Lots of church today on a Wreck-Free Sunday

This has been a very long day for me, from helping to open up the church about 1030 after being up late last night and not getting out until nearly 1300, then having to be back by 1700 for a board meeting as head of the Social Justice committee and not getting home until 2000. Basically I spent a full 8 hours away from the house on church business of one kind or another. It was “interesting”.

In between I saw most of the Sprint Cup race from Dover, where Happy Harvick was leading again when I had to leave for the board meeting, but it was another fuel economy race and nobody knew for sure what their fuel level was. So while Kevin Harvick was leading when I left I have no idea who won the race. More importantly I have no idea of who was eliminated from the Chase for the Cup, because when I left Jimmie Johnson was in 14th place in points as they ran because he had a rear axle failure that required a replacement in the middle of the race putting him 36 laps down when the repairs were finished. So I’m going to have to wait until I get the report in my inbox tomorrow morning.

What I spent most of Saturday doing was looking up various suppliers of parts and plastic model kits to build a miniature test Sprint-T for the geometry of the full size version that is looking more and more out of reach given the budget and Mrs, the Poet’s restrictions on donor vehicles. Basically my budget is completely used up as soon as I get a crate engine and transmission, leaving me short a rear axle, hubs, brakes, the front axle, shocks and springs, headlights… So I went with a $50 budget for the kit and supplies to build a replica, which seems to be do-able. Now to find the right parts for the build.

Basically I’m going to use the Wide 5 wheels I put in Friday’s blog post, and as I said I’m going to make two versions of the wheels. The supplied version is a scale 11″ wide, the full size car uses an 8″ street version, and a 14″ race version. I haven’t been able to find anything close to the 23.5 x 13.0R15 Hoosier Formula Atlantic tires in 1/25 scale, but I did find a close replica for the 27 x 10.50R-15 LT Hoosier Pro Street tire for the street version in a similarly-sized dirt track tire.

And I’m going to be doing some errands in the morning, so I have to get to bed soon. Also I have been spending almost as much time fixing typos in this paragraph as I have composing it, so I really need to hit the hay.

PSA, Opus the Poet

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Another busy day at church on a Wreck-Free Sunday

This has been a very busy day, what between 2 services at church, a committee meeting, and getting ready for pot luck, and a supermoon total lunar eclipse on the one hand, and a Chase Race in the Sprint Cup on the other.

Let’s cover the Sprint Cup race first. It was a 300 lap race around the 1 mile flat oval at Loudon NH, and most of the race was dominated by Kevin Harvick in the 4 Chevrolet SS, and once again I had trouble staying awake for the first ²/₃ of the race. Happy Harvick wasn’t running away like the guy did last week in ChiTown, but it was pretty bad. Then it turned into a fuel economy race, and things started to get interesting, even though visually it was still the same race. Again it became a nail-biter of wondering who would run out of gas first, the guy in front or one of the guys behind him. This time Harvick ran out with 2 to go, giving Kenseth the lead, and most of the top 10 lead lap cars ran out on the white flag lap, except Kenseth, who won by a wide margin what with most of the lead lap cars having to get pushed by lap down cars to get back to the pits after the race was over. There were a lot of teams betting they would be the last ones to run out and betting wrong.

The other interesting moment was Kyle Busch blowing a right front tire and hitting the wall, because it totally changes the Chase for him to not finish the race and I don’t know if they got that car back out on the track before the checkered flag.

For evening service we had the first Veritan public Full Moon, which was a little rough around the edges mostly because this was their first public Full Moon and they didn’t quite have a handle on what a FM means in their theology. I know what it means in mine, but I’m not Veritan, I’m Eclectic Pagan. In my theology, a FM is time to celebrate women as well as mark the slide of the seasons from one to another. The quarters and cross quarters also mark the changes of the seasons but more abruptly and more male. I’m not going to get into any arguments about one being “better” because neither and both are “better”. You just have to go with what works for you and let it ride from there.

Also the Supermoon was peeking in and out of a high thin cloud layer tonight and was not really all that impressive because of it, although the dim red thing hanging in the east was cool when there were no clouds blocking it.

And that’s all I got tonight, aside from a severe case of allergy nose and eyes.

