I haven't anything to say, so a picture of Buttercup eating yogurt from a spoon.



Don't say I don't deliver.

The house is on Craigslist.

For rent, blah, blah, blah. Description of our house (and ever other house in the neighborhood). Location. No phone number to call, just an e-mail address.

(No, I'm not linking. Are you crazy? You'd so stalk Adam.)

Here's the twist: neither one of us posted it.

We find out about about the ad when a minivan with Ohio plates pulls into the driveway this afternoon and an affable sort of guy gets out and asks if we're the landlords. Which, given the context of Adam climbing around on the roof, winterizing the swamp cooler kind of makes sense, but still we were both like "say wha?"

"I saw your ad on Craigslist. $1095 a month for a two story house. This street and that street."

We kind of looked at each other and shrugged. The house across the way is up for rent, but it's a teeny one-story jobbie and would never be confused with our house. So I went online looking for the ad, and it seems that yes, someone's trying to rent what sounds like our house.

I'm sure the rental company for the house across the way just mixed up listings, but at the same time, dude. That's kind of jacked.

Oh, all that is good and holy, please don't let the wrath of Nick Denton land upon my head.

Jalopnik, people. It's not my bag; maybe it's yours.

In other car news . . .

Adam installed the new ECU on his car and has spent a couple of happy weekends playing with mapping and chatting with the Flyin' Miata guys and generally preparing for the eventual engine swap and turbo kit.

That's gonna be a fun couple of weekends.

According to the club page we're down to two Farmington events before the fork's in the season. There's rumor of rescheduling a Santa Fe event this weekend, but, y'know, I haven't heard anything.

Finally, I bought Bucky three years ago today. Since his purchase, I've striped him, swapped the suspension twice (JDM, baby), fixed the eponymous bucking clutch, replaced the sound system, made a cold air box for the intake and kept him normally aspirated. I think that last one's a biggie.

Oh, and driven (and parked) on the back straight at Indy.



Happy birthday, Buck.

Labels: bucky, miata, mx5, sharka

It's true. I do liek my pie.

People aren't getting the concept of the cheap and easy weekend. Nor are they sharing the love. When I try to explain the concept, there's just a lot of head bobbing, followed by a subject change.

The cheap and easy weekends aren't that complicated, really. An idea for what to do is formulated the weekend before, usually on a Sunday morning when we're lolling about on the upstairs couch. The work week is spent e-mailing suggestions back and forth. Plans are shorn up by Friday night.

I think it's the constraints of the cheap-and-easy throw people. "How can you have any sort of fun on $50 in Albuquerque?"

It's all a matter of planning. Those fifty bucks finance any meals out, cover charges we may incur, movie tickets, admission prices and -- most horrifying to some -- booze. We made the decision to keep the booze seprate from our grocery tab to keep costs down, and to get us out of the house and somewhere interesting when we want a beer.

(Coffee on the other hand? Even though Satellite's kind of out of the way and not at all included on any sort of grocery bill, it's still covered.)

Anyway. Once the money's out, we're done. If there's cash left over, it goes in the next weekend's pot, but it's usually less than $10.

So I scour the Venue each week, looking for free activities (corn maze!) and stuff playing at the dollar theater. We e-mail weekend structure ideas back and forth. Meals are planned because we're both big into cooking for entertainment. When we do eat out, we become very particular about where we're going. Not that we've ever been fans of casual chain dining, but now I have even less inclination to eat at TGIChilibees. Please see the sushitastrophe from two weeks ago. Why eat bland pre-packaged food when there's incredible spicy tuna to be had?

Exactly.

Fifty bucks isn't a whole heck of a lot, but suddenly, I'm living for the weekends more than I have in a long, long time.

Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy will be sucking my life for the next several weeks. Yep.

