the Emperor. I’m not sure I like it for a few of rea­sons, 1) the sud­den blast of blue in an oth­er­wise maroon and gray page, b) the cars rel­a­tive scales and iii) it looks photoshopped.

It looks like the only thing that can keep the Red Sox from beat­ing the Angels is the rain. It is tied 0–0 in the 5th inning at Fen­way and the tarp is on the field. Look­ing at the Weather Chan­nel map the rain will taper off about 11:00 PM, so if they do play this I’ll be read­ing about it in the morning.

120,000 Hondas!

Yes­ter­day the Brian & Donna Buy A New Car Tour came east both phys­i­cally and fig­u­ra­tively. But first a cou­ple of house clean­ing issues.

1) Yes­ter­day I men­tioned the Red Sox were 2 and 10 after their win, but they were actu­ally 3 and 10. After today’s 8 to 1 win over Toronto they still have the worst record in base­ball at 4 — 10, but jumped to sec­ond to last in run differential.

2) Some­where near River­watch Park­way and I-20 on the way home from Augusta yes­ter­day the Emperor eased past the 120,000 mile mark. That is an aver­age of 1.85 miles for every hour we’ve owned it.

Our last car test drive event was over in Augusta and con­sisted of all Korean cars, yes­ter­day we stayed closer to home and shopped Japan­ese at Honda Cars of Aiken. And while there actu­ally were only 106 new Hon­das on the lot, it seemed like there were 120,000 to choose from. As we walked through the show­room door we were instantly greeted by some­one and we said we were there to test drive a cou­ple cars. He said he was a man­ager of some sort and he would get us a sales­man. True to his word, within sec­onds, Brad arrived and asked what were we inter­ested in. We wanted to drive a Civic Coupe and an Accord Coupe. Brad asked what color and we told him it didn’t mat­ter as long as it was a base LX model, but when we buy one it’ll be blue. He came back in less than five min­utes with a dealer plate and a key (we like this expe­ri­ence bet­ter already.)

First up was a Civic in Royal Blue Pearl. This is the smaller car and the equiv­a­lent to Hyundai’s Elantra and while not nearly as swoopy in styling it is still a nice look­ing car. We are both instantly 100% more com­fort­able in it than the Elantra. Right legroom for me as the dri­ver is accept­able, but the left leg is stopped short by the dead pedal (which should be easliy reme­died by just tak­ing it out.) There is a large dig­i­tal speedome­ter above and for­ward (almost a HUD) of the large tach and other gauges, inter­est­ing and slightly quirky. We start our drive and I take a turn off US1 towards Gran­iteville and at the stop sign I ask what is con­sid­ered a rea­son­able test drive. Brad replies from the back, “What­ever you want.” I briefly con­sider a left turn up Chalk Bed Rd, but Donna says we need to cross some rail­road tracks (a convertible’s neme­sis), so I take a right and drive through “down­town” Gran­iteville. This is a great test because along with those rail­road tracks there is one sec­tion of road that prob­a­bly started life as con­crete sec­tions, like those found on some inter­states, so we got to drive over all those seams, cluh-thunk, cluh-thunk, clu-thunk. Each tran­si­tion is felt and heard in the car, not as rough as a Miata, but def­i­nitely inex­pen­sive, small car-like. Over­all we both like the car, it is small, but really the right size for us. Donna is almost sold, but I have a cou­ple of reser­va­tions. Includ­ing the very lame, “They are too com­mon.” On any given day, there are prob­a­bly 150 cars in our com­pany park­ing lot and 3 or 4 recent vin­tage Civic Coupes and at least twice as many as that of Civic Sedans.

Next up we drive an Alabaster Sil­ver Metal­lic Accord Coupe. For a car that appears to dwarf the Civic, the inte­rior room in the front of the Accord feels exactly the same size as the Civic (and the num­bers bear it out.) The dash is more my old school lik­ing in that there are a two large cir­cu­lar ana­log gauges (tach & speedo) sur­rounded by a temp and fuel gauge with an odome­ter in the mid­dle bot­tom. The extra 600 pounds of this car make drive through bumpy Gran­iteville much smoother and qui­eter, more what I was look­ing for in a new car. That extra 600 pounds of the Accord over the Civic is almost exactly off­set by the 50 extra horse­power it has, so the seat of the pants accel­er­a­tion feel is about the same. Nei­ther is prob­a­bly much quicker than the Miata in a straight line, but there is not the same sense of speed as in the open topped car (which is both good and bad.) When we get back to the dealer I pull it along side the pre­vi­ously dri­ven Civic. Donna jumps in the driver’s seat of each car for cru­cial short dri­ver test. Amaz­ingly she feels she has a bet­ter sense of the know­ing where the front of the larger Accord is com­pared to the Civic. We look inside at each trunk and just like in the inte­rior, there doesn’t appear to be any more room in the Accord’s than the Civic and the Civic’s is shaped bet­ter. We both like this car too, me more than Donna.

We thank Brad pro­fusely and take home a Civic and an Accord brochure along with two of his busi­ness cards, one for me to call if we decide on the Accord and one for Donna to call if we opt for the Civic.

It is a tough call between the two. We both like the looks of the Civic bet­ter and the Civic’s blue is nicer shade too. The Civic is the right size car and really all we need. As a plus it is $5k less in price, but to me it rides much chop­pier and nois­ier, sort of like it is $5k less. Now, com­par­ing the Accord Coupe to the Gen­e­sis Coupe, is where the whole thing falls apart. The Hyundai is about the same size car, but doesn’t look as bloated. The Gen­e­sis is a rear wheel drive with 210 HP and because it is turbo charged, a much flat­ter torque curve with the peak appear­ing at half the RPM of the Accord. The Gen­e­sis Coupe is a sports car and the Accord Coupe is a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 998

Pretty Much How Things Are Going

Even with today’s win the Red Sox still have the worst record in Major League Base­ball at 2–10. They also have the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing the worst run dif­fer­en­tial in the Majors (mean­ing both the Amer­i­can & National Leagues) at minus thirty. That means they have been outscored in those 12 games by 80 to 50. Those 80 runs allowed are also the high­est in the bigs, which means our pitch­ers prob­a­bly have the high­est team ERA. Indica­tive of the FRS’s sea­son so far, today I received my Red Sox Nation packet and it was inside a small plas­tic bag with the fol­low­ing label:

WE CARE
Dear Postal Cus­tomer:
We sin­cerely regret the dam­age to your mall dur­ing han­dling by the Postal Ser­vice. We hope this inci­dent did not incon­ve­nience you. We real­ize that your mail is impor­tant to you and that you have every right to expect it to be deliv­ered in good condition.

Although every effort is made to pre­vent dam­age to the mall. occa­sion­ally this will occur because of the great vol­ume han­dled and the rapid pro­cess­ing meth­ods which must be employed to assure the most expe­di­tious dis­tri­b­u­tion possible.

We hope you under­stand. We assure you that we are con­stantly striv­ing to improve our pro­cess­ing meth­ods in order that even a rare occur­rence may be eliminated.

Please accept our apolo­gies.
Sin­cerely.
Your Postmaster

At least the Mem­ber­ship card sur­vived intact…

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 998

Well, I Feel Better Now

The FRS can’t lose tonight, they got rained out. They can’t lose tomor­row night either because of a reg­u­larly sched­uled day off.

But what really has turned around my dour atti­tude was that the War­lock has spo­ken: “It’s a long sea­son and there’s a ton of tal­ent there and a really bitchin’ hit­ters park they play in. Relax.” Thanks Char­lie, I really feel bet­ter now.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 994

Why Bother?

It is halfway through game #11 and the FRS are los­ing 3–0, fast on their way to being 2 and 9 to start the season.

At first I thought it was kind of com­i­cal that the team that many pre­dicted to be the best in the majors stum­bled out of the start­ing blocks, but now it is not so much funny as it is depress­ing. Their fan­tas­tic pitch­ing staff has appeared more like lit­tle lea­guers and their fear­some bat­ting lineup has only about two of them bat­ting more than their weight.

I know, I know Mark, I should have faith and believe that it is till pos­si­ble to fin­ish the sea­son at 154–8, but right now it is kind of hard to believe that they won’t fin­ish dead last in their divi­sion. Right now the only bright spot is that they lead the MFY 2 to 1 in the sea­son series.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 993

Oh, This Twinkie Thing, It Ain’t Over Yet


Mirabeau Blue Gen­e­sis Coupe

Bike rode to pay our bills (cable, water, power & doc­tor) this morn­ing and ended up at Atlanta Bread Com­pany for break­fast. Maybe tomor­row I’ll tell the paper cup story.

This after­noon I fixed some­thing, which is a rare occur­rence around here. Last time I went to use the leaf blower it wouldn’t go. The gas line from the tank to the “car­bu­re­tor” was bro­ken. It had dried out and cracked in a cou­ple places. We found a kit at Big Box Home Store and I man­aged to replacethem with­out too much trou­ble. I did have to enlarge one hole in the plas­tic tank to fit one of the plas­tic tubes through. There appears to be a minis­cule bit of leak­age at that point, but I doubt it cre­ates any hazard.

With that repaired, I pro­ceeded to blow the oak pollen clus­ters off the roof and back deck. Donna then took over and cleaned the front walk and dri­ve­way. While she did that, I fin­ished hos­ing the pine pollen off the screened porch, so that maybe we can enjoy our din­ner out on Monday.

Tonight I’m watch­ing the Red Sox — Yan­kees game on ESPN, but lis­ten­ing to it on the WEEI off the ‘net. I’ve tried sev­eral times in the past to do this, but the audio and video never lined up. Tonight, for some rea­son, they are in sync.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 992

Dog Gone It

Gozque — Span­ish for small yap­ping dog.

The Red Sox finally won a game. The start­ing pitcher for the FRS gave up 6 runs in 7 innings and low­ered his ERA by nearly 10! As a bonus the 9 –6 win came against the dreaded Yankees.

We rode the tan­dem to work today and it was a great ride. It is Spring Break around here for the schools and it is amaz­ing the amount of traf­fic that elim­i­nates. Dur­ing school time we see maybe a dozen cars, but today we were lucky if we saw 3.

My dab­bling in Ubuntu Linux, will always be just that, just dab­bling. Late last night I dis­cov­ered that you can­not stream Net­flix in Linux. Plus I should read my own posts…back last Octo­ber when I loaded it on the lap­top I real­ized that my most used Geo­caching pro­gram doesn’t have a Linux version.

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 990

Oh & Five

Colum­bus: It’s amaz­ing how fast the world can go from bad to total shit storm.

9:45 PM
I sit down at the PC and check on the FRS score — ooh, only los­ing 3 to 2 in the sixth, we’re still in this one.

By the time I get logged into Game­day Audio the Indi­ans have scored another run, it’s now 4 to 2.

Why, oh why, MLB.com, when I click the audio but­ton on the web page of the Boston Red Sox do I get the Cleve­land radio announc­ing team. You would think if I’m on the FRS page I would get the WEEI crew of Joe Cas­tiglione & Dave O’Brien.

By the time the audio player is loaded and I have changed broad­cast­ing teams, I hear like two pitches called and then on the third pitch some moke for the Tribe hits it into the right field seats with two run­ners on base. 7 — 2.

9:50 PM
I close the Game­day Audio player and open up Winamp to lis­ten to the sooth­ing sounds of GotRa­dio New Age Nuance.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 988

9–5 12–5 5–1

We got our base­ball pre­view issue of Sports Illus­trated last week and guess which team they picked to win the Amer­i­can League East? The Boston Red Sox. They picked the Red Sox to beat the A’s in the Divi­sion Series and the Sox to beat Twins to win the Amer­i­can League and play the Giants in the World Series. Who did they pick to win the World Series? Right. The Red Sox. SI isn’t the only ones singing the praises of the Boys from Bean­town this year either.

Maybe the play­ers believed with all that good press and they would just have to show up to crush their ene­mies, see them dri­ven before them­selves, and to hear the lamen­ta­tion of their women! Or maybe they for­got that this sea­son started before the first week­end in April not after it. But for what­ever rea­son, the FRS were soundly beaten by the Texas Rangers in the first three games of the sea­son by a com­bined score of 26 to 11 (see post title.)

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 986

Best of 2010

Jan­u­ary

Hi, I’m Zeke And I’ll Be Tak­ing Care Of You

Sun­day the 10th

After a pleas­ant after­noon geo­caching we decided to eat out for din­ner. Because a cou­ple of our favorite haunts are not open on Sun­day we set­tled for a third tier option, Chilis. They have that 2 for $20 thing going on which we had enjoyed at one in States­boro, GA on our way back from Florida at Thanks­giv­ing. This din­ing expe­ri­ence wasn’t as good as that one, but that is a whole ‘nother post.

While wait­ing for Zeke to bring our drinks, Donna spot­ted an appli­ca­tion book­let on the table to join their E-mail Club. They ask for your birth­day, so we fig­ured maybe you get a free mar­garita or some­thing on your spe­cial day. Trou­ble was we didn’t have any­thing to right write with, so we asked Zeke if he’d lend us a pen. We both filled one out and handed them and the pen back when Zeke brought our appetizer.

As we fin­ished our desert Zeke asked if we wanted any­thing else, when we replied in the neg­a­tive, he dropped off our check and dis­ap­peared. Trou­ble was, he didn’t leave us a pen. I eye­balled the receipt and noticed that it was that thin glossy stuff, almost almost like old time fax paper, and thought, I bet this is pres­sure sen­si­tive. I grabbed the salad fork, which I hadn’t used, turned it back­wards and test wrote the total on the *guest copy*, with the han­dle. It worked, it was a lit­tle light, kind of like I signed it in pen­cil, but fully legible.

Zeke returned a few sec­onds after I had fin­ished fill­ing out the charge slip and said, “Did I for­get to leave you a pen?” “Yep,” I replied, “But not to worry, I signed it with the fork.” He was so stunned than he for­got to say thanks for din­ing with us or hurry back or what­ever the cor­po­rate man­dated server’s last line is.


Feb­ru­ary

A Case of Atten­tion Deficit Disorder

Mon­day the 15th

I haven’t blogged much about the actual rea­son we are in the hos­pi­tal for sev­eral rea­sons, Donna isn’t as excited to share the inti­mate details as I would be, the spotty inter­net con­nec­tion and the lack of free time allot­ted the assis­tant lay nurse of a sick per­son. But I will shared my favorite story of the past week. Treat­ment for her type of col­i­tis is the steroid solu-cortef. The steroid amps you up and in Donna’s case on the sec­ond day kind of turned her into a 5-year old kid with a case ADD. To counter act this the doc­tor pro­scribed Xanax, an anti-anxiety med­i­cine, and it has calmed her some, but not entirely.

While on the clear liq­uid diet she was drink­ing all sorts of flu­ids, but she always kept her favorite three at hand on the bed table, water, cran­berry juice and diet gin­ger ale. Each fluid had its own lit­tle sty­ro­foam cup which she would have me write the flu­ids name in three or four places along the top edge of the cup. She would line them up in a straight line for­ma­tion. Directly behind the cup marked water was the large hos­pi­tal sup­plied plas­tic mug which the staff kept full of ice and water, directly behind the gin­ger ale was the small 8oz can of soda and lastly right behind the cran­berry juice glass were stacked the 4oz plas­tic con­tain­ers of juice. Each cup had its own sep­a­rate straw. After each drink from the cups, some­times one right after the other, she care­fully arrange them back in straight lines.

This morn­ing after we got all the cups arranged and filled with the appro­pri­ate com­bi­na­tion of fluid and ice she looked down at the row of drinks and frowned. When she looked up at me I asked, “What’s wrong?” She looked at me and said, “My straws don’t match.” Sure enough, there were two yel­low straws and one white one. I went over to her neatly arranged bed stand picked out a match­ing yel­low straw.


March

With This Ring I Thee Wed

Wednes­day the 31st

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.


April

Lit­tle Boy Blue

Thurs­day the 1st

The Folks in the MMC don’t know it yet, but tonight is Donna and my last Club meet­ing. Reg­u­lar read­ers will remem­ber that a cou­ple months ago I was vir­tual car shop­ping, well we have decided on a car. It was not on the orig­i­nal list in either cat­e­gory because it fell out­side the the­o­ret­i­cal bud­get limit, and if recent events have taught us any­thing it is you only live once, so you might as well enjoy your­self while you can.

The local dealer didn’t have what we wanted, but a quick search turned up almost a per­fect match, satel­lite radio instead of the Ip Odd inter­face, in Charleston, SC. We will be able to pick it up on Fri­day at Tay­lor BMW in Augusta. With trad­ing in the Emperor, $2k addi­tional down, we ended up financ­ing $28,000 @ 3.95% or $475 a month for the next 6 years…

Meet Lit­tle Boy Blue: a BMW 128i Con­vert­ible.


May

Iron Man 2

Sun­day the 16th

My rants about this movie the other week turned out not to be as big an issue as I imag­ined. The intro to the Stark Expo was still a lit­tle long, but taken in con­text not all that bad. The race scene/suitcase suit grip dis­ap­peared because Whiplash didn’t just wait for it watch­ing, he was pinned to the side wall by Happy dri­ving a Rolls Royce. Mickey Rouke makes an awe­some vil­lain. I don’t under­stand why they change the open­ing bit from the trailer wher Tony jumps out of the plane unless they though it might spoil the the end­ing bit. I thought it would have been a per­fect way to tie that together…

Scar­lett Johans­son looks good in black hair and her chem­istry with RDJ leads me to believe she would have made a good Pep­per Potts had not Gwyneth Pal­trow already had a lock on that role. But the whole Black Widow bit seemed tossed in as an intro to the char­ac­ter and for the sex appeal of the suit (not that there is any­thing wrong with that.) But if rumors are cor­rect and the Black Widow gets her own movie, I think I feel a repeat of Cat Woman or Elek­tra com­ing on.

There is more action in this one, some dan­ger­ously close to being too much (and/or too long), but all and all very sat­is­fy­ing. Man I need one of those suits…

Two impor­tant lessons can be learned from this movie, 1) do not ever let a Russ­ian near your com­puter, both the males and females seem to be trained hack­ers that can break any encryp­tion thrown at them and 2) (this one I already knew) a con­vert­ible is as good as a pick up truck on a sunny day.

Brian gives it 2 thumbs up and Donna says I owe her a Julia Roberts movie.


June

Frus­tra­tion

Tues­day the 1st

While return­ing from Hen­der­son­ville on Sat­ur­day after­noon I wit­nessed the true def­i­n­i­tion of frustration.

We were zip­ping along south on I-26 some­where south of Spar­tan­burg with Donna at the wheel and me watch­ing the world go by at 70 MPH. Up ahead I could see three turkey buz­zards right on the edge of the shoul­der mov­ing back and forth towards the road. One would take a cou­ple steps towards the right lane and then quickly hop back. Then another would do the same thing. When we got right next to them I could see what was going on. There was a small piece of road­kill about 2 feet into the right lane and after a car passed, one bird would take a few steps towards what it con­sid­ers food, he would get about 5 feet from a tasty morsel, then another car would approach mak­ing it hop back to safety. Trou­ble was, traf­fic was fairly light and there were sin­gle cars in the right lane spaced evenly about 200′-300′ apart, so there was never enough time to get a nib­ble safely.


July

Morn­ing Bobby

Tues­day the 13th

Sev­eral years ago it seemed like there was an abun­dance of peo­ple by the name of Robert who worked at The Valve Store™ and as a joke, myself and another coworker would always say, “Morn­ing Bobby”, when we’d pass each other for the first time each day. His name is Joey and mine is, well duh, Brian, but we got a kick out of it.

Over the years the num­ber of Roberts waned, Jims took over the top spot, yet we still kept up the ‘Morn­ing Bobby’ rou­tine. The num­ber of folks named Jim hasn’t dimin­ished any, but Bobs have made big advances again recently. My imme­di­ate super­vi­sor is named Bob and his boss is named, yep, you guessed it, Bob. To dif­fer­en­ti­ate between them they are some­times referred to as Lit­tle Bob and Big Bob respec­tively. Our lat­est Indus­trial Engi­neer is also a Robert and usu­ally went by Bob, but I think as a con­di­tion of employ­ment, he had to will­ing to be known as Rob to avoid fur­ther confusion.

With them ceas­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing at the home office in Florham Park, NJ we have had a few folks from up there make the tran­si­tion to work­ing here in South Car­olina. The last two to join us are both named Bob.

Joey and I will may just start say­ing, “Morn­ing Bobby”, when­ever we pass any­body, because we will have a real good chance of being right.


August

OW!

Sun­day the 8th

Some­times I don’t even heed my own advice.

Nearly 2 years ago I posted here that one shouldn’t use a string trim­mer with­out wear­ing long pants. That time I came away with a speck­led leg from the dirt and tiny stones kicked up by fish­ing line rotat­ing at sev­eral thou­sand RPM. This time it is much worse.

Today when I cleaned off the front porch using the leaf blower I noticed a few strands of ivy creep­ing their way towards the house. I went and got the trim­mer which was freshly loaded with some of that heavy duty red string stuff. As I made mince meat of the ivy I could feel a few things ric­o­chet off my legs, but then sud­denly I for­got all about my lower extrem­i­ties because some­thing grabbed me by the right ear and lifted me off the ground. OW! I must have pissed off a wasp and it stung me on the back of the ear.

It is 4 hours later and my ear still hurts worse than that time in sec­ond grade when Bobby Mitchell punched me in the head because I stuck my tongue out at him dur­ing recess.


Sep­tem­ber

I Can’t Believe I’m Still Listening

Sat­ur­day the 4th

I must be a real fan. As of this morn­ing, depend­ing on which ver­sion you believe, the FRS play­off chances stood at 3, 4 or 5%. That was before the Yan­kees won their game today and the Sox lost the first game, post­poned by Earl from last night and will likely lost tonight’s reg­u­larly sched­uled game (they are los­ing 3–1 in the 7th.)

As much as I enjoy the cof­fee (and the cof­fee cake muf­fin) from Dunkin’ Donuts I fear they may have lost our busi­ness for­ever this morn­ing. We should have taken the hint. On our way into the place this morn­ing we passed a car with a fel­low in the dri­vers seat talk­ing very loudly to him­self, or rhetor­i­cally to his pas­sen­ger inside the store, say­ing, “How long does it take to get a dou­ble cof­fee?!?” There were three employ­ees with only three cus­tomers, so it shouldn’t have taken too long, but some­how it did.

One asso­ciate, because of the head­set, must have been the drive-up per­son, who’s job descrip­tion read, “Do not leave the win­dow for any rea­son, even if there are no cars in line. And when you are not busy please feel free to carry on a per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion with your fel­low employ­ees to aid in the dis­rup­tion their pro­duc­tiv­ity.” Employee num­ber 2 was the main counter per­son and was either very new at the job or only used to deal­ing with humans via tex­ting or stoned and hav­ing a hard type com­plet­ing a com­plex order that con­sisted of three cof­fees. To be fair, this per­son was deal­ing with some­one who had either never been in a Dunkin’ Donuts before or never ordered cof­fee or was hun­gover. The third per­son dressed in a pink polo shirt with DD embroi­dered in brown on their right breast was prob­a­bly the “cook” and tried to help out the sec­ond per­son in line (whose part­ner was out­side with steam escap­ing his ears and pos­si­ble think­ing of dri­ving his 15 year old pur­ple Dodge Neon through the front win­dow), but was stymied by the request for iced cof­fee and the unex­pected return of cus­tomer num­ber 1 to ask where they kept the “to go” sugar. We took this oppor­tu­nity to leave the store.

We headed back across town at a small fam­ily restau­rant called Aut­ens that we had been mean­ing to try for some time. We ended up spend­ing a bit more money there and the cof­fee was noth­ing spe­cial, there were three really nice sur­prises. First was they offered a salmon cake as a meat side, which Donna ordered, and I sam­pled, which was very good. The sec­ond was instead of hav­ing “home fries” as the alter­na­tive to grits they offered some­thing called potato scram­ble, which turns out to be, I’m guess­ing, last nights mashed pota­toes with some but­ter mixed in and fried on the grill into a sort of pan­cake. Thirdly, our wait­ress was Evan­ge­line Lilly who was pos­si­bly doing research for her next movie. She is a lit­tle younger look­ing than she seemed on TDTVS and her freck­les were cov­ered by makeup, but it was her alright.


Octo­ber

Sorry I Doubted You James

Mon­day the 4th

Oh, about a month or so ago, we had vis­i­tors and one of those vis­i­tors was a 3 year-old nephew named James (Hi James.) One of the things we had to amuse said 3 year-old was a book about air­planes. It wasn’t just any ol’ sta­tic book about air­planes, it came with lit­tle card­board repli­cas of planes that needed to be put together and had the advan­tage of being capa­ble of flight. Not real aero­dy­namic flight mind you, but by brute force. Each plane replica had a small notch on the bot­tom of the “fuse­lage” that you hooked the rub­ber band of the included prim­i­tive sling­shot thingie into and then pulled back as far as your mighty 3 year-old arms would go before let­ting loose launch­ing the plane into the wild blue yonder.

James and uncle Brian spent a few enjoy­able hours over the course of a cou­ple of evenings “fly­ing” planes in the back yard. One evening James launched the B-2 bomber with a mighty tug and it soared off in the direc­tion of our mimosa tree and I didn’t see it come back down. He said it was stuck in the tree. I couldn’t see it, so I fig­ured it had come down in the neighbor’s yard. James insisted that he could see it and wanted me to go up and get it. I just knew it wasn’t there, so told him I would get it, but I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a tall enough ladder.

