Dec 1 - Advent

It's that time of year again.  The first candle on the Advent Wreath has been lit.  Christmas is around the corner.  People are putting up lights and wreaths.  No doubt Christmas Carols are playing in the stores as they were at Mass.  I don't have any brick-and-mortar store shopping plans, but not because I don't like Carols ! !

I will, however, put up our Christmas lights.

Two weeks from now, if all goes as planned, we'll be waking up and hitting the St. Catharine's Canada Passport office and then driving north to the cottage.  I did some organizing of the piles of boxes in the closet yesterday to get a mental picture of whether or not all this would fit into the back of the car without buying another hitch-rack ... I think that it will.

I went over to Tire Kingdom shortly after they opened and had the new tires installed.  I brought the old ones home.  Eventually I'll get tired of looking at them and will sell them or take them back to Tire Kingdom for disposal.  I can't imagine putting them back on the car, but who knows.

If I remember, I'll get out there this a.m. and check the air pressure in all four tires, radiator fluid in both cars etc.  All this needs to be done with the cars cold.  I also need to give the X5 an oil change before we head north.


An older couple came into Tire Kingdom with their car on a flatbed.  They'd had a flat on I95 as they headed south from Port Orange, just north of us, to Fort Lauderdale.  He was agitated because they were trying to get to a cruise sailing.  The tow truck had installed their doughnut to get it onto the flatbed but they were clearly not going to drive on it all the way to Ft. Lauderdale.

The Tire Kingdom guy told them that they shouldn't be on the road on their tires, that at ten years old they could disintegrate at any time and that indeed after six years, tires are questionable.  I'll have to do some Googling on that.  He sold them a new tire but the old fellow wouldn't go any further and replace all four tires.  I expect that they could have simply plugged the existing tire had it not been shredded to bits ...

I ended up spending more time at Tire Kingdom because I let them bump me.  The lady said that they'd been into the Honda dealer the day before who had noticed a nail in the tire but said that "it wasn't all the way through" and pulled the nail.  Clearly it was all the way through because they didn't get very far down the highway.

After Tire Kingdom I went for a ride.  North into a headwind, as usual, but not as usual into a foggy day.  I fully expected to be donning my rain jacket at some point but while the fog persisted, it was never a wet fog and never rained.  Riding south on A1A in Flagler Beach and indeed all the way south, cars had their headlights on because it was so foggy.  I could hardly see the ocean even though it was right beside me.

Daytona was pretty deserted, what with the foggy weather.  It wasn't a day for the beach.  The temperature hit the high 60's so it was pleasant from a riding standpoint, with my long sleeved jersey of course.

We had steak for dinner, rib eye from Publix.  It was pretty tasteless, i.e. bland.  When I think back on it, I'm not even sure why I even ate my whole piece.  Habit.

Our Amazon Prime membership is getting a workout what with Christmas orders and video streaming.  We're watching The Good Wife on Amazon; Law and Order on DVD (season 9).  I'm watching Warehouse 13, the latest season on Amazon but not on Netflix.  I've also started watching The Twilight Zone, the old series, on Netflix.  That show is fascinating.  Rod Serling had quite an imagination.

The original series was 1959-1964.  I've only seen a couple of episodes from that era, because we didn't get it in North Bay on our ONE TELEVISION CHANNEL.  Actually we got two channels but one was in French.  I was a deprived.  We didn't get Twilight Zone or Mister Ed, to name a couple.  I was always fascinated when we visited our Toronto relatives to find TV that a) had more channels and b) came on before noon. 

There's another run of Twilight Zone from 85-89 and yet another in 2002-2003.  Since he passed away in 1975 at age 50, these are with him as writer but obviously not as narrator.  He was pretty prolific as a writer, it seems.  I don't know how many of these later ones are on the streaming services, haven't checked. 

I hope that we're going to see Sam today.  I'm ready for these railings to be finished. 

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Sandy and I talked about next summer's travels.  Potentially we'll tie a trip to the U.K. including Scotland as well as Ireland, France and Belgium into two rides that I want to do one of which is in southwest Ireland and the other starts in Belgium.  More on that later.

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Onward ...