Miatatude

The past two days the weather channel has told us that the temperature would be in the low seventies with little chance of rain, so we drove the Miata to work with visions of top down drives home. Yesterday it was sprinkling, so we kept the top up. Today we managed a few miles with it down, but had to put it up when we got our haircut because of threatening skies.

For the next two days they are calling for scattered and then isolated showers, 30% chance for each. So we we’ll drive the Sonata and you watch, the weather will be sunny and mild…

If you believe in that sort of thing, according to the prognosticating woodchuck Punxsutawney Phil, we are in for 6 more weeks of winter. Well I say, “Big whup.” If the weather in the next six weeks is anything like it has been for the last six, bring it on. For the second week in a row the Miata has been our car of choice for the commute to work. For the last four days we have had the top down on the ride home for all of them and today we even drove to work with it down.

How come one of those second tier cable channels (cough, cough, USA, cough, cough) don’t run a 24 hour marathon of the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day movie on this day every year?

I’m betting the Emperor has thought that things have returned to the BPW (before purple whale) times as he has made the commute to work now for three days running. Today we even chanced a trip to work with the top down. The windows were up, but no heater was required. We didn’t make it out of the parking lot on the way home though.

When we exited the building there was on large dark gray cloud hovering over us like one of those giant flying saucers from the movie Independence Day. It started to lightly sprinkle as we walked to the north forty where we park and Donna wanted the top up, but I convinced her that once we got moving we wouldn’t get wet. We folded up cockpit cover, hopped in and hit the exit. Within 50 yards the rain started to come down harder and I reluctantly raised the roof. Good thing too as about a 1/4 mile from the Valve Store(R) it really started to come down.

The rain is supposed to be over before the morning commute and tomorrow’s high is predicted at 68°, with an overnight low of 60 (5 degrees above our average high for this time of year) we might even get both legs of Friday’s commute with the top down.

The weather has been warmer than average around here this week, so much so that we drove the Miata to work and had the top down both to and from. Today was on the windy side and this morning as we were driving down our street we got dripped on from the trees a couple of times with left over rain drops from last night. As we approached the first stop sign an acorn hit the road in front of us and promptly bounced off the windshield with a pop.

As we left ASCO’s parking lot to come home tonight a piece of pine straw zipped by Donna’s head before bouncing off the console. The rest of the way home we put the windows up to keep the blowing dead leaves from smacking us from the sides. And the Coup de Grâce was on our street again, where another acorn barely missed our heads and landed somewhere in the cockpit between us.

This prompted Donna to say, “We should have ridden our bicycles (we had contemplated this seeing as it is sort of Friday), we’d have been safer because we would have been wearing helmets.”