Tonight as I walked under­neath the mimosa tree on the way to the shed to get out the lawn mower and leaf blower so Donna and I could do a lit­tle lawn main­te­nance, I looked down on the ground and this is what I saw:


Novem­ber

Obit­u­ary For A Printer

Tues­day the 16th

Friends,

It is with much sad­ness that I inform you of a beloved co-worker’s pass­ing yesterday.

PRVLAK_DFT_H4V_01 suc­cumbed to a “50 Ser­vice” error. PRVLAK_DFT_H4V_01 or as his friends called him, Laser­Jet 4V, was 16 years old and for the first 15 years of his life he was a robust and reli­able fel­low who printed each and every one of the over a quar­ter mil­lion pages with glee. Last year age finally caught up with him requir­ing a tricky fuser trans­plant. Shortly after his full recov­ery from that ordeal, his 11 x 17 paper tray needed to be ampu­tated because of wear. Three weeks ago with his rare life blood toner run­ning low, it was dis­cov­ered that sup­plies of this pre­cious com­mod­ity were no longer avail­able through nor­mal chan­nels. Unfor­tu­nately the non-FDA approved toner from South Amer­ica did not arrive in time to save his life.

PRVLAK_DFT_H4V_01 is sur­vived by his big brother PRVLAK_DFT_HDJ800 and his cousin PRVLAK_ENG_HP4650. Funeral ser­vices are being han­dled by Safety Clean and will be pri­vate. In lieu of flow­ers please send Sta­ples gifts cards.

Brian Bog­a­r­dus
Arts & Crafts Engi­neer
ASCO Valve Man­u­fac­tur­ing
a facil­ity of ASCONUMATICS
part of the Indus­trial Automa­tion Divi­sion of Emer­son Elec­tric Cor­po­ra­tion
located in beau­ti­ful Aiken, SC, USA


Decem­ber

Worst BBQ Ever

Sat­ur­day the 4th

We went geo­caching today in Craw­fordville, GA and A.H. Stephens State Park. We took along a coworker and because the Miata does not seat 3 com­fort­ably we took her car. Craw­fordville is where Hol­ly­wood comes call­ing when it needs to film in a quin­tes­sen­tial small south­ern town. There have been about a dozen films that have used this town as a bit player in them and there are 8 caches here with names that are the titles of those movies. We looked for 4 and found 2. The two we missed I don’t count as DNFs because they were in loca­tions that made us very ner­vous search­ing which was only height­ened by the fact that we were dri­ving a car with New Jer­sey plates. There were 6 caches in the state park that you can get to by land and we found 5 of them.

Prob­a­bly the most rec­og­niz­able movie that was filmed in town was “Sweet Home Alabama” and for lunch we decided to eat at the BBQ place that was used in the bar scenes (Stella’s Road­house) of the movie. We were talked into get­ting the Plate by the almost surly woman behind the counter at Heavy’s as it included meat, brunswick stew and coleslaw. We opted for a rib plate and a chicken plate to split between the three of us. The coleslaw was too vine­gary and had way too much pickle taste. The “stew” was run through a food proces­sor for too long as it was kind of a sickly look­ing brown mush. The only thing remotely edi­ble was the meat and that was over­pow­ered by the amount of BBQ sauce it was cov­ered in. Inter­est­ing place to visit, but you don’t want to eat there.


No Buck & McCarver

I’m watch­ing Game 2 of the World Series with the TV sound muted and lis­ten­ing to the Texas Ranger’s radio broad­cast­ers through MLB Game­day Audio. Unlike when I tried this trick with the FRS a cou­ple of times dur­ing the reg­u­lar sea­son the audio and video are very close to match­ing up, prob­a­bly less than a sec­ond, so it is entirely bearable.

There is an arti­cle on Dead­spin on how to sync up the audio and video. In my case the video is slightly ahead of the audio, so my fix to per­fectly sync them up is to use a DVR, which I don’t have (good thing it is close.) If your audio is ahead of the video there are sev­eral ways to sync them up using some soft­ware and maybe some cabling depend­ing on your audio setup requirements.

As a bonus, the jux­ta­po­si­tion of the audio from one com­mer­cial over the video of a dif­fer­ent one makes the between innings gaps a lot more interesting.

Silenc­ing Joe Buck And Tim McCarver: A Sim­ple Tech Solu­tion To Our Crappy World Series Announcers

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 876

Citgo Sign

Even though the Sox’s chances of mak­ing the play­offs are extremely thin*, I still believe. And back just in time off the dis­abled list to help them make that run to the post sea­son is, Citgo Sign, the out­side the park left fielder.

*Any­where from 1.6%to 4% accord­ing to baseballprospectus.com. Although they are sink­ing fast as we speak because the FRS are trail­ing the Blue Jays 7–2 in the 5th inning.

Tonight, along with Take Me Out To The Ball­game, 218,000 new LED lights will once again illu­mi­nate the night above the Green Mon­ster after 2 months of darkness.

Started down, went up, back down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 830

SAD

Post­ing here has been a lit­tle slack recently. I have sev­eral excuses lined up, includ­ing my nag­ging lit­tle back ache, the slight dis­so­cia­tive feel­ing from the pain pill for said back ache, com­pany swarm­ing the nor­mally quiet home in Dun­bar­ton Oaks and, I know this will be hard to believe because of my usual excit­ing life, noth­ing blog­wor­thy has hap­pened. But in all real­ity it is prob­a­bly Sea­sonal Affec­tive Dis­or­der.

Not in the clas­si­cal def­i­n­i­tion though as the days, although short­en­ing a lit­tle each solar time seg­ment, have not become short enough for that, but the real­iza­tion that your favorite base­ball team’s sea­son is over. While not math­e­mat­i­cally elim­i­nated, the FRS really haven’t had a legit­i­mate shot at mak­ing the play­offs for last three weeks at least. Base­ball Prospec­tus has their odds of mak­ing the post sea­son at 2%, but there is still hope. We still have 6 games left with the MFY and if Tampa Bay can beat them a major­ity of 5 games they have left with them…

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 823

Swimming Pool

I’m in the din­ing room area of the Fair­field Inn lis­ten­ing to the FRS and watch­ing Four Christ­mases. I’m not sure what is worse, the WiFi recep­tion in the pool area or the movie. Donna, her brother Scott, his wife Beth and their two munchins are splash­ing around in the minia­ture indoor pool. I started there to be polite, but the lousy WiFi and the humid­ity forced me into a hotel com­mon room, where there was some­one loung­ing on the couch watch­ing this two year old Christ­mas Turkey on HBO.

The Sox started out good with 2 runs in the bot­tom of the first. Tampa tied it up in the top of the 3rd and have now taken the lead on a bases loaded walk in the fourth. I maybe be head­ing back to the pool…

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 820

I Can’t Believe I’m Still Listening

I must be a real fan. As of this morn­ing, depend­ing on which ver­sion you believe, the FRS play­off chances stood at 3, 4 or 5%. That was before the Yan­kees won their game today and the Sox lost the first game, post­poned by Earl from last night and will likely lost tonight’s reg­u­larly sched­uled game (they are los­ing 3–1 in the 7th.)

As much as I enjoy the cof­fee (and the cof­fee cake muf­fin) from Dunkin’ Donuts I fear they may have lost our busi­ness for­ever this morn­ing. We should have taken the hint. On our way into the place this morn­ing we passed a car with a fel­low in the dri­vers seat talk­ing very loudly to him­self, or rhetor­i­cally to his pas­sen­ger inside the store, say­ing, “How long does it take to get a dou­ble cof­fee?!?” There were three employ­ees with only three cus­tomers, so it shouldn’t have taken too long, but some­how it did.

One asso­ciate, because of the head­set, must have been the drive-up per­son, who’s job descrip­tion read, “Do not leave the win­dow for any rea­son, even if there are no cars in line. And when you are not busy please feel free to carry on a per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion with your fel­low employ­ees to aid in the dis­rup­tion their pro­duc­tiv­ity.” Employee num­ber 2 was the main counter per­son and was either very new at the job or only used to deal­ing with humans via tex­ting or stoned and hav­ing a hard type com­plet­ing a com­plex order that con­sisted of three cof­fees. To be fair, this per­son was deal­ing with some­one who had either never been in a Dunkin’ Donuts before or never ordered cof­fee or was hun­gover. The third per­son dressed in a pink polo shirt with DD embroi­dered in brown on their right breast was prob­a­bly the “cook” and tried to help out the sec­ond per­son in line (whose part­ner was out­side with steam escap­ing his ears and pos­si­ble think­ing of dri­ving his 15 year old pur­ple Dodge Neon through the front win­dow), but was stymied by the request for iced cof­fee and the unex­pected return of cus­tomer num­ber 1 to ask where they kept the “to go” sugar. We took this oppor­tu­nity to leave the store.

We headed back across town at a small fam­ily restau­rant called Aut­ens that we had been mean­ing to try for some time. We ended up spend­ing a bit more money there and the cof­fee was noth­ing spe­cial, there were three really nice sur­prises. First was they offered a salmon cake as a meat side, which Donna ordered, and I sam­pled, which was very good. The sec­ond was instead of hav­ing “home fries” as the alter­na­tive to grits they offered some­thing called potato scram­ble, which turns out to be, I’m guess­ing, last nights mashed pota­toes with some but­ter mixed in and fried on the grill into a sort of pan­cake. Thirdly, our wait­ress was Evan­ge­line Lilly who was pos­si­bly doing research for her next movie. She is a lit­tle younger look­ing than she seemed on TDTVS and her freck­les were cov­ered by makeup, but it was her alright.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 817

I’m Not Watching Or Listening

I was watch­ing the MFY play Oak­land on ESPN, but that was short lived as the Yanks took a lead in the 1st inning, so I quit watch­ing that. I didn’t quit watch­ing in time though as I caught the ticker on the bot­tom of the screen report­ing that Bal­ti­more was already up 4–1 on the FRS in their 1st inning.

How can my lip be numb from the pain pills, but I have a sore throat today? (instead of yesterday’s headache)

Can’t fig­ure out what car? Here’s a hint:

Now if they can get their steer­ing issues worked out…

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 811

Now I Shouldn’t Be Listening

Last night the FRS had the night off and still lost ground in the stand­ings (both Tampa & NY won.) Tonight they are get­ting their butts kicked by the sec­ond worse team in Major League Base­ball. I hear the Fat Lady warm­ing up.

You can’t even notice, but I updated the theme for the blog. Tomor­row I may even update the ver­sion of Word­Press I’m run­ning. Try and con­tain yourself.

How can you still have a headache when you are tak­ing Ultra­cet for back pain?

We have pretty much decided to keep the cur­rent Emperor’s Dynasty going by buy­ing a new grown-up car next year. Take a guess what the lead­ing com­peti­tor is? And no it is not a Mini…

Started down, went up, back down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 809

I Can't Watch

The FRS on on ESPN tonight and I can’t watch.

I’m sit­ting here lis­ten­ing to the game in front of the PC. This is the 3rd and final game in this series against the Tampa Bay Rays who are one of the teams ahead of them in the Sox’s road to the play­offs. They really needed to win all three of these games and they started right by win­ning Fri­day, but they lost last night. On Fri­day there were only 34 games left in the sea­son and the Red Sox were 5–1/2 games behind both the Rays and the MFY. That means they will have to win 6 more games than either one of those two teams to make the play­offs. If the Yan­kees and Rays play at the same pace they have so far this year they will fin­ish those remain­ing 34 games at a record of 21 wins and 13 loses. So to pull ahead the FRS will have to play 27–7 ball, and while that pace is not impos­si­ble, it is highly improbable.

Accord­ing to Base­ball Prospec­tus the Red Sox’s chances of mak­ing the play­offs, as of this morn­ing, stood at 18%, 13.5% or 7.5%, depend­ing on which ver­sion of their “play­ing the rest of the sea­son a mil­lion times” you believe, reg­u­lar, ELO or PECOTA. And they find them­selves in the posi­tion that either Tampa, Bal­ti­more or Toronto has been in for the last decade, play­ing good enough base­ball to make the play­offs except for the fact that the Yan­kees and them­selves were in front of them.

Update: After last night’s loss the FRS odds of mak­ing the play­offs now stand at 11%, 10% & 4.5%

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 806

Happy 15th Birthday Windows 95!

Task bars & email & short cuts, OH MY!

Funny, I don’t remem­ber this video included in my copy of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Prob­a­bly because I had the 13 floppy disk ver­sion of it. I have thought­fully cued the video up to the 1:45 mark so you can get right to the worlds first Cyber Com­edy star­ring Jen­nifer Annis­ton & Mathew Perry. Let me know how many sec­onds you can take of it. My buddy Mark was still using 95 to run the CNC pro­gram upload/download sys­tem in the back of the plant until just about 6 months ago.

Its rain­ing in Bean­town so the FRS’s game against Seat­tle was post­poned, they’ll play two tomor­row. This means quite pos­si­bly they will lose ground in the stand­ings with­out even play­ing a game.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 802

111,000 Ways To Be Disappointed

We did our gro­cery shop­ping this evening and on the way to Kroger the Emperor passed the 111,000 mile mark. By the time we got home and I checked on the Red Sox they were los­ing nine to noth­ing after three innings. Didn’t bother to waste my time lis­ten­ing to the game, so I went into the liv­ing room and Donna and I watched the eighth and last episode of Series 1 of Life on Mars.

After that, hop­ing for some sort of mir­a­cle come­back I checked in on the FRS and was excited to see that they had scored two whole runs, unfor­tu­nately the Blue Jays had scored 7 more runs mak­ing the final score 16–2.

Oh, and Dustin Pedroia’s return to the start­ing line up lasted all of three games, he went back on the dis­abled list today. I don’t know what they will have say over at Base­ball Prospec­tus tomor­row, but I’m mark­ing down the Sox’s chances at the play­offs at about 10%. (This morn­ing they stood at 20%)

Go Rays!

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 798

Like Lindsay Lohan Coming Out Of Rehab

Today’s strip of the Sox­a­holic cen­ters around a cou­ple FRS fans chat­ting on the phone about how now that the Sox are start­ing a nice home stand after a rocky road trip they should have an eas­ier time catch­ing Tampa and mak­ing the play­offs. In the sec­ond to the last panel one says to the other, “We’re kid­ding our­selves aren’t we?” The punch­line in the last panel is this post’s title, “Like Lind­say Lohan com­ing out of rehab.”

The way they have been play­ing lately I haven’t been kid­ding myself. Often when you are watch­ing a base­ball game you can pick the win­ner, some­times it is really obvi­ous, like one team hav­ing an eight run lead, while in close games the win­ner can be fore­told by the intan­gi­bles, line dri­ves just squeak­ing by field­ers or bloops land­ing just out of reach, etc. This can be extrap­o­lated to whole sea­sons as well, and in this Red Sox sea­son they just can’t catch a break (as long as you don’t count Jacoby Ellsbury’s ribs.) Accord­ing to the math wiz­ards over at the Base­ball Prospec­tus, as of today, the FRS only have a 26.98664% of mak­ing the playoffs.

Today at work I ver­bally threat­ened to stop lis­ten­ing to them to a cou­ple peo­ple, but I guess I’m too much of a fan to jump off the band­wagon because here I am in front of the PC lis­ten­ing to the WEEI broad­cast. And right now I’m glad I did because they are beat­ing the Angels 6–0 in the sixth.

Also I might have totally missed a rar­ity in the base­ball world. If you have ever been to a minor league base­ball game, invari­ably the PA guy will play the sound of break­ing glass when a player fouls a ball out of the sta­dium towards the park­ing lot, so the crowd will think the ball broke a car win­dow. Well tonight, Red Sox out­fielder, Dar­nell McDon­ald hit a home run over the Green Mon­ster in left field and actu­ally did break a win­dow in a car parked on Lans­downe Street. Quick think­ing announcer Joe Cas­tiglione, after mak­ing the home run call said, “I guess he is going to have to call 1–800-GIANT,” giv­ing radio broad­cast spon­sor Giant Glass, who’s slo­gan is, “Who you gonna call when your wind­shields busted?” an extra, but very appro­pri­ate plug.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 791

Zombieland

This is the expla­na­tion for those of you with puz­zled looks on your face over the post titles this past week.

Last Mon­day the FRS had a day game, so in the evening, while Donna surfed her usual cook­ing, home or real­ity shows on TV, I decided to watch a movie from my Net­flix queue. This movie was there because sev­eral of my co work­ers had seen it and were talk­ing it up as some­thing I just had to see, so to appease them I added it. Now I don’t watch a lot of mon­ster movies to begin with and zom­bie ones are even at the bot­tom of that pile, but once I got watch­ing it though, I was hooked. And it turns out it is more of a road trip slash geeky guy wins heart of attrac­tive female romance flick than a zom­bie movie. Plus nobody told me it was a comedy!

The nar­ra­tor of the movie is a col­lege stu­dent that cred­its his sur­vival of the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse to the strict adher­ence of a set of rules, which is where the last 7 titles came from. Not all the rules are actu­ally in the movie, some came from trail­ers and other pro­mo­tional items, and the list is not com­plete. I guess that is why they are going to make a sequel. So we can know what Rule #5 is and #10 and so on.

01. "Cardio"
02. "Double tap"
03. "Beware of bathrooms"
04. "Wear seatbelts"
06. "Cast iron skillet"
07. "Travel light"
08. "Get a kickass partner"
12. "Bounty paper towels"
15. "Bowling Ball"
17. "(Don't) be a hero"
18. "Limber up"
21. "Avoid strip clubs"
22. "When in doubt, know your way out"
29. "The buddy system"
31. "Check the back seat"
32. "Enjoy the little things"
33. "Swiss army knife"

On a side note, I thought that the lead actor/narrator, AKA Colum­bus, looked famil­iar and it turns out I had just seen him in another movie a cou­ple of weeks prior. The title of that movie was called Adven­ture­land. I won­der if every movie he will be in will have some­thing­land in the title? And Lit­tle Miss Sun­shine is grow­ing up nicely.

As long as you don’t have a weak stom­ach, sorry Donna, I rec­om­mend you see Zom­bieland. At least once.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 789

TV Is Winning

I haven’t been post­ing or a cou­ple rea­sons, but the main one is I can’t seem to find the time. I’m watch­ing too much TV. On Mon­day their is House from 8–9. then at ten there is the orig­i­nal Law & Order and Cas­tle which get watched via tor­rent on Tues­day. Tues­day evening we watch the L&O and Cas­tle before watch­ing TDTVS at 9. Tues­day at 10 is The Good Wife and L&O:CI on USA which get delayed until Wednes­day. Wednes­day at 10 is In Plain Sight which get watched on Thurs­day before Flash­for­ward (which some­times gets delayed until Fri­day.) And as always there is a Net­flix disc with a movie and another disc with a TV show (cur­rently Life) that need watch­ing too.

It has got­ten so bad that I haven’t even been lis­ten­ing to the FRS on the inter­net (which as it turns out is a good thing because they seem to be win­ning when I’m not lis­ten­ing.)*

I’ve got plenty of stuff to post about, but by the time I get around to it a lot of the details will have leaked out my ears and won’t be avail­able to make the story more than a tweet length. The only rea­son you are get­ting this on today is I’m bored at work with a very repet­i­tive job and needed a break before I nod­ded off in my chair.

*As if to prove my point, the FRS had an after­noon game today and I lis­tened to it at work. They lost 3–2 to Toronto.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 630

Stolen Thunder

Because it is Patriot’s Day the FRS game started at 11:05 AM this morn­ing. By 11:08 they were los­ing by one run. At the end of the third inning they were trail­ing by eight.

I had an idea for tonight’s post, but before I start­ing writ­ing I did my usual check of select links from the side­bar and there it was in the sec­ond panel of today’s Sox­a­holic, I’m not the only one think­ing it.

Started down, went up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 600

The Dead & The Wounded

The the past week or so, maybe longer, the wheel on mouse of the desk­top PC was act­ing up. When you scrolled down it would jump and jit­ter, some­times huge chunks of pages. Scrolling up it was fine…so Sat­ur­day we went to Sta­ples and bought a new mouse. We opted for a corded mouse for a cou­ple of rea­sons, its eco-friendly (no dead bat­ter­ies fill­ing the land­fills) and cheap at twenty bucks. As a bonus it had a PS2 adapter which I used so as to free up a USB port and now I don’t have to crawl under the desk and swap out the cables for the web cam or scan­ner depend­ing on which one I need at the moment.

Today while sit­ting on the screened porch lis­ten­ing to the FRS get­ting their hats handed to them 7–1 by the Tampa Devil Rays the cord­less mouse on the lap­top quit work­ing. 6 weeks and kaput. The cute lit­tle receiver which barely sticks out of the USB port was HOT to the touch. Just to be sure I swapped the AA bat­tery out of the mouse with a dif­fer­ent one, I tried the receiver part in another port on the lap­top (I had to pull it out with a pair of pli­ers it was so hot) and tried it on the desk­top PC and it still didn’t work. Guess I’m going back to Sta­ples tomorrow.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 598

Best of 2009

Jan­u­ary

Really Expen­sive Pedometer

Wednes­day the 14th

Over the years to keep track of how far she walks Donna has tried umpteen dif­fer­ent pedome­ters. We started cheap (because how tech­ni­cal can they be?), like six bucks. Well those pup­pies aren’t too accu­rate, it really seemed to mat­ter that it was on a cer­tain point of your waist to get a decent read­ing, but a lot of times even if you put it right where it was yes­ter­day, it wouldn’t work. We tried dou­bling our price point with no improve­ment. We have even tried one that was like $25 and the results were just as disappointing.

She has tried them while at work, walk­ing around the block and hik­ing in the woods. Occa­sion­ally the mileage recorded seemed like it might be close, but mostly it was way, way, off. The work tally would be inter­est­ing because she really does do a lot of trav­el­ing around the plant in her job. The after work mileage is eas­ily com­puted because we can use the bicy­cle com­puter to repli­cate the route, but the woods walks are harder. The map we use is marked with a grid and the lines are 1000′ apart, so she has been esti­mat­ing the mileage by approx­i­mat­ing the windy trails to the grids cov­ered and divid­ing by 5280. Not too accurate.

The other day when we came out from our walk in the woods she said, “I wish there was a bet­ter way to see how far we have walked.” I said, “I know one sure way.” “What?” “A GPS,” I replied.

Our Garmin eTrex Ven­ture HC arrived today.


Feb­ru­ary

Red Shirt

Mon­day the 2nd

Although orig­i­nat­ing in Star Trek, the term “red­shirt” has been used in com­men­tary on other action adven­ture sto­ries, par­tic­u­larly seri­al­ized tele­vi­sion. As a plot device, red­shirts are most com­monly used on shows which focus on char­ac­ters who are promi­nent mem­bers of a larger group. In terms of plot func­tion, red­shirts serve to high­light the dan­ger of a sit­u­a­tion with­out forc­ing writ­ers to sac­ri­fice lead characters.

Feb­ru­ary is National Heart Month and this com­ing Fri­day is Wear Red Day 2009 to sup­port the fight against heart dis­ease in women.

For what­ever con­vo­luted rea­son our com­pany nurse decided to pass around a memo last week to try and get every­one to wear red today, Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 2nd and in spite of what hap­pened to Frogurt while wear­ing a red shirt in last week’s episode of TDTVS I took my life into my hands and wore a red sweater to work today. Obvi­ously because I am home sit­ting on the couch in a yel­low shirt, noth­ing bad hap­pened to me on today’s “away mission.”


March

Giant Metal Squirrels

Thurs­day the 12th

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.


April

Key­stone, SD

Mon­day the 13th

1365 miles from home.

We have been as far away from Aiken as we will be on this trip and also the far­thest north, both of which occurred today. Now we start to work our way south. Up until this after­noon it has been cloudy or rainy or cold or some com­bi­na­tion of all three, but around mid­day blue sky started to show up, so now we are just down to cold, but just at night the days should be pleas­ant (about like early Feb­ru­ary for Aiken.)

Speed­ing north on I-25 in Wyoming yes­ter­day there was a large quan­tity of black ani­mals off to the west, at first we thought they were cows, but then real­ized they were buf­falo. At the posted speed limit of 70 MPH they were gone from view before my synapses could reg­is­ter that maybe I should take a picture.

Speed­ing east on Wyoming 24 this morn­ing they was a large quan­tity of small black ani­mals not far off the road to our right, at first we thought they were goats, but then real­ized that they were wild turkeys. At the posted speed limit of 65 MPH they were gone from view before my synapses, etc.

The deer up here are fear­less. They stand along the side of the road graz­ing and pretty much ignore us. That ignor­ing thing works both ways though, as there are quite a lot of dead ones along the road too.

So far I am 0 for 2 when ask­ing for Coke in a restau­rant, they have had Pepsi, which I have politely declined.

Dev­ils Tower is awe­some. On the way up the rain was spo­radic and occa­sion­ally the clouds would thin out enough that we would almost need sun­glasses, but mostly the skies were gray. I told Donna that I thought it would be cool if I could get a shot of the thing with the top half shrouded in clouds. She didn’t want that at all, she was hop­ing for a nice blue sky. Turned out we both got our wish.


