Driving Rain at the Track

Saturday morning I awoke to rain pounding the window of the condo. Not a particularly good sign, considering I was supposed to be at the Dakota County Technical College (DCTC) driving track by 7:30 AM to volunteer for the BMW Car Club of America. When I stepped out of my Mercedes at DCTC, a horizontal rain slapped my face and drenched the hood of winter jacket. I ran into the classroom building, leaping over a puddle the size of a small pond. Luckily, hot Caribou coffee awaited us inside, and my facial skin began to thaw as organized badges and forms for the drivers. 

While I handed out badges, the sky began to lighten, and the rain tapered off. A red-breasted robin hopped onto the window ledge and preened his wings. The foreboding morning turned into a relatively dry, albeit very cold, day at the track. BMWs intermingled with Volkswagens and little Mazda Miatas in a dance of automotive speed. Despite the long winter, the first track day of the year heralded the first signs of spring. With only one spin-out, and plenty of coffee consumed, we considered the track day a rousing success.

My First Mercedes, aka the Smart Passion, at the DCTC Track in 2015

Time to Revive!

 It's been about twelve years since my last blog post, and over that time, I was too busy writing a dissertation and a bunch of boring journal articles to post at my beloved blog. But here I am, doctorate in hand and nearly tenured, so there is no time like the present to return to Programming Monkeys. The wonderful thing about the blog is there are no peer reviewers. No one reads a blog post and then tells me a one sentence paragraph is a travesty or that I need to get off the couch and go to the library to get some more reliable sources to cite. Someone did post a comment on the blog once criticizing my stories about my Ford Festiva, but hey, the Festiva is a car that irritates a lot of people.

Speaking of cars, today I sold my car for more than I paid for it two years ago. I bought it about a week before everything shut down for the pandemic, thinking that I would be driving to work at my new job regularly and need a reliable ride. COVID-19 had other plans for me and my vehicle. This gleaming red Mercedes CLA 250, with a spoiler, sweet rims, and the AMG sport package, has been idle in the garage save for a couple of hasty track days sandwiched in-between vaccination and the Delta variant. Even though I loved the light-up Mercedes star perched like a Christmas tree topper in the grill, I knew it was time for this lovely vehicle to grace someone else's driveway. Goodbye CLA, I hope you are the star in someone else's sky tonight.

Dream Vacation

My dream vacation would involve iguana sightings, 24-hour pizza room service, and hanging out with a few of my favorite metal bands, like Atreyu and Shadows Fall.

I want to float away on the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise in January. 40 metal bands, a trip to Cozumel (part of the native habitat of the giant green iguana) and round-the-clock pizza. A dream come true!

http://www.70000tons.com/home.htm

R.I.P. Paul Gray

A few of you might know I'm a big Slipknot fan (or maggot, as they refer to their fans.) I always keep my Slipknot T-shirts discreetly tucked under a blouse and a conservative blazer when I'm in a professional environment. But to the core, through and through, I'm a maggot.

I am deeply saddened to hear of the loss of Paul Gray their bassist today. Over the past 10 years their music has been there for me when no one else was. The remember the first time I heard Wait and Bleed in my headphones, ensconced in the blue carpeted walls of my cubicle. Since then Slipknot has been there after every crummy day at work, after every put down from the boss, every meeting gone awry. Slipknot is a group of Midwestern metal heads who do incredible things, like traveling the world and winning Grammies. I grew to believe if they can accomplish that then I should be able to at least apply for a promotion. They've always brought me up to a higher place.

Paul Gray's music was amazingly powerful and his time too short. My deepest condolences go to his family and friends.

A Little Swedish Metal

In the past few years I've come to love Swedish metal as much as IKEA. I struggle with how something from a foreign place can engender nearly as much excitement in me as incredible Midwestern bands like Slipknot. In particular I enjoy the Swedish band In Flames' tune "Take this Life". It's a great song to blast while tooling down the highway in a Smart car, with just a bit of irony, as the clerk at my favorite Kwik Trip reminds me weekly how I'm taking my life in my hands driving a Smart on the highway. My dream is to someday vacation in Scandinavia and check out the black metal scene there.

Smart Car Sighting

Today in Minneapolis I spotted a Smart ForTwo "bumblebee" (what Smart insiders call the black and yellow configuration of the tiny car.) I'm getting a lot of grief about being a tree-hugger and granola cruncher since adopting my Smart car in 2008. So I thought it was darn funny when I noticed the custom license plate of the bumblebee Smart. It read "2VEGANS". Perhaps there is some truth to the granola-crunching stereotype!

A Smart Winter Driver

In one day five people stopped me to ask me questions about my Smart car. One at McDonald's (he just wanted to say he loves my cute car), two at Sam's Club and two at work. The people who stopped me at Sam's were driving a cool hybrid Saturn SUV. I got talking to them and discovered they live in my old trailer park. Since their mobile home has a shed instead of a garage, we were trying to figure out if they could fit a Smart cabriolet convertible in it. If they could shoehorn the Smart into the shed, they could drive a convertible in the summer and store it in the winter without paying storage fees.
Not to say Smart cars aren't excellent winter vehicles. I didn't die once this winter in my Smart car, despite dire warnings from other customers at the gas station. Smart cars were actually released in Canada years before being released in the US. If Canadians can drive these tiny cars in the winter (and over 10,000 of them do), I figured the car would do just as well in Minnesota.
Little did I know just how well the Smart handles in ice and snow, though, until I read about two Smarts driving the Dempster Highway across the Yukon alongside ice road semi-trucks. If you're a fan of the ice road trucking show on cable, then you have to check ice road smart driving: Ice Road Smart Driving