PSA, Opus

Almost done with the extended stem on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I wore out three dremel cutting bits but I finally got the donor stem and the raw stock fitted together. Now I just have to find my brazing wire out somewhere in the garage (or run by the welding supply store to get some more) and apply some heat with the torch to get the metal parts joined together. Getting everything matched up was a long process, because this was a “sneak up on it” operation. I only had one donor stem and one chunk of raw stock to work with, so I had to not make the hole too big or ruin the donor stem trying to get it inside the raw stock. Plus there was the whole “pride in workmanship” thing. I wanted something that looked as good or better than the bike it was going on, so as to not distract from the beauty of the bike with an ugly stem extension.

Anyway, this was where we left off last time I had a chance to work on the extension.

And this is what I have now.

And this shows how the cap from the donor stem is flush to the top of the raw stock.

Now the plan is to heat the raw stock until braze fed in at the edge of the opening flows into the tiny space between the donor stem and the raw stock to make them a solid piece capable of withstanding ferocious forces, or at least that won’t fall apart when I ride exuberantly. Seriously this thing is fitted so tight that I doubt it will take more than a couple of grams of braze to completely fill the gaps. The rest will be used to make a smooth fillet between the raw stock and the donor stem, that will have to be filed smooth after it gets applied.

Something I have been thinking about is cutting a filler piece to cover the gap at the top of the donor stem, so the donor stem looks like it grew through the raw stock, or out of it. I also want to grind down the weld where the clamp joined the donor stem, because that MIG weld looks like a worm crawling around the clamp. You can see the weld (but not clearly) in the “before” picture at the top of the post. That’s the “pride in workmanship” thing again. If I’m going to put all this work into making it I will go ahead and do the little bit more work required to make it “not ugly”. I don’t see the point in just making something ugly.

I watched the Sprint Cup race from Richmond last night, at least the parts I could stay awake for. Yes, I fell asleep (several times) watching that race, it was that exciting. I’m glad Matt Kenseth had such a good race, but dang, what has happened to short track racing in the Sprint Cup? Now we go to the first race on the Chase for the Cup in Chicago.

Now I have to get ready for evening service at church, so I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

PSA, Opus the Poet

Home maintenance and hot rod engineering on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I just got done replacing the doorknobs on every entry door in the house as we had 2 out of 3 fail and become unlockable this week. So I had a gift card to Lowe’s from one of my non-writing gigs sitting around, that I used to buy 3 mid-level security locks on Friday, then spend about 40 minutes on the first lock and another 40 total on the next two swapping out the locks. That means Mrs. the Poet won’t be able to get in the house when she gets home unless I leave the door unlocked except for the deadbolt. As for what caused the lock failure, I’m thinking it might be that they are the original locks installed when the house was built back in 1985, and they are worn out. I mean seriously the individual parts work just fine separately but put them together in the door and you get a latch that jams and doesn’t latch. Well I spent $55 of my gift card to buy new locks and just over an hour installing them in the doors.

I’m currently working on the design for the brake bracket for the front because the rear bracket is a buy and bolt on but this is a unique application for the front brakes. The Wide 5 hub and the four-piston caliper on the early Ford spindle axle are very uncommon, and always done with custom parts. I can think of only 3 cars running this combination since I started reading hot rod and custom car magazines back in the late 1960s, and none with the size disc I will be running on the Sprint T. I will be putting a 12.19″ disc inside a 15″ wheel which will just fit with the caliper I chose, the AFCO F88 for a .810″ thick rotor. So I have been using a rear axle bracket for the caliper with a known center distance (for welding the bracket to a 3″ diameter rear axle tube with a 11.75″ disc) and extrapolating from there for the 12.19″ disc and the larger (5.5″) flange on the early Ford spindle. And this is what I do to relax from writing about bicycles.

Yesterday’s D&D session was held in my living room, and was the “kinky” game, the one where sex is a weapon for social interaction and we have pages of special rules for sex. Basically this is what you would get if you crossed D&D with a porn movie. Since I try to keep sexual things out of the blog I can’t report much about what I did except that my character leveled up again because of the CR of the enemies we went up against this session. I mean seriously this could have been another TPK and reset to the previous save point that’s how dangerous and numerous the monsters were in this session.

