A new game... Post pics from your cel phone V.1.0

[MiniDave]

Very cool shot, and I'm surprised you could get onto the flight line to get the shot- nice!

[MPlayle]

The museum is at a small municipal airport in San Marcos, Texas.  It sits right on the flight line and the only way to get to it is via the flight line.

[Jims5543]

There is a nude beach I drive by once a week. 2 weeks ago the parking lot was closed to be paved.

Yesterday I drove past it, it appears to be a very popular place.  I think if I went out to the beach I was be scarred for life. 

[Mudhen]

    

[MiniDave]

I think you'd be disappointed, at the one in Sandy Ego it was mostly gay men that "hung out" there...

[Mudhen]

I think you'd be disappointed, at the one in Sandy Ego it was mostly gay men that "hung out" there...

😆.

Maybe it would be right, uh...up his alley?

[Jims5543]

Old fuckers - Ever have a nostalgia moment where you think you want a car like the one you had when you were in high school.

Maybe you forget how bad they were. Only how cool they looked. I was at the crossroads, I thought I wanted a late 60's Mustang like I had in HS.
Then I catch myself and convince me that they were not that good.

Today I had a moment that cemented that mindset. My neighbor across the street, Larry from the Bronx, recently purchased a 1963 Chevy Nova SS at the Orlando Mecum Auction.

This morning he ran out of gas in his SUV when he was driving to pick up the Nova from a local mechanic that was doing a PPI on it.  He asked me if I would run him to his SUV, I agreed.  I fully planned on taking him to his SUV in my Mini. He insisted on my driving his Nova.

Fine, I get in and nostalgia hits me, the smell reminded me of my 67 Mustang.  I stated that to him.

His SUv was about a mile from us. He drove there, when we got there his Nova kept stalling out. He said the mechanic lowered the idle and now its stalling. I ended up under the hood adjusting his idle on the side of the road.  We made the Nova happy he told me to drive it back.

I did and then remembered how bad these 60's cars are.  That short 1 mile drive cured me.  Dans Mini I bought is 100X better than an American car from the same era.  Disagree? Lets fight!

Driving it, no gauges works on the dash, the brakes were a suggestion, the handling was horrid, every bump in the road made it jump around, it was not a nice car to drive...




... and yes the wipers were stuck in that position too. Plus it was a Auto...



That cured me of ever wanting another Mustang. Thanks Larry!!!

[Jims5543]

House behind the house I was working on, someone has an umbrella fetish. Yes, that is remnants of hurricane damage from this past summer.

I kept looking over at that house and wondering, why do they have all those umbrellas?


I am toying with starting a You Tube channel, I meet the coolest people with this job, I am wondering if I could start a 10 questions interview channel. If they come across as interesting, ask them if I can video 10 questions in 10 minutes.  Make short video's with these people. I think it would be interesting.

Both the guys I met today were super interesting, one is a new car friend. LOL! He will be joining me at the next AX in either his E39 700HP BMW Dinan M5 or his Lotus Esprit both were in his garage which prompted conversation.

The other guy is part time in Florida and has a 200 acres farm in Michigan, he is also an engineer at Lazi-Boy.  I mentioned my wife and I like watching Clarksons Farm, he had no idea it existed. I asked if he has Amazon Prime  and he did, so I gave him a homework assignment. LOL!

A few months ago I met a really nice guy who was an engineer at Smith and Wesson. 

[BruceK]

I spotted this tree the other day. I noticed it because:

1) it plain didn't exist there last week
2) this is Texas, not Washington state

Turns out it's a cell tower.  These disguised ones are getting better looking.  If this was the Pacific Northwest, I probably would never have noticed it.  But it kinda sticks out here.  Still, better than a plain cell tower.

[BruceK]

I've seen this scene for months and months but only today did I make time to take a photo.


The manager and the lead tech at this oil change place both DRIVE TESLAS.  That's a funny as hell.

[94touring]

This was about as obnoxious as you could imagine.  Rarely do I feel compelled to run people over in my truck, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't imagine how great it would have felt. 

[MiniDave]

Is it legal to ride those on the street in OK?

[94touring]

Is it legal to ride those on the street in OK?

Certainly not.  They were doing wheelies and revving their obnoxious exhaust the whole way down the road too.  I went full old man angry at the whole situation.

[MiniDave]

Reason I asked is that it seemed to be legal to ride all sorts of off-road vehicles out there in South Dakota....

I laughed at your "old man angry" comment! 

I didn't notice the brain buckets at first.....what a joke! These guys were what, late 20's early 30's? They're too old to be acting like teenies.....

[MPlayle]

It seems to be a state-by-state thing as to whether some types of "off roader" machines are allowed on the streets.

To my recollection, most of the ones in South Dakota that I saw during the Mini Meet East-West event were of the side-by-side variety.

[Jims5543]

Guess which one does a lot of burn outs.

We get the occasional kid on a dirt bike here, usually traversing some roads (illegally) to head to another set of paths in the woods.

The only place we see a lot of that around here is in West Palm Beach, it seems to be a big thing in the hood. It's a big problem down there in West Palm.

