Month: June 2020

Track 06 – Johnny Appleseed

From Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros’ second album Global a Go-Go. Johnny Appleseed was the theme song for a short lived series on HBO about surfer culture in SoCal called John from Cincinnati.

Schrodinger’s Lottery Ticket

For practically forever, we have been buying a Mega Millions quick pick ticket that gets us into the bi-weekly drawing for 5 weeks at a time. We routinely end up not winning squat, so every month and a quarter we get an Andrew Jackson out of the ATM, and place that money down on a chance at winning mega-millions.

Thursday last week, we when out for an evening drive and in the middle we stopped at Fred Meyer to use the lottery vending machine and bought our next Mega Millions Lottery Ticket.

The bought ticket hangs on the upper shelf of my computer desk and earlier this week while watching a movie on the PC I noticed there wasn’t one there. My “prop” Mega Lotto Jackpot ticket with the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 & 42 that Hurley won $114 million with was still there, but no real life Mega Millions ticket. By the time I finished watching the movie I had forgotten all about the lottery ticket.

Yesterday, while I finished watching the last episode of Devs, I again noticed the missing lottery ticket. This time I clued Donna in, so we commenced to searching for it. The last time I remember seeing it, it was in the center console of the Miata. That was what we were driving that evening. I put the ticket in there because I didn’t want to put in my pocket where it would get wrinkled. We started there. Not in the center console. It was also not in the glove box. Or the trunk. For thoroughness we looked in the Mini too. We came back upstairs and while I searched every pocket in every item of clothing that I could have been wearing when I bought the ticket, Donna was busy searching in the living area where any piece of paper could be laying. We both came up empty.

Thus we became owners of a Schrodinger’s Lottery Ticket. Because I didn’t think to memorize the 6 numbers on the ticket and there has been two Mega Millions drawings since then, right now we are both winners, and losers, until we somehow happen to find that ticket.

Not wanting to not find the ticket and then read in the local paper of a Klamath Falls individual who purchased a jackpot winning ticket and never coming forward to claim the prize, we went out this evening and bought another ticket.

Track, Daily, Crush by the Numbers

First off, yesterday wasn’t the 52nd Edition of TDC at all, it was the 53rd. I didn’t count the 45th one because it happened on 4/20 and was cutely entitles Track, Happily Daily, Crush.

I went back and gathered up all the names of all the cars that appeared and entered them into a spreadsheet (csv file.) and out of 159 vehicles, the:

Most Tracked – Porsche with 10
Runner Up – Ford with 4

Most Dailied – VW with 7
Runner Up – Ferrari & BMW with 5

Most Crushed – Ford with 5
Runner Up – Chevrolet & VW with 3

Most Mentioned Make – Ford & Porsche with 16
Runner-Up – Volkswagen with 11

Most Mentioned Model – Miata & 911 with 9
Runner Up – Mustang with 5

Track, Daily, Crush

The 52nd Edition. As of Monday, June 15, 2020 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Track Daily Crush
1973 Chevrolet Nova
Drag Car		 1967 BMW 2000CS V8-Powered
1974 Porsche 914
Hold onto your hats. Mid 60s sporty elegance. V-8? Aberration!

You would think that the 52nd edition would equal the one-year anniversary, but not so, I missed a couple of weeks in there somewhere. My first TDC happened on Thursday the 23rd of May last year and the second one appeared on the following Monday where it was to became a weekly feature.

Post Office Picture Book In The Flesh

Went ahead and ordered a physical copy of the South Carolina Post Office Picture Book on the 28th of May. It’s 8″ x 11″ hard-covered 89 pages wasn’t cheap, even at the 40% sale price. Mr. Mailman delivered it to our door today and it sure is pretty.

You can still see all the photos for free by peeking in this gallery right here. The book, in contrast the gallery’s alphabetical layout, runs in chronological order, so it is kind of a history of our travels around South Carolina.

This got me thinking of a sequel trip, and the inevitable photo book, for Donna and I to visit every one of Oregon’s Post Offices. Using the information I found on the website Postal Locations I’ve determined that there are about 375 Post Offices in our new home state (South Carolina had 455.) I’ve created a spreadsheet and I’m about 2/3rds of the way through confirming their addresses on the USPS site.

Right now there are about a half dozen that we can do in a day drive, but after that, who knows when we’ll be safe enough to stay overnight in a hotel, let alone venture anywhere closer that a hundred miles of any of the big cites in the state…