Best Of

January

Empty Can with an Exclamation Point Inside

Tuesday the 2nd

The Miata resides in the garage while the Mini sleeps outside. Monday night it was cold as all get out, so I was not really surprised when Donna called me from the gym to tell me she had a light on the Mini’s speedometer that looked like an empty can with an exclamation point inside. The small info screen on the tachometer also indicated that the right front tire was low.

It was obvious that the tire wasn’t flat or she wouldn’t have made to the gym, but I asked her to take a look at the tire and see if it was noticeably lower looking. It wasn’t, so I told her I’d fill them up when I got home.

The sticker inside the driver’s door said the tires were supposed to be set at 33 p.s.i. The right front had 28, the right rear had 30, the left rear had 29 and the left front had 30 p.s.i. I dragged out the long extension cord and my little air compressor and filled all four tires up to 34 pounds.

After I rolled up the 50′ extension cord, stored away the air compressor and was nice and warm inside the house I realized I didn’t check the tire pressure in the spare. I wonder if it has ever been checked since October 4th, 2012 when the car rolled off the assembly line. Better put that on my list to do tomorrow.

February

I Just Want To Remember How It Was

Friday the 9th

I was a big fan of the X-Files from back in the day. My interest dipped sharply in 2000 when Season 8 started without Mulder. But, I hung in sporadically because I still enjoyed the format of the mystery/monster of the week. While I didn’t care for the UFO mythology shows anymore, they had come completely nonsensical by then, it was still better than TV than any “reality show” clogging the airways. Of the 19 shows in season 9, I probably watched all of 5. Including the tiresome show finale which really soured me on the franchise.

So needless to say, I wasn’t too thrilled when they dragged the show out of retirement in 2016 for a 6 show special event miniseries. And I was not disappointed, it was pretty bad, expect for maybe one show, “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster” and that was merely alright.

April 2017 rolls around and Fox decides that they can milk the dead cow once more and produce 10 episodes for an eleventh season in early 2018. So, like a moth to a flame on January 3rd I tuned into Fox to watch the first new episode. Can you say hot mess? The Cigarette Smoking man was still alive? Wasn’t he killed in a helicopter rocket attack back at the end of season 9? I didn’t even make it to the series title sequence, I turned it off.

I recorded the show anyway figuring I’d gather all ten shows and maybe binge watch them, so once I got going I would get into them. After about 3 weeks, there was nothing else to watch, so I tried to re-watch the first show again. This time I got past the intro and maybe 10 more minutes in before giving up in disgust.

When I learned the fourth week’s episode had been written by Darin Morgan, I decided that I was going to watch that particular show. Mr. Morgan has written 5 other X-Files episodes, 2 of which are among my top 5 favorites (Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose and Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’), 2 are in the top 20 (Humbug and War of the Coprophages) and the 5th was the only barely watchable episode from season 10 (Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster.)

Well, unfortunately, The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat was a lot more like the last one Mr. Morgan wrote and not the other four. Even though there are 6 more episodes left in this season, this is the last one I am going to bother to watch.

At the end, Scully and Mulder are sitting together on a couch (in his place I guess) and they are about to dig into a batch of Goop-O ABC (think Jell-O 123) that Scully remembers fondly from her childhood. She had molded it in Mulder’s fake Sasquatch footprint maker because that was all she could find. As Scully scoops up a spoonful and brings it towards her mouth, she pauses, shakes her head, puts the spoon down and says, “I just want to remember how it was. I just want to remember how it all was.” Fade to black.

A pitch perfect ending for me to go out on. And apparently for the actress who plays Agent Dana Scully, Gillian Anderson, to go out on too, because at the very end of last year she announced flat out that she was through playing the character.

If Fox wants a season 12 of The X-Files it will have to be without the two of us.

March

Ailuropoda Velox

Wednesday the 14th

Because it was a little after 1:00 PM as we got back to Aiken, after Saturday’s Coffee and Cars we thought maybe we should get something to eat before going home. As we were verbally ticking off places that we might like to eat at, Donna suggested Panda Express as it was about 500 feet right in front of us. I said sure.

The Panda Express is our fair city’s newest dining experience. As with any new restaurant in town, the place is packed for the first two months because everyone in the entire city has to eat there as quickly as possible so they can brag to their friends that they have done so. And true to form, whenever we have been over that way, be it lunch or dinner time, the parking lot has been jammed and the drive-up line practically circled the building.

Neither of us had eaten at a Panda Express before, so we wanted to check out what was meant by Chinese Fast Food. The Aiken store had been open since around the first of the year, so it had been awhile, but we were still surprised to find that there was nearly no one in the drive-up line nor in the dining area.

As it turned out, fast Chinese food is another way to say “controlled portion” buffet style. All the dishes are pre-cooked and sit in warming trays behind a display case and an employee dishes out a measured spoonful of the meal of your choosing. Donna selected chicken and green beans, I picked the Peking beef, we got fried rice as our side and we added one egg roll to split.

Let’s just say, this is the first and last time we will eat at a Panda Express. Our food was dished up by a less than enthusiastic employee and the food matched. Everything tasted like 3 day old leftover take-out where all the flavor had been absorbed by the baking soda at the back of the fridge. It was luke-warm in temperature and the rice was so dry you were lucky to keep more than a dozen grains of it on the fork at a time. The egg roll was hot enough, probably by random chance, but there was no hot mustard or orange sauce packets anywhere to be found.

This probably explains the uncrowdedness of the place on a Saturday at lunchtime. Everyone else in town had already eaten there, had a similar experience as us and discovered that eating here once was more than enough?

April

Easter Miracle

Saturday the 28th

Cleaning up the drafts folder…
Somewhere in the middle of March, while doing some laundry, one of the socks from Donna’s favorite pair of yoga socks came up missing. We looked in every nook & cranny of every item of clothing that was in the wash load with no success. I retraced our steps to the laundry room, I looked beside and behind the washer and the dryer, I looked inside the dryer to see if it was stuck somewhere and then retraced our steps back into the bedroom where we were folding the clothes. No sock.

Donna repeated what I just did and she didn’t find the missing sock either. While she was doing this I looked under the bed we threw the clothes on to fold thinking maybe it fell off and got kicked under there. Nope. When Donna got back she looked under the bed too. No sock. We shrugged our shoulders and figured it would show up in the leg or sleeve of someone’s in the near future.

Two weeks later, on Easter morning when I got out of bed in our hotel in Myrtle Beach and turned on the light in the bathroom, there in the middle of the tile floor was the missing sock. How the sock got there is a total mystery. The suitcases with all our clothing were kept in the room. Any clothes brought into the bathroom wouldn’t have included socks or anything that a sock could hide in. It was just there.

Of course we weren’t really sure that it wasn’t the non-missing sock until we got home on Sunday afternoon and Donna looked in her closet and saw the other sock sitting on the shelf right where she left it waiting for its mate. Still not sure how the resurrected sock made it to Myrtle Beach and to magically appear on a bathroom floor.

May

Where The Locals Eat

Saturday the 26th

Day 27 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Minden, LA to Hammond, LA. Last night’s hotel clerk recommendation for a good breakfast where the locals eat was to drive just up the street a bit and go to Hamburger Happiness and Southern Maid Doughnuts. We were worried a bit as there was only one other vehicle in the lot when we pulled in.

The one guy sitting by himself didn’t seem too friendly, but the nice old lady at the counter where we placed and paid for our order was very pleasant. I think it was literally a mom and pop shop because I could see an old man through the saloon doors to the kitchen.

Soon the rest of the locals started arriving one by one and they greeted each other by name. The same lady brought our food to us pipping hot and it was delicious. The portions were correct and the price was right. We could hear the locals in background discussing the weather and the size of farm tractors. When we finished up and stepped outside I knew I needed to snap a picture. Take a guess, which one of these things is not like the other.

June

Wendover Will

Sunday the 3rd

On Day 12 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip we spent the night in the town of Wendover, Utah. The town sits right on the border between Utah and Nevada and just across the literal line in the sand sits the town of West Wendover. In 1952 West Wendover, Nevada replaced a bright light on a tall pole that State Line Service (a cobble stone service station), right on the border, had used to attract visitors with a 64″ tall mechanical cowboy outlined in neon lights.

Probably hundreds of thousands of people have taken pictures of Will and even themselves with Wendover Will over the years, but now the town has created a page where if you submit a selfie photo with him they’ll post it with a digital pin on the map of where your from. I, of course, thought it sounded like fun, so I took a picture. It is not a very good picture overall and shows that I need a lot more practice at the selfie thing. Take a look and see if you can find me: Wendover Will Visitor Map

July

Miata Maintenance Day

Thursday the 19th

Seeing as the CTBNL hit the 65,000 mile plateau on Saturday, the other day when Donna went off to the gym, I jacked up the Miata, rotated the tires and changed the oil.

I was going to give the car a bath too, but after eating lunch I didn’t want to go back outside. Besides I did not want to violate Russ’s Rule for Retirement. To wit: Do one thing a day. You have all sorts of things you need to do and have been waiting until you more free time, there are all the things you want to do for yourself and then there is all to things your wife wants for you to do. It can overwhelming, so pick one thing and do just that one thing, don’t try to do too much.

Now you might think that changing the oil and rotating tires is two different items, but to me, I have always combined them. This is because to only real easy way to get to the oil filter in the Miata is to remove the right front wheel. And while I guess quite possibly you could jack up that front side and remove the one wheel, but then you would need to make sure the car is level to allow all the oil to drain out. That and you are now already 1/4 of the way to rotating the tires anyway…

August

Bagels For Breakfast

Saturday the 11th

We like bagels and really miss the ones we used to get when we lived in New Jersey for those two years. After living in South Carolina for several years we adjusted to just live with the ones from Dunkin Donuts. Whenever we would travel we would seek out a shop that sold “real” bagels, so now we have gotten kind of snobbish about them and will only eat those.

For a while we were satisfied from the one we got from a chain called Bruegger’s that had a store in Lexington, SC a mere 50 miles away. These were fine until we discovered a place called Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC on a trip to see my sister. The bagels from there elicited memories of those from Jersey, so we have stopped going to Bruegger’s.

A hundred mile round trip to Lexington and back for bagels wasn’t bad, but a 330 mile round trip to Hendersonville and back would be nuts. So we started looking for someplace closer that had “real” bagels. We found a place in Greenville, SC (a 220 mile round trip) called Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli. It is really too far away for frequent trips to just get a bagel for breakfast, but we’ve combined it with looking for some Motoring Challenge points and have been a couple of times.

Yesterday we decided it was time for some bagels this weekend. We were planning another Greenville trip, but I decided to look around for something else in the state that might be closer. Charleston and Hilton Head on the coast had promising bagel bakeries, but they were both further away than Greenville. Then I found a place called Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC. This place is a little under a hundred miles away one-way, not that many miles savings over Greenville, but Anderson is a much smaller town so traffic will be better and we won’t have to get on the Interstate at all.

We each got a toasted bagel and one each in a bag to go at the Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli. I thought it was not too bad, but Donna said it was barely Bruegger level. “Well,”I volunteered, “Greenville and Greenfield’s Deli is only about 30 miles away. You want to go there?”

So that is what we did. Because we had our own bagel in Anderson, we just split a toasted one in Greenville and then also got a couple more to go. I told Donna that I thought that this bagel was better than our previous gold standard, the Joey’s in Hendersonville. She informed me that I was nuts, Joey’s was better. “You know,” I said, “Joey’s is only about 40 miles away?”

“Let’s go,” she said. So we did. Here we split another toasted bagel and had them bag up a couple more to go for each of us. While eating in Joey’s NY Bagel’s store Donna decided that just maybe I was right about which one was best. We brought home at least one bagel from each place, so maybe we will have to figure out a way to do some back to back blind taste testing…

The triptych above shows the interiors of all three places we ate a bagel at this morning. From left to right: Corner Bagel Bakery & Deli in Anderson, SC, Greenfield’s Bagels & Deli in Greenville, SC and Joey’s NY Bagels in Hendersonville, NC.

September

Smile, There Are Cameras Everywhere

Tuesday the 25th

On Saturday’s return pass of the Gap, just a little after dawn, at around mile marker #5 we passed one of the ubiquitous photographers set up in one of the corners. As I went by I entered the corner too deep and crossed the white line. Knowing the photos wouldn’t be very good, I found the next pull-off so I could make a u-turn to make another portrait pass. I went through the corner a lot better this time, drove until the next pull-off for another u-turn. The third pass wasn’t for photos, it was because that was the way we need to be going.

Maybe a mile and a half further along towards the end of our return pass I surprised another photographer who was just setting up his awning. He quickly grabbed his camera and started shooting. I just made the one pass and continued on our way back to the hotel. I thought for sure he probably didn’t get a good look, plus I figured the first guy had enough chances to get a great shot of us already.

The first Dragon photographer had his vehicle wrapped with the company logo and name, 129Slayer.com, so I knew where to go to see those pictures. In the span of the 2 minutes it took me to make my 3 passes he snapped 42 exposures. I needed a Google search of “deals gap photographers” to find our second photographer, US129Photos, and our brief 20 second encounter with him netted just 6 exposures.

In the end, the best shot, came out of those 6. I did also purchase 2 out of the 42 from 129Slayer too and it was a good thing I did go by him 3 times, as both of the ones I bought came from the last pass.

October

Mmmm, Derby Pie

Saturday the 6th

Today was the Annual Chocolate Festival at St. Mary’s Church which is used as a fund raiser for their school. There are fun and games for the kids, a small vendor area, a silent auction, a couple of spots for lunch, a bake sale, a used book sale and a plethora of chocolate goodies for consumption. As we do almost every year we dropped in for a brief visit to look at the used books, check out the silent auction and eat some chocolate based food stuffs.

We actually bought a few books this time after having not for the last couple of years because of becoming Kindlized. Donna picked 8 books to mail off the munchkins in Washington state for a quarter a piece and a couple of paperbacks for herself at a half a buck each (one of which she is reading by flashlight on the back porch as I write this.) I bought 5 for myself, so for eight bucks we came away with 16 books. Which is pretty good considering the 8 we got for our reading pleasure were “trade” paperbacks that retail for like $15-17 each.

We hit the bake sale where we spent a bit on some cupcakes and cookies before heading outside to buy some other chocolate goodies. Donna found some chocolate covered pretzels for herself and I snagged a slice of Derby Pie. We found a shady spot to sit and enjoy our treats. As I took my first forkful of pie and brought it up to my mouth I was bopped in the hands by a volley ball. I did manage to save the bite on the fork, but the rest of the container of pie hit the ground. Neither one of us saw it happen, but a ball somehow got loose from the octagonal corral where a couple of kids were hand batting it around. One of the older kids who was running the game was very apologetic, but the other one just hung her head. I brushed myself off and went back over and spent another 75¢ for a second slice. This time I kept my head up while eating.

November

69,000 Yellow Leaves

Sunday the 4th

We had 5 Miatas from the Masters Miata Club scheduled for the weekend trip. One of our Miata club members is also a member of a local Corvette Club and he invited some of his fellow ‘Vette guys to join. We had two who wanted to come, but neither was going to drive their Corvette. One was going to drive a Miata and the other was going to drive a Porsche. At the last minute, the Miata driver backed out, leaving just the mystery Porsche driver to meet us in Elberton, GA on Friday. Trust me, it was fairly easy to spot his Lava Orange 911 GT3 RS in the McDonald’s lot.

Our Porsche guest was a great sport about just loafing around with us slow poke Miatas and rode mid pack on the trip up. He had been as far up into North Carolina as Highlands, but had never driven into these western parts, so he was just happy to be with us and soak up our knowledge of the area.

After driving the 200 miles to get Robbinsville, no one wanted to drive the 50 extra miles total to do a Dragon run, except for our Porsche driver and me. So instead of the two of us driving, I asked if I could ride along with him. “Sure,” he said. While the cost of the Porsche was roughly equivalent to the cost of all of our 5 Miatas put together, he promptly justified the high cost of the car to me by demonstrating how it would feel to do the trip in a low flying Blue Angels jet.