May

Kamakazie Kricket

Fri­day the 15th

I was just out in the garage giv­ing the Emperor a lit­tle sponge bath in prepa­ra­tion for tomorrow’s MMC event when I spot­ted a cricket watch­ing me. I’m not even pos­i­tive crick­ets have eyes, but this one sure seemed like it was giv­ing me the once over. There were sev­eral large splats on the nose of the car that I was Quick Detail­ing off and maybe this cricket felt I was being dis­re­spect­ful of a dead rel­a­tive or something.

It was no ordi­nary cricket either, it was big one, about the size my friend Mark might use as bait while fish­ing for kayak sized cat­fish. Well, all that star­ing kind of unnerved me a lit­tle, so I slipped off my sneaker and moved slowly that direc­tion to flat­ten Jiminy out.

In some places it is believed if you kill a cricket it is bad luck, but with the way my luck is run­ning recently, who would notice. I’ve also heard that if kill a cricket it’ll rain, but with the weather we’ve had, and are pre­dicted to have, who would notice.

As I swung my Nike with deadly intent at our giant cricket, it leaped out of the way at the last minute. Did he jump away from me, no, he jumped AT me!

I am proud to say that I didn’t squeal like a lit­tle girl as it bounced off my arm, then my chest and then who knows where. I did how­ever flail my arms and upper body around in a pathetic attempt to get away like an unco­or­di­nated spaz who just stepped on a banana peel.


June

When The Going Gets Tough…

Fri­day the 19th

…the tough go shopping.

The FRS were on TV tonight because they were play­ing the Braves and if you live in the south every Braves game is on TV. The Red Sox had their 13 Tril­lion Yen Man (Daisuke Mat­suzaka) pitch­ing and there was much excite­ment in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun because he was fac­ing off against the Brave’s Japan­ese starter Ken­shin Kawakami. Both guys have had rough starts to the sea­son, but tonight’s rough start award went to Boston’s Dice-K as his first pitch of the game was belted into the bullpen for a home run. Then it went down­hill from there. By the end of the 5th inning the Sox were down 6–0, so we went out to do our weekly gro­cery shopping.

For the sec­ond time in seven days we have left a store leav­ing our selected pur­chases behind.

I got in a check­out line behind what I thought was a woman who was nearly fin­ished as she had a full cart and about a dozen items left on the belt. After unload­ing 2/3rds of the cart onto the nearly empty belt I real­ized it hadn’t moved and there were now two cashiers fid­dling around at the scan­ner. I think they were try­ing to take an item off the woman’s order, they’d swipe some­thing and the machine would boop and they’d both look up at the screen in uni­son, shake the heads, repeat. After the forth time I think it worked because one cashier left and the remain­ing one scanned another item and then imme­di­ately start­ing ask­ing for the first cashier to come back. It was now becom­ing clear that she didn’t know what she was doing. And it also became clear that the shop­per was sep­a­rat­ing the final 10 items into 2 sep­a­rate orders and she had a pay­check to cash or maybe a sub­stance check and that we were going to stand­ing here awhile. There was one other check out line open, but there was no way that I was off load­ing the belt to put it in my cart to move over two slots. We looked at each other, shrugged and headed for the door.

We drove a mile down the street to another store, prob­a­bly spent $25 more dol­lars than we would have at the first store, but we were in and out and on the way home like we should have been at Store #1.

The game was mer­ci­fully over by the time we got back, both teams each scored 2 unevent­ful runs, so they FRS lost by a score of 8–2. They play each other twice more over the week­end, so it is not too late to save face.


July

Pay­Pal Bonus

Wednes­day the 22nd

A cou­ple weeks ago I had an unau­tho­rized charge show up on my Pay­Pal account. I only had a lit­tle over $10 in there, the charge amounted to about $35 and because my check­ing account was linked, they took the over­age from it. I dis­puted the charge with both Pay­Pal and the mer­chant and they both agreed I was wronged, so my money was returned with in a cou­ple days.

I basi­cally only use Pay­Pal for an occa­sional eBay pur­chase, but in the past I’ve used it for snap deals found on the net, so a credit card is also linked. After dig­ging through the Pay­Pal help pages I dis­cov­ered that they could do an instant trans­fer from my check­ing because I had that CC listed as a back-up source. Want­ing to ensure that they couldn’t just yank money out of my check­ing account again, I removed the credit card.

Well, because some­one had used my account with­out per­mis­sion Pay­Pal had me do a cou­ple of things before they would let me access my money again. One of which was change my pass­word and another was to change my secu­rity ques­tions. Both were no brain­ers and easy to do.

The third thing they wanted was to con­firm my address. This was the sticky one. The easy way to con­firm my address was to link a charge card to my account. Nah, don’t want to do that, that’s what got me in this mess in the first place. There is another way, Pay­Pal could mail a code to my snail mail address that I could, when received, enter into their site. Trou­ble was I didn’t meet the require­ments for this option, because I had a dis­pute within the last 3 months.

I stewed for a week fig­ur­ing out what I should do.There were no wor­ries about any­one get­ting any money out of the account dur­ing this time because it was frozen while we con­firmed my address. The plan I came up with was to con­firm with a credit card and then once I had access to my money, pull it all out and close the Pay­Pal account.

To make sure that the card, and con­se­quently my address, were good they were going to charge the card $1.95 and then promptly refund it. I for­got all about the whole thing until about 5 days later when I got an email from Pay­Pal say­ing they were giv­ing me a bonus. I thought, wow, that’s nice, must be to make up for the has­sle I’ve been through, they added a dol­lar ninety five into my account.

Hey, wait a minute!

I checked my CC online and sure enough they had no trou­ble with­draw­ing money, but they never refunded the card. They turned around and cred­ited my money into my Pay­Pal account and called it a bonus.

That cinched it, I trans­ferred my measly $60 back into my bank and I’m shut­ting down my Pay­Pal account.


August

I Know It When I See It

Wednes­day the 5th

Let’s talk porn, in honor of my two recent posts on the sub­ject thanks to io9, the scifi (not syfy) site I read every day. They are part of net­work of sites that cover var­i­ous sub­jects, one of which is about the biggest money maker on the net, porn. So every time there is any­thing remotely about sci­ence fic­tion over on Flesh­bot it gets cross posted on io9.

At my age pornog­ra­phy has lost a lot of its lus­ter. Notice I didn’t say all of it, I’m not above check­ing out some of the posts on Flesh­bot when io9 links them, but I don’t have the site book­marked or any­thing. There is noth­ing like that first thrill of find­ing your dad’s Play­boy at 12 or sev­eral years later a friend dis­cov­ers some black and white 8mm stag films in his base­ment. When I was in the Navy there was a co-worker who knew where you could get XXX on VHS. On Sat­ur­days I would carry my VCR over to his house and we would both make a copy a movie. He was try­ing to amass a col­lec­tion, I was just using the same tape and copy­ing over last weeks movie.

It was the last six months in the Navy that removed most of the lus­ter off of porn for me. My final duty sta­tion was aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima as an E6, or Petty Offi­cer First Class. We had a 1st Class Mess, which was basi­cally a small room on the Mess Deck, where we could eat our meals, take a coffee/smoke break or just spend our down­time read­ing or play­ing Acey Duecy. There was a TV mounted in high up in one cor­ner of the room, so we could watch Armed Forces TV. The TV also had a VCR attached so we could watch movies. There was a selec­tion of cur­rent releases if you were inter­ested, but by far the largest col­lec­tion of tapes were of the XXX variety.

Who ever the guy was that was in charge of movies really liked the hard core stuff. Every, and any, time you went into the mess that cor­ner of the room was filled with inces­sant moan­ing and close ups of gen­i­talia. Try to eat eggs over easy and sausage links at 5 AM or hot dogs at lunch with that going on in the back­ground, it sort of takes the plea­sure out of both activities…


Sep­tem­ber

Covey of Cachers

Fri­day the 4th

I mean that not in a avian way, but in a Dead­head or Phish Fol­low­ers way. These are a few of ingre­di­ents that were stir­ring around in my sub­con­scious lead­ing to last night’s final dream:

1. Attend­ing the June CSRA Geo­cachers meet­ing where there were 60–70 peo­ple.
2. Read­ing the logs of caches where it seems like some folks travel in packs from 6 to 12 or more and do big quan­ti­ties of finds in a day.
3. A brief con­ver­sa­tion with a cache owner when I returned his ban­ished from SCDNR land ammo can.
4. A short scene from the last movie we watched, Invis­i­ble Cir­cus.
5. I ate too much junk from the Ryan’s Mega Bar the night before.
6. Wak­ing a 4AM to go to the bath­room, thus leav­ing enough time to get back into deep REM sleep before…
7. …being jolted awake mid dream so the last snip­pets were fresh in my brain.

We were out caching on a South Car­olina back road and had just logged a find. Donna was sit­ting in the car plan­ning our next des­ti­na­tion and I was walk­ing the short dis­tance into the woods to replace the ammo can. Donna shouted, with a slight bit of alarm in her voice, “Brian!” I hastily tossed some pine straw over the cache and started out of the woods. I can see what caused her state. There parked on the other side of the road from where we were was a bus that looked like it came from a scene in The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And out of the bus piled dozens of peo­ple aged from 8 to 80 in odd dress that looked like it was bor­rowed from J.F. Sebastian’s man­u­fac­tured com­pan­ions in Blade Run­ner. There was jug­gling, a uni­cy­cle rider, tam­bourine play­ing, etc. As I got closer I rec­og­nized the faces, they belonged to geo­cachers from the local Club. Just as I was cross­ing the street to intro­duce myself to one of these char­ac­ters with a Cyrano de Berg­erac nose when the alarm went off.


Octo­ber

Talk­ing Birds

Fri­day the 23rd

1. This morn­ing we stopped on the way to work to take some cash out of the ATM. Donna sat in the car, I walked up to the build­ing and inserted my card into the machine. For every but­ton I push on the ATM it emits a pleas­ant lit­tle beep.

Donna could hear some birds off to the right in a lie of hedges between the bank and a home. She also heard what she thought was a dif­fer­ent bird com­ing from the big tree near the ATM where I stood.

Donna heard the birds on her right move over towards me and the other bird. At the same time, as I wound down my trans­ac­tion, I heard a cou­ple of very noisy birds so close that it sounded like they were in the ATM alcove with me.

The birds I heard were in the tree not the ATM alcove and the dif­fer­ent bird she heard in the tree was my ATM but­ton presses. So, did the beep­ing ATM talk those birds into mov­ing from the hedge into the tree?

2. On our lunch time walk as we passed the car we could hear a crow in a tree in the pas­ture next to the plant, “Caw, caw. Caw, Caw.”

The Weather Chan­nel was call­ing for a 30% chance of evening show­ers, so we had left the top down with the cock­pit cover on, but the skies were now look­ing kind of dicey. As we walked, we dis­cussed whether or not to just put the top up. I thought that it was prob­a­bly going to be OK with it down as the clouds didn’t like like big rain pro­duc­ers, but I was not real certain.

As we neared the car on the way back, that same crow was still speak­ing loudly, “Caw Caw! Caw Caw!” It seemed like he was talk­ing to us and it sounded like he was say­ing, “Top up! Top up!” So we put it up.


Novem­ber

How Was Your Day Dear?

Mon­day the 16th

Can you say root canal?

I did not watch this evening’s episode of House. I will plan on down­load­ing the tor­rent, so I can watch it in HD tomor­row. I under­stand tonight’s episode has some­thing to do with a sick porn star and absolutely noth­ing to do with her hav­ing a root canal.

Same deal for Cas­tle, don’t watch and down­load the tor­rent, their first sus­pect has air­tight alibi, turns out he was hav­ing a root canal done at the time of the murder.

I need to buy a Nestle’s $100,000 Bar 100 Grand Candy Bar soon as the Emperor cur­rently has 99,864 miles on the odome­ter. I’ll be care­ful to chew it up on only the right side as I wouldn’t want the soft, chewy caramel to pull out the tem­po­rary fill­ing from my freshly root canaled tooth.

Mod­ern den­tistry is awe­some, the hard­est part of get­ting a root canal these days is hold­ing your jaw wide open for 45 min­utes straight, well maybe the sec­ond hard­est after you see the bill.


Decem­ber

The Spi­der That Came In From The Cold

Fri­day the 18th

Just as my wife was was bring­ing din­ner to the table see cried, “Roach!” This as we all know is the man of the house’s call to action. I shout where as I reach for a suit­able insect death device. She points down and says, “There, but hurry it is going under that chair.” She spins the big arm­chair next to the couch out of the way. With no shoes handy, I grab the top mag­a­zine from the plethora of them semi-neatly fanned across the cof­fee table.

By now Donna has her bug tracker radar locked on the intruder and has cor­rectly ascer­tained that it is a large spi­der. Like most mod­ern war­planes her radar can track and iden­tify sev­eral tar­gets at once, so she orders me to drop the newest South­ern Liv­ing I had picked up and replace it with last week’s Time.

I’m grate­ful it is a slow mov­ing spi­der, I have a chance at that, those pal­metto bug/roaches move very fast and I usu­ally end up slap­ping the floor sev­eral times right where the bug used to be before it squeezes under the base­board mak­ing good its escape.

By now the large black, 1–1/2″ long, spi­der is under one of the end tables which lim­its my arm travel. I make sev­eral inef­fec­tive swats at it and I am begin­ning to think it might get away when I get lucky and it zigs right under where I’m swinging.

I think I need some spi­der swat­ting lessons from Garfield.


Backwards Time Travel Is Impossible

We fin­ished watch­ing Disc 1 of Sea­son 1 of Taxi last night and while we thor­oughly enjoyed the show way back when and we enjoyed re-watching these 8 episodes, we decided to take the rest of the discs out of the queue. Some­times you just can’t go home again.

Now that I don’t has the FRS to lis­ten to any­more (well, at least for the 6 months) I’ve been watch­ing some Net­flix Instant Watch movies, fin­ish­ing three of five in the last week. DNF’d were Sex Drive and Numb.

Fin­ished (along with the movie note I sent to friends):

Brick - Mix an LA high school unre­quited love story with a heavy dose of “The Big Sleep.” Then add a plot so thick with char­ac­ters that when the movie ends you may not know what hap­pened. Inter­est­ing watch.

Dead­girlThis isn’t for many peo­ple & I’m not so sure I’d even rec­om­mend it to any­one. Even with a cen­tral theme that is about as sick and twisted as can be, I found this a movie worth watching.

The Last WordBoy meets girl, boy falls for girl, in spite of him­self. Boy & girl break up. They don’t get back together. Quirky. Quiet. Dark. Con­tem­pla­tive. Oddly enjoyable.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 435

Baseball Season’s Over

The FRS had their hats handed to them this after­noon by the that team from out west with an unwieldy name, the Los Ange­les Angels of Ana­heim. Well, there are still a cou­ple of teams play­ing, but they don’t count…

I Started Watching

Couldn’t take the blo­va­tions of the TBS crew any longer, so I stopped watch­ing. I’ve lis­tened to the last two innings the way I used to all sea­son, on radio via the ‘net. The game is now offi­cially half over and stands as a score­less tie.

I can’t stay up any longer, so the FRS will just have to win (or lose) with out me.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 420

Like Kissing Your Sister

Pop the champagne, we're a pretty good team!Last night, after their 5th loss in a row, the FRS backed into the Wild Card spot in the Amer­i­can League play­offs because the Texas Rangers lost as well. This means that even if the Red Sox lose their last 5 games they will still have a bet­ter record than the Rangers if they win all of their last games. Which is a good thing too because the FRS are about to lose the the Blue Jays again tonight (in a dou­ble digit shut out no less.)

This morn­ing the Sox web site was proudly direct­ing folks to the store where you could buy your 2009 Wild Card para­pher­na­lia. No thanks. Admit­tedly the 2003 World Series win­ning Red Sox were the Wild Card team, but trust me, this is not the 2003 team. They’ll be lucky to get past the first round the way they are playing.

Rainy Saturday in NC

Hairy HedgeIt was a quiet and rainy day here at the SMH. We were up early enough to get the lot mowed and give a bad hair­cut to the hedge in front of the porch (before pic­ture to left) before the rain started.

We didn’t get in any caching because we are not hard core enough, a lit­tle (and it was not always lit­tle) bit of pre­cip­i­ta­tion scared us away.

So we stayed inside and watched all of Disc 5 of Sea­son 7 of West Wing this after­noon and we now have just the very last 3 episodes to watch. We are still not sure what we are going to replace it with in our TV rental queue, quite pos­si­bly nothing.

After West Wing I spent the next three hours watch­ing the FRS lose to the Yan­kees again. I know the games don’t really mean any­thing stand­ing wise, we’re not catch­ing them for the divi­sion and we have a lock on the wild­card, but if they don’t at least win tomor­row I’m going to have to take an incred­i­ble amount of grief at work on Mon­day from my manager…

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 409

Shouldn’t Have Posted Two Yesterday

Should have saved it for today, because I got nothing.

Except for a tear in my eye for what could have been. In the last two days the FRS lost two games to the lowly Kansas City Roy­als. If they hadn’t they would be only 4 games behind the MFY and then tak­ing 2 of 3 from the Yanks this week­end could have put them just two games out in the east with a week left in the sea­son. Instead, best case if they win tonight, they will be 6 games out with eleven to play, means a sweep this week­end is their only hope at win­ning the divi­sion. They’ll still make the play­offs as the wild card and that worked pretty well for us in 2004.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 403

95,000 Reflectors in the Middle of the Road

Just like the last semi-major mileage mile­stone, this one was past on the way to the Stricker Moun­tain Home (I’m think­ing that may need an acronym.) Only this one was about 50 miles fur­ther away in Spar­tan­burg, not right here in Hendersonville.

With what is arguably one of the best bullpens in the Amer­i­can League, why oh why is the back-up short­stop pitch­ing an inning of relief? (I know it is a 9–2 blowout the wrong way, but still…)

Even though there was a lot of rain around the state we made a good pro­por­tion of the drive up with the top down. We prob­a­bly could have made the whole trip with it down, but I chick­ened out as we came into NC.

Started down, went up, back down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 366

Well, You’re Stuck With Me For Another Year

I have the domain mr-miata.net reg­is­tered through Yahoo Domains. I signed up with them 3 years ago and the price was $9.95 a year. Well, it is time to renew, and I got an email the other day telling me I would be auto­mat­i­cally renewed at their new price of $39.95 a year! That is way too much and I fig­ured I would shop around for another domain reg­is­ter. Trou­ble with that plan is I mis­read the auto renewal date as 8/31, when it really said 8/21, i.e. today. Too late.

I have been strug­gling with pro­duc­ing con­tent for this place the last cou­ple of weeks and had even con­sid­er­ing tak­ing a break from blog­ging, but now that I’m forty bucks into it, I’m going to keep at it even if the con­tent is crap (and after all, what else were you expect­ing, it’s right there in this blog’s tag line: a proud part of the 90%.)

And while $39.95 sounds like a lot, it is less than 11¢ a day. If you fac­tor in the 10 bucks a month for host­ing it still comes out to less that 45¢ a day. Cheap therapy.

And trust me, I need the ther­apy pretty bad as the FRS are los­ing to their arch neme­sis the Yan­kees tonight 15 to 4…

Started up, went down, went up, back down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 353

Eleven For Eleven

Donna has had her eye on a caching series called Color Code for awhile that is in North Augusta. It is a group of nine micro sized con­tain­ers, each hav­ing a cute title that includes a color name. On the first page of the log of each of them is a word you need to write down. When you find all of the caches those words are used to help you locate a large mys­tery cache some­where else in the city.

What started this morn­ing as a sim­ple trip to Geor­gia to buy a Mega Mil­lions lot­tery ticket turned into a 4 hour, 100 mile cache-a-thon. It might have been shorter in both time and dis­tance had we planned to do the whole thing, because we would have mapped them out, but it all started as, “Let’s try one or two of these and see how we do.” Then went to, “Hey, that was fun, let’s do another.” To, “Keep going.” To, “Let’s just fin­ish these nine and do the final one another day.” All the way to, “It is only a two mile walk.”

The micro series and the bonus cache gave us ten for the day and it was time past time to go get some lunch, so we started back towards the car. Part way there I serendip­i­tously looked down at the GPSr. Yikes! There’s a lit­tle trea­sure chest look­ing thing right on the screen near here. Fired up the PDA, read the descrip­tion, peeked at the clue and pro­ceeded to look about. Found it.

In a totally unre­lated note, Big Papi clears the air (in his head) by hold­ing press con­fer­ence today in New York to explain about his test­ing pos­i­tive for steroids in 2003. His answer stuns the world, “I don’t know how it hap­pened.” Mr. Clean swears he didn’t take any steroids, but he might not have been too care­ful about the sup­ple­ments he was tak­ing. His team­mates, in a stun­ning show of sup­port, go out and are nearly no-hit against the Yan­kees. They end up with a whop­ping total of 4 sin­gles and lose the game 5–0, drop­ping 5–1/2 games behind the MFY in the AL East.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 327

This Is Sad

At the MMC monthly meet­ing tonight every­one seemed to enjoy them­selves. Most of the time was spent on future event plan­ning, where we ham­mered out the details for the next cou­ple of month’s. Like what restau­rant we would be hold­ing the next 2 meet­ings at and where we would meet for the monthly break­fast. Then some­thing odd hap­pened, one mem­ber had the audac­ity to sug­gest a car related event…

When I got home from the meet­ing I turned on the ball­game and the FRS were beat­ing the MFY 3 to 1 after 3–1/2 innings. The Yan­kees then scored 8 runs in the bot­tom of the 4th inning and it has been down­hill every since. I won­der if it is too early to call in sick for tomorrow?

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 324

Lost Afternoon

Instead of lis­ten­ing to the FRS ball­game on the inter­net I spent an hour or so watch­ing the videos from Comic-Con of the panel for TDTVS (only six months to go.) The pro­duc­ers answered ques­tions from the audi­ence (as cryp­ti­cally as they could on some, more hon­estly on oth­ers), they had sev­eral of the shows actors join them and there were sev­eral videos shown, includ­ing a phony America’s Most Wanted seg­ment on Kate Austen. But my favorite was this com­mer­cial for Mr. Kluck’s:

When I finally decided to see how the Sox were doing I went to their home page and there was a large photo of John Smoltz pitch­ing and this bit of ver­biage under­neath: J.D. Drew sin­gled, moved to third on Adam LaRoche’s sin­gle and scored on Jed Lowrie’s sac fly as the Red Sox broke through in the fifth. Read­ing that you might think things were going well for Boston, but in fact it was just the oppo­site, they were los­ing six to noth­ing when the run scored and Smoltz had already pitched his last pitch in the game. With this loss the FRS will have won 2 out of three games in this series and usu­ally when you are win­ning 2 of 3 you are play­ing good ball, but they can catch the Yan­kees play­ing like that because right now the MFY are 9–1 in their last ten games.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 302

What the Heck Happened?

Ugly WallThe FRS started the “sec­ond half” of the sea­son with a three game lead over the MFY in the AL East. Both teams have played four games since then, and after last night they are in a first place tie. Tonight the Sox are los­ing to the Texas Rangers and the Yan­kees are beat­ing Bal­ti­more, if every­thing stays as it is they will find them­selves look­ing up in the stand­ings to the Yanks.

We attempted a nifty puz­zle cache that took us to the Aiken County Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial Park the other night. We had a list of names to look for in the brinks in the walk­way sur­round­ing a foun­tain, they were a mix­ture of indi­vid­ual donors, com­pa­nies and trib­utes to the fallen. To facil­i­tate find­ing indi­vid­ual bricks they were arranged in a grid with let­ters for columns and num­bers for rows. We quickly real­ized we needed the num­bers to arrange them into the next set of coor­di­nates. Didn’t have time right then, so we fin­ished the jug­gling at home with the inten­tions of going back.

Yes­ter­day we headed back over there with our new GZ to look for the cache. The GPSr led us right to a big crape myr­tle sur­rounded by lots of low bushes and seemed tai­lor made for hid­ing a cache. It must have been hid­den real good because we didn’t find it after 10 min­utes of crawl­ing around there. When we got home I emailed the cache owner and asked for con­fir­ma­tion of our coordinates.

This morn­ing the reply came to the effect that there were no bushes any­where near the cache. Dang we have the wrong coor­di­nates. Recheck­ing all the pos­si­bil­i­ties it turns out we missed one and it was only 137 feet due west from where we were look­ing yes­ter­day. After din­ner tonight we went back to this set of coords and there were no bushes and there was a cache.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 300

Untitled

Stage 8 of the TDF resulted in zero change at the top of the leader board. Old Man Lance is still in third place 8 sec­onds out. We are in the Pyre­nees Moun­tains, but today and tomorrow’s stages are the kind that prob­a­bly won’t deter­mine who will win the Tour, but can decide who will lose it. While there are two or more big ass climbs on the stage, they don’t end at the tops, there are 30 to 40 miles of down­hill & flats before the fin­ish line allow­ing any of the con­tenders who is dropped on the climb to catch back up.

Appears that some of the blog’s theme CSS (Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets) con­flicts with the theme stuff that is pro­duced by the stats gen­er­a­tor and I’m not smart enough to know if there is an easy fix and don’t want to spend the time, so I took the easy way out. Just click on this link — Geo­caching Statistics

I guess it is OK to blog about this because the FRS appar­ently don’t need me to jinx tonight’s vic­tory over the sup­pos­edly lousy Kansas City Roy­als because right now their relief pitch­ing is busily snatch­ing defeat from the jaws of vic­tory. When John Smoltz left the game after pitch­ing 5 solid innings they had a 9 to 1 lead. KC scored 5 runs in the sixth. Now after a solo homer in the 7th they have a men on first and sec­ond with nobody out, so now the cur­rent bat­ter rep­re­sents the go ahead run!

