Year: 2019

72,000 Grains of Pine Pollen

I didn’t have an idea for how to use seventy two thousand in the title of this post, so I went back and looked to see what I used when the Emperor hit that mark over a little over 11 years ago: 72,000 Grains of Rice. Perfect.

Last Friday I washed both cars.

The Miata because it needed it. The other day I leaned into it to get something out of the center console and when I stood up there were dark smudges on the both thighs of my khaki hued jeans. Man, do silver colored cars hide road grime well.

The Mini because it needed it. When Donna got home from the gym on Thursday she complained because you could see of fine coating of about 72,000 pine pollen grains built up on the roof of the car. Man, does a gloss black roof show yellow pine pollen grains.

On our day trip Saturday to gather a few Moss Motoring Challenge points just outside Tennille, Georgia the CTBNL passed through the 72,000 mile mark.

Keep It Simple Stupid

I’ve been really having a hard time blogging. There has been plenty of stuff to write about, but I open up a browser check a few websites and then login here to write…and stop. When I verbalized this to my wife yesterday she said, “Why don’t you post a picture and just one sentence?” Well I already try the one picture thing with Instagram, so maybe I need to just write a simple line or two each day to get the ball rolling again. After all that is how this whole thing started, below is post number #1 of The Miata Diaries, the predecessor to Life of Brian.

Happy 2002

Tuesday, January 1, 2002

New Year’s Day. Cold, maybe mid forties. The Miata sits in the garage all day. The farthest I venture is around the block on rollerblades. Donna goes to the store, but uses the MSV.

Tagged: Miatatude

Blast From The Past

The “a decade ago” WordPress plugin I use returns one day early no matter what combination of years/months/days I enter in the settings, so in actuality the March 5th post of 2009 is called The “My Album Cover” Game. The last time I stole this idea it was from a blog that I have out now lasted, so this time I’m stealing the idea from myself.

To Do This
1 – Get a random Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and the article title is the name of your band.

2 – Get a random quotation http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is your album title.

3 – Get a random photo from flickr https://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/? and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
I had to cheat to get this photo because the photographer had disabled downloading, so I did a print screen and cropped to just get the photo.

4 – Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – The original number five was to post the album cover to Face Book and tag others, but I’m still not “on” Facebook, so here exclusively here on my blog is the cover of Anzan Ardabil’s new album entitled As Well As The Earth.

Cocktail Weenie?

A couple of weeks ago we drove over to Atlanta, GA (approx. 300 mile round trip) and spent the night in a motel to take a picture of the Miata with a Wienermobile to score 9 points in this year’s Moss Motoring Challenge.

Now, for next weekend, we are considering driving to Gainesville, FL (more than 300 miles one way) and spending a night in a motel to take a picture of the Mini Wienermobile which is worth zero points in this year’s Moss Motoring Challenge.

Seeing as it is worth zero points, if we go, what should we drive? The Mini, to take a picture with it and the Wienermobile made from a Mini. Or should we drive the Miata, just to have a photo of it with both sizes of Wienermobiles.

To Witch Hazel Ride

We kind of feel like we are living in the northwest around here, seems like nearly everyday it has been rainy or misty or both. I managed to sneak in a walk on Monday morning, but the last two days it has just been too wet to try. Today looked like it was going to be a repeat. By mid morning it had stopped raining, even the mist disappeared, but the sun stayed hidden behind the clouds. Donna was going to go swimming, but after she found out the Golds Gym pool water temperature was a very chilly 74°, she decided to skip it and walk with me. I suggested Hitchcock Woods. We walked for about an hour doing a nice and muddy 2-1/2 mile loop.

Hot Dog!

In this year’s Motoring Challenge the two big point earners, worth nine each, are the Wienermobile and a Blimp.

Getting a handle on the Wienermobile location is supposed to be easy, just download the app and you can find out where any of the 6 vehicles will be on a given day. There were early rumbling on the Moss Motoring group Facebook page that the app was way wrong and a couple of folks showed up only to not see a Wienermobile. Didn’t matter to me because when I first tried to load the app on my phone, the Google Play store wouldn’t let me, it told me my device was incompatible.

