January

Empty Can with an Exclamation Point Inside

Tuesday the 2nd

The Miata resides in the garage while the Mini sleeps outside. Monday night it was cold as all get out, so I was not really surprised when Donna called me from the gym to tell me she had a light on the Mini’s speedometer that looked like an empty can with an exclamation point inside. The small info screen on the tachometer also indicated that the right front tire was low.

It was obvious that the tire wasn’t flat or she wouldn’t have made to the gym, but I asked her to take a look at the tire and see if it was noticeably lower looking. It wasn’t, so I told her I’d fill them up when I got home.

The sticker inside the driver’s door said the tires were supposed to be set at 33 p.s.i. The right front had 28, the right rear had 30, the left rear had 29 and the left front had 30 p.s.i. I dragged out the long extension cord and my little air compressor and filled all four tires up to 34 pounds.

After I rolled up the 50′ extension cord, stored away the air compressor and was nice and warm inside the house I realized I didn’t check the tire pressure in the spare. I wonder if it has ever been checked since October 4th, 2012 when the car rolled off the assembly line. Better put that on my list to do tomorrow.

February

I Just Want To Remember How It Was

Friday the 9th

I was a big fan of the X-Files from back in the day. My interest dipped sharply in 2000 when Season 8 started without Mulder. But, I hung in sporadically because I still enjoyed the format of the mystery/monster of the week. While I didn’t care for the UFO mythology shows anymore, they had come completely nonsensical by then, it was still better than TV than any “reality show” clogging the airways. Of the 19 shows in season 9, I probably watched all of 5. Including the tiresome show finale which really soured me on the franchise.

So needless to say, I wasn’t too thrilled when they dragged the show out of retirement in 2016 for a 6 show special event miniseries. And I was not disappointed, it was pretty bad, expect for maybe one show, “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster” and that was merely alright.

April 2017 rolls around and Fox decides that they can milk the dead cow once more and produce 10 episodes for an eleventh season in early 2018. So, like a moth to a flame on January 3rd I tuned into Fox to watch the first new episode. Can you say hot mess? The Cigarette Smoking man was still alive? Wasn’t he killed in a helicopter rocket attack back at the end of season 9? I didn’t even make it to the series title sequence, I turned it off.

I recorded the show anyway figuring I’d gather all ten shows and maybe binge watch them, so once I got going I would get into them. After about 3 weeks, there was nothing else to watch, so I tried to re-watch the first show again. This time I got past the intro and maybe 10 more minutes in before giving up in disgust.

When I learned the fourth week’s episode had been written by Darin Morgan, I decided that I was going to watch that particular show. Mr. Morgan has written 5 other X-Files episodes, 2 of which are among my top 5 favorites (Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’), 2 are in the top 20 (Humbug and War of the Coprophages) and the 5th was the only barely watchable episode from season 10 (Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster.)

Well, unfortunately, The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat was a lot more like the last one Mr. Morgan wrote and not the other four. Even though there are 6 more episodes left in this season, this is the last one I am going to bother to watch.

At the end, Scully and Mulder are sitting together on a couch (in his place I guess) and they are about to dig into a batch of Goop-O ABC (think Jell-O 123) that Scully remembers fondly from her childhood. She had molded it in Mulder’s fake Sasquatch footprint maker because that was all she could find. As Scully scoops up a spoonful and brings it towards her mouth, she pauses, shakes her head, puts the spoon down and says, “I just want to remember how it was. I just want to remember how it all was.” Fade to black.

A pitch perfect ending for me to go out on. And apparently for the actress who plays Agent Dana Scully, Gillian Anderson, to go out on too, because at the very end of last year she announced flat out that she was through playing the character.

If Fox wants a season 12 of The X-Files it will have to be without the two of us.

March

Ailuropoda Velox

Wednesday the 14th

Because it was a little after 1:00 PM as we got back to Aiken, after Saturday’s Coffee and Cars we thought maybe we should get something to eat before going home. As we were verbally ticking off places that we might like to eat at, Donna suggested Panda Express as it was about 500 feet right in front of us. I said sure.