And let me tell you, this car gets some respect on the road. On the way up to the start of the Gap going up US129, we came across a tight 3 pack of cars, traveling 60 MPH or so, going the same way. The stock looking Civic SI in the back surrendered first, approximately 1/4 mile after we came right up on his rear. The middle car, an older model GTR, withstood about two miles of him having this orange beast filling his mirror before he hit his flashers and slowed on a short stretch of straight. The lead car, a late model Mustang that looked a bit modified, hung on leading for about the next three miles (he was doing pretty good), but after we past a small tangle of cars turning into the Tapoco Lodge he finally gave in on the first wide spot after the sharp uphill turn past the dam. He quickly disappeared in our mirror.

For a minute I was afraid this trip would make the same drive in a Miata feel pedestrian, but on Saturday morning on our early morning trip through the gap and back, it actually was the opposite, the Miata felt almost more fun, for a lot less work, so I probably won’t be cashing in my 401k to buy my own GT3 RS.

Somewhere around the lovely town of Cross Anchor, SC on the way home today the CTBNL reached the 69,000 mile mark.

December

Hide and Seek

Monday the 3rd

Back in October Donna and I went to the Fall Steeplechase with a couple of couples from the Miata Club. Our house was the meeting point so we could walk over to the field together and all our “tail-gating” stuff could be carried over in one pickup truck. We had an exciting time at the track and one last bit of excitement once we got back to the Bogardus Estates at the end of the day. I wrote about it on the Masters Miata Club site, here is the final paragraph of the event wrap-up there, reprinted below with the permission of the author, me:

The truck riders and walkers home arrived at Boardman Road at about the same time and when Donna entered the code on the remote garage door opener – it didn’t open. Thinking she may have fat fingered a number, she tried again. It didn’t open. She waited about 15 seconds, cycled the cover open and then closed before trying the code again. Still nothing. Brian then tried it and got the same no response. We even told Jennie and let her try. Time for Plan B, open a regular person styled door with a key. Well, Brian carried his Miata key chain but it has no house key. Donna’s key chain does have a house key, but she didn’t take her purse, it was inside the house. Spare key hidden outside somewhere? Nope (that is a whole other story.) Fortunately a local locksmith was happy to come out and do the rescue.

This is the whole other story. I was lying when I said nope to having one of those Hide-A-Key things with a spare hidden outside, we did, we just didn’t know where to find it.

It used to be inside the old gardening shed, but when that was torn down in August I took it and hid it somewhere else. The six of us wandered all over the back yard looking for any place a magnetic key holder might be hidden with no luck. Somewhere in there I had what I thought was a eureka moment and checked under the bird feeder only to be disappointed. I tried it there, but Donna couldn’t reach that high, so it had to go somewhere else. I even looked under a bunch of old leaves alongside the stairs to the deck, because this was one of the spots where we had hid a key before it went into the shed. After about 15 minutes of looking without success we called that locksmith.

Fast forward to today. The temperature climbed into the upper 60s so Donna and I went out to the screened porch in what will probably be the last time to enjoy it until next spring. As we made our way to our chairs Donna noticed some strange dust in several places on the table we have our portable gas grill sitting on. When I started to look around to see what I could see, what should I spot stuck to the bottom of the grill, but that missing Hide-A-Key. I must have stuck it there after taking it off the bird feeder.

The best part of this whole story is, that all the time we spent looking for where I had hid the key, the whole time we spent waiting around for the locksmith to show up, what we needed to open a door was right at our feet. The gas grill had made the trip to the steeplechase races and was off-loaded from the back of the pickup truck. It was sitting right there on the driveway in front of the garage door.

So now we have one Hide-A-Key hidden somewhere entirely new (which I promise I have committed to memory) and one back up set in a drawer in the house.

January

Awwww Mom!

Sunday the 29th
Even though this morning’s temperature was borderline freezing, Donna and I still bike rode over to our usual Sun-day breakfast spot, Ridgecrest Coffee Bar for a panini. We were the only folks in the place until we were just about finished and a family of five came through the front door.

It was a man and woman probably around 30-years old, two boy kids maybe 5 & 6 and a infant in one of those car seats with a basket handle. The parents had on puffy vests, car seat infant was under a blanket, but the kids were just in flannel shirts. As the group approached the counter, the younger of the two kids, noticing the sliding window behind it, said, with as much exasperation as a person that age can muster, “They have a drive-thru!”

I’m not sure whether his annoyance was because he had to get out of the car and walk 15 feet to the door (in the cold) or because this was the first time in his life he had ever been in a restaurant that had a drive-thru and and they hadn’t used it.

February

Decades Old Fantasy Fulfilled

Friday the 3rd
BACKGROUND:
In the early Aughts when the X-Files was on TV every Sunday night I developed a little crush on Gillian Anderson. Somewhere in there I started a minor little gallery of photos that I culled from the internet. Everything from her early modeling days to then current magazines to show screen captures. If any of you were around then, and I can’t fathom that any of the tens of people of might see this now were, at one time I thought it might be fun to add one of her pictures to each of my posts. There was no correlation to whatever I was writing about to whatever picture, but anyway, it was fun for a while.

I would point you to that era if I could, but in a move from one blogging platform to another or one server to another I opted not to put the pictures back in place. The picture collection is long gone too, probably dumped in the bit bucket on a PC move or due to hard drive space requirements. I don’t have the compunction to blog stalk her with photos anymore, but somewhere deep inside my addled brain is the thought that if I wasn’t married to Donna and she wasn’t married to whoever, I’d have a chance.

THE EVENT:
I got to sleep with Gillian Anderson. Not in the same bed. Well, I don’t know, it might have been in the same bed, but it definitely wasn’t the same time. It was the same house though, well, it might have been the same house. It was on the same property, well, maybe it was the same property, but I definitely slept in the same B & B that had an autographed picture of her on their brag wall downstairs.

Using the same logic, I also got to sleep with Shirley MacLaine & Hugh Jackman. It is kind of hard to tell, but that is Shirley in the pink jacket in the photo above and to the left of Gillian and Hugh is the photo above and to the right.

March

Who’s Guarding The Fort?

Thursday the 23rd
My sister and her husband live in a gated community so to deliver her the breakfast bagels we reminded her to call down to the gate house and let them know we were coming to visit on Sunday. So, when we turned into the access road to Carriage Park I drove right up to the left gate to identify myself to the person on duty. To my surprise, at 8:30 AM, it was empty. Hmmmm, now what?

I backed up 50 feet to the call box and tried to figure out how to get to their name using a keypad and no scroll bar. Donna said, “Just call the house.” Ooh, that’s right, I have a smart phone of my own now. I call the house phone. No answer, so I leave a message, “We are at the gate, but there is no one to let us in, what’s the code?’ ” As we are idling there waiting for any sort of response, another car pulls in the access road and stops a few feet behind us. They must not live in the sub-division either or they would have driven up to the right-hand gate where their little transponder would automatically cause the arm to raise letting them in.

As Donna and I are discussing our options the car behind me loses patience and whips around me in a big hurry and sudden stops at the gate house to display his anger at my inaction. About this time a resident pulls slowly up to the right gate causing the arm to start to go up to let them in. I throw it in first and time my run to hit the opening at the same time as the back end of the resident’s SUV. We’re in! Leaving frustrated man stuck outside, now possibly even more so.

April

WWJD

Sunday the 16th

From the song “Trial Before Pilate” on the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar:
-Pontius Pilate-
Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction.
Die if you want to, you misguided martyr.
I wash my hands of your demolition.
Die if you want to you innocent puppet!

Friday I watched Jesus Christ Superstar on the TV in the living room. Donna poked in a couple of times as she like the music, but doesn’t really care for the movie. Last year I watched the movie on the laptop and the video quality was not that great, but my rip of the 720p resolution DVD which in of itself was made from the 1973 movie film really looks fuzzy only 9 feet away from a 52″ TV. I’ve read there is a blu ray version of the flick available, but I have also read it wasn’t remastered in any way so I’m not to keen on buying it. There is probably a torrent out there of it. What Would Jesus Do? Would he download the torrent to see if it worth maybe buying it?

Today we watched the totally forgettable movie The Intern. From the title I thought it was that stupid Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson thing, but the trailer had Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway and it seemed kind of fun. And it was, but at 2 hours it was about 15-20 minutes too long. We didn’t need the interns Ocean’s Eleven side trip, Ben at the kid’s birthday party and we didn’t really need the whole infidelity sub plot.

In between we had breakfast out with a small contingent of the MMC, lunch out with a friend, a three mile walk in Hitchcock Woods and plenty of screened porch time. The 3-day holiday weekend is winding down and tomorrow it will be back to work for me and back to the grind of retirement for Donna.

May

Another Exciting Day at Work

Tuesday the 16th
Two of the Valve Store’s engineers were standing outside my cubical discussing a housefly problem. The engineer with the problem had tried a couple things with little success, so the other says, “Have you heard about air-power gun that shoots salt that kills them.” “Nooo..”, came the reply. “It is sort of like a shotgun water pistol that fires table salt.”

I hadn’t either, so I looked it up. It’s called Bug-A-Salt, cute, huh? So, the housefly host says, why don’t you get a couple of them and bring the boys over (non-fly guy has 5-year old twins) and they can hunt the flies down. I’ll offer up a bounty. At this point I jump in with, “Hey, I want in on this bounty. How much is it?” The answer is $50 a ton. This is a perfect answer because the kids will jump at the size of the bounty and not really have a sense of how much a ton is.

I on the other hand know how big a ton is and how big a fly is, so I’m no longer interested in hunting houseflies. But I am now curious as to just how many flies it would take to get a ton of them. A quick search turns up these figures in a couple places, so they are going to be accurate enough for our little math problem.

Typical housefly: Adult size: 5-7 mm = 0.005-0.007 m Adult mass: 12 mg = 0.000 012 kg

1 Imperial Ton = 1016.05 kilograms, so we divide 1016.05 by .000012 = 84670833.333, or just a mere 84.7 million flies in a ton. Not nearly as many as I originally thought, I would have guessed some number followed by about 10 or 12 zeroes.

Next I guess we will also need to figure out how big a bucket we are going to need to hold ton of flies. I couldn’t find a volume for a house fly, so I’m going to take a SWAG and say if the fly is 6 mm long and it is roughly cylindrical shape of about 2.5 mm in diameter. This gives me, fudging for wings and legs, let’s call it 30 cu/mm per fly. So the 84670833.3333 x 30 = 2540125000 cu/mm. Converting to cubic feet gives us 88.90437499965 or a slightly overfilled 3-yard dumpster from California Waste Services.

June

Jedi Mind Trick

Wednesday the 14th
This morning Donna went along for a ride in the Miata, which she misses, to the local Dunkin Donuts for a quick breakfast. She wanted to go this particular morning for two reasons, 1) the a fore mentioned Miata ride and 2) be-cause the local DD has free copies of the Aiken Standard for customers and Wednesday is the day there are grocery coupons in the paper.

We are getting away cheap because we bring our own drinks and all we buy are a muffin for me and some doughnut holes for her. When the girl waiting on us asked what we wanted I said, “I’ll have a Coffee Cake Muffin and my wife will get 4 Munchkins.” As I was about to say, “Two glazed and 2 chocolate glazed’, as that is her go to order for the doughnut hole variety when Donna said, “I want 4 chocolate glazed.” I repeated to the server, “Four chocolate glazed Munchkins”, all the while thinking, “She usually gets 2 glazed and 2 chocolate glazed.’

We sat down and when Donna opened her little bag and showed me – 2 glazed and 2 chocolate glazed.

*The force is strong with this one.*

July

Cicada Siren Song

Thursday the 27th
Remember last Friday when I said I had two things on my honey-do list before I put down the garage floor tiles? The tiles were installed on Sunday and those two items are done, but for the life of me I can’t remember what day I did them. Might have been Saturday afternoon or heck even Monday after work, I do remember it was during the day.

I don’t have my own little shop to work in, so I often do little projects either in the driveway or on the back deck. For cutting up that junk wood, the deck was used, because this way I could lay the long pieces of wood on the seat that runs around half the deck, stick the wood out about a foot, step on it and use the circular saw to cut segments off the the end.

The 12 feet of junk wood from behind the plant started life as a box top, so along with the 1/2 thick pieces I needed for my test, there was a border of 1″ x 3″ wood strips as support that had nails spaced about 4 to 5 inches all around. Rather than try and remove the approximate hundredty-million twisted nails from the 24″ of wood, I just hammered the bent ends down flat. Because of the nails I had to cut the 1″ x 3″ wood into about 60 pieces total.

After a little while I got a nice rhythm going; cut a couple pieces, release pressure on my foot, slide the board for-ward, repeat until done. About halfway through cutting up the second 6″ piece of wood a very large black bug dive-bombed by the front of my face and angled down towards my right hand. I let go of the trigger on the saw and dropped it to the deck.

There was a female cicada trying to mate with still spinning blade. After a few seconds the insect realized its mistake and flew back whence it came. I finished that board and started on the third 6″ piece and wouldn’t you know, my horny cicada took another shot at the saw. I dropped it on the deck again. This time when the bug flew back into its tree, I went inside the house and got my can of Raid Wasp & Hornet spray for the next time.

Sure enough, as I was finishing cutting the third piece, my love struck bug returned. I dropped the saw, grabbed the can and fired off a stream of insecticide at her. I’m not sure if I hit the cicada with any of the stream or she finally learned that the sound of a circular saw rhythmically cutting 1″ x 3″ pieces of wood was not a male of her species, but I cut the full 6″ length of the last piece without a return fly-ins.

August

Second Saturday in a Row

Wednesday the 30th
We have led a Masters Miata Club Event…this week was the annual Bug Splat.

When Donna and I put on this event for the very first time way back in 1999 I had devised it sort of like a rally style start, I would send each car out at 3 minute intervals to guarantee clean air in front of the cars for maximum exposure to bugs. When I tried that the next year everyone balked at it, so I handed out the maps and sent them all on their way. I had underestimated the Club’s love of driving all in one long line (which as it turns out is second only to the love of all eating at one long table no matter how big the group or small the venue.)

By the third year everyone wondered why Donna and I weren’t playing along. When I explained that we didn’t want to steal anyone’s chance at a prize, they all went, “Pshaw, you should have some of the fun too.” We have been leading the line of cars around the route ever since.

It took me a couple of years to figure out the group had ulterior motives for this. They just wanted someone to lead so they wouldn’t have look at a map and/or not get lost, but probably the most likely reason was to decrease their odds of winning the Biggest Bug Trophy which is so ugly it is kind of cool. You either love it or hate it, with the haters having the larger numbers.

As we were loading the trophy in the trunk to bring to the starting point on Saturday, Donna was looking over the list of names of those who have held it in the last 18 years and asked, “How come we haven’t ever won it?”

“Alexa: play ominous music”

That’s right, we won the trophy this year with a silver dollar size splat on the nose of the CTBNL right next to the Mazda logo.

September

Caffeine Has Flavor?

Tuesday the 12th
I’ve made no secret here that my drink of choice is Diet Dr. Pepper, usually the regular stuff, but I have come to enjoy the cherry vanilla flavor too (even though I sort of made fun of it at my first exposure.) There is always about 6 cans chilling in the fridge at all times. There is always a 12-pack box (at least half full) in the cabinet next to the fridge. Whenever the 12-packs of Diet Dr. Pepper goes on sale we buy a couple to stock up.

Weekend before last we bought a couple of 12-packs and when I went to put some new cans in the fridge I noticed that I had picked up Caffeine Free Diet Dr. Pepper. Eh, I figured, it wouldn’t make a difference. Caffeine withdrawal would usually cause a headache, but now that I’m drinking a coffee in the morning, that would prevent the headache. And it has, but…

The caffeine free has a slightly different flavor the the regular stuff and I’m not sure I like it. Who knew that the caffeine would affect the taste? The Internet did apparently, just not me.

I can’t tell the difference between caffeine free and regular coffee. Why should the soda be any different? I’m betting that it is because I’m not drinking just straight coffee like I am the soda. I like just a bit of coffee flavor in my sweetened cream breakfast drink.

October

Who Likes Who Better

Friday the 13th
When I sat down at my desk at work this morning I looked down and noticed a bruise forming on the back of my hand at the knuckles of the middle and ring fingers. Took me a second, but then I remembered.

It is an immutable law of the universe that whenever there is a couple, each of the individual satellites surrounding them will seem to gravitate more to one than the other. Daddy’s little girl or the dog will come when called by one, but ignore the other. And it is not just people or pets.