I heard Twitter was supposed to be the way to go while they fixed the app, but the information I found was somewhat incomplete. It gave a date and city, but not an actual location. And it only went out so far and then when that date passed, it never posted another schedule. I tried to create a Google news feed that tracked mention of the Wienermobile, but that usually resulted in getting a story once it had been and gone somewhere.

Guessing it was going to be in Atlanta on Superbowl Weekend, I checked the Atlanta paper online and found out it actually would be there and it listed specific locations. So we made plans to drive over and back the Saturday before, but in end the weather was supposed to be rainy and we hate driving in Atlanta, so we didn’t go. There is one of the Wienermobiles assigned to the southeast region, so we knew we would find it someplace eventually.

Last week I learned that the app was supposedly fixed. I tried again to load it my phone, but it still wouldn’t. So I found a place I could download the APK file and side-loaded it to the phone. Lookie there, the Wienermobile was going to be in Atlanta again this weekend. This time it was going to be in the eastern suburbs, so we wouldn’t have to venture inside the I-285 beltway, AKA The Danger Zone. On Sunday it was going to be at two different Walmarts in Lithonia.

We still had enough points left for one more free room at a Holiday Inn Express, so on Saturday afternoon we tossed a change of clothes in a bag and drove over to a town one further west of where we needed to be on Sunday morning. In the morning when I looked in on Twitter to see if anyone had posted pictures from the event the day before, I was shocked to see that a Wienermobile was at the Daytona 500 in Florida. Knowing they were assigned to regions and the flaky app postings, I wasn’t real confident that our goal would not be waiting for us in the Lithonia Walmart parking lot.

As you can see above, there was a Wienermobile where the app said it would be. Turns out the southeast region Wienermobile was in Daytona, but this one was from the midwest region. I didn’t think to ask them why they were down south. Donna and I chatted with the two “Hotdoggers” for a bit and I think they were happy for the company because at nine o’clock on a chilly, misty Sunday morning there weren’t a lot of visitors. By 9:30 we were back on I-20 heading home nine points richer.

One down and one to go. Now, where is that confounded blimp?

12 Rules For Miata Life

A few days ago I blogged about the “12 Rules” phenomena and I mentioned I thought it would take a while to think about the subject before I could create my own set. So, off an on since then, I have been plugging away at doing just that with a little Miata spin. I had a good start, Rule #1, but then it all fell apart. It ended up more like 12 reasons to buy a Miata, so anyway…

  1. It’s a Convertible – Put the top down as often as possible.
  2. It’s Inexpensive – Until you start adding options, every new Miata is priced below the $34,000 average cost of a vehicle in 2019. Nice 5-7 year old ones can be had for $15-20k. Of course there are cheaper cars to be had, but nothing can touch it on a cost per mile of fun.
  3. It’s Reliable – Well taken car of early models are still going strong at over a quarter of a million miles. And not so well taken care of examples can easily be brought to life without breaking your bank.
  4. It’s a Sports Car – On any giving weekend at SCCA, NASA and autocross events there will more Miatas than practically every other make of car. Even if you just drive on the street, do not buy cheap tires, they limit the fun available.
  5. It’s a Slow Car – And it is leaps and bounds more fun to drive a slow car fast than it is to drive a fast car slow.
  6. It’s a Small Car – Always park at the end of a row so at least one side will be free of large vehicles to make it easier to back out.
  7. It’s a Great First Car – The open cockpit will make your teen driver feel vulnerable, so they will be paying attention to trying not to get crushed by the typically much larger vehicles around them, plus it is small, light-weight and maneuverable making it easy avoid them. As a bonus it is a two-seater thereby reducing the peer pressure to do something stupid by 66% as compared to the typical sedan.
  8. It’s as Good as a Pickup Truck – On a sunny day. With the top down it is amazing what can be carried in the passenger seat sticking up and/or back.
  9. It’s More Fun with Friends – So join a local Miata Club, they’re everywhere.
  10. It’s Infinitely Customizable – While some consider them perfect right out of the box, there is an aftermarket for these things that is staggering, from every possible performance modification you could think of to all manner of cosmetic stuff to nice things that Mazda probably should have put on one to begin with.
  11. It’s Photogenic – Like babies and pets. See above. đŸ˜‰
  12. It’s not a Collector’s Car – So drive it..