Rants

AstroGnome

I’m going on a slight papercraft kick these next few days. There is a good reason and I will share it with you later, so just hold on to your britches. Here is a link to yesterday’s Darth Vader and today’s AstroGnome if you are interested.

House has jumped the shark, I can’t pinpoint exactly when, but it has a lot to do with the whole Huddy thing. Castle has also jumped the shark or should I say Nuking the Fridge and I can pinpoint when that happened. The take off for the jump was last week in Part 1 when our “heroes,” instead of solving the usual MOTW (Murder of the Week), are tasked with saving New York from a dirty bomb, complete with a big bright red digital countdown clock (probably purchased from ACME.) The jump’s landing occurred in Part 2 this week when Castle and Beckett* had not just one, but two, near death experiences where they could have professed their mutual love for one another, but didn’t.

* There really should be a cute abbreviation for this relationship, but I can’t seem to find one on the net. Maybe because when you combine their last names you come up with Caskett which is not really romantic. Well, let’s try it with first names, Rickate. Hmm, sounds like rickets. Guess maybe that is why there isn’t one…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 958

Dam

Donna and I piled into Joan’s car this morning and drove back to up to the Modoc Trail in McCormick County to find the one that got away last weekend. We had received an unsolicited hint from the CO after he read our DNF log. We might have just chalked this cache up to a loss and moved on, but this is the first stage of a multi with about 16 stages that takes you on a tour all around the state of South Carolina. We figure we have lived here long enough that just maybe it is time for us to explore the place a bit and see what this state has to offer.*

*Imagine this sentence rendered in the sarcasm font.

The hint turned out to be no help because it told us to look somewhere we had already looked, but we had to give it try anyway. Seeing as we drove all that way and came up empty handed we tried a couple more caches over by Thurmond Dam. The first one we looked for was listed as kid friendly, so we figured we shouldn’t have any trouble with it. Wrong, apparently it was adult un-friendly as we came up empty handed.

There was one other cache, a short three stage multi, that was also on the South Carolina side of the base of the dam. Stage 1 was easy, but at stage two you needed to get a date that was to be found on top of a stone column for the coords for Stage 3. Unfortunately there was no plaque on top, just a metal lid with a padlock covering the column. We got the north coordinates by counting the flood gates, but still needed the two digits of a day in July 1980 to add to the last three digits in the Stage 1 west coordinates to get the final stage’s west coords. Being patriotic Americans we started by plugging in the number generated by using July 4, 1980. That took us to the middle of the parking area for a boat ramp. Hmmm, no good. So I created a waypoint for the first of July and then another for the 31st. Because we had the north coordinates the cache had to lie somewhere on a line between July 1st’s waypoint and the 31st’s waypoint. Knowing that, and reading the clue, it allowed us to make the find, with Joan making the actual grab. Time constraints sent us home after this so we could up our Find/DNF ratio.

This afternoon the Emperor got a transfusion and had his socks swapped with his gloves (oils change and tire rotation.)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 956

Summer’s Here

No, not summer weather, spring weather is just now sneaking in, but bathing suit season has arrived in the form of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.

What started as a few page diversion from the mid winter doldrums has morphed into an extravaganza! There is no sports involved anymore (and no, you can’t count comely female athletes in bikinis as sports content), for that you get a separate regular issue of the mag.

I glanced through the issue and it took all of five minutes, because if you have seen one swimsuit issue you’ve seen them all. Dazzling warm weather locales; check. Incredibly expensive suits on supermodels; check. Girls with nothing on but incredibly painted-on replicas of of incredibly expensive suits; check. Girls with nothing on but shells; check. Girls with nothing on, but hiding behind strategically placed palm fronds; check. Random erect nipple or two; check. And unlike playboy when can actually say with a straight face, “I read it for the articles,” the only words in the magazine are two page “stories” on how arduous it was to shoot photos of nearly naked supermodels in each dazzling warm weather climate.

And now there is no real reason to buy the magazine off the newsstand if you aren’t a regular subscriber, just click on that cover photo there and off you go to the web site where there are more more photos than on paper, with videos too.

And like all things that start small and become wildly successful, it has sold it’s soul to commercialism in an effort to make as much money as possible. There are more ad pages than swimsuit pictures…I tossed out two of those smelly fragrance ads, 4 pages for Lexus, 8 pages for Direct TV before giving it up as fruitless. And now it is not just ads in the magazine, Nissan made several TV commercials that feature it’s very ugly Juke and swimsuit models.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 947

We Have Lift Off

After about a week of 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, before or after breaks and lunch, the Tor.com Stubby Rocket is finished. It is 2 times scale of the downloaded PDF and is literally hung by a thread from the drop ceiling in my cube.

I wonder what the reaction will be, if any, on Monday from my supervisor and my manager, who were both are out of town on business this week. The big cheese Director of Operations, who sometimes makes a sweep of the area, wasn’t in today either. He is probably who told my manager to instruct his charges that the new offices should be more business-like and not be shrines to our individual personalities…

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 941

Woot Ka Nal

Fourteen months ago I had a root canal done. Yesterday was Donna’s turn to go under the drill. Last week she had a bad headache that nagged her for a couple days and then over the weekend a tooth started to pain her. The headache was her body trying to tell her she had an infection in the tooth. On Monday she called the dentist and got an appointment for Tuesday and an antibiotic prescription because her face was starting to get swollen on one side. Monday after work we got the script filled and she took one as soon as we got home. Then we read the sheet of side effects and precautions only to find out that persons with Crohns or Colitis shouldn’t take that medication.

On Tuesday she saw our regular dentist and he immediately sent her down the hall to the specialist. The infection was so bad that there was a possibility that she might have to take antibiotics for 10 days before the root canal could be done, but they ended up doing it right then. They sent her home with a prescription for an antibiotic she could take, Amoxicillin. After a root canal your mouth is sore because they have been in there working, but the pain is minimal. For Donna’s root canal they had to give her two shoots to kill the pain and lance part of her gum because of the infection. She hurt pretty bad and neither one of us got a lot of sleep. Around 3:00 Am this morning we contemplated going to the emergency room for help. But Donna the trooper gutted it out, but called the dentist for some pain meds today. She now has 15 Lortab (7.5/500) to take every 4 to 6 hours, the pills do a good job of knocking the pain back, but only seem to last, at most, a couple hours. Hopefully the antibiotics will kill the infection and that will make the pain go away without having to keep taking the pain pills.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 933

Minimimmo

My latest fixation, started in the usual manner, a random blog post on a random web page. Now I just can’t help myself, I just have to cut something out of card stock and glue, insert tab into slot or press it together to create “art.”

Today’s papercraft piece, Minimimmo, is from Italy and hopes to colonize the world. These boogers are just so cute, I might just make a hundred of them, starting a southeastern US outpost. Good thing there is a video on the web site as the downloadable instructions were only available in Italian.

No package in today’s mail. No failed attempted delivery notice. Some rat bastard postal worker is wearing my Pacific Playland T-shirt.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 930