Also, I feel so left out of the lonelygirl15 YouTube loop. I just don't have enough free time to be that pop culturally versed, and it makes me a sad, sad panda. It was so much easier to be slavishly devoted to pop culture five years ago. All it took was VH1, a subscription to Entertainment Weekly and a weekly round of the box office totals and Billboard charts. Now? Im.possi.ble. I barely fathom MySpace and I don't have the patience for my not-so-broadband to load clip after clip on YouTube.

Which brings me to this: maybe it's time to stop perusing MySpace and start persuing a legitimate brain-filling line of trivia, but with a more academic bent. Maybe it's time to think about getting that Ph.D. I could be the worlds 1343rd foremost Proust scholar, but that would require reading and actually finishingProust, and while I like madelines soaked in tea as much as the next nerd, I just don't have it in me.

Suggestions?

Michael Schumacher's retirement announcement comes with a weird mixture of 9/11 and F1 for me. The 2001 Italian Gran Prix with the stripped Ferarris was my first exposure to the sport. Comcast had added the then Speed Channel, Adam had been jonsing to see European racing and I needed a break from the frentic week at work. I don't think we even saw the whole race; that would be the Australian GP the following season. But there it was.

And now five years later, he's retiring. He was never my favorite driver, but I did admire his talent, his confidence, his fist-pumping, podium-jumping exuberance. He's the reason why I could hum the Italian national anthem for a bunch of copy editors during the 2004 Olympics, and why Adam and I were hanging off of each other, howling with laughter at Pixar's "Cars."

I'd probably feel better about his retirement if I didn't buy into the rumors he was pushed out. It feels tainted -- not quite genuine. Even before Varsha was repeating the McLaren murmurings, I was speculating a Michael Schumacher seat with the Mercedes team next year, because I can't see him going out of the sport with this cloud hanging over him.

Besides, wouldn't you just give anything to see an Alonso/Schumacher pairing? It'd make the Montoya/Raikkonen years look like amature hour! It'd be great! It'd sell tickets!

It'll probably never happen.

Anyway. Godspeed, Jellybean Head. It's been a fun five years.

A Saturday in pictures


















(best picture of me in six months)

BEST! SATURDAY! EVER!

Where we've been: the Concours du Soleil gala for the Carrie Tingley Foundation (a worthy cause; they were instrumental in helping me as a small child). Awesome cars. Adam in a suit. Mayfield in a tux. Pictures to follow.

Where we're going: Burt's Tiki Lounge/Atomic Cantina for the Johnny Cash tribute night. More Mayfield in a tux. Pictures? Maybe, if we remember.

What does it all mean? A big, BIG weekend at Casa de Lobo.

Mmm. Beta.

So there's been an influx from the visitors from North Carolina as of late, and I'm wondering if my mother finally leaked the url to the network of cousins. If so, hello! We put coleslaw on our chili dogs! If not, hello, anyway! I'm sure if we're not somehow related, you're in contact with at least three dozen members of my family.

(The Carter branch of my family is nothing if not sprawling.)

And yeah. That's it. Mostly, I wanted to play with Blogger.

At the end of seeing "Cars" at the dollar theater, Adam turned to me and said, "According to Pixar, our cars are sluts."

Weekend report in pictures:

We rode the train up to Bernalillo and -- after surveying the decidedly scary crowd -- stayed aboard and went back to downtown.



Adam reacts to having a picture taken. This is no reflection upon the Rail Runner service. However, his reaction could also be to the people behind us who were playing "identify that ringtone" for twenty friggin' minutes.

Once again, Verizon? Is not a parenting device.

More pictures of the Bernaillio Excursion:







Once off the train, we wandered around downtown in search of sushi, books and restoring our hipness quotent.








(I'm being arty here.)

Also, before we went up to Bernalillo, we ran over to Buffalo Exchange and exchanged two skirts and a dress I never wore for a pair of jeans for Adam. They're awesome.



As for today, this was the highlight:



More chile.

And now I wish the drunk idiots down the street would shut up. Some of us have to work tomorrow.

Happy Labor Day!