WTF

Lost and Found

These two items have been sitting on the side of the computer desk since sometime in early June awaiting my blogging about them. Well, 4 months is about right for them to have ripened…

We bought the Mini in October of 2017 and for the first 5 months it received almost a monthly bath. It could probably wait a bit longer in between washings except aerodynamics and the vertical rear end ensures a very dirty back surface in short order. When we returned from our month long road trip in May I decided to do a deeper cleaning than the usual exterior wash and vacuum the mats.

Lost – While cleaning the backs of the leatherette front seats I felt a square shaped bump in the map pocket of the drivers seat. Turned out it was the jewel case for the BeeGees One Night Only CD. The case was empty and there wasn’t any CD in the car’s player when we bought it, so I guess the previous owner popped the disc out and forgot the case was behind the seat.

Found – I had remembered to make sure the spare tire, which is mounted under the car had a full load of air before the trip, but had never really checked to see if the jack, etc. that was needed to changed out a flat tire was complete. So while vacuuming the “trunk” area I pulled up the flat carpeted fiberboard that covers the tire changing tools. There is a jack, a lug wrench, a wrench to remove the spare, a couple other things required for the job and a square pack of what looks like folded white vinyl. It was unopened, I really didn’t want to open it, so I tried to look it up on the web, but there wasn’t any number or anything. I looked up the German words on the package, teile is parts and München is Munich, so no help. My best guess is it a drop cloth for put down on the ground when changing a flat so you don’t get dirty.

Happy Birthday Google

When I opened Chrome this morning right there on the new tab page was a Google Doodle that looked like those birthday cake candles in the shape of letters. When I opened a news page there was a note about today being Google’s 20th birthday. Well, now the the doodle make sense. But then I notice the image attached to the news bit and it looked nothing like the one I got. What the heck?

I opened a new tab and when I went to hit the play button on my Google Doodle, as my mouse reached the edge a title attribute box popped up with the phrase “Happy Birthday, Brian!” in it. What do you know, today is my birthday and Google knew it, so, cool or creepy or what the heck did I expect? Or more importantly, does there really need to be a comma after birthday and before my name?

Need A Job Brian?

Need a job Brian?

Need a job Brian?

When I opened a new tab in Chrome this afternoon in between the search box and the most visited site list I got at couple of tabs to search for jobs in the local area. Huh? Neither of us were looking for work nor using the web to look for one. So why was it there? A new President Trump Executive Order trying to make America great again by making unemployment zero?

Or, although I did this a couple months ago, the folks in Mountain View are just catching up, because I removed my work address when I retired from Google Maps.

Set Work Location

Set Work Location

Must have been an unpublic beta or something because it is gone now…

In Russia, Photo Manipulates YOU Redux

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of my discovering a website called PhotoFunia and my glee of finding it still up and running here you go:

28,000 Gross Vehicle Weight Rating

As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times before here, we always park way far out in parking lots, for both the walk and to avoid door dings. Trouble is, that more times than not, we will come out and find that someone has parked their very large truck right next to us blocking our view for pulling out of the spot.

Today when we pulled into Kroger’s to pick up a couple things, I noticed this large truck parked way out with nobody else around it, so to give one of the them a taste of the same sort of inconvenience, I parked right next to them.

I think I made my point.

Somewhere on our shopping trip drive the Angry Ladybug crossed the 28,000 mile mark.

Wendover Will

On Day 12 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip we spent the night in the town of Wendover, Utah. The town sits right on the border between Utah and Nevada and just across the literal line in the sand sits the town of West Wendover. In 1952 West Wendover, Nevada replaced a bright light on a tall pole that State Line Service (a cobblestone service station), right on the border, had used to attract visitors with a 64 foot tall mechanical cowboy outlined in neon lights.

Probably hundreds of thousands of people have taken pictures of Will and even themselves with Wendover Will over the years, but now the town has created a page where if you submit a selfie photo with him they’ll post it with a digital pin on the map of where your from. I, of course, thought it sounded like fun, so I took a picture. It is not a very good picture overall and shows that I need a lot more practice at the selfie thing. Take a look and see if you can find me: Wendover Will Visitor Map

Easter Miracle

Cleaning up the drafts folder…
Somewhere in the middle of March, while doing some laundry, one of the socks from Donna’s favorite pair of yoga socks came up missing. We looked in every nook & cranny of every item of clothing that was in the wash load with no success. I retraced our steps to the laundry room, I looked beside and behind the washer and the dryer, I looked inside the dryer to see if it was stuck somewhere and then retraced our steps back into the bedroom where we were folding the clothes. No sock.

Donna repeated what I just did and she didn’t find the missing sock either. While she was doing this I looked under the bed we threw the clothes on to fold thinking maybe it fell off and got kicked under there. Nope. When Donna got back she looked under the bed too. No sock. We shrugged our shoulders and figured it would show up in the leg or sleeve of someone’s in the near future.

Two weeks later, on Easter morning when I got out of bed in our hotel in Myrtle Beach and turned on the light in the bathroom, there in the middle of the tile floor was the missing sock. How the sock got there is a total mystery. The suitcases with all our clothing were kept in the room. Any clothes brought into the bathroom wouldn’t have included socks or anything that a sock could hide in. It was just there.

Of course we weren’t really sure that it wasn’t the non-missing sock until we got home on Sunday afternoon and Donna looked in her closet and saw the other sock sitting on the shelf right where she left it waiting for its mate. Still not sure how the resurrected sock made it to Myrtle Beach and to magically appear on a bathroom floor.