Christmas Presents

We have been busy doing our part for Christmas commercialism this past week by filling our stockings with stuff.

1. Last Wednesday I noticed a very low left rear tire. I noticed it because all of a sudden I was bottoming out on my own personal speed bump again. The other 3 tires were at 24 p.s.i. and the left rear was half that. I backed the car out of the garage, jacked up the left side, removed the rear tire and found a nail head visible in the center of the tread area.

Initially I though to take it to a local independent tire store and have them put a plug in it, but dismissed that idea when I saw how shallow the tread depth was. The tire was worn pretty good, probably a few hundred mile until they reached the wear bars. Plus the inside of all the tires were way worn, probably from the more aggressive alignment from Panic Motorsports when they put on the new shocks and springs last year. It was time for a new set of tires and a more stock alignment.

Ordered another set of Toyo Proxies R1R‘s from TireRack and had them drop shipped to Aiken Discount Tire. By Friday at lunch the CTBNL was back in the garage on fresh rubber.

2. Over the weekend the 8-year Dell PC was acting all sluggish. I tried several clean-up operations without much success. Overnight I copied all our important documents off the main hard drive to the large 2TB secondary drive. On Monday the plan was to plug in an older 250GB drive that used to be the main drive in its spot and reload windows, but that fell through after the PC would not restart after turning it off.

This failure to restart has been an issue after an unplanned power failure several years ago. This is why we never turn the PC off, we’d shut the display off and walk away. On the occasional time I did have to turn it off for maintenance, and if it didn’t turn back on, I could coax it on, by holding the power button in, pulling the power cord and plugging the cord back in. When this problem first cropped up, I swapped out a power supply I had borrowed from the Valve Store and that didn’t solve the issue, so I figured this was a motherboard issue and decided it was time to replace the PC.

Because we live in a technological wasteland, if you need a PC in a day you have very few options. First up was the Staples right around the corner. I went online and found something that I thought would work, there was one in stock, so I put it on the charge card for in store pickup. When we got it home and I opened the box I realized it was a slim tower with no room to add my second hard drive. Back to the store it went. A quarter mile down the road was a Walmart, we peeked in there and nothing was on the shelf that would work.

We were headed to Augusta later in the evening for dinner out with friends, so we figured a visit to Best Buy was in order. So instead of dealing with actual people I did the same thing there as I did at Staples, online order for in store pickup. I’ve spent the last couple days uninstalling the multitudes of HP branded software crap and reloading all the programs I do use onto the new Pavilion 590-P0054.

It was not all dull and unexciting gifts though…

3. We dropped into Academy Sports and bought Donna a couple new pairs of Fila Memory Threshold athletic shoes.

4. And I went online to Amazon and bought some new boxer briefs. 🙂

30,000 Damn Yankees

We saw this sign on the way down to Hilton Head on Thursday, but Donna was driving and there was some traffic, so I said we’ll be sure and stop on the way back home. I had a good idea of where the sign was, but still had drive by it and then find a spot to turn around to go back.

I took the picture and as I was getting back into the car another vehicle slowed down next to us. The driver zipped down their window and said, “I stopped, took a picture and sent it back home up north and everyone got a big kick out of it.” “Actually it used to be a giant Confederate flag, but someone burned it down.” (you can see that sign on an old Google Streetview)

On the way home on SC125, about halfway through the Bomb Plant, the Ladybug blasted past the 30,000 mile barrier.

Sunset Over Skull Creek

We got lucky with our time of arrival at Hudson’s Seafood House On The Docks, the sun had just set and we were treated to a brief splash of color. We didn’t stay outside very long admiring it, with the main source of radiant heat gone in was cooling down fast.

We are here on Hilton Head Island for our annual “business” dinner meeting and brisk after-dinner walk around the neighborhood with Donna the Condo Queen.

Hide and Seek

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.

Gauges Installed


Hover over the picture above to see what they look like at night

Installation went off pretty smoothly, with just one little hiccup, I managed to “break” the needle of the Temp Gauge when I removed it. It was separated into its 3 little component parts, the cap and the needle popped off and the base stayed attached to the pin of the gauge. It was easy enough to put them all back together with some Gorilla Glue.

While I am definitely happy with the results, as befitting anything I do, I do have a couple of quibbles. One of which is not the color of the needles. Because I went with the amber baked in lighting, to keep the gauges matched to the rest of the stock interior lights, the red needles look right at home.

The first quibble is minor one and will probably disappear after a few weeks of looking at them, the faces are a bit shinier looking than shown on the gauge web page.

The second is also minor, but one notch higher, call it a grumble. At night there is a noticeable light intensity difference at the very bottom of the speedometer. Although it is hard to notice in my cell phone picture above, the area between zero and twenty is a little darker than everywhere else.

Just from remembering what the inside of the gauge cluster looks like, I’m guessing this darker area is caused by the shadow of the square plastic tube for the check engine light. Unlike my set, on most of the other gauges the CEL is relocated, so that shadow causing tube is nibbled away like the rest of the ones on the bottom of both the tach & speedo.

I’m going to drop Adam an email and see what my best option would be. Should I nibble just a little of the top of the tube off hoping that will increase the light without actually lighting the CEL all the time or do I paypal him five bucks and have him send me little gauge section for relocating the check engine light to the place where all the other gauges has it.

Four Points By The Skin of Our Teeth


On the way home from Hendersonville, North Carolina on Friday after we had spent Thanksgiving with my sister and her husband, we detoured through Spartanburg, SC to check on a skating rink that hosts roller derby. Sure enough, there was a sign out front of Skate Palace advertising a match from back in October. Unfortunately we were in the Mini not the Miata, so we vowed to drive the 100 miles one-way back there the following day. But Saturday was a cold, miserable, and rainy. Not a nice day for a drive, even with the top up.


We waited until today to make the trip. When we got there, the two people you see on the left were changing the sign to read Craft Fair Today (see the ladder…) and fortunately for us they had finished only one side. The other side still had the roller derby announcement on it. Pheew!