Happy Fat Tuesday

Today is the last day of Mardi Gras. The day before Ash Wednesday and the start of the 40 days of Lent for those of a western Christian beliefs. Donna grew up in New Orleans and remembers while in high school actually participating in some of the parades.

When Donna and I lived in New Orleans in the middle 80’s my idea of a Mardi Gras parade was more of the ones put on by small artsy organizations that marched through the French Quarter. I really wasn’t too excited about the whole St. Charles Avenue or Metairie big parade thing. If I was still living in the Big Easy today I probably would have wanted to attend the Krewe Delusion parade on the 4th, but I definitely would have attended the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus parade last Saturday.

One year my mom and her sister took the train down from New England to New Orleans to enjoy the festivities. We had a good time showing them the sites, dining on spicy seafood and taking them to a couple of parades. But I think both women felt that the party atmosphere on the train trip down generated the best stories and oddball memories from the trip.

From left to right in the photo above: a small glimpse of our 1983 Honda Prelude, me in my quasi-Miami Vice attire, my Mom, and Virginia, Mom’s sister, my Aunt and mother to Martha and Louise.

14,000 Orange Trees

The return trip from the Land of Orange Trees was an adventure. First I forgot to create a pocket query for the three remaining counties we wanted to get in south Georgia. Then we couldn’t find free Wi-Fi anywhere for me to get online to make one. When we did find free wi-fi at Mickey D’s the charge on the laptop battery was so low it was insufficient to get the query information downloaded to the GPSr and PDA.

We walked over to a Cracker Barrel from McDonalds for lunch and as we were led to a table Donna asked if there was one near an outlet (so we could charge up the laptop.) The hostess made a sharp left and seated us across the room from where she was original intending to place us. This turned out to be a little good, wall plug, and very bad, because when our waitress arrived with Donna’s water and my sweet tea she promptly spilled both big glasses on the table and on me. Donna didn’t get wet, but I got a kind of wet/damp on one sleeve and both upper pant legs.

After the pre lunch “bath”, things were nothing but better, as we were now out of Florida, off the awful Interstate and onto the beautiful back roads of Georgia. But first, one of the caches we needed (Lowndes County) was within walking distance of the Cracker Barrel. As a bonus it turned out that not only did it satisfy the county, but was also worth a needed Delorme page.

Cache number two, which was for Lanier County, took us to the lovely small town of Lakeland, GA. The “Welcome To” proclaimed it was the the Georgia’s Historic Mural City. On our circuitous route through town on GA135 we didn’t see any murals…until we crossed Main Street where we noticed a lot of folks dressed up and several Model A Fords parked. We quickly parked, jumped out and walked towards the excitement. They were filming something with the towns folks posing near a building with one of the murals. We asked a couple of the locals who were watching like we were, but didn’t get a real solid answer. Once the thing broke up we wandered around a bit found a few of the apparently many interesting murals.

The last cache we found counted for Atkinson County and was called “Willacoochee Choo Choo” and I’ll let my geocaching.com log do the talking here:

Just from the title I was worried about this one. Little Red Cabooses are our kryptonite and we had already lucked out and found one on this trip, so I just knew we would never find this one! Thanks for this not being a magnetic key holder stuck somewhere on the thousands of square feet of metal on the undercarriage of a train car.

It was just a plain ol’ 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment.

Covey of Cousins

You met my cousin Louise, the woman on the left, back in January when she passed through South Carolina on her way to Florida. The woman on the right is Martha, AKA Muffy, the other half of my known universe of first cousins.

Muffy is down in Florida visiting her sister, so we all met at Donna’s sister’s house. Friday evening we got together for dinner and drinks and then again on Saturday for more food and story telling. Both of my cousins are a few year older than I, so it was interesting to get their perspective of my parents from their visiting them before I was old enough to actually form memories.

