I’ve started the South Carolina Post Office photo book. I liked yesterday’s photo collage thing so well I’m going to use it on the cover.
There is a sign on US17 in South Newport, GA that proclaims “The Smallest Church in America.” With our love of Roadside Americana we would have stopped to look at it even if there hadn’t been a cache nearby. Donna went inside and read a sign that said you can have your wedding here, it had better be a small party as it would be a tight squeeze with just preacher, bride, groom, best man and maid of honor. At 10′ x 15′ it is pretty small and I’d have a hard time fitting the Miata inside, but someone has found even a couple more churches littler – Smallest Churches in America.
We didn’t do a lot of extra driving today, Google says it is 197 miles from Pooler, GA to Lake City, FLORIDA and we only took 244 to get here. It was raining when the day started and for most of the trip it varied from drizzle to downpour until we entered the Sunshine State. Then true to it’s nickname the skies cleared and within a few miles we had the top down. Found 7 geocaches today, including our first one in Florida, DNF’d only one and that was another Florida first.
The Miata cockpit can be a very warm place for various reasons. It is not helped that the outside air vented into the cockpit is heated 15-20 degrees above the ambient outside air.
Several years back I decided to try and cool this air down. I used nearly every trick that I could unearth on the Miata Forums, ensure the heater flap closed fully, close holes in hood with tape, stuff a piece of insulation in the seal between cowl and engine compartment and tape over holes in firewall leading to the windshield cowl area, yet I remained defeated. On my own I thought maybe if I removed the big plastic piece over the inlet for the cabin air I might get some outside air directly in the system. This exposed a big opening directly to the vent system’s squirrel fan covered only with a wide mesh appropriately sized to keep out overweight house cats.
Having had to clean small leaves and pieces of pine straw out of that fan from inside the car a few times in my Miata owning career (major milestone approaching) I thought it would be a good idea to cover that up. The only thing I had handy was a spare 20×20 house HVAC filter. So I cut out a piece of the fiberglass mesh roughly the size of the opening, edged it in some maroon duct tape I had left over from covering the holes in the hood and taped it over the opening.
I change the “cabin air filter” out each time I change the oil which is about every 3 months. Do I breath cleaner air because of this filter, I doubt it, what with all the time I spend with the top down, but it must be doing something judging by how dirty it looks when I swap it out. If you look in the clean filter picture above you can see a bunch of debris to the right of the filter, I don’t think this would have made it into the fan without the filter because of the 2″ vertical wall of the opening (probably designed that way to keep out water), but stuff has made it in there before, probably due some sort of perfect storm scenario, and since I have been using this filter method nothing has made in there yet.
Time for the Emperor to dress up for Halloween….
I need to swap the bedroom set to the summer bedroom. I need to clean the pine pollen off the back deck. The garbage disposal in the kitchen has stopped working, so I need to take it apart and see what has jammed it up. I still have 12 days of vacation photos sort through.
So what did I do today? We went geocaching, on a Time Speed Distance Rally with the MMC, watched two episodes of West Wing and I’m listening to the FRS on the internet.
Oh, and I have to order a new battery for the Miata.
We finished a disappointing tied for fifth (out of 6 cars) in the rally this morning. We made one error due to a misleading statement from the rally masters misinterpretation and another because of a missed a clue. We felt that we had kept track of the time and mileage overruns, but even subtracting them from our totals we were still way over and lost big points. The capper was I worked a pounds to kilogram conversion the wrong way and blew the bonus question.
After lunch at the BBQ place one of the Club members had left his lights on and the car wouldn’t start. That is a picture of three of us trying to push start him. After about 4 or 5 attempts we gave up on that and went inside to see about borrowing some jumper cables. The jump start work its magic and off he went.
On the way home Donna and I stopped at a quick stop store in south Augusta to get a bottled water and a Sprite. When we got back in the car I turned the key and was met with silence. Hmm, did I have the clutch all the way in? Tried again and still nothing, but radio display flashed as I went by. The dome light was on, so I figured it wasn”t a dead battery. Funny thing was that with the ignition switch in the ACC position the radio display would flash and there was a clicking sound (like 2 relays) coming from the instrument cluster.
Pulled out the cell phone and called Rudy (AKA Clunk) (or is it Thunk) and his first thought was battery, even after I described the symptoms. He said hold on, I’ll get the truck and come take a look. Thirty minutes later Rudy and Patti pull up. He brought some wrenches so we could remove the battery and (for what I figured was for testing purposes) the battery out of his Mazdaspeed Miata. We swapped batteries and the car started right up. According to Rudy the newer batteries don’t give you any warning, like they used to in the olden days. now they just up and die. We called a couple places to see if they had any batteries for the car and one said we don’t carry ’em, called the dealer and the other had one, but for $90 and he was all the way on the other side of town. Rudy has his truck and Patti just got a new Lexus, so he let me babysit his battery for a while.
It is still going to cost a hundred bucks or so for the battery, but it won’t be a generic replacement from Autozone, it’ll be a quality Westco replacement that is designed for the Miata.
Thanks Rudy.
This post is coming to you from a fresh install of Windows 7 Beta Build 7000. I tried in vain along with millions of other geeks to download a copy from the Microsoft web site on Friday, but it didn’t happen because the biggest software company in the world wasn’t prepared for the onslaught.
Like anything on the internet there is always more than one way to skin a cat. I used bittorrent to snag a copy of the ISO that has been floating out there for a week or two already. I didn’t know how long this beta version would stay viable without an activation key, those too were supposed to be available on Friday too (at least 2.5 million anyway), but they were just as unavailable as the OS was. The interweb saved the day there too, someone left a comment on a LifeHacker thread that listed some of the keys that people had managed to get. I plugged the first one in and activated this copy. It is supposed to be good until August of this year. Probably by that time I will be needing a new PC and will get a legal copy with it instead of having to buy it out right.
Update: Just found out that Microsoft has decided that they screwed up and to make amends they have extended the availability of the Beta until January 24th and will not cap the activation keys at 2.5 million — Go Get It. You still have to have, or sign up for, a Windows Live ID (or an MSN Hotmail, MSN Messenger, or Passport account?)
I may go ahead and download a version from Microsoft too, just to be safe.
I had an idea earlier today on something to blog about, but it got lonely, so it left.
