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Rolled it over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer, that is. Saturday afternoon, about 3:30.
I bought the car on April 25, 1994. That’s 15 years, 7 months, and 4 days. Spreading 200K miles across 5697 days gives just over thirty-five miles a day. Not bad for a car that still zooms and travels nicely – our recent trips to Knoxville and Cleveland were in this reliable machine, and I’m getting around 30 miles per gallon in normal driving. It’s getting a decent amount of body rust, but it’s still a great car. Definitely not a clunker, by anybody’s description.
Welcome to Awed Manor’s Black Friday edition!
I saw an infomercial a commercial for Ronco knives recently. Yes, that Ronco, home of the Veg-O-Matic (now called the Dial-O-Matic). The knife set as shown in the commercial does all the normal things you do with knives at home – slice tomatoes paper-thin, slice a piece of paper in the air, slice a pineapple in half, cut iron shavings off a metal hammer. And of course the original knife added all his friends until the count got up to around 25 (with a free solid flavor injector!), and then they offered two for the price of one. Hucksterism at its finest.
It prepared me well for when I switched channels and saw the Perfect Brownie offer. Silly me never realized that my brownies in a pan that I had to cut individually were in some way imperfect. They have been servicing me for years (well, across multiple instances. Not the same single pan of brownies.). I think I’ll try to scrape by with what we have.
Side note: The company behind Perfect Brownie is LiveMercial, which also pumps the Tool Band It. This thing was shouted by Billy Mays (before his demise), but looks like a terrible accident at the hardware store.
Holds twenty-five pounds? Maybe if you get it blood pressure cuff tight. That’s three gallons of water stuck to your upper arm. I think the guy in the inset is wearing two – one on each arm. I also think his fingers are turning blue. Tempting product, but I think I’ll pass. I try not to buy things that are single-purpose. Oh, it’s also a tourniquet? Interesting . . .
Happy shopping, early birds!
Last July, I almost scrambled some bird eggs. This was out back, near our cistern.
That is mulched grass you see on top of the eggs. I came very close to mowing these over.
I mentioned it to my friend Dude, who pointed me to a neat selection of the Smithsonian’s collection, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio. And I found out that most likely, they were eggs from a meadowlark.
(description here).
Now Dude is a relative of mine, something on the order of second cousin twice removed. Or something like that. My dad’s a closer relative to him, but still not too close. The interesting thing is that my parents live in Sierra Vista, Arizona, which was once the training camp for the Harlem Globetrotters, who starred Meadowlark Lemon.
All this is not to be confused with Mount Lemmon, a couple hours north of my folks.
Now you see why my thoughts are scrambled??
(not about bicycles)
Bespoke is a fancy way of saying “custom”. It doesn’t technically apply to the subject at hand, but it does in spirit.
We’re talking 959s, baby!
Specifically, the eight of them made in 1992/93, four years after the production run of 300. (In Gruppe B, only 200 cars were required to count as a “production” car – the extra hundred must have been spares. It sure wasn’t a money-maker. Even at $800,000, Porsche was losing around a half-million per car.)
Seems that there were some spare parts just laying around the factory, so the Porsche guys decided to throw them together and come up with something saleable. And they did – four of the red Porsche 959, and four of the silver. They cost almost twice as much, but – surprise – Porsche had no trouble selling them.
Porsche made a number of the racing 961 models, and did race in Group B (the supercars), but these last eight cars were all sold to collectors.
Not me, you understand.
I can hope . . .
My original plan was to till the new garden on Saturday morning. Since I don’t eat breakfast, I was going to get up and start rolling. Instead I had a special board meeting at church, and I stopped at a couple stores on the way back. So I hit Chipotle and got my lunch, brought it home, and munched down before starting rototilling.
That would be four hours of rototilling.
Oh, and with time off for moving rocks out that the tiller dug up. And getting out the two big rocks that got jammed up inside the tiller.
And moving the whomping big rock that is not a cenotaph, because it’s not a monument for somebody whose bones are elsewhere. It’s just your garden variety, three foot by one foot by four inch, hundred and twenty pound rock.
So if you need a cenotaph, and are willing to take one that I can’t pick up but still has tiller scars along one side, you’re welcome to this one.
And yes, I took off Saturday evening from doing anything constructive. I earned it.
My interweb credibility is growing by leaps and bounds.
Okay. One leap, one bound.
A few weeks ago, my favorite technical blogger tweeted a link back to my blog, and I picked up a massive spike in hits here.
Then I wrote about my great experiences with MailBoss, the secure mailbox people. I wrote to them and told them they could use anything they like. They didn’t take the pictures from my blog, but they used my blog entry and the letter I wrote to them, and posted it all here.
I’m taking the internet by storm.
Busy days – not a lot of time for long entries. Bettie did harvest the garden last weekend, and we’re due to have BLTs this weekend with homegrown tomatoes. (That would be one tomato each, but still – they’re ours!)
Anyway, here’s a couple fun sites. There, I fixed it and Lovely Listing. The first is actual pictures of kludges that people have done. Makes me feel normal. “I’ve never done that. I wouldn’t have thought of that!” The second one is pictures taken from real estate listings. Again, it makes me bubble over with normalcy.
Here are a couple sample pix, without the fun commentary from the sites.
Good timewasters.
We got called over to the old house today. The appraiser had been over there, and the potential purchasers had a list of eight things they needed to have addressed. We met the realtor and his handyman.
Went pretty well. It came down to three things that really needed to be fixed. Chimney, electrical box, and the leaky shower. The handyman will get us quotes by Monday, and then we’ll see where we stand.
Since we were there, we decided to have me clean out the gutters instead of stopping by after church on Sunday. Good thinking. Then Bettie wanted to clean out the flower beds, and have me trim some trees, and clean out a drain in the floor, and test three different drains, and haul boatloads of leaves to the back of the property, and mow the leaves that were left (after our tenant mowed – the leaves were thick).
I came close to having myself a pity party, and going to sulk in a corner somewhere. I chose not to. Yes, it was a serious derailment of the day (we ended up spending almost 5 hours over there). Yes, I had to call back some people I was doing computer support for and tell them that I couldn’t make it today. Yes, I’m achy and taking small steps when I walk. And yes, I was not happy, and told Bettie about it. But yes, I did the work. Yes, it was a good thing to do. Yes, Bettie and I are very much in love.
And yes, I’m going to sleep very well tonight.
I like the Indiana Jones movies – the cliffhanger attitude taken from the old serial flicks. Indy gets himself into a place where it’s impossible to get out of – and then a miracle occurs, and everything works out.
It’s not only on film that this happens. Miracles happen in real life.
After the house being with our old realtor for nine months and having only four showings, our new realtor had us an offer in two days. After some counter-offers, we have agreed on a price that should pay off our old mortgage. It’s much less than we had hoped for a year ago, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
They’re hoping to close the day before Thanksgiving. That will give them the $8,000 government bailout money, and give everybody more to be thankful for.
Was it the realtor that did it? Nope, although he’s a great guy. It was God, testing and teaching us. And if this all falls through, that doesn’t diminish God’s power or goodness. It just provides Bettie and I with a new opportunity to grow our faith.
I helped out at our church’s first KidzTown this past Saturday morning, and I heard a riddle there.
How do you turn 7 into an even number?
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