The Great Roach Kidnapping Caper – Part I

The Players: (in order of appearance)
Rob – Industrial Engineer
Penelope – Dead Roach
Winnie – Cleaning Lady
Danny – Head Cleaning Crew Guy
Ian, Chip, David, Greg, Bob – Chorus
Mark – Muscle
Brian – Brains

The Back Story: Rob’s office is just outside the engineering side of the front office’s entrance to the cafeteria. Like most manufacturing front offices, the folks aren’t in actual offices they are in cubicles. Our cubes are nice, fairly new, blue fabric, 60″ high acoustical panels. Nobody has the actual slick cubicle furniture, but old 70’s desks with wood veneer overlay tops that have been painted gray along with the wide variety of mismatched bookcases.

A couple of weeks ago when Rob came into work he noticed a dead palmetto bug laying upside down on the top of the cubical wall that is next to the cafeteria door all the way up against the wall. He left it there, maybe out of fear of touching it (it might just be playing dead), but most likely in a little game of let’s see how long it takes to get picked up by the cleaning crew.

We have an outside cleaning crew that takes care of the building. It consists of a lady, Winnie, that empties the cubicle trash cans and keeps the rest rooms clean. She is as nice as you can be, but often times you can see bits of trash laying on the floor next to the just emptied cans. Either it because she is a little overweight and has trouble reaching the floor or maybe she has some eyesight issues and doesn’t notice the odd gum wrapper/used sticky note or just maybe she just can’t be bothered to be that thorough with what they pay her.

The cleaning crew supervisor is there most days to check out how Winnie is doing and maybe help out, but seems to spend most of his time sitting outside in the break area smoking and talking on his cell phone. Danny’s favorite trick is to play inspector general by walking around the front office, running his fingers along the top of the cubicle walls like he has white gloves on and checks to see if the second shift crew has done the dusting.

Rob noticed this Inspector General behavior several times and the fact that the dead roach is still there after two weeks. Having grown fond of the insect corpse he has now given it a name, Penelope, pronounced Pen – ah – lohp and has spent all of the week before last telling the story of Pen ah lohp to all his surrounding engineer friends. This amuses Mark & Brian to no end.

The Plan: Kidnap the Roach

Part II

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Cosmic Dog Run

How far would you drive for a hot dog for lunch? 135 miles? We would.

Saturday we are going to take a road trip to Mt. Pleasant, SC to visit Jack’s Cosmic Dogs. Now the timing of our trip may be a mistake, this place was recently featured on the Food Network’s The Best Thing I Ever Ate (which is the reason we are going), so there might be a crowd, but after driving that far we will probably even wait a bit before giving up.

You know now that I look, if we were to swap the rotation of our loop, we could hit a second place featured in the same show, a BBQ place in Orangeburg. But we won’t be doing that, we’ll just save that for another day.

Of course we will be doing some geocaching too. I’ve picked out almost 40 along the route, but 3/4 of them are if we feel like it on the way there and back. The important ones will be in the middle around Charleston where we hope to get 3 Delorme pages and 1 county for the SC Challenges.

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Unobtainable Goal?

We are fast approaching the end of year one of looking for tupperware using satellites. Our first find was called Up Sand Creek in Hitchcock Woods on February 15th and since then we have found another 312. The other day when we were talking about this milestone I foolishly said, “Hey, why don’t we try and get to 365 caches by then so we can finish up the year averaging one a day.”

Right now we are averaging .95 caches found per day, so it sounds like we should have an easy time of it. Not necessarily so. There are only 25 caching days left until the 15th and we need 52 to reach the goal, that means we would need to average a hair over 2 a day until then, or more than twice our average so far. Considering we mostly cache on weekends and there are only 4 of those left, we will need to find an average of 13 on each of those Saturdays and Sundays. Our best weekend ever was in August with 14.

The goal is not impossible to reach though, we have had 2 days with 11 finds and one with 10, so we just have to get busy and hope for nice weekend weather until then.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
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I’m Such A Loser

Yesterday I received 2 pieces of comment spam on my post about Saturday’s adventures in MMC land. You know what I did? I stripped the fake email address and the referring link to the junk and approved them, they just seemed so nice (and complimentary)…

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The Muppets On Dharma Island

T-minus 15 days and counting down. The publicity machine has been cranking out all sorts of LOST stuff. Thanks to the internet and TDTVS’s global appeal we can now see promos from not only the good ol’ USA, but Israel and Spain as well. This week we are getting cast interviews that reveal nothing to go along with always present spoilers and plot line guesses from the rabid fan base. Today’s big news was that Entertainment Weekly had a third “last supper” cast image and it needed over analyzing.