And I have managed to feed myself again this week, not that I’m any kind of chef or anything. I just managed to not give myself food poisoning so far. 😛 Today was easy because we had potluck for lunch and dinner at the church, to which I brought my famous-at-the-church beans and rice. I have been keeping a sink with soapy water sitting waiting for dirty dishes and so far I have been keeping ahead of the dishes without running water every time I had a dish that needed cleaning. Even with everybody from the D&D game having a clean glass for their beverage of choice I still managed to keep ahead of the dirty dishes.

Just as I was finishing the post the Sprint Cup race in Sonoma finished, with “gimpy” Kyle Busch winning the race. I used quotes because Kyle had that horrific wreck in Daytona at the beginning of the season where he broke his leg and the ankle on the other leg and had to spend weeks in the hospital and more time getting rehab to restore strength and range of motion in his legs and here he is at the end of the first half of the season winning a road course race, the kind of race that is the hardest on a driver’s legs on the Sprint Cup circuit.

And it’s almost time for evening services, so I’m cutting this off.

PSA, Opus the Poet

Easy day today, and the Feed

I’m almost done filtering today and there are very few links that have made the cut so far. I’m also still pondering the service I have to do on 7/12 about Hephaestus. What I have been able to find other than what drew me to jim initially has been a Harry Potter fanfic from 2011, and the information that specific rituals were handed down as oral tradition from a master smith to his apprentices. So, I’m going to go with what I know, and then in the fine tradition of modern-day Paganism, I’m going to make something up for the actual ritual. Ordinarily I would blame Christians from the Middle Ages for the lack of information but in this case I don’t think I can do that. There is no information because the followers of Hephaestus made sure there was no information except what was written in the myths of the rest of the gods of Olympus. What we know of Hephaestus we know from people who were not specifically his followers, which means what we know is incomplete but not as self-serving for Heph as it would be if Hephaestus’ followers were writing the stories. So perhaps what we have is the most honest presentation we could get for a deity.

In other news Mrs. the Poet reports that “Arthur, Arthur Dent” is “less denty” or less concave and the incision site is looking less like a baseball and more like something you would find on a human being. She says this is “better”. I will take her word on it because she can’t manage to take a picture without blurring it by moving the camera when she trips the shutter so I haven’t seen the back of my neck clearly since the operation.

Up first we have another double dose of Daily Ted. Morning Links: Businesses benefit by trading parking for bike lanes, and new upscale spinning studio in DTLA That’s the good one. Bike rider run over and killed in Stanton hit-and-run after falling in the street That’s the not-so-good one.

And another act of terrorism against UK cyclists. Sussex cyclist breaks collarbone after hitting tripwire in third such incident in a fortnight And I’m not the only one who sees it that way Ian Walker, @ianwalker

Still in not-so-Jolly Olde, more on the cyclist crushed by an HGV making a left turn across the bike lane. Friends of physio killed while cycling in London call for safer roads

Why are they talking about transportational cyclists getting injured or killed, but leading with a picture of the TdF peloton riding under Big Ben? Number of cyclists injured on west London roads rises A similar juxtaposition would be to talk about traffic deaths in Ft. Worth with a picture of the Sprint Cup race at Texas Speedway.

More on that Toronto hit-and-run death. 19-year-old to appear in court after cyclist killed in hit-and-run Comments are still being made that the delay was an attempt to destroy evidence to make prosecution for higher crimes more difficult or impossible, IOW “obstructing justice”.

Still on the other side of the border, a Canuckistani wife says “It’s been a year, what have you done to prevent another death?” A year after cyclist’s death, his widow urges city to make Pembina safe I understand that realistically one year is not enough time to make any significant changes in the infrastructure, but I also understand the frustration of the widow. There should be contracts being let for dirt to fly next summer, since they already have a ready-made template available in the form of the CROW manual that has been available for years for €90 ($101.20 at current exchange rates) plus VAT (no VAT for sales outside of Europe).

