Year: 2020

20 Seconds

The rule for washing your hands is for you to do it for 20 seconds to thoroughly remove all the bad germs. Easy way to time this is to sing the Happy Birthday song, twice. I use a different method for timing it. I turn on the hot tap in the upstairs bathroom and when the water turns hot it has been 20 seconds…

Oh, and late to the game, I just picked up on the origin of COVID-19.
COronaVIrus Disease 2019….

Sunday Crossword

We still get the local paper delivered to our house. It is a small town paper that publishes 4 times a week (down from 5 from when we first got here.) Most of the national news content in there is old by the time we get the paper and some of the local news as well, but we like supporting the local businesses. It is cool to know where the for sale open Houses are and who is having a Yard Sale, although we usually will only go to them if we can walk there. Plus, I’m old school in that I like to read my comics printed on a piece of paper I can hold in my hand. Donna likes it so she can do the crossword puzzle, the Jumble and & Little Words (sometimes I get to help.)

As with most newspapers, and practically anything, you occasionally get some random weird errors. Perhaps because of times we are going through now the errors seem a bit more frequent. Reprinting the same comics pages, puzzles or articles on consecutive days, announcing events on the day after they are available and mis-aligned color printing so that every picture seems fuzzy.

<━ This past Sunday’s we got a new error. The crossword puzzle was printed already filled in! Guess who had to scan the puzzle, erase every letter (about 450) and then hand number where the answers went for her. ━>

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Because every week was there not a track focused car, I always had a very hard time narrowing down a daily driver and it was very hard to pick something to crush – Track, Daily Crush is dead.

Our current garage consists of a Mazda Miata for pleasure drives, the *sport* of carving of canyons and weekend getaways and a Mini Cooper for local errands, inclement weather transport and comfortable *touring*. We have made no secret that we need one more vehicle, a Jeep to advantage of all the *off-road* opportunities that Oregon has to offer, if we could get just one more garage bay.

So, welcome to the inaugural edition of Touring, Sport, Off-Road. Where I will pick a dream garage with something to substitute for the Mini and Miata, plus pick a nice vehicle for leaving the pavement in.

The First Edition of SORT.
As of Monday, August 10, 2020 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
Electric Porsche 356 Speedster Replica 1978 Toyota Chinook
4×4 Conversion		 2007 Porsche Cayman
5-Speed
With the stated range it will only be local canyons… Not only ride off-road, but camp there too. The quintessential tourer; fast, comfy. lots of space.

I Looked

When we moved into our house in Aiken in 1989 there was a metal mailbox attached to the side of the house for the mail carriers to put your mail in. We unfortunately were not allowed to use it, we needed to put a mailbox on a post out at the street. The city had transitioned from walking carriers to using trucks to deliver the mail a few years earlier, but the previous owner was grandfathered in and she could still get her mail at her door. The neighborhood carrier had to hop out of their truck and walk up to the porch for them, for us they just cruised down the street and stopped if required.

When we moved into our house here there was no mailbox at the street and there was no metal mailbox attached to the house, but there was an honest-to-god mail slot next to the front door. Klamath Falls uses a walking mail carrier still and our mail comes right inside the house!. We of course have got to know him a bit as he will knock on the door if he has a package for us. We will wave when he is doing his route and we are out for walk around the neighborhood. Donna makes sure to give him some fresh baked cookies if she has made some.

Now that the weather is nice we are often sitting on the front porch when he is doing his delivering. We will go several days running getting mail and then we might go a day without. If we don’t get any mail and he passes by, Donna will say, using a sad voice, “What no mail for me today?” A couple weeks ago we went a couple days with no mail. On the third day, Donna said, “If you don’t bring me any mail tomorrow, I’ll never bake you cookies again.”

The next day he came up the stairs as we were sitting on the porch with no mail in his hand, but he did give Donna what you see to the left here.