Magically Moosetery Tour

One of the motoring challenges this year is Wild Animal Statue or Sculpture (life-size or larger) and we were going to use one of the fiberglass art horses still scattered around town, but after some discussion we thought that maybe they didn’t fit the wild part, so we have been keeping our eyes open for other possibilities. Three weeks ago when we did our three city deli bagel taste test drive on our way back from North Carolina on US176 South, somewhere we zipped by a large metal sculpture of a moose. We both noticed it, but didn’t stop because we were over carbo-loaded and just wanted to go home.

This past Saturday we decided to take a road trip back up to Greenville to go to Greenfield’s Deli to get some more of our favorite bagels. And seeing as we were nearby, we decided to go and find that moose statue. The both of us could see the statue in our minds eye and knew it was somewhere along US176 between Landrum,SC and Flat Rock, NC. Not that I minded the extra 80 or so miles of driving because fully half of it would be on windy two-lane US176 up and down the mountain between those two towns. We were relatively sure it was just outside either Tryon, NC or Saluda, NC, but as it turned out it was nowhere near them, it was nowhere we could find along that route.

So either we both had the same visual hallucination or it was a real moose grazing in the grass as it migrated back to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

66,000 Roller Skate Bearings

Near Mile Marker 7 on I-20 West heading towards Augusta, Georgia, the CTBNL crossed over the sixty-six thousand mile plateau. We were headed over to the Red Wing Rollerway to try one more time for the elusive Roller Derby Rink photo in the Moss Motoring Challenge. The Augusta Soul City Sirens were going to be holding a try out/boot camp session on both Monday and Tuesday nights. Just like in January, we were foiled again by the lack of any outdoor signage. What is the definition of insanity?

Because it is so hot in the middle of the day we have just been picking away slowly at the motoring challenges. Since we have last spoke on the matter, a month and a half ago, we have captured a marginal Carpentry Shop, a questionable Horse Drawn Carriage, our last Historic Landmark, a Share The Road sign, Lightning, a Mail Carrier, a Scene You Can Smell, the I go Here All The Time, the Disc Golf Course with Players and then a better Disk Golf Course with Players for a total of 17 points.

Chronologically TDTVS

While searching for LOST podcasts I stumbled onto one by two women called “Lost in Order.” Anna & Wendy watched an episode and every week or so dropped a podcast on their thoughts. I can’t listen to it though, it is not their voices or the sound quality, it is in the way they are watching the show.

Not long after the sixth and last season of TDTVS came on on DVD, some genius or madman or possibly Mad Genius, using a timeline found in the Lostpedia re-cut the show in chronological order. Anna & Wendy are podcasting about the results of Mike Maloney’s masterpiece, Chronologically LOST. Mike has taken all 118 aired TV episodes and created 101, roughly forty-five minute long, chronological episodes for a total of 84 hours of LOST watching pleasure.

In a way I wished I’d found out about this a month ago before starting to re-watch the show as I think it would be interesting to see the show in linear time. Would it be more interesting than the non linear original? I’ll let you know someday, I’m a little more than halfway through downloading the torrent. It is going to take about a week to get it all because unlike current popular movies, there aren’t hundreds or thousands sharing it, but each time I’ve looked in on the progress I am connected to anywhere from six to twelve peers.

TDTVS Re-Redux

Ten years ago on the third Thursday of August (it was the 21st not the 23rd) I wrote about waiting impatiently for the fifth season of LOST to start. On this third Thursday of August we watched the first two episodes of season three, having blown through the first two season in the last 2 weeks.

We tried another of The Lost Boys podcasts a couple of weeks ago, but gave up as it just didn’t work out. As with any podcast, even if you are passionate about the subject, if the voices aren’t pleasing to your ears, you just can’t listen. It was sort of a good thing that we didn’t like this podcast as we would have caught up to them in short order anyway as they were currently just starting season two and we were already in that boat with the The West Wing Weekly podcasts.

Because the King’s English from the blokes of The Lost Boys podcast was hard to understand, I went looking for another one for us to listen to about TDTVS. I hit the Jack pot (a little LOST word play) with one called Getting LOST from a couple of dudes, Clint & Adam, who speak in ‘Murican English. Their premise is eerily similar to The Lost Boys one in that one of them has seen the show seven times before and the other is watching it for the first.

Clint and Adam started back in October of 2015, so they have already finished doing podcasts for all six seasons of the show making it perfect for our two-a-day habit. But the two Getting LOST host’s voices are also somewhat similar to each other making it hard to distinguish who is who, sort of like the Flight 815 survivors Scott and Steve who are always being confused for each other by the main cast. Given enough time I’m sure we would have eventually been able to tell them apart, but after a couple of tries at listening to them, they were not to our liking either.

I think we are just going to have give up on the LOST podcast idea as all my other searching has not turned up another show that has done all six seasons or one that is currently in production and I’m OK with this.

Need A Job Brian?

Need a job Brian?

Need a job Brian?

When I opened a new tab in Chrome this afternoon in between the search box and the most visited site list I got at couple of tabs to search for jobs in the local area. Huh? Neither of us were looking for work nor using the web to look for one. So why was it there? A new President Trump Executive Order trying to make America great again by making unemployment zero?

Or, although I did this a couple months ago, the folks in Mountain View are just catching up, because I removed my work address when I retired from Google Maps.

Set Work Location

Set Work Location

Must have been an unpublic beta or something because it is gone now…

Road Closed

It was time for an oil change for the Lady Bug. I was going to take it back to Newton’s Automotive where we had taken it before, but when I called to set up an appointment, I got the answering machine and the outgoing message mentioned they were in process of moving to a different location. It would be a 30 mile round trip to drop of the car and another 30 to go back and pick it up.

Plan B was implemented, we choose another shop much closer to home. Auto Tech which is a 3 mile round trip. They at one time were an authorized Mini service center and still deal with them, as well as BMWs and other high end vehicles. They were pretty quick about finishing the work and did a nice job (meaning they returned the car at the same level of cleanliness as we dropped it off at.) They were about $30 more than Newton’s and right about the upper level of what I want to pay to have someone else do the job.

If I was to do the oil change at home like I do for the Miata I would want to get all 4 wheels off the ground, so I could rotate the tires too. The Mini (along with BMW) really needs an adapter to fit into a rectangular jack point to safely jack the car up. I would need 4 of these adapters and the official Mini part is $25 each. You can get some aftermarket bits for around $8 each.

The Mini oil change is more expensive than the Miata, but it might be cheaper in the end. The Mini uses 5 liters of synthetic oil compared to the Miata’s 4 quarts of regular dino oil and the filter is a little more expensive too, but it would last twice as long as I do the Miata every 5k miles and the Mini at 10k.

Might be worth the investment in those jack pad adapters…

Bagels For Breakfast

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.