Last night we went out for a drive in the Miata to grab a couple of Motoring Challenge points locally. The Miata was in the garage with the top up. I went to the driver’s side and Donna was on the passenger side and we both reached into disengage the top latches on our respective sides. Mine went easy, but Donna was having a hard time getting it to unlatch. She got it partially open and it snapped back closed, pinching outside of the hand between thumb and forefinger. Not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to turn the skin red and to hurt a bit.

Yesterday I drove the Mini to work to 1) show it off, 2) see how many people would think I’d bumped my head and got rid of the Miata and 3) see how many people don’t pay attention at all. The answers are: 1) a half dozen wanted to know about the car while one wanted to actually see it and sit in it, 2) two people, both today and 3) the other 250 or so.

My lunch box goes in the trunk of the Miata and went in the trunk of the Sonata too, but the Mini does not have an actual trunk per se, it has a hatchback with a spot behind the back seats and a little lid thing to keep stuff out of sight. When closing the Miata’s trunk lid I grasp the loop that goes into the latch mechanism and “throw” the lid down. The Sonata had a nice handle for this purpose molded into the underside of the lid. When I closed the Mini hatch before leaving home I just pressed down on the outside of the hatch and pushed. When I got to work, I noticed that the Mini, like the Sonata, had a handle for grabbing to close the hatch. When I tried it, it was sort of awkward to reach and when I “threw” it down I didn’t get enough force on it to totally overcome the upwards pressure from the 2 struts. The hatch went down 6 to 8 inches and bounced right back up and hit my hand. Hard.

This must be the cause of my bruised hand. And we now know for a fact that the Miata likes me better and the Mini likes Donna better.

November

Sorry Soda City Minis

Saturday the 18th
A couple of weeks ago, to compliment our MMC membership, we poked around looking for a Mini Club. The near-est group to us was a facebook group called Soda City Minis. They were going to have a meet and greet on Saturday, November 18th. The meet up spot was Sesquicentennial State Park and end up at a Red Robin for lunch. We were back and forth about attending for a while, but opted to go after the Miata Club event that day was going to a breakfast spot we didn’t care for.

The trip to the Soda City1 was two-fold, the Mini Meet-Up and a bagel for breakfast at Bruegger’s. We got up at our usual 6:00 AM to make the hour drive to Irmo to have breakfast. Before we left we checked the Soda City Minis page to double check the 11:00 AM start time and noticed that the event was called off because of lack of participation. There were only 4 people who had responded “Going.” I asked Donna if one of them was her and she said, “No. I don’t like to post on Facebook.”

Sorry about that Soda City Minis. Although I doubt that our one more, making 5 total, would have made the mini-mum participation level that had been set by the organizer. If it was me it would have been around 10…

December

Good News/Bad News

Monday the 4th
Good
Somehow, through no fault of my own, the Angry Ladybugs have slipped into the EZEFFL Playoffs. I won the last game of the season by beating the only team in the conference with a worse record than me1 and was helped out by having the only combination of two teams, who I held the tie-breaker over, losing.

Bad
Another “I Really Am Old” milestone was passed today when I signed up for a Wheel of Fortune Spin ID number. Most nights at 7:00 PM we’ve finished eating and are parked comfortably on the couch, so after watching the net-work news, watching Pat & Vanna are the perfect mental pallet cleanser and blood pressure lowering tool. If you happen to be tuned in and see the Spin Id Number of BB6861302, let me know, I’ll split it with you.

January

Happy Curmudgeon Day

Friday the 29th
For the past however long¹ we have worked at the Valve Store ™ we have had 9 holidays off. They were New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, the Friday after, Christmas Eve & Christmas Day.

Depending on what day Christmas & it’s Eve fell on it was mostly always turned into a 4 day weekend with the exceptions being if Christmas fell on a Wednesday or Thursday. A large group of employees would combine this with the New Year’s Day holiday and most of their 2 or 3 weeks of vacation disappear from the middle of December and not return until January 2nd.

I say we had 9 holidays, because the company decided that starting this year they were replacing Christmas Eve with a Floating Holiday of the employee’s choosing. This floater had to be scheduled like a vacation day by filling out a vacation request, but noting that it was your Floating Holiday. But it would have to used like a holiday in that you couldn’t take it in 2 half days and it was not allowed to be carried over.

Around lunch time yesterday Donna decided that maybe it would be nice to turn this into a 4 day work week by taking today off. We decided instead of wasting a vacation day we would go ahead and burn that floater. So I hearkened back to my bicycle club newsletter days and went looking for a esoteric holiday to celebrate. Found several and opted for Curmudgeon Day. So I put on the vacation request handed in to our supervisors, January 29th, Curmudgeon Day (in honor of William Claude Dukenfield’s birthday.)

When my acting supervisor asked me who William Claude Dunkenfield was I told him it was W.C. Fields. Ever the smart-ass he said, “Oh, I know him, he makes the cookies.” Not to be out smart-assed, I replied, “No, that’s his wife.”

February

$500 Car Wash

Monday the 1st
The Purple Whale just got back from his 60k service appointment and before they give you car back as a “free” perk they wash and vacuum it.

We dropped off the car yesterday, so this morning I called the Service Adviser to see how how much this was going to set me back I was told it would be $491. When we showed up to get the car back he told me the total was $527 which I figured was the price + tax. We I got home and looked at the back page of the sheet he gave me there were itemized costs for labor, parts, misc and tax with a total of $580.33. Right underneath that he had hand written in -$53.08 bringing the total to the paid $527.29. WTF? The math isn’t even right! The original $491 plus the 7% sales tax should have totaled $525.37.

The recommended service is to inspect a zillion things, the major items are changing several filters and draining, flushing and replacing the big three fluids (oil, coolant & transmission.) Where did the $580 come from, hard to tell, because the inspections aren’t itemized so all the cost is lumped in the blocks for the 3 fluid changes.

While he was in the shop he also had a couple recalls taken care of. One was some sort of brake pedal stopper which might cause the car to not start needed to be replaced. The second was inspection for engine block noise which might indicate possible main bearing failure. Some engines apparently didn’t get all the chips flushed out during manufacturing. The Purple Whale was fine on that count.

A couple of other observations:
1) They noticed a clunk when turning and replaced a steering coupling under warranty. I have been hearing something like that when backing out of the driveway when transiting off the little curb there, but thought nothing of it. In the write up section for this it says, “Replaced steering coupler per TSB 14-ST-002. One time good will for customer satisfaction.” So they changed something per a Technical Service Bulletin and it is goodwill?
2) In another shining example of car dealer math, Hyundai recommends changing the oil every 7,500 miles and in a little note towards the end of my service print out it says “next oil lube service due @ 63,258 miles, or about 3,746 miles more than the car has now.”

March

Moss Mail

Saturday the 19th
Monday when we got home from work, Donna checked the mail and she came out with a padded envelope, looked at me and asked accusingly, “What did you order from Moss Motors?!?” I thought for a moment, couldn’t come up with anything…then it dawned on me, it was our prize package for finishing as one of the 50 runners-up in the 2015 Motoring Challenge. Sure enough, that’s what it was, a nice t-shirt, a cool little sticker and our $50 gift certificate.

This year for the Motoring Challenge instead of a T-shirt they are giving everyone who scores 50 points a nifty hat, well last week’s “Slow Children Playing” sign put us over that mark. All they wanted as proof was a photo of your entry sheet with your progress so far marked off. So Wednesday after work I took a picture of ours sitting on the trunk of the Sonata and wrote 52 pts, so far with my finger in the coating of pine pollen. I then spent the next 1-1/2 hours washing the pollen off both the Sonata and the Miata, even though I knew they would be covered again to the same thickness in a couple days.

In this afternoon’s mail was another padded envelope from Moss Motors. This time, she didn’t ask what I bought because we knew the hat was on its way. Now I have to figure out what I want to spend the fifty bucks on so I can get another padded envelope from them in the mail again.

April

Bamboo Dog Repellent

Friday the 1st
What started out as my usual Tuesday evening post-work rollerblading excursion about a month ago¹ turned exciting a mere 50 yards from my driveway.

From my left came a barking blur. Closing in on me fast from about 8 o’clock was what looked like a collie based hybrid mutt about 2-1/2 feet high. As he² got close, he leapt trying to grab my left arm. I managed to raise my arm just out of his reach. When the dog missed, he stopped, barked a couple more times and ran back towards the house it came from.

Good thing it didn’t get me, the dog probably weighed 30-35 pounds and had it got my wrist my forward momentum would have come to a sudden stop. I would have hit the pavement hard. I wear my bicycle helmet while rollerblading, but that wouldn’t have been any guarantee it would been in the right place to totally protect my noggin as it impacted the pavement from 6-1/2 feet up.

Another 50 yards down the road with my heart rate returning to near normal, a Honda CRV eased on up next to me with mom driving and her high school aged daughter. They were obviously not too far behind me and witnessed the near miss. The passenger window glided down and the girl asked, “Did he get you?” “No,” I replied, “but it was close.” The window rose back up and they drove off.

I reached the halfway point of my trip and made a u-turn to head back home. Knowing I would have to pass right by that house again, I started to think about how I would handle that dog if it took another run at me. I needed some sort of stick. Just then I noticed at the edge of the road, as if my Fairy Godmother had heard my thoughts, lay a tree branch about 3 feet long and as big around as my thumb. I did a quick spin around and picked it up. Now, armed, I was ready for my return trip.

Sure enough as I got near that house the dog repeated his earlier run at me. This time he was approaching from the right and that was the hand I had my stick in. When he got about three feet away I swung the stick at him. I didn’t see because I was looking forward and continuing on my way, but I felt a thwack and heard a yelp plus the receding doggie paw steps. Yikes! It worked!

Two days later as I got suited up to go rollerblading again, knowing that I would be traveling that same dog protected section of road, I looked around in the garage for a suitable piece of something to use as protection. I found in the dusty corner behind my tool box a 3′ piece of bamboo probably left over from an old matchstick blind from Pier 1. Perfect. I wrapped a little duct tape around one end as a sort of handle. I have skated this route literally hundreds of times and have never seen a dog at that house before. I have now skated that route a half dozen times since then, carrying my piece of bamboo dog repellent and have not seen my attacker again.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen the mom and daughter in the CRV again either. Coincidence?

May

Phish And Let Phish

Thursday the 5th
In my work email this morning was the below email:

From: careerservices@ernerson.com
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2016 11:52 PM
To: Bogardus, Brian [INDAUTO/ASCONUM/USAK]
Subject: Account Owner Questionnaire

Emerson employee,

As of May 1, 2016, all account owners will be legally required to digitally sign and provide response to the employment history questionnaire. This questionnaire helps develop a more complete profile of our employees for reporting purposes.

Please confirm and update your questionnaire
immediately via the link below.

Click Here

Sincerely,
Career Services Team

It has phishing scam written all over it. Because the Valve Store® is part of the Emerson Corporation all our email addresses are @emerson.com, this email, if you look quickly, appears to come from the home office, but it doesn’t, it comes from er nerson.com. Career Services? Never heard of it. And if this sort of action was required of us we would have already had a couple of emails ahead of time informing us that this action would be coming up on a certain date.

The clincher was if you hover over the Click Here link in the email (go ahead, I copied it here) you will see the URL that you would be taken to and it was the word phishing right in the link, thus signifying it probably really wasn’t a phishing scam. To double check, I opened a browser and entered mediapro.com and I was taken to website that sells Privacy and Security Awareness Solutions.

It was a phishing test from corporate. Every couple months we get one of these things to test our awareness of this type of scam. From my informal survey around the engineering area we are definitely getting pretty good at not falling for them.

Later in the afternoon this email showed up in my inbox:

From: Help Desk, ASCO Numatics US
Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2016 2:57 PM
To: ASCO Numatics US DL
Subject: Phishing Attack Notification
Importance: High

Account Owner Questionnaire

OVERVIEW: Reports have identified a malicious email circulating on the Emerson network. The attack appears to be related to an online questionnaire in an attempt to lure users into clicking on and opening a malicious hyperlink.

DATE EFFECTIVE: Immediately

IMPACT: All Emerson Employees and Contractors

DETAILS: The following malicious email is an example of what has been reported throughout the Emerson network. Please be aware these e-mails may vary slightly.

Please report all suspicious e-mails to phishing@emerson.com. (Please note that the phishing e-mails quarantined by IronPort in your Outlook mailbox need not be reported; only the e-mails that gets through the spam filters.)

ACTION: Always use caution when opening an e-mail from an unknown or untrustworthy source. As an e-mail and web user, beware of any suspicious e-mails, e-mail attachments, or unknown Internet locations. Blah, blah, blah…

So this second email effectively kills the test.

I went up front and asked our new IT guy Matt why. He of course recognized the phish for what it was and he had a few people ask him it was real or not. And he had a couple people ask him if he was going to send the warning email like John Smith used to, but he couldn’t because he had emailed the Help Desk in Florham Park to ask if he should send out that boilerplate email, but was told no. So I asked him why did one finally come out. His answer was probably one of the Division IT Directors or maybe the VP of IT got tired of answering the “Is it real” question and ordered it sent.

I asked Matt do they ever get the results and he said no, but you can bet if enough people clicked on the link we’d hear about it in some form of company-wide email phishing recognition training.

June

Thank You For Your Service

Sunday the 19th
Yesterday morning we drove the Miata to lovely downtown Trenton, SC. We were with 9 other Miatas from the MMC and we were on our way to drive in the 46th Annual Ridge Peach Festival parade. This was the 13th year the Club has driven in the parade. Donna and I were among the 8 cars that first year, and while we haven’t done it every year, but I bet this was the 8th or 9th time.

During the parade you are allowed to throw candy to the crowd and we always spend about $20 so that we have enough to last the entire 2/3 of a mile route. When we could drive 2 abreast we would and Donna would throw candy to the crowd-side herself, but when the crowds thickened and we had to drive single file she would throw to the right and in between, hand me candy so I could toss some to the left. It was during this time when I tossed a few Starbursts at a couple of kids that I happened to make eye contact with the mother and she said to me, “Thanks. And thanks for your service.”

That woman at the parade was thanking me based solely on the hat I was wearing. A month ago when we toured the USS Midway I bought a hat in the gift shop to commemorate our visit and my time aboard almost 40 years ago. This has happened a couple other times too, once in Barstow, CA and once again here in Aiken, both times it was just because of the hat. Not that I don’t slightly deserve it having spent 10 years in Uncle Sam’s Yacht Club, but any schmoe who’s toured the ship or spends around twenty bucks can get one from Amazon or eBay and that weirds me out because they’ll get thanked for possibly no service at all. I’d like to wear the hat, but I’m going to have to only do it when there will be little chance of interaction with people and definitely not on Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

And then again maybe it is probably just me who has a problem with this, but when I joined the Navy in 1973 people were still into calling servicemen returning from Vietnam baby-killers and now after the middle-east conflicts it has become fashionable to call servicemen (and women) heroes and to thank them for their service and I am of that era, not this one.

July

Inattention Giveth and Inattention Taketh Away

Tuesday the 5th
We went to Bed, Bath & Beyond on Monday to buy a couple of new pillows. We have two different sleeping styles, so we usually buy two different styles of pillows. I am a stomach sleeper and Donna is side or back sleeper, so I get a regular pillow and Donna gets a thicker one. Mine is $10 cheaper. I plopped both pillows down on the counter and the kid checking us out didn’t really pay attention, so he just scanned one pillow twice. It was my cheaper pillow he scanned, so in essence we were gifted ten dollars.

Later on we did a little mop-up shopping at Krogers. As we usually do whenever we are not doing our weekly shopping, we used the self-checkout. Donna asked if we should go to the express line because we had a coupon, but I waved her off noting that there was a clerk at the station. Donna also recommended I take $20 cash out for the work week, I agreed. I was buying wine, so I knew I’d have to show ID and scanned the first 4 items, saving the alcohol for last knowing that I wouldn’t be able to go any further until the attendant came over and looked at my license. Beep! “Attendant Has Been Notified To Assist You.” The attendant didn’t hop to, she was tapping away on her phone possibly making plans for when she got off shift, so I went to her. She came back, scanned my ID, then scanned the coupon before heading back to her station and texting. I grabbed the bags, the receipt and another $5 off coupon for my next wine purchase. It wasn’t until we got home that I remembered I never picked up the $20 bill.

Karma? Had pointed out the ten dollar undercharge at B,B & B would I have remembered the twenty at Krogers?