At the pool party with the MMC this morn­ing it was pointed out to me that I had mis­spelled retire­ment in my count­down wid­get in the right side­bar. What hap­pened here, either all of my read­ers are as bad as I am when it comes to spelling or you all enjoyed watch­ing me humil­i­ate myself with the Inter­net equiv­a­lent of toi­let paper stuck on the bot­tom of my shoe.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 292

Transformers — Revenge of the Red Sox

Papel-BotBuddy Mark was going to the local Drive-In tonight to see the new Trans­former movie. To get a good park­ing spot I told him to leave early because for pop­u­lar first-run movies there the place really fills up fast.

If he fol­lowed my advice he left before the end of the Braves — Red Sox game today. And if he did, he missed the FRS’s very own Trans­former smash the hopes of the Atlanta team by pitch­ing the bot­tom of the ninth inning in typ­i­cal Papel-Bot fashion.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 269

That’s Even Weirder

A few years back when I started lis­ten­ing to the FRS base­ball games on the inter­net I com­plained that it was weird when between innings there was silence instead of the usual radio com­mer­cials. That was only the first year, ever since then I have been get­ting the Boston radio station’s local com­mer­cials. Normal.

Tonight the Sox are play­ing the Braves and the game is on some­thing called the Peachtree TV. My local cable com­pany doesn’t nor­mally carry Peachtree, but because of the big Braves fan base they do show the base­ball games on an open chan­nel. I don’t know if it is con­trac­tual or what, but dur­ing inning breaks we don’t get com­mer­cials We get silence and some­times a black screen, but mostly the video is of the infield and the silent tableau of play­ers trot­ting to their posi­tion, which an occa­sional ver­tigo induc­ing zoom in to a close-up of the sec­ond base bag.

On radio it was weird, but on TV it is even weirder.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 267

Awry

John Smoltz pitched his first big league game in over a year and he relearned mow­ing ‘em down in the minors doesn’t always trans­fer well to the majors. He gave up 5 runs in the first three innings and was pulled after five. Hope­fully it was just stage fright on open­ing night and he can do bet­ter next time.

Last night I could only lis­ten to the base­ball game through my right ear. No, it is not another flu symp­tom, the left com­puter speaker wasn’t work­ing. I reseated every con­nec­tion with out any suc­cess, but I did dis­cover that it you pushed on the vol­ume knob just right while turn­ing it the left side would start to work. Tonight that trick sort of worked as now it seems like the game announc­ers are com­ing from some­where right of cen­ter. I guess this week­end it will be back to Sta­ples for a set of com­puter speakers.

The way things are going, it might be a good idea to do a data back up…

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 265

When The Going Gets Tough…

…the tough go shopping.

The FRS were on TV tonight because they were play­ing the Braves and if you live in the south every Braves game is on TV. The Red Sox had their 13 Tril­lion Yen Man (Daisuke Mat­suzaka) pitch­ing and there was much excite­ment in the Land of the Ris­ing Sun because he was fac­ing off against the Brave’s Japan­ese starter Ken­shin Kawakami. Both guys have had rough starts to the sea­son, but tonight’s rough start award went to Boston’s Dice-K as his first pitch of the game was belted into the bullpen for a home run. Then it went down­hill from there. By the end of the 5th inning the Sox were down 6–0, so we went out to do our weekly gro­cery shopping.

For the sec­ond time in seven days we have left a store leav­ing our selected pur­chases behind.

I got in a check­out line behind what I thought was a woman who was nearly fin­ished as she had a full cart and about a dozen items left on the belt. After unload­ing 2/3rds of the cart onto the nearly empty belt I real­ized it hadn’t moved and there were now two cashiers fid­dling around at the scan­ner. I think they were try­ing to take an item off the woman’s order, they’d swipe some­thing and the machine would boop and they’d both look up at the screen in uni­son, shake the heads, repeat. After the forth time I think it worked because one cashier left and the remain­ing one scanned another item and then imme­di­ately start­ing ask­ing for the first cashier to come back. It was now becom­ing clear that she didn’t know what she was doing. And it also became clear that the shop­per was sep­a­rat­ing the final 10 items into 2 sep­a­rate orders and she had a pay­check to cash or maybe a sub­stance check and that we were going to stand­ing here awhile. There was one other check out line open, but there was no way that I was off load­ing the belt to put it in my cart to move over two slots. We looked at each other, shrugged and headed for the door.

We drove a mile down the street to another store, prob­a­bly spent $25 more dol­lars than we would have at the first store, but we were in and out and on the way home like we should have been at Store #1.

The game was mer­ci­fully over by the time we got back, both teams each scored 2 unevent­ful runs, so they FRS lost by a score of 8–2. They play each other twice more over the week­end, so it is not too late to save face.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 256

How Long Can They Keep This Up?

The Sox and Yanks are play­ing base­ball this evening and for some rea­son the FRS are win­ning. And not only tonight, they have beaen the MFY the other 5 games they have played so far this sea­son. I hated to say any­thing for fear of jinx­ing it and they’ll prob­a­bly get their butts kicked tomor­row night while I’m watch­ing the game on ESPN, but it feels pretty good.

I’ve been putting off wash­ing the car for a cou­ple weeks now because they keep call­ing for rain, well I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I washed the car tonight. So it will prob­a­bly pour tomor­row, but the joke will be on Mother Nature because the car will be in the garage all day, we are rid­ing the tan­dem to work.…wait a minute then the joke will be on us anyway.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 243

I Hate Plumbing

Sun­day I got the screened porch cleaned off of pollen and we moved into our “sum­mer” bed­room. Tonight I fin­ished edit­ing down the vaca­tion pic­tures to 124. For most, the title will be enough, but I still will need blurbs for quite a few of them so they make some sense. I ordered the new Miata bat­tery this morn­ing. Tonight I fixed garbage dis­posal, it grinds up stuff just fine

But in the process I cre­ated two leaks under the sink. There is now a plas­tic bin under there to catch the water. I knew I was in trou­ble when I dis­con­nected the dis­posal drain out­let, the rub­ber gas­ket was all gunked up, along with the seat­ing sur­face of the unit. I was not going to be able to make a water­tight con­nec­tion no mat­ter how hard I tried clean­ing up, but I tried any­way. As a bonus the thin wall tubing’s flange was eroded away in a small area. The other leak is over near the trap sec­tion of the Rube Gold­berg maze of pip­ing required for a dou­ble sink with a disposal.

Tomor­row it is off to the Big Box Home Improve­ment Store to buy a new unit, some pip­ing and a gas­ket or two.

The FRS are play­ing the MFY tonight on ESPN and the game that was sup­posed to start at 7:00 PM just started (2–1/2 hours late) because of a rain delay. Every time these two teams get together it is a marathon heavy­weight fight last­ing around 4 hours, so I will be read­ing about how this one comes out tomor­row morning.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 181

How Was Your Day?

I need to swap the bed­room set to the sum­mer bed­room. I need to clean the pine pollen off the back deck. The garbage dis­posal in the kitchen has stopped work­ing, so I need to take it apart and see what has jammed it up. I still have 12 days of vaca­tion pho­tos sort through.

So what did I do today? We went geo­caching, on a Time Speed Dis­tance Rally with the MMC, watched two episodes of West Wing and I’m lis­ten­ing to the FRS on the internet.

Oh, and I have to order a new bat­tery for the Miata.

We fin­ished a dis­ap­point­ing tied for fifth (out of 6 cars) in the rally this morn­ing. We made one error due to a mis­lead­ing state­ment from the rally mas­ters mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion and another because of a missed a clue. We felt that we had kept track of the time and mileage over­runs, but even sub­tract­ing them from our totals we were still way over and lost big points. The cap­per was I worked a pounds to kilo­gram con­ver­sion the wrong way and blew the bonus question.

After lunch at the BBQ place one of the Club mem­bers had left his lights on and the car wouldn’t start. That is a pic­ture of three of us try­ing to push start him. After about 4 or 5 attempts we gave up on that and went inside to see about bor­row­ing some jumper cables. The jump start work its magic and off he went.

On the way home Donna and I stopped at a quick stop store in south Augusta to get a bot­tled water and a Sprite. When we got back in the car I turned the key and was met with silence. Hmm, did I have the clutch all the way in? Tried again and still noth­ing, but radio dis­play flashed as I went by. The dome light was on, so I fig­ured it wasn”t a dead bat­tery. Funny thing was that with the igni­tion switch in the ACC posi­tion the radio dis­play would flash and there was a click­ing sound (like 2 relays) com­ing from the instru­ment cluster.

Pulled out the cell phone and called Rudy (AKA Clunk) (or is it Thunk) and his first thought was bat­tery, even after I described the symp­toms. He said hold on, I’ll get the truck and come take a look. Thirty min­utes later Rudy and Patti pull up. He brought some wrenches so we could remove the bat­tery and (for what I fig­ured was for test­ing pur­poses) the bat­tery out of his Maz­daspeed Miata. We swapped bat­ter­ies and the car started right up. Accord­ing to Rudy the newer bat­ter­ies don’t give you any warn­ing, like they used to in the olden days. now they just up and die. We called a cou­ple places to see if they had any bat­ter­ies for the car and one said we don’t carry ‘em, called the dealer and the other had one, but for $90 and he was all the way on the other side of town. Rudy has his truck and Patti just got a new Lexus, so he let me babysit his bat­tery for a while.

It is still going to cost a hun­dred bucks or so for the bat­tery, but it won’t be a generic replace­ment from Auto­zone, it’ll be a qual­ity Westco replace­ment that is designed for the Miata.

Thanks Rudy.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 180

Maybe I’m Not Ready…

…for base­ball sea­son. At least the FRS may not be. Last night I posted that they were tied with the MFY 1 to 1 in the 8th inning, well in the bot­tom of the inning the Yan­kees scored 6 runs, unearned runs mind you, to win the game 7–1.

I am ready for tonight’s episode of TDTVS.

I am also ready to get the brakes fixed, but that ain’t hap­pen­ing until at least Fri­day night now. The parts got to the dealer on Tues­day, but I decided I didn’t want to deal with dri­ving 60 miles with the last 8–10 in hec­tic cap­i­tal city traf­fic, so I had them ship the stuff to me. Parts arrived today and wouldn’t you know it, they were the wrong ones. I called the part’s guy back and he said, “Oh yeah, there are two kinds of brakes for your year car, you must have the hard sus­pen­sion. I’ll get the right parts and ship them right to you and they should get there Friday.”

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 152

Less Than 2 Weeks To Go…

..and I’m ready.

Although tech­ni­cally I’m not elim­i­nated from the office March Mad­ness con­test (to win it #1 seed Louisville has to lose to #12 seed Ari­zona and my other remain­ing 14 picks have to be cor­rect), I am ready for the tour­ney to be over and get to the start of the base­ball sea­son. Right now I’m lis­ten­ing to a pre-season base­ball game between the Sox and the Yanks (it’s tied 1–1 in the 8th) and it is going to be great to have some­thing to lis­ten to each evening.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 151

The Greater Good

Sea­son 1 Episode 21 revolves around Sayid off island and we find out just how he ends up on that fate­ful Flight 815. On island we attend a funeral, wit­ness a near mur­der and Sawyer calms the new baby, “Turnip Head”, by read­ing a car mag­a­zine. The SciFi Chan­nel has been run­ning repeats of TDTVS since Sep­tem­ber by run­ning 4 episodes every Mon­day start­ing at 7 PM and coin­ci­den­tally the show run­ning tonight at seven is The Greater Good.

I stayed up to see the whole game last night. It was close the whole way and the FRS had a cou­ple of chances in the late innings, but couldn’t pull another rab­bit out of their hats. The Tampa Bay Rays are on the way to the World Series to play the Philadel­phia Phillies and the Red Sox are going home. Because it doesn’t mat­ter to me who beats who in the Series, I might watch some por­tion of the games if Donna can’t find any­thing she wants to watch on TV those nights, so base­ball is pretty much over for me for this year.

Pitch­ers and catch­ers report in 115 days.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 386

Have I Learned My Lesson?

I’m going to say no. The FRS forced a decid­ing game seven in their series with the Rays by win­ning last night’s game. But tonight, if the Sox are trail­ing by a bunch of runs in the late innings, I’m going to bed at 11. Tomor­row is an early start and the 5:00 AM alarm will come quickly.

I’m kinda glad I don’t have HDTV, John Lester’s sweat salt encrusted hat is ugly enough in plain ol’ ana­log TV.

Although I like the theme of the Brooke Shields com­mer­cials for the new Volk­swa­gen mini­van, I just wish there was some actual Ger­man engi­neer­ing behind the Routan aside from fig­ur­ing out where to paste a big VW logo on a Chrysler Town & Country.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 384

Do No Harm

Tonight we watched episode 20 which fin­ishes disc 5, leav­ing only 4 episodes of Sea­son 1 left. Off island in flash­backs, Jack gets mar­ried to a women he saved after a car acci­dent and on island Jack tries to save a Lostie who is injured badly in a plane crash that wasn’t Flight 815. Def­i­nitely a 4 han­kie episode; the wed­ding, a new romance blos­soms, Boone dies & a baby is born.

If you fol­low sports even in the slight­est you know what hap­pened last night. If you don’t, a quick recap, The FRS were los­ing last nights ALCS game seven to noth­ing in the sev­enth inning with two outs (mean­ing they only had seven outs left) and they pulled it out win­ning 8–7 on a two out sin­gle in the bot­tom of the ninth. It was the sec­ond largest run deficit over­come in a play­off game. The other one didn’t really count because it hap­pened nearly 80 years ago, so the only peo­ple who knew about were base­ball sta­tis­ti­cians and they had to look it up (and the only rea­son they looked it was because of this game.)

As I said last night I fig­ured the FRS were out of it in the first inning when they were trail­ing 2 zip. I handed the remote to my wife in the 4th with them los­ing five to noth­ing. I checked just before my pre-bedtime shower and Tampa’s lead was up to seven. After the shower the Red Sox had bro­ken through for 4 runs thanks in the most part to Big Papi’s 3 run homer. It was after 11:00 o’clock and even though my wife asked if I wanted to stay up to watch the end of the game, based on they way they had played tonight and in the series so far, I went to bed. I fig­ured stick a fork in ‘em, they’re done.

Today the sports world was all ga-ga over the come­back. There was tons of sec­ond guess­ing of the Rays man­ager; he should have left the starter in longer or he should have brought in so ‘n’ so to face that bat­ter or what­ever. He played it how he played it to get the team to where they are, one vic­tory away from the first World Series in the team’s short and up ’til now, dis­mal, his­tory. Pretty easy to sec­ond guess on the morn­ing after isn’t. And just how many Major League Base­ball games have you managed?

There was also plenty of neg­a­tiv­ity hurled at the fans at the sta­dium who were leav­ing after the mid­dle of the sev­enth. The same went for the folks at home who turned off their TVs and radios (like me.) We were told we need to get off the band­wagon, turn in our Red Sox Nation mem­ber­ship cards and should never be allowed into Fen­way Park again. Screw you. I’ll root for the team in the man­ner that got me here, watch­ing them win and turn­ing off the game if I think they are going to lose.

I wasn’t always able to turn away, but some­thing hap­pened in 2004, against all odds the Red Sox won a World Series. And to do it, they had to come from a 3 games to none deficit to the MFY in the League Cham­pi­onship Series. The fate of the world no longer rested on a vic­tory in a play­off game or series, they had done it and I had reached a zen like level of fan­dom. If a game ran late I could just go to bed and find out the score in the morn­ing. If they blew a lead and lost there was no more toss­ing and turn­ing replay­ing the fail­ure, as my head hit the pil­low I was asleep. To quote the Great Guru of Base­ball, “(If) It doesn’t hap­pen, so who cares? There’s always next year. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.”

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 383

Deus ex Machina

Show num­ber nine­teen fea­ture John Locke in the flash­backs where we learn that he has very flaky par­ents that he never knew and prob­a­bly now wishes he never did. On island Locke is frus­trated in his attempt to open a strange hatch buried in the jun­gle that he uncov­ered a cou­ple weeks ago and has so far kept secret.

Tonight is game 5 of the ALCS and the Red Sox have their backs against the wall trail­ing Tampa 3 games to 1. Past years play­off hero and star pitcher Curt Schilling, who is injured and hasn’t played at all this year, tossed out the cer­e­mo­nial first pitch. Turn­ing a pos­si­ble inspi­ra­tional moment into a feel­ing of dread, Curt, famous big league pitcher, bounced it up to the plate. He was 60′-6″ away and threw it all of 45 feet.

In the top of the first inning the thir­teen tril­lion yen man walks the lead off hit­ter and the next guy up hits it into the mon­ster seats. We have been play­ing ball for all of five min­utes and the FRS are down 2 runs already. Here we go again…

I know it is early and the Sox are still an excel­lent team capa­ble of com­ing back and win­ning this game and even the two fol­low­ing to advance to the World Series, but if you look at how it has gone so far, I’m think­ing they are going to be watch­ing the Rays and the Phillies play the those World Series games on TV like the rest of us (except for maybe in HD and on a lot big­ger TV.)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 382

Lost In Translation

I had a dif­fer­ent image picked for Episode #17, but I swapped to use this one because it is the pose that inspired McFarlane’s Series 2 “action fig­ure” of Sun. The show’s flash­back is more about the back story of our Korean cou­ple. I think the show’s writ­ers hit their stride with this episode, the on island story cen­tered on the wife and her feel­ings while the off island stuff was more about the hus­band and what was going on in his head. But this mar­ried cou­ple is com­prised of two peo­ple who are not com­mu­ni­cat­ing with each other real well, so they don’t know that their prob­lems are so sim­i­lar that a hug, an apol­ogy and some hon­esty would make their mar­riage stronger, but instead they end up mov­ing to sep­a­rate on island camps. While the Sun and Jin story was the main focus of this episode, we also received a lot of inter­est­ing devel­op­ments in a few of the other relationships.

I’m not watch­ing the game, it is too hor­rific. I’m lis­ten­ing on the com­puter where it seems some­what less painful. If the Rays score one more run here in the sixth inning the umpires will invoke the 10 run rule and award the game to Tampa. Once that hap­pens we will have the Rays just where we want them, up 3 games to 1 and over con­fi­dent. Last year in the Amer­i­can League Cham­pi­onship Series against the Cleve­land Indi­ans we were behind 3 games to 1 before com­ing back to win and then going on to sweep the Rock­ies win­ning the World Series. In 2004 the FRS were down 3 games to none to the MFY before com­ing back and tak­ing 4 straight to get to the World Series. Where they then swept the St. Louis Cardinals.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 382

Blame Me

I sensed it was over right after B.J. Upton hit the three run homer in the third inning. I turned the game off at the end of the 4th with Tampa Bay lead­ing 5 to 0 to watch an old Law & Order rerun on TNT.

There is a come­dian (I say come­dian, I think he wants to be con­sid­ered an imper­son­ator, but of the numer­ous imi­ta­tions he does, the only one I rec­og­nize is George W. Bush, and that is not very good) called Frank Something-or-other who has a show on TBS that is get­ting relent­less pro­mo­tion dur­ing the base­ball play­offs on that net­work (so much so that in an effort to try and take the edge off, they even filmed a com­mer­cial with Frank threat­en­ing even more pro­mos if we didn’t watch the show or what­ever.) So what do you think hap­pened dur­ing breaks of L & O on TNT? Right, I got a cou­ple of Frank TV promos…sigh.

I checked in on the base­ball game later via the web to see if I was cor­rect in my gut feel­ing that the FRS were going to lose, hop­ing against hope that they had had an offen­sive explo­sion and I was way wrong. It didn’t hap­pen, they were los­ing 9 to 1 in the ninth inning. The offi­cial Sox web site put the best pos­i­tive spin on things they could by trum­pet­ing the fact that the FRS had scored a run in the sev­enth — the Nation rejoices. Who are they fool­ing, the head­line should have just said, “Red Sox Are Road Kill!”

You can blame me for the defeat though, it is all my fault. When I crossed paths with a fel­low Red Sox fan (Hi Jerry) at work today I said, “We’re back in Fen­way tonight, home cook­ing and lights-out Lester is on the mound, we can prob­a­bly go ahead and chalk this one up in the win col­umn.” We are both old-school Sox fans and are more used to hav­ing our hearts ripped out in game sev­ens than this whole World Series Champ thing, so he smiled, shook his head and replied, “I wish.” I knew the feel­ing, so vol­un­teered, “Yeah, will prob­a­bly get our asses whooped.”

Damn if it didn’t happen.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 382

Outlaws

We watched Episode #16 tonight instead of tomor­row because tomor­row the FRS play game three of the ALDS at 4:30 PM and if the game goes as long as last night’s it will be past my bed­time, leav­ing no time for TDTVS view­ing. In the flash­back we learn a lot about Sawyer’s moti­va­tion in the flash­back and on island we learn that he is not smarter than your aver­age boar.

In between this morning’s cloudy damp­ness and this evening’s rain we actu­ally had a nice, albeit windy, day and after lunch instead of a bicy­cle ride around town to pay our bills (that windy thing) we walked.

Right now I’m couch-ridden with End­ofthe­week­endi­tis, but don’t worry about me, Dr. Gre­gory House is on the job.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 382

All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues

Episode 11 is chock full of Jack. Pre-island Jack rats on his dad being drunk in the Oper­at­ing Room and on island Jack gets mon­key stomped by Ethan the Other.

Last night the FRS had their ear­li­est start­ing time for any game in the 2008 play­offs, 7:30 PM, but played their longest game — 12 innings in five hours and nine­teen min­utes. Because this is our early start­ing nine hours days at work, I went to bed at 11:00 PM in the mid­dle of the 7th. The game was tied at four runs a piece at that point and the Angels ended up win­ning the game, but I got 6 hours sleep instead of 4–1/2. Tonight’s game starts at 8:30 and I’m still going to bed at 11 even if it is only in the 5th inning.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 376

Regular Season Wrap

The FRS are fin­ish­ing out the the last of their 162 game reg­u­lar sea­son today. Ordi­nar­ily these last three games with the MFY would be very mean­ing­ful and have every Sox fan (and Yan­kee fans too) on the edge of their seats, this year it is dif­fer­ent. The Red Sox clinched a Wild Card Play­off spot sev­eral days ago and the Yan­kees are not going to the play­offs for the first time since 1993. I am sit­ting here lis­ten­ing to the broad­cast and most of the time I’m not sure who is bat­ting and who is in the field. Not because I’m not pay­ing atten­tion, but because both teams are play­ing the scrubs.

I started lis­ten­ing to this afternoon’s game, but quit for a bit because I had some­thing else to do, when I tried to recon­nect I couldn’t get back to the Boston web site. I couldn’t even get to MLB.com. I guess a lot of peo­ple took advan­tage of the daily or week­end pass for MLB TV and they over­loaded the servers.

When I first checked the Boston home page this morn­ing to see what they planned on doing about yesterday’s rain out, I noticed an advert to buy some Red Sox play­off gear. I’m not sure if you can read the hat, but it says “2008 Divi­sion Cham­pi­ons.” Some­one for­got to check their facts because that ship sailed on Fri­day when the FRS lost a squeaker to the Yan­kees 19–8. If you clicked on the link you got to see the gear the Sox really earned, the much cov­eted “Wild Card” or “I Kissed My Sis­ter” hat.

Myrtle Beach

We are stay­ing in a place called Sea Crest in their 15 story tower with a room that has a bal­cony. From the room you can see the beach, but you can’t hear the surf over the 20 water fea­tures in the kid­die pool. And even if you could shut off the water there would be the music from the bar to con­tend with…

I didn’t really pay to close atten­tion to all the hotel had to offer, because if I had I would real­ized that the place didn’t offer in room inter­net. My first clue was when I opened the wire­less util­ity and there wasn’t any sig­nal labeled with any vari­a­tion of Sea Crest. There was how­ever about a dozen unse­cured con­nec­tions, sev­eral with real good strength, labeled Hotel Blue, a 15 story neigh­bor­ing monolith.

We went for a big loop drive today and took Post Office pic­tures, a baker’s dozen. We also took a walk on the beach, went to a Greek Fes­ti­val, looked at the fishies in the Ripley’s Aquar­ium, didn’t watch the FRS (they were rained out), took a nap, bought some sou­venir t-shirts and when it got dark we drove a feww miles south and west for a night­cap, one more Post Office.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 367

Pilot — Part 2

Show 2 of 82. Does this photo look famil­iar? I think it does. Just six days ago I posted a photo I had taken of the Shan­non Ruther­ford “Action” Fig­ure that was based on the scene from this episode.

After Sun­day’ games the FRS had a magic num­ber of 1 for clinch­ing a wild card play­off spot. They were also only 1–1/2 games out of first place and win­ning the divi­sion was once again in play. But last night they lost and Tampa Bay won drop­ping them back to 2–1/2 games behind. Because the Yan­kees had the night off the play­off clinch­ing magic num­ber remained at one. Tonight the Yanks are win­ning and Tampa Bay has won the first game of their dou­ble­header and although the FRS are win­ning, they are mak­ing it look hard, they are up by only one run and the Indi­ans have loaded the bases the last two innings. Update: The FRS man­aged to stave off defeat and are going to the playoffs.

