Riftwave.net - Kevin's web log

During my travels drivng back and forth to the new gym and running errands in Cumming (yes, that is the real name of the city), I noticed a familiar name in an odd place just off Old Atlanta Road. A Carvel ice cream shop! For the uninitiated, Carvel is a chain of ice cream stores which I frequented in my extreme youth while living in New York City. As far as I know (since I was 5 years old when i used to visit), they are more known for their soft serve ice cream rather than a the bevy of flavors and concotions that coldstone and marble slab specialize in. This morning I got up and drove to the gym to find noone there… so after a little bit of deliberation I decided that it was a prime opporunity to re-live my extreme youth with some Carvel on an early Sunday afternoon. I ordered vanilla soft-serve in a waffle cone (with rainbow sprinkles), chatted a little bit with the owners (who are in fact from New York City themselves… Coney Island in Brooklyn), and then sat outside and typed with one hand on my laptop and my newly acquired confection in the other.

The ice cream cone was just as good as I had remembered, but I don’t think I will make too many return trips because McDonald’s actually has soft serve which is just as good as Carvel’s. It is true that you can’t get a huge waffle cone or sprinkles at McDonalds’, but the prevalence of McDonalds restaraunts are a veritable plague upon this continent… making them much more convenient if I ever need to satisfy my sweet tooth.

This post is coming to you from a table outside the carvel in Cumming/Suwanee, GA. I’m finally actually getting some use out of one of this year’s most extravagant purchases, my IBM T22 thinkpad notebook.

Anyways, on with the post…. one of the instructors I have worked at the gym with for the past few years had his car stolen and then found again in the same week. His name is Ryan O. Ryan started out at the gym while still high school student (at chattahoochee high) doing bday parties and moved on to tumbling classes. Ryan is in to the whole ‘ricer car’ scene. He owns a ‘97 Honda Civic Del Sol that he has upgraded with a body kit and a few other aftermarket accessories. Just last weekend he swung by and tried to convince me to go to a body paint shop in Buford with him. I declined.

On monday, Ryan called and told me that his car had been stolen… right out of the parking lot of Georgia Perimeter where he’d had classes earlier that morning. Ryan’s car (and most other Del Sols) are 7 years old and worth under 5k, which hardly makes them valuable commodidities to hoist on the black market… So it was obvious that his car’s appearance and accessories are what had made it a target in this case. However, some of the more interesting circumstances surrounding the car’s theft seemed a little more than coincidental:

First off… remember that trip to the paint shop that I declined to go on? Well, Ryan had left his car at the shop about 3 days prior to its disappearance to get it primered for an upcoming paint job. Upon retrieving his car from the paint shop he noticed that 3 extra miles had been put on the odometer.

Second, Ryan had an alarm system in his car which is designed to thwart conventional auto theft by locking down the ignition system. Instead of jimmying the key with a screwdriver and sending electric current to the ignition lead in order to start the car and drive it, in Ryan’s car half the ignition system must be rewired (and the security system detached from the circuit) in order to keep the car from turning itself off.

This led him to the conclusion that someone at the paint shop had copied his car key and used it to steal his car. A theory later supported by the fact that the police found no signs of forced entry or ‘hotwiring’ when they later found his vehichle.

These facts were reported to the local sheriffs, and Ryan’s dad made some phone calls to the paint shop in question. Also Ryan put the word out among his friends in the 2 or 3 local car clubs he has been a member of and at the local honda dealership where he used to work… so there were plenty of eyes adding to the heat.

2 days after the first call, I got another call from Ryan reporting that most of his car had been found. It had been abandoned at the side of a road in Decatur about 30 min south of the parking lot from which it had been stolen. Most of the aftermarket pieces were missing, but a few had been replaced, which suggests that the car was hastily disposed of halfway through refitting it for a new owner. Perhaps after the crooks realized that law enforcment had a good idea of where to start sniffing around.

