Miatatude

Turkey Day

Before the whole family descended on the house demanding baked poultry and all the fixin’s, Donna and I had time to go out and get a gourmet breakfast at Hardee’s. Mmmm…Biscuits & Gravy. It was a bit chilly, but seeing as top speed was around 35 MPH we could handle it.

Later I took my 17 year-old niece for a top down drive through some of the twistier sections in a couple Aiken’s sub-divisions. Amazingly enough about a 1/2 mile into the ride she emulated a classic Donna pose while I drove, throwing both hands straight up like a lot of roller coaster riders do. I may have to resurrect the old warning sticker I had in the 95.

Happy Anniversary

It was one year ago today that we left behind a 1995 Laguna Blue Miata at Rader and brought home a 2003 Miata in Garnet Red Mica. In 366 days we’ve been over 18,000 miles together. It is raining tonight, just like it was last November 24th. Last year when we got home with it, we parked it in the garage and drove the MSV down to Florida for Thanksgiving, this year it will be in the same garage, but we will be here with it.

Peektures II

Truth or Fiction? I recevied an email this morning:

Brian,

somehow I came over your mr-mita site. You take really great car pictures! Very cool! We are a little advertising agency in Munich, Germany and I think we could use some of these pictures for our work. Are you interested in selling these?

Best regards Andreas Z
http://www.some-site.de/

The Internet skeptic in me wondered if it was another cleverly worded email harvesting ploy. If it is, they’ve gone a step further than most, as theirs is a fully functioning web site if you click on that link. Well I bought it and replied. We’ll see if anything comes of it.

Lost Post

I had a really nice little election post almost all written when I accidentally hit the back button on my browser. Gone it is.

Oh well, I guess I’ll go put the
Don’t Blame Me…
I Voted For Bartlet
bumper sticker on the back of the Miata.

Good Will Mud Flaps

To mount the small side sills I had to remove the perfectly good front mud flaps. Well they were no good to me any more, but they probably would be great for someone else with a Garnet Red Mica Miata. It did take too long to find a match, someone in Orlando, Florida will be the lucky recipient and all it will cost them is some postage. I saved all the hardware when I pulled them off, but I couldn’t really remember what went where at first. Then I went out to the garage and started to piece it all together and I’m pretty sure I got everything where it should go. The only problem is that the double sided tape has lost most of it’s stick when it was pulled off the car. Guess they’ll just have to go get a bit of it from an auto parts store.

18 Holes

I bought the side sills from Trussville Mazda. They are a regular sponsor of Miata.net and they have real good prices on Mazda parts and accessories. Cheaper even than the local dealer who gives us Master’s Miata Club members 20% off. Still with all that discounting, the sills were more than twice the price, quasi-regular reader, Ernest wanted for a set of used one he had. I was scared off by Ernest’s for two reasons, first was they needed painting in my color and second he had no fasteners for mounting them. Ernest got them from a Mazda recycler in a trade that was as complicated as the Nomar Garciaparra deal because he was going to add them to his new Mazdaspeed MX-5. Ernest was selling them because he found out to mount them you had to drill holes in your car. Seven holes on each side that your mid $20k car didn’t come from the factory with. Well, Ernest, after reading the 12 page instruction book that came with my factory fresh sills, I can say you are wrong about needing seven holes, you need 9 or 18 total.

Painting Ernest’s side sills didn’t scare me as the front spoiler painting came out top notch, so they would have done just as good a job again, but the no fasteners thing really scared me. Turns out I had good reason, there are like 4 bits each per those 18 holes, plus a half dozen other screws, clips, etc per side. There is a mounting strip to hook the top front edge of each sills to. There are four different paper templates for locating the parts. There is a tube of some adhesive stuff. The bag of stuff you get is worth $100 easy.

For funsies I scanned all 12 pages and then combined them into one big ol’ 2-1/2 megabyte pdf file. So if you would like to see why I want to set aside a whole day for this project and have a fat pipe to the net: Genuine Side Air Dam Instruction (Installation) Manual

Miata Weekend Off

At noon on Friday when we got home from work Donna & I and her Mom and Aunt piled into the MSV and headed north, destination Cherokee, NC. After dinner in our favorite little Italian place in north Georgia we arrived at the Holiday Inn in Cherokee. Right after Breakfast on Saturday we dropped off the ladies at Harrah’s so they could spend a chunk of the day feeding the one armed bandits. Donna & I went back to the hotel and packed the car and checked out. We then drove 5 miles the other way to go for a walk in the woods. She had picked a nice little 1-1/2 one way walk to a waterfall.

The leaves are at near peak and the morning, though cloudy, was crisp and in the lower 60’s. The walk was basically all uphill to a nice waterfall, who’s name I have forgotten already, but worth the walk. We then came back down the same way we went up. What a great way to spend the morning. After hiking we drove into Bryson City to find some lunch. We stumbled onto the 4th Annual Chili Cookoff, so guess what we had? For $5 you got a bowl, a spoon and a napkin and could sample any of the chili’s you would like. It started at 10:00 AM so by the time we got there a few had already run out and we missed voting for the people’s choice, but we got our fill of some very interesting tastes. After about 7 or 8 different half ladles of chili Donna and had had enough and took a little walk around downtown Bryson City. On the way back to the car we ducked into an ice cream shop, Donna got a scoop of chocolate, but I only got a small coke, as I was still full of chili. Turns out she was too, as she could only finish 1/2 the ice cream.

Then we went back to the casino to pick up Mom and Mary. Cell phones don’t work inside the casino and they won’t page anybody, so your only option is to wander around looking for who you want. Amazing how hard it is to find two particular little old ladies amongst the thousand or so people hunched over all those machines. It was pure luck we stumbled on Donna’s aunt. We then split the casino in halves and made another loop before we found Mom sitting in one corner. I can’t imagine how the atmospheres we each spent our mornings in coul be any further apart. Donna and I out in the clean air of nature and Mom & aunt in the closed, dark, smoke filled, beer in the carpet smelling room. Next time, they have a certain time to meet us outside.

The UPS man had left the side sills from Trussville on the back deck as I asked. I was going to install them today, but realized that I need to mail a Master’s Miata Club newsletter out on Thursday and I haven’t even started it. So today will be spent working on that little item, maybe next Sunday I can get them installed.