Diary

Due to a bad dining decision, I went to lunch at Burger King last week. As I moved through the line, I noticed a slightly overweight Hispanic girl leaning against the counter, waiting for her food. She was wearing low-cut hip-hugger jeans.

Here’s my Fashion Hint for the month:

If you are a girl, and you have a .. hair problem.. don’t wear low-cut jeans. Most importantly, if you are a girl and you have thick glossy ass-hair, ass-hair that has crawled out of your ass and up your spine to reach your mid-back in some unholy ass-hair creeper-vine fashion, ass-hair that would be more fitting on a swarthy Italian sailor’s chest [or head], please, please, for the love of all that is holy, please do not wear low-cut jeans when you have an ass-pelt!

Week before last, the AC went out.

For those of you not living in Atlanta: this is a crisis of Biblical proportions. Even in April.

I called around, on a Sunday, and A Guy to come out and look at it. He mumbled something about leaks, and about the age of the AC unit, filled it with coolant, charged me $180 and left.

Three days later, the AC was again blowing tepid air.

My third-day impressions about the MINI:

I’ll preface by saying that my trade-in was a 2000 Ford Escort ZX2
automatic.

A lot of people have complained that the MINI is too loud for long trips, that the ride is too rough, especially on run-flats, and so on. I haven’t noticed any of that, probably because my senses were dulled by four years of Ford Escort. possibly not, though, because Laura noted how quiet it was inside the car with the windows up. Bumps that were very jarring in the Escort are still noticeable in the MINI, but only on an ‘informational’ level — it doesn’t feel like serious structural damage is taking place when I drive over a small pothole.

Given the VIN of an ordered MINI Cooper, you can paste it into the Wallenius Wilhelmsen cargo tracking page and locate the name of the ship that carries said MINI, as well as estimated departure and arrival dates.

It shows that the vessel containing my MINI, the Curitiba, has sailed, and is due to arrive in Charleston, SC on 3-30. This could change, because the shipping terminal info is a little hedgy until the ship proves to be underway.

After years(!) of drooling, I ordered a MINI Cooper S from Global Imports. I would’ve gone to Hank Aaron Mini, but the sales weasels tried to rob me. Luckily, I know Excel and wouldn’t put up with them trying to charge interest on the total amount, without counting the down payment.

It’s Chili Red with black stripes, roof, and mirrors, similar to this one. It should arrive sometime in May.

MINI Links

• Mini2 has great forums.
  • MotoringFile is an excellent MINI weblog.
    • Eric Longman‘s weblog. He helped out with some of my MINI questions.

My first girlfriend mailed me a little stuffed hamster/beaver/thing. It was doused in her perfume, ‘to remember her by’, since she lived two hours away and I only got to see her every other weekend.

Twelve years later, I have no idea what became of that girl, and the beaver is now a thoroughly-masticated dog toy.

There’s a parable in there somewhere.

Because Laura‘s the best girlfriend ever, she got me a Roomba for Christmas. It took a while to get here, and I wanted to test it for a while before writing a glowing review.

In short, the Roomba sucks.

And that’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. It sucks without my intervention, except a few times when it got stuck or trapped, and it does a damn fine job of sucking. It sucks up cat hair, cat litter, cat feces, cat barf, cat dandruff, and all the other various parts of cat that are strewn around my house. It sucks up sand-dune sized litter drifts without a complaint, and it sweeps up the gnawed corpses of toilet paper rolls left by the dog. It handles 2/3 of the floorspace of my house in about an hour, and has some battery charge left over.

A while back, I suggested we paint the bathroom green, because anything would’ve been better than the nasty, soul-sucking blue-grey that the bathroom had been painted in since the early 70s.

At the time, I was joking, but I think it turned out quite nicely. I want to continue the Tiki theme, adding a bamboo print border, and eventually replacing the toilet and bathtub with rattan replicas. Within a few years, perhaps I can make defecating in my bathroom a truly tropical experience, replete with strange diseases and mysterious insects eager to inflict and explore supporating wounds.

Here’s the Gallery, folks.