Still in Canuckistan and still on the state of their infrastructure, more evidence that reductions in motor vehicle fatalities are the result of making cars more resistant to wrecks than changes in the infrastructure or any improvement in drivers. Edmonton fatal collisions down in 2014 Fatal collisions are down, but cyclist and pedestrian fatalities are up and cyclist injury wrecks are likewise up. Fewer than 1 in 4 wrecks were the fault of the cyclist even judged by car-head LEO, which means that 3 out of 4 wrecks were caused by or the fault of drivers of motor vehicles. That means that 101 out of 144 wrecks were because a driver screwed up so bad that there was no way to deny it.

And I’m all out of links and ready to kick back and have some fun.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the Poet (at current exchange rates that’s still pretty much $0.02)

My Warlock died yesterday and more on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Yep, my poor Warlock was severely killed (along with my apprentice NPC Bard) in the kinky D&D game yesterday. I was down to 6 HP when I got hit by a 34 HP attack centered on me and my apprentice because we were not in the room in an earlier attack that made the entire rest of the party magically pregnant with the half-siblings of a half-dragon daughter of a Green Dragon. She was pissed at us for not being there to get pregnant during that attack. I managed to get off a few good shots but a 5th level Warlock going up against even a half-dragon just ain’t gonna work. And so, I died.

Fortunately in the party loot was a clear bottle with a lead stopper filled with orange smoke and flashing lights, a “bottle of djinn”. This djinn was fairly powerful in that he had enough moxie to do two resurrections and bring both me and my apprentice back to full life with no loss of levels or XP. The senior member of the party then ordered the djinn to be free, much like the climactic scene in Disney’s Aladdin. We did this because we only had control over the djinn for 24 hours and if he was powerful enough to bring two characters through a full resurrection he was more than powerful enough to do a TPK in a single attack. So, “bring my friends back to life, and be free” seemed like a good choice.

On the Sprint Cup race today Martin Truax finally got a win this season after practically pounding the door down all season long with the Furniture Row Racing team. They won simply by virtue of having the stronger car pretty much all race long, and were able to outrun Happy Harvick at the end. This puts him in for the Championship Chase at the end of the season. I have liked Truax as a driver since his days with Michael Waltrip Racing, and was highly disappointed when MWR let him go at sponsor request, even after winning races. Well now he won driving for a single-car team with a tiny fraction of the resources of the big name teams. I mean until now had you ever heard of Furniture Row Racing?

With the parts that arrived last week detail design work on the Sprint-T progressed a little further as now I know how big the things holding the rear axle from moving relative to the frame are. Knowing this I know how much leeway I have to provide to keep them out of the bodywork and frame, and where they have to connect to the rear axle so that the coilovers don’t hit that. Having the actual items in my hands to measure makes things that much easier to draw. The issue I’m now facing is that I need the instant center for the rear suspension to be above the rear control arms slightly so that the rear axle doesn’t chatter under heavy braking, and when you throw that in with the “don’t hit the body” during suspension travel, or violate the “nothing lower than the main frame rail or the rims” parameter that is one of my basic rules for building a street vehicle it kinda boxes you in.You might have noticed that there was a bit of a bow in the control arm in the picture last week to accommodate the mount for the coilover unit.
This means I can’t just run the part between the rear end and the frame or it will run below the frame rail as this is a dual-use part. Not only does it locate the axle fore and aft, it also controls the up-and-down motion by mounting the rear springs, and the anti-roll bar bolts to the bottom to control roll (obviously, part of the name of the part). Why let a part do only one thing when you can use it to do three jobs at no increase in weight? I think it was Colin Chapman (founder and first designer for Lotus Cars) who said that, but he might have been quoting an earlier engineer.

I just returned from evening service where Mrs. the Poet was installed to the board of the church as a member-at-large for 2 years. It was quite moving. It was also rather frightening on one level, as the oath of office was basically in invitation for your gods to hunt you down and kill you in the most painful way possible if you screw up. I don’t know if that was the intent of the oath of office, but that’s surely the way it came out. I guess that is an effective way to ensure that screw-ups will be unintentional.

And I should let this end here as I have already gone a bit over my planned word count. And I’m having trouble putting the abstract concepts into concrete words.

