Winding Down at Work

Wow, so the past few days goes down in my book of records as busiest extended weekend ever. I’ll try to keep this post short and sweet, but no promises.

I took Wednesday & Thursday off work (I don’t work Fridays, so I had that day off too), and spent pretty much all day Wednesday driving around with Keith getting everything packed up for our camping trip. I swear that Keith and I spent literally half the day driving, trying to get cars where we wanted them (between my house, my parents and his apartment) and making sure we had everything we would need. We did take a short break to meet up with Damon of Maita Scion to have lunch at In and Out, but after that it was back to shopping and packing.

Thursday morning, I had to get up at 4:30 to go out to Elite Power to put in a few hours of work before we left my house to drive down to Lawson’s Landing in Bodega Bay. The drive was pretty easy, 2.5 hours with little or no traffic problems. The spot we had hoped to snag for camping was already occupied, but Matt and Tiffany found us a pretty good spot close to the dunes and ocean. I ended up taking almost 400 pictures over the three days that we were there, including some decent night sky shots. But I haven’t had a chance to upload any of them yet, so I’ll leave most of the details of the trip for when I get the pictures uploaded and I can link to them.

We came back Saturday morning, made a slight detour down Highway 1 because I wasn’t paying attention that wasted almost 45 minutes, so by the time we got home and brought the truck up to my parents we barely had enough time to get everything unloaded, grab some delicious stakes steaks, wish my Dad happy birthday and head down to RPM to begin our next event.

RPM was the beginning of Mikes Bachelor party, and was an absolute blast. I should see if I can scan in my time slips for the three races we did. Those little carts are wicked fast. My average speed per lap was around 35MPH, and I have little doubt that given a long straightaway they could get up to 50 or 60mph without a problem. Cody ended up taking first place overall, but no offence to Cody, with the particular course we were on and everybody’s driving level it was more a matter of where you started than your ability to push to the front (Read: it was nearly impossibly to pass without breaking rules).

After RPM we headed over to get dinner at Chevy’s in Elk Grove. Fairly un-eventful. To wrap up the night we headed back to our house for some typical bachelor night partying, but the details of that are for those people who were there
After some hard partying Saturday night, I still managed to get up at 7:30 Sunday morning and out to the Sacramento Raceway by 8:30 (including time for a carwash and a stop at Starbucks) to join Damon and the extended Scion family at Wide Open Scion. While the event was sponsored by the local Scion dealerships it was generally open to the public, so there were quite a few Honda owners there, and even 4 or 5 American muscle cars. I helped out by directing traffic and parking cars for the first few hours I was there. By the time Keith showed up the number of cars coming in was low enough I figured they could take care of themselves and so I went out to enjoy the event. Keith ran his car on the track a few times, did respectably, but ended up running really low on gas and had to stop before any real racing happened. The event was hoping to draw about 500 people, but it didn’t seem to get anywhere near that, so I’m not sure if it will happen again next year or not. Too bad really, Damon put a lot of work into it and it had a lot of potential, it just was lacking the necessary marketing and awareness in my opinion.

Keith and I left the raceway early so we could finish up the last of our unpacking. We ended up stopping at his house for a few hours, ordered a pizza and watched the Never Ending Story before we finally got around to going up to my parents. When we got to my parents we unloaded and cleaned up the last of our camping gear, and mostly just crashed, by this time I was ready to just sleep anywhere. I got my hair cut while I was up there because it was starting to get really out of control and I keep forgetting to call Kelly.

I got home around 10:30, and finally had more than just a few minutes in front of the computer, but I was really tired so I only spent enough time to copy all the pictures off the camera of camping and Wide Open Scion. I didn’t get around to uploading the camping pictures, but I did get the Wide Open Scion pictures up. They aren’t very good though and I’m not really happy with them. There seems to be a lot of dust inside my camera too that is really upsetting. I’m going to have to take it somewhere and have it cleaned or something because I can’t seem to get it out.

So that pretty much concludes my extended weekend, I’m at work now, trying to wind down mentally and catch up on some things. I’m still really tired, and coffee seems to have little effect this morning. Oh well, I may pass on magic night tonight to facilitate an earlier reunion between me and my pillow.