Miata Moves

An Even Dozen

This afternoon, in spite of the snow flurries, I backed the CTBNL out of the garage and drove a short loop that included a stop for milk and to pick up our called in pizza. Even though it has been snowing for the past few days and is forecast to do the same for a couple more, the roads are perfectly clear. The bad news for any of the snow sticking is that the daytime temps and some of the nighttime have been above freezing. When the snow hits any sidewalk or street it melts on contact and what lands on the grass hangs around for a bunch of minutes before melting into the ground.

Today’s Miata drive was a mere 4.1 miles and was drive number 12 since mounting the all-season tires. Trip number eleven was 6 days ago for a whopping 6.3 miles while making a cannabis run and took the above photo. I forgot to annotate or even write a post from that day so that is why the count below jumped 2 places.

The intent was that the car would be driven at least once a week to keep the battery charged,, but I have fallen way off target. If I tally up the days from last October 28th to today you come up with 22-1/2 weeks and the number of Miata drives since then is an even dozen.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 12

 

Watching Family Trees Grow

Donna and I have been a big fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s show on PBS called Finding Your Roots for quite a while. While it is fun to dig into the family trees of actors, musicians and other famous people, it always come with an interesting history lesson that a member of their family was directly involved in.

Because we have a subscription to Peacock so we can watch bicycle racing we were pleasantly surprised to stumble on a show on it called Who Do You Think You Are?. It is pretty much the same thing as Finding Your Roots except is from NBC and sponsored by Ancestry.com.

The PBS version is a nicer shop to watch because there are no interruptions for commercials and it will usually follow both sides of the person’s lineage back. The NBC version usually just picks one branch to chase back and while we don’t get commercials (we subscribe to the add-free level), we still get the 4 or 5 interruptions, with the title cards where commercials were, along with some sort of “cliff hanger” before and the repeat of when we get back.

After watching the 6 episodes of Season 1 of the show on Peacock and because the copyright date at the end of the last show was MMXX (aka: 2020), Donna asked, “I wonder if they are going to make more?” So I headed off to IMDB to see if there were any more. Turns out there are 85 total episodes over 12 seasons of the show. Not only that, but the “season 1” we watched on Peacock was actually season 12, the last one listed on IMDB.

A bit of poking around led to the discovery (pun intended) that the show aired for several years on TLC. Wait a minute, I’ve seen TLC listed on the Discovery+ streaming service we also subscribe to. Sure enough, we could watch more of the show, Discovery+ had seasons 4 thru 10. We had already seen 12 on Peacock, so where were seasons 1,2,3 and 11?

Adding up the total episodes from each season listed on Discovery+ for seasons 4 thru 10 comes up at 49. I then counted the episodes on IMDB for seasons 4 thru 11 and the total episodes was 49 again. The seasons on IMDB and Discovery+ didn’t line up, the quantity of episodes per each season were different and some shows were listed in different seasons.

So I tried a third source, Wikipedia. I counted episodes from season 4 to 10, because this source called season 11 what IMDB called 12 and Peacock called season 1, confused, me too. Anyway Wikipedia’s total was 52! I went through the list and found the 3 missing episodes, J.K. Rowling, Minnie Driver and Jim Parsons.

Also on Wikipedia I learned that seasons 1, 2 & 3 of the show were originally broadcast on NBC. Hello? Peacock is the streaming arm of NBC, why aren’t they available there?

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 10

 

I’ve Been Blogging Too Long

It has been 8,108 days since I wrote my first blog post, Happy 2002, on January 1st of that year. That post consisted of 34 words. Since then there have been, not including this one, 6,047 more posts written with a total word count of 1,401,582 words. The average post word count overall is 232. Some posts have had a lot fewer words, including some with no words, just a picture. Others have been so wordy that you might not want to read the whole thing. The shortest post, That Hosting Company VIII cont., was a mere 4 words and the wordiest post, BMW Ultimate Drive for the Susan G. Komen Foundation was 2,374 words.

One of my and my wife’s favorite features on the blog is the “On This Date” widget in the right column. It is set up to throw a link to a couple of posts from the same date as when you are looking at the page. It is kind of fun to get tossed back into the past and see what was going on it 2002 or 2008 or 2014, etc.

Yesterday’s headliner in the past links was Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch that concerned a nail in the Miata’s tire, Netfix movies and the TV show LOST. There were seven links to other places on the web in the post and not a single one lead me to where they were originally when I wrote the post in 2008 or 15 years in the past.

The first 2 are for Netflix movies and I linked to them using a URL shortener TinyURL and the first movie’s text is just called “this movie” while the second one lists the title and it is called The Good German, but send me to a Netflix error page. The last five are basically just screencaps from the show LOST.

When I take these time jumps to the past me and there are links that don’t work for various reasons, no S at the end of HTTP, the site is no longer there, etc., I will usually try and fix them. This time there are seven and that many caused me to write this post, but because I’ve got nothing else to do and even though these new links may fall by the wayside as well in the coming years, I still went ahead and put my Internet Sleuth Hat on. So if you click on Sorry To Leave You In The Lurch you too can be whisked away to 15 years ago and get a peek into my 2008 mind.

P.S. The word count for this post is an above average 423…

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 9

 

Groundmiata Day

Backed the Miata out of the garage and it didn’t see its shadow so we are in for for an early spring no matter what Punxsutawney Phil says.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 7

 

Inspired By…

…those insipid Verizon commercials that I see while watching the NFL games on Sunday. Which, while bad, are not nearly as annoying as the multitude of Spectrum (wireless, business and whatever Spectrum One is) ads that they stick in practically every commercial break all dang day long.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 6

 

30,000 Jigsaw Puzzle Pieces

Out running around this afternoon because we had a few things to take care of. We needed to find a new dentist (possibly another separate blog post.) We stopped at Goodwill to restock our shelves with jigsaw puzzles. We have done 3 so far this year and only had about 4 left in the queue. So we picked up another eight. Seven of them had green tags which meant they were half off the $4.29 regular price. The eighth one we gladly paid full price for because it still had the factory seals intact, so we are sure to have one puzzle with all its pieces.

Those eight puzzles don’t total to 30,000 pieces, but on our way to our last stop, Wendy’s for Jr Frostys, the Mini rolled past thirty thousand miles.

On last Saturday the Miata got driven twice. Firstly I went and just randomly drive around for 6 or so miles because the poor car hadn’t moved for a couple weeks. Then later that day it was time to head down to the local cannabis stock to stock up on our “sleep” medicine – Wyld Elderberry Gummies.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 5

 

Gas ‘Em Up

It is coming up on the end of the month so we needed to finish using up our Fred Meyer Fuel Points that are left over from November. We filled up the Mini last Wednesday, but we still had a touch over 800 points to use or lose by the end of the month. so this morning I unplugged the battery tender, put up the top and drove to Freddy’s and bought 6.858 gallons and saved $5.49.

It wasn’t really snowing, I just added it to the picture for fun. The snow on the roadside is real and left over from the last snow storm.

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 4