Miatatude

Spring Is For The Birds

I think.

Last week at this time the freezing rain was still falling, now seven days later we drove home from work with the Miata’s top down in the upper 70’s with the sun shining.

The weather is certainly springlike and there must be birds singing out there, but you can’t hear them over the sound of the whirring of chainsaws. Every street in town is lined with pile of upon pile of fallen tree limbs and broken branches like hedgerows. Some streets in our neighborhood have been narrowed down to a single because of the tree debris lining both sides.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1294

134,000 Grains Of Salt

Bridal Veil FallsWow, another thousand miles has gone by. This one in less than a month. Almost seems like old times when the Emperor was our only car and we drove it everywhere. A good chunk of this thousand miles can be directly attributed to our trip to Deals Gap a couple weekends ago.

On our way back home that Sunday we stopped just outside Highlands, NC at the Bridal Veil Falls for a small photo op. We thought with all the recent rains in the area it might have a lot more of a flow, but it seemed to be about the same amount as any old fall day.

Tonight we went out to get some dinner and were surprised by the amount of traffic at, admittedly the busiest intersection in town, Whiskey & Pine Log Roads to turn left. It was backed up about a 1/4 mile with about a hundred and thirty four thousands cars in line. We were going to go left there, but opted to go straight through and turn left further down the street to sneak up on our destination, Captain D’s. Even that left turn was a bit of a wait and the short circuit we were making was crawling (literally) with cars.

We left the house with the odometer on 133,999 and by the time we parked it was right on the 134,000 mark. One mile traveled, but it felt like about five. Our drive brought us to a parking lot area where the were several restaurant options, so when we arrived Donna changed her mind, since she was going to have fish for lunch tomorrow, she would rather go to Five Guys and get a burger. Very little arm twisting was needed to get me to agree. The burgers are pretty darn good and the fries are awesome as well, except they sure do sprinkle on the salt. I bet but our small size had about 134,000 grains of salt on them.

Car Camo Considered

bmw m4 camo small

This is the back end of the new BMW M4 covered in camo because they are not ready to actually debut them yet, although they are out test driving them. I drove its predecessor, the M3, back in 2008 at a Susan B Komen Ultimate Drive and effervesced about the experience:

414HP V-8. Yikes! This car should be illegal, but I’m glad it is not. Just the exhaust note alone is enough to make the hairs on your arm stand up. Not deep throaty Detroit rumble, but raspy, race car purposeful. One suggestion, when you mash the go pedal to the floor you should already have your head back on the headrest or it will be snapped back to it. This is as close as you can get to experiencing a catapult launch from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier on land, unless you drag race funny cars on the weekend.

If I was really rich, or kinda rich and single, this thing would be my daily driver, but seeing as I’m neither of those things I drive a 10 year-old Miata (not that there is anything wrong with that.)

What I think might be cool, and I wouldn’t even have to be rich, would be to find a place that vinyl wraps cars and cover the Miata in that black & white swirly camo. Although, I think to do that I would need to be single, or if I did that without asking for permission, I would end up single. 🙂

Ugly Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Behold!
01-pininfarina-alfa

From AutoBlog: Take a good look at the picture of the Alfa Romeo 2uettottanta concept by Pininfarina, because the production Spider that will be a joint development with the coming Mazda MX-5 Miata isn’t expected to look anything like it. According to a report in Autocar, designers at Fiat\’s Centro Stile couldn’t figure out how to translate the concept to a production car.

To which I say good thing, so even if it did look sort of like this, later in the same article there was this: …but won’t have any body panels in common with the Mazda.

Maybe next year, if they regrow the passenger foot well and lower the door height to allow comfortable elbow resting again, a 2015 Miata might be in the cards.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1244

Blast From The Past

I’ve been kind of slack on the blogging around here, with nothing much interesting to write about, I thought maybe I’d fill this spot up with a scintillating post from 10 years ago. Back in 2003 this was actually two blogs The Miata Diaries and Brian’s Daily Rant and I posted something on both every day. I hoped to find something good and I struck out, apparently it was kind of a dull day then too.

From Brian’s Daily Rant:

When Will I Watch A Movie Again?
It has been two weeks at least since I’ve watched a DVD. Right now there are 4 Netflix rentals on the coffee table waiting a spin. ( Rabbit-Proof Fence, Moonlight Mile, Spirited Away and Adaptation ) Also stacked up there are 3 other movies from my Co-Worker DVD Swap Club: Pork Chop Hill, Tuck Everlasting and K-19. Plus on top of those I have A Brother From Another Planet that I picked up in a truck-stop in rural North Carolina for $4.88. I guess I\’m going to have to take a break from writing in 3 blogs and reading 10 for a night or two…

From The Miata Diaries:

House Cleaning Day
Did a little sprucing up around here, very little, but I feel better.
1) This site is now a proud member of the Blogging Brians, so I added a link to the left.
2) I got rid of a stale weblog that hadn’t been updated since like March from the Mortal Blog list and added Blogumentary, go check it out.
3) This page’s extension is now PHP instead of HTML. I snagged a script that allows me to keep a constantly updated set of stats in my search for ET and installed it on the left. Thanks Sam Ley.

Purchased Today: $0
Money spent since 03/03/03: $923.63
Started up, still up.
Top Transitions since 02/02/03: 166

The money figure was money spent on the Miata and of course I was keeping track of the top transitions back then too.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1241