Global Warming?

I just realized Monday is December and we are still keeping the doors and windows open around the clock. Haven't turned the furnace on yet.
It's supposed to be nearly 80 degrees, all next week.

I'm sure as soon as we make some definitive plans to be outside for an extended amount of time, the weather will turn on us.

We Are Stinking Hippies Now

Steve's brother, among many others, came over for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. He brought his guitar and we enjoyed ourselves a little sing-along after dinner was cleaned up and put away.

Happy T Day

We have much to be thankful for, and one of them will be the friends and family who are coming over to have a wonderful dinner with us today. I should probably be thinking about logistics right now, like tables and chairs.....

JVR is My Hero

I have few heros in the world, besides Superman. John McCain has been one for many years, and anyone who's read this blog before already knows that. I also consider Steve a hero of mine, not only because he can fly but because of the type of person he is.
Jim Russell is another one. People call him JVR (his initials) but I'm terrible at remembering that.

I began working for Jim in 1994, as a shop flunkie in his business called Desert Steel. I was the shipping and receiving person, in the portion of the business that handled the production and sales of aftermarket truck and jeep suspension parts. Lift kits, lowering kits, traction bars, shock brackets, and A-arms were just a few of the things in our catalog. I filled orders for Skyjacker, J.C. Whitney, 4 Wheel Parts Wholesalers and many other big-time off road suppliers who typically ordered constantly while the demand was high. I worked that position for several years, while attending college classes at night. Jim, meanwhile, also provided radios for race vehicles around the world. The United Arab Emirates were customers of his, getting custom intercom systems for their toys and race cars. He had revolutionized the communications industry by developing these intercoms that could be wired into race driver's helmets. He also developed radio systems for the off road trucks that enabled them to radio back to their pit areas, even across hundreds of miles of desert. That's veritably a BRIEF and simplified discription of his resume because he did so much more, like his own Nissan factory sponsored race team.
He was a busy guy.
He branched into something new when he decided to launch his own car show. He called it the Havasu Happening, and the popularity was tremendous because it wasn't just cars: it was trucks, boats, lowriders, semi trucks, helicopters, golf carts, quads, and motorcycles. He said it was "The Best of Everything." He was right.
After a few years of just one Happening show, he expanded to other towns in our area and at one point had so many shows on the schedule it became an intensely demanding portion of my year. After eleven years of producing one of the most popular events in our area, Jim began cutting back because sponsors were dropping off. But for a while there he was probably the most successful events promoter in our area, and earned a lot of respect in an industry that's full of back-stabbing, fraud, and corruption. Promoters are usually the ones who get prosecuted for their shady deals. Jim was always honest and realistic, and I was honored to learn the business from him.

Working for him over the years I noticed he has always kept his cool. He has been in some very demanding industries and he's always been the guy who thought his way thru everything and made sure it was done right.

He began offering his services as the Timing and Scoring entity for SCORE off road back in the early 90's, and has done so ever since. It is of course a very part time position because there's only four SCORE races each year right now, but Jim has earned the reputation of being very precise in his work with the scoring and that's difficult in itself. Other race organizers have struggled to get up on the level that Jim Russell has attained with the scoring, because it's a hugely important aspect of the racing. How would you like to race your ass off, only to find out that someone didn't score you correctly? It's more than a little disappointing.

Jim dated a friend of mine after a very nasty divorce several years ago. I called her a friend back then, but lately she's been labeled a frenemy because of her awful behavior--both toward me and others in her life. She and Jim split up, thankfully, once he realized she was just a leach and a psycho. After that Jim met Sunny, who turned out to be perfect for him. I just love Sunny, and we were lucky to get to know one another very well at this last Baja race we worked at.