The weather has turned pos­i­tively March like all of a sud­den here, High near 80, low in the upper 50s and 20 MPH winds. Even though it is our long days and 1 hour ear­lier start, we got up even ear­lier so we could ride the tan­dem to work. The good thing about the extra hour early start, there is nobody, and I mean nobody, on the road at that time. The good thing about the wind is it is com­ing from a direc­tion that makes it a tail­wind on the way home.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 360

Synchronized Horseback Riding

We walked back over to see the bal­loons fly again this morn­ing (more pic­tures.)

After the skies cleared they held some eques­trian type stuff, go fig­ure, the event is called Ford Trucks Eques­trian Amer­ica Bal­loon Fes­ti­val. We stayed a while to watch our neigh­bor and another mem­ber of the Aiken Pony Club do a musi­cal dres­sage demon­stra­tion. They did a 5 minute walk, trot, can­ter, etc. in sync inside a small ring set up to the music from TDPM.

Coin­ci­den­tally I got to watch the last 15 min­utes of that movie on USA after the FRS beat the Blue Jays on TBS that segued into a House marathon, which I have been glued to ever since. If you like House like I like House check out Med­ical Reviews of House on Polite Dis­sent. The fel­low is a doc­tor which gives him a very unique slant on the show. Don’t for­get to read the com­ments as they are almost as good and at times even better.

Just like us, the Emperor took the day off.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 360

Man of Faith


John Locke

Like Mr. Locke, I am a man of faith, as long as you con­sider faith in fail­ure. The FRS were lead­ing tonight’s game by 13 to 1 after 5–1/2 innings and then as if to val­i­date my faith, they have given up 5 runs in the last two innings. I’m pretty sure they won’t blow the remain­ing 8 run lead in the last two innings, but if they do, you should have faith that I will blame myself for the loss because I jinxed the team by say­ing, “Pretty sure they won’t.”

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 357

The End of the Weekend

The FRS were on TBS this after­noon (and won the game thanks to a cou­ple of Jays errors and a cou­ple of blown calls in their favor by the umpires), so I spent sev­eral hours planted on the couch watch­ing. Then at 5 o’clock this after­noon a House marathon started on USA and here I am, still dent­ing the cushion.

We did get out and go for a nice hike this morn­ing though…

My Friend Flicka

 

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 356

Can’t Really Blog Right Now

The FRS are on the tube play­ing the Evil Empire, so I can’t pay atten­tion enough to write a coher­ent post (whether any­thing I write here is coher­ent is open for inter­pre­ta­tion), so I am going to pre­tend I have a Twit­ter account and recap the last 7 posts in twitterese.

Even though I know it is home in the garage, I can’t help think­ing, “Dude, where’s my car?” sev­eral times today. — Wednes­day, August 20th

To get ready for the upcom­ing sea­son five of Lost, I think I’m going to watch the first four Memento Style, AKA, in reverse order. — Thurs­day, August 21st

Can­cer Sucks! — Fri­day, August 22nd

Dick Weber I’m not, as I miss a 300 game by 8 strikes. — Sat­ur­day, August 23rd

From cer­tain angles, Donna’s gyne­col­o­gist looks remark­ably like Emily Deschanel. — Sun­day, August 24th

In the navy, come on, pro­tect the moth­er­land. In the navy, come on and join your fel­low man.” Chair­man Mao? Nope, Vil­lage Peo­ple. — Mon­day, August 25th

Oreo Cakesters are the great­est inven­tion since, well, Oreos. — Tues­day, August 26th

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 315

Weekend Wackiness

Ath­leti­cism, power, grace, joy­ous vic­tory and heart­break­ing defeat. No, not the Olympics, but the Most Best of MXC 2 was on Spike TV from 1 to 2 PM today. It was a lot more enter­tain­ing than Men’s Field Hockey, Women’s Hand­ball or the Mixed Double’s Bad­minton from Beijing.

I knew the polit­i­cal con­ven­tions were com­ing up and a quick check of Wikipedia reveals that the Demo­c­ra­tic Con­ven­tion is next week­end from August 25 to August 27 at Pepsi Cen­ter and on August 28 at INVESCO Field at Mile High in Den­ver, Col­orado. The Repub­li­can Con­ven­tion will take place at the Xcel Energy Cen­ter in Saint Paul, Min­nesota from Sep­tem­ber 1 until Sep­tem­ber 4, 2008. Maybe if you just said Den­ver and Saint Paul, leav­ing off the cor­po­rate named venues, it would sound more pres­i­den­tial to me.

The best game the FRS have played so far in this week­end series with the Toronto Blue Jays was the game they didn’t take the field in. They were rained out on Fri­day. Yes­ter­day they lost 4 to 1 and today after just 3 innings they are los­ing 8 to noth­ing. Should have banked some of those runs they scored last week against Texas.

This morn­ing at about the halfway point of our 16 mile bike ride, we took a water break at a stop sign. While we waited for a car to go by we took a quick drink and snagged a quick kiss before tak­ing off again. Cyclists are still a fairly odd sight on the back roads of South Car­olina, so we are used to strange looks from motorists, but the one we got from this dri­ver was really odd — his was giv­ing us a kissy face, per­haps ask­ing for a smooch of his own.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 296

On the Couch

Through the magic of a Paint Shop Pro I can paint in water­color. This is from last Sunday’s visit to Hopeland Gar­dens home of the Thor­ough­bred Rac­ing Hall of Fame & Museum.

Hav­ing spent the last two nights in sep­a­rate rooms, me with base­ball in one and her with the Olympics in another, tonight we decided to be in the same room at the same time. I’m lis­ten­ing to the FRS on the inter­net via lap­top on one end of the couch and Donna is watch­ing the Olympics on the other end. Right now there is two women beach vol­ley­ball on that I keep notic­ing in my periph­eral. All I have to say is with all those play­ers on the sand at one time, it is a good thing they have num­bers on their suits, so we can keep track of who is who.

On another Olympics related note, I hap­pened to catch the Nike com­mer­cial for the Redeem Team while watch­ing sports cen­ter (should that be cap­i­tal­ized? one word?) on ESPN this morn­ing. We have been sub­jected to many ren­di­tions of our national anthem over the years, some very good — Whit­ney Hus­ton prior to the Super Bowl and some very bad — Rosanne Barr before a San Diego Padres base­ball game, but I really like this non-traditional ver­sion of Mar­vin Gaye’s that is the basis for this commercial.

For some enter­tain­ing read­ing, try the online ver­sion of “Seattle’s Only News­pa­per”, The Stranger.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 295

Artful Dodger

The last few days have been chock full o’ fun, the FRS have lost a bunch of games and Manny Ramirez has been all over the sports pages. There has been plenty of trade talks, Boston and Florida, then Boston and Florida and Pitts­burgh. I left work at 4 PM, which was the trad­ing dead­line, and there were still con­flict­ing reports — it was going to hap­pen, it wasn’t going to hap­pen. I got home at 4:30 and there was still noth­ing new.

I was fin­ish­ing up paint­ing in the mid­dle bed­room around 6 o’clock when Donna came in and said, “Your friend is going to Los Ange­les.” At first I thought Angels? No, it had to be the Dodgers and it was. I’ll let the real sports nuts debate over which team got the best part of the deal or the worse part of it, but right now look­ing at FRS left field­ers, new and old, if both play­ers con­tinue at their present pro­duc­tion, it looks like a wash. Player to front office rela­tion­ship has improved, but, more impor­tantly, how it will effect the club­house, ask me in a month.

As a fan, I will def­i­nitely miss the Manny Being Manny moments, it was nice to see some­one enjoy base­ball as a game, but for every phone call from the wall dur­ing pitch­ing changes there seemed to be a missed game due to “injury” or mis­played ball in left.

Have fun in LA Manny.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 274

Looks Like It Is Coming Down On Lansdowne Street

This used to be my Win­dows wall­pa­per, until the 6th inning of tonight’s game when the Angels scored 5 runs. The FRS dropped 2 of 3 to the MFY over the week­end and it looks like they are going to be swept by LA in this 3 game series. Both Tampa and NY won ear­lier today, so in just a few more min­utes the Red Sox will be three games out of first and only one game ahead of the Yanks. Oh, well, at least I’m not a Braves fan (sorry Mark.)

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 272

I Can’t Watch

After the the last two games, I just can’t watch tonight’s game on ESPN. That it is rain­ing in Boston and the game is going to start an hour later at 9:00 PM (so they claim), so that I won’t be able to see but a cou­ple of innings before hav­ing to retire for the evening, makes it easier.

We watched the final stage of the Tour de France today and I will be glad not hav­ing to the see that block of com­mer­cials anymore.

So now the cable box and it’s myr­iad of chan­nels with noth­ing inter­est­ing to watch goes back tomor­row. This year was a big dis­ap­point­ment as there wasn’t one movie worth watch­ing on Starz or Encore dur­ing the whole month.

My wife has the remote and she is watch­ing The Next Food Net­work Star and dur­ing com­mer­cials she hops over to E! to see Denise Richards: It’s Com­pli­cated. I think I would be hap­pier watch­ing the FRS get­ting the crap­ola beat out of them by the MFY. At least she has stopped check­ing in on Richard Gene Sim­mons Fam­ily Jew­els

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 266

Long Range Baseball on the Radio

The FRS had an after­noon game in Seat­tle which started here on the east coast at 4:40 PM. Per­fect tim­ing for me as I could lis­ten to the game while I put another coat of gloss white on the trim in the mid­dle bedroom.

I fired up Game­day Audio, selected the Boston radio sta­tion that broad­casts the games and I was greeted by some inane sports talk show. At first I thought they might be in a rain delay, know­ing the pacific north­west, but then remem­bered that the Mariners field had a retractable roof, so a lit­tle liq­uid sun­shine wouldn’t halt play. I clicked on the link for the Seat­tle radio station’s broad­cast and sure enough they were nearly through the top half of the first inning.

It was kind of neat to hear a dif­fer­ent set of voices with a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive of the game. The roof was open and because the sta­dium is near the city’s rail yard there were quite a few times when you would hear train horns blast­ing in the back­ground that, for me, added to the ambiance. Half way through the game the TV and radio broad­casts swapped play-by-play guys and I got to lis­ten to their long time announcer, Dave Niehaus. He has been doing Mariner’s games for 32 years and you can hear why he has been doing it so long and is get­ting inducted into the Base­ball Hall of Fame this Sun­day. A very nice lis­ten even if his team loy­alty is misguided.

Dur­ing the breaks between innings there was some­times silence and some­times com­mer­cials. I remem­ber when I first started to lis­ten to the Red Sox games on the inter­net all I ever got was silence, but some­time in the last cou­ple years I started hear­ing all of them. I won­der if it was because MLB.com blocked cer­tain ads. That seems unlikely, because as much as base­ball frowns on gam­bling (right Pete?) one of the spon­sors I did hear from sev­eral times was the Swinomish Casino. A big spon­sor of the Red Sox base­ball games is Fox­woods Resort & Casino as well. The only thing I can come up with is the radio sta­tion has a two tiered spon­sor­ship plan for adver­tis­ers, one cheaper one for local cov­er­age and a more expen­sive one for the national coverage.

I stopped lis­ten­ing to eat din­ner with the game tied at three runs apiece. When I came back I tried the Boston broad­cast again and they were doing the game, so I stayed with the old famil­iar voices. The game was still tied, but the FRS finally won the game in the 12th inning earn­ing a three game sweep of the Mariners (which took a lit­tle of the sting out of being swept by the Angels in the three games before.) Tomor­row is an off day before the dreaded MFY come to Fen­way Fri­day for a week­end series which means I’ll prob­a­bly get to see some of the games on TV.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 261

Every Man Has His Price

And appar­ently mine is pretty small.

I didn’t vote for play­ers for the base­ball All-Star Game this year. Mat­ter of fact I have never voted in all the years they have let fans do it. I don’t think it should be a fan based pop­u­lar­ity con­test, the play­ers should be cho­sen by the league man­agers. They can vote for any­one they like except their own players.

The last cou­ple of years they have even allowed the fans to vote on an extra player for the bench, pretty soon the fans will get to vote on what kind of pitch the pitcher will be throwing.

Any­way, I broke down and voted for the extra player this year because they were giv­ing away a week’s worth of MLB.TV. Which is kind of a smart move on their part, because with the All-Star break in the mid­dle of the give­away week you only get to see like 4 games.

So right now I’m watch­ing Bal­ti­more put the hurt on the FRS in a small win­dow while I blog. The video qual­ity is not bad in a tiny win­dow, but full screen it is very pix­e­lated. Not some­thing I want to pay $80 a year for. Besides I like the whole lis­ten­ing thing much bet­ter, it is eas­ier to multitask.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 246

79,000 Doves Cry

We got up at 5:00 AM and headed south­east, des­ti­na­tions: Dorch­ester, Ridgeville, Sum­merville, Sum­merville, Ravenel, Hol­ly­wood, Edisto Island, Adams Runs, Jack­son­boro, Cot­tageville and Round O.

Just before cross­ing the bridge over the inter­coastal water­way in the South Car­olina Low Coun­try at the inter­sec­tion of No and Where, the Emperor ticked past the seventy-nine thou­sand mile mark. Some­where within 25 miles either way of that event a young male blue­jay tufted tit­mouse com­mit­ted sui­cide by fly­ing right in front of us. He was given an un-proper bur­ial (i.e. dumped) under a bush along the side of the Adams Run, SC Post Office.

I didn’t lis­ten to the ball­game on Thurs­day or Fri­day and the FRS beat the MFY. I watched the game yes­ter­day after­noon and they lost. Tonight they are play­ing on ESPN and I fig­ured that if I didn’t watch they might win like Thurs­day or Fri­day. I’m lis­ten­ing on the inter­net and that might be the wrong thing to do too, as the Yan­kees are up 1 to 0 in the sec­ond. Maybe I should quit lis­ten­ing… Nine o’clock on USA are new episodes of Law & Oder: Crim­i­nal Intent, fol­lowed by In Plain Sight.

Oh, word of advice, if you live on a hill and your neigh­bor has a pool, don’t for­get to set your park­ing brake.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 235

TV Stars

MAL: We’re not gonna die. We can’t die, Bendis. You know why? Because we are so very pretty. We are just too pretty for God to let us die. Huh? Look at that chis­eled jaw.

This is what hap­pens when you win the World Series, you get to play on TV a lot. Last Sat­ur­day on FOX, yes­ter­day on TBS, tonight on ESPN and this com­ing Wednes­day on ESPN2. So far the FRS are 1 and 1 and trail­ing by one run tonight going into the 9th.

Hasn’t left much time for Net­flix disc watch­ing. We still have 3 episodes of Due South to watch on the first disc of Sea­son One and we also have P.S. I Love You col­lect­ing dust on the cof­fee table.

On the way home from work tonight we stopped by the cable com­pany and picked up a con­verter box. We need the box to get Ver­sus, Le Tour starts in less than two weeks.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 217

Official Cheese Doodle of the Boston Red Sox

Wise. They also make the Offi­cial Potato Chip of the team too.

Looks like it is com­ing down on Lands­downe St, bet­ter call 1–800 Fifty-Four GIANT” “Dave how’s your new Azek Deck com­ing along?” “Now at Papa Gino’s, buy any Rus­tic Pizza and get a small tra­di­tional cheese pizza FREE!”

Not only do I hear all those com­mer­cials between innings of the base­ball game, but now these guys are squeez­ing lit­tle com­ments into the mid­dle of their play by play. I’m almost immune to the ads though, but some­thing hap­pened the other day that was very dis­turb­ing. When I fired up the media player to lis­ten to the FRS, before the radio broad­cast came on there was an actual video com­mer­cial. I don’t remem­ber what it was for I was so in shock. Dis­turb­ing, I could no longer, turn on the game in progress and get in with the usual 1 minute delay, now I had to wait another minute sit­ting through yet another plea for my money. At least it doesn’t seem to be an every­day thing, I only saw it once, but my inno­cence is lost.

Washed the Miata yes­ter­day because it needed it and I fig­ured I was safe because they weren’t call­ing for rain for about a half dozen days. Today the Weather Chan­nel revised their fore­cast, it is now going to rain tomor­row or the next day and then there is a small chance of rain for the whole rest of week.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 192

Pretty In Pink

We are in the mid­dle of a British Movie Binge — Casino Royale (well sorta British), Once begat The Com­mit­ments, The Last Detec­tive (Disc 2 of Sea­son 3), Death at a Funeral (didn’t fin­ish), Starter for Ten, Keep­ing Mum (on the cof­fee table) and Rumpole of the Bai­ley: The Lost Episode (next in the queue.)

Starter For Ten, was pretty darn good. It reminded me of those 80’s John Hughes movies, Pretty in Pink, 16 Can­dles, et al. In plot it was prob­a­bly most sim­i­lar to Some Kind of Won­der­ful. The 80’s sound­track (The Cure — Psy­che­delic Furs — Echo & The Bun­ny­men) prob­a­bly helped the com­par­i­son along as well.

This is inter­est­ing — The Net­flix Player by Roku. I’m try­ing to jus­tify the pur­chase, but I’m hav­ing trou­ble. Of the Net­flix library there are only 10% avail­able for view­ing using this box. Admit­tedly that is 10,000 titles, but they are mostly older flicks and TV shows. Not that I can’t find a bunch of stuff to re-watch, but I already have 100 movies in the reg­u­lar rental queue to watch, there is bunch stuff on HULU that I want to see and the FRS are on the radio nearly every night, so my free time is lim­ited. I haven’t really explored Joost or Miro or even Find Inter­net TV. The $100 would be bet­ter spent on a PC to TV con­verter so that other inter­net media could also be watched on the tube besides just Netflix.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 172

P.S. Which Sports Car Are You?
Con­tinue read­ing Pretty In Pink

Exorcising The Devil

Usu­ally it hap­pens in June and usu­ally it is the MFY over­tak­ing them, but this year it is dif­fer­ent. The FRS almost always start strong and lead the East­ern Divi­sion until the mid­dle of June or early July when the wheels come off and they fall from the top spot. Usu­ally the New York Yan­kees replace them in first place.

This year the swoon started early as yesterday’s loss to Bal­ti­more caused the Red Sox to relin­quish first place in the divi­sion to the Tampa Bay Rays. Who? Up until this year the team from Tampa was known as the Devil Rays and for the first ten years of their exis­tence have never won more games than they have lost, even their best year, 2004, they were 21 games below .500. If they knew all it took to become a win­ner was remove the Devil from their name, I’m bet­ting they’d have done it a lot sooner.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 158

Charlie Wilson’s War

Joanne Her­ring: Why is Con­gress say­ing one thing and doing noth­ing?
Char­lie Wil­son: Well, tra­di­tion mostly.

Julia Roberts has a throw away role, Tom Hanks is excel­lent, but this is Philip Sey­mour Hoffman’s movie and he is great.

Char­lie Wil­son: You mean to tell me that the U.S. strat­egy in Afghanistan is to have the Afghans keep walk­ing into machine gun fire ’til the Rus­sians run out of bul­lets?
Gust Avrako­tos: That’s Harold Holt’s strat­egy, not U.S. strat­egy.
Char­lie Wil­son: What is U.S. strat­egy?
Gust Avrako­tos: Most strictly speak­ing, we don’t have one. But we’re work­ing on it.
Char­lie Wil­son: Who’s ‘we’?
Gust Avrako­tos: Me and three other guys.

This is the sec­ond movie in a month about war in the mid­dle east, Lions for Lambs being the other, both were inter­est­ing, thought pro­vok­ing and worth a watch, but Char­lie Wilson’s War was much more entertaining.

We are on vaca­tion, but not going any­where, so it was odd not going to work today. Even odder was going for a bike ride at eight o’clock on a week­day. We may have to start rid­ing ear­lier on week­days when not on vaca­tion. I went to the store this morn­ing to get some actual paint­brushes for the bead board instead of my usual foam-on-a-stick things and when I went by the cor­ner quickie mart the price of gas was $3.72, pass­ing by the same store tonight the price had jumped by a dime to $3.82.

I’ll be glad when the FRS aren’t on ESPN any­more and I can go back to lis­ten­ing on the radio because tonight looks a lot like last night. They have gone and dug a them­selves a 4 run hole again that I’m bet­ting they aren’t going to be able to dig their way out of either.

Started up, went down, back up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 156

Another Rainy Morning

I put the top up to drive through the down­pour to get a Sun­day paper. The car spent the rest of the day drip­ping water on the garage floor. It was also my only foray out­doors as well.

Did a lit­tle paint­ing, did a lit­tle read­ing, did a lit­tle surf­ing and now I’m watch­ing the FRS on ESPN try­ing to get back in the game against the Twins.

Hope­fully tomor­row morn­ing it won’t be rain­ing and we can get in that threat­ened bike ride or a walk in the woods.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 153

Tuesday With Brian

Work
Bike Ride
Eat
House on DVD
FRS
Flickr!
Blog

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 144

Hurley Is A Citizen Too

Just after lunch today there was a knock at the door. We weren’t expect­ing any­one, but turns out that was wrong. When Donna opened the door there was the unlikely duo of Shan­non Ruther­ford and Hugo Reyes. I knew Jack was a Sox fan, but I was sur­prised to find a native son of Santa Mon­ica, CA was too. I had bid victoriously.

Here’s an item I won’t be vic­to­ri­ous on — I don’t have quite enough cash in my Pay­Pal account — David Ortiz “Yan­kees Curse” Jersey

I primered the the inside of the newly remod­eled bath­room and then hung a towel rack, the TP holder and the shower cur­tain rod. We started to shuf­fle things around in prepa­ra­tion for mov­ing our bed­room to the other end of the house. We cleaned out the two clos­ets by car­ry­ing a dozen boxes up into the attic. Sun­day night we’ll move the bed and our clothes to com­plete the transition.

Broke down and washed the car tonight, even though there is a chance of after­noon thun­der show­ers tomor­row. Pine pollen sea­son is all but over and it has been 6 weeks since the last wash, so I fig­ured it was time. Plus we are going on a Post Office Safari tomor­row and the Emperor always like to put his best face for­ward even though he isn’t the pri­mary pho­to­graphic subject.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 111

Official Citizen

Sounds kind of Social­ist doesn’t it? (not that there is any­thing wrong with that.) My 2008 Red Sox Nation mem­ber­ship card came in the mail today. Got a sticker too.

I’ve been a mem­ber of the Nation since I was 10 years-old or so, long before the mar­ket­ing depart­ment of Major League Base­ball thought there should be such a thing. I swore the oath at 12 in that incred­i­ble sum­mer of 1967. I really don’t need the card to val­i­date my cit­i­zen­ship, but see­ing as they want $14.95 to join and it costs the same amount as a sub­scrip­tion Game­day Audio (which I usu­ally get and is included in the mem­ber­ship), I sign up.

Because this week­end is a three game series against the MFY I am only lis­ten­ing to one of the games. The other two are on TV, because when the Red Sox play the Yan­kees it is like the Mon­tagues and the Capulets, the Hat­fields and the McCoys, the Sharks & the Jets, high drama makes riv­et­ing television.

But after lis­ten­ing to last night’s game and watch­ing today’s, the rivalry doesn’t seem to have the same inten­sity so far as it has had in the past. Maybe because the FRS are still jet lagged from the Japan trip. Maybe because the Red Sox have finally exor­cised the “curse” with the two cham­pi­onships in 4 years thing. Maybe all the Yan­kees are sad about them tear­ing down the House That Ruth Built. Or maybe it is just me.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 104

Good Day

It was def­i­nitely a good day to be a Red Sox fan. The play­ers got their World Series rings today in a 45 minute cer­e­mony prior to the home opener. Bil Buck­ner, that’s right Bill Buck­ner, threw out the first pitch. The FRS won the game 5–0 behind the pitch­ing of the 13 Tril­lion Yen Man. The only thing that didn’t go right is my offi­cial 2008 Red Sox Nation mem­ber­ship card didn’t arrive in the mail.

But Blue Miata and Tia were wait­ing patiently in the mail­box for me today. The red ones are at work and I think these smurf blue ver­sions will stay home. There are also gold ver­sions out there too, but I think I’m going to pass on acquir­ing them. I think is time to buy some Lost “action” fig­ures instead.

Hard to tell from this photo, but a lot was done on the bath­room project today. The floor was repaired, a real shower liner of vinyl was put in place, and most of the new moved wall was put up. The con­trac­tor picked up the tile today. We will meet with him after work tomor­row to dis­cuss how we want it put in.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 100

What Next?

The Home Shop­ping Net­work is going to start show­ing movies? First MTV, AKA Music Tele­vi­sion, stopped play­ing music. Then CNN Head­line News started doing stuff besides con­tin­ual 1/2 hour news shows. The Weather Chan­nel has stopped doing the weather 24/7. And now, tonight, the Car­toon Net­work is show­ing Juras­sic Park 3. That’s not a car­toon. Although I guess some argu­ment could be made that the CGI dinosaurs are and Bill Macy has a face that only a car­toon­ist could love…

We went for a nice walk in Hitch­cock Woods this morn­ing. It has only been a lit­tle over a week since our last visit and the woods have been trans­formed, all the dog­woods and the wild aza­leas are flow­er­ing, plus all the other trees are bud­ding and turn­ing green. I took a cou­ple dozen pho­tos on our walk and I learned two things: 1) I suck at pho­tograph­ing flow­ers and 2) the add an image thing isn’t work­ing in WP 2.5. Fixed.