August

NO to ND

Thursday the 11th
This morning as we backed out of the driveway, I got into the street and when I shifted from reverse to first – I stalled it. Just exactly like the last time I drove when David came over for the swapping test drive thing. I am sure I will probably get used to giving it a little more gas before letting out the clutch because of the lightweight flywheel. Just as sure as I am I will get used to the 1/2″ higher take up point of the clutch. Hopefully sooner than later.

At 6:30 in the AM around here there is hardly anybody awake except for usually one other neighbor going to work in the opposite direction from us and sometimes a person out walking. It was kind of damp and misty morning, but I could easily see a neighbor up ahead coming towards walking his two mouse-sized dogs. So I restarted the engine and while I did, simultaneously started turning the steering wheel to the left to go around him.

This time I gave the car a little more gas and got the clutch engagement just right, so I got a smooth forward motion, but it was accompanied the sounds of a large pack of excited howler monkeys emanating from engine compartment. I pushed in the clutch and coasted by the dog walker with a meek wave and only one or two monkeys saying hello to him as well. About this time, Donna joined in on the screaming too as she was mortified at the noise we were making (me too, just not so loudly.)

I shut the car off and the belts stopped squealing and then Donna did too. I started the car back up and the monkeys were still at it a little, so I slowed down a bit to make a u-turn back to the garage for the belt dressing spray. I pushed in the clutch and the noise stopped, so I slowly let it out and normal quiet had returned to Dunbarton Oaks. I chanced one more start from the stop sign at the end of the block and when the squeal didn’t happen again we kept on going. The car was quiet for the rest of the commute in.

September

Third Time’s Not The Charm

Sunday the 4th
Our first two attempts at floor mats came from the cheap throw rug aisle at Wally World. Both the red and the gray didn’t look as nice in the car as they did in our heads while looking at them in the store. Plus they were a bit flimsy and moved around when they were stepped on getting in and out of the
car.

Last weekend we were in Home Depot looking at their in-stock commercial grade carpet because we had so much success with the remnants from the Valve Store’s office remodeling. No luck there as everything was browns and tans with nothing in gray. But over in the rack with some other stuff we thought we had the perfect solution to our mat desires. There was something that might have been an outdoor mat or an internal dirt catching carpet protector that was a solid gray, not too dark and not too light with a nice square high-low texture, so we bought it.

When I got home I used my usual procedure to turn carpet into mat: Trace the upside down OEM mats onto the back of the newly purchased mat material with a sharpie. I cut out the new mats using a utility knife and a retired pair of kitchen shears. Then the finishing touch, running around the edges with my butane charcoal grill fire starter to seal them. They were just the right weight and stiffness, plus the back side was covered in a rubbery #10 grit sandpaper-like stuff. They seemed perfect. After several days of use the mat’s Achilles heel showed itself though, the fine fibers it was made from started to shed like the fur of an Angora cat in the summertime.

So, we’ve now tried three different times to find a floor mat that would meet all our stringent criteria, spent around $50 and are nowhere near happy. Might be time to go ahead and bite the bullet by spending the $130 on the Zeromotive Checkered Floor Mats in black/light gray I’ve been eyeing for a while now.

October

12-1/2 Years Later

Sunday the 2nd
In March of 2004 at the MMC Tech Day I brightened the otherwise vast expanse of blackness in a fellow Club member’s 2001 Miata interior with the random aluminum bits from the Emperor. Today I did it again to our “new” Miata with the help of Steve from Panic Motorsports.

When we sold the Emperor to Steve he said he’d give us a check for the sale amount, plus $50 in cash for lunch for driving it to him in Columbia. When we got there we got to chatting and forgot all about the cash. When I remembered, I sent him an email and said instead of the cash I’d take it in trade, the random aluminum look bits from a 2003. The very same ones I traded away 12-1/2 years ago. He said, “OK, next ’03 to ’05 that comes in as a donor car, you can have their stuff.”

Last week, such a car arrived. Friday on our way to Charleston we picked up the 4 air vents, the radio and shifter surrounds and the 2 interior door handles. Saturday they made their way into the CTBNL.

November

Stop The Madness

Tuesday the 29th
Subject: Christmas/Holiday Gift Giving At Work
To: Workgroup
Cc: Department Boss

Folks,

Every year I have been going around and asking (begging/cajoling) for some amount of money to pool together to buy the boss one big gift card. The decision of what store that card should be from is haggled over until a consensus is reached. I then go get the gift card from said place, stuff it in a Christmas card that we present to the boss at our annual holiday lunch at a local restaurant. At that same meal, the boss usually turns right around and hands out an individual gift card to each and every one of us, for about the same value as our individual donation to his card, in appreciation for our hard work during the year.

Well, this year I propose we stop the madness. Lets avoid the whole senseless swapping X amount for the same X amount already. A free lunch on the company, a hardy handshake and a thanks for everything is all that any of us really want during this holiday season. I think it would be better for each of us to take that gift card money and drop it in the red kettle outside a grocery store or donate it to a charity that you feel is doing good work (or buy yourself Independence Day: Resurgence on BluRay.)

If someone else wants to take up the mantle of gathering money to pass along something up the food chain, please leave me out of it. Im not a total Grinch, so if anyone, group or individual, wants to give another individual in the department a gift, by all means go for it. And after this, if someone still somehow feels the need to give me a gift, I will thank them profusely and promptly go out and buy a share in a goat in Zanzibar of equal value in their name.

Brian

P.S. Immediate Boss, please, dont take this personally just because this is your first year as the boss and this is the year Id like to opt out of the gift card swaperoo thing, it’s been festering for a few years now.

December

Backup Man With A Backup Plan

Wednesday the 14th
The Valve Store has actually hired a real IT Guy¹ a couple months ago, so I am back to being just a back-up. And right now my only actual duties when the primary IT Guy is off is to change the backup tape every day in the server room². Occasionally I get called upon hand out a cable or go lay hands on an ill PC, but the tape is really it. I remove the previous night’s tape and put in the current day’s, then take the used tape over to the main entrance door and hand it to the Security Guard (where later he gives it to a courier for off-site storage.) The highlight of this duty is to make up something different to say about the contents of the tape: “Just fast forward to the hour and 15 minute mark because that is where all the nudity is.” or “Don’t let Congress get a hold of this, its got all of Hillary’s emails on it.”

Unless you have been out west protesting an oil pipeline for the last 2 months or so you probably know there is a new Star Wars movie coming out. Well, over Thanksgiving week while the real IT Guy was on vacation I thought it would be cool to make a label for Friday’s tape referencing the supposed plot of Rouge One. That way when he pulls out the tape on Monday to swap them, he’d notice my little Easter Egg and get a smile. Trouble was, because I wouldn’t be in on that Friday, the guard was going to do the swapping and I didn’t want to take a chance he’d notice the different label, not get it, and call somebody because of the “error.” So I didn’t do it.

But last week I got a second chance. The IT Guy had to visit a sister plant for a project and would be gone from Tuesday through the end of the week. Friday afternoon I scoured the internet for a Galactic Empire logo and I also found out that the “Death Star” had a real name – Orbital Battle Station. I made a label just a touch smaller than, and used a glue stick to paste it over, the existing one on the tape.

Monday morning I heard the IT Guy get paged a half dozen times in the first hour by at least 4 different people, so I knew he was hopping around like a one-armed paper hanger. Around mid-morning I finally stopped in for a visit and asked him how the visit went and updated him on any IT problems that arose. I then asked if he had changed the tape yet. “Yep” “Did you notice anything different? Like the label?” “Yeah,” he replied, “I thought the storage site messed up somehow and just put the tape in the box and sent it off.” He totally missed my joke…sigh.

January

Christmas Gift?

Friday the 2nd
On our Christmas Day road trip, we stopped at a convenience store at the crossroads of No and Where for a snack and a restroom break. I opened the door to the single toilet Men’s Room and there was already someone in there, so I backed out saying I’m sorry. As I played back the scene in my mind’s eye, I realized he wasn’t going to the bathroom, he was dropping quarter’s in the condom machine.

I cooled my heels, inventorying the Lance crackers on a rack a few feet from the door, waiting for the guy to finish his “business” in there. As he walked by, tucking a small packet into his jacket’s inside pocket, I asked, “Going to get your Christmas present?” He shrugged and replied, “I hope so.”

February

Good Morning Sunshine

Saturday the 7th
On our trip down to FLA we spent the night in Darien, GA right next to I-95, so come morning we could jump on the Interstate and get by Jacksonville before the commuters clogged the roadways. I set the alarm for 5:30 and double checked to make sure it was AM as I’ve mis-set that a few times in the past. Thursday morning we woke without the alarm at almost 7 o’clock. My alarm setting was spot on, but I failed to make sure the clock itself was set to the correct Meridian, Ante or Post. Actually the late start was not a problem as this put us passing around Jacksonville after the morning rush.

Friday night I set the alarm on the cell phone for 5:30 AM, because Donna wanted to be up to say goodbye to one of Sandy’s Seattle area friends before she headed to the airport to fly home. Saturday morning we woke without the alarm at about 20 minutes after 6:00 AM. The alarm never went off because we keep the thing on silent so as to not bother us at an inopportune time, but unfortunately that also prevents it from waking us at the opportune one.

We’ll finish the trip home tomorrow, but for today we’ve stopped in Ocala because it is about halfway and we wanted to try and find the one geocache left not found in a local Conservation Area. About 4 this afternoon Donna wanted a nap, she said I could read if I wanted, but could I lay on the bed with her. I opted to shut my eyes for a bit too. Saturday afternoon we woke to the blaring of the hotel alarm clock at 5:30. Whoever was here last must have wanted it to go off at 5:30 PM. Or maybe they meant 5:30 AM and messed it up. Then again we stayed in this very same hotel back in November on a return trip Florida, maybe that someone was me.

March

Six Foot Tall

Thursday the 5th
My height was listed as 5′-11″ on my very first driver’s license when I was sixteen. 6-00 is what it reads now on my current South Carolina driver’s license. I grew an inch in Navy boot camp and this height is what has been listed on every subsequent driver’s license, in whatever form required by any of the several states I’ve lived in since. In the intervening *cough* *cough* years I’m thinking that if measured it stocking feet today, I’d be back at the five foot eleven inch mark. In shoes though, still six foot even.

Back in May 2011 we bought a metal awning to park the Purple Whale under. The bottom edge of the powder coated mild steel side edge is 6’3″ from the surface of the driveway which allows for me to walk right under it. Normally. Sometimes I forget, like I did the day before yesterday, and step on the 3″ square tubing that serves as its base.

This caused me to bop the very tippy-top of my slightly pointed head. Fortunately I was wearing a hat so that instead of scraping off a dime sized layer of skin, I only ended up with a 1/4 inch long cut. Still it’s a head wound, so stopping the slight bit of bleeding took a while and a band aid.

In the past four years this happened with some regularity and you would think that I would avoid doing this and you’re right. I remember to step over the base or duck slightly when stepping on it for about two months, just about the time the previous wound heals

April

Full Moon Flush

Friday the 3rd
Shortly after takeoff from Atlanta, Donna noticed the full moon out her window hovering just off the wing tip, so I thought I’d get a picture. About the time I got the camera out from under seat in front of me and leaned over her to take some pictures the plane started its turn to the west. Just managed to get one with the wing and moon in the same frame.

About 30 minutes into the flight the Captain made an announcement from the cockpit they were having toilet troubles, seems like only a couple of them would actually flush. He literally told us to hold for a bit while they tried a couple things to fix it. If those failed, we were going have to land shy of our destination to get another plane. A few minutes later he came back on and apologized for the inconvenience, but good news, they all seemed to be working now.

The rest of the flight was uneventful and we finally arrived at our hotel near the airport at about 11:30 PM Seattle time, but for our bodies it was really 2:30 AM Saturday. We got checked into a room and before we even got settled in we had go back down to the lobby to get a different room, the reason – the toilet wouldn’t flush…

May

I Lettered In Drafting…

Friday the 8th
…in both high school and college.

I stunk at both Wood Shop and Metal Working in high school, but did manage to get an industrial course that I was not only good at, but liked as well when I got to Drafting. So I kept at it, taking couple more classes in it during my time at good ol’ NBHS. After getting out of the Navy I took a Blueprint Reading in my first semester in college and realized that being a Draftsman was what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Every drawing has something called a Revision Letter that is used to keep track of any changes made to a drawing. Some places start with an A, some start with no letter before going to A, but the Valve Store(tm) starts with a – and then the first change is an A. In the beginning of my training as a draftsman I was taught that there are 5 letters that are never used as a Rev Ltr because they might be confused as a number, I, O, Q, S & Z.

Without using those five you still get 21 revisions before you have to start over again at AA. Because ASCO has been in business for 126 years now, a few of our older drawings have the honor of dual letters. Even though there is now a prefix, those five letters are skipped again the next time around. One of the sets of drawings I was working on the other day had a B as the first letter, meaning it has had over 40 revisions. This particular drawing’s previous Rev Ltr was BH, so naturally the BI letter combo was skipped and next pair in line was used – BJ.

Now, maybe because I was in the Navy or maybe because I’m a guy or maybe I have a dirty mind, but I think there are a few 2 letter combos that don’t include the fab five that should not be used as Rev Ltrs, that’s one of them. The next one is less likely because a drawing would have to be on its 122nd revision for it to occur, but FU probably should get a pass. The next one my dirty mind comes up with is at 177and that is HJ.

Got any more?

June

The Prodigal Travel Mug Returns

Tuesday the 30th
A little over two weeks ago we took the Emperor to Columbia to have some maintenance done. Panic Motorsports is closed on the weekends (they’re usually off racing Miatas somewhere), but they were nice enough to give me the gate code, so that Donna and I could drop off the car on Saturday, thereby avoiding the possibility of having to drive the 100 mile round trip on consecutive days.

When we got back home later that day and unloaded the Sonata I couldn’t find my favorite travel mug. Drove up there in the Miata drinking from it. I remember locking up the car and it wasn’t in the cupholder in the center console. Other than that I was unsure of anything else, so after the Emperor had been away at camp for a couple days I sent Steve an email:

From: Brian
To: Steve
Subj: How’s the prognosis?

And more importantly, did you find my Contigo Travel Mug?

From: Steve
To: Brian
Subj: It’s going home tomorrow.

Probably get the transmission out before the end of the day, then slam it back together and align in the morning.

Coffee mug is not on the premises sir.

From: Brian
To: Steve
Subj: Good deal

Let me know before 3:30 tomorrow if it is not. And if it is, let me know the total, because that is the first thing my CFO will ask.

I know I drove up there to drop off the car drinking from it…from that point I don’t know what I did with it. The thing didn’t come back in the support vehicle. There are a couple places I might have put it down, the roof of the Protege (you’d have
seen it) and the front seat of the red Miata (probably noticeable when retrieving the keys.) The only other place might have been when I unlocked the gate…ooh, a memory just floated to the surface, my hand placing a bronze colored Contigo travel mug on a wooden fence post.

P.S. “Slam it back together” might be OK amongst us guys, but please use something like “precisely realigned” while the previously mentioned CFO is present…

We brought the Miata home and a day later thanks to Amazon Prime I was drinking from my new Contigo AUTOSEAL West Loop Stainless Steel Travel Mug in Trans-Matte Latte.

Fast forward to yesterday and I had almost forgot about losing the old one when an unexpected package arrived in the mail with a return address of Old Dunbar Road, West Columbia, SC.

From: Brian
To: Steve
Subj: Where Was It?
On the floor of the red Miata?

From: Steve
To: Brian
Subj: Nope

No, apparently you did leave it on the fence post. My neighbor in the cabinet shop came in and found/recovered it, and we haven’t seen each other in a couple weeks. He asked me if I’d lost a coffee cup and I said “No, I don’t drink coffee”. He said, “Well, it sure is a nice one” That’s when it clicked

One of my fears was that someone had found it and was enjoying drinking from the best travel mug in all the world on my dime. Well, when I opened the box and unscrewed the lid, I knew that wasn’t the case.

