Miata Washings

Decorated the cubical for the holidays today and even Captain Jack Sparrow got into the spirit. Remind me tomorrow to tell you about Dead Man’s Chest and overstock dot com.

I own about 48 DVDs of movies I love, movies that I could watch over and over again. Trouble is I hardly ever watch them again after the first time when the shrink wrap came off. If I have a spare couple hours and think, “Hey let’s watch a movie!” I’ll open the cabinet and start looking at titles to pick a flick, then as I look at the box I watch the whole movie in my head in about 15 seconds, well, I guess I don’t have to watch that one. Pick up the next box, fast forward the movie, put it back. I never get to put one in the player. I think what would work though is one of those 200 disc changers where I could have it play a movie at random, once it got going I know I would enjoy the movie.

I have about 48 movies in my Netflix rental queue. Whenever I add a movie it goes to the bottom of the queue. I could move it to the top, but that would displace movies that are already there and most likely they got to the top by slowly percolating up as I watched the ones ahead of them. I really want to see most of the movies that are in the queue about equally, so its kind of hard for me to pick which ones to see first. Somewhere a while back I took the time to mix the genres up so I wouldn’t have a bunch of the same kind of movie back to back. One comedy, one drama, one sci-fi, one independent, repeat. But over time my careful mix has become scrambled again. What I need is a Netflix Queue Randomizer. I wrote to customer service to ask if they though maybe they could add that to the queue page. The response was typical customer service, “Thanks for your interest. We will hand your idea over to the development team for further study. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Searched for Netflix Queue Randomizer with Google and got a bunch of hits. I found four different ways to accomplish my goal; 1) a script for Greasemonkey, 2) a script that you just copy into the address bar while on the queue page, 3) a small executable file that you could download and 4) a bookmarklet. I used the address bar script a couple of times to really shake things up for now, but I got the bookmarklet one all ready to try next. I ♥ the Internet.

Oh, yeah, I finally washed the Florida bugs off the front of the car. To make it even I washed the whole rest of the car too.

Washed the Miata tonight and my next door neighbor is probably thinking I wash the Miata once a week. For the last month or so, he’d be right, this was the fourth time since October 5th.

Today’s bath was to get the red dirt off the inside (and outside) of the wheel wells because tomorrow is a MMC event and I want to look pretty. On Tuesday Donna and I delivered dinner, from her department, to a coworker who is home recuperating from surgery. This person lives down a dirt road and it had rained most of Tuesday, so the driving surface was easily transferred from ground to car as we slid precariously around a couple bends in the road.

Tuckered out from a long day yesterday, we went to bed early and then got up early, thereby missing out on the whole “get an extra hour of sleep” thing. After a normal breakfast we went for a nice walk in Hitchcock Woods. One of today’s photos made the grade and I used it for October’s entry in my 2006 Hitchcock Woods Gallery

At 11:30AM we had a date with Field Number 9. There was a baseball tournament going on at Citizen’s Park here in Aiken, our friend’s son Jared’s team was in it and we hadn’t seen him play in a while. When the game was over and we were leaving with Jared’s team having lost 10 to 3, his mom apologized about us having to see such a bad game. As Donna put it, I guess it is hard to be objective when you are a parent. It was a good game to watch for us because it was pretty well played baseball for 13-year olds, no real keystone cops type innings and the weather was near perfect. Sure the Bombers didn’t win, but it wasn’t so much that they lost, they got beat. The other team was hot and hit the stuffing out of the ball, didn’t matter who was on the mound.

Later in the afternoon the Emperor got a nice bath and because I was feeling magnanimous I waxed him as well.

This is yesterday’s and today’s all wrapped in one because we got in at 12:30 last night (which is technically today) and it was too late to do anything but fall into bed at 1:00 AM (although it could be argued it was only 10:00PM west cost time.)

After breakfast on Wednesday we took a short walk along Tacoma’s waterfront (where today’s picture was taken) before hopping in the car to do some last minute sightseeing. We started out at Point Defiance Park and it’s views of the lower Puget Sound. We could have visited Fort Nisqually, a living history museum based on the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trading outpost built in 1833, but it didn’t open until 11:00 AM (it was only 9.) Or we could have visited the Camp 6 Logging Museum, set up to look and feel like a logging operation with an operating railroad, but it didn’t open until 10:00 AM. So we just drove the 5 mile loop through the part and headed towards the Glass Museum. As we battled the mid morning traffic a decision was made to table the Glass museum and just head for the airport, we did take the scenic route instead of I-5 and we ended up dropping off the rental at 11:30 with just an hour to go before we started boarding our plane home. Good thing we left that much time too, because security at SeaTac took a whole heck of a lot longer than at Charlotte. We did still have time to buy a couple books and wolf down a small pizza from Pallino Pastaria (it was actually quite good.)

The flight home was not nearly as pleasant as the one out. We had already seen the movie, The Break-Up, and screaming babies echoed through out, including the 3-year old behind Donna who threw, basically, a 4-1/2 hour tantrum. We will be petitioning the airline to consider that all children under 7 be treated as animals, ie. caged and kept in the baggage compartment.

When we got to Charlotte we were treated to temperatures in the 70s (it was lucky to get to the middle 60s out west) and some humidity (which I never thought I’d miss) to go along with a nearly full moon for the drive home.

Today was sleep in, grocery shop, wash clothes, wash the car and one last big meal out (it was the MMC monthly meeting and we met at Olive Oils, a very nice Italian place here in town.)

I took a hundred and twenty-four pictures and I’ll be separating the wheat from the chaff this weekend and try and get a gallery of about 30 photos online.