Misc Photos

1.6% of Our Fame

Banksia SkyThe picture in last Wednesday’s post was on TV. After I showed the image to a couple folks at work I was told I should sent it in to the local morning weather guy because every morning he shows a picture that a viewer has sent in. I emailed it to him on Friday and he replied that it would get shown on Monday at 5:15 and 6:15AM. When Donna asked if I wanted to get up a little earlier so I could see the picture, I told her no, I’d already seen it.

There are a lot of people at work who get up early and must get their weather in the morning from Matt Monroe because I had a whole lot of people catch me Monday (and a few on Tuesday) and tell me they saw my picture on Channel 6. One person tells me I won a coffee cup with some ground coffee. Another tells me I will probably get an umbrella. I think both of those are promotions from other stations or previous weather people, but never having watched the local morning news, who knows. I vow to watch on Tuesday morning to see what actually happens during the viewer photo segment.

I of course forget all about it. Then last night a friend from the MMC emailed me to say she saw my photo on TV on Monday and I should watch this morning to see one of hers, so I rolled out of bed about 10 minutes earlier than normal and watched the morning weather. Matt did the weather and then went to a commercial. Huh? No picture? When they came back from the break, there was Carol’s photo of some high mountains and blue sky. Oooh and aaah from Weather Guy, cheery comment from Anchor Woman and back to the news. No mention of a coffee mug. No umbrella. Nothing but using up about fifteen seconds of our 15 minutes.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 438

Northwest Photos

I took 124 photos on our trip to Washington and Oregon and I weeded them down to 44 for posting in a new web gallery for your viewing pleasure here (and always available from the “Northwest Trip 2006” link on the sidebar.) I’ve got titles on them, but it will take a while for me to add some captioning.

I really had a hard time weeding out the big rock photos, I’m sure some will think I left in too many, but they were just so alien and curious looking to me that I couldn’t help myself. On Monday in Oregon we went for a 1-1/4 each way hike in Ecola State Park and I only managed a few pictures before the camera battery died. I did get one really interesting photo of a giant woodpecker:

It’s Raining at Fenway Park Right Now

Both with raindrops and Minnesota Twin’s hits. It was supposed to rain all day here in Aiken, but as you can see by this picture it wasn’t at 1:45 this afternoon. And it still hasn’t.

Skyview

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 393

At Least I Thought It Was Great Idea

Cancer Care InstituteThe other day I realized that I wasn’t using my camera anymore, it was just riding around in the cargo net in the trunk. The honeymoon was over. Then I had an idea (watch it, I know what you’re thinking), I would take one picture a day for every day in August. This way when I blogged in the evening describing my mundane day, there would be a mundane picture to help you really get a feel for how my life is being carried out. After all this thing is called “Life of Brian.”

Yesterday’s photo was supposed to be of the local used bookstore where we stopped on the way home and I selected 5 fiction paperbacks to read. I forgot to take the picture. You would have think I would have been reminded to do so when I plopped the books into the trunk, because the camera would have been plainly visible. But noooo.

This afternoon Donna was feeling a bit worn out, so I volunteered to drive her to her radiation treatment and then take her home. While she was inside getting zapped I took my camera and walked to the edge of the property and took a couple of close-up snaps of the Cancer Care Institute sign with the building in the background. Tonight I put the camera in the cradle and hit the download button. Selected the directory, as always I checked the remove from device box and hit go. Everything looked normal until the EasyShare Gallery software loaded and today’s pictures were not where they were supposed to be. Searched the hard drive to see if they went somewhere else, nope. I picked the camera up out of the dock and the LCD screen said, “Memory Card Needs Formatting. Proceed or Cancel.” I hit cancel thinking maybe I can salvage the pictures tomorrow at work.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/06: 301

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