The Panda Express is our fair city’s newest dining experience. As with any new restaurant in town, the place is packed for the first two months because everyone in the entire city has to eat there as quickly as possible so they can brag to their friends that they have done so. And true to form, whenever we have been over that way, be it lunch or dinner time, the parking lot has been jammed and the drive-up line practically circled the building.

Neither of us had eaten at a Panda Express before, so we wanted to check out what was meant by Chinese Fast Food. The Aiken store had been open since around the first of the year, so it had been awhile, but we were still surprised to find that there was nearly no one in the drive-up line nor in the dining area.

As it turned out, fast Chinese food is another way to say “controlled portion” buffet style. All the dishes are pre-cooked and sit in warming trays behind a display case and an employee dishes out a measured spoonful of the meal of your choosing. Donna selected chicken and green beans, I picked the Peking beef, we got fried rice as our side and we added one egg roll to split.

Let’s just say, this is the first and last time we will eat at a Panda Express. Our food was dished up by a less than enthusiastic employee and the food matched. Everything tasted like 3 day old leftover take-out where all the flavor had been absorbed by the baking soda at the back of the fridge. It was luke-warm in temperature and the rice was so dry you were lucky to keep more than a dozen grains of it on the fork at a time. The egg roll was hot enough, probably by random chance, but there was no hot mustard or orange sauce packets anywhere to be found.

This probably explains the uncrowdedness of the place on a Saturday at lunchtime. Everyone else in town had already eaten there, had a similar experience as us and discovered that eating here once was more than enough?

April

Easter Miracle

Saturday the 28th

Cleaning up the drafts folder…
Somewhere in the middle of March, while doing some laundry, one of the socks from Donna’s favorite pair of yoga socks came up missing. We looked in every nook & cranny of every item of clothing that was in the wash load with no success. I retraced our steps to the laundry room, I looked beside and behind the washer and the dryer, I looked inside the dryer to see if it was stuck somewhere and then retraced our steps back into the bedroom where we were folding the clothes. No sock.

Donna repeated what I just did and she didn’t find the missing sock either. While she was doing this I looked under the bed we threw the clothes on to fold thinking maybe it fell off and got kicked under there. Nope. When Donna got back she looked under the bed too. No sock. We shrugged our shoulders and figured it would show up in the leg or sleeve of someone’s in the near future.

Two weeks later, on Easter morning when I got out of bed in our hotel in Myrtle Beach and turned on the light in the bathroom, there in the middle of the tile floor was the missing sock. How the sock got there is a total mystery. The suitcases with all our clothing were kept in the room. Any clothes brought into the bathroom wouldn’t have included socks or anything that a sock could hide in. It was just there.

Of course we weren’t really sure that it wasn’t the non-missing sock until we got home on Sunday afternoon and Donna looked in her closet and saw the other sock sitting on the shelf right where she left it waiting for its mate. Still not sure how the resurrected sock made it to Myrtle Beach and to magically appear on a bathroom floor.

May

Where The Locals Eat

Saturday the 26th

Day 27 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Minden, LA to Hammond, LA. Last night’s hotel clerk recommendation for a good breakfast where the locals eat was to drive just up the street a bit and go to Hamburger Happiness and Southern Maid Doughnuts. We were worried a bit as there was only one other vehicle in the lot when we pulled in.

The one guy sitting by himself didn’t seem too friendly, but the nice old lady at the counter where we placed and paid for our order was very pleasant. I think it was literally a mom and pop shop because I could see an old man through the saloon doors to the kitchen.

Soon the rest of the locals started arriving one by one and they greeted each other by name. The same lady brought our food to us pipping hot and it was delicious. The portions were correct and the price was right. We could hear the locals in background discussing the weather and the size of farm tractors. When we finished up and stepped outside I knew I needed to snap a picture. Take a guess, which one of these things is not like the other.

