Sturgeon’s Law Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Oddly, when Sturgeon’s Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to ‘crap’.
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In yesterday’s post I mentioned that you could run on the track both Friday and Saturday. I only showed you Friday’s results. That is because there were no Saturday results for me.
Back in 1991 the Miata wasn’t the center of our universe, that didn’t happen for a few more years. We were still into bicycling pretty big and the Miata was just a really sporty means to transport our bikes. So on Saturday morning, instead of driving around Roebling Road Raceway, Donna and I met up with the Coastal Bicycle Touring Club and rode 50 miles with a half dozen or so folks. We met at a Park N Ride lot off I-95 northwest of Savannah and rode to Bluffton to eat lunch at the famous Squat & Gobble, then riding back along the same route.
When the 1991 Miata National Event was through on Sunday morning the last thing we did was drive to a closed shopping center where a professional photographer got up on the roof and took a group portrait. I don’t think every car that was at the event made the trip to get photographed, but a vast majority did. I count 100 cars in the picture above. The first row consists of one car of each color the Miata was available in then (they had just added silver and British Racing Green in 1991.) We got to the photo spot fairly early, but they took one look at our car and told us we would have to wait until everyone else arrived before we would be lined up. They didn’t want us to spoil the Miata aesthetic.
Our crime was a bike rack on the back of the car with two bicycles sticking up. Click on the top photo and it will enlarge, where if you look at the last row where the round looking tree is, there is a gap because no one wanted to park right behind our blue car…
One of the Donna’s Canadian Cousins is in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Pipe Band which marched in this year’s New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. It snowed.
Parade was not too long, only took 75 min to complete, it was the 3 hrs standing around in the holding area before marching off that was tough. But managed to make it. It’s been a long time since I last marched in a snowstorm.
Cousin John is a big guy and because of that he is in the back row, smack in the middle of the band’s official trip photo (Caution! 1.5M in size) taken in front of the UN after they had given a concert there.
One of the open shelves in the new kitchen, the one above the stove, will have a couple of neat old metal cars in it. One of which reminded us of an VW bus we had back on Guam when we were first married. We got out the old photo albums looking for a suitable picture of us to add to the shelf. We found one of us standing near said bus, but for a couple of reasons, one of which would be that I’d have to explain what is happening, we didn’t want to use it. So we found this one of us taken on our wedding day by one of our witnesses just outside the courthouse where we tied the knot and thought it might do nicely.
No, that is not the courthouse we are standing in front of, it is the Chocolate House in the Plaza de Espana, which consists of a couple of building still standing of the Spanish Governor’s house from the 1600’s.
The final cabinet (the 24″ Drawer Base replacement) arrived Wednesday afternoon. Donna pulled the duty of coming home and waiting for this piece seeing as I had done it on Tuesday for the 3 wandering cabinets. Those showed up in a Lowe’s branded truck handled by Lowe’s employees in Lowe’s red vests.
This single piece, like the major portion of the order before it, arrived in the back of a Budget Rental truck manned by folks in jeans and tees. At least the first bunch found the house fine. For this guy I had to talk him in like a stewardess landing a jumbo jet after the pilot has had a heart attack. Even with me guiding him he still made a wrong turn and 5 minutes later after not seeing my next landmark had to make a u-turn.
We were supposed to be stop 5 according to the dispatcher, but this guy must have skipped #4 because Donna said that he had to climb over a bunch of boxes to get to our one item. He then nearly dropped it while moving it around in the truck. But eventually the cabinet made it in to our garage and in spite of all my imagined scenarios of what could have been wrong with it, it was fine.
Donna then had to call his next delivery appointment (possibly #4) and find out where she was, so Donna could direct the truck driver. He claimed his GPS was broken, but judging by appearances we think that maybe he just didn’t know how to operate one.
Nearly a decade ago, here in Our Fair City, the town had 31 life-size fiberglass horses done up by artisans and displayed at various businesses. At the end of a time period they were auctioned off to raise money for some cause. There are about a third of them still visible around.
Now, this year it is 28 cats, about 3 times scale, that are getting the same treatment. We went downtown today to photograph as many as we could. I think we managed to snag about half of them. And unfortunately most are behind storefront windows and are hard to photograph without distracting reflections detracting from the image.
When we talked with one cat sitting business we discovered that not only would the cats be auctioned off at the end to raise money, the business had to bid on the privilege of hosting the painted cat. We also discovered why the cats were universally inside the business instead of outside like the horses were. Because they are a lot smaller, and consequentially lighter, they would be easy for a nefarious individual to take a cat home and the business would have to pay $5k for the loss.
The camera store had 2 in their window, so we went in to try and get a shot sans reflection when we noticed Santa sitting there just waiting for some little kids to have their photo taken with him. We chatted with him for a bit and he asked, so we agreed.
Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1183
We went to watch polo this afternoon and took along the new guy at work. The weather was perfect, sunny and low 70’s and the game was awesome. It was the finals in an 8 Goal* Tournament and after 5 of the 6 chukkers the score was tied 7–7. The final ended up being Skaneateles 12, Hutchinson Farms 9. Vaughn grew up around horses, but had never seen polo, so he had a great time. We couldn’t have asked for a better game either, usually when we go to a polo match we are lucky to see 10 goals scored total.
*The goal total is not an indication of how many goals the team should score but a player handicapping/ranking system.
Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1177
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