Hey! You Phone Company! Get Off My Lawn!

We still have a land line with AT&T and it costs us about $45 a month for the privilege. Just like with the cell phone, we don’t use it much, but it is there if we do need it. We don’t get a bill in the mail from AT&T because they just hit the charge card whenever they want their moola. Maybe because we don’t get that paper statement anymore, they have no way of reminding me of their other very fine offerings, so they have taken to mailing me a very polite letter every month offering me a special deal if I combine my home phone service with their U-verse(r) High Speed Internet.

They started coming in like clockwork every 4 weeks about a year and a half ago. At first I opened the letters just to be sure it wasn’t something important. After a few of them I came to recognize the envelope and would sigh knowing what was inside, but I still had to look to be sure it wasn’t import information about our service. I started to voice my frustration out load and this was a mistake.

Donna decided to make a game of it. Because she was usually the person bringing the mail in each afternoon, so she would announce with seriousness, “This one’s for you.” Then try and hide her smirk. Or say, “What’s this about?” “I think this might be important.” A few months ago I got annoyed enough that I decided to do something about it.

I went to the web site listed at the bottom of the letter and entered my information, lo and behold, I couldn’t take advantage of the this fabulous U-verse(r) offer even if I wanted to. Boardman Road must be in a whole different ‘verse.

So I called the 866 number on the letter and talked with a CSR pretending that I wanted to take advantage of the their fabulous offer and she was disappointed to inform me that I would be unable to get the high-speed U-verse(r), but I could get their regular DSL internet with a 768 Kbps speed. I said, “Ma’am if you were giving away that service I still wouldn’t take it. Right now I get something 100 times faster from the cable company.” I asked if there was some way to get off the mailing list for the U-verse(r) stuff, seeing as I can’t get it. She told me she couldn’t do it, but would pass it along to the proper channel and get it stopped.

The next month, sure enough, a letter arrived in the mail thanking me for being an AT&T customer and having reviewed my account they have found that I qualify for a special offer that may save me money. Arrg! I tell Donna that the next time I get one of these letters we are going to dump AT&T and just get a cell phone plan and not even have a land line.

Well, 4 weeks later almost to the day an envelope from AT&T arrives. This one, I don’t even open. I start shopping around on the net for wireless providers and it doesn’t take long to get frustrated with the shear amount of phone options to choose from and the myriad of plans to pick from. The length of commitment required is troubling, but the kicker is the cost, all are more than what AT&T is costing us. We’ll just stay put.

Wait a minute, the cable company offers phone service. Wonder how much that is? Atlantic Broadband’s phone service is $36 month for their unlimited long distance plan or $26 a month and long distance would be 10¢ a minute. But wait, there is a deal for existing customers who bundle to get the unlimited for $29.99 – for life! So I call and go through the sales spiel with the cable company’s CSR and all is progressing well until we get to the part about me owning my own modem. You see, to get the phone service you have to rent the cable co’s modem at a cost of $9.95 a month. So, with taxes and fees we are back up to the same cost as the AT&T phone service. I tell the CSR that I need to think about it and hang up. We’ll just stay put.

Two days ago, less than two weeks after that last letter, another one arrives in mail from my friends at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Donna opens the envelope and places it in front of my without a word.

Today I stopped in at the offices of Atlantic Broadband and ordered up their phone service.

Giant Ball of Lint

Giant Ball Of Lint

On our road trip we stayed in a combination Holiday Inn Expresses and Hampton Inns with a Sleep Inn & Suites thrown in for good measure. The only place we stayed that was not part of a chain was the Blennerhassett Hotel in downtown Parkersburg, West Virginia and it was definitely a step up. The price was really not that bad, about what the average was we paid for all the rooms on the while trip.