June

Wendover Will

Sunday the 3rd

On Day 12 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip we spent the night in the town of Wendover, Utah. The town sits right on the border between Utah and Nevada and just across the literal line in the sand sits the town of West Wendover. In 1952 West Wendover, Nevada replaced a bright light on a tall pole that State Line Service (a cobble stone service station), right on the border, had used to attract visitors with a 64″ tall mechanical cowboy outlined in neon lights.

Probably hundreds of thousands of people have taken pictures of Will and even themselves with Wendover Will over the years, but now the town has created a page where if you submit a selfie photo with him they’ll post it with a digital pin on the map of where your from. I, of course, thought it sounded like fun, so I took a picture. It is not a very good picture overall and shows that I need a lot more practice at the selfie thing. Take a look and see if you can find me: Wendover Will Visitor Map

July

Miata Maintenance Day

Thursday the 19th

Seeing as the CTBNL hit the 65,000 mile plateau on Saturday, the other day when Donna went off to the gym, I jacked up the Miata, rotated the tires and changed the oil.

I was going to give the car a bath too, but after eating lunch I didn’t want to go back outside. Besides I did not want to violate Russ’s Rule for Retirement. To wit: Do one thing a day. You have all sorts of things you need to do and have been waiting until you more free time, there are all the things you want to do for yourself and then there is all to things your wife wants for you to do. It can overwhelming, so pick one thing and do just that one thing, don’t try to do too much.

Now you might think that changing the oil and rotating tires is two different items, but to me, I have always combined them. This is because to only real easy way to get to the oil filter in the Miata is to remove the right front wheel. And while I guess quite possibly you could jack up that front side and remove the one wheel, but then you would need to make sure the car is level to allow all the oil to drain out. That and you are now already 1/4 of the way to rotating the tires anyway…

August

Bagels For Breakfast

Saturday the 11th

We like bagels and really miss the ones we used to get when we lived in New Jersey for those two years. After living in South Carolina for several years we adjusted to just live with the ones from Dunkin Donuts. Whenever we would travel we would seek out a shop that sold “real” bagels, so now we have gotten kind of snobbish about them and will only eat those.

For a while we were satisfied from the one we got from a chain called Bruegger’s that had a store in Lexington, SC a mere 50 miles away. These were fine until we discovered a place called Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC on a trip to see my sister. The bagels from there elicited memories of those from Jersey, so we have stopped going to Bruegger’s.

A hundred mile round trip to Lexington and back for bagels wasn’t bad, but a 330 mile round trip to Hendersonville and back would be nuts. So we started looking for someplace closer that had “real” bagels. We found a place in Greenville, SC (a 220 mile round trip) called Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli. It is really too far away for frequent trips to just get a bagel for breakfast, but we’ve combined it with looking for some Motoring Challenge points and have been a couple of times.

Yesterday we decided it was time for some bagels this weekend. We were planning another Greenville trip, but I decided to look around for something else in the state that might be closer. Charleston and Hilton Head on the coast had promising bagel bakeries, but they were both further away than Greenville. Then I found a place called Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC. This place is a little under a hundred miles away one-way, not that many miles savings over Greenville, but Anderson is a much smaller town so traffic will be better and we won’t have to get on the Interstate at all.

We each got a toasted bagel and one each in a bag to go at the Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli. I thought it was not too bad, but Donna said it was barely Bruegger level. “Well,”I volunteered, “Greenville and Greenfield’s Deli is only about 30 miles away. You want to go there?”

So that is what we did. Because we had our own bagel in Anderson, we just split a toasted one in Greenville and then also got a couple more to go. I told Donna that I thought that this bagel was better than our previous gold standard, the Joey’s in Hendersonville. She informed me that I was nuts, Joey’s was better. “You know,” I said, “Joey’s is only about 40 miles away?”

“Let’s go,” she said. So we did. Here we split another toasted bagel and had them bag up a couple more to go for each of us. While eating in Joey’s NY Bagel’s store Donna decided that just maybe I was right about which one was best. We brought home at least one bagel from each place, so maybe we will have to figure out a way to do some back to back blind taste testing…

The triptych above shows the interiors of all three places we ate a bagel at this morning. From left to right: Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC, Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli in Greenville, SC and Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC.

