Memorial Day Weekend 2008
Following an overall decent weather-weekend, it's cold again today. It was in the mid-40's and very windy on the train platform this morning. In fact it was cold enough that I put on my winter hat. It's May 27th, mind you, and the fact that I still need to carrying my winter hat in my work bag is hard to comprehend.
For the first time in a while, we did not travel up to Wisconsin for Memorial Day weekend. Our illness in December prevented us from seeing my mom's side of the family over the Christmas holidays, so we gathered with everyone at my grandmother's in South Elgin on Sunday for the yearly Memorial Day cookout. The weather was so nice on Sunday (for a change) and Nate had a blast trying to kill himself by climbing the stairs to the deck and running through rose bushes. It was nice to see the family and getting together at my grandmothers is always a loud and fun event 
On Saturday, 
helloheather and I cleaned like mad in the morning and early afternoon because 1) the house really needed it and 2) our friends Larry and Jen (and their two children) were coming over for dinner. We've not seen them in probably 4 years. I'm not quite sure how that happened. Nate again had fun trying to kill himself by falling off the slide and off the landscaping stones in the front. He has now graduated fully into boyhood by having both knees scraped up at the same time!
Yesterday (Monday) helloheather and I took Nate to the Milwaukee County Zoo. Nate is still too little to take in a full zoo experience (still taking a mid-day nap) so we went for the morning only. I think we tried to do a little too much in the short time even with reminding ourselves that we knew going into it that we wouldn't see all the animals. Live and learn, I guess. Overall Nate had a good time was asleep just after we left the parking lot.
In the middle of all of this, helloheather and I managed to find time to watch the first disk of the first season of Battlestar Galactica (the 3-hour mini-series). After having heard so many people rave about the show, I bumped the first season to the top of the Netflix queue. (We don't have SciFi channel because we don't have digital cable so opportunities to watch the show were few and far between anyway.) All I can say is: wow. This is really good stuff. I'm looking forward to the rest of season one and am wondering if I should upgrade our Netflix account back to 2-disks at a time...
Robert Asprin has passed away
When a friend of mine started a BBS sometime in 1990, I connected and created an account. I needed a user name and, being the nerd/geek that I was (and still am), a copy of Robert Asprin's "Phule's Company" was sitting next to the computer monitor.
And so..."phule" it was and, for the most part, "phule" it's been ever since. It's difficult to comprehend that I've been using the handle for 18 years. (Though, as many know, I've been a fool for 33...)
Robert Asprin passed away, rather unexpectedly as I understand it, on Thursday. May he rest in peace.
Road America bound
My cousin Steve and I are headed up to Road America on Saturday for the SVRA event and I'm looking forward to it. I've not been to RA since...well, it's been so long I don't remember. It was probably for a SCCA event, I'm guessing June Sprints. My uncle used to race in the SCCA, first with a Fiat X1/9 and then later with a DSR Sorcerer R1 (not 100% confident on the name of the second car).
RA is about 2.5 hours north, not too far from Sheboygan. Surprisingly, the track is only a short drive from a lake called Crystal Lake.
I expect to shoot a lot of photos while there and I expect to keep very, very few. With any luck, the possibility of storms keeps dropping (it's down 10% since yesterday). I am also planning on bringing my Holga+Polaroid back with for a little extra fun with photography in the paddock areas. We'll see how well my Polaroid peel-apart film has held up. Expired film packs tend to die because the chemistry dries up. Hopefully this is not entirely the case, as I still need to get a few more shots of Nate before retiring that camera forever.
So, vintage race cars, a road course, and photography. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