Totally for­got about the FRS play­ing on TV this after­noon. Stum­bled on the game in the top of the ninth inning and watched them go down in a ball of flames to the Jays for the 3rd straight day. Plus it just seemed so wrong to hear voices I asso­ciate with Braves base­ball on a chan­nel that used to do every Braves base­ball game call­ing an Amer­i­can League game. Their record now stands at 3 wins and 4 loses, not a great start. At least the MFY are only 3 & 3 and we can blame the rocky start on the whole 3 coun­try, 12 time zone road trip. Tues­day is the home opener where the play­ers will get their World Series rings and the 0–5 Tigers are in town. Time to wake up and start look­ing like you want to repeat as WS Champs.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 100

Weekend Wrap Up

We went down­town last night to get an ice cream. The place was hop­ping. That was to be expected because the mid­dle jewel of Aiken’s Triple Crown, the Spring Steeple­chase, was yes­ter­day and it rou­tinely attracts 30,000 peo­ple and a lot of them hang around town long after. The restau­rants were packed and there were sev­eral venues with live music. We arrived at the Sweet Cow Cream­ery at just the right time, we were next in line to be served and by the time I paid for our ice cream there were a half dozen peo­ple storm­ing the door to get in.

This morn­ing after watch­ing last Thursday’s episode of Lost with break­fast, we went out and got lost in Hitch­cock Woods. As usual, we were not really lost, we just didn’t know exactly where we were. The map hasn’t been updated in a long while and there are quite a few new trails that can con­fuse us for a short while.

To help you through the next few dark days until April 24th, go to the Lost Island Video and see want some tal­ented Losties have created.

So far I am 31 of 48 in my March Mad­ness picks leav­ing me only 20 points behind the lead­ers and next round games are worth 15 points. That’s the good news, the bad news is that there are still 15 of the 21 peo­ple entered ahead of me. Unlike last year when I watched none of the games, this year I have actu­ally watched a few of the games. The b-ball play­ers these days love their tats. There was one guy play­ing for Mem­phis who I could have sworn had the whole Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence tat­tooed on his upper arm.

We are tak­ing the day off from work Tues­day because the BMW’s are com­ing to town. We can’t start dri­ving until 9:00AM, but that is OK because I have the per­fect way to spend those pre drive hours — base­ball. The FRS open the sea­son in Japan against Oak­land and the game starts at 6:00AM on ESPN2.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 86

Libra

Because of where the date of my birth falls in the Gre­go­rian cal­en­dar I am con­sid­ered a Libra. The sym­bol for Libra are the scales of bal­ance rep­re­sent­ing the bal­ance that Libras con­tin­u­ally seek in their selves and their life.

I don’t put much stock in astrol­ogy and my wife doesn’t either, but one or both of us must sub­con­sciously because it is my job to bal­ance the check­book. And when I get done post­ing here I need to get back to seek­ing what hap­pened to the $5.41 the bank says we have that I don’t think we have.

An inter­est­ing side note (or maybe not): Libra is the only inan­i­mate sign of the zodiac, all the oth­ers rep­re­sent either humans or animals.

Might be some­thing to this astrol­ogy after all, because I am con­stantly seek­ing ways to be inanimate.

The FRS almost didn’t go to Japan for Open­ing Day.

To get you ready for tomorrow’s Episode 8 of Lost here are a cou­ple of the­o­ries on what the “Island” is all about:
1. Coolest. The­ory. Ever.
2. The Great Gedanken Expri­ment, a Tale of Time Travel and Schrodinger’s Cat

They are kind of long, so you might want to save them for next Thurs­day night, because Lost won’t be on. Tomor­row is episode eight of thir­teen total for this sea­son and there is going to be a six week break before we get to see the last 5 episodes (dang writ­ers strike.)

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 85

Weekend Update

Car News: For some rea­son the BMW 6 Series con­vert­ible is back at the house down the street. The 5 Series sedan is gone. This guy must sell BMWs for a liv­ing or he has big repair issues with the 7 Series and swaps around loaner cars.

Other Car News: Halfway between here and there, some one traded in their Hum­mer H2 for a BMW Z4. It is an M edi­tion no less. So I guess I was right about the Z4M, just off by a cou­ple houses on the location.

Outdoors: Although we do enjoy lay­ing around the house doing noth­ing, it can’t be the only thing, as we found out yes­ter­day. By early last evening we had cabin fever, so today to stave off the late in the day bore­dom, we went for a walk in Hitch­cock Woods around mid-day.

Komen’s Com­ing: They have got the BMW Ulti­mate Drive map for 2008 online. Shiny new BMWs with pink vinyl accents will be stop­ping in Augusta on Tues­day, March 25th. Donna and I will be putting in for our vaca­tion day tomorrow.

Innings Pitched. Yes­ter­day was the first offi­cial work­out of Spring Train­ing for pitch­ers and catch­ers in Fort Mey­ers. The FRS title defense begins soon.

Ever­thing Hap­pens For A Rea­son: Only two of the famous num­bers were picked in Saturday’s Power­Ball draw­ing — 4 & 8

Sunday Night: And it is time to go watch some Law & Order: Crim­i­nal Intent on Bravo.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/08: 40

Best of 2007

Jan­u­ary

Who Want’s To Be A Millionaire?

Wednes­day the 17th

Ahhhh, me!

As part of our com­pre­hen­sive retire­ment plan Donna and I play the Power­ball Lot­tery every draw­ing. We will plop down $10 and get a quick pick set of num­bers that are good for the next 5 weeks of Wednes­day and Fri­day drawings.

Let­ting the machine pick the num­bers for us is the best way to go. We used too play some fam­ily birth­days, but never won any­thing so what good are they. Besides, we had more than 6 birth­days to chose from, so we had to leave some num­bers off. Then what would have hap­pened if we were to miss the jack­pot by one num­ber and that one num­ber was one of the omit­ted birth­days. How would we feel towards the per­son who had the birth­day num­ber that was wrong? How would we feel towards the per­son whose birth­day we left off and would have won it for us?

When you go to a Chi­nese restau­rant and you get a for­tune cookie now a days they include a set of “lucky” num­bers for the lot­tery. Well, a cou­ple of years ago I got a for­tune that said, “Finan­cial pros­per­ity is com­ing your way!” See­ing this as a good omen, I tucked it into my wal­let with the inten­tion of giv­ing those num­bers a try, but never got around to it.

Yes­ter­day while chat­ting with a co-worker (Hi, Mark) I men­tioned that see­ing as the Power­ball was up to 180 mil­lion that just maybe I’d go buy an extra shot at the prize. I told him about my lucky num­bers and he asked to see my for­tune slip. I thought he was kid­ding when he wrote them down and said he was going to play them. This morn­ing he told me that he really bought a ticket using those numbers.

Tonight on the way home from get­ting our hair cut I stopped at a quick mart and bought a ticket using the “lucky” num­bers too. Had to. Just imag­ine how I would have felt if he hit with those num­bers that I had been car­ry­ing around in my wal­let for years and never played. That’s right, the only thing left to do at that point would be Seppuku.

Feb­ru­ary

Life of the Party or Annoy­ing Guest?

Mon­day the 5th

When I went for my esoph­a­gogas­tro­duo­denoscopy (I just love that word, I can’t say it, but boy does it look impres­sive writ­ten down) on Fri­day, I had a hos­pi­tal arrival time of 7:30 and a pro­ce­dure time of 8:30. Donna dropped me off about 7:15 so she could get to work at her nor­mal hour. The patient reg­is­tra­tion clerks were ready and effi­cient, so when I entered the Endoscopy Lab where I was to have my pro­ce­dure, I was very early. All the nurses were sit­ting in a big cir­cle drink­ing cof­fee, cut­ting up and laugh­ing. When I was noticed, every­one qui­eted down and one of the nurses directed me to the wait­ing room and told me they would call me when they were ready for me. They were prob­a­bly hav­ing a morn­ing staff meet­ing or some­thing, but they sure were a happy bunch with all that laughing.

What ever the feel good juice is that they give you before the scop­ing, it is awe­some. One of the nurses stuck the nee­dle in the IV and said this will take about 5 min­utes to kick in. I looked up at the clock and saw that it was 9:05 and I thought that I bet­ter remind the doc­tor that I wanted a pic­ture of my insides, when the next thing I knew I was in the recov­ery area and a nurse asked if I wanted a Coke to drink. Mem­o­ries of the next hour or two are very scat­tered, for me. My wife will tell you dif­fer­ent. Appar­ently I bab­bled on and on, repeat­ing every­thing I said two or three times. Donna even tells me I was tor­ment­ing the other patients, par­tic­u­larly a woman who was in for a colonoscopy. I have zero recall of any of this. I won­der what else I was saying?

Over the week­end I fig­ured out what all those nurses were laugh­ing at when I walked in on them Fri­day morn­ing and why they went so silent so fast. They were prob­a­bly com­par­ing notes on how their patients had acted and what they said while under the influ­ence of the anes­the­sia the day before.

I expect they all had a pretty good laugh about me at this morning’s meeting.

March

Nim­rod Lane

Sat­ur­day the 24th

We went for a nice long walk in Hitch­cock Woods this morn­ing and boy was it crowded. We saw 4 peo­ple on horses and three peo­ple walk­ing their dogs. One of our favorite pas­times while walk­ing is to make up elab­o­rate his­to­ries of peo­ple who have trails named after them. Mrs. Knox, Mr. Fletcher, Willie Bar­ton, etc. This “lane” is named for the great Civil War Gen­eral Beau­re­gard Nim­rod who died in 1864 while either defend­ing Aiken from the vile north­ern aggres­sors or from friendly fire after berat­ing the beloved com­pany mess sergeant because he felt his grits were undercooked.

From Ask Yahoo:

The Amer­i­can Her­itage Dic­tio­nary offers two dis­tinct def­i­n­i­tions of a nim­rod — either a hunter, or a per­son regarded as silly or fool­ish. The dic­tio­nary goes on to explain that the sec­ond mean­ing prob­a­bly orig­i­nated with the car­toon char­ac­ter Bugs Bunny. The wily Bugs used the term in its orig­i­nal sense to refer to dither­ing hunter Elmer Fudd, whom he called a “poor lit­tle Nim­rod.” Over time, how­ever, the “hunter” mean­ing got dropped, and the “dither­ing” con­no­ta­tion stuck.

April

I Know Why He Did It

Tues­day the 17th

While in DC the other week, after we walked to a lot of the war memo­ri­als in West Potomac Park we headed over to the Tidal Basin to see if we could find any cherry trees that still had blos­soms on it. Unfor­tu­nately there were only a few. There are about three or four vari­eties of cherry trees planted around the basin so that some of them bloom at dif­fer­ent times, but dur­ing our walk we only came across about three trees that looked like they were at their peak. Because of the great dis­tances between bloomed trees, my dream of a sweep­ing panorama of bloom­ing trees with the Jef­fer­son Memo­r­ial in the back­ground (very postcard-like) was squashed. I did take a cou­ple of close ups of one bloom­ing tree. As we strolled along I was look­ing down review­ing my last pic­tures when — SMACK –my head hit a low hang­ing branch. I know now why George Wash­ing­ton chopped down that cherry tree. It wasn’t bad enough to make me see stars, but I did decide from then for­ward that I would wait until I was stopped to look down at the camera’s LCD.

May

I Can See Still See In The Dark

Wednes­day the 23rd

Today was Donna and my annual eye exams. Good news is that nei­ther of us have any issues nor have our eyes changed enough to war­rant get­ting new glasses.

We went mid after­noon and some six hours later the drops they put in your eyes to dilate them has not not entirely worn off. I think I could take a book into a closet and read it with the light off. You know your pupils are open wide when the lit­tle WinXP screen­saver (bounc­ing logo on black back­ground) has a bright rain­bow hued halo around it.

I remem­ber a cou­ple of years ago we went late after­noon and by the time we left the Eye Guy’s place it was dusk. The sun was down but the sky was still light. Most cars were dri­ving with their lights on and both head­lights and tail­lights were giv­ing off these awe­some star­burst pat­terns. Even the traf­fic sig­nals looked like they were being viewed through a star­burst fil­ter. Very cool effect, but it was dif­fi­cult to con­cen­trate on actu­ally dri­ving and not run­ning into any­thing while look­ing at all the pretty lights.

June

Sun­day Stuff

Sun­day the 3rd

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.”

July

Un Happy Meal

Mon­day the 16th

On our way back to the hos­pi­tal in Flo­rence on Sat­ur­day, Susie asked if I would stop at a McDonald’s so young Katlin could get a Happy Meal. Ever the oblig­ing dri­ver I spot­ted a Mickie D’s and got in the drive up line. Susie also wanted a Snack Wrap or some­thing for her­self. Because the only thing I have ordered at a McDonald’s Drive Up in the last three decades is a Hot Fudge Sun­dae, Susie would tell me what to repeat into the micro­phone, in essence trans­lat­ing McDonald’s speak through me. After we ordered and the team mem­ber inside told us, “Dat ill be foe six dee.” I got to repay the ear­lier favor by trans­lat­ing South­ern for Susie, and told her that the total for the food was four dol­lars and sixty cents.

At the sec­ond win­dow we received our two bags of stuff. Susie’s wrap in one and the Happy Meal in the other. When Susie pulled out the toy from the Happy Meal bag it was a Mon­ster Wheel obvi­ously intended for a boy. I tried to hand it back to the team mem­ber in the win­dow say­ing, “Could we get a girl’s toy?” She wouldn’t take it back, they were all out of girl’s toys. With no Hello Kitty toy on the hori­zon and rather than get noth­ing, Katlin excepted the neon green wheel thing with a frown.

To try and lighten the moment I told Katlin that I guess she didn’t get a Happy Meal after all, but instead she got an Un Happy Meal.

Well, I thought it was funny.

August

Lost Time

Thurs­day the 9th

Yes­ter­day at 2:35 PM I scraped my arm.The nurse and I spent 20 min­utes treat­ing it. We then spent the next 15 min­utes exam­in­ing the scene of the crime and recre­at­ing the event. We then called in the main­te­nance super­vi­sor to have him look at the offend­ing junc­tion box cover and he then got a main­te­nance guy to remove the cover, smooth off the sharp edge and then replace it. Another 30 min­utes used up. From there we ended up in my boss’s office while he, the nurse, and I filled out the acci­dent report, spend­ing another half hour. Pretty much killing the rest of the work day.

Today the nurse spent almost 2–1/2 hours with me, dri­ving me to two dif­fer­ent doctor’s offices, so I could get my tetanus shot. (At the first place we went, the front office per­son “couldn’t get me in the com­puter”, so we left after an hour.) Back at the plant we spent the next 45 min­utes together to 1) re ban­dage the cut because the doc­tor did a lack­lus­ter job after he spent all of 10 sec­onds look­ing at it, 2) fill­ing out the appro­pri­ate paper­work to have me take a drug test and 3) me pee­ing in a cup and her test­ing it. Later my boss brought around the acci­dent report for me to sign (anther 2 min­utes, but who knows how long it took to com­plete it.)

Next week the Direc­tor of Oper­a­tions, the Facil­i­ties Man­ager, the HR Man­ager, my super­vi­sor, his Man­ager, the super­vi­sor of the depart­ment I was pass­ing through and his man­ager will meet to dis­cuss how to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing again. More than likely after all of these folks spend an hour in a room, a main­te­nance man will be dis­patched to reroute the offend­ing junc­tion box and it’s asso­ci­ated con­duit, another main­te­nance man will be dis­patched to place yel­low tape on the floor to des­ig­nate an offi­cial aisle and the depart­ment super­vi­sor will spend a half an hour instruct­ing his peo­ple not to place pal­lets in the new aisle.

This was not con­sid­ered a lost time acci­dent, even though over 8 man hours have been spent on it so far, with lots more to come, because I did not “miss” any work.

As a bonus, as far as OSHA is con­cerned it is not a record­able acci­dent because I did not require stitches, x-rays, or antibi­otics (tetanus shots don’t count) so our company’s acci­dent free hours num­bers don’t get reset.

Sep­tem­ber

Dedo de la Mantequilla

Tues­day the 4th

Once every cou­ple of weeks I’ll have a snack attack and head into the cafe­te­ria to quench it. My usual extin­guisher of choice is Lance’s Peanut But­ter on Nekot cook­ies. These have two draws, 1) I like ‘em and 2) they are only 50¢. Today I opted to go wild and get a candy bar of some kind. It had been awhile since I had a But­terfin­ger bar, so I pressed E9. I know it had been awhile because the last time I bought one it was 65 cents, today the price tag below my selec­tion said 75¢.

The only prob­lem with buy­ing a But­terfin­ger from a vend­ing machine is you don’t usu­ally get to bite off pieces to eat, falling from the E Row always busts the bar up into a bunch of uneven chunks. When I got back to my desk, I opened up the wrap­per and sure enough there were 3 big pieces and one small piece inside.

As I savored that crispety and crunchety candy I read the label and dis­cov­ered that each Eng­lish word was fol­lowed imme­di­ately by it’s Span­ish coun­ter­part — Bar fol­lowed by Barra on the front for exam­ple. I’ve noticed some of the larger chain stores around here have goten ino the same act, Wal-Mart, Lowes, etc. Men with a smaller Hom­bres under­neath. Doors -> Puertas.

I don’t like it. Not for the rea­son you think either, I don’t like the cacoph­ony (ruido) of it, Eng­lish and Span­ish. Just pick one. Hell, I don’t even care if you pick Span­ish. With immer­sion, I’ll fig­ure it out.

But­terfin­ger in Span­ish is still Butterfinger.

Octo­ber

Isn’t That Special?

Thurs­day the 11th

At work there are 4 of us in the “Car Guys” group. We each sub­scribe to a car mag­a­zine and then pass it around among us. Thank good­ness the mag­a­zine peo­ple don’t have a RIAA like group look­ing out after them, we’d be in trouble.

Today the lat­est Motor Trend was sit­ting on my desk. You couldn’t see the cover because of the card stock over­wrap announc­ing your chance to get two sub­scrip­tions for the price of one, your renewal and a gift sub­scrip­tion for some­one, just in time for the holidays.

The tear out card has the cur­rent sub­scribers name already on it, it served as the mail­ing label, so all you have to do is fill out the blanks for your friend and send it back, just check the box marked bill me later. To the left of the address area is the text read­ing, “Yes, I accept! Extend my sub­scrip­tion for 1 year (12 issues) at the pre­ferred sub­scriber rate of only $20 and enter my 1-year gift sub­scrip­tion to the per­son listed above — that’s two sub­scrip­tions for the price of one!”

Sounds great, until you real­ized that you can sub­scribe to Motor Trend for $10 a year from a bunch of places, includ­ing the Motor Trend site itself…

I won­der what their non-preferred rate is?

Novem­ber

The Most Fun I’ve Had At Work In A Long Time

Tues­day the 13th

We are get­ting a front office update, no new cubi­cal pan­els or fur­ni­ture, just some new car­pet, wall­pa­per and the trim painted a dif­fer­ent color. They did Human Resources first and now they are con­tin­u­ing through the plant from right to left.

Yippee my area will be sec­ond. There really is noth­ing wrong with the way it looks now, sure there are a few places where the exist­ing stuff is stained from use and there are a few holes, but we are a man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­ity, not a lawyer’s office. Six months from now the place will look nearly as well used as it does now.

I guess I should go pay atten­tion to how HR looks to see what is in store for me, but it has got to be fairly blah, because I have been in there sev­eral times since their update and can­not bring to mind what it looks like.

I know no one else in the office is sure what the new wall­pa­per looks like! The room next door is first to get the rework, last night the con­trac­tor came in and removed the old two-tone gray wall­pa­per. All that was up this morn­ing was the white liner paper cov­er­ing the still older pan­el­ing. For gig­gles I printed out two col­ors of ‘wall­pa­per sam­ples’ and tacked them to wall next to the door into my area. I snagged the back­ground from the Boston Red Sox home page on MLB.com. One was the stock back­ground, dark blue with white-ish socks and in the other I col­ored the socks red.

The idea came from my fel­low front office FRS fan (thanks Gerry) and got the expected reac­tion from my MFY lov­ing man­ager. The best part was the reac­tions from all the other peo­ple that pass that way each day. Quite a bit of them are obvi­ously not base­ball fans because hardly any­one noticed the real con­nec­tion. I bet about half of them were actual argu­ing the mer­its of the all blue paper vs. the blue with red in it. Some noticed the socks in the pat­tern, but couldn’t fig­ure out why they might be there.

The folks in the room that is all tore up, that the “sam­ples” are in, were good sports about it and with as straight a face as they could muster, explained that that really is the choice of paper for the office remodel. Some­time in the after­noon one of the USC fans had made up a small sam­ple with Game­cock logos all over it to add to the mix.

At the end of the day they must have tired of all the peo­ple ask­ing about the redo because they pub­lished an FAQ and pinned it to the wall as well. It con­sisted of one ques­tion and one answer:
Q. Are y’all remod­el­ing?
A. Yes

Decem­ber

Monk Moment

Wednes­day the 26th

We spent a frus­trat­ing 2 hours tonight search­ing sev­eral stores for a 32oz insu­lated water bot­tle with a big enough open­ing on top to except ice cubes. They are in every store, on numer­ous aisles as long as it isn’t Christ­mas time and Donna had the mis­for­tune of drop­ping her water bot­tle and break­ing it this morn­ing Decem­ber 27th.

To ease our suf­fer­ing we dined on Car­ni­tas at Marias. We were seated at a booth by the win­dow with a lovely view of the laun­dro­mat next build­ing over. As I looked through the faux wood blinds, it came to my atten­tion that sev­eral of the slats were tilted dif­fer­ent from the major­ity. Reflex­ively, I nudged the offend­ing slats into line with the rest.

Adrian would have been so proud.

The Most Fun I’ve Had At Work In A Long Time

We are get­ting a front office update, no new cubi­cal pan­els or fur­ni­ture, just some new car­pet, wall­pa­per and the trim painted a dif­fer­ent color. They did Human Resources first and now they are con­tin­u­ing through the plant from right to left.

<sar­casm>Yippee my area will be sec­ond.</sarcasm> There really is noth­ing wrong with the way it looks now, sure there are a few places where the exist­ing stuff is stained from use and there are a few holes, but we are a man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­ity, not a lawyer’s office. Six months from now the place will look nearly as well used as it does now.

I guess I should go pay atten­tion to how HR looks to see what is in store for me, but it has got to be fairly blah, because I have been in there sev­eral times since their update and can­not bring to mind what it looks like.

I know no one else in the office is sure what the new wall­pa­per looks like! The room next door is first to get the rework, last night the con­trac­tor came in and removed the old two-tone gray wall­pa­per. All that was up this morn­ing was the white liner paper cov­er­ing the still older pan­el­ing. For gig­gles I printed out two col­ors of ‘wall­pa­per sam­ples’ and tacked them to wall next to the door into my area.

Wallpaper Samples

I snagged the back­ground from the Boston Red Sox home page on MLB.com. The idea came from my fel­low front office FRS fan (thanks Gerry) and got the expected reac­tion from my MFY lov­ing man­ager. The best part was the reac­tions from all the other peo­ple that pass that way each day. Quite a bit of them are obvi­ously not base­ball fans because hardly any­one noticed the real con­nec­tion. I bet about half of them were actual argu­ing the mer­its of the all blue paper vs. the blue with red in it. Some noticed the socks in the pat­tern, but couldn’t fig­ure out why they might be there.

The folks in the room that is all tore up, that the “sam­ples” are in, were good sports about it and with as straight a face as they could muster, explained that that really is the choice of paper for the office remodel. Some­time in the after­noon one of the USC fans had made up a small sam­ple with Game­cock logos all over it to add to the mix.

At the end of the day they must have tired of all the peo­ple ask­ing about the redo because they pub­lished an FAQ and pinned it to the wall as well. It con­sisted of one ques­tion and one answer:
Q. Are y’all remod­el­ing?
A. Yes

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 476

Forget About the Hat

I’ve decided not to buy a Red Sox World Series hat, instead I’m going to get some of those fash­ion­able Offi­cial MLB World Series Cel­e­bra­tion Goggles.

Champagne Shower

Now if I can just find out where to get them…

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 470

Millinery Maneuvers

My search for a FRS WSC hat continues.

2007 WSC Ugly Blue HatThis one offered at MLB.com was too pricey at $30 for me to buy. I don’t really like the look, but if it was cheaper I might have bought it.

 

 

 

2004 WSC Blue HatA lit­tle search­ing around the web led me to dis­cover that the 2004 hat, that I had owned and liked, was still avail­able and maybe I would just buy another. It is avail­able for $20 at the Yawkey Way Store.

 

 

2007 WSC Blue HatOn the front page of the Yawkey Way Store page is a link that says World Series Cham­pi­ons Mer­chan­dise Click Here. It takes you to a sis­ter site that has the same Yawkey Way Store title and look, but the URL is www.thesouvenirstore.com. There I found a hat that looks like the 2004, but with 2007 and the word Cham­pi­ons in script. It is $30, but I’d pay that much for this one, because I like the looks.

You have to reg­is­ter with the site to buy any­thing, so I put the hat in the shop­ping cart and start the check­out process. When I get to the ship­ping page I find out that the cheap­est way they offer is UPS ground and that costs $10. So now I rethink this pur­chase because the hat is now a $40 hat. I like it, but maybe not that much.