September

Smile, There Are Cameras Everywhere

Tuesday the 25th

On Saturday’s return pass of the Gap, just a little after dawn, at around mile marker #5 we passed one of the ubiquitous photographers set up in one of the corners. As I went by I entered the corner too deep and crossed the white line. Knowing the photos wouldn’t be very good, I found the next pull-off so I could make a u-turn to make another portrait pass. I went through the corner a lot better this time, drove until the next pull-off for another u-turn. The third pass wasn’t for photos, it was because that was the way we need to be going.

Maybe a mile and a half further along towards the end of our return pass I surprised another photographer who was just setting up his awning. He quickly grabbed his camera and started shooting. I just made the one pass and continued on our way back to the hotel. I thought for sure he probably didn’t get a good look, plus I figured the first guy had enough chances to get a great shot of us already.

The first Dragon photographer had his vehicle wrapped with the company logo and name, 129Slayer.com, so I knew where to go to see those pictures. In the span of the 2 minutes it took me to make my 3 passes he snapped 42 exposures. I needed a Google search of “deals gap photographers” to find our second photographer, US129Photos, and our brief 20 second encounter with him netted just 6 exposures.

In the end, the best shot, came out of those 6. I did also purchase 2 out of the 42 from 129Slayer too and it was a good thing I did go by him 3 times, as both of the ones I bought came from the last pass.

October

Mmmm, Derby Pie

Saturday the 6th

Today was the Annual Chocolate Festival at St. Mary’s Church which is used as a fund raiser for their school. There are fun and games for the kids, a small vendor area, a silent auction, a couple of spots for lunch, a bake sale, a used book sale and a plethora of chocolate goodies for consumption. As we do almost every year we dropped in for a brief visit to look at the used books, check out the silent auction and eat some chocolate based food stuffs.

We actually bought a few books this time after having not for the last couple of years because of becoming Kindlized. Donna picked 8 books to mail off the munchkins in Washington state for a quarter a piece and a couple of paperbacks for herself at a half a buck each (one of which she is reading by flashlight on the back porch as I write this.) I bought 5 for myself, so for eight bucks we came away with 16 books. Which is pretty good considering the 8 we got for our reading pleasure were “trade” paperbacks that retail for like $15-17 each.

We hit the bake sale where we spent a bit on some cupcakes and cookies before heading outside to buy some other chocolate goodies. Donna found some chocolate covered pretzels for herself and I snagged a slice of Derby Pie. We found a shady spot to sit and enjoy our treats. As I took my first forkful of pie and brought it up to my mouth I was bopped in the hands by a volley ball. I did manage to save the bite on the fork, but the rest of the container of pie hit the ground. Neither one of us saw it happen, but a ball somehow got loose from the octagonal corral where a couple of kids were hand batting it around. One of the older kids who was running the game was very apologetic, but the other one just hung her head. I brushed myself off and went back over and spent another 75¢ for a second slice. This time I kept my head up while eating.

November

69,000 Yellow Leaves

Sunday the 4th

We had 5 Miatas from the Masters Miata Club scheduled for the weekend trip. One of our Miata club members is also a member of a local Corvette Club and he invited some of his fellow ‘Vette guys to join. We had two who wanted to come, but neither was going to drive their Corvette. One was going to drive a Miata and the other was going to drive a Porsche. At the last minute, the Miata driver backed out, leaving just the mystery Porsche driver to meet us in Elberton, GA on Friday. Trust me, it was fairly easy to spot his Lava Orange 911 GT3 RS in the McDonald’s lot.

Our Porsche guest was a great sport about just loafing around with us slow poke Miatas and rode mid pack on the trip up. He had been as far up into North Carolina as Highlands, but had never driven into these western parts, so he was just happy to be with us and soak up our knowledge of the area.