To add interest to my miniature family gathering, there were Canadian cousins from Donna’s side passing through for lunch and a visit today between their cruise return and Mouse World. Two of them, John & Margret, we had met before, last September at the Gatlingburg Gathering. With them were their two kids, their respective significant others, plus two point five grand kids.

13,000 Geocaches

Well, we are 1/13th of the way there after today. Our 1,000th find came in the town of Eastman, GA at a historical home that is now a museum, open only by appointment. The find happened in typical fashion, the GPSr led us to the base of a tree with a nice bit of shrubbery all around its base, the perfect spot to hide a cache, but it wasn’t there. Believe me, we tried to make it be there, we each walked all around the tree twice, separately, but it just wasn’t there. We then checked a couple of surrounding trees and bushes with the same lack of discovery. Finally I started looking under the porch of the house and there it was, thirty eight feet from GZ.

The Purple Whale passed the 13,000 mile mark some where between the 1,000 find and the town of Abbeville, GA where the above court house is.

Old Govemor’s Mansion

This is the first Executive Mansion of the state of Georgia and it filled that capacity from 1838 to 1868 until the state capital was moved from Milledgeville to Atlanta. It is still open for public tours.

If you ever find your self in Milledgeville, a great place to eat is Buffington’s. I can personally vouch for the Cry Baby Burger (ground Angus beef, roasted jalapenos, caramelized onions with white American cheese) and the fried pickle slices as a side were almost Razzoo matching in their succulency. The few spoonfuls of Donna’s Bob Marley soup (creamy base, Caribbean chicken & rice with a “kick”) that I had was delicious and reminded me of a sort of thick gumbo. I didn’t get any of her quesadilla, but it must have been good because she made the whole thing go away and she usually gets a assist from me on that front when we are at Moe’s.

We grabbed a couple caches in Milledgeville before we hit the hotel. And I didn’t realize it until just now when I checked our statistics, but today was the three year anniversary of Geocaching. On 2/15/2009 we found Up Sand Creek in Hitchcock Woods. Our total finds stand at 993 or 0.9052 caches/day.

Oh, Crap!

When we got home from work the PC wasn’t on. Hmmmm, the power must have gone off again? Yep, all seventy hundred LED clocks in the house were flashing the wrong time. For whatever reason this seems to be becoming a regular happening. I bet it has occurred on average every 6 weeks for more than the last half year.

I hit the power button on the new Dell Insipron 620 and was greeted after several seconds by a singular, stationary underscore style cursor. This is bad, I’m not even getting the Dell boot screen. The power supply wasn’t hosed or I wouldn’t have even gotten that. I tried turning it off and on a couple more times with the same results. Visions of a fried motherboard danced in my head. Oh, Crap!

Donna was so mad she got on the phone to SCE&G to read them the riot act and asked whether they were going to buy us a new PC or not. The CSR took down her information and promised a call back with on 24 hours. She then headed out the door for a power walk around the block a couple times to blow off steam.

Me, I followed the guy code to the word, i.e. even if you have no clue and so, probably no chance of fixing something, you still open it up and wiggle things around. Then you can shrug yours shoulders and in all honesty tell the woman in your life you tried.

I took off the side cover. The good news was it didn’t smell inside of burned electronic bits, so I wiggled some wires, spun the cute little fans on the CPU & back panel before turning it on one more time. And wouldn’t you know it, but it booted smoothly back up into Windows 7.

As an extension of the above section of the guy code, sometimes you get lucky and the thing fixes itself and the woman in your life thinks you are a genius.

Happy Valentines Day dear.

This Is An Improvement?

Two years ago when I first started working on a short list of new cars for us to buy, one of those under consideration was a Genesis Coupe. Overall I liked the car, but I had a couple of concerns, see #4 on the second list.

This picture, which shows the front of the car, shows what my concern was in the first part of that statement (the second part is for another post.) This year Hyundai released pictures of the mid-cycle refresh that will be the 2013 Genesis Coupe.

I don’t know about you, but the original face is looking pretty good about now.