Month: March 2004

Happy Birthday Diane

My little sister is 47 today. Hope you got our silly little card. Hope you didn’t eat too much cake and ice cream. Hope you celebrated more than I do for my birthday. Usually the day itself it is no big deal for me because it is near the end of a month long holiday that Donna and I call birthanniversarydaymonth. It runs from Donna’s birthday at the end of August, through my birthday towards the end of September to our anniversary at the end of September. It is 30 days of hijinks, dining out and rampant spending on ourselves and each other. I can hardly wait until it happens again….

Palace Coup

In the little over a week since Tech Day and my bemoaning the lack of sound improvement the new muffler made, it is starting to come around. Getting just a little throatier. Still dead quiet at idle and cruise (which is good,) but it sounds a bit better under acceleration now. If it improves just a bit more I can forget all about that intake business.

On that very same day I named the car, The Emperor, but have not been able to refer to it as such since. My guess is that it may now be what the car calls itself, but to me it has no name. I’m just not the type of person to name inanimate objects. I feel that this is my biggest failure in Miata geekdom, on par with my inadequacy to obtain sci-fi geekhood because I haven’t been able to read (nor watch the movie of) Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Curry Shrimp

Donna’s mom has been our designated cook every since she moved in with us back in May of 2000. I like her cooking and Donna, well as we all do, loves her mom’s cooking. Not only because she grew up eating it, but it means she doesn’t have to do it. Mom is famous for picking a recipe and starting to cook it, before checking if all the ingredients are in the house. Most of the time she will find something that will substitute, but other times she just fakes it and adds anything. For tonight’s meal, when she came upon a missing ingredient, she just didn’t put anything in its place. As a result the meal came out a little bland; it is tough to make Curry Shrimp, without any curry power…

Here’s A Couple Of Them

They are fresh, not really new experiences. They mirror my previous experiences with these same places, so you would think I would have learned my lesson, but I am dense.

The first is Wal-Mart. We were in Hilton Head and needed one item and wanted another, figuring we could get them both at Wal-Mart we went there. Hoping that it would be different, but it was not. It must be corporate wide, because it was Saturday night, prime Wal-Mart shopping time, they only had 4 checkout lines running and there were at least 8 people in each line. We placed our purchases on an empty conveyor belt and walked out.

Second was at my old friend Popeye’s here in Aiken. We have had the worst luck at lunch time during the week, but we figured it was Sunday, might be different. What do you think? Right, same old song and dance. Both Donna and I love the food, but it is such a pain to get anything. They had a total of 3 employees handling the Sunday lunch rush, 1 counter person, 1 drive-up person and 1 cook! Not only that, but the cook was deep frying each person’s order separately or something because it was taking a long time to get each person’s order to them. So long that they asked you to sit down and they would bring it to you. This is smart, now the time that would be better spent making or taking orders was spent delivering food to customers. I vowed never to return. Who am I kidding, I’ll probably go back, I think it makes the food taste all that much better if I have to suffer for it.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, It’s Off To HHI We Go

Time to go pack the trunk with our custom fitted luggage for the weekend get away to Hilton Head Island. It is a semi-working trip as Saturday morning I will taking condo interior photos so the web site can get updated some. Hope to snap a couple new Post Office pictures for that gallery on the trip too.

Picked up the framed new caricature tonight. I’m going to hang it on the same wall as the old one. They are going in a vertical arrangement and I can’t figure out which one I should put on top. Should it be the new one as the top would be considered a position of dominance, or should the new one go in the lower position as that is more eye-level? Stay tuned….

I really should be out with the California Duster and/or Quik Detailer erasing the pine pollen dust off the car in prep for the trip, but instead I sit here typing away.

What Would Jesus Do?

A friend at work has acquired a DVD of a movie that is still in theaters. He has gotten another fellow to make copies of it using a piece of pirated DVD copying software. Knowing that I had said I wouldn’t see this one in the theaters, but instead would probably rent it when it came out, they asked if I would like a copy of my own for viewing now. I said, “I’ll let you know.”

The movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”

I Forgot To Mention

One other “Mod” I did on Saturday was to stop the buzz when you leave the key in the ignition and open the door, etc. It was a simple enough procedure and everything you need to know can be found right here – 1999 Miata Key “Buzzer” Disconnect.

While I was swapping interior bits with Dave I asked if he would like me to disconnect his too. He said sure and I went ahead and did it, but I was thrown for a small loop when I located the wiring harness to disconnect it. The instructions on the page said locate the connector with two wires coming out, he didn’t have one with just two. I went back and looked at what I disconnected on my car and then matched up connectors to one on his car. If you look carefully at the bottom photo at the above link you can see the connector will hold 4 wires, but it only has two in it, that is the way mine is. Dave’s had 4 wires coming out of it. The only differences in our cars is that his is an automatic transmission, so we figured the other two wires must have something to do with that. When disconnected, his buzzer stopped and all other functions seemed to work as before. I wonder what those extra wires might be for?