As of this posting, Ryan hasn’t heard anything new back from the police. His car isn’t quite drivable yet because of some of the missing pieces and the fact that there is a copy of his key floating around. Let this be a warning to folks using this paint shop. More news later as I hear it.

The reason I haven’t made a post recently is because I have been extremely busy with work. The gym where I was working, Atlanta Xtreme Jayhawks split. The Jayhawks are doing their own thing in Duluth, reopening under their former name, CDA Jayhawks. The group I am with is opening in a new location in Cumming, Georgia (yes, that is the actual name of the city). The gym’s name is Atlanta Cheer Source.

The past week has been a series of 8-12 hour days doing all manner of grunt work in an attempt to get the gym up and running. The building’s previous tenant was a computer refurbishing warehouse business called Royal Computer. 20,000+ square feet of 16 foot shelves filled with palettes of computer equipment ranging from ancient DOS 1/Sparc equipment to modern laserjets. The first two and a half days were spent taking computer stuff down off those enormous shelves and moving Royal computer out. Tiresome, dirty work. Besides being on the recieving end of various cuts and scrapes, I almost had a shelf support fall on me and had an entire column of shelves fall out from under me while I was about 12 feet up (luckily, I still had a place to stand and hang on to).

After the vast bulk of the work moving Royal Computer out was finished, the work of preparing the facility for the gym to move in started. Painting (lots of painting), caulking, knocking walls down, putting doors in and a lot of general cleaning has been my life for the past 6 days. Today was my first day off since Sunday. What’s good is that the extra hours will help me make up for the lack of hours/work during the week of spring break.

I will add some photos of the gym-in-progress tomorrow. I also have a bevy of other news to report… including a co-worker’s stolen-and-then-recovered car and a hefty tax refund I will hopefully recieve. I’m also toying with the idea of putting a body kit on the 626

March has come and gone. Pope John Paul and Terry Schiavo have passed on, the Final Four is over, and I have worked my last day at Atlanta Xtreme Jayhawks.

I have the week off (spring break), and NCA College Cheerleading Nationals take place at the end of this week, but I don’t think I will be able to make it . None of the people I usually drive down with are going this year and everyone else I have asked about already has plans. No fun in the sun for me I guess . I dont’ have anyone to stay with down there (and don’t feel like footing the bill for a room alone for myself) so it would take a small miracle for me to end up going. I hope one happens, but I think its already a lost cause.

I visited a skate park yesterday. Iffy told me about a concrete skate facility at Pinckneyville Park, which is about 20 minutes away from where I live and about 10 minutes from where I work. I was really surprised that I hadn’t heard of it before and so I went down to check it out and skate, despite not having been on my skates in over a year. I invited Iffy, but he had injured himself at the park the day before and so he didn’t join me (serves him right for going without me in the first place)…. he also mentioned something about him not knowing how to drop in on a bowl. The skate park was a 2-section concrete ‘dry pool’ with a shallow large ‘mini-ramp’ section (with a concrete platform/ramp in the middle), and a much deeper circular bowl section. There were 3 galvanized steel rails sunk into some of the edges for grinding.

As I said, i’ve been off my skates for over a year, so I was rather conservative with what I tried (no front flips over funboxes, as I’ve done before). Wisely [sarcasm], I chose the hardest narrowest section of the pool to drop in on. The trip down was fine, but I almost fell over on the very steep, very sudden upgrade. I find that concrete is a very unforgiving surface to fall on and slide across, so not only did I wear all my pads (helmet, knee-pads, elbow pads, gloves), but I also kept my speed down and concentrated on trying to grind (which I’ve never been very good at). I spent about an hour at the skate facility and plan to return again soon, now that spring is blooming.

I have more news to report like talking on the phone with a No Doubt cover band, recent myspace.com messages, the situation with the new gym and Davis Flip Center, and cousins who are graduating this summer (Marlon from FAU and Jessica from Rutgers), but that stuff will have to wait for subsequent blog entries.