Veterans Day weekend

The wonders of having a three day weekend (Veterans Day) is whatever I had planned to do, instead of having two days to execute, I get three. The leisure time afforded in between was quite welcomed and made this past weekend a refreshing one indeed.

On Friday while performing oil change on the car - $35 total for 5 quarts of synthetic and filter, the heavens decided to open up and it rained biblically for a good half hour. To avoid getting soaked the easy thing would be to stay under the car for the duration, but I believe too much in superstition to be beneath a vehicle supported by jack-stands for any longer than necessary.

At least the rain washed away the oil puddle that invariably forms due to the stream missing the catch-can. No matter how good I think I've positioned the reservoir, the first unleashing of oil from the engine pan will always find the ground. For sure it isn't the most environment friendly thing to do, but I'm not paying the $80 or so the dealership charges for a simple oil change - the Miata needs one every six months. 

On Saturday I went over to my sole house-owning friend's place. He's in the middle of having solar panels installed on his roof. The reality of having a climate-controlled house year-round is extremely nice indeed, and because the friend doesn't live in San Francisco - no fog, the place will get plenty of sun. To achieve the same level of pampering I'd have to live in my car. 

Sunday was the first opportunity to try out intensively the iPhone X's camera. Perhaps I'm spoiled by my Sony A7R2's 42 megapixel images, the X's camera isn't completely wowing me, save one feature: portrait mode. It's been one year since Apple introduced the feature, and it's gotten spectacularly good. The boundary between what's in focused and blurred is executed so well now that it's often difficult to tell the difference from a proper DSLR. Check out these flowers I took yesterday, unedited:

Climate control is awesome

In what was a tremendous Mother's Day weekend for me got bookended by a terrible case of the sore throat sickness. Obviously, it hasn't been much fun these couple of days. It's definitely passing out though so hopefully I'll be alright by the latter half of this week. 

Temperature has returned to the 90s here in San Francisco once again, which can only be described as torture. At least its forecasted that during the nighttime the mercury will come back down to sane levels, so at the very least I don't have to lie in my own sweat just to get a decent sleep going. Because you're delirious if you think we got air-con here in San Francisco. 

Air-con in the car though, is very nice indeed. Who cares if it degrades my car's already horrendous gas mileage. First world solution to nature's problem, yo. I bet there's a huge subset of people who couldn't care less about climate change because they're so used to man-made climate control in cars, building, and homes. 

Summer already

It was an unusual oppressively hot day in San Francisco, right up there into the 90s. Of course, being denizens more used to weather in the 50s, low 90s is practically apocalyptic on the hotness scale. My car's automatic climate control was going bonkers in its feeble attempt to normalize the temperature to a solid 70 when the car has been sitting outside in the blazing sun for a good five hours. Protest loudly, the fans did. 

Of course, it isn't all bad - far from it. Summer-like weather means the lovely ladies are in their gorgeous dresses and short outfits. The perks of working at a college campus: the views were specially lovely today.