Maybe, just maybe, if I drank my coffee black it might have been salvageable, but the 1/2 oz of Dunkin Donuts coffee infused with Dunkin Donuts creamer/sweetener that I had left in there had turned into a petri dish full of the beginnings of some sort of alien life form. A quick rinse in some hot water removed quite a bit of the larger chunks of stringy, slimy black colored gunk. But there were still a crap ton of brownish-black large amoeba looking spots still stuck all over the sides, so I filled it up 3/4 of the way with a diluted solution of Simple Green and shook it up for a few minutes. Oooh, that’s still ugly in there. Now I started working on the insides with hot water, dish soap & a toothbrush.

I’m making slow progress when the CFO notices what I’m doing and says, “Throw it out and get a new one.” I hate to admit defeat, but acquiesce. I was confident I could get the stainless steel body clean enough to drink from, the rubber and plastic fancy mechanism top, not so much. After seeing the inside and how hard it was to try and get clean, I don’t think I would have felt comfortable drinking from it anyway.

I didn’t order a new one because I only need the one and if by some chance I leave this on a fence post somewhere too, a replacement is only $15-20 & 2 days away.

July

This Come Off Of The Emperor?

Sunday the 5th
So I pull a u-turn and about a 100 feet back is a big bolt smack in between the yellow lines. I continue past a bit and pull another u-turn. Stopping in mid lane I get out and pick up the bolt. Yikes! It’s hot. And it has a very thin coating of something that looks like anti-seize compound. Now is it hot because it just came off our car or a car not too far ahead of us or because it is 95° out and laying on a dark surface? Time-wise I can narrow it down only to it has been on the road since after the last thunderstorm here because otherwise the fluid on it would have washed off.

I pull the car off the road onto the shoulder and crawl around a bit underneath looking around at the suspension because that is the last thing that was worked on. I also take a peek at the brake calipers as it almost looks like a slider pin, but see nothing amiss. Might be off the PPF as that was probably loosened or removed for the recent clutch change, but I can’t get that far under there to see.

We get back in the car and slowly start back down the road. I get it up to about 15 MPH and hit the brakes hard and the car responds as it should, with a sudden stop. I then wig/wag down the road like a race car driver warming his tires on the pace lap and the Miata dances back and forth with no drama. But we are both a little spooked, so I drive home at the speed limit with both hands on the wheel.

When we got home I jacked up the car about 12? off the ground and put all 4 jack stands under it. Looked at everything I could possibly see and there was nothing missing on the PPF or nothing absent at any of the suspension connections. Must be someone else’s bolt.

I swear I did not see anything on the road in front of me before the sudden noises, so I’m guessing it was there already and I scooped it up with a tire and bounced it back and forth between the car and road a bit before ejecting it out the back.

August

NO to ND

Saturday the 29th
Last weekend at the finish of the Bug Splat (which I really need to write about over on the Club site) Donna and I noticed one couple’s car had nice new shiny leather seats in their 2001 Miata. We asked where they had them done and they said a little place called Evans Upholstery over in Georgia, $800 installed. This is a pretty good deal as the seats themselves from leatherseats.com would be anywhere from $700-750, then you’d have to install them yourself or pay someone a couple hundred more to do it.

This morning when we got up, with the practically fall-like weather decided to drive over and check the shop out. Most places like this aren’t open weekends, but the Internet’s know-it-all Google said that they were open from 8 ’til noon. Because the GPS was giving Donna fits when she was trying to enter in their address we opted to see if we could find it using my hazy memory of the Google map I looked at for 45 seconds yesterday. Predictably, that didn’t work out so well.

I pulled into a quick-stop and while Donna was inside I tried the GPS again. This time, it magically knew where to go. When we pulled up front Donna said, “Looks dark. They’re closed.” I said, “Nah. There’s an OPEN sign in the window.” When I pulled on the door, it didn’t open. Donna handed me the phone and I dialed the number on the door. After each ring in my ear I could hear the muffled ring in the shop. When the answering machine clicked on, I clicked off the phone. Turns out that Google is just like every other know-it-all I’ve ever known; they just think they know it all.

Another thing we learned at last week’s Bug Splat was that Gerald Jones Mazda over in Augusta had a couple of the 4th generation cars, AKA the ND, in stock. Seeing as we were over this way anyway we thought we’d go check and see if they were still there. One was, a Ceramic Metallic GT. It was right out front with the top down. As we parked and started walking towards it a salesman who was walking around the lot plotted an intercept course and headed that way too. Donna and I arrived first and popped open the doors and sat right down.

It’s still a Miata, just updated. Kinda like your living room if you painted the walls a shade brighter color and bought new furniture. The good news is that the passenger leg room has returned from its absence in the 3rd gen car, the bad news is the 4 x 6 x 1-1″? high hump adjacent to the transmission tunnel is still there. The good news is that it doesn’t feel like sitting in a bathtub as much as the 3rd gen car did, the bad news is it still feels a lot more enclosed than our car. The good news is that as everyone on the Miata.net has said, it is much nicer looking in person than it is in pictures, the bad news is that Donna is still not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling from its appearance.1 While I give it 4 out of 5 stars and Donna gives it about 2-1/2, I’m pretty sure the Emperor’s reign over the Bogardus household is safe for the next several years.

When the salesman asked if we wanted to take it for spin we said, “No thanks, it’s an automatic.” When he asked if we wanted a call when they got a six-speed in, I said sure and gave him my work phone. And depending on if it is not too inconvenient when he calls, we just might go over.

I spent the rest of the day pampering the Emperor in preparation for our big trip. Rotated the tires and changed the oil. Checked all the fluid levels and air pressures. Then washed and waxed (with actual paste wax) the car. Couple items left to do, clean the inside glass and top off the air in the spare, these will happen tomorrow in the garage while it rains outside.

September

Can I See Your Visa Please?

Thursday the 3rd
Not the credit card kind either.

We are coming up on our two-week vacation and while filling up our pill containers there were four prescriptions that didn’t even have enough pills in them to put in all slots of both of containers. I entered the script numbers into the pharmacy’s web site and two went through fine, but the other two came back as being too soon the be refilled. No problem, we have done it before, I just call and ask for a vacation over ride. The pharmacist who answered, said he’d call the insurance company and call me back if there was any problem.

Ten minutes later the phone rings. It’s the pharmacist. There’s a problem.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Alabama wanted to know what day I was leaving on and where I was
going on my vacation! I told him we were leaving Saturday on a driving trip through 20 states. BCBS of AL needed to know if I was staying in the U.S. or going out of the country. Seems that their rules have changed, if you are staying in the country, you would need to have the prescription transferred to a pharmacy local to where you were going. Only if you were leaving the U.S. would they refill a script early. I asked, “How would they know?” He said, “I have to ask for your itinerary.” “Just take the pill bottles with you and get a pharmacist to call us and I can give him all the information he needs.”

Donna asked me to go back and check to see where the two that we couldn’t get refilled ran out. We got lucky, in one of them there were enough to make it through the second Friday evening when are planning on being back anyway. The other only had enough to make it until the second Thursday evening, but seeing as it was the same acid reflux stuff that I take, I had enough extra to front her the one needed.

Next year if we take another two-week vacation, I’m telling them we are going on a hiking trip in Swiss Alps or something. I just hope Blue Cross/Blue Shield doesn’t make the pharmacist ask to see my passport to check for the proper visas.

October

Did You Have a Fight?

Sunday the 4th
Friday I had to be at Aiken City Court, my number was up, I’d been summoned to be a juror. I had to report at 9:00 AM and while technically I didn’t have to go to work, what else was I going to do, watch the Today Show? So I went in to work. Because I didn’t know if I would be selected to actually serve on a jury or not, Donna drove in in the Sonata and I drove the Miata. We parked next to each other in the usual far corner of the parking lot.

Not long into the day, a co-worker comes up to Donna and asks, “Did you have a fight?” Her perplexed look back signaled further explanation was required. He said, “You came in separate cars.” She replied derisively, “No”, turned around and returned to work.

When she told me the story later, my first thought was, if we did have a fight, would we have still parked next to each other?

November

What Did You Want It For Then?

Sunday the 22nd
November’s Masters Miata Club breakfast was yesterday and the responsibility of the new President of the Club He picked Betsy’s in downtown Aiken. When he asked me to post the info on the web site he said to have everyone meet up at the usual gas station off Exit 1 of I-20 and could I send him a copy of my route I used the last time I did the very same run. I assumed that meant he was planning on leading the group from there to the breakfast spot. Silly me.

Donna and I arrived at the gas station about 6 minutes before the appointed 8:00AM meeting time and were surprised that there was no one else there, especially the event organizer. A couple minutes later another car showed up. By 8 o’clock there were three cars, but none were the leader of the breakfast event. We waited another ten minutes and when the President and event leader never showed up, I ended up leading the small group on a slightly different route to the breakfast place.

When our three car caravan arrived at Betsy’s there were already two Miatas outside. One of them belonged to the President of the Club and when we got inside he and another member were just finishing their meal.

When I asked what he wanted the route map for all he said was, “That was if I did do the route I needed to study it because I don’t have a navigator.” So I asked did he read the post on the web site and the reply was, “No, but I figured it out when my dining companion asked where everyone else was.”

What could I say, I just went over to the table with the rest of the group than drove in together and ordered some breakfast.

December

A Variation On The Elf On The Shelf

Saturday the 12th
Back in February when I needed to replace one of the Emperor’s 02 sensors I bought it and the wrench I needed to change it online. The sensor showed up, but the wrench was back ordered, so I went down to the local Advanced Auto and bought one to do the job with. Naturally the online wrench arrived a couple days after I finished the job. I couldn’t return the used one locally and I didn’t feel like spending the $5 to return the online wrench just to get $6 back, so now I have two of the same wrenches that I might not ever have to use again.

A couple times during the year I thought that maybe I’d just give one away as a “Door Prize” to an attendee to one of my Masters Miata Club led events, but never did. Well it is now towards the end of the year and the Masters Miata Club Christmas Party was coming up, maybe I’ll just wrap it up and put it under the “tree” for Ol’ Swapperoo Gift Exchange.

Then a couple of weeks ago I overheard my cubical neighbor telling another co-worker about his experience with The Elf On The Shelf and his 3-year old twins. I had heard of The Elf On The Shelf before, but never knew what it was all about. So rather than let on that I was ignorant of the subject, I Googled it. WOW! There is a whole subset of America’s mommies that are The Elf On The Shelf disciples and are not afraid to swap stories and activities and tips on how to make this “fun” for the month of December. This is where I discovered that some folks, that now knew what The Elf On The Shelf was about, but didn’t feel like spending the money on the book and the official elf doll and could just make their own. A light bulb figuratively illuminated over my head at this point, I’d turn the extra wrench into a automotively themed The Elf On The Shelf.

What followed was a weeks worth of some fun and some frustration for me and mostly frustration for Donna as we perused local stores scanning shelves for the ingredients for my Masters Miata Club Christmas present. I already had some red paint for the wrench/body, but needed a small Santa hat, a styrofoam ball for the head, red pipe cleaners for arms and legs and some colored felt for the hands, feet, etc. Then we needed just the right size plain box to put him in. Just when finding all the required pieces proved too elusive we got lucky in Hobby Lobby when we found a $6 elf ornament for half price.

The right box was still missing. Google to the rescue again, the 6th link down for DIY Gift Boxes led to a hexagonal shaped box that I could scale to fit. What better style box for a wrench could there be?

Fearing a copyright infringement lawsuit I couldn’t call it The Elf On The Shelf, so in keeping with the car theme called it The Wrench On The Bench. I photoshopped an homage to the actual The Elf On The Shelf book cover and now I just needed to put something on the inside to tell the story of The Wrench On The Bench. Hoping to find a passage or two from the real book to inspire a new story once again I turned to Google. No actual words from the book, but I did find a poem on lil’ luna that got me going enough to hack something just long enough to go on the inside of the hex box cover:

How does Santa know who’s naughty or Nice?
The Wrench on the Bench sits in your garage
Watching if what you do is wrong or right
And reports back to the North Pole every night.
Harbor freight junk from Ol’ Saint Nick
Is going to be under yor tree if,
You crawl under a car without jack stands, or,
Use pliers when a 6-point socket is called for.
Santa will make sure it is presents you’ll get
If you always consult your Chilton or Haynes,
Use a torque wrench instead of a guess
And at every 3,000 miles your motor oil is fresh.

There are only two rules for the Wrench on the Bench;
1. Never touch the Wrench on the Bench or it will be gone forever.
2. The Wrench on the Bench needs a name that is clever, but not Murphy, not never.

January

Self…Something

Friday the 17th

Last October for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month the company nurse had a bunch of cards printed up with instructions on how to do a self breast exam (a scan of both sides is to the left, click to view it larger.) The cards are made of hard plastic with a hole and slit near the top to hang on a door knob. At the bottom are two rows of six punch outs with the month’s abbreviation on them. The idea being to hook it on the bathroom knob so you are reminded to check yourself each month and punch out the appropriate tab. She put one in every salaried female’s mailbox and handed them out to as many of the hourly women as she could. Whatever the minimum order for them were, it was larger than the female population at the Valve Store(R) because there is still at thick stack of these cards on a table outside her office.

This morning while using a stall in the bathroom near the Nurse’s office I noticed that this month’s issue of Stall Talk, the newsletter the nurse produces monthly and is distributed in all those clear plastic document holders that mysteriously appeared in all the restrooms last year, was partially obscured by one of those breast self exam cards.

I could only think of one reason it would be there, in a clear holder on the door of a mens room stall, visible to a person sitting on the pot. I was slightly weirded out. But I didn’t know which was worse, the thought of what some off-shift individual did in the stall I was now using or the fact that the days I could be sexually aroused by just looking at a clip art drawing of a woman’s breast were long gone.

February

Reason #127 Why I Shouldn’t Be Sent On Errands Alone

Saturday the 8th

Because we hadn’t done our weekly grocery shopping yet the cupboard was nearly bare, so this morning I was sent out for breakfast. Donna wanted an order of Biscuit ‘N’ Gravy from Hardee’s and I volunteered to make the run as long as I could stop at DD too and get my morning Cup O’ Joe too. She said fine, but don’t pay the buck eighty nine for a Hot Chocolate for her as she could make her own at home.

Hardee’s was the first stop where I picked up Donna’s breakfast. Normally I get a Sausage and Egg Biscuit here, but I decided to forgo that and get a muffin at Dunkin Donuts instead. At the DD drive up I ordered and when I got to the window I handed the clerk my DD Card and she handed me my muffin. She rang up my bill then handed back the receipt and my card. It wasn’t until I was driving around the back of the building that I realized I was missing my coffee. I was so keyed in on the fact that I was getting a muffin that I drove off too soon.

So I parked the Purple Whale and sheepishly walked inside the store to pick up my Medium Coffee with Cream & Sugar.

In case you are wondering, this is Reason #1

March

40,000 Ghostly Images of Old Florida

Wednesday the 12th

We are on our way to visit Donna’s sister and her family and my snowbird cousin for a couple of days. Because we will drive back on Sunday on mostly Interstate we are taking two days to drive down on mostly back roads. On today’s drive we came into Florida and took aim half way between Lake City and Jacksonville where we found some small town’s and uncrowded back roads.

We originally planned on driving the Miata and doing some more Motoring Challenge photos, but the weather was supposed to be crappy today and then again Sunday for the drive home, so we opted to take the Sonata for the trip. Turns out there were some towns, counties and photo ops that would have been good for the challenge, but they were mostly mid-Georgia, so we filed them away for a weekend in the future.

Somewhere near the small town of Orange Springs the Purple Whale eased by the 40,000 mile mark. Tonight we are in a new HIE in Silver Springs. While this section of town is too full of modern amenities to be considered Old Florida, once inside our dinner spot we were thrown back in time. The Denny’s was located inside a Days Inn and it was filled with characters from Central Casting, including; a really old man alone at a table wearing shorts, sandals with black socks, a Veterans of Foreign Wars ball cap with large-lensed sunglasses who was chewing with his mouth open and eyeballing us because we didn’t belong, a skinny androgynous African-American who spoke on his cell phone loudly in a high-pitched stereotypical gay queen manner, plus the cook teasing a couple of regulars were they going to eat or were they here for the paranormal meeting.

I thought she was just joking, but when we used the restroom before walking back to our hotel, right next to them was a “banquet room” that was shared by Denny’s and the Days Inn and it was all set up for Investigating the Paranormal with Carolynn and Carla.

