Miatatude

It was supposed to get into the middle 70s today. Tomorrow rain and the weekend cold, so Donna convinced me to take the afternoon off and enjoy the day.

We headed over to Sportsman BBQ and got a plate and a sandwich to go. And go we did. We went up to a small park next to Clark’s Hill Lake. We had a little picnic at one of the tables overlooking the lake and the dam. After eating we spread out a blanket and lounged in the sun to read some. A fairly short time after we got settled, another car showed up. A minivan with a young family. They proceeded to unload a huge amount of stuff, strollers, bikes, coolers, fishing poles, etc. Mom and young daughter were in constant communication, “Stay here.” “Alright,” as she wanders off. “Don’t go far. ” “I won’t,” as she keeps on walking. “Come over here.” “Mom?”

We packed our books and blanket in the trunk and went for a walk around exploring every nook and cranny of the small park. After about a half an hour we got back in the car and went for a nice drive in the country before coming home.

Really nice day for a convertible. But somehow I feel we are going to have to pay for it with a couple inches of snow in February…

Might be time to get one, after a little over two years and less than 32k miles, our current car has developed a major defect. A dash rattle. Just started showing up on cold days at between 2600 & 2800 RPM. God, I hate dash rattles. Most times they are my fault because I had the dash apart to do some mod or another. This time it was self generated because I really haven’t disassembled the interior too much.

I remember the Laguna used to have a couple of dash rattles, one only showed up when the outside temperature was above 85 degrees and then there was another that only made an appearance when it was below 40 degrees. Different sounds for each and in spite of several attempts to find the source they never were quieted down. At least I had relatively quiet springs and falls.

With any lightweight, tightly sprung car you are eventually going to develop these annoying buzzes, creaks or rattles, it is only a matter of time. I was hoping for another year of quiet though.

Wait a minute, I just stuck a new CD in the glove box the other day, could it be that simple? I doubt it.

A little over 7 weeks ago I test drove a new 3rd generation Miata for two reasons; 1) curiosity and 2) the promise of a $35 Gift Card. My curiosity was satisfied immediately, the gift card arrived today.

Well, actually, the certificate to get a gift card. You go online and enter the codes from the paper and start shopping. The place that Mazda teamed up with must be a big clearing house for this sort of promotion, because there were several categories of merchandise to choose from along with a whole host of places that offered gift certificates. It was practically overwhelming the choices, under the household section of merchandise there were 742 items to look at. The other categories were as equally packed. Then I realized it was going to be slightly easier because they were listed in ascending price order and the $35 dollar limit was a small portion of the available items. Plus the items offered at that price level were mostly junk unappealing to me.

I headed over to the gift certificate section and figured I would just get one to Amazon.com where I could get just about anything, when my heart grew three sizes and I decided to not be so selfish and I picked a restaurant that Donna and I would enjoy and ordered $35 worth of gift certificates.

In 2 to 3 more weeks I’ll let you know what we had for dinner.

Saturday while I washing my car in the driveway, a lady walking her dog passed by and asked if I’d wash her car too. I thanked her for her offer, but respectfully declined.

A little while later my next door neighbor asked me the same question. To him I replied that I would be happy to wash any car he brought over as long as it was smaller than my Miata. I was safe as all they have are SUVs and a minivan.

Got me thinking, just which car could he have brought over that I would have had to wash?