Misc Photos

Land Yacht

Next door to ASCO is a little place called Bobby’s Clean Up that, while I’m not exactly sure what, has a lot to do with cars. Every now and again there is something unusual parked over there. This week it is a 1959 Cadillac Sixty Two Convertible. It showed up on Tuesday and has been inside the shop since then. Today I noticed it parked out front as I came back from taking Donna home.

I pulled in and poked my head inside the building to ask if it was alright if I took a closer look at it. The fellow inside said that it belonged to a local home builder and he had spent about $35k for it. It was there getting it all nicely detailed for this coming Sunday’s downtown Aiken cruise-in.

The car is absolutely beautiful. Every panel is faultless and the interior is in nicer shape that mine. It has either been hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar on the porch of Funk & Wagnalls or been recently fully restored.

I really wanted to get a picture of it with the Miata parked behind it, so it looked like it was the big cars dinghy. It was high noon with the sun extremely bright and with the Caddy backed in under the awning, the contrast was so intense taking a good picture was nearly impossible. Here is one that came out OK:

'59 Caddy

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 234

Mmmm…Pizza

Mmmm?PizzaWe were supposed to go up to Kershaw, SC today to see fellow MMC member John Haff race POS in the SCCA Solo I & II event there, but we didn’t make the trip. The weather was listed as iffy all week and this morning we checked the radar and figured that we were going to have a very rainy day and that Kershaw probably would too. I’m sure John, who with his wife Carol were already up there, got in some laps because it looked like they didn’t get wet until a little after noon time. A couple other couples from the Club were also planning on going, but I don’t know if they made the wet drive up or not.

We mostly hung around the house and listened to the rain hit the roof. I sorted through nearly all of 4,000 photos in the My Pictures directory and renamed, resorted and arranged in directories. I still have about 350 in the “Photo Dump” directory that need sorting or more like deleting. While I worked on the digital pictures Donna sorted through a bunch more of the old photos in the Big Box of Morrison Memories. Included in there was another blast from from the Miata past. About a month after picking up our first Miata, a 1990 Mariner Blue A package, we drove down to New Orleans for Christmas. I don’t remember what I got for a present that year (if you don’t count the new car), but the Miata got a cracked windshield on I-20/59 in Alabama.

After the rains cleared here this evening Donna and I went downtown to get some pizza at Ferrando’s. While not the pinnacle of the pizza peak, the pie from Ferrando’s is right up there past the tree line and there is none better in Aiken.

Started down, went up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 101

New Camera= New Fun

New Camera= New FunMy picture taking had really slacked off recently, but now that I have a new toy the “magic” is back. We were at the local Honda dealer this afternoon and inside their showroom they a meticulously restored 1973 600 Coupe. I used the 23mm wide angle lens to take the picture and then added a Kodak EasyShare fun filter called appropriately, cartoon, to get the finished product.

This car is famous in my memory because while stationed on Guam, one of my VQ-1 squadron mates owned one. When Super Typhoon Pamela made a beeline for our tiny little island in July of 1976, he had to be on one of the squadron’s planes that flew off to safe harbor in Japan. He left his car parked with those of the rest of the aircrew near the hanger, which was in plain sight from the back of our barracks about 200-300 yards away. On the typhoon’s way onto the island, it was best to be holed up in your barracks room, but after the eye passed the wind shifted so that the back stairs were in relatively quiet air and we could stand on the landings and watch the winds wreak havoc on the airfield buildings and hangers.

As some of us watched 4 x 8 sheets of corrugated tin roofing get peeled off an older hanger, my roommate pointed back towards our hanger. There rolling down the tarmac was that poor little Honda 600. It got rolled onto one side, then onto the roof and then over on the other side before coming to a stop pressed up against the squadron’s duty pickup. To add insult to injury, the wind then pushed a nearby dumpster sliding along the pavement until it mushed into the roof of the tiny 1200 lb car. Needless to say the car was a total loss.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 98

The Last Olympus D-40Z Picture

The Last Olympus D-40Z PictureNo I haven’t given up taking pictures, there on the left hand side of that photo you will see the LCD of my new camera, a Kodak V570, displaying the EasyShare System logo.

The couple of negatives I didn’t like about the camera, proprietary battery & no direct USB connection to the PC, were over ridden by the positives, seperate 23mm wide angle lens, very small (about 2/3rd the size of a deck of cards) , 2.5″ LCD and short shutter lag.

I have always loved the look of wide angle shots, so the separate 23mm lens was the big factor in the decision. The other lens is the typical 35-105 found in most point and shoot digital cameras. The big factor for my wife was the short shutter lag. It has always been a thorn in my side, but after Donna struggled mightily to take picture during the BMW Ultimate Drive last week, she said, “You’ve got to find a better camera.” This camera has about a 2/10 second shutter lag which feels positively instantaneous compared to the Olympus.

The rechargeable battery gets juiced up as long as the camera rests in the dock, but I’ll probably buy a second battery somewhere down the line, they’re only $20. The no direct USB connection to the PC will be solved by getting a SD card reader for the laptop to take along when traveling. The camera has 32MB internal storage, but I bought a 512MB SD card when I picked up the camera last night.

The Olympus had a panoramic mode where you could take several shots and then you knitted them together using the Olympus software on the PC. This Kodak has a panoramic mode where you take 3 shots and they get knitted together right in the camera. With the 23mm lens you can get a little more than a 180 degree picture. I experimented with it this morning when we were in the woods. I may go ahead and add a panorama gallery to the website.

We Have A Winner

We Have A WinnerWe stopped by the Aiken County Museum this afternoon to check out the entries in the 2nd Annual Sculpture Competition. Last year there were about 20 displayed outside with the rest indoors. This year there were only about 5 outdoors with the majority inside. This picture is of the 1st place sculpture, Gretchen Lothrop’s ?A Subtle Miracle.?

I didn’t bring a tripod, so shooting indoors was really out of the question, but I saw one that was interesting and seemed to have enough light. But when I snapped the picture, the flash went off, causing one of the elderly volunteer ladies to come over and chastise me. I apologized and made sure it wouldn’t happen again. As it was it didn’t matter as there was nothing else I found photogenic anyway.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 84

A 1,031 Words

Lines

Email notifications of comments is working again. I think turning them off and then back on did the trick.

Startedup, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 82

New Photo Gallery

Because I never did find another spot (I really didn’t look to hard) to do another year long series of shots like I did for Mr. Fletcher’s Ride, I have decided for 2006 just to take my camera every time we hike and once a month post the one I find most interesting of the bunch.

This morning we went for a nice long and somewhat muddy walk in the woods. I snapped a couple pictures of a familiar spot from a different angle and from those selected February’s entry. I then dug through my shots from a couple of January’s hikes and picked one to represent that month.

Hitchcock Woods 2006