Roaring Twenties

This 1927 Ford Model T Police car marks the halfway point in our Moss Motoring Challenge quest of getting a picture of a vehicle from each one of the 12 decades since the turn of the 20th century. And it is worth 6 points. Something from 1910 to 1919 is worth seven points and anything from the nineteen aughts is worth 10.

Every year in October the small town of Olar in South Carolina hosts a Model T’s festival. Olar has a special connection with Ford Motor Co. because of Henry Ford’s relationship with C.F. Rizer, an Olar native, in the early 1900s. You can read about it in this Charleston newspaper article from 2011.

Personal Speed Bump

The driveway slopes down as it nears the end towards the door, rises up to the door and then drops again into the garage, forming a low wide pyramid. When we brought home the first stock Miata back in 1989, the car bottomed out with a quick thunk on the frame rail with both of us in the car. A coworker at the time helped me solve the issue by filling in most of the area in between the external down then up portion.

The Emperor was lowered slightly and with this fix in place it would only bump if I didn’t slow down a notch before entering. The CTBNL is just slightly lower than the Emperor and as a consequence of that I need to take more care entering the garage at all times. With just the driver it is not too bad. Add a trunk full of groceries and you really have to creep in slowly. Add a passenger and the car hits bottom every time on the high point where the garage door closes on right under my butt.

Donna has taken to not getting into the Miata before we leave and getting out before I drive in. This is fine in a way though, as long as it is not raining, because it makes it easier to get in or out. When I park the Miata in the garage I have to pull to left and just clear the tandem up against the wall on my side and there are cabinets on her side that leave barely 18 inches to open the door and then squeeze in (with the top up and holding a purse and travel mug this is a giant feat of gymnastics.)

At first I though my easy solution would be to extend the interior slope of my wide pyramid about a foot or maybe two with a few bags of Quikrete like we did in 1989. But the other day I had both of us ride into the garage just until we hit bottom. We squeezed out of the car because the doors lined up with the garage door. I then measured the length from the bottom of the pyramid to to the front tire and it came to about 5-1/2 feet. Wow. I’d have to raise the floor up, for at least a half inch about 6 feet into the garage. So much for a couple bags of Quikrete.

My next though was to get some of those 12″ x 12″ plastic tiles and lay them down. Because of the cabinets on one side and the inside of my personal speed bump 10′ x 16′ would cover the floor nicely. I think because the car is not hitting very hard the half inch thick tiles might just do the trick, I’d still have to slow down some, but both of us could ride inside. Total cost would be $420 to 430 depending on tile color selection. The black ones are cheaper. The new garage door has no windows so it is dark enough in there already color in the floor would be almost necessary. For grins I went to one of the sites design tools to see what it might look like. What do you think? Classic Checkerboard or Stripes?

Hot Meat

Regular readers know that our go to Sunday morning breakfast is about a 10 mile bike ride to Ridgecrest Coffee Bar in east Aiken with a 3-5 mile ride home. Well, our go to meal is to split one of their signature Breakfast Paninis: large pieces of thick crusty sourdough bread surrounding a layer of white American cheese, a 1/4″ thick layer of baked scrambled egg patty and 3 or 4 slices of deli ham and toasted/melted in a industrial panini press.

The pressing does a great job of toasting the bread in a perfect “ruffles have ridges” way and melts the cheese, but the ham can be an issue. Depending on who was cooking on Sunday mornings the meat, which comes out of the fridge, was anywhere from lukewarm to actually cold, which totally ruins the combination. In the beginning we made a “suggestion” to the owner one morning when she was there that they should heat up the ham first. She said, “They are supposed to, but I’ll reiterate that to them.” Since then we have had slightly better luck with the results. So recently Donna has specifically reminded me, because I’m the one who traditionally does the ordering, to remind them to really make sure the meat is hot before making our sandwich. And most of the time I actually do tell them to, “Make sure the ham is hot.”

Today when I ordered from the young girl at the register I started with, “Please make sure the ham gets heated up real well because my wife likes her…errr-likes it that way.” I almost said, “…my wife likes her meat hot.” I self corrected mid-sentance because I just wasn’t sure if she would have understood that I wanted to make sure the ham was hot in the sandwich for my wife, groaned at my double entendre, thought I was flirting with her or maybe even bragging about my imagined sexual prowess.

Aborted Assault on Atlanta

or A Key Failure

We have Atlantaphobia and really don’t like going to there. It is too dang big with too many people and the traffic is awful. If it wasn’t for the airport offering the best prices on direct flights to Seattle we would would probably never go there. There is only one other possible reason that might make us go there – Moss Motoring Challenge points.

For 2017 we need a Haberdashery. One with a sign. And there is one in the Buckhead section of the Big Peach. There were a couple of other possible points selected for the way over and or back too. Plans were made to drive over Sunday the 28th of May. We hoped that this would lessen the traffic madness levels considerably because 1) it was going to be real early on Sunday morning and 2) it was in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend and a lot of people would be off somewhere else.