April

See You in 2026

Monday the 15th

On Sunday the Emperor got an oil change and as always, I rotated his tires as well. When I checked over the right rear tire before putting it back on the front, I spotted something shiny, looked like some sort of a spike. I didn’t want to pull it out for fear that it would go flat, so I decided to take it to a LTS to let them pull it out.

I tossed the tire in the trunk of the Sonata and headed over to a small shop around the corner. They were of course closed, so I tried a second locally owned store not too much further away. They too were closed on Sunday. This left me no other option but to pay a visit to the big name brand chain place that had I swore never to visit again after they scratched the heck out of my aftermarket rims installing tires on the previous Miata.

I rolled the tire up to the desk and asked the guy behind the cash register if could they fix it. The fellow asked if I’d been there before and I said sure, but a long time ago. So I gave him my phone number and he asked, “Brian?” I said, “Yep, I guess I’m still in there.” “When was the last time I was here?” “2002,” he replied.

He said, “I’ll have to get someone to see if it can be fixed.” And about that time some moke who worked there was passing by on his way somewhere, so the fellow asked him. This guy eyeballed the tire and said, “I don’t think that goes all the way through.” He spun 180° and went back to get a pair of pliers. Then straddling the tire, grabbed the spike and pulled. He was right, it didn’t go all the way through. It was a small screw embedded in a tire block almost perpendicular to the tire. It looked like a spike because the screw had been worn in half so I was seeing almost a cross section of it.

The guy in the work shirt with his name over the pocket handed me the screw piece, slipped the pliers into his back pocket and continued in the direction he was headed before we interrupted him. I looked over at the cashier and asked, “What do I owe you?” He said, “Nothing, don’t worry about it, we’ll get you next time”

I said, “Thanks. See you in 2026.”

May

Phone Charger

Wednesday the 28th

Unlike the last time we went on a driving vacation, we didn’t forget the phone on our way out of town, we forgot the charger for this trip to Texas.

We were in Alabama or Arkansas or somewhere when we noticed that the cell phone battery indicator had only one of four segments of the battery filled in. At the next gas station stop I perused the typical spin stand of cell phone accessories looking for a Samsung phone charger. There was one on the bottom level in a dusty plastic clam-shell that was priced at $15, so I bought it, along with our usual assortment of snacks and drinks.

That night at the hotel I pulled the charger out of its plastic and hooked it up to the phone. The Verizon logo flashed on the outside display and then went off, so I assumed it was charging up. We thought nothing else about it until several days later when the phone wouldn’t turn on. I tried the charger again. I tried it both ways, wall socket and USB from the laptop. Each time I plugged it into the phone the logo would briefly come on and the display would then go black.

We were in Natchitoches, LA and they had a Wally World, so we drove across town to get a charger there, this time not only looking for a Samsung charger, but one that was advertised to fit a Gusto 2 (SCH-U365.)I couldn’t find one that listed our phone, but I did find that they had one of our exact model phone for sale for $11.88.

So for three bucks lees than the first purchase, not only did I get the absolute correct charger for our phone, I got a spare battery and in case I decide to kidnap a co-worker’s dead palmetto bug again I’ve got an untraceable to me burner phone.

June

Come On In

Tuesday the 17th

We left for Florida
right after work on Friday. We had everything all packed up, so all we had to do was change out of work attire, fill up the insulated lunch box and hit the road. About a block away from home, as Donna ran through her internal checklist, she realized that she didn’t have earrings on. I offered to turn around, she initially refused as she had some packed in the suitcase, but then changed her mind. I circled the block and waited in the car while she ran inside to get a pair of earrings. A minute or so later out she came and off we went.

Fast forward to Monday evening around 7:00PM; as I pull into the driveway, returning home from Florida, we notice that the garage door is already up. Uh oh! Either thieves have broke in by hacking our number keypad on the outside and our house is empty of “valuables” or I just forgot to close the door that second time and the worst that has happened is a neighborhood stray cat has made a home in the laundry room. I went inside the house to check and see if the burglars were still there and Donna checked the mail. Her search was more fruitful, she found some mail and I found nothing missing.

It is nice to live in a quiet neighborhood in a small town.

Oh, and when Donna went to unlock the front door to go for her evening walk tonight, that’s right, you guessed it, it was already unlocked.

July

Are You A Member Of Our Loyalty Club?

Monday the 28th

Even though we did the weekly grocery shopping on the way home from Florida yesterday, we didn’t get the a menu planning done for tonight. When we couldn’t agree on what we wanted to fix, we opted to do the easy thing and go get something to eat.

Donna has been on a soup kick recently, so she suggested a trip to Atlanta Bread Company just down the street where they do a pretty good French Onion. I agreed, but suggested getting it to go, so we could pretend we weren’t eating out. She ordered a cup of the French Onion soup and a half a cubano panini. I selected a whole NY Hot Pastrami sandwich.

When the cashier asked, “Are you a member of our Loyalty Club?” I said, “Sure.” and gave her our home phone number. She scrunched her nose up and said, “It’s not coming up.” We tried the number again with the same results. So I gave the 9 digits to her again. “That’s funny,you are not showing up.” I say, “That can’t be, we just used it last Thursday night in Statesboro, GA.” Donna chimes in with, “That was a Panera Bread.”

Nice job, that’s like trying to use a your CVS loyalty card at Walgreen’s or your My Lowes card at Home Depot.

August

New To Math Too

Sunday the 17th

Friday night Donna and I ran the route for the MMC’s Bug Splat Rally that we were spearheading on Saturday night. The drive would start after dinner at Apizza di Napoli in Aiken and end up at a Sonic in North Augusta after 34 miles of zigging around. Most of the roads we were taking people on were familiar to us, but 2 of the dozen or so on the route, we had never been on before. We wanted to be sure there wasn’t any construction or surprises for us to stumble upon while leading a group of Miatas. Plus, we needed to make sure we’d recognize the turns onto the ones we had never driven on before.

When we finished our dry run up at the Sonic we thought maybe we would sample a bit of ice cream. You know, just to be sure the quality hadn’t suffered any since last year. Rather than sit in the car when at Sonic, we usually sit at the table and chairs out front where it is better for people watching. Both ordering stands had a group in front of them and after listening to both sets try and figure who wanted what for a while, our lack of patience for this sort of ineptitude from small family units presented with so many choices at dining establishments that they are overwhelmed, took hold and we left.

There was a Bruster’s Ice Cream stand just up the road, so we thought we’d give them a shot at our frozen dessert business. We got lucky there as the family grouping was already sitting about with their ice cream in their hands. Donna ordered a small chocolate in a cup and I ordered a small Almond Chocolate Coconut in a cup. Our young server ducked to the left, rang us up on the cash register and reported back with the total, “That’ll be six dollars and twenty-four cents.” I didn’t have enough ones to make it to six, so I handed her a ten dollar bill and said, “Wait, I’ve got some change.” I added a quarter to her hand.

I could see this young woman through the window as she struggled to make the change. She picked up some bills. She put some back. She picked up some coins. She put some back. Donna looked at me and asked, “What’s taking so long.” “She’s making change,” I replied with a lopsided grin on my face. She gave a look that I knew was going to lead to more anxiety for our hapless ice cream server, so I held up my hand to hold her back for a while. Server came back to the window with 3 one dollar bills, two quarters and a penny. Both of as said, “That’s not right,” at about the same time. She called someone over to help her out. After a minute or so she came to the window and handed me four ones and a penny. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m new here.”

New to math too, I thought, but didn’t say.

September

Happy Birthday From Officer Krupke

Saturday the 27th

It is actually fall around here, so for my birthday we were going to drive down to Folly Beach in an attempt to get a Moss Motoring Challenge photo of their fishing pier and to get some seafood for lunch on the beach.

We started our road trip today in the usual way, by going to the local DD and getting my coffee and Donna’s hot chocolate, when we left the parking lot it got slightly unusual. It was early, so there was very little traffic on the 5 lane Whiskey Road and it was still dark, so picking the spot to exit was easy. I waited out the two cars coming from the left that were close together and there were two more coming from the right that had a enough separation to get between, so I swung left, out between them and got in the far right lane because I was turning right at the next intersection about 200 yards away.

As I stopped at the light and prepared to make a right on red, that second car that I had got in front of, pulled to a stop behind me. It was a white car and I instantly recognized the headlight signature as that of a Dodge Charger, which probably meant one thing, city cop.

My blinker was on and the car behind me put his on. I turned right and moved to the left turn lane in preparation for my next turn. Sure enough the white Charger followed in step and when he got in the left lane, he lit ’em up. I hung another left into the back parking lot of the quick oil change place there.

We were in the Miata with the top down and as the officer approached the car, Donna “helpfully” told him it was my birthday and it was her fault we were going this way as she forgot something at home. I think our LEO was more nervous than I was because as he tried to explain why he was pulling me over he was stumbling over his sentences and was a little confused as to where I came from when I got on Whiskey Rd. He did get out that the reason we were gathered here together was that when making a left turn onto a multi-lane road you should enter the leftmost lane first before moving into the right one.*

I handed him my license, insurance card and registration and as he walked back to his car he said, “If everything checks out OK, I’ll probably send you on your way.” Well, of course everything checked out, so our friendly young officer reiterated why he pulled my over, then explained he was just giving me a warning, which generated the piece of paper he was giving me. He then wished me a Happy Birthday, told me to drive safe and sent me on my way.

I blurred out my driver’s license number in the image above (I didn’t do any of the rest of the info as it is already readily available elsewhere on this site.) I did change the name of our police officer** and blurred out his badge number as well.

*South Carolina Code of Laws, SECTION 56-5-2120. Required position and method of turning. Paragraph (b), Left turns … Whenever practicable the left turn shall be made to the left of the center of the intersection so as to leave the intersection or other location in the extreme left-hand lane lawfully available to traffic moving in the same direction as the vehicle on the roadway being entered. I’m guessing that if I was to get a ticket it would be for a violation of that bit of very confusing legalese. It is the only thing in the vehicle code that I can find that is remotely on point.

**to the first name that popped into my head, it’s from West Side Story in case you were wondering.

October

Like A Virgin, Touched For The Very First Time

Thursday the 16th

Every Thursday for the last few months Donna’s sister Sandy, her husband Paul and Paul’s mother Dottie have had a masseuse come to their house to give each one of them a massage. Because Sandy & Paul are in Miami right now leaving Donna and I to “babysit” 99-year old Dottie, Donna took Sandy’s place and I got Paul’s spot.

Back in the day when I was cycling a lot, a few of the guys in the bicycle club swore that after
doing a long ride a massage was just the ticket to work out the kinks. After every Aiken Bicycle Club’s yearly century rides and at most other 100 mile fund raiser rides offered by other cycling clubs there was a masseuse available. I was only mildly curious as to what a massage would accomplish, plus I’m kinda cheap, so I never took advantage of the offer.

As payment for our “babysitting”, Dottie offered to pay, so I was finally getting that massage and I wouldn’t have to ride a bicycle 100 miles to get it. This was nothing like the 20 minute long concentrate on the legs post century massage though, but a full 1-hour deep tissue massage. Well, what did I think? It was not unpleasant. It was not the be all to end all in muscle relaxation either.

It is eight hours later and I still feel a little beat up in a few places. Maybe it is because Kelly used the same amount of pressure on me, a classic ectomorph that she uses on Paul, who is more of a mesomorph and 30 pounds heavier. Or maybe I am just like Mac from that old Charles Atlas body building ad that was on the inside back cover of the comic books of my youth.

November

51,000 Transponders

Sunday the 9th

Friday, a dozen or so miles north of Yeehaw Junction on the Florida Turnpike, the Purple Whale rolled through its fifty first thousandth mile.

For the first time, in the dozens of times we’ve used the Florida Turnpike to travel to or from Palm City, we didn’t have to stop at a toll booth. We motored right on through, only slowing a bit. After listening to BIL Paul tell us of all the advantages of using SunPass for so long we finally decided to take the plunge.

There are two kinds of SunPass devices, a sticker for you window for $5 or a transponder for $20. We went with the more expensive kind for two reasons, the transponder has suction cups and can be transferred to different vehicles (and we have two) and Paul said that it would come with your twenty bucks back loaded on the device. Well, at least we got that portability thing. Maybe brother-in-law bought his transponder real early in the process or during a special promotion to get the $20 back on the unit at purchase time, we did not.

We did see, in our two trips using it, the other benefit he mentioned, saving a percentage off the cash toll price. On our trip home the toll using the SunPass was $11.04 instead of the usual $13.50. Plus we had saved another three bucks on a round trip to Miami. This means we are over a quarter of the way towards “saving” money using SunPass.

December

3rd Drone’s A Charm

Thursday the 11th

The other day when I broke my 2nd quadcopter in as many years after about a total of 2 hrs of “flying” both of them, I figured I would never get my Drone Driving License. I was moping around the house with a big ol’ sad face on when my wife took pity on me and said, “Oh, all right, go ahead and buy another one.” “But this is it,” she said, “three strikes and you’re out.”

I headed back to Amazon to go shopping. Last week when I bought a passel of K-Cups from them, they offered me a 30 free trial of Prime, I took them up on the offer. I was kind of surprised by this, because they did the same thing back in August when I bought the Kindle and I used it for 29 days then cancelled. I’ll do the same thing again, but first this will solve my having to wait a week or so for my next magnificent flying machine. All I needed to do is look for a little check mark under an item signifying that it was Prime Ready and two days later it would be here.

Started out looking to get another one identical to the recently my deceased drone, but couldn’t find it for the same low price and get it before Christmas too. Then I stumbled on a different model that already came with a built in propeller guard, something that should be very helpful with my spastic flying skills, for a little more than what the Cheerson CX-10’s were going for, the BangK CX-13.

The new one looks about the same size, i.e. real small, until you place them side by side. The CX-13 measures 1-7/16″ between motor shafts making the old broke CX-10 at only 1-1/4″, about 25% smaller. I’ve had it a couple days now, flown it quite a bit, crashed it quite a bit too, and I haven’t bent a single prop. Tomorrow I may venture outside where I have more room so I don’t have to panic and kill the throttle after drifting only a couple feet of course.’, ‘Best of 2014’, 0, ”, ‘publish’, ‘open’, ‘closed’, ”, ‘best-of-2014’, ”, ”, ‘2017-02-28 18:27:22’, ‘2017-02-28 23:27:22’, ”, 24448, ‘http://www.mr-miata.net/?page_id=17967’, 14, ‘post’, ”, 0);

January

Free Sink

Tuesday the 15th

When we first picked out the counter tops at Lowe’s, Cabinet Guy told us that if we did buy it from them we would get a free sink. Cool.

Then the Contractor told us that we should shop around for the counter top because we could get something a lot cheaper from a local granite place. Well he was right, it was a lot cheaper, but that was mainly because we were looking at a different grade of granite. If we did buy from the local shop we would have to buy our own sink for $175. That figure is not a lot compared to the stone, but every little bit saved…

This last time at Lowe’s we looked at the lowest priced granite and it was only $2 more a square foot than the local guy and it was sealed with a 15 year warranty, so decided to just get it there. Plus the sink was free.

After about the third time of hearing that the sink was free, I muttered just loud enough to be heard, “It ain’t free, it’s in there somewhere.” Cabinet Guy responded that it was free as long as we picked from one of three standard sink styles.

When we got home I put the Lowe’s quotes inside our little remodeling folder and removed the counter top quote from the local guy. Before tossing it I looked it over and noticed the price break down; the sink was $175 and the sink cut out charge was $100. I looked back at the one from Lowe’s and sure enough the sink was listed at $0, but the sink cut out cost was $280.

Free sink my ass.

February

Easily Distracted

Tuesday the 12th

Last night we went to Kroger to stock up on some more restaurant gift cards. There were two reasons for this, one, no kitchen, so for the next couple of weeks we will be dining out fairly often and two, they were offering 4x fuel points. So the $100 spent equated to 400 points or an additional 40¢ off a gallon of gas above what we normally get from our weekly shopping.

A big disappointment was that they didn’t have any DD cards, because we eat there at least twice a week we burn through those $15 cards pretty quickly. As we were checking out I suggested that take out twenty in cash too as I only had two dollars in my wallet. Donna agreed. As I was going through the motions of checking out, Donna asked the employee manning the area did they have any Dunkin Donut gift cards in the back or somewhere. I paused and waited until the attendant got back, empty-handed, to finish checking out. I gathered up the gift cards and their accompanying bits of paperwork and we left.

