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Fledgling Snowbird

Dad was an only child and Mom had one sister, so the sum total of my first cousins is quite small. The woman on the right in the photo above represents exactly one half of them, meet Cousin Louise, fledgling snowbird.

When we received her annual Christmas letter this year she mentioned that she was tired of the winters in Maine, so she was going to rent a house in Florida from a friend for the months of January, February and March. She had gotten her nurse’s license for FLA and planned on finding some work to keep her kind of busy and recoup some of her rent money. Turns out the town she was renting in was a mere 15 miles from where Donna’s sister Sandy lives, so we told her we were going down in February to visit Sandy and some of Donna and her cousins when they returned from a cruise* and we would stop in and visit. We also offered up a free night of room and board at Casa de Bogardus if her drive down brought her our way.

*Maybe we should check on those plans, as they may have decided on something different after the Costa Concordia thing.

And at the beginning Louise was going to pass right by here as she traveled from Virginia Beach to Atlanta visiting friends, but when we checked in with her the day before her scheduled arrival, she mentioned that she was getting anxious to get to her destination and was going to keep the car pointed south instead of jogging west our way. Seeing as she was going to have to pass right through South Carolina on the way. We plotted a likely point for her overnight stay on Friday and because we had that afternoon off we’d drive over and meet her for dinner.

Serendipitously, it turned out to be a town that we are intimately familiar with meeting cousins in. It is the same city where we usually meet Donna’s cousin Laurie at a Cracker Barrel in Florence, SC. So we made some reservations at a hotel that fit our one important criteria, be within walking distance of a restaurant that served wine. We each agreed to ask at the front desk to see if the other had checked in yet so we could get together.

Donna and I took our time on the way east on I-20 doing a few a few park & grab geocaches. When we got to the hotel I told Donna we would first circle the lot looking for a car with Maine plates before checking in. We didn’t get very far, there was a red Toyota Prius under the entrance awning. We did some catching up, then a lot more family stories over dinner. There was a bit more chatting at breakfast on Saturday in the hotel before Louise continued flying south for the winter and we geocached home vowing to meet again in February.

Hard Drive Suicide

With the new PC in hand and all my files transfered over to it, it was time to wipe the hard drive so I can pass it along to a co-worker.* I use a program called KillDisk to over writes everything on a drive with zeros, then re-install the operating system, so that the next person starts with a clean slate.

*I was going to donate it to Goodwill, but found someone here at work who is starting a Tax Prep business and needed to keep that stuff separate from the household PC.

I made a bootable USB drive to erase the hard drives, but for some reason the PC wouldn’t start up using it. So I installed the Windows version and it wiped the secondary hard drive and it wiped the second partition on the main drive, but would not commit suicide by wiping the drive it was installed on. Not unexpected, the computer was just obeying the 3rd Law of Robotics: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I ended up burning a CD to kill the main drive.

Yo te Mostrar? el M

We rode the tandem to work today and had the afternoon off, so as I gathered up Donna to go change for the ride home, I overheard Trina, another planner in the cubicle behind her, say to Ian, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Now, taken out of context in an office environment, you just might wonder what was going on there…

Fridays at ASCO for lunch we get Mexican brought in. We don’t have a cafeteria, but the sister of a woman who works on a Assembly line fixes the food for delivery to the Valve Store(R). It started small, just the folks that work on her line, but once word got out how good the food is, especially the green chile sauce, it has branched out to all around the plant.

Us office types give our order to Ian, one of the Assembly Engineers, who gathers the money and gives the order sheet to the woman. I was kind of bummed that I missed out on the Mexican this week as one of the offerings was a burrito with white rice and the green chile sauce on the side and this is my favorite. Apparently Trina is fond of the sauce as well, because her container was not full to the top. She was complaining to Ian about the quantity of it and he must have been dismissive of her concern. So that is why she said, “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Adios 2011

Published this year’s “Best Of” page tonight. You can find it over on the left under Highlight Reels.

In the beginning, ten years ago, this was two different and separate blogs, The Miata Diaries with stories about the car and how it fit into my life and the other, called Brian’s Daily Rant, was a place for me to bitch about what got stuck in my craw each day. There was so much stuff written during the year that I had a hard time weaning out all the quality posts to get it down to just one best per each month.

Somewhere around 5 or 6 years ago I merged the two into this one. The total posts diminished and soon after the caliber of content did too. For the last couple of years I have wished I could have cheated and used a second post from one month to use in the place of another month with nothing that I felt qualified.

And as I look back on this year I don’t see very many posts that qualify either, mostly they were just just recaps of geocaching adventures or pictures of papercraft projects. In an effort to at least post something when I didn’t feel like writing I would often upload a photo. So for the Best Of 2011 I have used no words, just my best picture from each month.

I Dare Anyone

To not enjoy this video and/or not get this song stuck in their head.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf_hdFSnOEI

The Sweet Smell Of Decay

I haven’t turned all morbid, stared taking mortician training courses at the local junior college or anything, but me merely enjoying the slowly drying out of our real pine wreath hanging on the inside of our front door.

Downtown Christmas Shopping

We walked the main downtown shopping street in Melbourne twice. Once when we went for lunch and a second time because went back when the “candle light” thing was going on between 5 & 9 PM. There were a fun assortment of stores and restaurants to keep us entertained and fed both trips.

Outside one of the funky little shops there was a colorful flashing, rotating light that danced on the sidewalk that prompted passers-by to dance on the spots.