By 6:00 AM were were on our way west on I-20. I drove the first leg, but we stopped at the Rest Stop at mile marker 182 to swap drivers. Donna got in the drivers seat and when she started up the CTBNL it almost immediately stumbled and died. She tried to start it again and it would turn over but never start. I asked, “Are you sure you have the clutch all the way in?” “Yesss,” she replied derisively. I asked because 1) she is a lot shorter than me and occasionally in the past she hasn’t moved the seat forward enough so that she could get the pedal depressed far enough and 2) since she retired she hasn’t driven the Miata once (and it is not like she drove it much before.)

I said, “Let me try.” We swapped sides. I slid the seat all the way back, twisted the key and no start. Well crap. Got plenty of gas. Do we call a tow truck? I try one more time. The car still doesn’t start, but this time I notice a brief red flash in the dash. A clue! The light is shaped like a key. Synapses fire in my brain – immobilizer. I took out her key and put mine in, turned it…the car started right up.

I wanted to test my theory, but hesitated. Both keys are the same age, if hers failed, what makes it so sure my key wasn’t far behind. Not wanting to be stranded in a rest area on a Sunday morning, or worse, downtown Atlanta, we opted to turn around and head home before shutting off the car. Because it was a nice morning we took the long way home and it turned out that the aborted trip was more of a Motoring Challenge point success anyway. Haberdashery was worth a whopping one point, but we managed to score 2 points for a Lumber Mill and 28 points for Scrabble Challenge section when Donna spotted a street sign for Jacqueline Dr. while zipping merrily along GA 150, north of Appling, between the thriving metropolises of Winfield and Phinizy.

Good Thing I Hadn’t Totally Given Up

Once I got stuck on those extra rooms of the Orphan Black game last week, I basically quit playing it. If you follow the 2 hints the first one is fine, but #2 is impossible to accomplish. There is a flying evil angel that sweeps across the room from one corner to the next each time my clone moves a square. There is no way to line up the characters in the proper spots because it takes an odd number of steps to get where the flying angel can’t kill you or the paramedic pursuing you but the path, no matter how circuitous is always an even number of steps.

Today at lunch I thought, ‘There has got to be a way. I’m going to try just one more time.’ When I opened the game I was presented with a whole new “world.” I’m now Cosima on the secret island where we left the show at the end of Season 4. Cool, they have tossed in some more frustrating maze-type action for me to play. For free. Not a bad deal for my initial $1.99 investment. This is probably a veiled promo for the premier of Season 5 of the show this Saturday. I’m cool with that.

The first room is kindergarten level just to introduce you to the new twist of the new world. And it is a twist literally, if you get one of the bad guys standing on a certain spot when you throw a switch the square under the bad guy rotates 90°. Room 2 was fairly simple, but I got kind of stuck in #3. There are 8 rooms, we’ll see how far I can get.

Straps On, Straps Off

We have used a cockpit cover (the grey thing you see above) on the Miata for 15 years now. Not all the same cover, there have been several since the first in 2002. After awhile the car cover fabric that they are made of deteriorates due to sun exposure, and continually being folded and tucked into the side of the trunk, so they need replacing every now and then. The one above is a hold over from The Emperor and is only a couple years old, so it probably still has a couple more years left.

Do you see that black strap hanging down by the front of the door? It has a felt covered hook that is supposed to be hooked into the edge of the wheel well (sort of like the strap on the back.) These straps have a tendency to fall off like this if the cover doesn’t get hooked around the mirrors just so. I’ve tried adjusting them longer or shorter and re-positioned in the wheel well to no avail. Invariably, even though the seem solid when put on in the morning, one or the other will be dangling uselessly by lunch or quitting time.

Today both of them were just hanging by mid-day. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back. I am going to cut them off. They really aren’t needed because the front of the cover gets tucked under the windshield wipers. I’m thinking if the wind is strong enough that it can get under the cover with the wiper arms holding it down and lift it up, it then has to break the velcro bonds around both mirrors to make it flap off. And if this is the case it is way too windy to be using the cover in the first place.

Yooge Pothole

We have been nibbling around the edges at this year’s Moss Motoring and this is the latest example. The other day on our way somewhere we cut through the almost entirely empty Aiken Mall parking lot to avoid dealing with the Whiskey Road traffic and noticed a big old hole in the ground. We both went, “Oooh, we need a ‘huge pothole’ for the Challenge.” I didn’t want to get a picture then because we were on our way to that somewhere. We did make a mental note of it and scheduled a near future evening drive at dusk to get it. That future happened Monday.

I was thinking about maybe trying to photoshop some fish in the water, but gave up after it turned out to be more work than it would have been worth.