Had the opportunity to join my friends Michael, Andra and her husband Michael on a road trip to Scott’s Bar-B-Que up in Hemingway, SC, about 90 minutes north-ish from Charleston. We also met Andra’s dad there, who in the grand tradition of southern gentlemen, will quite happily tell stories and talk your ear off .
Like all the decent BBQ places, Scott’s isn’t much to look at, only open three days a week and is quite popular. Oh, and if you decide to go, bring cash. They don’t take debit or credit cards.
After an uneventful drive up SC 41, we arrived at this blue and white kind of dilapidated looking building with bins of watermelons for sale out front and the smell of smoke in the air.
Inside, there are drink coolers to the left, a few tables and the counter where you place your order to the right. Large metal buckets containing ziplock bags of fried pork skins tempt you while you stand in line to order.
At the counter, you can place your order by the pound or by the hog. You can even BYOH (Bring Your Own Hog) and they’ll smoke it for you. They do turkey and chicken too in case you don’t do pork. Lunch plates are available too, with coleslaw and baked beans.
I ordered one of the BBQ pork plates to eat there and two pounds of pork and a few chicken leg quarters to bring home with me for later. If you order the plate, you’ll get a lot of pork. The BBQ is tasty and their BBQ sauce is vinegary and spicy. Not quite as smoky as I thought it might be, but still very good. The BBQ pork was so good even the normally vegetarian Michael Maher dug in.
We stayed for about an hour or so enjoying BBQ, listening to Andra’s dad tell stories and watching the line of people coming to get BBQ get longer. Eventually it was time to hit the road and head on back. On the way back, Michael, who is a big railroad fan, decided to stop at an old train bridge to get some pictures. It made for a nice little photo op and I came away with some pretty decent shots.
Check out the rest of my pictures from our little BBQ road trip adventure.
Overheating
When I woke up this morning and the house was 28°C (82°F), I didn’t have a good feeling about it. The blower inside the house was running, but the heat exchanger thing outside was just making a buzzing noise but wasn’t running. Not a good sign.
After last year’s maintenance inspection, I was expecting that the unit had finally failed and was going to need to replace it. Today being a holiday, I wasn’t expecting to be able to get anybody out to check on it until Thursday or Friday, but when I called the company (Carolina Air Care) was able to send someone out this afternoon, much to my surprise. It took a while for them to get out here (busy day for them it seems), but once the technician got here it only took him one look to diagnose the problem: a blown capacitor on the heat exchanger. A quick replacement and the unit was up and running once again.
The repair wasn’t cheap, but it was a whole lot less expensive than what I was expecting. Hopefully this will keep things running a little while longer and give me a little more time to continue saving to replace the heat exchanger. I know I’m going to have to replace it soon. It would just be nice to have a little more saved up for it before replacing it.
When it starts cooling down, I’ll have them come out again for the annual maintenance inspection and see how much time I might have left on the unit. Hopefully I can get another year out of it before needing to replace it.
Yaesu VX-8DR X-ray Take 2
Radiographs of my VX-8DR that show the innards a little better. 81 kV, 5 mAs, small focal spot.
The battery (which is actually two batteries)
The radio itself
The antenna. If you look closely, you can see some internal structure now, compared to the fluoro image from earlier.
9 years. 9!
With all the ham radio stuff going on recently, I completely failed to notice that my blog turned 9 years old a little over a week ago. 9 years of random musings, miscellaneous events and maybe a few interesting observations.
First blog entry was June 23, 2003. Now the blog has entered Year 10.
Wow, who’d have thought.
Yaesu VX-8DR X-ray
Put my VX-8DR under a fluoro unit I was testing today. Fluoro generally doesn’t provide the greatest resolution images, but enough to see what the innards of my radio are like. Will get a regular radiograph later.
This is the antenna. Not a whole lot going on aside from a lot of metal.
