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The Ottoman Empire

After a dry run of the route, and din­ing at the des­ti­na­tion, of next week’s MMC Break­fast Rally that we are lead­ing, we did the weekly gro­cery shop­ping. With that out of the way, we got down to the seri­ous busi­ness of liv­ing room fur­ni­ture shopping.

Our des­ti­na­tion was Rooms To Go in Augusta. Not only do they have a big ol’ selec­tion, but I was angling to up the $800 sofa to a $2k, six or seven piece suite with a “Free” 51 inch Sam­sung 3-D TV. And my plan might have worked had we been able to find some­thing that met our com­fort needs and more impor­tantly had the looks/style we liked. Didn’t hap­pen, where we got one, the other was not there or vice versa.

After lunch went back to the store where we saw the couch can­di­date the other day and to see how well it might match our cur­rent stuff we had brought along one of the accent pil­lows. Turns out it didn’t look half bad, but after a more in depth try out, we deter­mined that the con­toured seat areas were really not com­fort­able for the after­noon nap lay­ing across pose.

On sec­ond thought, our cur­rent couch didn’t seem that bad, sure it was slightly worn, not nearly as bad as Marty Crane’s recliner, so let’s just say that it had acquired a nice patina. And because what had started this whole fur­ni­ture shop­ping expe­di­tion in the first place was the desire to remove my feet off the cof­fee table, which not only holds our oblig­a­tory fan of mag­a­zines, but dou­bles as our din­ner table on week­days when watch­ing Law & Order re-runs, we just took the easy way out and bought a $50 ottoman.

Couch Shopping, Desserts Bigger’n Your Head & You Sure That’s Right?

Last time we bought liv­ing room fur­ni­ture we got a 3 piece match­ing set, couch, love seat and arm chair. Because it is just the two of us, the only piece that has seen appre­cia­ble use is the couch, so now we need a new one. The other two items are basi­cally brand new, so we would like to keep them and just buy a couch. Because it has been quite a while, a match­ing piece is entirely out of the ques­tion. The object we seek will be some­thing that will com­pli­ment what is stay­ing. Not easy, the cur­rent fur­ni­ture is a bur­gundy cloth with rolled arms accented with nail heads sit­ting on ball feet. Not too much out there in that style and to make it nearly impos­si­ble we have decided to get a couch with built in reclin­ers. The sec­ond store we tried tonight had a pos­si­bil­ity, but we still want to look at at least a cou­ple more places.

We had din­ner out with the Mas­ters Miata Club tonight at the Boll Wee­vil in down­town Augusta. The food is always good and tonight was no excep­tion. They are know for their desserts and usu­ally Donna and I decline, but for some rea­son tonight we didn’t. Boy are we sorry. Here is a photo of some of there desserts, our Per­fect Choco­late cake (which we “spoiled” with two scoops of vanilla ice cream) was larger than those shown, it was actu­ally hang­ing off both sides of the plate!

On the way back from Augusta we filled up the Emperor’s gas tank. Reg­u­lar was under 3 bucks, and because HRH takes Pre­mium it was going to cost us $3.17 a gal­lon, but with our shopper’s dis­count it too was under three at $2.97. I had reset the trip odome­ter in Clay­ton when we filled up last Sat­ur­day morn­ing, I didn’t reset it when we topped off on Sun­day, so the mileage since that first fill up read 454.3. I took the last two gas receipts, totaled up the two tank­fuls and got 15.065 gal­lons. That means the MPG for the past five days, which con­sisted of 60% windy moun­tain roads, 25% 2-lane back roads and 15% 4-lane divided high­ways was a respect­ful 30.16.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 1072

Hey Four Eyes

Yes­ter­day was our yearly eye exams and after skip­ping it last year, this year we are going to go ahead and get new glasses. We have both got­ten quite used to the Easy­Clip frames with the mag­netic sun­glasses. They only had a small selec­tion in the store to chose from for women and zero for men. Donna picked a cou­ple of decent ones, but the one she really liked had a very short ver­ti­cal dimen­sion. While the help­ful staff mem­ber said that they were fine for pro­gres­sive lens, they have about the same mea­sure­ment as my cur­rent glasses do and it took me a long while to adjust to that con­fig­u­ra­tion. Just because some­thing is pos­si­ble it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean it should be done. We asked if we could hunt up some frames on the web and bring the model num­bers to them so they could order a copy for us to try on and touch. The answer was yes.

This evening I did some shop­ping on the web. My cur­rent glasses have full frames and the pair I had before were rim­less, so this time I split the dif­fer­ence and got semi-rimless. These are the four I picked out four for me to try:

His

The first pair on the left is one of the ones Donna liked in the shop. Her cur­rent glasses are gold with pearl accents and she wants a lit­tle more color this time, so I went look­ing for red­dish frames. The other three are what I chose from online for her to try:

Hers
Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran­si­tions since 10/24/08: 950