This morning when we got to work Donna asked for a dollar so she could go to the machine and get a hot chocolate. When I opened my wallet to give it to her all that was in there was just two dollars. Uh, oh, I instantly knew what happened. I was so caught up in the DD card process that I never grabbed the twenty out of the dispenser. Dumbass!

Donna saved the day by calling the store, and lucky us the cashier noticed the lonely twenty dollar bill and turned it in to the service desk. Retrieving the money after dinner this evening was quite an adventure and if I get around to it, a post in of itself.

March

We Almost Out Of Texas

Wednesday the 6th

This morning we all went for a couple of short walks near the lodge as we were marking time until Donna’s oldest brother Jim arrived. Jim was taking a day off from work in Dallas to come down and see everyone.

When he arrived we all piled into two cars and drove the 20 miles to the Rio Grande Village in the southeast part of the park. We had a picnic lunch and then took a short walk over to the boat ramp to actually stare off at another country, Mexico. Jim, myself, James and Madilyn tried to incite an international incident by throwing rocks at the other side. The river is only about 25 yards wide here and though several of our group landed rocks in the Mexican half of the river and I managed to strike land twice, no Federales returned fire.

While we were eating a roadrunner made a brief appearance near us, but accurately judging our maximum firing distance, or he was watching us throw stones at Mexico earlier, came no closer than 25 yards.

After our picnic we drove over to the Boquillas Canyon Overlook to gaze again at the Rio Grande and from this height some of its flood plain. At the parking area there were a half dozen or so large rocks covered in trinkets made from beads, pieces of Fool’s Gold and painted walking sticks in a sort of self-service Mexican souvenir stand. When we looked across the river, there were the artists and their horses sitting in the shade.

Prior to 9/11 there was an unofficial border crossing here. The Mexicans from the small isolated village of Boquillas, not too far from the overlook, would row American park visitors over to the other side to sell them these same type of items, before bringing them back across. Since then the crossing has been closed and Americans are not allowed to cross the border except via the official crossings a hundred miles east or west of here. I’m guessing there is a sort of understanding between the park rangers and the villagers that as long as they are not actually on American soil actively selling these items it is OK. And they let the Mexicans ride across the river in the morning to set up “shop” and then back to collect their unsold wares and proceeds each evening.

April

Straight Hat As A Metaphor For A Baseball Season?

Monday the 22nd

My Red Sox Nation Citizenship package arrived in the mail Saturday. This year instead of the basic Starter Level package I usually purchase for $15, I doubled my investment and went for the All Star Level. For the extra dough I got some stuff that was cool, a 12″ x 18″ page full of Red Sox Fathead decals that I can stick various places and a Red Sox Yearbook. And some not so cool, a catalog of Red Sox themed merchandise to buy and a small drawstring bag made sort of like a sweatshirt or a small sweatshirt turned into a sort of drawstring bag.

But the real draw was the free hat. Regular readers who are more obsessed with my life than I am will remember that last year’s Red Sox hat only stayed in the head wear rotation until May before being donated to Goodwill because the sox were hanging crooked. This year’s RSN hat has its socks dangling at the proper angle and this season is looking good so far.

May

Ship To Store (Act 3: The Final Curtain)

Monday the 13th

As part of the kitchen remodel that spread out over nearly the whole house we needed some new living room curtains. We shopped online and found some we like at Lowes. We went to the store and they had them on the shelf, but only in the 84″ length and we needed 95″. To make sure these were what we wanted we bought one panel in 84″ to take home and hang.

We like ’em. I go to Lowes.com to order 6 panels (it’s a big window) and there are 3 delivery methods, Store Pickup, Lowe’s Truck Delivery & Parcel Shipping. Store Pickup is free. Parcel Delivery is for whatever reason grayed out and listed as unavailable. Truck Delivery is $79!, roughly half the total cost of the 6 panels themselves. Guess which one we “chose?”

A week or so later when we get home from work there are 2 messages on the answering machine. Both are from Lowes, 2 different voices, letting us know our order can be picked up. It was the night of the monthly MMC meeting and this month it was in Aiken, so we decided to leave a little early and pick up our curtains beforehand.

We go right to the service desk as that was how it worked last time. I tell the woman behind the counter, “I’m here to pick up an internet order.” She asks for my phone number and she enters it in the register. She then looks behind her into the cage on the wall. She looks back at the register. She glances at the phone. Back at the cage. The register. The phone. She sighs. She picks up the phone and pages a Mrs. Someone. We wait. She takes a couple steps back and glances at the cage again. A guy shows up behind the counter. She looks at him. She looks at the register. She looks at the phone. Donna corners the second individual and wants to know what is taking so long to retrieve our order. He says he’ll check and off he goes. We wait some more.

The person who was paged finally makes an appearance and we let her know that this is unacceptable. We had two separate calls telling us our order was in, but no one can seem to find it. She apologizes and says, “I’ll go see what is happening.” We wait. The original woman behind the service desk is looking nowhere and especially not at us. I’m so mad at this point if they showed up with the curtains now I might just walk back around to the other side of the service desk that is marked RETURNS and get my money back. Instead we leave the store, leaving who knows how many people looking for our curtains, so we can make the Miata Club meeting.

An hour and a half later we return to Lowes and the woman behind the counter recognizes us and picks up the phone right away. She says someone will be bringing our curtains right out. We wait. Every minute, minute and a half, we would hear a conversation coming down an aisle our way and each time it wouldn’t be our curtains. It took over 5 minutes before they finally arrived. We left very disappointed in the experience vowing to shop at Home Depot from now on. And swearing we won’t ever do the
ship to store thing ever again.

June

Magic Antenna?

Thursday the 20th

No combination of rabbit ears, pre-amplifier and fancy Leaf antenna will allow me to pull in the signal from the local FOX affiliate reliably, which is supposedly closest tower to me. This is not really a big deal until football season rolls around in a couple of months when FOX carries one to two games every Sunday. In the mean time I have not given up hope of finding a do-it-yourself HDTV antenna that will do the trick. Last week I stumbled on a neat idea on instructables that looked like it was worth a shot, the Fractal Magic DIY HDTV Antenna. I even had all the pieces needs to make this baby in house.

So yesterday evening and tonight I put this magic antenna together. With just the Mohu Leaf hooked up we get the big 3 networks and their 4 total sub-channels for a total of 7 channels, with the Fractal Magic DIY HDTV Antenna – only 4. CBS and it two extra “really old TV show” channels were gone.

The antenna was magic alright, it made 2 sheets of plain paper, a 10×18 inch piece of poster board, 10 feet of speaker wire stripped of its insulation, a couple of crimp connectors, 6 foot piece coax cable and 2 hours of my time disappear.

July

Bird Feeder

Monday the 8th

When we eat at DD we always sit at the “bar” that is at the window looking out at the parking lot. It is always fun to watch people park as they try and fit their cars in parking spaces, especially getting an SUV into a spot that has cars in both adjacent spots. We also get to watch the resident sparrows swoop down on the crumbs left behind from dropped food around the two outside tables on the sidewalk.
One day last week we were in the Miata and had it parked in a spot in the front. We were early enough that the car traffic was light, but there were a couple brown sparrows dining on the sidewalk. I guess they finished everything on the ground because at one point they hopped up on the lower lip of the mouth the Emperor. They sat there looking inside the mouth inquisitively for a second or two before disappearing into it and coming right back out.
They couldnt go far because I have a mesh grill in there to sort of protect the AC condenser. But that is only as far as they wanted to go, they were picking at the dead bugs collected in the grill.
By the time I thought thatd be a cool picture and I grabbed the cell phone, then fumbled around trying to figure out how to take a picture, someone pulled in next to the Miata and spooked them off.

August

I’m Insulted

Thursday the 8th

Early this week they put clear lucite sign holders on every single table in the cafeteria. Inside each one is a flyer calling for volunteers to sign up to be a First Responder. Every one in Maintenance is already trained to do this, but they are looking for a few more good (wo)men. They also put one on each of the six tables in what management refers to as the break area out front or what everyone else calls the smoking area.

For the last couple of days they have been putting up wall mount versions in every restroom. There is one on the wall just above every urinal and one on the inside of each stall door. I figured they were going to fill them with more of the please be a First Responder sheets, but they remained empty. Until this morning.

The ones in the Men’s Room out in the Turned Parts Department, near where my cubical is, had advertisements in them this AM. One of the urinals had a Viagra ad over it, while the other had one for Vesicare and each stall had an Ex-Lax ad, one vintage and very modern.

Once word got out about them, people were going in just to look, conversations ensued as to whether they were for real or was someone just having fun. Seriously, how could it have been anything but a joke. I know sales are slow right now, but would the Valve Store really try and make up some of that money by selling ads on restroom walls?

I’m insulted that no one asked me if I had anything to do with it…

September

Coupon & Self-Checkout Fun

Thursday the 12th

After dining out this evening we stopped into Kroger to pick a couple of items we needed. Donna had a coupon to get a dollar off if we bought 3 bottles of Suave body wash, so those were among our 10 or so items. There was a speedy lane open, but I prefer the DIY approach of the self-checkout.

When I got most of the way done scanning, Donna headed over to get the attendant to scan the coupon. The attendant who wrangles the 6 self-checkouts was not inside the self-checkout area near her console. When she was interrupted from visiting with another Kroger employee, she leaned into the area and asked had we purchased the required 3 items to satisfy the coupon (had she been near her station it would have been self evident that we had.)

As she made her way around the counter to get to the screen, she paused to chat with a customer in the speedy 10 items or less line briefly. Then once she got towards her screen at the station she started helping another customer who asked for help after we did, because that customer was closer to her station. After she helped that other customer she finally started to scan our coupon.

She tried at least a half dozen times, pausing between scans to tilt her head in wonderment that her wand wouldn’t do its magic, because the coupon just wouldn’t register. By this time we felt we had waited a little too long to make it worth it for saving a dollar on our order, so we abandoned our bagged items and headed for the door. As we walked by the attendant’s station, on the other side of the counter, I heard her apologize about it taking so long as she looked in the direction we should have been. It was too late, we kept on going right out the door, but not before I snatched the coupon back out of her hand.

If we recall correctly, this isn’t the first time we have had trouble redeeming a coupon at the self-checkout, so when we go back tomorrow to get the things we need we’ll probably use the 10 items or less aisle.

October

Dunkin Donuts Gift Cards

Thursday the 17th

When Kroger started selling gift cards they stocked 2 hooks full of the Dunkin Donut $15 cards and one of the $30 denomination. We bought them there, used them up and then tossed the empty card away because we could get double the fuel points for each dollar spent on them in the store. About six months ago, one of the hooks of $15 DD cards was replaced by some cards for the Cheesecake Factory. The next month the $30 hook fell to the same fate.

The fifteen dollar DD cards on the remaining hook became hard to find, as soon as they were displayed, they disappeared. We asked a couple of times at the service desk how come they had trouble keeping the cards available and our answer was always, “We stock what the warehouse sends us.” About six weeks ago they just stopped filling the slot entirely (at least they didn’t add another Cheesecake Factory row.) After having to use our debit card for a couple weeks for our breakfast purchases we finally broke down and bought a gift card at the Dunkin Donut store and have been refilling it online ever since.

Our fair city has two Dunkin Donut stores and you can’t buy a gift card for them at Kroger. If you want a $25, $50 or $100 gift card to the Cheesecake Factory you have plenty to choose from, but to use one of them you will have to drive 150 miles to Charlotte, NC or Atlanta, GA.

November

Blimp!

Thursday the 28th

We are visiting Donna’s sister and family in Florida and this morning we told them we were going for a walk. Well, we went for a WALK! Needing a couple of things and with the only place open on Turkey Day around here that would carry all of them being a CVS, off we trekked to a shopping center a little over 2-1/2 miles away. As a bonus, there is a DD nearby for mid-trip refreshments.

We were about a half a mile from their house on the return trip when I heard a distinctive buzzing sound, I knew instantly what it was, a blimp. The sound of one flying is very unique and to me unforgettable, but maybe that is because of my first experience of hearing one.

Back in my high school years the favored hang out of my friends and I was behind a junior high school just down the street from one friend’s house. There was a slight hill at the end of the big open field that served as the school’s soccer field. We would sit near the top, close to the tree line, surveying what we considered our kingdom.

Many a summer night was spent laying back on the hill consuming purloined beers and smoking cigarettes while solving the important issues of the day. One particular evening after three of us had finished off a couple of hand rolled smokes we heard this strange buzzing sound. First we each looked at each other to make sure we weren’t the only one hearing it. Then we started speculating wildly as to what it might be, there was of course the typical paranoia, but soon that changed thoughts of a possible UFO.

As the noise peaked, the stars that were bright in the sky above us started to disappear. Soon, nearly all the sky above us was black and the buzzing was deafening. We knew any minute now that we would be beamed into the space ship and be confronting little green men.

Suddenly the sky erupted into daylight as thousands of LEDs started to spell out a word – G……O……O……D……Y……E……A……R

December

Root For The Ol’ Home Team

Thursday the 26th

When it came to draft day for the EZEFFL back in August, a couple of the owners wouldn’t be available to be at the draft. Those that couldn’t make it, made arrangements for a substitute, who had their proxy to pick players. Some had elaborate matrices on who to pick for their stand-ins, while others instructed they use the pick the next best available player strategy.

One of the owners who couldn’t be there, got Donna to pick his team. They both have New Orleans in their roots, so his and her number 1 priority was the drafting of Drew Brees. Along with that, he had a couple of specific requests and a collection of pick the best available of this position in this round selections. As there luck would have it, Donna managed to make all his asked for picks. Because of this, she granted herself the unofficial title of Director of Player Development for the Swamp Rats SR team. So during the season, right after she asks me how my team is doing on Sundays she asks about them.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning of this week. After a mediocre 4-8-1 season I got hot in the playoffs and won three games in a row advancing the Purple Whales into the Championship Game. My opponent is the team with the league’s best regular season record at 10-3, the Swamp Rats SR.

When I asked Donna who would she be rooting for this coming Sunday when the Whales square off against the Rats in the Lenio Bowl for all the marbles, she replied, “I’ll let you know.”

January

Yo te Mostraré el Mío

Friday the 13th

We rode the tandem to work today and had the afternoon off, so as I gathered up Donna to go change for the ride home, I overheard Trina, another planner in the cubicle behind her, say to Ian, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Now, taken out of context in an office environment, you just might wonder what was going on there…

Fridays at ASCO for lunch we get Mexican brought in. We don’t have a cafeteria, but the sister of a woman who works on a Assembly line fixes the food for delivery to the Valve Store(R). It started small, just the folks that work on her line, but once word got out how good the food is, especially the green chile sauce, it has branched out to all around the plant.

Us office types give our order to Ian, one of the Assembly Engineers, who gathers the money and gives the order sheet to the woman. I was kind of bummed that I missed out on the Mexican this week as one of the offerings was a burrito with white rice and the green chile sauce on the side and this is my favorite. Apparently Trina is fond of the sauce as well, because her container was not full to the top. She was complaining to Ian about the quantity of it and he must have been dismissive of her concern. So that is why she said, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

February

Spel Cheker

Monday the 27th

We had breakfast at DD this morning and after walking out on Saturday morning because no one wanted to wait on us in a timely manner we were glad to see the little older woman behind the counter. She, unlike most of the younger kids that man the register, can enter our highly complex order* without hunting for several seconds looking for the right button to push. Not only that, she seemed to be the only person in the store and we got our food and drinks in a more timely fashion than usual.

On her badge, there was a label, right under her name with her title, SHEFT LEADER.

*Small Coffee, cream & sugar
Small hot Chocolate, no whipped cream
Coffee Cake Muffin
Plain Bagel, toasted with butter

March

A Tale of Four Circle Ks

Saturday the 10th

Today was the monthly MMC breakfast run and our destination was the same place as it has been for the last two March’s, the North Augusta Optimist Club Pancake Breakfast at the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.

The event organizer zipped off an email yesterday to remind everyone of the event and she listed the meeting location as “at the Circle K at exit 5.” That very same email said we would depart from there at 8 AM sharp.

When Donna and I arrived at Exit 5 we noticed that there was a Circle K [1] just past the Interstate on the northeast side, but it looked a little hard to get to and there were no Miatas visible. We were about 15 minutes early for the departure time, so we passed right by to grab a geocache that was just up the road. As we turned down the little road to get the cache we realized there was a Circle K [2] right at the corner. No Miatas there either.