When checking in we asked to be away from the elevator and ice machine, our Guest Relations Representative assured us that even though we were not that far away, we would not hear either and asked if we wanted to see the room to check for ourselves. We said, “Sure.” At this point is where the clerk gives us a key, but not here, she hands the key to James the bellman who leads to the elevator and escorts us up. The room looks kind of small with a king bed in it, but it is furnished very nicely. The GRR was right and we head back down to finish the check in process.

They ask if we need help with our luggage and we of course decline, we are after all in the Miata, our luggage consists of 4 small bags, a laptop and a purse. The bellman/doorman does get to hold the door open for us though, both on the way out and again when we come back in.

The very best thing about the place were the towels. Used to the thin rough things you normally get at some chains, these things were a revelation. Normally post shower I grab the hand towel and use it like a squeegee to brush as much water off as possible before getting mostly dry with the bath towel, but here I get almost entirely dry with just the hand towel. These things are like water magnets. Soft? It feels like you are drying yourself with an Angora cat, the same breed that inspired the song Soft Kitty that Sheldon Cooper likes sung to him when he is sick.

I make note of the name on the tag and search the interwebs. One of the hits that come back is an Amazon link to buy them. $200 seems high at first, but it is for 6 bath towels, six hand towels & 6 washcloths, we vow to buy them when we get home.

We do, and they arrived last Friday. Best move ever. Knowing that new towels need to be washed separately, boy do they, we run them set through a cycle. Because these things are so big and so fluffy we have to break it into 2 loads. When load one comes out of the dryer the lint filter is completely covered about a 1/4 thick. When I get them in the house and are ready to hang them up, they are still covered in a bunch of balls of lint. They need to be washed a second time. I start saving the lint because it is prodigious.

What you see above is all the lint from the four dryer loads squeezed like a stress ball into something about the size of a regulation major league baseball.

Finding Emu (Part 2)

Emus

How could our Washington County Kentucky picture get any better? Donna asked sort of offhandedly to our gathered County Extension Agent staff, “Does any farm around here have emus?”

“Doesn’t so & so have..” “..they don’t any more.” “I think Brenda still does. “Who?” “The woman up on the hill.” “Do you think she’d be open for a visit?” “I’ll call.” “What’s her last…oh, here she is.”

The younger of the Price is Right models calls her up, explains who she is and asks if she could send some people up to look at her emus. Her heads nods up and down, then she launches into a shortened version of my explanation of the Challenge. She hangs up and says Brenda would love for us to come over and visit her emus. They give me the address and I plug it into the GPS. We get brief directions to get us started and we are off.

The weather is still misty, so the top is still up and the wipers are on intermittent. We are slowly driving down the road looking at mailboxes for the address. We get where the numbers are way too big so I do a u-turn. We head back, now driving at 20 MPH. The GPS says you have arrived and I see the address number we are looking for. I pull in a very nice new concrete driveway, it even has 3′ high concrete walls over the culvert. Fifty yards later I stop in a big parking pad. Donna says, “I don’t think this is it.” “Me either,” I say, “But the address is right, the mailbox said 2350.” That’s when she says, “It was 2320.” Me, “Oops!” I turn around and drive back to the street.

This time we spot the mailbox that has 2320 on it and turn in. It looks to be a shared drive and we start up. Where the road splits we met up with a red pick up coming down the road. We roll down windows and he asks, “Are we the folks looking for emus?” I say we sure are, so he says he is going out to pick up some dinner, but his wife is waiting for us up at the house. Before he drives off, he asks if we want to take one or all of the emus with us when we go home.

After parking we are greeted by a quite friendly older lady. She and her retired Marine husband moved back to the area where she grew up and bought this bit of land, a hundred thousand dollar house with the million dollar view. I think she got it right, they do have a beautiful view of the surrounding countryside. Brenda & hubby got into emus in their heyday so they could raise them for meat and the eggs. At one time they had almost 75 of the birds. But like everyone else, they soon found out that raising emus wasn’t going to turn into a goldmine.

