Sack time...

I've decided that this is how I'd rather be spending my day today.....

Back in the saddle again...

Haven't posted for a few days - computer problems (solved by finally buying
a new one. My old one was built at the end of the last century!!). Got that
solved, and been busy with getting the race car torn down and the rebuild
started. Here's the race recap I was going to post last Tuesday.....

Saturday was a mix of rain, sleet, snow, wrong tire choice, and too much
throttle in the wrong place.... But with the liberal application of a dead blow
hammer and a lot of duct tape, we were back out on track after missing our
qualifying session. From a distance, you couldn't even tell there was any
damage, but I've got a couple of weeks of sheet metal work and paint ahead.
Fortunately, the suspension survived intact. We even ran the fastest laps
of our race group on Sunday afternoon. We'll get it all back together between
now and mid-May for the Under 2 litre Trans Am Revival race the weekend
of the 17th.

Another busy day....

Not too much time to post today.... actually having to do some work!
I'll post some pics from our first race weekend later tonight - it was
a wild weekend at the track.

For now.... Joan and I found this church outside of Albuquerque
off Route 66 during a cross country trip in Feb 2004.

Dont touch that dial!!

So.... there's nothing wrong with your screen. You haven't gone back in time to this past winter.... This is this past weekend here in the part of Seattle that I live in. We're about 30 miles north of downtown Seattle... due north, not inland near the mountains or anything like that....
8" of snow in the driveway... snowed most of Friday afternoon and evening and part of Saturday morning. The plants are seriously confused, the frogs that live in the stream behind are seriously out of sorts, and I am just so over this weather... We went racing this past weekend - the tracks about 50 miles south of where these pic's were taken... and yes, we had just about every kind of weather there as well. I'll put those up a little later...

Going Racing!

Our season starts this weekend at Pacific Raceways in Kent- and
here in Seattle, with the always changeable weather, we may be
looking at mixed rain and snow.... if nothing else, it's gonna be cold.
Today is novice day - all the newbies are out on the track under the
watchful eyes of the more experienced racers, and tomorrow and
Sunday everybody else hit's the track.
Time to shake off the rust (figuratively speaking, but you never know)
and cleanout the cobwebs - (and maybe some carb-webs as
well - bad puns R us).
The 'Defrost' usually doesn't have the big fields that we get later in
the year. The 'Spring Sprint's' over the weekend of May 17 & 18 should
have a great turn out - we're running a revival of the Trans Am under 2
litre races with car's from the late 60's.
If you're in the area that weekend or over the 4th of July for the
Pacific NW Historics, look for the Jolly Roger flying in the
pits- that's us.
You can get some more info if you'd like at at the link on the right
for the Society of Vintage Racing Enthusiasts.

A quiet day....

... deserves a quiet picture. This is the sanctuary
of the Mission de Alcala in San Diego. I posted a
picture of the courtyard a week or so ago. Almost
250 years old, and still in continuous use...

Flowers.....

I've really got to get a photoblog of some sort set up... Any ideas?

Until then.....

New Americans....

84 people from 31 different countries....

That's how many people became US citizens at the swearing in
ceremony that Joan and I went to yesterday.

Think about that for a minute... For all of the bad and horrible
things that others around the world (and some here in our
own country) love to say about us, for all of the things that
we're blamed for around the world, there sure are a lot of
people that want to come here, and leave their old country
behind. Multiply that number from here in Seattle by
however many Immigration offices are around the country
doing the same thing.

Take some time - go and see one of the ceremonies. I think
you'll be moved by the emotions and the reactions of these
new Americans.

Congratulations again to our neighbor Nina (from Lebanon).

Welcome to the United States!!

Balboa Park

A courtyard in one of the buildings in Balboa Park - a great public park in downtown San Diego. Also home to the San Diego Zoo...

Coming to America....

A big day for one of our neighbors today. She finally got her citizenship last week, and has her swearing in ceremony later this afternoon. Congratulations Nina!!

You just can't hide from your past...

So Mom brought a bunch of photo's from the past to share with all the
people at the party... and this seemed to be the favorite....

(yes, I really was stuck. and yes, she left me there to go get the camera before she got my butt out of the bucket....)

Too much fun....

Wow.... what a weekend. Saturday I hit the big five-oh (I know, hard to imagine the handsome guy kneeling on the starting line of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is 50... goes to show what good genes and clean livin' can do!!)