Ten bucks doesn’t sound like too much to ship 2 hats, so I try to order both the 2004 and 2007 hats. Can’t be done. Even though they are tech­ni­cally com­ing from the same place the two web sites don’t talk to each other.

2007 WSC Khaki HatDo I get one $30 2004 hat or one $40 2007 hat or two hats for $70? Maybe I’ll call the 1–800 num­ber tomor­row and see if they will ship me the 2 hats for a total cost of $60. If I do get 2, the 2007 hat will be in khaki to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it between the 2004 hat.

Next year when the FRS win the 2008 series, I will get the hat, sim­i­larly styled, in red.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 462

New Hat?

OK, I lied to you. I did not go to bed at 11:00PM, I stayed up until 12:15AM and watched multi-millionaire kids dance for joy on a field of green on a late Octo­ber evening in Den­ver. I did not stay long enough to see if Syn­drome would do another River Dance in his under­wear again though.

Three years ago when the FRS won the Fall Clas­sic for the first time in 86 years, I bought a hat to com­mem­o­rate the event. This year I will prob­a­bly do the same, but I’m not sure yet. One, I don’t really like the looks of the hats avail­able and Two, they are kind of pricey at $29.99. The 2004 World Cham­pi­ons hat I bought was $19.99!

2007 Wild Card LoserTo rub it in I was going to buy my MFY fan man­ager a 2007 Wild Card Win­ner hat as a gag when I pur­chased my Red Sox World Series Champs hat, but even it at $24.99 is a lit­tle too much to spend on a quick gag.

Maybe I’ll just buy the Wild Card hat for myself and on the back where there is a ’07 Divi­sion Series patch I’ll have the word Loser embroi­dered there. :-)

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 461

Has Anyone Seen Them In The Same Room Together?

SyndromeIf you hunt around on the web you can find loads of pic­tures of the Red Sox closer, Jonathan Papel­bon, in mid gri­mace after the final out and some oth­ers of him doing his lit­tle river dance after the FRS won the ALCS, but I can’t find any of him in the dugout between the eighth and ninth innings dur­ing one of his long, 4 out saves to show you what I mean. But a cou­ple times dur­ing this World Series he has been in there sit­ting on the end of the bench with his wild-eyed look, run­ning his fin­gers through his hair ver­ti­cally to make it stick straight up. This gave him a very dis­tinc­tively dis­turb­ing look. Unfor­tu­nately for him this may have given away his evil super hero alter-ego — Syndrome!

Last night, Donna and I watched the whole freak­ing game three and it didn’t get over until like 1:00AM. Tonight we are going to bed at 11:00PM, no mat­ter what, the Red Sox will win or lose whether I’m watch­ing the game or not, because tomor­row is a work day and we won’t be able to sleep in until 8:30AM like we did today.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 460

And If The Band You’re In Starts Playing Different Tunes

Dark Side of the MoonPlan­e­tol­o­gists at the Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­tory study­ing this photo from the dark side of the moon Bownce, believe that the red areas are large deposits of cop­per and the faint yel­low indi­cates that there might be sul­phur just below the surface.

May not be big news where you are, but they opened a new Wal-Mart Super­center here today.

They may have opened a new Wal-Mart in Bean­town today, but I wouldn’t know because I don’t sub­scribe to the com­pany newslet­ter. I know they opened one here because it was front page news in the local paper. If they did open one in the Boston area I bet they did a box office busi­ness in Red Sox paraphernalia.

I got exactly what I didn’t want last night, the FRS scored a baker’s dozen worth of runs, so although I didn’t see it, I bet some­where in Amer­ica a sports page head­line read, “Sox Rock Rox.” I’m afraid to men­tion that I don’t want to see the Rock­ies score a bunch of runs on the Red Sox, so that some­one can get to write the oppo­site, for fear of it hap­pen­ing, so mums the word.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 456

Liquid Sunshine

May not be big news where you are, but it rained here today.

Its rain­ing in Bean­town too, mak­ing for a messy game one of the MLB Cham­pi­onship Series. Post­ing may be light for the next 5 to 9 days as my nor­mal blog­ging time coin­cides with the TV broad­cast­ing of the FRS and the Col­orado Rock­ies. Plus I can barely con­cen­trate long enough to post some­thing with­out any distractions…

As much as I’d like to see the Red Sox score tons of runs and win a World Series game, I don’t really want that to hap­pen so in the morn­ing I’ll see a sports head­line that reads, “Sox Rocks Rox.” What­ever the score of a Boston win, I can bet some­where, that that will appear in print.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 455

Its Finished

Got done read­ing book #11, Vale­dic­tion, this evening, thereby com­plet­ing my quest to read every one of Robert Parker’s Spenser nov­els. I’ve got all 34 books on a shelf and maybe in a cou­ple years I’ll read them through in order, instead of ran­domly like this time. It was never required, but it might make some of the ref­er­ences fit together better.

This book didn’t have any crime buster secrets, but it did have one of Spenser’s Laws of Dining:

In high restau­rants the food never lives up to the view.

The sec­ond to last book I read, A Sav­age Place, did have a Dick Tracy Crime-Stopper reference:

I had a full file of Dick Tracy crime-stoppers at home, but none of them that I could remem­ber cov­ered this. What would Allan Pinker­ton do? What would I tell the Bel-Air Patrol if they put the arm on me here in the bushes? My palms felt a lit­tle sweaty. I squinted a lit­tle to blur things and took a quick peek. They were still at it. Pri­vate eye was one thing, Peep­ing Tom was another. I headed for the car.

See­ing as no spe­cific rule is men­tioned it didn’t make the cut.

In case you missed it the FRS didn’t lose to the Indi­ans in game seven of the ALCS, like I expected, so they are on to the World Series (or more appro­pri­ately the MLB Cham­pi­onship Series.) They now get the priv­i­lege of play­ing the Col­orado Rock­ies of the National League who have won 20 of their last 21 games and swept through both of their play­offs series. I hope Mark is right in that if the Rock­ies ever lose one, they’ll col­lapse and not win another until next year some time and that the FRS can win the first game on Wednes­day to start that slide.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 454

You’re Killing Me

Game 7. Ack.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 452

What?

I’m not blog­ging tonight. You can’t make me. So if you’ve come here to read about my ‘excit­ing’ day there will be noth­ing here for you.

I didn’t go out to eat with friends tonight. So there will be no sto­ries of how my Fil­let Gor­gonzola was very tasty, but the pasta and veg­gies that served as side dishes were not palate pleasers. Or how Donna’s Veal Saltim­bocca while not visu­ally appeal­ing was very good.

The FRS didn’t win their play­off game. So there will be no trum­pet­ing about the 10 runs the Bosox scored nor Beckett’s 6 inning mas­tery of the Indi­ans only allow­ing one run with the bullpen fin­ish­ing the game allow­ing only two more.

I am def­i­nitely not going to tell you about our drive to work this morn­ing with the top down, but the win­dows up because it was down right chilly, nor, how on the way home from the restau­rant we didn’t eat at this evening we put the win­dows up again, but not the top.

Nope, not going to do it.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 440

Be Careful What You Wish For

Lucy In The Sky With DiamondsI’m sit­ting here on the couch watch­ing the MFY play the Indi­ans in the Amer­i­can League Divi­sion Series. Because I would rather have the Red Sox lose, if they were to lose, to Cleve­land than to New York in the League Cham­pi­onship Series, I am root­ing for the Indi­ans. Not only for that rea­son, but there is the usual one too, I always root for who­ever is play­ing against the Yankees.

It is not entirely over just yet, but the Indi­ans have a five run lead in the 5th inning and are lead­ing the series 2 games to 1, so it is look­ing good for them. But the way the Indi­ans are play­ing right now, maybe, just maybe, I don’t really want them to win…

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 437

California Here We Come

I wasn’t going to blog tonight. I didn’t need to write any­thing just so I could append it with the top count, because the car hasn’t moved all day. I didn’t really have any­thing pro­found to say. I don’t have any more cute gnome pic­tures to post.

So what prompted me to write this post, three things:

1) Read­ing this on TechDirt: If You Play Your Radio Loud Enough For Your Neigh­bor To Hear, Is It Copy­right Infringement?

2) See­ing the phrase that is the title of this post on the Boston Dirt Dogs web site per­tain­ing to the FRS and their trip to LA for game 3 of the ALDS after Manny’s walk-off homer last night.

C) And hav­ing the phrase that is the title of this post become applic­a­ble to me because it looks like our 2008 trip to the north­west will start and end in San Fran­cisco with a trip up the coast to Vic­to­ria, BC in between.

Oh, yeah, for what its worth.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 436

Meet the Beatles

Meet the BeatlesLast night Gnorm went home with his par­ents, so here is one last photo from when he went it to work with me the other day. Gnorm was totally cap­ti­vated as the Fab Four played “I Want to be Your Gnome”, “The Gnome on the Hill” & “Hey Gnome” for him.

Three more Spenser paper­backs came in the mail today and I already fin­ished one, The God­wulf Man­u­script. It is the first in the Spenser series and while not as pol­ished as the later books, you can def­i­nitely see the char­ac­ter in his rough form. Sort of like a wood carv­ing Spenser is work­ing on a cou­ple times in this story.

The MFY lost their sec­ond game to the Indi­ans today, dig­ging a big hole for them­selves where they will have to win the next three games to advance. As I type this the FRS are trail­ing 3–2 in the 5th inning to the Angels, and if I had to guess by the way the breaks are going they will end up on the los­ing side of this game, but I hope I’m wrong.

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 436

The Speed Of Light Is Much Faster Than The Speed Of Sound

LightI know the post sea­son starts tomor­row, but tonight it just seems so over, there is no base­ball game on the radio. Prac­ti­cally every night for the last six months I’ve sat in front of my PC and wasted sev­eral hours muck­ing about and lis­ten­ing to the FRS on WEEI and I miss it already.

Now the play­offs begin, with all the games on TV and I’ll feel com­pelled to watch, even though I will more than likely cringe at lis­ten­ing to the mon­keys in the booth fill every sec­ond of air with truly inane stats and state­ments. I would much rather lis­ten to the radio announc­ers call the game and watch the TV pic­tures, but that is impos­si­ble to take because of the time dif­fer­ence. There is a 5 or so sec­ond delay between the TV pic­tures and the radio sound (I have no clue as to what the rea­son for this delay is) and it made me crazy the one time I tried it.

Oooooh, I won­der if you had TIVO and hit pause until the radio sound caught up to the TV, then restarted the video?

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 430

Round 1

They finally set the sched­uled times for the first round play­off games. This is the only one that counts, but I’ll prob­a­bly have one eye on the Cleve­land — New York series. As much as I’s hate to have the FRS knocked out of a chance at a World Series win by the Yan­kees, it would be so much sweeter to trounce the MFY on the way to it.

Game 1 LAA @ BOS Wed Oct. 3 6:30 pm TBS
Game 2 LAA @ BOS Fri Oct. 5 8:30 pm TBS
Game 3 BOS @ LAA Sun Oct. 7 3:00 pm TBS
Game 4* BOS @ LAA Mon Oct. 8 9:30 pm TBS
Game 5* LAA @ BOS Wed Oct. 10 8:30 pm TBS
* If Necessary

My prize for the David Ortiz Walk Off Con­test on The Joy of Sox showed up in the mail today — Big Papi — My Story of Big Dreams and Big Hits. There are a few pic­tures in the book and one is of David when he played for the New Britain Rock Cats in the sum­mer of ’97. I can’t remem­ber if we vis­ited my old home town that sum­mer and if we did, did we take in a game and if we did, did we see “Lit­tle” Papi.

Also one of the Spenser books I ordered came too, so I’ve got plenty to read for Mon­day, Tues­day, Thurs­day and Sat­ur­day between games.

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 428

Lovers Lane

Lovers LaneGnorm went for a walk in Hitch­cock Woods with us today (some peek­tures) It was another beau­ti­ful fall day, almost a car­bon copy of yes­ter­day; cool, crisp with the very def­i­n­i­tion of blue sky over­head. It was great to get out and take a hike. Because we got a late (for us) start we had to share the woods with dog walk­ers, run­ners (Hi Anne) and horse­back rid­ers. We prob­a­bly saw 10 peo­ple! Donna and I took Gnorm down our favorite trail, but it just made him sad because his new girl­friend from yes­ter­day wasn’t with him.

At the end of last week, every time I came home from work the inter­net con­nec­tion was down. I would have to reboot the modem, and some­times the router too, a couple/few of times to get it sta­ble. Yes­ter­day it was fine, but today as I pre­pared to lis­ten to the FRS’s last game of the sea­son, it just wouldn’t work no mat­ter how many times I rebooted every­thing. I ended up on the back porch with the lap­top and took a ride on the inter­net on a neighbor’s dime. Some­one close by has an unse­cured WAP… After on more reboot of every­thing, includ­ing the PC, I now have inter­net on the desk­top. I can con­nect to my wire­less net­work with the lap­top, but I can­not see the desk­top nor the inter­net. Plus I can no longer get the router’s admin panel from the desk­top even after reset­ting the router. Fix­ing that will be a job for tomor­row after work.

The Emperor got a bath this after­noon and had the royal scary den­tures installed. They will add a lit­tle spice to some of the Octo­ber Post Office photos.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 425

The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back

I shrugged last month when the Yan­kees swept the FRS in the Bronx cut­ting their lead in the East to 4 games. No big deal, with a month and a half to go we were still play­ing good base­ball and the Yan­kees were red hot and bound to cool off.

The Yan­kees did cool just a bit and when we started a 3 game series in Boston last week their lead over New York was 5–1/2 games. I was not wor­ried until they only won one of the three and the MFY left town only trail­ing by 4–1/2. Still, it seemed like we were OK and in com­mand of our own fate.

But maybe being in com­mand is not as easy as it looks. After Monday’s loss to Toronto and NY’s win over Bal­ti­more the lead fell to 3–1/2. Crap.

Last night was the last straw. The Yan­kees won again. The Sox were win­ning 2 to 1 and the FRS man­ager sent in trade dead­line acqui­si­tion, Eric Gagne. This was trou­ble­some because all Mr. Gag-Me has done since putting on a Red Sox uni­form is blow 2 of 2 save oppor­tu­ni­ties, lost 2 games with an ERA of 9.00 in 15 appear­ances. Well you guessed it, a walk, a sin­gle and a walk to load the bases. He should have been pulled out of the game right then. Nope, he then walked in the tying run. Did he come out now, nope again. The next bat­ter dou­bles in two runs. I stopped lis­ten­ing to the game, I just couldn’t take it any more.

I started root­ing for the FRS at about 8-years old, mildly at first, but the hook was set in 1967 when Yaz had his Triple-Crown year and they made it to the World Series. They lost in seven games. There have been quite a few ter­ri­ble years with a few notable excep­tions, 1975 and 1986 when they made it to the World Series again. Only to lose both in seven games. For about the last decade they have started fast and have lead the East­ern Divi­sion before cool­ing near the All Star break and even­tu­ally fin­ish­ing 2nd or 3rd behind the Yan­kees. Some­how the cos­mos shifted and in 2004 they won World Series for the first time in 86 years. Right after 2004 they returned to their old ways. This year they have lead the East since some­time in April, but it doesn’t look good for them to stay there. Another loss and a Yan­kees win last night cut the lead to 2–1/2 games. Tonight in the sev­enth inning of both games the sta­tus quo pre­vails, the Yanks are win­ning and the FRS are losing.

Divorce PetitionI can’t take the men­tal abuse any more, to the left you can see my divorce peti­tion dis­solv­ing my rela­tion­ship with the Red Sox. I am not lis­ten­ing to tonight’s game, I have washed my hands of them. My blood pres­sure may even go down a few points. I am now offi­cially not fol­low­ing any team for that mat­ter any sport. I can stop read­ing a sec­tion of the paper. I can drop sev­eral chan­nels from the TV. I’m not sure what I’ll do with all the free time yet, maybe needlepoint…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 398

Can I Worry Yet?

The FRS dropped 2 of 3 over the week­end to the MFY and their lead in the East was then down to just 4–1/2 games. But I was not wor­ried, for the Yan­kees to tie us at the end of the sea­son they would have to fin­ish 11–2 if the Red Sox just won half of their remain­ing 12 games.

Tonight the Sox lost to the Blue Jays 7 to 1 and right now the Yan­kees are beat­ing the Ori­oles 7 to 2. Looks like after tonight the divi­sion lead will be down to just 3–1/2 games, small­est since some­time in May. I’m now wor­ried. Not only that I think I might have jinxed them because I opened my mouth say­ing how improb­a­ble it would be for them to lose the divi­sion. Is it 1978 all over again?

Since I revamped the Post Office Gallery, I decided to exper­i­ment with a cou­ple of related pieces of soft­ware for some other galleries.

Pho­to­time Tues­day is now run­ning some­thing called Post­card Viewer, a free Flash image viewer. The inter­face is based on the real world metaphor of a set of post­cards shuf­fled onto a sur­face. And the Gnorth­west Gnorm gallery is using AutoViewer. It is designed to dis­play a lin­ear sequence of images and cap­tions and has a slide show feature.

Check ‘em out:
Pho­to­time Tues­day
Gnorth­west Gnorm

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 398

Fireworks?

Killer Klowns From Outer Space, the Spe­cial Edi­tion sits unwatched on the cof­fee table. Maybe tomor­row after­noon, before the Killer Klowns from New York invade Fen­way Park and are hope­fully rebuffed by those scrappy kids in an ice cream truck.

After last night’s ball­game, I felt cheated by this afternoon’s con­test, even thought Boston won, because the game only went for three hours and thirty-seven min­utes. Com­pared to the four hour and forty-three minute marathon loss on Fri­day, today’s con­test was a minute waltz . Tomorrow’s FRS / MFY game is going to be on ESPN and won’t start until 8 PM, which means it prob­a­bly won’t go off until at least mid­night. I may just go to bed with­out see­ing the whole game, the FRS are going to win or lose whether I’m watch­ing or not.

After the game this evening Donna and I decided to ride the tan­dem down­town and get a scoop of ice cream at the Sweet Cow Creamy. We have a fairly pow­er­ful head­light and a flash­ing tail­light, so night rid­ing in our small burg is a fairly safe propo­si­tion. Things were going smoothly until we were about a half mile from our des­ti­na­tion and crossed some the rail­road tracks. We hit a rough spot that wasn’t too vis­i­ble and slammed the back wheel pretty hard. About 50 yards later a loud bang was heard. Gun­shot? Fire­cracker? Nope, back tire. We had a flat.

For­tu­nately we had a spare tube and pump and were not too far from a well lit street cor­ner. I popped off the back wheel and put in the new tube. Donna showed me the big hole in the tube, I showed her the bent rim and for good mea­sure, the nice split in the tire (thank­fully not all the way through.) Got every­thing back together and pumped the tire back up with a small col­lapsi­ble pump that we got when we bought the bike. Because you can only get 1/2 to 2/3 the air pres­sure rec­om­mended for the tire with the bity hand pump, we fin­ished the trip, includ­ing the ice cream stop, slowly and carefully.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 398

As Threatened

I have cre­ated a new gallery For the South Car­olina Post Offices, the old one is still there for now, but I have changed the link on the side­bar to point to the new one. I was built using the Sim­ple Viewer skin for Jal­bum. I like it a lot, but there are a few things that I don’t like, so it may or may not be permanent.

I’ve got the pic­tures seg­re­gated three ways, Alpha­bet­i­cally, Chrono­log­i­cally and by Zip Code, but it takes three sep­a­rate direc­to­ries of the same set of pho­tos to accom­plish this. Plus I haven’t fig­ured out how to make the text any big­ger or in a dif­fer­ent loca­tion. Let me know if it works for you. For some rea­son it doesn’t work at home with Fire­fox. Works with my portable ver­sion of Fire­fox that I carry around on my thumb drive… Works with IE at home and at work. It works with Opera.

South Car­olina Post Offices

Ooooh, what a lucky man he was. Not David Ortiz, but Brian Bog­a­r­dus. Last night Big Papi pro­duced his first walk-off hit of the sea­son and I had 9/12 picked in the con­test over on The Joy of Sox, so not only did the FRS win a game last night, I won a book.

Did not watch Killer Klowns From Outer Space tonight. I’m scared.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 395

I’m Sorry

I gave up too soon on them again.

Tim Wake­field who has prac­ti­cally owned the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the past, he is 20–2 against them life­time, was pulled in the top of the 4th inning after giv­ing up 10 hits and 7 runs. By he time the top of the fourth was over the FRS were trail­ing 8 to 1. To add insult to injury the MFY were beat­ing Toronto Blue Jays 8 to 2. Fig­ur­ing we would prob­a­bly get swept by the Yan­kees this week­end, I had pretty much seceded the divi­sion and the rest of the sea­son, but…

The Sox bat­ters didn’t feel he same way. In the bot­tom of the 4th they go 4 runs back. In he bot­tom of the 5th they scored three more. In the bot­tom of he 6h they scored 6 to take the lead 14 to 9. Sud­denly the sun is shin­ing and things are look­ing up.

Thing Are Looking Up

 

From Chap­ter 43 of the Spenser novel Widow’s Walk:

“Do you have a conclusion?”

No, I can’t fig­ure her out.”

Maybe you need to,” Susan said. “Maybe you need to find out more about Mr. Smith’s life as a gay man. Maybe you need to find out why Mrs. Smith mar­ried him.”

A tip?” I said. “A crime-stopper tip?”

Two tips,” Susan said. “I have a Ph.D. from Harvard.”

A hotbed of crime-stopping,” I said.

A hotbed,” Susan said.

 

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 391

Took A Drive

Tigerville, SCWe had a reser­va­tion at a Hol­i­day Inn Express (guess I should make this an acronym — HIE) for Sun­day night because our orig­i­nal plan called for us to drive up on Sun­day morn­ing to watch the Pro­fes­sional Road Race Cham­pi­onships that are being held in Greenville. Decided to drive up today and catch a few Post Offices. Ten fell before the shut­ter. Most inter­est­ing: Tigerville.

Last night, six FRS pitch­ers gave up nine runs and 13 hits to the Bal­ti­more Ori­oles. Tonight, 1 pitcher gave up no runs on NO hits. In 23 year-old Clay Buchholz’s sec­ond big league start he faced only three more bat­ters than the min­i­mum possible.

Started up, went down, back up, down again, up again, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 369

Mainlining Spenser

I’ve now fin­ished 17 out of the 35 Spenser books. I’ve got two more books still on the way from my Ama­zon spend­ing spree of a week ago and I’ve still got one left to read of the four I’ve already received. Today we went to 3 used book stores, one in Aiken and two in Augusta and bought 6 more books includ­ing a good find of a paper­back reis­sue of #3 in the series, Mor­tal Stakes. his now leaves just 9 books in the series I don’t have.

Mor­tal Stakes is about Spenser and the 1975 Red Sox (with fic­ti­tious play­ers) so it is like get­ting two plea­sures for he price of one, even though I’m really not enam­ored with the FRS right now after their show­ing in the Bronx and tonight’s game, so far, against Baltimore.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 365

That Hurt

SweptTues­day, August 28, 2007: MFY 5, FRS 3
Wednes­day, August 29, 2007: MFY 4, FRS 3
Thurs­day, August 30, 2007: MFY 5, FRS 0

The lead in the east is still 5 games, but lets hope the highly paid pro­fes­sional ath­letes that wear the uni­form of the Boston Red Sox aren’t as eas­ily depressed by these devel­ope­ments as I am…

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down, up, down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 364

Two Saturday’s In A Row

The Elusive Hilda Post OfficeDidn’t post last night, not because the wire­less con­nec­tion was crap in my room like last week, it was fine because we were home, but because it was such a full day and we got home too late to blog about it.

In the morn­ing Donna and I went on a drive to pho­to­graph a half dozen Post Offices. In one I had to use the Emperor’s Mini Me because it was inside a build­ing with no out­side indi­ca­tion it was a PO and another that will have to be re shot on another trip that way because there were too many peo­ple in lawn chairs in front wait­ing for a parade.

True to the Postmaster’s let­ter the Post Office in Hilda was inside a car garage store. There was lit­tle sec­tion just inside the front door on the left that was set aside for that offi­cial func­tion. If you look towards the bot­tom of the photo right next to a fuel fil­ter is the Match­box Gar­net Red Miata. The other side was the cashier for the garage. Coin­ci­dently when we pulled up there was a white 1st Gen Miata just out­side one of the garage doors with it’s hood up being worked on.

When we entered the town lim­its of Ehrhardt, SC the town sign said “Home of the Schuet­zen­fest.” I won­dered to my self what that might be and when they held it. The answer to the sec­ond ques­tion was answered when we got to the inter­sec­tion of US601 & SC64. There were peo­ple every­where. The road was not blocked yet, but you could tell that peo­ple were stak­ing out spots to watch a parade. The Schuet­zen­fest was today. How lucky could we be? Well, not so lucky, the Post Office was nowhere near the south end of town where the Google map thought it should be. We parked the car on a par­al­lel street to the parade route and did a walk through. Found the PO and it was 100 feet from the cen­ter of all the action. This photo would have to wait for another day. The answer to the sec­ond ques­tion had to wait until we got home and checked Wikipedia. Leave it to South Car­olina to mis­spell it and homog­e­nize it to look like another “fes­ti­val” with blow-up kids enter­tain­ment thin­gies, crafts for sale and deep fried dough.

