Miatatude

Hope I Can Get 2 Good Shots From The Next Camera

Picked up the finished photos for entry #1 in the Drive By Photo Contest. Yikes! They are uniformly bad. The ones mounted on the cockpit brace showed too much car and not enough scenery. The shots of something in the rear view mirror are a possibility, but I’m going to have to defeat the flash as it washes out all the color out of the mirror because it is so close. The pictures with the car hood in it and scenery in front, didn’t work as the flash illuminated the BLUE hood and left the scenery dark. I’m not sure if there is any metering going on in the camera, as some photos look like there is and others don’t. There were a couple that came out OK, but hardly worth blowing up to 8 x 12.

As long as you buy two cameras you are entitled to 2 entries and it doesn’t matter which camera the entries come from. Hopefully we will get 2 good pictures from the next camera.

I may scan a couple tomorrow and see if I can tweak them in PaintShopPro. They won’t be eligible for the contest, but I’ll get a picture to post on my photography blog…

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TAG! You’re It South Carolina

I made up a little web page of the newspaper article from the Sunday paper about license plates that featured yours truly, seeing as the newspaper didn’t. OCR’d the words and scanned in the pictures, so here I am in all my media glory: Specialty License Plates Say It All

Dropped of the disposable camera tonight. Pictures will be ready tomorrow. We are going to wait to buy entry #2 in the Drive By Photo Contest until we have seen #1.

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Splat

Nice turn out for the Bug Splat. We had 6 Miatas do the route, plus one Chevy S-10 and a Camry. There were three Miatas that didn’t participate. The OTM belonged to a couple of members whose cars are not running right now. Big engine problems for both, both basically self-inflicted. One non-participant was us, the judges, another just literally got back in town from a two week vacation and another that just popped in to say hi. The cleanest car was an easy call, as was the closest to the dot, but biggest and most was a little more difficult. Two cars were pretty covered and the same two also had a couple of large mayflies plastered on their fronts. The big bug winner and recipient of the big trophy was chosen because of the intangibles, his was still twitching on arrival at the finish and trailing behind it was a long streak of bug blood. So the other woman was awarded the most bugs prize.

Oh yeah, I changed the oil and rotated the tires this morning at 120,200 miles. I had the filter so all it cost was the oil.

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Shopping Trip

With our whole day off we decided to go over to Augusta and do some shopping. Donna won a $25 gift certificate to Sports Authority and it was burning a hole in her pocket. We also wanted to go to Bed, Bath & Beyond to pick up a gift card for Donna’s Mom to take to Seattle next week as a gift for her brother’s wedding.

While we were over there we went in a few other stores looking for just the right prizes for tomorrow’s Master’s Miata Club Bug Splat Rally – read cheap. By the time we came back to Aiken it was near 2:00 PM and in the lower 90’s, but the humidity must have been down as it felt hot, not oppressive.

Tonight we drove downtown and got a dish of ice cream and wandered around looking in shop windows. Well Donna was looking in windows, I was looking for possible spots to try out the night mode on my digital camera by taking pictures of the Miata.

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I’m Gonna Be In The Paper. Maybe.

Don’t worry I finished the newsletter. Print it up tomorrow at work, collate it at home and in the mail Friday, right on schedule.

I may or may not have my picture in the Sunday paper. I may or may not have my pearls of wisdom printed in the Sunday paper. I know somebody who knows somebody is how it happened.

The local rag, the Aiken Standard, is doing a Sunday feature this week on the plethora of specialty SC license plates. The reporter who interviewed me said that there are 96 different plates available with 6 more on the way. I have Share The Road plate from the Palmetto Cycling Coalition (picture is about halfway down the plate page.) I was not the only person photographed or interviewed so we will see what gets published.

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Only Because I Washed It

The top cycled, but only because I washed it. Then I waxed the car too. After the clean-up I went out and bought some new windshield wipers. I remembered while windexing all the widows that the last time it rained I needed wipers, so I bought them before my usual reminder, a streaky windshield the next rain. Feeling real expansive, I also bought a can of semi-gloss black to respray the wiper arms and a roll of masking tape so I could use the same paint on the two rocker panels to touch them up.

At lunch we drove in the MSV out to a farm in the county to see our neighbor girl do a show jumping competition.

Mid-afternoon it was over to North Augusta where we had a nice turn out of Miatas for the Sno-Cap Anniversary, but we were outnumbered by Mustangs.

We had just an hour after returning from there before we went two streets over to “baby-sit” our friends kids. Time for bed as it is up at 6:30 for an early bike ride. Yawn. Maybe tomorrow afternoon I will have time to hunt up something broken for Photo Friday.

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Dead Bugs & Fat Families

We went out after dark and drove one of our favorite 25 mile loops into the less populated sections of the county. Smashed about 1,000 bugs onto the front of the Miata. That is OK as tomorrow it will get a wash. Later in the day we are headed over to North Augusta to help the Sno-Cap Drive In celebrate their 39th anniversary, throughout the day various local Car Clubs hang out for an allotted time. We will be sharing the lot with the Mustang Club. There will be free drinks and food samples served by middle and high school cheerleaders, plus games, contests and trivia. Pleasant way to spend a couple hours on a Saturday afternoon.

At the end of our drive was a stop at Krogers for the essentials for breakfast tomorrow. Eggs, bacon, bananas, apples and a cantaloupe. As we were walking in, we had the misfortune of following in a fat family of three, mom, teenaged daughter and a pre-teen. The “littlest” was 4′-6″ and 150 pounds. The teenager was maybe 5-8 and 175. Mom was a little shorter than the teen and weighed more, maybe 200 lbs. The two daughters were busy calling each other names. The mother was telling them to stop it and they just ignored her. They went left and we went right. Of course we ran into them again near the eggs. The teenaged daughter was standing there swinging the gallon of milk she had in her hand not paying attention to anything. We had to shift over to another aisle to get by. The two girls were still bickering and the mom was still shushing them. We made it to the cashier and guess who got in line right behind us? Right. After listening to them for about 30 seconds we left that line even thought we were next and went 3 lines over.

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