[Jims5543]

My wife and I met her family downtown for an art festival. My wife and I have been quietly looking for local art to decorate our house with.

We ran across this artist and his booth, we ended up hanging out with Richard for over a half an hour, even watched him sell a couple of paintings, one to our niece titled "Ozzi-Lisa" a play on Ozzi combined with the Mona Lisa pose.

One caught our eye, it was title "Inside the mind of Dali" we are huge Dali fans and love abstract.

We ended up purchasing the Dali piece from him. This is our second local art purchase, we picked up a small piece a few months ago when we were in Cocoa for an evening working on a project up there.

Richard was a neat guy, I could have hung out and chatted with him longer but we had to get going. He is from Uruguay, I have to text my friend Matias in Miami and tell him about this cat, he is from Uruguay as well. When I mentioned to Richard that I made friends with Matias after selling him my old BMW, he loved hearing about fellow countryman.

This is a news story about Richard, seems he created quite a stir in his town that made national news. No press is bad press.

https://authenticflorida.com/home-is-where-the-art-is-at-the-starry-night-house-in-mt-dora/

Here is our Richard Barrenechea, Inside the Mind of Dali:

[94touring]

Guess which one does a lot of burn outs.

We get the occasional kid on a dirt bike here, usually traversing some roads (illegally) to head to another set of paths in the woods.

The only place we see a lot of that around here is in West Palm Beach, it seems to be a big thing in the hood. It's a big problem down there in West Palm.

The one "dude" had pony tails too.  I'm pretty sure this is how I looked. 

[Jims5543]

Remember when we met up in WPB many years ago and saw some morons doing the same thing as we walked to dinner?

 We do not get any of that up here.  We get a lot of old people in Golf Carts, but, they made that legal here, you have to have directional etc.. and a tag from the DMV on it.

The cops up here have nothing to do, that crap would never fly here.

[94touring]

They were approaching a nice area of town too.  Didn't make any sense what they were doing there. The "old money" area. 

[Jims5543]

Driving back from a job site today, we see a Stuart Sheriffs car with its lights on in the middle lane of a road heading into a round about.

In front of the Sheriffs car is another car that had been stopped from going the wrong way down the road leading into the traffic circle.

I am still not sure how the hell this lady managed to do this. Then again, winter in Florida gives us many gems like this.

Pic shot in my side view mirror. I mirrored it to correct it.

[BruceK]

I've always been a fan of the various space programs so my wife and I traveled five hours to South Padre Island to see the next launch (and booster catch!) of the huge SpaceX Starship rocket.

Blastoff was scheduled for 5:30 PM Friday (Feb 28) afternoon, but unfortunately it was postponed until at least Monday (Mar 3) afternoon.  Our schedules and hotel reservations would not allow us to stay that long so we're going to miss this one and we'll have to try to see it again some other time. 

With no launch happening on Friday, we decided to drive to the Starbase and see what we could see of the launchpad and rocket hardware. It's incredible how close you can get to everything right on the public road to the beach. The rocket was not fully assembled. The upper stage, the Starship, sat separately from the Heavy Booster which was already sitting on the launchpad from the last launch when it was successfully caught by the "chopsticks" after the flight in January.

I'm looking forward to trying again sometime to watch the launch and especially the booster recovery. 

[94touring]

That would be something to see in person. 

[Jims5543]

I keep wanting to take off from work and head up to Cape Canaveral to watch a launch.  Its about 100 miles from me. I can see he rockets from here..

It is 100X better up close.

Bruce you have inspired me to try to get up for a launch soon.

[bikewiz]

I've always been a fan of the various space programs so my wife and I traveled five hours to South Padre Island to see the next launch (and booster catch!) of the huge SpaceX Starship rocket.

Blastoff was scheduled for 5:30 PM Friday (Feb 28) afternoon, but unfortunately it was postponed until at least Monday (Mar 3) afternoon.  Our schedules and hotel reservations would not allow us to stay that long so we're going to miss this one and we'll have to try to see it again some other time. 

With no launch happening on Friday, we decided to drive to the Starbase and see what we could see of the launchpad and rocket hardware. It's incredible how close you can get to everything right on the public road to the beach. The rocket was not fully assembled. The upper stage, the Starship, sat separately from the Heavy Booster which was already sitting on the launchpad from the last launch when it was successfully caught by the "chopsticks" after the flight in January.

I'm looking forward to trying again sometime to watch the launch and especially the booster recovery. 

Pretty cool. My daughter is an engineer at a company in Wilmington, Ma. that does work for Space X, she worked on the fixturing for thruster nozzles on the Dragon capsule.
This past summer during sailboat racing season I needed extra crew one night to sail with my sister and me, an unassuming woman volunteered, ends up she had returned from the ISS in April aboard Soyuz. Look her up Loral O'Hara. She was on Expedition 68 to the ISS. She was visiting Woods Hole for part of the summer as she had worked at The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on the Alvin sub, Alvin was the sub that found the Titanic. For a kid who grew up with Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, sailing with a real astronaut was the highlight of my summer.