Spring Is On The Horizon


Sumo by PaperTom

When I was growing up in Connecticut when you saw a robin in your yard that meant spring was on its way. Here in Aiken that doesn’t work so well, I don’t think the robins ever go away here. Today I saw three signs that Punxsutawney Phil was correct in his prediction that spring is just around the corner.

The first thing I noticed that portends spring, even though we are still nearly a month from the vernal equinox, was a box of Girl Scout cookies on someones desk. Number two was the Bradford Pear tree outside the front door of the Valve Store(tm) was starting to bloom and lastly, and most troublesome, was that there was a light coating of yellow pine pollen covering the exterior of the Emperor when I parked it in the garage this evening.

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Version 3.1

I’ve updated to WordPress 3.1 and I couldn’t be more excited.* Down below is my new desktop wallpaper and has nothing whatsoever to do with WordPress, it is just a pretty picture and it is helping me fill up space. Clicking on the picture should net you a full 1920×1080 version if you want to use it too.

*here would have been another place for the use of that sarcasm font…

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Hey Four Eyes

Yesterday was our yearly eye exams and after skipping it last year, this year we are going to go ahead and get new glasses. We have both gotten quite used to the EasyClip frames with the magnetic sunglasses. They only had a small selection in the store to chose from for women and zero for men. Donna picked a couple of decent ones, but the one she really liked had a very short vertical dimension. While the helpful staff member said that they were fine for progressive lens, they have about the same measurement as my current glasses do and it took me a long while to adjust to that configuration. Just because something is possible it doesn’t necessarily mean it should be done. We asked if we could hunt up some frames on the web and bring the model numbers to them so they could order a copy for us to try on and touch. The answer was yes.

This evening I did some shopping on the web. My current glasses have full frames and the pair I had before were rimless, so this time I split the difference and got semi-rimless. These are the four I picked out four for me to try:

His

The first pair on the left is one of the ones Donna liked in the shop. Her current glasses are gold with pearl accents and she wants a little more color this time, so I went looking for reddish frames. The other three are what I chose from online for her to try:

Hers
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Your Geocaching Name Is Tag-a-Long

In a scene eerily not at all reminiscent of Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman getting their Delta Tau Chi fraternity names of Pinto and Flounder, Joan received her geocaching user name today, tag-a-long.*

What started as a simple couple hour trip, with a mile and a half walk, to grab 5 geocaches along a new, not completely finished, section of the North Augusta Greeneway, turned into six hours, 6.2 miles of traipsing hither and yon, nine finds, 2 DNFs, meeting seven geocachers, one of whom is the local “godfather”, and lunch.

On the first pass we couldn’t find one of the five, so we got in the car and drove down to a different parking area to look for a few new caches located on the original section of the Greeneway. We were signing the log when a couple of folks walked up and one had a GPS in his hand. As is tradition, when meeting a cacher who is a stranger, you introduce yourselves with name, geocaching handle and then fall into discussing common finds, hints for DNFs and an invitation to the next group gathering.

With a hint hot in hand, we walked back to the car, drove back to the original destination to look for the one we missed in our first pass. As we walked up the gravel pathway, we saw up ahead, four adults, a loose kid and one in a stroller milling about at a spot that held one of the caches we had found earlier. Again we introduced ourselves around. One of the women looked at Joan and asked what her geocaching name was. I said, “She doesn’t have one.” Joan answered, “I’m just tagging along.” The woman said, “See, you have your name, tag-a-long.”

*She’ll have to add a number on the end though to differentiate between the other user who already has that name.

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A Bridge In The Woods

Just on the other side of this bridge is a new cache on a trail in McCormick County. We were the second folks to visit it in the 3 weeks that it has been active. The only thing is, that bridge is a little over 4 miles along the trail from the parking area. We are not totally insane, we didn’t walk all the way out here just for this one cache. There were 5 others along this trail and we found four of them (5 of 6 total for the day.)

We used to mountain bike on this trail way back in the early 90s and there were lots of places that were familiar. We didn’t ride this trail as much as the others in the area because it was a lot more technical, but there are lots of nice scenic riding in between the several rocky creek crossings we remember having to get off the bike and walk.

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Lost That Lovin’ Feeling

My excuse last night is that we were out late at a movie, so I didn’t have time to blog. Tonight I have no excuse. Maybe tomorrow…

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Summer’s Here

No, not summer weather, spring weather is just now sneaking in, but bathing suit season has arrived in the form of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.

What started as a few page diversion from the mid winter doldrums has morphed into an extravaganza! There is no sports involved anymore (and no, you can’t count comely female athletes in bikinis as sports content), for that you get a separate regular issue of the mag.

I glanced through the issue and it took all of five minutes, because if you have seen one swimsuit issue you’ve seen them all. Dazzling warm weather locales; check. Incredibly expensive suits on supermodels; check. Girls with nothing on but incredibly painted-on replicas of of incredibly expensive suits; check. Girls with nothing on but shells; check. Girls with nothing on, but hiding behind strategically placed palm fronds; check. Random erect nipple or two; check. And unlike playboy when can actually say with a straight face, “I read it for the articles,” the only words in the magazine are two page “stories” on how arduous it was to shoot photos of nearly naked supermodels in each dazzling warm weather climate.

And now there is no real reason to buy the magazine off the newsstand if you aren’t a regular subscriber, just click on that cover photo there and off you go to the web site where there are more more photos than on paper, with videos too.

And like all things that start small and become wildly successful, it has sold it’s soul to commercialism in an effort to make as much money as possible. There are more ad pages than swimsuit pictures…I tossed out two of those smelly fragrance ads, 4 pages for Lexus, 8 pages for Direct TV before giving it up as fruitless. And now it is not just ads in the magazine, Nissan made several TV commercials that feature it’s very ugly Juke and swimsuit models.

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