Last week we had speculation that ABC/Disney was not going to let this successful franchise just fade away, this story line with these characters will be over after Season 6, but perhaps they might do a prequel or alternative time line stuff exploring the Black Rock or maybe the whole ancient civilization/four toed statue. But a new image leaked from the basement of ABC headquarters might just give us a glimpse of that new direction:

It really is just a promotional still from something called LOST Untangled which is put on by ABC to “explain” what is going on with the show if you are just tuning in, but won’t that be kind of cool, Muppets on Dharma Island?

Started up, went down, still down.
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What Have You Seen Lately

In the last month we have watched 12 discs from Netflix. They fell evenly into 2 groups of six, one group of British TV show discs and 6 movies. In that same time frame we also watched all 17 episodes of Season 5 of TDTVS and all 8 episodes of Series 4 of Doc Martin.

At yesterday’s MMC gathering when it came time to swap movie recommendations with the usual suspects, I could only come up with one of the six movies, Doubt. Looking back on the list, it was the most memorable, but there were a few more that deserved a good word. Here are a half dozen twitteresque movie reviews in the order of my appreciation of them:

  1. Doubt – Did he or didn’t he? The nun thinks she knows for sure.
  2. (500) Days of Summer – a pleasant light-hearted comedy that is not really a love story. Pay attention to the numbers.
  3. Priceless – Sort of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with a French accent.
  4. Charlie Bartlett – Take one cup of Rushmore and mix with 3 cups Harold and Maude.
  5. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs – Funny animated movie for the first 30 minutes and I might have finished watching it if I was 12 or under.
  6. My Blueberry Nights – Rent a Norah Jones music video disc instead.

Addendum: Also yesterday we got a tip that we should try a new this season show on CBS, called A Good Wife. It’s a lawyer show with a case a week, but what makes it different is the lawyer’s back story and its continuous repercussions on the current. Thanks Patti. <- Here is where I’m sure if I need to use the new sarcasm punctuation mark or not because we just spent the entire afternoon and evening mainlining the first 7 episodes…

Started up, still up.
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Onions Are Like Underwear…

…you gotta have ’em. Or so said a contestant on Chopped this evening.

This morning we met the MMC for breakfast in Augusta and Donna and I left a bit early with plans to do a little geocaching on the way. Well it turned out we weren’t that early and didn’t stop anywhere. There was a cache that was located right behind the shopping center where breakfast was to be, so we walked around to grab it before going inside. With the title and the hint we think we found a part of the cache, but the actual container didn’t appear to be around. Dang.

The eleven of us finished eating by 8:15 and we were then stuck, the bowling alley, our post breakfast entertainment, didn’t open until 9:00. We stood around outside the door of the restaurant chatting and watching someone in a truck in the parking lot tossing bread out of his window feeding seagulls. After the novelty of that wore off, we trooped down to Kmart (the only other place that was open in the center) and shopped for blue light specials. Tiring of this Donna and I said, “We’ll meet you there.” There was geocache right down the street. Found it, yeah!

A couple of games of bowling was quite enough (my wrist was sore by frame 5 of the second game) and most of the group were busy picking out a lunch place while Donna and I and another couple walked 2/10 of a mile to behind a restaurant to try and find a cache that was hidden there. It was sprinkling slightly and GZ was between the back of the restaurant and its dumpsters, it wasn’t the tidiest place, so we gave up looking after about 3 or 4 minutes. Darn.

After our failure the 4 of us went our separate ways. Donna and I were going home, but couldn’t agree on what we wanted for lunch, so when we drove by the place the rest of the club had picked, we pulled in. It was BBQ place, not atypical as they had other meat items and seafood on the menu, called Flyin’ Cowboy. The food was slightly better than good and I could probably eat here 2 or 3 times a year, but probably won’t because it is 25 miles away. One of our group ordered a “Manhandler” which consisted of 6oz of pulled pork piled on top of a softball sized loaded baked potato. John was up to the task and finished the whole thing, along with both his side dishes, earning himself the title of “Potatohandler.”

To recap, on today’s Miata Club event, we all drove separately to a restaurant and had breakfast. Afterward we did some shopping together followed by driving to a bowling alley separately. We bowled a couple of games together and then drove separately to another restaurant and ate lunch. Well, at least some of us actually drove Miatas…

Here is the top count from yesterday, the first nice day since it seems like Thanksgiving. Today it was cold in the morning and now hasn’t stopped raining since this morning.

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