I Am A Carrier

I think the poor fellow had a predisposition for the affliction though. Back in January I let him take a spin behind the wheel of the new Miata and within a few months he had to have one. He didn’t tell me what year he wants me to guess when I see it next trip down. I did get the fact that it was red, that is no big help in narrowing it down as there has been a red offered every year. I refrained from asking a few key questions that would help me narrow it down. The only other hint, if you could call it that, was that it has 36,000 miles on it. He said it proudly, so I’m guessing clean first generation. Knowing Jerry wouldn’t spend a lot, I’m betting on a 92 or 93, which with those miles would be a sweet car. He mentioned it came with a hard top that he has no need nor desire for. That puppy is probably worth a grand and if he can sell it, that will lower his purchase cost considerably.

Life Can Be Fleeting

Fortunately in this case it stuck around.

I myself had an experience like that once. About a decade ago when we were heavy into mountain biking, Donna and I took a trip to western North Carolina with the Augusta Bike Club to ride some trails and camp for the weekend. It was Saturday morning and we were returning back to camp from our 11 mile loop. The last mile or so was all downhill and Donna knowing I liked to go faster than her said, “Wait for me at the bottom.” Off I went barreling down. I was starting to catch some of the other riders who were ahead of us when my front tire hit a rut or something. My bike stopped and I did not. The next thing I knew I was coming to with people standing over me, I was out for a minute or so. Best we can tell is that I went over the handlebars and landed on my head breaking my foam helmet right in half longitudinally. I had a point and shoot camera in a fanny pack that was smashed from when I landed on my back after continuing my somersault. I rode the last of the 1/2 mile down the hill with the thing bothering me the most being a flap of skin the size of a dime missing off my right index finger. My cycle computer was stuck at 28.4 MPH, I guess that is how fast I was going before launching myself off the bike. We packed up the car and headed back home because we knew I was not going to be riding anymore and would be sore the next day and might not be in condition to drive the 4 hours home.

Yesterday was Jared’s. He is the 10 year-old and youngest son of our friends. We have been baby sitting him and his brother once a month ever since they have been a year or so old. We have watched them play baseball and basketball for fun. Whenever we are free the 2 families get together for Sunday lunch to catch up on how our weeks are going. When we didn’t get the call to lunch today we figured they were busy with Jared playing baseball. Later in the afternoon a mutual friend called to let us know that Jared was in the hospital and had been since yesterday evening. He was at a friend’s house and they were playing around the friends electric scooters. You know the kind, they go for like $150-200 with small gas engines. They can’t go too fast, but down hill they can get going pretty good. Jared was barreling down a hill behind their house when the front wheel caught on something and he and the scooter went down hard. The handlebar got rotated 90 degrees and he slammed on top of that bar with his abdomen. The skin was not punctured do to the rubber grip on the end, but he hit with enough force that it pushed its way through the muscle and abdominal walls mushing up a section of small intestine. The intestine poked out of this fissure creating a fist sized bulge under the skin. A trip to the Aiken Hospital emergency room was followed by an ambulance trip to the Medical College of Georgia’s Children’s Hospital in Augusta. Last night Jared had 40cm (8″) of his damaged small intestine removed. For the next 5 to 7 days will be fed intravenously until he heals. Right now he is also getting a morphine drip to dull the pain of having had his entire small intestine pulled out of his body and then put back through a 6″ incision in his belly to get inspected for any other damage.

One or two inches either way, in either of these instances, could have meant a broken neck and quadriplegia for me or a ruptured aorta and death for him. Let’s be careful out there.

The Stepford Hair

It what can only be the weirdest movie/media tie-in ever, all the female On-Camera Meteorologists at the Weather Channel have now adopted the exact same hairstyle. It started with Alexandra Steele who had the do from the beginning of her tour. Sometime in the last 6 months they hired another blonde-in-a-bottle babe by the name of Hillary Andrews who sported the same hair style. Now there is newly hired, Jen Carfagno, with the same hair. This morning I noticed Kelly Cass has joined the Stepford Hair team by letting her normally cut shorter hair down to the length of the others.

Of course I have been known to see conspiracies every where and it could just be they hired a new hairstylist…

What Are The Odds Of That?

When the Master’s Miata Club‘s pool party that has been on the schedule for June 26th for like forever, got postponed a few weeks ago, I felt there needed to be an event that weekend, so I tossed out a Big Mo Drive-In trip. I received an email last night from a member of the Low Country Miata Club telling me that they had planned an overnight event to come up here to go to the drive-in the same night. We are now in the process of trying to work on maybe doing something together before the movie.

We don’t know what will be showing the weekend we are going because they never know until the Monday before what movies they’ll get. Shrek2 and Mean Girls were shown there the last 2 weekends. This coming weekend is Garfield and The Day After Tomorrow. Of the movies listed on their coming soon page only Troy and Harry Potter are out or will be out by the weekend we are going. Of course with my luck the movie I would least like to see will be playing then, it opens the weekend before, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

We Get Surveys

Received a survey in the mail from Mazda today asking about my satisfaction with my recent warranty service. I guess this was my 7500 mile service, but it was reported to them as warranty work because they replaced a top latch I complained about being loose and there is a TSB out on them.

1) This is where I will tell them about the service tech not abiding by the torque specifications for the lug nuts when he rotated my tires. Negative

2) This is where I will tell them about how it took 2 1/2 hours to complete a job they told me would take an hour. Negative

3) I will also tell them about one individual who made sure I got a loaner car for the extra time so Donna and I could do the shopping we had planned to do after the car was serviced. Positive

4) I will also tell them about the overpowering smell that was present in the interior of the car, which I assumed was the lubrication applied to the trunk hinges to eliminate the creaking I complained about. Negative

5) I will probably leave out the part that while the trunk is easier to open and close, only 80% of the creaking is gone, because I haven’t given them the shot at fixing it again. Neutral

Let me go sharpen my No.2 pencil…

What Would Jarrod Do?

Today was our usual lunch out with friends at the usual Subway. Today instead of my usual BMT or Cold Cut Trio I decided to try something new. I told the girl behind the glass that I would like a 6″ Cheese Steak Sub on white. Her question to me was, “Do you want cheese on that?” I guess that particular sandwich was new to her too.

3 Laws of Humanity

I’ve always been a lover of sci-fi. Growing up I had a few favorite authors and one of them was Isaac Asimov. I was eagerly awaiting this summer’s release of a movie based on his robot stories, I Robot. After seeing the first trailer with it’s The Who soundtrack and it’s Apple-likeness (I wonder how much they had to pay Steve Jobs for that?) I was stoked. But the newer ones aimed at drawing in the action crowd seem so against type from my memories of Asimov’s books/stories that maybe I won’t enjoy the flick at all. That may just be me though, as from at all the clips at TheMovieBox.Net the movie looks awesome.

All this got me thinking about those 3 Laws of Robotics the Asimov wrote way back when. Maybe, just maybe, this world would be a lot better place if we just changed the word robot in them to man:
1) A man may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A man must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A man must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.