Boy Is This Monitor Bright

This evening after work Donna and I had our yearly eye exams. Part of the comprehensive exam is to have some drops put in your eyes to dilate your pupils. After they get them cranked wide open the doctor comes in and shines a 10,000,000 candle power light in both eyes several times from several different angles. Not the funest thing in the world and while not physically painful it is mentally.

New this time is a camera that takes a snapshot of the inside of your eye. It is a Cannon 10D on the back of some machine that of course flashes another very bright light into your wide open eyeball. You can then check out what the doctor sees when he looks in there. Cool. They will take a picture every year and then the computer can compare the images and spot stuff so small that the doctor might miss.

It has been 3 hours since I got the drops and my pupils still look like saucers. And boy does that make the PC monitor bright.

I Crack Me Up

This last week’s challenge for PhotoFriday was Abstract. After much brainstorming I went out and took a closeup shot of one of the windshield washer nozzles of the Miata.

At the end I asked people to guess what they thought it was. Sure enough, the first person got it right. So I told him so.

The next commenter used humor, “No, he’s the little robot guy that makes your blinkers work. 🙂 ” So I replied in kind, “You are absolutely right. There are two on every car sold and when one falls off or fails prematurely, the remaining one mistakenly thinks he has to work twice as hard, which is why you sometimes see cars with their blinkers flashing twice as fast as normal. Poor thing, he really doesn’t have to double his effort, as everyone knows, your blinkers are wired in parallel, not series. He soon dies of overwork and fails completely, which is why you see a lot of cars not using blinkers at all. It is not inconsideration, merely both their little robot guys are broken.”Hee, hee, hee.

One Outa Two Ain’t Bad

We got 8 minutes into Identity and turned it off. The secret to making a good serial killer movie is to either make the audience care for a) the killer or b) the victims, and in this short time we could tell we didn’t care for, nor would we ever care for, either.

Next up was Le Cercle Rouge and it was definitely anti-Hollywood. The pacing is deliberate and the dialog sparse, but maybe a just bit too much, at around the 2 hour mark I missed an important plot twist (possibly during one of the several 2 seconds naps I took) and when the bang, bang shoot-’em up ending happened I’m not sure exactly what took place. All in all a good movie, but don’t run right out to Blockbuster and get it.

I have such high hopes when I read the critical reviews about these films and then when I get them home and start watching them I wonder WTF was I thinking. After rereading the sleeve blurb on the last movie I have at home, Better Luck Tomorrow I’m not so sure I want to watch it anymore either.

Is That A Snack? Gonna Share?

Every morning for nearly all our married life, my wife packs up my lunch for me. It usually consists of a fresh made sandwich, a soda, some cookies in a plastic sandwich bag, a few ounces of carrots in a sandwich bag, half an apple cut up in slices in a sandwich bag, some raisins or maybe grapes in a plastic sandwich bag and a snack pudding. I kind of graze all day, grabbing a plastic sandwich bag of something every couple of hours. I’m a lucky guy.

Donna recently changed purses, replacing an old one with something a little smaller. She used to keep all her make-up stuff in a see-thru case on one side of the old purse for easy access. Donna would take it out and “fix her face” as I drove us to work each day. The see-thru thing was a little too big for the new purse and not wanting to lose the ability to see what she had, Donna put the make-up stuff in a plastic sandwich bag. Now, each morning on the commute when she pulls out that sandwich bag, I, having been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog from years of snacking from those same types of bags, don’t think lipstick, but cookies, etc. I don’t have to see it, just hearing that faint rustling sound and I wonder if she will share some of that food with me.

Old Skool Antenna Mount

The non-powered antenna mount arrived from Trussville today, so right after work I spent the next hour or so tearing apart the trunk to swap out the powered one for the fixed mount. I had to undo the CD Changer from it’s base and various other trunk trim bits, so I could remove the plastic pocket for access to the antenna mount mounting.

I coughed up $45 for the OEM Mazda unit because of where it is mounted in the fender. If I bought a generic one and just clamped it to the fender, then someone pulled or bent at the antenna it would do the same to the thin metal fender below. The OEM mount is basically the powered one without the motor that clamps onto the fender and is bolted to a metal piece making a very rigid system.

While I had the unit apart I painted the shiny bit that is the nut on the top semi-flat black to match all black plastic mounting base and the antenna, which I still don’t have. With a deck full of MP3s, who needs the radio? I may want to get one before Saturday though, that is the next possible time I would be using the radio, Car Talk comes on at 10:00AM.

Bye-Bye Miata Magazine

Today marked the end of an Era. Actually, the end was a few months ago, this is more like the beginning, but it is the end for me.

When I bought my first Miata back in 1989, I did so without the knowledge that this car is more than just a transportation module, but it is a way of life. About a month after buying it a magazine showed up in my mail, a magazine devoted entirely to my new little roadster. It contained columns, how-to articles, travel articles, pictures, letters to the editor and ads for parts. Because I waited so long to take delivery (108 days) this was actually issue #2. I immediately subscribed (by joining the Miata Club of America) and ordered back issue #1. It started out as a quarterly and grew to a bi-monthly about 5 years back. I have every issue stacked neatly in the base of my nightstand. It is great to look back occasionally, like looking at your kids photos from when they were in each grade of school.

Several years back the Miata Club of America folded because of accounting improprieties by the founder and president. The magazine soldiered on with out the support and database of the MCA. Then later, Mazda the corporation stepped in and formed a company backed club, the Miata Owners Club. The magazine found some support. Then less than a year later Mazda closed the Club. Again the magazine lost money and another database. Like the last time, word of mouth (or more appropriately word of electrons, email) saved the day by contacting subscribers so that they could still receive the magazine, now once again fully independent. A couple of times through this, I considered not renewing, I was tiring of it all, the net had replaced most of functions provided by the mag, but in a show of support for the poor publisher (mainly one woman and her family) I continued.

With dwindling subscribers and without the backing of a nationwide Club the magazine was facing hard times last year. A decision was made to embrace the corporate zoom-zoom strategy and now cater to not just Miatas, but all of Mazda?s “sports” cars including the new RX-8 and the new 3 and 6 models…

Today I got my first issue (of how many more I don’t know) and I can now break clean. I was barely hanging on when it was just Miatas, but I don’t care one wit for the other cars. I wish them luck with their new direction, but I’m doubling back on the old road. I may do like I do for the X-Files, every other month on the 15th, I’ll break out an old issue and read it, working my way back up to the end.

New Mats (on order)

After just 2-1/2 months the tan mats in the car are turning dark brown in spots and dingy looking. I think it is time for some new ones. The last set of mats I had in the Laguna were a set of Coco Mats in black with gray dots in them. I bought the generic fit ones from a place on the web called AJ Prindle at a real bargain price. The fit was so-so, but the mats themselves looked great, stayed put and hid dirt real well. This time I decided to bite the bullet and get the custom fit jobbies at a substantially higher price. They have a tan herringbone that would probably look super, but to spice things up a bit, I opted for the black with tan dots (hoping they will hide the dirt better factored in as well.)

We’ll see if they look as good as my mock-up. I downloaded the image sample from their site and used PaintShop Pro to turn it into a seamless tile. I then created a 16 x 28 image and filled it with the pattern. Printed it out on my HP650C plotter at work and laid it in the passenger footwell. I was worried that Donna wouldn’t like it, but when she said she did, I went right back in, got on the web and ordered some. Site says there is a three week wait on custom orders, so hopefully I’ll get them in time for the Master’s Miata Club Tech Day so I can have a project to work on. 🙂