Miatatude

Miata Profile Icon

NB Miata Profile Picture

For the longest time I have been using a Mad Men style profile picture for my user login on Win7, both at home and at work, but after viewing those line art ND Miata images from the electronic owners manual I posted the other day, I thought maybe Mr. Miata should have a Miata as his profile picture.

I couldn’t use one of those as I don’t have a 4th gen car, but I did have a plain line art image of a NA (1st gen) that I made when the MMC was thinking of redoing the club logo. I re-colored it to resemble the previously owned Laguna Blue car and used it for a day. Didn’t feel right, so I made up one of the NB2 (face-lifted 2nd gen) an colored it in like the Emperor.

Here are large white versions of each generation for you to color and use as your own: – NA – NB2 – if you don’t have a paint type program, special requests accepted.

Brief Respite

We pretty much brought back the northwest weather pattern with us last weekend as ever since it has been mostly cloudy and rainy. Fortunately the temperatures in the 50s remained back in Washington state.

Last night for the first time since we’ve returned, we backed the Emperor out of the garage and went for 45 minutes of a pleasant dusk to dark drive. Good thing too, as today was a total wash, figuratively and literally. Sigh. At least the rest of the week looks decent and maybe, just maybe we might get to ride the tandem to work for the first time in 2015.

Warning!

Just like I did 10 years ago when Mazda was getting ready to introduce the 3rd generation Miata, I’ve been keeping my eyes on the Miata.net Forum staying up to date on the chatter about the 4th generation model. Actual information on the car has been dribbling out for months with the Japanese and European model stuff coming first. There have been leaks of a Japanese Accessories Catalog, a German spec sheet and price list and hints of Australian pricing.

Today we got a link to the Japanese Electronic Owners Manual! I can’t read kanji, so I wasn’t always sure what I was looking at for the last hour or so as I clicked on a bunch of things, but it sure was fun.

I did learn that you shouldn’t drive the Miata down stairs because you might scrape the bottom or don’t try and drive over parking lot dividers, you won’t make it:

 

 


Also, you don’t need to understand Japanese
to know what this Miata is saying,
“I hate winter. $#!*%”

 

 

The only real question I have is, “What the heck is this thing?”

wtf

Prize Patrol Visits

Trunk Lid

When we commute to the Valve Store(TM) in the Miata I get to check the mail when we get home. When we drive the Sonata I just pull into the driveway and Donna gets out and walks back to the mailbox. The driver’s side mirror on the Purple Whale is the same height as the mailbox and I almost tried to force the two of them into sharing the same space at the same time when I checked the mail for the first time in the Sonata. The Miata on the other hand glides easily below the mailbox level.

Spring seems to be here, so the Emperor was our chariot of choice for today’s trip to and from work. When I pulled open the mailbox lid there was a big padded envelope in there. As I pulled it out, I remarked, “What’d I buy?” Donna answered back with mock seriousness, “You better tell me.” Probably thinking I bought another BlipShift T-shirt with a Miata on it. But then the light bulb went off over our heads, it was the prize package from Moss Motors. Inside was a T-shirt, a sticker and my $50 gift certificate. The shirt is in the wash (a small phobia of mine) and the sticker has already found a home on the trunk lid. The fifty bucks? Maybe I should buy my wife something nice, like a T-shirt with a Miata on it?

Cars & Coffee

Daily DriverA little thing called Cars & Coffee, an informal car guy gathering, started out in California 7 or 8 years ago and has been spreading around the country. Mostly in big towns, but now some of the smaller places are picking up on it.

Turns out there has been one in Augusta, GA on the first Saturday morning of the month for a year now, but I never knew about it. Someone in the Miata Club brought it up at the yearly planning meeting and requested I put it on the MMC’s event calendar.

Shoot, I like cars and I like coffee, so Donna and I are going to go over there tomorrow to check it out. We also have an ulterior motive, it will count as a car show point in the Moss Motoring Challenge…

The 11-1/2 year-old, 149,000 mile Miata got a bath tonight. I even used a bit of some spray-on wax to gussy it up more gooder. When you get that close to the Emperor you can see it is starting to show its age in paint chips, scratches small dents, so I made up the little sign you see above to place on the dash.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1467

NA NA NA NB NB NB

na_na_na_DETAIL_grandeToday’s Blipshift shirt is another Miata design. Its a cute take on the minions from the Despicable Me movies because they always sound like they are going na na na when they laugh and it shows a minion in a first generation Miata, AKA the NA.

You only have a couple days to get in on owning one, so get out your charge card. There are now 5 Miata related designs from Blipshift, 4 of which feature the NA (all of which I own by the way) and one other featuring a 3rd gen car, the NC.

But I’m not falling for this one. Where is my car, an NB? Show me a 2nd generation Miata on a T-shirt and I’m buying a bunch of them.

Car 54k Where Are You?

On the way to the Valve Store(tm), that is where. The Purple Whale needed just to travel 1 mile from our driveway to reach the 54,000 mile total and it happened this morning on the way to work.

I’ve been hanging on every word and photo of the next generation Miata. Our first 2 Miatas were 1st generation models. The first car we kept for 6 years and the second one stayed around for eight. The current car is a 2nd generation model and has been in the family for going on a dozen years. We thought we were going to get a 3rd generation model about 4 years ago, until we sat in and drove one. Neither of us liked the look, the bath tub like feeling and the fact that they stole passenger foot well room for routing of the exhaust. Plus, the couple of inches it did gain in all directions made it appear a lot larger than the previous versions of the car.

The 4th generation car is supposed to be smaller than the 3rd in a most areas and is actually shorter than the tiny first car, but you can’t tell it from the pictures below, it looks larger.


On the plus side I like the looks, except for those tail lights, and a leak of the Japanese market brochure shows that it will quite possibly be available in something called Dynamic Blue Mica. On the down side, I can’t imagine the “bath tub” feel has improved any from looking at the door height in those photos and I’ve read that the seat has been lowered in the car for more head room and improved balance. We will definitely go sit in and drive a 4th generation model later this year when they become available and even though right now I think I want one, odds are the reign of the Emperor will continue…