My hip hurts

I really need to replace my futon, because I lack padding on my right hip and when I sleep on my right side I get a painful not-quite-a-bruise on my hip. I never in my life though I would ever say I wasn’t fat enough, but … I really need a new bed.

I’m doing the channel bounce as there is a F1 race and a Monster Energy Cup race on at the same time, and the NHRA race just started broadcasting. I’m mainly sticking with the F1 race as Hamilton had a flat tire on the first lap and there is a ton of drama because he went all the way to the back of the field and he could clinch the championship this race depending on where Sebastian Vettel finishes, unless Hamilton finishes 5th or higher. As I type this Hamilton is leading the points by running in 9th with Vettel in 3rd at the finish to clinch the driver championship two races before the end of the season.

Watching the Monster Energy Cup race now from Martinsville.

Just got a text that the Shadowrun game we had going tonight was dropped because the GM has another class to attend, and one of the players for our group is having some kind of health issue. This makes me slightly upset, but not totally broken. As the saying goes, shit happens. I’m just getting tired of shit happening to me.

Speaking of that, I didn’t win the lottery again last night. So I’m still p’, too impoverished to buy a vowel.

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Truex wins the first race of the Chase Playoffs, Josef Newgarden wins Indycar Championship

Well, the first race of the Chase Playoffs is in the books and to nobody’s surprise Martin Truex won on the mile-and-a-half Chicagoland Speedway. It was a great race, especially with Kyle Busch getting 2 laps down but finishing on the lead lap. Truex didn’t exactly dominate the race, but there weren’t many times when he wasn’t either in the lead or striking distance of the lead.

And the IndyCar race from Sonoma is on but it might as well be on the radio because Clint has decided that the spot in front of the TV is the perfect place to take a nap, which blocks the crawl showing the running order, and it’s almost like they were watching me type this because now the crawl is at the top of the screen, and Clint is laying down almost enough to see the whole screen. There was a break in there where Clint decided to try to sleep in behind me in my chair (I have a memory foam seat cushion that retains body heat) and I couldn’t reach the keyboard to type. And Simon Pagenaud wins the race but Josef Newgarden of Hendersonville TN wins the championship. I used to work in an auto parts store in Hendersonville for a company that doesn’t exist any more. I wonder if Newgarden ever came into the Honey’s Auto Parts in Hendersonville?

Now is the replay of the F1 race in Singapore. I missed the first show and haven’t checked the F1 web page for the race. So for me this is like a live race. And that first lap was wild. Too many people trying to win in the first corner with too little traction in the wet. There were 5 cars taken out in one corner and half of them were hit by a car out of control after bouncing off another car. At this point about halfway into the race there are either 7 or 6 cars out, the graphics aren’t staying up long enough to be sure. And now they are back to showing just 5 cars out with two some laps down. With all the cars flying during the slow-motion replays I’m getting lots of good ideas for underbody configuration. And right now they have a dry line and small lakes off line so it’s follow the leader on slicks, but the rest of the track is drying so maybe there could be some passing in the last few minutes. Checking the graphics they lost 2 more to mechanical failure bringing the casualty count to 7. ATM it looks like Hamilton unless something breaks in the last lap which has happened before to Hamilton in the Mercedes. But today he won. Even though they didn’t throw a checkered until the second lap after the white flag. Another WTF moment in a series of WTF moments in this race.

On the TGS2 right now there is zero progress being made. I’m rebuilding my hone to get the kingpins to fit the spindles but other than that nothing is getting done. The biggest impediment is changing my anti-depressant meds destroying any motivation I have. That and zero budget for parts and tools. That really kills progress too.

And on that happy note I’m going to shower and get to bed.

Comparing forward and conventional driver seating

Watching the Canadian GP on the idiot box while waiting to walk down to the phone store and pay the bill. Aside from Hamilton running away and hiding from the rest of the field it is a good race to watch with lots of close racing all up and down the order. And in a few minutes the Cup race from Pocono starts.

You have heard the saying about a picture being worth a thousand words, and my usual post is about half that. So instead of talking about the difference in the driving position I marked the body with the rear of the conventional driving position to go with the previously marked far forward driving position.
The forward mark is the same one I used before, same piece of tape even. The rear mark is what I get by putting my feet behind the original firewall. That tiny piece of tape was the inside edge of my butt marker from when this body was going to be a front engine bucket with two seats. Yes, my butt is that narrow, the outside edge is the edge of the floor where the body turns up. And moving my butt that far forward only changed the weight bias from 63% rear to 60% rear without the 0.25″ floor pan under said butt.

OK F1 race just ended and Hamilton finished like 20 seconds ahead. Except for the usual first lap/early race carnage most of the attrition was brake failure except for one engine vibration retirement to keep from scattering the engine on the track. So now I switched to the Cup race at Pocono which is still in Stage 1 and drivers are already complaining about brakes going away, which partly shows why I want to make sure I can get enough tire to make good use of the big brakes on the TGS2. I know with the rear weight bias the front brakes won’t get as much use as they would with the front engine, and the rear brakes will see much higher temperatures than with the front engine.

