Sunday was a good day

Sunday was Ford Fest at Bandimere Speedway where I raced the Coupe in the Pro Ford category and managed to make it all the way to the semi-finals. There is where my bubble burst as I went too quick and broke out going to quick. What that means is I said I'd run a 11.95 and I actually went 11.930 which is .020 too quick, and then the guy I lost to red lit in the finals, why couldn't he have done that against me? I really needed to go some rounds like that, I was getting pretty bummed losing first round all the time. The secret was letting my friend Mike use the car on Saturday and he was cutting some really good lights so I asked him where how he was doing it and used that info Sunday and it worked. So, now I have a pretty good idea how to really drive my car, wish me luck.

RMMR

That stands for the Rocky Mountain Mustang Roundup and it was held last weekend, June 18-21 and was fun as usual. I worked like crazy for 2 weeks prior to get Carrie's '68 ready to go and it made it just fine, mechanically that is. Cosmetically it didn't, one of the new emblems I put on the side blew off just east of Idaho Springs and is lost, then some of the chrome on the rear of the car was snagged and looks like junk now. It did have a slight problem when lining up for the show on Saturday, the car wouldn't shut off which turned out to be a bad starter solenoid, replaced it and all was good.

It didn't win an award, but Carrie didn't really care about that she had a ball just driving it and having it there.

My car did win an award, second straight year too and I was rather surprised too because I didn't put as much effort into this year like last year. Still, I thought it looked pretty good and was excited to win again.

I did the autocross again this year, it's run on Friday and you get 4 timed laps around a course of cones laid out by the Pikes Peak Autocross club and it was a long hard course this year.

Carrie rode with me on all 4 runs, started off screaming then went right into laughing and said she had a blast. The autocross is fun because you get to test the limits of your cars handling legally.

It really is a lot of fun and packs quite an adrenalin rush, these are photos of my first lap and I was shaking when I finished. My times went down with each run, 1st run - 55.256, 2nd run - 52.432, 3rd run - 52.270, and my last run was a 51.633. I improved with each run and ended up 8th out of 16 cars in my class.

There's one event I don't have any photos of and that's the Senic Cruise they hold on Thursday where you drive your Stang around the Steamboat area. It's done like a poker run where you get a cards at each stop and put together a winning hand. They also give out 'door' prizes at each stop and we were lucky and won a nice hat at the second stop. We used Carrie's '68 for the cruise and it went great, but I had forgotten I had entered the Mach 1 in the cruise too or we would have had two cars cruising around.

All in all it was fun and Carrie said she can't wait for next year, she's now hooked on it just like I knew she would be.

One of those weeks

Have you ever had one of those weeks where nothing really goes right? That's me this week so far and I still have to get through Friday. Started off decent enough and then came Tuesday when I discovered the blower motor in the furnace wasn't working. I was trying to get the AC on since it was in the 90's and getting rather warm in the house and no AC. So Carrie called a number we had from a previous visit and the guy came out Wednesday and fixed it, $400 later that is. He replaced the the blower motor and what he called a ECU and now we're cooking with Crisco (maybe even a bit too cold now). Then I happen to notice one of the trees we planted last year in the backyard has blown over to one side from some very serious wind we had the last two days. So I go to look at it and I notice that I have 'ringed' the tree, not good for a tree. When you 'ring' a tree it pretty much kills it because you've cut a ring around the trunk of the tree. When I staked the tree after putting it in the ground I forgot to put some tubing around the trunk so the string wouldn't cut a ring into the tree. We tried to stand it back up and it ended up snapping off right at the 'ring', killing the tree. DOH!!!, my bad.

Now we're up to today, uneventful until my friend Mike calls me to see if I can help him get one of his cars home from his uncles house. His car is a 2003 Cobra Mustang that is just a ton of fun to drive and it was all good until we get it to his house. I knew I shouldn't have tried to pull it in the garage for him but I did anyways and ended up scratching the passenger mirror on the garage door. Boy do I feel like a dumb ass now and he try's his best to make me not feel so stupid about but I do anyways. So yeah, this week pretty much sucked and I'm glad it's about over.

Crazy weather

The last few days there's been some crazy weather around here. Sunday we rain, hail and high winds and some parts of town had tornadoes. Carrie's brother had to head to the basement when one hit the area he lives in, it tore up a strip mall pretty good but didn't get to close to his house. It turns out one of the mail carriers I work with lives in the same area and his house was torn up pretty good by the hail. He showed some pictures of the hail and it was almost baseball size, luckily his Explorer was parked in the garage or it would have been totaled.

Tuesday we had some bumpy weather around here, wind and some rain and a few funnel clouds in the area. There weren't any around us but I did see some rotation in the clouds but it didn't last very long. All this rain is great, I haven't had to turn the sprinklers on in a couple of weeks, saving some money on the water bill.

Before and after

These are the before, taken almost a year ago

These were taken today, 175 pounds









What do ya think?