Rants

Mixmaster

Well I finally got around to starting to paint the walls in the middle bedroom tonight. Got a wall and a half painted before giving up.

Donna originally wanted me to paint it the same color as the other green bedroom, but I didn’t have enough paint to do it. Trying to not buy another gallon of paint, she then suggested I used the color from the hallway. I didn’t want to do that, I barely like it in the hallway, its too light, I wanted something darker. Then I had an idea, I could take some of the other cans of paint I have and pour parts into the really light green and maybe come up with something suitable.

I added what little I had left of the other green bedroom color. I poured in a heaping dose of a forest green that was used in one of the bathrooms (prior to remodeling). Then I tossed in a few dollops of a a sort of olive green that was used on the lower kitchen cabinets. Almost there, it just needed to be a little darker. I added a pinch of some flat black I had used for the interior of the fireplace a long while back. I now a full gallon of a nice green that looked real close to what was in the existing green bedroom. Perfect.

I used a small brush to cut in all the edges and corners. When I started using the roller I was getting black dots at intervals. Ack! Somehow the black paint had coagulated into little beads of black that were invisible in the tray or can, but when rolled on the wall they left behind little black spots. I found that when they popped up I could spot them on the roller and then kind of disperse them using a small brush loaded with paint from the tray. Then with careful reapplication I could blend the paint on the wall to make them disappear (I thought.) After a dinner break I went back in to start painting again, but now that the paint had dried I could see that where I thought the black dots had vanished, they had actually been sort of spread out real good.

Tomorrow after work we are going to stop at Home Warehouse Store and pick up a gallon of paint, so I can start over.

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That’s Enough Human Contact

This morning after a not so special breakfast at IHOP, Donna got lukewarm water with not so mixed in powder instead of the hot chocolate she requested, we had a very interesting visit to the North Augusta Post Office. And I think I figured out why Postal employees “Go Postal”, it is not so much their working conditions, but more like having to deal with surly customers all day.

They aimed for camp, but fell short. There were some clever lines that will probably be seen as signature quotes on internet message boards and I actually sort of liked the musical numbers. See it for free before its gone (Sunday, July 20th @ midnight.)

Dr Horrible?s Sing-Along Blog

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Sorry Benton

Our second disc of the TV show Due South came from Netflix the other day and tomorrow I’ll ship it back — unwatched.

We have such fond memories of the show, but we struggled to get through the first disc. Wanting to give it another chance, we kept it in the rental queue. Now faced with watching more episodes we just can’t do it. It is amazing how much TV has changed in a dozen years since it first aired.

The main detraction from our enjoyment of the show is the caliber of the transfer. The focus is soft, the colors muted and the contrast is muddy, it looks like you are watching 12 year old VHS tapes.

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Thanks For The Coupon

Every once and a while the local Mazda dealer will send me a mailing that is supposed to get me to come in and let them service my car. The one I got today offered a free oil change using a new filter and topping off of vital fluids.

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Until you get to the fine print, then things get strange. “Plus applicable taxes.” Seven percent of nothing is…ahhh, let’s see, zero times zero point zero seven…carry the zero…is Nothing. Oh, wait a minute, I see how it is applicable, the next bit of fine print says, “Some vehicles may be slightly higher.” How much higher? Define slightly?

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Serenity

Along with our Netflix membership, we are also members of a couple Movie Gallery video stores here in town, due mostly to our TDTVS addiction. Every once in a while one of them will call us and leave a message on our phone answering machine to say they haven’t seen us in a while and to bring us back we are entitled to a free movie rental. We got one of those calls on Thursday. A while? Ha! The last time we were in any of their stores was when Season 3 of Lost was released or the last time they offered a free rental.

Having just finished re watching the Firefly DVDs on Friday we decided to see if we could get the Firefly based movie Serenity as our freebie. Luck was with us as Movie Gallery had a copy on the shelf, so today we had “Lunch and a Movie.”