PSA, Opus the Poet

Weather has effected my TV watching on a Wreck-Free Sunday

Well I was going to be watching the Spring Bristol Sprint Cup race right now, but they are swimming around the half-mile oval where the cars should be running. But no problems, this lets me take in the delayed USCC race from Long Beach while switching back and forth with the IndyCar live broadcast from the same venue. I like the LB course as a spectator with combination of fast “straights” and very slow corners that require lots of braking giving lots of chances for passing. This makes for exciting race watching, sometimes fun for the drivers if you have good brakes and lots of grip, or a kind of living purgatory if any of those are marginal. Oh and the reason I put “straights” in quotes is because most of the fast straights have slight curves or kinks in them, especially Shoreline Drive. That kink in Shoreline Drive would be a numbered turn on any other course, but on LB it’s just another part of the “straight”.

I have been still working on the Sprint T. I am working on a complete revamp of the bottom of the car to improve aero, rigidity, and ground clearance. The “problem” I was running into in the first run-through of the frame was the firewall is 22″ (55.88 cm) or 23.5″ from the bottom of the frame rail for the first iteration. This leads to problems with the engines I’m looking at using fitting under the hood. The 5.0 Coyote Ford is 28.89″ tall, the 383 Chevy is 25.4″ without the air cleaner, the 302 Ford pushrod is 27.5″ tall, the LS3 is 28.25″ or 25.25″ with the dry sump, and the Hemi Crate engine is 34″. None of those will fit under the hood without dropping the bottom of the engine below the bottom of the frame. So, the bottom of the frame to the top of the firewall has to be about 30″ to get the engine enclosed by the hood, which means the frame has to be 8″ from the bottom to the mounting flange for the body. This translates to a fabricated tub to hold the body up or a full length light sheetmetal tub instead of the 1.5″ square tube lower frame rail. This will help on the interior space considerably, changing the driving position from “go-kart” to a little more chair like. The challenge will be keeping the weight down without compromising safety or rigidity. I’m thinking really light gauge sheetmetal with 0.125″ doublers where the roll cage hoops and the front and rear frame clips tie in. Or maybe extending the tub to completely replace the front clip. I’ll have to calculate if there is a weight benefit either way. There is a tiny benefit in rigidity by making the tub full length, but not enough to make a difference on the track. Going from a 1.5″ to an 8″ frame rail would normally cause a huge change in stiffness, but because I’m using the roll cage as a vertical member with the fore and aft braces as the upper frame rail that change is swallowed up by that huge increase in stiffness of making the upper frame rail on the outside of the roll cage.

After re-reading the previous paragraph I decided I needed to do a quick mockup of the seating with the 8″ body raise, and it drastically reduces the distance from the seat back to the pedals. That means no “go-kart” driving position, and someplace to put my feet comfortably for long trips. It also means there is room to put the battery under the passenger seat without any problem. This changes the relationship of the body to the wheels to almost identical to the Speedway series of kits, but with a much stiffer frame and more interior space because the floor is the same height as the bottom of the frame while the seat is in the same place relative to the top of the body. Of course if you put some skid plates under the frame you could mount the battery under the passenger seat on the Speedway kits too. It would just require a lot more work to protect the battery from getting hit. This way protects the battery and gives me more legroom all in the same operation and hopefully without weight penalty.

And to wrap this up, they finished the Bristol race, and Matt Kenseth won at 2130 with a 1100 scheduled start, the jet dryers did more laps than the race cars. Congratulations to the Dollar General team on winning the Bristol 511 (lots of caution laps after the last wreck) from the pole. If you want to know the rest of the finishers I suggest looking up the results on one of the sports web sites.

PSA, Opus

Binging on car races, on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I like motorsport. Put 4 wheels and a motivator on it and make more than one of them and compete against each other and I’ll watch it, or participate if I can. And so far I watched the Sprint Cup race live from down the road in Ft. Worth, then the F1 race from China, then after morning service was the IndyCar race from NOLA Motorsports park over in LA.

Working backwards, the race in NOLA was mostly a parade behind the pace car as it was a wet race with streams crossing the track but dry in other places, and they did not have a tire combination that could deal with the conditions. Intermediates wore out too quickly, but slicks hydroplaned across the streams. I think the longest green flag run was maybe 3 laps before someone would either run over another car or slide off the track in a bad place and require a rescue. The carnage was massive. IndyCar is running with the same chassis as last year, but the engine package you choose dictates the bodywork you run. So it’s possible to identify which engine a car is running this year by only being able to see the sidepod in front of the rear wheel, or the wing package on the back bumper. The front wing is different, but I can’t tell the difference in the shots I saw today. BTW James Hinchcliffe managed to parlay good pit work and timing to get to the front of the pack and avoid the carnage behind him to win the race.