After driving the 200 miles to get Robbinsville, no one wanted to drive the 50 extra miles total to do a Dragon run, except for our Porsche driver and me. So instead of the two of us driving, I asked if I could ride along with him. “Sure,” he said. While the cost of the Porsche was roughly equivalent to the cost of all of our 5 Miatas put together, he promptly justified the high cost of the car to me by demonstrating how it would feel to do the trip in a low flying Blue Angels jet.

And let me tell you, this car gets some respect on the road. On the way up to the start of the Gap going up US129, we came across a tight 3 pack of cars, traveling 60 MPH or so, going the same way. The stock looking Civic SI in the back surrendered first, approximately 1/4 mile after we came right up on his rear. The middle car, an older model GTR, withstood about two miles of him having this orange beast filling his mirror before he hit his flashers and slowed on a short stretch of straight. The lead car, a late model Mustang that looked a bit modified, hung on leading for about the next three miles (he was doing pretty good), but after we past a small tangle of cars turning into the Tapoco Lodge he finally gave in on the first wide spot after the sharp uphill turn past the dam. He quickly disappeared in our mirror.

For a minute I was afraid this trip would make the same drive in a Miata feel pedestrian, but on Saturday morning on our early morning trip through the gap and back, it actually was the opposite, the Miata felt almost more fun, for a lot less work, so I probably won’t be cashing in my 401k to buy my own GT3 RS.

Somewhere around the lovely town of Cross Anchor, SC on the way home today the CTBNL reached the 69,000 mile mark.

December

Hide and Seek

Monday the 3rd

Back in October Donna and I went to the Fall Steeplechase with a couple of couples from the Miata Club. Our house was the meeting point so we could walk over to the field together and all our “tail-gating” stuff could be carried over in one pickup truck. We had an exciting time at the track and one last bit of excitement once we got back to the Bogardus Estates at the end of the day. I wrote about it on the Masters Miata Club site, here is the final paragraph of the event wrap-up there, reprinted below with the permission of the author, me:

The truck riders and walkers home arrived at Boardman Road at about the same time and when Donna entered the code on the remote garage door opener – it didn’t open. Thinking she may have fat fingered a number, she tried again. It didn’t open. She waited about 15 seconds, cycled the cover open and then closed before trying the code again. Still nothing. Brian then tried it and got the same no response. We even told Jennie and let her try. Time for Plan B, open a regular person styled door with a key. Well, Brian carried his Miata key chain but it has no house key. Donna’s key chain does have a house key, but she didn’t take her purse, it was inside the house. Spare key hidden outside somewhere? Nope (that is a whole other story.) Fortunately a local locksmith was happy to come out and do the rescue.

This is the whole other story. I was lying when I said nope to having one of those Hide-A-Key things with a spare hidden outside, we did, we just didn’t know where to find it.

It used to be inside the old gardening shed, but when that was torn down in August I took it and hid it somewhere else. The six of us wandered all over the back yard looking for any place a magnetic key holder might be hidden with no luck. Somewhere in there I had what I thought was a eureka moment and checked under the bird feeder only to be disappointed. I tried it there, but Donna couldn’t reach that high, so it had to go somewhere else. I even looked under a bunch of old leaves alongside the stairs to the deck, because this was one of the spots where we had hid a key before it went into the shed. After about 15 minutes of looking without success we called that locksmith.

Fast forward to today. The temperature climbed into the upper 60s so Donna and I went out to the screened porch in what will probably be the last time to enjoy it until next spring. As we made our way to our chairs Donna noticed some strange dust in several places on the table we have our portable gas grill sitting on. When I started to look around to see what I could see, what should I spot stuck to the bottom of the grill, but that missing Hide-A-Key. I must have stuck it there after taking it off the bird feeder.

The best part of this whole story is, that all the time we spent looking for where I had hid the key, the whole time we spent waiting around for the locksmith to show up, what we needed to open a door was right at our feet. The gas grill had made the trip to the steeplechase races and was off-loaded from the back of the pickup truck. It was sitting right there on the driveway in front of the garage door.

So now we have one Hide-A-Key hidden somewhere entirely new (which I promise I have committed to memory) and one back up set in a drawer in the house.