Twenty Seventeen

Didn’t do real good on that though of writing on Wednesday did I? Well, I have a good excuse. After I got finished polishing this turd, I thought maybe I could do the same for the MMC’s website.

WordPress usually adds a nice shiny new template as an option with each major release of the software. They typically name it after the year of release, so the latest is called, unsurprisingly, Twenty Seventeen, an man is it cool. The page opens to a large image (or video if you are so inclined) and then you scroll down to the next page and there is an image to transition across to each new page. Check the demo page, then come back.

I downloaded a a program called InstantWP which allows you to install a portable version of your site on a USB stick. Not as simple as it sounded, I had to tweak a couple of PHP files to even get the Club’s large database loaded. When I finally got that sorted I fired up the web site. The side bar is on the right and we have it on the left, that was a project in itself. Countless internet pages later I got that sort of working. Several widgets didn’t work as they did before, but I thought maybe I could work around them or find substitutes.

But one of the widgets killed the whole deal, the calendar plugin that we rely on for event planning would not work at all. Sigh. I knew this day was coming, the plugin was last updated in 2009, but at least it still works on the current site. It is the next one that is really worrying, there will probably come a day when an update to WordPress itself will cause it to stop working. Look like finding a replacement might need to get moved to the front burner.

Wheel Watcher

As usual when I run into one of these blogging avoidance streaks, I come back and make up for lack of content with a new design for the site. I’d like to blame the empty week of posts on how hard I’ve been working on the coding that creates the blog, but that would be a lie, it took about an hour. I downloaded a template I liked, added the header picture and tweaked a couple colors. Done.

And believe it or not, I have been blogging practically every night since my last post. We’ve gotten into a routine here at Casa de Bogardus that goes something like this: wake up, go to work, come home, have dinner while watching Mike & Molly reruns, cussing under our breath during the evening news, watching Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and then some inane network shows before retiring. Usually somewhere in there I’ll pull out the laptop and surf a few of my favorite haunts then open up the Life of Brian. I hit the New Post button and compose a little something about my day in my head. Then mentally edit a bit to polish it up and then close the window without ever typing anything.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll actually write something.

Sniff, Sniff

Like a good boy I got a flu shot back in November, but for the last few days I have been under the weather with what is obviously the flu. I’d ask for my money back, but it wouldn’t do any good, not because of the usual “we thought we knew what strain would be prevalent this year” disclaimer, but because it didn’t cost me anything, my insurance company paid for it.

Fake News! Lying Media!

An excerpt from President Trump’s first solo press conference yesterday:

NBC’s Peter Alexander: Mr. President, very simply you said today that you had the biggest electoral margin since Ron Reagan. In fact, president Obama had 365,

President Trump: I was talking about Republicans-

Alexander: George Bush, 426 when he won. So why should Americans trust-

President Trump: I was given that information. I was just given it. We had a very, very big margin.

Alexander: I guess my question is why should the American people trust you when you accuse the information they receive as being fake when you’re providing information that’s not accurate?

President Trump: I was given that information. Actually, I’ve seen that information around. But it was a very substantial victory. Do you agree with that?

Alexander: You’re the president.

President Trump: Yes.

Our Lucky Day

We’ve had a couple of DNFs on two of our caches down on the old US301 trail recently, so on Sunday we decided to make the drive down and see what is going on with them.

One of the caches, “Kiosk #1”, was right there at the spot where you park, but we decided to walk the 3/4 mile down the trail to the one called “Used to be Twin Stumps.” It is called “Used To Be” because at one time we had a cache there called just “Twin Stumps” for the two side-by-side tree stumps that were there. But one stump turned to sawdust and we lost the spot where the container was hidden.

I was holding the GPSr and I stopped when it read 4′ from destination. I was nowhere near a stump and and a hump of sawdust. We both looked around for where we might have hidden a cammoed waterproof matchstick holder, nothing stood out. We both mentally scratched around in our heads for a recollection of where we might have put it, nothing stood out. So walked back a ways until we found the used to be twin stumps. Still couldn’t remember where we put it, but I said, “If I was hiding something like that today, I’d put it right there.” I went over and lifted the end of a 2 foot by 4 inch diameter log and right there was the container. Donna opened it up and the log was dry, so we put it back under the log.

That log was almost 40 feet from where the GPSr said the cache should be, so I laid the unit on the log, created a new waypoint and let it sit there for a bit all the while averaging its location. While we waited I re-read over the description of the log and I had mistakenly mention that you had to climb down the embankment and to be careful. While that note is needed for one of the caches we placed on the trail, it did not apply to this one. These two things were more than enough to make someone DNF this cache, so when we got home I edited the description to say the cache was at trail level and corrected the coordinates.

When we got got to the end of the trail to check on “Kiosk #1” it was not inside the crook of the three small trees we had placed it in. It was laying on the ground right next to them. This is a 2-stage cache, the coordinates lead you to the kiosk and then to find the container you have to walk 150′ at a course of 270°. The distance is right, but maybe I don’t have the course right? We found it using that parameter, so who knows.

We were lucky in that we didn’t need to replace either container, but that is not the real lucky part. On the way to look for “Kiosk #1”, we knew that it was off in the woods to the right of the old paved road, so we took the first opportunity to get off the pavement along a little path in the weeds. I went first and Donna was a couple steps behind me. About 20 feet in I heard her behind me say, “Hey! That’s a snake! And it rattled!” I turned around and we both walked back a couple steps. Sure enough, there was a very viper-ish looking snake all curled up and the thickest part I could see looked about wrist sized. I’m not real schooled on just what kind of snake it was and I didn’t want to get close enough to take a good picture. But if in fact it was a rattlesnake we were both very lucky because we walked less that two feet from the reptile.

117 Years of Transportation

One of the categories in this years Moss Motoring Challenge if to find a car from each decade since 1900 to 2010s. The cars from the 70s to present are worth a point, but then the point value starts going up by 1 each decade going backwards to reach 7 points for a car from 1910-1919. Then it jumps a bit so that an automobile from the first decade of the twentieth century is worth 10 points.

The first photo we took in this category was worth 5 points when a coworker randomly showed up at work with her 1935 hot rod a couple of weeks ago.

Today, Donna and I went to Outback for lunch and then to Target for a little discretionary spending. As we exited the Restaurant I noticed a stanced Smurf Blue NA Miata go by on the street. I’ve familiar with that car because it used to belong to the boyfriend of our next door neighbor’s daughter. That kid sold it when he went off to college so it hasn’t been around for a while.

As we drove into the Target lot in our NB Miata I saw a gray retractable hard top NC car leaving. It was then Donna saw that same modded little blue NA and asked, “What year is that?” “90 or 91,” I said. She said, “Let’s go take a picture of it.” About that time we saw a white ND Miata drive right by the front of Target. We had now seen all four generations of the Miata in the same parking lot in a two minute span.

We looped back and took a photo of the customized NA (obviously because of the photo above) and chat with the kid who owned it, told him that we just wanted a picture of his car along side ours for a photo scavenger hunt we were doing. I had the Challenge poster in my hand and as I was showing it to him he reached for it, so I handed it to him. Seeing as he had a hold of it, I asked if he wouldn’t mind posing with it and he was game (or just to stunned that this old couple wanted a photo of his car), so I took a couple pictures, one from the front and another from the back.