They sold them all off except for the last 4, Romeo & Juliet and another pair, Bob & Edna1, named for her crazy aunt and uncle. She asks if we would like to feed them, I say “I’d love to.” Donna not so much. Brenda gets a couple genuine farm sized feed scoops filled with Purina Giant Chicken Chow, hands me one while she takes the other and we lean over the fence. In short order we are joined by 3 of the four emus and a couple of llamas. They really are big birds up close, but they aren’t aggressive unless you are a piece of grain or a pellet of grain by-products, then look out.

We swap stories until the scoops are empty, we thank her profusely for her hospitality and prepare to take our leave. On the way down the hill on their driveway, the husband is on his way back up with dinner, as we pass, we wave. I’m not sure, but I thought I saw a frown form as he realized we didn’t have any emus in the car with us.

The address and names, even the bird’s, have been changed to protect their anonymity.

Finding Emu (Part 1)

Cooperative Extension Service

Ever since the middle of August when we heard that the bonus photo with regular farm animals was worth 2 points, but if you could get one with emus in it it would be worth 3 points, we have been always on the look out for those elusive birds. The Emu Vigilance Alert went from Yellow to Orange for our driving vacation. If you weren’t driving or actively plotting a course on the paper map or GPS you were to be scanning the skies for emus.

On the first Wednesday of our trip we started in downtown Parkersburg, West Virginia with breakfast at the Crystal Cafe before crossing the bridge into Ohio. The bulk of the morning was spent driving, ever vigilant, through the Buckeye State until we crossed the Ohio River again, this time on a ferry, into Kentucky.

The next couple of hours were spent driving the back roads along ridges and though hollows, all the while with our eyes on the darkening clouds, expecting it to start raining at any minute. In between we squeezed in an easy visit to the 4th least populous state capital (and smallest of the 5 we have visited) before zeroing in on finding just the right spot for the Washington County Kentucky photo.

Some Washington County photos were planned in advance before we left home using an internet search & then GSV and some were planned the night before the same way. For Kentucky we had done neither, so we were relying on the Garmin Auto GPS by for searching the words “Washington County.” One of the results that popped up in Springfield, the county seat, was the county circuit court on the way into town, because the County Court building is usually a big ol’ impressive building I said, “Let’s go there first.”

The GPs wanted us to turn on the unlikely (for a courthouse) named street, Industrial Road, but because of my brain’s conversion error between 500′ and actual distance, I turned on the wrong road. We ended up in an Industrial Park one street parallel to where our GPS was telling us the County Circuit Court was. As we slowly made our way down the road, Donna pointed out the Washington County Cooperative Extension Service saying we should take that photo. I pooh-pooh’d it, intent on finding the court building. She tried to convince me to stop, pointing out that the sign had the word Kentucky on it in large letters. I would have nothing to do with it just now, my head was locked on courthouse even though I knew we were unlikely to find my ideal of one here in this section of town, I was still hoping for a one story place with lettering and maybe an official looking seal. “We’ll come back if the courthouse doesn’t pan out,” I told her.

The parallel street that the GPS said we’d find my courthouse of course held nothing more than another couple of manufacturing plants and their associated parking lots. A u-turn was executed and I made my way back to the County Extension Agent’s place. The lot out front was empty, figuring they were closed for the day, we parked right up front. I grabbed the Challenge Poster and Donna the camera. About the time she was going to take the photo, the front door opened, a woman popped out and said, “Whatcha up to?”

I launched into my 500 word or more explanation of the Challenge and close to my finish, the woman asked, “Can we be in the picture?” “Sure, more the merrier,” I said. Next thing I know I’m standing by with the County Agent, our original friend and two other ladies from the office who are pretending to be The Price Is Right models displaying the sign outside as if it was one of the Final Showcases. This was going to be one special picture.

to be continued…

Sneak Peek

Costume Sneak Peek

And for once in a couple years I don’t mean it in the context of the Moss Motoring Challenge. Like last year I’m going to make a paper mask and then just don regular attire for work on Halloween. This is a small piece of the mask I’ll be wearing, a costume sneak peek if you will.

