Year: 2020

Everyday Is Like Sunday

Ever since I’ve been retired, my grasp on what day it is has been pretty fluid. This was perfectly captured in a Pickles cartoon that I featured here back in April. Today we were reading the paper and listening to Radio Paradise waiting for CBS’s coverage of the Masters to start, when the above song came on and it stuck in my head.

When 10:00AM rolled around and I swapped from the Roku box to cable I thought, hmmm, it is 1:00PM on the east coast, wonder which NFL games will be on, might delay golf it is interesting. A quick scan of the cable guide showed nothing but college football games. Oooh, that’s right it is Saturday.

Didn’t help either that our 4 times a week newspaper, had just last week, changed the Sunday Edition to a Saturday delivered Weekend Edition.

A Tradition Like No Other

I’ve had nine previous posts here on LoB on this subject and pretty much everyone of them starts out with me saying that we don’t play golf1 and really only watch one golf tournament a year and the Masters is that one.

This is because we have actually trod the hallowed grounds of Augusta National. We moved to Aiken, SC in May of 1989 and when we found out that you could pay a measly $5 and get in to see a practice round2 in the first full week in April of 1990 we took that Monday off and went over. We got there early, walked the whole course, ate a $1.00 palmetto cheese sandwich and drove home. That weekend we watched, just to see where we had been and it has become a tradition like no other ever since.

We did go back over a few times over few years until they instituted a lottery and we stopped getting picked. One year my brother (who does golf) came down to visit and he was fun to walk around with. He could tell us the names of the pros (and some of their history at the course) we would see as we wondered about. Another year my sister came down with her husband (who also golfs) and wanted to camp at at certain locations to watch as the players golfed through. That was in 1995 and I know that because that is when the photo above was taken.

And the only reason I still have that photo is because it is in one of five directories that are remnants of the Seattle FilmWorks era when you would get prints back and for a small fee, a copy in that new fangled digit format, in a staggering 640 x 480 pixel size. As you can see, the images leave a lot to be desired, but it was whiz-bang back in the day.

Here is another one to gaze at in wonder,
me in front of the famous scoreboard:

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Just Going To Keep Pretending I Won Edition of SORT.
As of Monday, November 9, 2020 at 9:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
2020 Chevrolet Corvette 2002 Jeep Wrangler X 2002 BMW M5
When the configurator first came online I went over to check it out and this is exactly how I spec’d mine. Bright Yellow makes it easy to find when I’ve gone way off trail. Just needs a hard top for Oregon’s winter. I might be taking a risk with the 141k miles, but it’ll be worth it until something expensive breaks.

Happy 31st Miataversary

Thirty-one years ago today, after a 108 day wait (story here) I drove home from Augusta, Georgia to Aiken, South Carolina in my first Miata. That’s me and it in New Orleans, Louisiana about a month later when we drove it down to visit Donna’s family for Christmas.

At The Car Wash

Took advantage of the next to last nice day (tomorrow probably is the last nice day until spring) to wash both cars. The CTBNL needed it because we recently parked under a tree and there was lots of little sticky sap spots all over it. The Lady Bug needed it just on general principle (looks like the last time it got a wash was May!)

The next time the Miata gets washed will probably be April. The next time the Mini gets washed it will be at a local automated place.

1st First To Find

A little over a week ago we took a drive up to the Lake of the Woods because it was a nice 35 mile trip to somewhere besides to the grocery store or some local restaurant to pick up a bit of take out. But mainly to take hike and do some geocaching.

Wouldn’t you know it, two days later, somebody published a new cache very near where we were. Donna wanted to go right back up there to try and be the First To Find. I talked her out of it to concentrate on the Friends of the Children scavenger hunt. I told her if that cache hadn’t been found after the hunt, we would try to be the 1st.

In over a decade of caching with over fourteen hundred caches found we have never been the First To Find on a cache.

We didn’t even try back in Aiken, because around there, there was a regular squad that would drop almost anything, including work, to rush out and look for newly published caches.

We were close once, really close, a second to find, on a random happenstance in Colorado. We were passing through on one of our driving trips and I had picked out some caches along our route, one of which had no finds. But, by the time we got there someone had beat us to it.

By today no one had found that Lake of the Woods cache yet, so this was the day for us to go up there and see if we could. Last time we drove up we took the Mini because it needed the exercise, but this time we drove the Miata because today was the last day it will be near a high of 70 until probably 2021.

After a little bit of searching around we found the cache. When I unfolded the log it was empty. Our 1st First to Find.