We found the cache and after signing the log we looked into Circle K [2] again, it was now 5 minutes before the planned departure and there were still no Miatas there. Donna wondered out loud that our event planner must have meant Exit #1 as that is where we had met the last two years. We decided that if there were no Miatas at Circle K [1] we would just head on to the church via Exit #1.

Just about then we noticed a Circle K [3] on the northwest side of the Interstate and there were two Miatas there. We pulled in. As the six of us chatted while waiting for our event organizer to lead us to the church we all wondered about the number of Circle K gas stations here. We weren’t too concerned as our leader was slightly late last year, so maybe she would be this year too. At 8:05, with our stomachs growling in hunger, we all decided to do what Donna and I were going to do before we stumbled on them, go to the church via I-20 Exit #1

As we passed by the previous year’s meeting spot, Circle K [4] there were no Miatas there either. When we arrived at the church, there was our event leader and one other Miata Club person waiting for us. They had met at Circle K [4] and by 10 after eight when no one else had shown, they drove to the church.

The event has been on the Club calendar since the January planning meeting and it has always listed the meeting place as the Circle K gas station off I-20 Exit #1 on Martintown Rd. Our group of six didn’t read the Club Calendar because of the email reminder. The person who did meet at the correct Circle K didn’t read the Calendar or the email either, she just went to where we had met before.

Anyway, all’s well that ended well. We did get together, have some conversation, some good eats and the cost went to a good cause.

April

Counting

Thursday the 19th

We stopped at the bank on the way home to deposit some checks and get a bit of cash back. One of our co-workers is turning 60 this weekend and we thought it would be a cool thing to get 60 quarters, 60 dimes, 60 nickels and 60 pennies, place them in a small Mason jar to give him. We deposited a nice round number, the majority of the money, and got $40.63 cash back. Of that, we wanted the sixty of each coin thing.

The two tellers up front were busy, but the woman handling the drive-up said she’d take care of us. We explained what we wanted and Donna asked how much all those coins would be worth, the teller replied $24. (This should have been our first clue as to what we were up against, its $24.60.) She brought over the quarters first; a $10 roll with 23 more loose ones and off she went to get the next denomination. A roll of dimes and 10 more. Good. We gave her back the 3 extra quarters. The next trip back she brought us a roll of nickels and ten extra. Um, wait a minute; we need ten more nickels, that’s only 50 of them. The second to last trip back she brought the 10 nickels, a roll of pennies and 10 extra pennies. Pheewww, right. The final trip she brought us 3 pennies and the bills, which she started counting out for us beginning with the singles, $25.63, $26.63, $27.63, and five makes thirty-two sixty-three and ten makes…wait, wait, that’s not right. We tell her she just owes us sixteen dollars more, finally we get a single, a five, a ten and exit the bank.

Did I forget mention that there was a gap of about 2 minutes between each trip to the counter to bring us money? It was no wonder the fellow next to us wanted to close out his safety deposit box, I’m betting he is starting to keep his important stuff in a Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee can under his porch.

May

Who?

Saturday the 19th

While I was standing around waiting to talk to someone before being allowed to drive BMWs and its competitors, I got into a little conversation with a gentleman who was standing there. He was casually well dressed and I assumed a salesman just standing around waiting for the low hanging fruit of customers falling out of the new 3 Series after the drive.

We chatted a bit about cars with their rapidly expanding use of technology, especially BMWs. We then traded push button start/proximity key fob stories. Mine was about getting out of the car and “locking” it by pushing the button on the door handle, being greeted by a long loud chime and not being bothered by it. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I learned that the sound was indicating that the car was *not* locked. Turns out that you can not lock the car with a fob inside the vehicle. Mine was in my pocket, but Donna’s was in her purse which we were trying to lock in the trunk.

His story involved a friend who showed him how easy it was to start his new car, just get in and push the button. His friend then let him get in the car and push the button. Of course it wouldn’t start, his friend was standing outside a few feet from the car. Ha, ha.

After driving all the cars I had to fill out a little survey. I thought it was going to be about which car I preferred and why, but it was mostly about my satisfaction on how the event was run. Every question got high marks except the last; it asked did I enjoy meeting the Olympic athlete? I had to respond that he wasn’t there when we were there. So I asked the girl giving me the survey who was our athlete, she said, “Larry Myricks, former Olympic long jumper.” I was too embarrassed to tell her I had no clue who that was.

This morning while reading the paper I noticed a small photo and article about the BMW event. There in the photo was the guy I was chatting with and, you guessed it, he was identified as one Larry Myricks.

Knowing what I know now, I kind of wish I could get another chance at that conversation…

June

Forget Something?

Saturday the 23rd

The Emperor’s new shocks are just what his subjects needed. The last few months his majesty had a tendency to wander in his lane. I tried to tighten things up by adjusting the Koni Sport shocks firmer, but that just ended up making the car bouncy. We picked up the car on Tuesday, didn’t drive it on Wednesday, but Thursday and then again Friday we did. On both days, me first, then Donna, noticed a kind of metallic rattle from the left rear when hitting sharp bumps. Wondering if maybe someone didn’t tighten something up during the shock change, I decided to check it out today.

First thing I did was put the front of the car on jack stands. Front? Yeah, I also needed to change out that burnt out fog light bulb. And while it can be done while lying on your back under the car, but it is much easier to jack it up and take off the tires. Even though only one was out I opted to change them both because with my luck if I did just one, the other would fail within week. Seriously Sylvania, fifty-four bucks for a pair of SilverStar Ultra H1 bulbs?!? I went with $7.75 ea Plain Jane H1.

With the front done I jacked up the back end and pulled both of those tires. A visual and shake check revealed nothing loose or out of place under there, so it was time to check in the trunk. My first thought was to just flat out empty everything out of the trunk and take the car for a spin to see if the noise remained. As I pulled out the faux carpet covering the spare I noticed something, a 3/8 drive, 14mm deep socket sitting on top of the rim of the spare tire. That just might be it. Just in case I hunted around for anything else that didn’t belong and found nothing. Buttoned everything back up and did a quick run around the block running over every imperfection and manhole cover. Didn’t hear a rattle. Big test will be the next time we go over some railroad tracks.

I guess I’ll give Steve a call on Monday and see if he wants his socket back.

July

Welcome to Friday Harbor

Monday the 2nd

Today was a travel day. Brother Scott and family were headed back to Snohomish while Donna and I were headed to the San Juan Islands.

We drove the 141 kilometers from Colquitlam, BC to Anacortes, WA and got in line for the 2 o’clock ferry to Friday Harbor. We were towards the end of lane 6 and we waited while they were loaded lanes 1, 2 & 3 (4 and 5 were empty.) Watching all those cars drive on we were kind of worried we wouldn’t get on board and have to wait until 4:45 for the next ferry. Donna got out of the car to go ask the ticket seller lady if we would get on the current ferry. She asked Donna if we got a ticket of a number, “A ticket,” replied Donna. “You’re getting on this ferry,” came the reply. See, fortunately for us, the M/V Yakima holds up to 114 cars.

Because we had a late start (about 10:00AM, which seems to be the typical Northwest start time, both American and Canadian) we planned on eating on the ferry. Definitely not haute cuisine, but it would have to do. I opted for a sausage dog and Donna was in a quandary as what to get until she spotted soup pots on the other side of the serving line. She noticed they had one of her favorites, split pea soup, and asked me to pass her a small paper bowl that was located on my side of the line. I lobbed one to her, but it bounced right off her hand and landed smack inside the middle of the clam chowder tureen. Ooops.

Donna snatched the bowl out quickly, but the cashier sprang into action, she commanded the woman next to Donna to close the lid on the Clam Chowder and shouted to the kitchen, “We need another Clam Chowder on the line!” all the while giving Donna and I a withering look. Fortunately she only charged us for the single cup of soup and not a whole pot of the stuff.

August

Leaking Refrigerator

Saturday the 18th

Last Sunday after we had returned from a bike ride I was sitting peacefully on the living room floor watching Sports Center while I stopped sweating when I heard a scream from Donna in the kitchen. Thinking it was just a visit from another Palmetto Bug, AKA Giant Flyin’ Cockroach, I hurried into the kitchen with a rolled up magazine from the coffee table in my hand for a weapon. It wasn’t a bug, but a quickly forming puddle in front of the fridge.

I hightailed it out the front door and shut off the water to the house. This wasn’t the first time, nor even the second time this kitchen appliance has decided to water the floor. We soaked up the small lake with some towels and I pulled the refrigerator out from the wall. I went outside, turned the water on part way and ran back inside to see where it was leaking. It wasn’t coming from the inlet line right at the back of the fridge where it had the last two times, but it was coming from somewhere near the front. Back outside to turn off the water, return inside to look under the front. It looked like the water was coming from the back of the cylindrical water filter that is impossible to reach unless you can turn the refrigerator on its side (which I had no intention of trying.)

A plastic water line comes up through the floor with no shut off valve and attaches to the refrigerator using a 1/4″ Brass Compression Union, so we agreed the easiest thing to do would be to cap one end of the union and live with ice cube trays. Home Depot is only mile away so I drive over and look in the plumbing aisle and they have a 10′ row of hooks filled with 1/4″ plumbing fittings. There is one hook that is empty leaving a glaring blank spot. Yup, that is where the 1/4″ ends caps should be.

Two miles down the road was Lowes and they had plenty of caps. I wrapped some teflon tape around the threads and tightened up the cap. Outside, water on, inside and inspect the capped union. It was dripping pretty good into a bowl we had placed to catch the water. Outside, water off, back inside to unscrew the cap, wrap more tape and tighten the cap down again. Outside, water on, back inside. Drip, drip, drip, %$@*&. Outside, water off, back inside. Upon inspection I noticed the cap was butting right up against the cent hex portion of the union. That has got to be why it is leaking. I dig into the miscellaneous plumbing bits draw and come up with a chrome union that has a slightly longer distance between the end of the threads and the hex portion. Problem solved…or so I thought.

Wrapped the threads with teflon tape and tightened the cap as well as I could and there was just a touch of daylight between the cap and the hex. Outside, water on, inside and there is still a drip, drip, drip coming from the connection. Plan C is hatched. We have a few pieces of rubber diaphragm from some discarded ASCO valves that we had around for who knows what. I could cut a small diameter circle that just fits inside the cap and tighten the union up against that. That’s gotta work. Button everything up, go outside, turn on the water, come back inside to…drip, drip, drip.

At this point Donna and I discuss leaving a 5-gallon bucket next to the refrigerator to dangle the dripping water line into that could be emptied once or twice a week. I say let me try one last thing. Outside, water off, inside. I go back to my plumbing spare parts draw and get one of those white plastic compression rings. I remove the rubber diaphragm piece and put in the ring. This time I don’t tighten the cap ’til I can’t turn the wrench any more, instead I give it about 3 turns and stop. Outside, water on, inside. SUCCESS, NO DRIPPING.

As I’m buttoning everything up, I trace out the waterlines under the fridge and notice that after the union the hose went to the leaking filter fixture, then out of the filter and into the back of a single inlet valve with 2 outlets, one to the in-fridge water dispenser and the other to the ice maker. This gets me thinking, why don’t I just bypass the filter, that way we still can have a working ice maker. But the plastic 1/4 line going into the valve doesn’t have any screw type connections, just a plastic collar. I Google search the interwebs and find out this is some sort of quick connect mechanism. Cool.

So I get out an X-acto knife and blithely chop off the union that I have spent the last hour and a half trying to, and finally succeeding to, stop dripping. I pull on the collar, pull out the line from the filter, push the plastic inlet hose in to the valve, go outside, turn on the water, return to the back of the refrigerator and no drips.

September

Two Options

Monday the 10th

Late afternoon as I sat in my chair in front of the computer screen I could feel myself getting sleepy, I could use a little caffeine. I had two options, bottle of Coca-Cola or a cup of coffee. The Coke was to much fluid with too little caffeine, so coffee it will be. Now I had two more options, coffee from the machine for a quarter or a 50¢ premium cup of joe from the Keurig in the mail room. I thought it would be nice to go for the slightly better K-cup coffee. This created still another set of two options, I could get change for a buck to pay for the coffee or I could just stiff the company as the Keurig setup is on the honor system.

I’m too honest for my own good sometimes, so I headed to the change machine in the cafeteria. I selected my crispest dollar bill because sometimes these machines can be finicky. I feed it in and it got spit back out. I unfolded the 1/16″ turned down corner and tried again. It came back. I swapped which end of the bill that went in first and it came right back out again. I decided to try a different bill, one slightly more wrinkled, the machine clunked and whirred and sounded like it was going to work. It did. A shiny gold dollar coin dropped into the output dish. WTF!

I had two options, I could go get 4 quarters from accounting for the dollar coin to get that cup of coffee or I could forget about the whole thing and go back to my desk. I went back to my desk, as I was now wide awake after my walk up front and failed attempt to get
a couple of quarters.

October

Mmmmm, Pizza

Tuesday the 23rd

There is a new pizza place in town and we were excited to eat there, but our excitement was tempered some after our first visit.

We were pulling back into Aiken after our trip the Florida a couple weeks ago when I noticed that the long rumored wood fired pizza place was actually open. We took a sharp left turn into the parking lot. The place was sparsely, but tastefully, filled in with 5 booths along the window and 6 tables between the booths and the open kitchen. We stood in front of the entry area where the cash register was and waited to be seated. The girl behind the counter motioned us forward and explained we ordered there, paid, and then the food was brought to you. You want a drink? “Chose from these fine beverages,” as she sweeps her hand, Price Is Right style, across an array of Coca-cola products. I select a Coke Zero and Donna declines any, and asks for water. We are handed styrofoam cups and instructed where to get ice. It was right over along the side where you also get your silverware.

The pizza was great and worth the hassle. Sort of.

Turns out they had just opened their doors for a soft opening a mere 4 days before. Hopefully some of the rough edges of their service would get smoothed out as they get more experienced.

Well, we wanted pizza tonight, but weren’t real confident that they had worked out all the kinks, so I was sent over to pick up a pie to go. They did have a working soda fountain machine, so you get a wider selection of soft drinks and you don’t have to scoop ice out of a metal pitcher with a red solo cup. There are now four young girls working there instead of one, but the whole enter, stand around near the door while looking at the menu before ordering and shuffling off to a table thing still exists.

Unfortunately the greatness of a wood-fired oven baked pizza when placed in a cardboard box and driven 1.7 miles is severely diminished. Fortunately, it is still better than the frozen take home or chain delivered version. Barely.

November

Oh, You Temptress

Wednesday the 14th

Got a letter in the mail the other day from my old friends at SiriusXM. They are turning on my satellite radio for 2 weeks starting today, running until the 27th. Hoping that if I like it I will renew for 6 months for the low sum of $25 (of course that doesn’t include taxes and fees) They are also they are hoping that after the six months you will forget to call and cancel and the price will automatically jump to the regular price of $15+ a month.

I’m not really tempted as all they have to offer me is the one channel in their line-up I did like, The Coffee House. Sorry Ms. XM I’m already married to the lovely and eclectic RadioParadise and I’m quite happy. I will probably listen in for the fortnight though; a guy can listen, right?

December

Who Knew?

Saturday the 22nd

Last year after Christmas we picked out our Christmas cards for this year, sue us, we’re frugal. We found them at Kroger and there were 4 different sized cards in each box all with the same style. Donna sat down as she does every year to write out the cards and I place the stickers and stamps on each envelope.

Turns out there is a minimum size envelope that can be run through the automated sorter machines at Post Offices and one of the four sizes we mailed was too small. So over the last 4 days, we have gotten your cards returned to us with various notes attached on the envelopes from “This is too small and undeliverable” to “Additional 20¢ postage required.”

Instead of trusting the additional 20¢ we opted to buy regular stamps and place your cards in regular sized envelopes, so sorry for the lateness of our Christmas greetings.

We got back 9 cards and we think there was a total of 10 of the small sized envelopes. The missing one might have gone to Canada where we hope the natural politeness of the Canadians applies to their postal service and it will get delivered anyway. If it ends up going to somewhere in America, someone on our list will be greeted by a USPS delivery person ransoming the Christmas card for 20¢