On the way home from Mexico on Sunday, Jim was driving the motorhome while Sunny and I relaxed. As we approached the American border, we all observed a man in his mid-thirties walking among the cars as if in a daze. He had this very awful look on his face and it creeped us out. He had an injury to the side of his face, like a road rash or something. Dressed kind of like a yuppy, we didn't know what to think. He stopped at Jim's window and told him his name, where he was from in California, and told a story that he and his brother had been visiting Mexico and had gotten into a car crash. They were hospitalized and then jailed. Of course he had to give all his money to the authorities in Mexico in order to get out. He had no money and no way to get home, and was raising money to buy a bus ticket. I've heard similar stories from people at the border, never quite sure if it was something true but I always give them a few dollars just in case.
But there was something about this guy that Jim took seriously. You could see the fear on his face and you could hear it in his voice. He needed twelve dollars to get a bus ticket home, and Jim handed him a twenty. The guy was so shocked, his voice wavered a little as he said, "Thank you, thank you so much!" And then he walked straight over to the bus terminal and went to the ticket window.
Sunny and I looked at each other and we couldn't help but get teary-eyed at the thought of a fellow human who was in so much trouble, how it could've been one of our own loved ones wandering between cars at the border asking for help. Jim helped that guy tremendously, and it made him a hero in my eyes.

An Even Busier Weekend

Drove to Baja Mexico for the Baja 1000 Race. I was chosen once again to work the timing and scoring at the start/finish line. Lots of pictures, I will have to really spend some time uploading them!
We arrived to some very nice weather, it was about 60 degrees or so. That's really wonderful after living in our 80 degrees for the past several weeks! We were ready to be out of sweat territory. The race's start/finish line is situated in the city of Ensenada, Mexico. It's a port for cruise ships and one of the few metropolitan areas on the Baja peninsula. Everything else is a fishing village. It's about an hour south of Tijuana.This is the view from my hotel balcony:


The day before the race, the race vehicles begin lining up for their tech inspection. This is called Contingency, and in Ensendada it's a real party. The vendors line the streets selling t-shirts and hats and whatever else, and the locals come out in the thousands to check out the vehicles and have a good time. There's music, dancing, beer, tequila, and most of the time it's wall-to-wall people. I like Contingency because I can walk thru and say hi to friends who I haven't seen since the last race.
Something unique to the Ensenada races are the Coca Cola, Monster Energy Drink, and Tecate Beer girls. They dress more and more skimpy each time, and they dance on top of stages as well as race cars. It's actually uncomfortable how the crowd responds to them. The Monster girls were kinda like in a Dominatrix outfit, and the men in the crowd were acting as though they were sailors on furlough:


I used to work Contingency for BF Goodrich, talking to people about their tires, getting their BF Goodrich stickers affixed to their race vehicles, and signing autographs. Anyone can be a celebrity at Contingency.

The food is always awesome in Mexico (I've never gotten sick, which is fortunate) and the people are more than willing to help you out if you need something. I love that town. When the races are there, everyone is so excited for the economic boost and I'm more than happy to spend money there. What was really nice, the hotel across the street had a little coffee shop out front and I enjoyed my lattes while sitting out at the sidewalk tables reading. I took my Pattie Boyd book, "Wondeful Tonight" and read it from cover to cover. Great book.

The Baja 1000 has had a lot more attention by the media over the past few years, thanks to a movie called "Dust to Glory." I was in it briefly, in a scene many people remember because it sort of poked fun at the pit stop staff who had to sit out in the desert for days on end, waiting for race vehicles to come by. When I was with BF Goodrich, we would drive the semi truck out to our designated pit area the day before the race. We'd get set up, which took several hours, then we entertained ourselves. It was many hours before the first race vehicles would get to us. They'd stop for fuel, repairs, and drinking water. Typically I did the food at the pit area, feeding somewhere around 20 people. Sometimes I helped with the scoring. BF Goodrich did their own scoring so they could relay to the other pits which vehicles had been thru. Kind of important to keep track of people when they're racing in the cold, dark desert by themselves.
In the Dust To Glory scene, we were playing golf in the desert. Just hitting balls as fast and hard as we could.