Grand Loop

Road Trip 2015

While trying to describe the loop driven on our vacation to a co-worker, even I got confused, so I made up this rough estimate of the way we drove. The little red star is Aiken. We left heading northeast and proceeded in a counter-clockwise direction, driving through parts of 21 states and Washington D.C.. We had tossed around the idea of doing it clockwise, but this way had the big advantage of hitting D.C. early on Labor Day Monday instead of mid day during the work week.

On Tuesday night’s MLB.tv broadcast of the FRS game, to go along with the odd “highlights”, we were treated to an actual commercial for some brand of baseball cleats. Interestingly, this stuff only came through when watching on the Roku, on the PC in between innings there was just the usual silence. Then Wednesday night it was back to silence on the Roku. My guess is that they are testing the feasibility to start showing actual commercials. Doesn’t matter to me, next year I’m going back to just the radio broadcasts.

25 Years Ago – Fall 1990

We had our Miata for all of six month when we read about these events in the summer magazine and considered going to the east coast version because we weren’t that far away from Callaway Gardens. But after a very un exciting possible South Carolina Miata Club formation meeting we decided we liked the Miata, but Miata people, no so much. So we didn’t register for the event. On the weekend of it though, curiosity got the better of us, so we drove down to Callaway Gardens, but never really saw any Miatas around.

Miata Club of America Summer Events

Can you say Callaway?
– by George P. Burdell

Do you remember the first summer camp you ever went to? Meeting different people that you were striving so desperately to find a common bond with? Suppose you found not only a common bond, but a passionate one – your sports car. Now throw in a healthy dose of maturity and you have an idea what it’s like to attend a Club Rally. Most of this past summer’s Callaway event attendees had never seen such an event before and all were pleasantly surprised to find that you can be a kid again.

The Miata Club of America 1990 East Coast Rally was held at the prestigious Callaway Gardens just south of Atlanta. Over 100 people were in attendance. Space Coast Chapter founder Chet Young even came without his Miata after testing the air bag!

What kind of people attend a Club Rally? The same kind that inspect your teeth for cavities, advise you on which stocks to buy/sell, and that are students at college. That is to say, all kinds. But the best of people, because Miata owners just want to have fun.

What happened at this rally? Let us tell you about the gymkhana, the road rally and the concours. The gymkhana was a slow speed driving test around some carefully place traffic pylons. Not everyone could conceptualize the need for slowness and multiple pylons were ingested by countless Miata mouths. Accuracy was key. Speed was a deterrent. So was manual steering. The course workers began to step back when certain drivers belted up.

The road rally was a timed course on public roads, outlined by very cryptic instructions. Finding the way was not as hard as staying on schedule, especially if you got stuck at a railroad crossing. Duane Simpson, our fearless racer, was seen making a U-turn in the rally (a definite no-no). Since he was driving the official Club race car, everyone who saw him made a U-turn as well. Lemmings, as they say.

Then there was the concours. These events are for those who really, and we mean really like to keep their Miata clean. Many were up before the crack of dawn, hotel ice buckets full of soapy warm water ready to hand wash their babies. How clean is clean? When was the last time you took Q-tips to your tire treads?

In addition to the outside events, there were substantial seminars. Mike Harris, service trainer for Mazda’s Eastern Region gave an excellent presentation on service basics. The Simpson brothers discussed the finer points of road racing and the proper lines for track driving. Road Show sponsored a clean-up/detailing seminar for those in the concours mindset. During the Friday night dinner, attendees were treated to an informative speech by Norman Garrett about the development of the Miata and the automotive industry in general.