And Junior just missed a shift and damaged the engine. And now it has been a few laps and Jimmy Johnson and Jamie McMurray both just had brake failure in the same turn, same lap to crash within feet of each other with McMurray catching fire from the impact damage. Jimmy absolutely nailed the wall, almost knocking it down. He got out under his own power but had to catch his breath a bit before taking the mandatory ambulance ride, while McMurray was in such a hurry to get out of his burning car he didn’t disconnect the AC hose and was walking around after the wreck with part of it hanging off the back of his helmet. Race has been red flagged because of the mess in turn 1, when Jimmy hit a lot of parts and pieces fell off the car and fluids ran on the track.

And Ryan Blaney just beat Kevin Harvick to the checkered flag. Sorry I got hung up with watching the race and forgot to report on it, but if you were interested in the race you would watch it I guess. And to add fuel to the Ford v Chevy wars, Harvick did the 3-2 instead of 3-4 shift and his Ford was fine but the Chevys all blew up in the same situation. And a Ford won.

I just saw an interesting use for coal, a carved anthracite trophy at Pocono. I don’t know if the eagle is made from coal but what is under it is.

And it’s time for me to walk to the phone store and pay the bill.

What a day for a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well, this has been a busy day even by Sunday standards. As far as church doin’s are concerned we had morning and evening services as usual and then a Board Meeting. So about 4 hours of the day was church or church-related. Nothing much to report about that as today was Pledge Drive Sunday, the day when members are “encouraged” to meet the “doors open” part of the budget or more if they can spare it. That’s pretty standard and boring.

The interesting parts of the day were the time between the morning service and the board meeting while I watched the Mexican GP and the Sprint Cup race from Martinsville. There was a lot of drama in the F1 race even though I didn’t see much passing on the track not caused by a wreck or near-wreck of the car being passed. Most of the drama was caused by pit strategy, who was stopping for tires and when, and how long they took to change the tires when they did stop. Now that the F1 driver’s title has been decided for Louis Hamilton all he has to race for is the total wins record, and everyone else is racing for a job next season either with their current team or a new team that picks up the pieces when their current team possibly folds at the end of the season. F1 is the most expensive form of motorsport on the planet, and some teams lack the financial muscle to compete.

The Martinsville race was typical NASCAR short track beating and banging, with many cars finishing with less than the number of fenders they started with or missing other body parts. The incident between Joey Logano and Matt Kenseth looked a lot like “payback” for the Kansas incident where Joey took Kenseth out of the lead and ultimately out of the Chase. There were a lot of other incidents that looked like just trying too hard in too tight a situation, and that wreck that knocked Kurt Busch about 3 feet into the air was an extreme example of that. I don’t recall the other 3 drivers involved in the wreck, but Kurt’s car was the last in that chain to get hit as one car hit another, that hit a third, that was sent violently into Kurt’s car causing it to climb over the third car’s tire and continue to climb on a ballistic trajectory for about another tire diameter after that.

And after all the beating and banging was done Jeff Gordon won on his final start at the track and his first win there in a long time and first win all season. So Jeff is in the final round in Homestead and waiting for the next two races to tell him who else is racing for the championship.

And it’s time for me to wrap this one up because I have a lot to do tomorrow.

PSA, Opus

Formula One is interesting this year, and a road course race in Sprint Cup, on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I was watching the F1 race from Austria early this afternoon, and Red Bull driver Sebastian Vettel is just snakebit, his luck is so bad. Today was his 3rd DNF in 8 races this year. Last year it practically took an Act of Gawd to keep the Red Bull team off the top two steps of the podium, the difference between last year and this year is just so stark. And Williams’ performance change this year is also astonishing, but in the other direction, as they put both their cars on the front row in qualifying. And then Mercedes was battling the limits of reliability in their braking systems while watching other cars literally blowing up their brakes (I didn’t catch who, but there was a carbon brake disk that caught fire and shattered taking out the car). Anywho, it ended up being a Mercedes 1-2 finish again, at least the 6th time this year, maybe the 7th.

I didn’t catch where anyone else finished in the F1 race because I switched over to the Sonoma Sprint Cup race. Road course races are the big equalizer between the big and little teams in Sprint Cup, and A.J. Almendinger demonstrated that by winning the pole. The race is a long way from done at the moment, and there have been a few wrecks that have significantly altered the flow of the race with leading cars or cars that had been leading and working back to the front after a pit stop. And Marcos Ambrose somehow keeps coming to the head of the field to fight for the lead. And Carl Edwards survived the carnage to win the race, but I missed seeing if he did the trademark backflip.

Yesterday’s RPG session was a bit different than usual. Instead of playing a D&D 3.5 campaign we went to a 1st edition Palladium game called Beyond the Supernatural set in Modern Day Earth with a twist. My character is Godwin Smythe, heir to and CEO of the 4th largest logistics company in the world, Possible Evil Twin, and Natural Adept Mage. My stats with this character are Pure Awesome, with mental stats in the super-human range and high (near-Olympic level) physical strength and endurance. So far the most my character has done is survive someone blowing up the bar where he was slumming to enjoy a quiet beer with “normal” people, then using healing spells to keep the other PC from attracting attention from authority, then healing a PC to keep him from dying. Then I got arrested as a terrorist suspect for being in the bar when it was blown up and not getting killed. How they got from “one of four people not killed in explosion” to “terrorist suspect” just shows the kind of convoluted conspiracy theory thinking that was normal for that game setting.

And I have to go to evening service now, so I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

PSA, Opus