When we got home we had some lunch and I went out­side to wash the car for a cou­ple of Miata events for that after­noon & evening. First up was the annual Sno-Cap Drive-In Anniver­sary hang out in the park­ing lot. Donna stayed home from this one as it was hot as the dick­ens and there is lit­tle place to hide from it over there, plus it is just a bunch of cars with a bunch of car guys stand­ing around talk­ing about cars. On the way over I found out how it looks to have a water­fall cas­cade over the wind­shield header. It looked a lit­tle hazy ahead and I didn’t didn’t see any oncom­ing cars with wipers on, so it couldn’t be rain. Wrong oh. It was a pop up thun­der­shower and it hap­pened so fast I had no time to pre­pare. Most times if you hit a shower and it is not too heavy the best defense is to roll up the win­dows and keep mov­ing. This was no one of those times. Trav­el­ing at 60 MPH in a del­uge just results in there being enough water and force behind it to make it come rolling over the wind­shield. After about a minute or so it was safe to pull over so I could get the top up, of course I had the boot on which just caused more of a delay in get­ting every thing closed up. The inte­rior and myself were soaked. Almost turned around and went home, but see­ing as I was halfway to the Cap I went any­way. About 2 miles later the storm was gone and the skies were blue so I dropped the top again hop­ing the sun would help dry every­thing out. Five miles later when I got to the Drive-In the only way to tell I had got­ten drenched was the pud­dle of water sur­round­ing the shift boot and the damp side of my cloth­ing that I was sit­ting on. The whole hour and a half I was at the Sno-Cap it didn’t rain a drop, but wouldn’t you know it, a cou­ple miles into the drive home it started to rain again and it kept it up for the rest of the trip. This time I was ready, I put the top up before I even left the Cap’s park­ing lot.

I had just enough time when I got home to dry off the recently washed car and lis­ten to 4 innings of the FRS whoop up on the Chicago White Sox before head­ing back out the door for the MMC’s Bug Splat Rally which I run. We had a good turn out (for our lit­tle club) with 9 cars at the restau­rant. Eight of which went on the run. The bugs were not so coop­er­a­tive though, there were a lot of clean Miata noses at the Dairy Queen fin­ish. There were a few large splats, but the biggest bug tro­phy went to a car that came back with a large mos­quito plas­tered near their turn sig­nal. The high­light for us was the medium M&M Bliz­zard we split.

This morn­ing we went out and did a 13 mile ride on the tan­dem, the first 50 feet my butt protested the return of the bicy­cles seat so soon after Friday’s ride, but I showed it who was the boss by con­tin­u­ing on. In truth that was partly the rea­son we did go for a ride today, because all we have been doing is short and very infre­quent rides the lim­it­ing fac­tor in our enjoy­ment is uncom­fort­able sit­ting. Most peo­ple who start bike rid­ing as an adult think that the rea­son their hiney hurts is they need a wider, cushier trac­tor seat, but what they really need is miles. I don’t know what really hap­pens, but it is like form­ing cal­louses on your hands from doing man­ual labor. If you are sit­ting cor­rectly on a mod­ern lightly padded skinny seat after a while of rid­ing your sit bones won’t bother you even on very long rides.

After rid­ing we did our weekly gro­cery shop­ping and were home and in the house for good by 10:30 AM.

I was pleas­antly sur­prised by Stranger Than Fic­tion that we watched this after­noon, it would have been per­fect if not for the happy end­ing, I would have given it a 10 out of ten, had it stopped right after the bus acci­dent part.

Started down, went up, back down, up for the del­uge, back down to dry out, up again, down once more, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 352

You Can Dance If You Want To, But I Don’t Have To Watch

Because the FRS have the evening off I had noth­ing bet­ter to do than watch a lit­tle tube. We started to watch Fever Pitch and made it a whole 34 min­utes before shut­ting it off. Part of the prob­lem was the whole lan­guage prob­lem you see, it was not the Drew Bary­more / Jimmy Fal­lon Amer­i­can ver­sion, but the orig­i­nal British movie. Maybe if they had Amer­i­can Eng­lish sub-titles…

From there I started to watch a Law & Order episode that was about 5 min­utes in. I had seen it before, but as usual didn’t remem­ber the end­ing, so I watched it through. Beau­ti­ful thing of it is, that in another year or so if I stum­ble on that episode again, I’ll have for­got­ten it again, so the end­ing will be a sur­prise. Again.

Right after that, TNT segued right into another L & O episode. This one I hadn’t seen, so I watched it for the first time. It started out with a thinly dis­guised re-hashing of that poor Cubs fan in 2004 who tried to catch a foul ball and was then sub­se­quently blamed for them not mak­ing the play­offs. It later turned into a whole cor­rupt police offi­cer and DNA clear­ing a wrongly accused mur­der, yada, yada, yada. Beau­ti­ful thing of it is that in another year or so if I stum­ble on that episode again, I’ll have for­got­ten it, so the end­ing will be a sur­prise. Again.

Two hours of TV was enough, even when it is “good” TV, so I handed the remote to Donna and picked up a book. She started chan­nel check­ing while I read with one eye and watched the flash­ing images with my other. She paused on some­thing I didn’t rec­og­nize, (The TV list­ings say it was Super­nat­ural, but I can’t con­firm or deny that because I am not famil­iar with the show.) and I looked up for a sec­ond and said that I thought that a cou­ple of the peo­ple in it looked famil­iar. She tired of what­ever it was and clicked to the next chan­nel. Two peo­ple were salsa danc­ing? It was Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance? I made a smart aleck crack like, “There’s some­thing I *don’t* want to be famil­iar with.” She laughed and changed the chan­nel. Wouldn’t you know it but the next chan­nel was PBS and they were show­ing Live From Lin­coln Cen­ter : “Mozart Dances” The Mark Mor­ris Dance Group per­forms… We both looked at each other and thought the same sar­cas­tic thought, only I voiced it, “Now there is some­thing I *want* to be famil­iar with.”

Next up, was the Weather Chan­nel. There was a mete­o­rol­o­gist in a park­ing lot in San Anto­nio stand­ing in a dry park­ing lot wav­ing his hands vaguely stage left telling us how much water used to be there. Riv­et­ing. That’s when I left the room.

With apolo­gies to Men With­out Hats: We Can’t Dance If We Want To

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 333

That Old Sinking Feeling

Night BallThe FRS’s lead in the east has shrunk to 4 games with today’s loss and Yan­kee win, but I’m not wor­ried, there are only 45 games left in the sea­son so there is no way the Yan­kees can catch them. Right. Their Magic Num­ber is just 42.

I pre­dicted that the lead would be down to 5 at the end of last month, I was wrong, but I don’t think I’ll be wrong this time when I say this, “The Red Sox will not be in first place in the East­ern Divi­sion of the Amer­i­can League on Sep­tem­ber 1st.”

Maybe if we had more games against the Aiken Foxhounds…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 324

FRS

The Emperor came home today from the doctor’s tonight after his lig­a­ment replace­ment surgery and fluid trans­fu­sion. On the way home we stopped for pizza at a place called Nick’s House of Pizza in West Colum­bia. Because it is called Nick’s you know that they also serve Greek food. So we had a Greek salad to go along with the 10″ pie with sausage, pep­per­oni, onions and bell pep­pers. There were a cou­ple of waters and a Sprite involved too.

Meal Cost: $17.92
Tip: $3.58
Spent Today: $21.50
Year to Date: $1549.16
Meals out, 88 of a pos­si­ble 597.

On July 1st the FRS had a 10–1/2 game lead over the Yan­kees. From the first of July through last Sat­ur­day the Red Sox have gone 6 & 5, but the Yan­kees have a record of 7 wins, 4 loses and were 10 games behind. On Mon­day morn­ing when I men­tioned that I thought the expected FRS slide had begun, I was scoffed at. I pre­dicted that the Yan­kees would only be 5 games back by the end of the month. Both my Yan­kee fan man­ager and Mark the Braves fan felt that the Sox were too good this year and the Yan­kees too weak. My boss was just mak­ing excuses in case and Mark is used to the Braves always win­ning the divi­sion, but I on the other hand have had to suf­fer through sev­eral decades of Red Sox collapses.

Both now may believe my prog­nos­ti­ca­tion pow­ers because since Sat­ur­day the Yanks have won 4 while the Sox are 1 win, 3 loses shrink­ing the lead to 7 games. I may still be wrong, at this pace the Yan­kees may be ahead of the Bosox by August 1st. Which brings to mind a mem­o­rable quote from the movie Game 6, while in the bar watch­ing the tit­u­lar game, the kid tells Michael Keaton’s char­ac­ter that he should be happy because the Red Sox are win­ning, to which he replies, “The Red Sox are always winning…until they lose”. The screen­writer must have been an FRS fan.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 283

Rain Delay

Both the FRS/Braves game and this blog are in a rain delay.…

Rain Delay

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 209

59,000 Raindrops

Litle FenwayAlter­nate Title: Down on the Farm.

The Single-A farm in Greenville, South Car­olina. The Drive are affil­i­ated with the FRS and to show the love, last year they opened a new sta­dium with the same dimen­sions as Fen­way Park in Bean­town (includ­ing a 30′ high Green Mon­ster with man­ual scoreboard.

Because we are trav­el­ing we are eat­ing out. Break­fast with the MMC at the Sun­rise Grill in North Augusta. The joint we were sup­posed to meet at at 7:00 AM had changed their open­ing hour from seven to eight recently leav­ing us locked out in an empty park­ing lot. No wor­ries mate, we just moved the show a 1/4 mile up the street. Half a waf­fle and two eggs for her, west­ern omelette with home fries for me. I had a cup of joe and she had a hot chocolate.

Meal Cost: $15.63
Tip: $3.00
This Meal: $18.53

Lunch at a Cracker Bar­rel in Greenville. I had the spicy grilled cat­fish sand­wich on sour­dough and Donna had a bowl of tor­tilla soup. One iced tea, one water to drink and guess who had what.

Meal Cost: $13.25
Tip: $3.00
This Meal: $16.25

Din­ner at the ball­park. $5 a piece tip to the Maitre De got us in the door (AKA Gen­eral Admis­sion tick­ets.) Nachos for her, Ital­ian sausage for him. Diet DP for him, bot­tled water for her. We split an 8-pack of chicken nuggets a lit­tle later.

Meal Cost: $16.00
Tip: None
Spent Today: $50.78
Year to Date: $1314.32
Meals out, 73 of a pos­si­ble 498.

The game was sup­posed to start at 7:00 PM, but it was prob­a­bly still pour­ing down rain at that time. The rain did stop and the game started at 7:30. We entered the sta­dium at 6:00 when they opened the gates and after eat­ing and tak­ing shel­ter, by the time the game started we had had enough. From the way the skies looked we were sure it was going to rain some more any minute, so we left. See­ing as the rain show­ers were scat­tered we opted to drive around Greenville and take some of the PO pic­tures we were going to do tomor­row. Ended up doing all of them (that we could find.) There is one on the Fur­man cam­pus accord­ing to USPS.com, but we didn’t see it.

At the last one of the night, a CPU in an ACE Hard­ware store, the odome­ter read exactly 59,000 miles.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down once more, up yet again, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 203

Tonight I Didn’t Call Her On It

Pizza was on the menu for Fri­day, but it got pushed up to today. We got the usual order from Ferrando’s, a 14″ 5-topping pie (sausage, pep­per­oni, green pep­pers, onions and banana pep­per rings) and brought it home to eat. Fin­ished half, sav­ing the sec­ond half for din­ner on the pre­vi­ous planned Fri­day evening.

Meal Cost: $15.52
Tip: None
Spent Today: $15.52
Year to Date: $1259.54
Meals out 69 of a pos­si­ble 489.

This evening’s enter­tain­ment was The Hol­i­day. Dou­ble your warm fuzzy feel­ings, dou­ble your tears, its two, two chick flicks in one.

The Red Sox are hav­ing trou­ble scor­ing runs. They are los­ing big time at home tonight against the Rock­ies 12–2 and are on their way to los­ing six of their last ten ball­games. The Yan­kees are about to win their ninth game in a row and will be 8–1/2 games back. Is it just me or has some­thing like what hap­pens to an RX-7 in this video hap­ping to the FRS?

Had some com­ments on one of my Post Office pho­tos on Flickr today. White Rock, SC 29117. Then if you want, go check out grussell903’s pho­tos before answer­ing this ques­tion: Troll or Real­ity Challenged?

We ran out to Kroger tonight to get a cou­ple items. As we were check­ing out I noticed that the cashier had keyed us in for a senior cit­i­zens dis­count. I think you have to be like 60 to qual­ify and we are about 8 years from that mile­stone. If asked if I qual­ify I say no, when that screen pops up on the self­ser­vice check­out I say no. I usu­ally say some­thing, but tonight I didn’t. Maybe it was because we saved so much – 47¢

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 193

I Can See Still See In The Dark

I Can See Clearly NowToday was Donna and my annual eye exams. Good news is that nei­ther of us have any issues nor have our eyes changed enough to war­rant get­ting new glasses.

We went mid after­noon and some six hours later the drops they put in your eyes to dilate them has not not entirely worn off. I think I could take a book into a closet and read it with the light off. You know your pupils are open wide when the lit­tle WinXP screen­saver (bounc­ing logo on black back­ground) has a bright rain­bow hued halo around it.

I remem­ber a cou­ple of years ago we went late after­noon and by the time we left the Eye Guy’s place it was dusk. The sun was down but the sky was still light. Most cars were dri­ving with their lights on and both head­lights and tail­lights were giv­ing off these awe­some star­burst pat­terns. Even the traf­fic sig­nals looked like they were being viewed through a star­burst fil­ter. Very cool effect, but it was dif­fi­cult to con­cen­trate on actu­ally dri­ving and not run­ning into any­thing while look­ing at all the pretty lights.

We rode the tan­dem into work again today. I think we are going to try and make it a once a week event from now on. Because we are work­ing our nine hour days this week, this morning’s ride start was way early and it was still dark out. We have a nice pow­er­ful light so that was not a real prob­lem. As a mat­ter of fact it was actu­ally nice that time of day, there was almost zero traf­fic on the road and it was nice and cool (I wore a light jacket and Donna was in long sleeves.)

Right now I’m not sure what is worse, the FRS los­ing 6–0 to the Yanks in the sixth or hav­ing to lis­ten to Chris Berman call the game and Bon­nie Bern­stein with the side­line commentary.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 171

Who’s the Boss?

Fabrication ManagerOur Fab­ri­ca­tion Man­ager has been gone for a week on vaca­tion and now he is absent for fort­night vis­it­ing ven­dors in Asia. Gnorm moved into his office today in a blood­less coup. Don’t worry, because he is the boss, he’ll be tak­ing next week so he can go to Seat­tle with us.

I’m still burn­ing my CD col­lec­tion and I’m almost done with row #5. I just came across a CD I have no rec­ol­lec­tion buy­ing and I can not even think of what any­thing on it sounds like: Pourquoi Que­bec? by Tony McManus. I may have to give it a listen.

I used to read quite a bit of sci­ence fic­tion as young­ster and as I entered my twen­ties, hor­ror became my choice of escapist “lit­er­a­ture.” Used to read a lot of fel­low FRS fan, Stephen King’s books, but quit about the time he started writ­ing them thick enough to be used as night­stands. Now I’m into pulp stuff about pri­vate eyes and dis­graced cops that save the world from crim­i­nals ans ser­ial killers. I’m also a sucker for lawyer slash court­room drama books. My lat­est read has been a real pleas­ant sur­prise, I picked it up think­ing I was get­ting a typ­i­cal lawyer saves a wrongly accused book, and it is that (at least I think he saves him, I’m not fin­ished yet) but it also mixes in a very con­vinc­ing hor­ror plot. For the icing on this cake it is also told with some bit­ing humor in places. The fol­low­ing is a snip­pet from Lost Girls by Andrew Pyper:

The next day is passed by expla­na­tions of DNA iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy deliv­ered by the google-eyed lab rat the Crown has brought up from Toronto. I feel for the poor bas­tard, though, try­ing to teach a reme­dial sci­ence les­son to the jury, who look back at him as though audi­tion­ing for the cho­rus in Deliv­er­ance: The Musi­cal. It gives me a chance to doze off for five-second hits of sleep. A tricky busi­ness that involves hold­ing your head up with one hand and posi­tion­ing it so that your closed eyes will be hid­den from the bench. This part is essen­tial. Judges are uni­ver­sally intol­er­ant of sleep­ing lawyers, mostly because their own seat­ing arrange­ment pre­vents them from indulging in the same plea­sure themselves.

Each time my eye­lids spring back open it’s with the ter­ri­ble image of Bert Gederov and Gra­ham Lyle hav­ing kit­tens all over the board­room floor two hun­dred miles to the south because I haven’t yet returned their calls. The rea­son is sim­ple: despite my best efforts I haven’t come up with a res­on­able explanan­tion for my remarks to the press of the other day. By the time the court is adjourned in the after­noon (the DNA dweeb hav­ing just fin­ished his “intro­duc­tory remarks”), I know that it can no longer be avoided.

Donna was out at a busi­ness din­ner with a cou­ple bish­ops from the Vat­i­can (ASCO HQ in NJ) and some ven­dors, so I was left to my own devices. A 6″ Ital­ian Sub (Ham, Salami, Pep­per­oni & Proval­one) from Sub Sta­tion II that I brought home and ate over the sink pre­tend­ing I was a bach­e­lor. All that was miss­ing was a bot­tle of beer to wash it down. I sub­sti­tuted a Sprite Zero.

Meal Cost: $3.60
Tip Jar: 40¢
Spent Today: $4.00
Year to Date: $1151.30
Meals out, 63 of a pos­si­ble 426.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 170

Damn Yankees

Watching Baseball 2Gnorm and I set­tled in to watch some more base­ball this evening. Yes­ter­day I could han­dle him root­ing for the Braves against my beloved FRS, but tonight I knocked him on his butt when he started to cheer for the dreaded Yan­kees. (Gno Gnomes were harmed in this stunt.) If Gnorm is still rout­ing for the Bronx Bombers he is now keep­ing quiet about it.

When Patti gave me Gnorm the other day she also passed along his spe­cial gnome bed (the molded sty­ro­foam pack­ing he came in.) It has seen bet­ter days and is all right for local trips, but he is going all the way across the coun­try with us. Today at work I mod­i­fied an exist­ing box to be a lit­tle smaller and had a friend on the assem­bly line make a cus­tom bed using some expand­able foam. Gnorm is now ready for the big trip.

But are we ready to fly with Gnorm? We’d like to put him in our carry-on bag, but how are the TSA screen­ers going to react to a polyresin statue cra­dled in a cus­tom padded box? Does it look like we are try­ing to bring a molded and painted chunk of C-4 on board? Could Gnorm’s pointy hat be con­sid­ered a weapon? I really want to get a shot of him in the ter­mi­nal for the flight out, but we may just have to put him in the checked bag.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 169

There Is Never A Dull Moment…

Watching Baseball…when the FRS are play­ing base­ball. The Sox had a 6 run lead through almost the entire game, some­how the Braves man­aged to get the tying run to the plate in the top of the 9th (must not have got the memo about Jonathan Papel­bon being the most feared closer in the Amer­i­can League.) But he got Andruw Jones to strike out swing­ing (for the fifth time in the game) to end it. Sea­son series so far: Boston 2 — Atlanta 1. There are three more games to be played in Atlanta in June to set­tle it for this season.

We started the morn­ing with a nice tan­dem ride. I had finally mea­sured the wheel cir­cum­fer­ence and set both cycle­com­put­ers to the same fig­ure, so Donna wouldn’t be rid­ing fur­ther than me on these trips. Worked out pretty good, as mine read 14.0 miles at the end of the ride and hers said 13.98.

Lunch out with friends at Zaxby’s where we split a large Wings ‘n’ Things and an order of Car­rots & Cel­ery Sticks. One large Coke and one water to drink.

Meal Cost: $11.72
Tip: None
Spent Today: $11.72
Year to Date: $1147.30
Meals out 62 of a pos­si­ble 420.

I uploaded five new pho­tos to the Enchanted Ceil­ing site, some­thing I hadn’t done in a while. It started yes­ter­day when I thought I might sort out my sky pho­tos. I had 14 posted EC and I had 34 posted in a gallery here. I have 37 in the direc­tory on my hard drive and about more 40 in a stag­ing direc­tory. I uploaded the 14 to my other Flickr! account and then to make mat­ters some­what worse I picked the 5 from the stag­ing direc­tory and added them to the Enchanted Ceil­ing site ( 12345 ), then the Flickr account, but not the gallery here. So did I help the orga­ni­za­tion or hurt it? Who knows.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 168

Word of the Day: Avulsion

Hilda Town HallAvul­sion — a forcible tear­ing or sur­gi­cal sep­a­ra­tion of one body part from another.

Or in this case a tear­ing of the time — space con­tin­uum, as 125 Broughton Ave in Hilda, SC, or at least the Post Office there, has van­ished. Our sec­ond attempt to locate a postal facil­ity in this micro town failed just as it did the first time. Maybe it is like Brigadoon and appears only one day every hun­dred years. I did take a pic­ture of the next best thing though, the Town Hall. I won’t put it in the postal gallery with the other 10 we grabbed today though, just not kosher. Fit­tingly, there is a sign on the door say­ing the Town Hall is open the 2nd Sat­ur­day of the month from 8 AM to 12 noon.

Three quar­ters of the way through our Postal Safari today we stopped in St. George for lunch, Taco Bell. Two hard tacos for Donna and two soft tacos for Brian and we split a medium fruit punch.

Meal Cost: $5.15
Tip: None
Spent Today: $5.15
Year to Date: $1,052.24

Josh Becket of the FRS was pitch­ing today. So far this year he has had 7 starts and has 7 wins, but some­thing hap­pened on the way to a record 8 straight. An avul­sion on the right mid­dle fin­ger, lead­ing to “irri­ta­tion of the skin” lead to him being pulled from today’s game after the fourth inning. This is the team being cagey, Mr. Beck­ett missed sev­eral games last year because of a blis­ter on his throw­ing hand. To me, no mat­ter how you spin “avul­sion on the right mid­dle fin­ger, lead­ing to irri­ta­tion of the skin”, it is a blis­ter. Sup­pos­edly the early exit was a pre­cau­tion to pre­vent an actual blis­ter, we’ll see.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 159

Mmmm Mmmuffins

Miataless Post OfficeWe bought this morning’s break­fast from the New Moon Cafe after yesterday’s hike, a low fat Blue­berry muf­fin for her and a Rasp­berry Coconut muf­fin for him (which we ended up split­ting 50–50.)

Meal Cost: $2.65
Tip: 35¢
Spent This Meal: $3.00

After break­fast we tried to make up for the last 3 weeks on non-activity in the Post Office quest by head­ing to the cap­i­tal city of the Great State of South Car­olina and get­ting a photo of all 13 POs. Mis­sion accom­plished. The only Post Office not accounted for that lists Colum­bia as the city is the one on the Army base, Fort Jack­son. (They have an Open House on the 18 & 19 of May for Armed Forces Day so we might try and sneak in then.)

A few years back a favored Sun­day lunch spot was an Ital­ian fast food chain called Fazoli’s, but they closed up shop here in Aiken and we have missed eat­ing their food quite often since then. Well, Colum­bia has two Fazoli’s and both are close to some of our des­ti­na­tion Post Offices, so we thought it might be a treat to eat there for lunch. I guess our mem­o­ries have been col­ored by time (or maybe it was this par­tic­u­lar restau­rant) because it didn’t seem worth the trip. The Twice Baked Ziti with Hearty Meat Sauce was good and the bread sticks were prac­ti­cally drip­ping in but­ter, but the salad and the dress­ing left a lot to be desired. I had a foun­tain Coke and Donna had water.

Meal Cost: $10.76
Tip: None
Spent This Meal: $10.76
Spent Today: $13.38
Year to Date: $923.03

Five out of six isn’t half bad. As a mat­ter of fact it is 83% good. After look­ing lack­lus­ter on Fox yes­ter­day the FRS came out swing­ing against the dreaded Yan­kees today and came out on top of a 7 to 4 score. Big Papi con­tributed a homer, as did the com­ing out of his funk Manny Rameriz, but those guys are expected to smack the long ball. A nice bonus was a homer from our util­ity infielder Alex Cora. Now we have 19 warm up games until we come back to the “House That Ruth Built” on the 21st of May.

Started down, went up, back down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 01/01/07: 133

Imagine

What Would Yoko Say?You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some­day you’ll join us and the world will live as one.”

Right now I’m work­ing at my rip­ping CDs project and lis­ten­ing to the FRS come from behind to whoop up on the Bal­ti­more Ori­oles. I’ve almost got one shelf of the ten total done and I’m up to Bog­guss, Suzy.

I’m still leak­ing copi­ous amounts of Brain Lubri­cant, but I made it all the way through the work day with­out the over­whelm­ing desire to take a nap. I made it all the past din­ner before hav­ing to catch 20 winks.

When I woke up Fox News was in the mid­dle of wall to wall cov­er­age of a low speed chase in LA, some knuck­le­head in a stolen car was lead­ing cops and news heli­copters around town. At one point, rid­ing on noth­ing but the rims, the “sus­pect” did sev­eral dough­nuts in the mid­dle of an inter­sec­tion leav­ing nicely marked up asphalt in his wake. When they final