Well, both the Mrs and I love Firefly, but were disappointed with the movie — there goes our nominations for the Browncoat Hall of Fame… Part of the appeal of the show was the character interaction among the crew with the plot of each episode serving as a vehicle to move the developing relationships along. The movie, as I explained to someone (Hi Rae), was too movie-ish. Everything had to be bigger, faster, more and it was jarring. On TV they used what they called the mule, basically a tarted up ATV, to get around planetside. For the movie they had some sort of hovercraft with giant jet engines and seated four comfortably. Why? During the run of the show when ever there was encounter with another spaceship it was always just one, for the movie they pulled a George Lucas – Industrial Light & Magic with a final battle consisting of hundreds of vessels crisscrossing and dodging and weaving. Why, when a dozen would have done the trick? There were several other instances with over the top gun battles, hero vs bad guy one on one epic hand to hand battle on the edge of a precipitous drop and and some sappy feel good Hollywood romancing.

Fortunately the movie, when it was released in 2005, didn’t make a lot of money (according to IMDB it almost made back it’s $40 million budget), so they didn’t make any sequels. Unfortunately, it didn’t make enough at the box office to revive the TV series.

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401

With last Sunday’s trip I now have photographed 401 of South Carolina’s 461 Post Offices. Flickr and Old School Galleries have been updated. The new fangled flash gallery hasn’t been updated because it is kind of a pain and I’m thinking of just dumping it until I’ve finished the whole project.

Bought a Logitech EX110 Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo last Thursday to replace the aging and increasingly stiff OEM Dell. It was sort of an impulse buy, so it wasn’t until I got home and hooked it up that I read some reviews. XP had no problem working with the combo right from the get go and that was a good thing because I wanted to avoid loading the Logitech software as I suspected it might be bloatware. The reviews were correct in that the mouse was a little cheap feeling and noisy, but I liked the keyboard feel. One thing that was mentioned frequently was that the mouse went through batteries quickly (sometimes in as little as 3 weeks.) Hmmm.

When Donna tried it out and the first thing she noticed was there were no lights (Num, Caps or Scroll.) Turns out you can get some indication of those statuses on the monitor, if you install their software. That coupled with the battery issue makes me box it back up for return. We are back to stiff keys until my new Dell wired keyboard shows up in a couple days.

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Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez

We took this afternoon off and had intended to go home and eat lunch before heading out, but didn’t make it, we ended up eating at Popeyes. Longtime readers will know that Popeyes and the Bogardi have a checkered past and will wonder just what the heck we were doing there again considering our history there. The rest of you will now be able to ask that question the next time we eat there, which will probably be during a weak moment several months from now.

It was 11:45 and before the lunch crowd so I walked right up and placed an order. We decided to split a #9 meal, popcorn shrimp with 3 catfish strips, dirty rice, a biscuit and a medium drink. Donna filled the drink and found a table while I waited near the counter for our lunch. There was already someone there waiting for his lunch and soon we were joined by a number of other diners as the order takers were more efficient than the order makers. Well, really, order maker because there was only one of him.

If you ordered chicken you were in luck because that was ready, but as usual, anything else needed to be cooked. I could see our order half filled sitting there with the rice and shrimp as we waited on the catfish. Donna by this time had joined all of us near the counter to chat up the poor guy who was waiting when we walked in and still was. Turns out he was waiting on a couple of po’boys. After about 6-7 minutes more his sandwiches were done and the lady tossed an apple pie in his bag for having to wait so long.

We were next and she put a couple of pies on our tray too, but tried to hand us red beans & rice instead of dirty rice. She corrected that and we headed for a table. Once seated Donna had to go back up to get some of the promised tartar sauce and an extra spork for the rice. Wasn’t until we were done that we realized we didn’t get a biscuit either. By then we didn’t want it either. We split one of the apple pie things and gave the second one away to a fellow sitting behind us.

Dinner was also Naw’lins style but a much nicer experience. Then again we have never had a bad meal at Razzo’s in Concord, NC. Donna had a shrimp po’boy and I had my favorite Andouille/Red Beanz ‘N’ Rice. I wish this place was closer to Aiken as I’d like to eat here once a week or so. Probably get old after a while, but I’d like to find out how long that would take. Tomorrow we will drop in at Razzoo’s again to pick up an order of Rat Toes to go. There is someone back in Aiken (Hi Mark) who would be very unhappy If I didn’t bring him back some.

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