That takes us to the fun in Shanghai for the Chinese Grand Prix. There were some wrecks but compared to the IndyCar race later in the day it was almost pristine. There were lots of wheel-to-wheel battles in the pack, but up front it was a tactical battle between Mercedes and Ferrari, which was won by Mercedes with Lewis Hamilton driving the winning car and Nico Rosberg driving the second Merc to second place. It was a great race to watch.

That backs us up to the Sprint Cup race. Now THAT was a race! Lots of passing, lots of pit tactics, some rubbing in the turns at over 180 MPH in spite of the fact that there were 4 separate lines through the turn that all went to the same place at the end of the turn. That caused some beating and banging. Jimmie Johnson won through a combination of adjusting the car to take advantage of changing track conditions, sharp pit work, hard driving and mistakes on the parts of other teams. The level of reliability displayed in the race was nothing short of astounding with 30 cars finishing on the lead lap of a 500 mile race. Read that again, that wasn’t 30 cars on the track at the end of 500 miles, that was 30 cars on the freaking LEAD LAP, out of 43 starting. I don’t think anyone had a mechanical DNF, everyone who dropped out had a wreck of some kind or blew a tire. The tires are designed to wear out and not running the tires ragged is part of racing Sprint Cup these days.

And tonight’s evening service was also good, as we focussed on the archetype of Death. The Shoe Hiding Fairy was merciful this week and only moved the young lady’s shoes a small distance away from her chair. I knew it was coming and was watching for it, but I still missed seeing the SHF moving the footgear.

And I’m ready to end this post now, because I need to get ready for tomorrow when I go to the tax preparer. A significant chunk of the paperwork needed for this trip is on my hard drive, so I can’t pre-filter the links and leave them up while I compose the post tomorrow, I have to wait until I get home from doing my taxes.

PSA, Opus the Poet

I’m not hairy on a Wreck-Free Sunday

I just finished doing the annual Spring head-shaving in the back yard partially in preparation for a trip to my PCP tomorrow to have that lump on the back of my neck taken care of. The other part is I leave the hair removed so the local birds can use it as nesting material. This was one of the years I take the porn-stache off to make sure there is nothing growing on my upper lip that shouldn’t be there.

The trip to the PCP is because the lump is between tennis ball and baseball size, and severely restricting my range of movement moving my head back and left to right. Also, I can’t even get my helmet all the way over my head because it hits that lump. So, the lump has to go, and the first step in that is tomorrow’s doctor visit. This is one of the downsides of my insurance, having to go through the PCP before getting anything that he (they) can’t do. And I’m pretty sure this is going to take a surgeon to deal with because it was originally a lipoma about the size of a walnut and now well just go back and read that first sentence in the paragraph again.

My cheap gene has been kicking in on the powertrain for the Sprint-T. I got a link to a $7500 conversion from ICE to EV and as this conversion is less than the cost of the engine and transmission… And this does not violate Mrs. the Poet’s decree against donor vehicles. The down side is there will be a major performance and range hit unless I drop the SLA and go LiFePO4. But then we are looking at thousands of dollars more, or roughly the same cost as the ICE installation and still not anywhere near the daily range of the ICE. Actually I just finished checking on the cost to get the same range as a 10 gallon gas tank and I am looking at $32K just for the batteries, so green is not as fast as brown or grey. The batteries for the same range as the SLA are about 3 times as much money and less than ¹/₃ the weight, so a slightly greater range on the same amount of electrical power. And I would need a truck to trailer the car for transport to races, so there is nothing to gain there. So, unless I want to totally abandon the major reason I’m building a T bucket rather than buying something like a Kia Rio, I will stick to the ICE. But the intellectual exercise of packaging the EV components in a T bucket was a brief entertainment for me.