The entire weekend wrapped up with a delicious cookout at a very lovely lakeside setting. It was even topped off with a three dimensional Miata birthday cake. In addition to the event winners, awards were given to:
Most Miles on a Miata: Charles Taylor – 46,530
Oldest Driver: Robert Moore – 61
Most Miles Traveled: Bradlee Shattuck – 1193 (from New England)
Chapter Attendance: Space Coast
Pylon Mutilation: Becky Simpson

And were there door prizes! A complete Millen Aero Kit, a Mazda spoiler and rear skirt from Monarch Mazda, and many others.

There’s more to tell but no space to tell it. Just ask anyone who attended if they had a good time. Will there be another Rally like this next year? Count on it!

Do you know the way to Monterey?
– by Lyn Vogel

A contingent from SOCALM (The Southern California Miata Association) is invited to the Miata’s first birthday party during the 17the Monterey Historic Automobile races. We’re promised scenery. We’re promised racing. We’re promised a party with Bob Hall, Mark Jordan, Norman Garrett, and Vince Tidwell. We decide to go any way.

Day One – We gather the group from stops in San Diego, Anaheim, and Los Angeles. Our goal today is the swiss-styled village of Solvang, 130 miles north of LA.

We are encouraged by the appearance of club member and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Charlie Hildebrandt. We want to know – Does he have a little magnetic siren for the top of his er, hood? Can he get us out of any tickets we may incur? Alas, bad guys await. He must return to his beat and we must travel without police escort.

Irony of the day: George Christensen’s Miata is rear-ended by a Honda next to the sign of one of our pick-up points, Disneyland – “The Happiest Place on Earth”.

Day Two – Some more join our caravan and we are now 35 cars strong. Freeway gaping from passing motorists is plentiful. We pass by a Miata billboard and it occurs to me that the sight of this many cars is bound to lead people into showrooms. . . (Mazda salesman to his manager: “No kidding boss. This customer on the floor says he saw maybe fifty Miatas on the road!” “. . . Fifty?” “Yeah! We’ve had fanatics in here before but this guy’s having delusions!”).

We stop halfway for gas and create the longest restroom line they’ve ever seen at this convenience store. Also stopped is a late model Rolls Royce. We do mental calculations as to how much money you’d have left over if you traded in your RR for an MX. We are depressed.

Back on the road to our overnight stay outside of Monterey our troop is passed by an impressive driver of a new Mercury Capri “X-R-2-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E”. She is aloof. She has her top up. She is bored.

The motel where we stay for the duration finds it is not only housing SOCALM, but the Bay Area Miata Association, The Bay Area RX-7 club, and the Alfa Romeo owners club. Car washing begins in the earnest and we quickly exhaust their supply of towels. Maid service is on red alert.

The night’s poolside reception is a success. there are impromptu speeches by Miata design team member Tom Matano, Mazda Information Bureau’s Fred Aikens, Wisconsin club president David Fogelstrom, and giving the “benediction” to the evening is the president of the Alfa Club. Presenting us with a bottle of saki he wishes us as much fun with our sports cars over the years as they’ve had with theirs.

Day Three – A day at the races! Laguna Seca is a viewer-friendly park with lots of spots to watch the action. Mazda has cordoned off a huge area calling it the “Hundred Car Corral”. The combined efforts of the Bay area and Southern California provide that many cars. We are giddy with pride.

Everyone is on their own for the next two days. enjoying the historics, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance a 1/4 scale red Miata birthday cake. Bob Hall’s Miata with special metallic teal green paint was on display as well.

Overheard during the weekend: Mark Jordan commenting on the mock-up birthday cake and its bumpy frosting, “I think it needs some surface development”. Bob Hall refers to the front tie downs in the Miata grill as “fangs”. Car nut Jay Leno visits the Mazda tent and tells a couple of jokes. Tom Matano remarks on one of the design goals of the Miata team, “People should want to go out to the garage and take one last look before going to bed at night”.

And outside the Club’s motel, didn’t we all see each other doing just that.

Copyright 1990, Miata Magazine. Reprinted without permission.