So - my lovely wife Joan decided to throw a party - catered Mexican food, about 50 friends, and a live band (many heartfelt thanks to Midlife Chrysler and their new lead singer Marty Gordon (http://renzntzman.blogspot.com/) ) - this was their first gig, and they were great! Joan got to sing with them on the Beatles song "Birthday" - and she sounded better than ever as well. There were friends from church, from work, from racing. My folks flew up from San Diego (and Mom did bring several years worth of embarrassing photos to share with all). It was the best birthday party I've ever had. Thank God I've got a few years to work on Joans 50th.... So how does one get in contact with the USC Marching Band.... and do they do parties??

Global Warming my a**....

So in honor of the fact that it finally looks like Spring has sprung, I thought I'd have one last reminder of Winter from the last weekend in March. This is from the front deck of our house.

I'm looking for Al Gore so I can kick his butt...

Missed a day...

Had the day off from work yesterday... my folks are in town for a big party Joan is throwing, so there was a lot of running around and general hangin' out. And the weather cooperated - it was a perfect spring day. Today is supposed to be even nicer - highs in the upper 60's or low 70's. Course it's going to start raining again Monday, but for once it all worked out with the weather and the weekend coinciding (if you live in the Northwest you know how rare that is.....)

Night time....

I was at the Daytona 24hr race earlier this year with Team Seattle. The great thing about that was the access we had all over the track.
Late night, the cars just seem to come alive under the lights. I'm going to start a photoblog or a flickr account or something to start getting a lot of these and other images on line, but for now I'll drop them in as "Pictures of the Day" or some such....

General grumpiness....

Busy day at the office today... I had a rant about air travel all ready to go (my folks flew into town last night... When did we
all start accepting that flights were just gonna be late, crowded, and be just like big flying buses??). I'm old enough to remember when (and flew on) airplanes with propellers instead of jet engines, and people actually got dressed up to go on a flight. Of course, my wife (too young by far) says that "they don't fly Pterodactyls anymore, now quit yer bitchin, and pass me that complimentary bag of peanuts ....

Off track again..... looks like I got a mini-rant in any way....

Meerkats (pic of the day)

Joan and I were at the San Diego Zoo during the week between Christmas and New Year's.
These are just a couple of the den (tribe? herd? coven? clutch?) of about 10.
These little guys drew quite a crowd...

What's in a name....

So the name on the blog is "Vintage Racer".... You may very well ask why. It's because it's what I like to do. A few years ago, a friend of mine took me over to meet his uncle Jeff, who'd just bought a Datsun 510 race car. Well, Jeff was new to racing, and I'd owned several Datsun trucks and cars, so I offered to help him out. Well, 7 years later we've been racing in western Washington, Portland, British Columbia, and gone as far south as Monterey to run at Laguna Seca. He drives, and I do the mechanical work and the fabrication. The liitle car's changed a lot in the past few years.

There's no prize money in vintage racing - it's just for sport, It's a great opportunity to see the cars you may have only seen in old video footage or magazines, and meet people you've only ever read about.
This is our car. I'll be posting pics of other cars, and doing some race reports, etc, through out the season. Hope you enjoy....

Picture for the day

In keeping with my plan to do this pretty regularly....
No real story behind this - just nice and colorful.

Picture of the day....

I thought I should do something to develop a habit of posting regularly.
So we'll try this. Feel free to comment, critique, complain, etc....

This is the courtyard of the Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala.
In March, 1769, a party of 219 men called the Sacred Expedition, led by Father Junipero Serra and Don Gaspar de Portola, left Baja California, Mexico, to establish the first Spanish church in California. Two groups travelled, one by land and one by sea, meeting in July, 1769, on a hillside above a wide bay. It was a difficult journey; almost half the men died, more were ill, and one ship was lost.

Portola soon took Fathers Crespi and Gomez and the strongest men and left for Monterey Bay. Father Serra and the rest selected a site - at the base of a hill, beside a river, with a native American village on a nearby hilltop.
On July 16, Father Serra celebrated the first mass beside a wooden cross. He named the mission San Diego de Alcala in honor of Saint Didacus of Alcala, the name explorer Sebastian Vizcaino gave the bay 167 years before.

Under Construction

Well, this is all new to me. The plan is to have a place to show and share some of my photos, share some thoughts and ideas, get some feed back, and start something new for myself. Lot's of things are gonna change, but I'll find something I like.
Might be a little slow at first - I'm hoping to get my newer, faster, and much more capable computer fairly soon here (hey, it was state of the art in 1999). So be patient, and I think you'll enjoy what you see....