I’m currently watching the Sprint Cup race out in Fontana CA, and it has been all JGR and SHR up front. I would call this one a good race anyway, because those are both 4 car teams, and they both seem to have 2 or 3 cars that can run up front at some point in the race. The last segment seems to have degenerated into a fuel economy contest at 190 MPH, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a nail-biter. To the contrary, now it’s a question of who will still be running at the end. This has been a fairly wreck-free race with most of the cautions being for debris. And just now they had a debris caution with 15 laps to go, so that means back to charging for all they’re worth to the end of the race. Unfortunately Matt Kenseth broke an axle leaving his pit box, taking his car out of contention if not out of the race. 😦 And they just had another caution with two to go, which put Kenseth back on the lead lap. Kevin Harvick decided to only take two right side tires… It’s a Green, White, Checker finish. And now we have another caution for a second GWC attempt to finish (they get three tries) but at least Kenseth got the Lucky Dog to be on the lead lap. And Brad Keslowski won after starting back in the pack from getting 4 tires on the caution that brought out the first GWC. Harvick keeps his string of top-2 finishes alive at eight.

And I’m out of things to say, so I’ll stop writing now.

PSA, Opus

The Greenville Ave St.Patrick’s Day Parade was not a Fun Time, and other stuff on Wreck-Free Sunday

Yesterday was a painful experience for me going to the local Big Parade. Getting there was not that bad except that the new shoes have not been modified to compensate for the hunk I lost out of my left leg back in ’01, so I was working on MOABackaches by the time I walked to the bus stop, but that eased off when I got on the bus and transferred to the train and the other train. Sitting with my pelvis level really takes the strain off my back. So the pain is just because I have to keep the muscles contracted on the side of my back opposite that leg which after a while restricts blood flow and causes all kinds of other problems that combine to result in a quiet stream of mutter expletives until I can sit or lie down and take the strain off. When I take anti-inflammatory drugs the pain is lessened, having the lift in the shoe for the short leg does a heck of a lot more to reduce the pain, both together is the best thing I have found so far.

Anyway, I got to the parade site about 90 minutes early because you really need to get there early to have a place to stand where you can see the parade. Remember the twinges I was getting on the way there? By the time the parade made it to our spot those “twinges” had progressed to feeling that the short leg was on fire and someone was pounding on my foot with a sledgehammer (that was on fire). I’m not looking for sympathy here, just telling it like it is. But I was not the only person having a bad parade.

Yes, that cooler just fell completely apart apparently from a structural defect combined with a heavy load of drinks and ice. Talk about a bummer.

And speaking of pictures, the pictures I took Friday night of the people picketing my church finally showed in my in box this morning, what took you?

Seriously, you guys didn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night?

I was watching the Sprint Cup race from Phoenix while I was doing this post, and Happy Harvick won again, putting him way out in front of the standings for the Chase for the Cup. There were a lot of cars that crashed out because they cooked the right rear tire tread right off the tire which causes the car to spin and then crash into the wall, including Dale Jr. and Jimmy Johnson. There was a lot of close racing except for the lead, because Harvick basically ran off and hid from the rest of the field except for green flag pit stops…

Now I’m watching the recording I made earlier of the FIA Formula E race in Miami, an all-electric racing series in its first year. Basically everybody is learning how to race EV with spec cars so they can really go at it over the next 5 years when they will be on spec chassis and tires with free within limits powertrains and batteries. Then we will see some tactical racing because the ridiculous car change “pit stop” will be eliminated supposedly in the fifth season and drivers will be required to complete the race on a single charge without recharge/replacing the battery. So basically at this point the winner of the race counts, but not really because this is all a series to learn how to race EV as a team, which I think they could learn from talking to electric RC racers, but hey, NIH (Not Invented Here) exists as an acronym for a reason.

I joined a new RP Group that will stick to D&D 3.5. This group will lean a lot more heavily on RP than on combat so when I built my character (on a 32 point buy system) I maxed out Charisma and dumped my Strength. I will start playing on the 28th because two members of the group have a church obligation next Saturday the 21st. Incidentally the “nice” people who were at the church in that group picture above promised to come back for the Sumerian ritual this Saturday. Considering the people doing the ritual are not the most tolerant people in the world when ritual is interrupted, I do not see good things in the future for the picketers. 😛

This is going to be interesting. Tune in for the report next Sunday, and stay here for regular posting Monday through Friday.

PSA, Opus the Poet