Forget Something Patti?

Donna and I led 4 other Miatas to breakfast at Ms. Shelby’s in Millen, GA for the May Edition of the MMC Monthly Breakfast Runs. We formed a short line of cars along 4 lane US 25 for the 40 miles south of Augusta, where we ate in the huge, but nearly empty dining room. Rudy and Patti were the first to leave the restaurant and it wasn’t until ten miles down the road back to Augusta before she realized she had forgotten them. It was as the last of us had paid our bills and I was leaving a tip, that anyone else (me) noticed the left behind item.

The four cars remaining took the slightly longer, slightly more rural, slightly more scenic two lane roads back to Augusta. As we traveled north the train of cars slowly shortened as folks fell off the route to do other things or head home. Donna and I continued on into the heart of the Martinez shopping district to return Patti’s sunglasses to her before heading home.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1015

Plated

As I was parking the tandem in the garage when we got home from work today I could hear the slightly muted beep of the answering machine. It was salesman Jerry letting us know that the Sonata’s South Carolina license plate was in and we could come get it whenever we wanted. Well, we wanted it now, so we changed clothes and headed over to Augusta.

The above picture does not show spiffy new SC plate because it was taken last weekend at Tignall Cemetery somewhere in Georgia where we DNF’d a cache. I ran it through an infrared plugin and then added the car’s color back in.

2,000 Foot-Candles

A few months back I moved into a new addition to our building. Today Donna got to move into the newly remodeled office space on the opposite end of the front office from where she was. Like those of us out back, every one up there got shiny new cubicles, with shiny new modular furniture inside shiny new short walls.

Several years back, when the company president made one of his quarterly state of the company addresses he told us that he likes low walled cubicles because they fostered communication, so now instead of the previous 60″ high walls everyone now has 48″ surroundings. Foster communication is corporate double-speak for I want to be able stand on one end of the office space and survey my row of minions like a proud farmers looking over his acres of rows of corn. What I have found out on the serf level is that fostering communications really means that you can hear everyone’s conversations, business and personal, every shuffle of paper and every burp and fart for a 6 cubicle radius.

More interesting is in Donna’s area, as opposed to mine, is that they installed alternating rows of 2′ x 4′ florescent light fixtures and the same size white tiles for the entire length of the 70′ long room. The effect is literally blinding. The carpet is a light tan/gray, the walls are a light beige, the cubical walls are light gray and the desk surfaces are light beige. The effect is somewhat akin to standing on the side of the planet Mercury that faces the sun. OSHA states the minimum lighting for office spaces is to be 30 foot-candles, they don’t list a maximum, but my guess is the title of this post is not too far off to what it is in this new area. By the afternoon, Donna’s eyes hurt so bad that she put on her sunglasses at her desk. Tomorrow she is taking in a visor…

The Purple Whale passed the 2,000 mile mark on the way home from the brightly lit cube farm.

Dentist Office Music

Today was our semi-annual dental cleaning and I literally fell asleep in the chair. Because we are regular customers the plaque that does need removing usually comes off with little effort and with the light touch of the hygienist it is quite painless. Add in some of that infamous dentist office music and I think I caught a couple winks while reclined this afternoon.

The music was almost retro dentist office stuff, mostly 60’s & 70’s no vocal jazz and show tunes. When I asked if it was Musak(tm), the answer came back that it was satellite. The station is called Escape (which seems cruelly apt for a dentist office) and with the 3 months trial of XM that came with the Sonata we could, if we wanted to, listen to this very same sleep inducing station while driving around.

But probably won’t.

Rommy

My attempt at a more complex Wall-E papercraft was ill advised. There were so many little complex pieces that it overwhelmed my feeble skills, the Rubik’s Cube & BNL Cooler were more my speed. And so is Rommy.

Elder’s Mill Covered Bridge

While slowing down a bit getting ready to turn off GA15 to hunt the Tignall Cemetery Cache I spotted a sign on the right hand side of the road that said “Covered Bridge.” So we made a quick turn and headed to the bridge. We both wondered out loud if we might have been here before, because way back in our early years in South Carolina we did chase down some north Georgia covered bridges. When we got to the bridge it didn’t look familiar, so we had either never been here before or had and forgot it.

Elder’s Mill Covered Bridge is a few miles south of Watkinsville, GA in Oconee County. It is a single span town truss bridge that spans Rose Creek. It is 99 feet long and was built in 1897.

The bridge wasn’t very wide and as a precautionary measure the state had erected an arch made of steel I-beams a hundred feet or so off either end. They serve the purpose as those metal basket things at the airline check in counters for your carry on’s, if it fits inside you can take it on board. If your car can fit through the arch it can cross the bridge. Me, being still a little unsure of the cubic volume of space consumed by the Purple Whale, was a little worried passing through the I-beams. We drove across and I made a K-turn to go back over the bridge while Donna jumped out with camera in hand to capture the moment.

2 Much

We got up 2 early for a Sunday morning 2 drive a loop through Georgia today. We found 4 caches and DNF’d 2, but we made the most of that small amount of finds because by the time we were finished a little after 2:30 this afternoon we got to cross off 2 State Parks, 2 Counties and 2 DeLorme Pages of our Georgia Geocaching Challenges.