So the race starts at 6:30am. We get positioned in Jim's motorhome at the Start line, clipboards in hand. Each racer is started one at a time with 30 seconds in between, so starting several hundred racers takes several hours. The motorcycles and quads begin first, then there's a three hour break before the Trophy trucks line up. Once they're started, then the buggies and other trucks begin lining up. It takes about two hours to do all those starts. Each race vehicle is allowed 31 hours to complete the 1000 kilometers, which is a little more than 600 miles. On a straight road that would be no problem, but the race course is a craggy, silty, rocky, dangerous track that zig-zags thru the desert and mountains.
We were surprised to see so many Rhinos racing these days. A year and a half ago there were two Rhinos and we always laughed because we knew we'd never see them again after the start of the race. Rhinos break so very easily when they're not on a tough race course, so the odds of them finishing are very bleak. This race we had probably eight Rhinos racing. An even bigger shock was the addition of a new sidecar class. These are specially equipped Harley Davidson bikes with a sidecar on it that looks more like a chariot. The guy in the sidecar (called a "Monkey") is standing and holding on, and it is his job to counterbalance with his weight. Two sidecars left the starting line and we felt we'd likely never see them again.
As I took this picture of the sidecar leaving the start line, I was saying, "Oh my gosh I can't believe they're going to do it..."


The trophy trucks are huge, loud, fast trucks that everyone comes to see because the drivers are people like Robby Gordon, Jessie James, and at times there's even Indy car drivers who come down to try their luck at off-roading. These trucks cost so much money, it's amazing to see that the class continues to grow. I guess the temptation is still quite strong.
We started them, at 10am, and the fanfare was amazing. NBC had a helicopter in the sky, there was more media than fans along the race course, and we had Mexican police as well as military guarding the Start line. We had our own little military man right outside our motorhome, and I managed to sneak a picture of him:

Notice the very large rifle in his hands.

I got off a few good pictures of the trophy trucks:






Here's a picture of the trophy trucks getting lined up. They are parked at an angle down the street to fit them all in:


Once the trucks and buggies were all started, we went into the computer to check everything. We found that the addition of the new sidecar class had corrupted the entire program we were using for the scoring, and unfortunately the only way to fix it was to delete all our progress and re-enter it. That includes re-entering all the racers names, numbers, and classes. After that we re-entered their start times. It took a few hours, but it got done. Then we had time to go get something to eat before the first of the finishers began making their way to us. We figured the first motorcycles would be there at about 7pm, and I think they ended up getting there a little later than that. The four of us agreed upon a shift schedule. That way, we could each take a couple of hours to walk back to our hotel and get a little nap.
I take so long to get relaxed, so my nap time was usually frustrating. I knew it was important to be rested and fresh in order to go back and work numbers, so I kept trying things to get to sleep a little easier. Earplugs helped, because it was such a loud hotel. Benadryl worked better. I at least had some time to just lay there and think about Steve, who was back at home. I missed him a lot and rarely had a quiet moment to just sit still and think of him. Shay misses me when I'm gone, so he would call me periodically. He wanted desperately to come to the race but I think he needs to be a little bit older where he can entertain himself while I work.

The first of the trophy trucks finished on my shift, which was sometime after 11pm.
Larry Roessler was the driver, and he is famous for his accomplishments in motocross. I took this picture as Larry and his co-driver celebrated on top of their truck at the finish line:


After that, finishers started trickling in. And the fog worsened. That delayed many out there on the race course because their lights were likely reflecting off that thick fog. Here's a motorcycle finisher, collasped shortly after the finish line:

I couldn't imagine riding a bike or anything else in this race. I can't go more than a couple of miles before pooping out!

Since the last of the starting vehicles left at 12:20 pm on day one, that meant we had to keep scoring until 31 hours later, which was 7:20pm on day two. What a committment! Then after the scoring we had to verify each number entry one at a time, and print the reports for both the media and the SCORE officials to post.
Here I am, at the Finish Line, celebrating the last minute of official scoring!!



We only had a couple of errors (it would have been nice to have NO errors) so we rewarded ourselves with a wonderful dinner. The lighting in the restaurant was a little weird, with neon right above our table. It made my octopus steak glow in the dark:


And it made Sunny's margarita glow as well. You can see her husband Jim in the background pouring himself a Dos Equis beer:


We headed home about 6 hours later, it was an 8 hour drive so we wanted to get moving. I struggled to stay up during the journey but after a couple of days of only napping periodically I did doze off for a little bit.

Getting home was nice because I missed Steve so much and thought about him every chance I had. We had a great Sunday afternoon together. Maybe we'll be able to make more time this week to be alone. That's always a special reward for working so hard.