What a long strange week it’s been, dear readers! Summer is most definitely over here in the Rockies! Last week I had to make a trip to the mountains for work which worked out perfectly because it allowed me to visit my partner, but it wasn’t without its adventures! It turned out to be the first snow of the year in those mountains, and it hit like a hammer, forcing yours truly to navigate through it! It was pretty, but it was cold!
And the cold was worsened by a sudden need to replace an alternator on Patrick’s Subaru in the parking lot of the local O’Reilly’s in Steamboat Springs!
Ah, the joy of driving old cars: always have your wrenches handy! Fortunately for both of us, Patrick is a better mechanic than I ever was, so we had that alt swapped out and were back on the road in less than 20 minutes! Try that at home, kids!
I thought the hardest work of the week was over once I got back to Denver, but, oh no; whether or not it was related to the alleged “global Day of Jihad” called for by Hamas after their latest attack on Israel, I was kept plenty busy at the office on Thursday and Friday when dozens of the firewalls I maintain were subject to hacking attempts; I had to work into the night on Friday hardening systems and having meetings with both my own peeps and my customers to try to calm everyone down. Fortunately, all those attempts failed; no one got in, but it made for a long and tense October Friday the 13th and left me with little time when I got home to race, so I ended up just watching a classic horror flick before hitting the hay; between the hacking and the movies I got my share of “spooking” for Friday the 13th, I can tell you!
Saturday launched early with a visit to the toy room for some Saturday morning cartoons with the bears and then some time at the workbench to do some more pre-race repairs and tuning, including replacing the dead chassis on my red Ferrari 250GT SWBB. I was just finishing up some more chassis tuning work when I bolted up from the basement to spend some time outdoors in the relative cold to watch the partial eclipse that was happening that morning!
Unfortunately, without the special glasses needed to really look at it, I did my best with my phone, so I couldn’t really see all that much, but what I did see was the extremely weird light it produced, an eerie and almost unreal “silvery darkness” that outlined objects with a halo effect and cast some very strange and beautiful shadows, with crescent-shaped reflections seemingly everwhere.
The eclipse was short lived though, and once done it was time to turn on some good music and get to Drag City where the BANZAI RUNNER IV Group C Sports Car race was just getting started! Racing continued throughout the weekend, so to see who the ultimate tournament winner was, stay tuned, race fans!
Eclipse are always neat. I was able so see a full one once and it was actually a profoundly moving and amazing experience. I remember the Steamboat Springs being a lovely area and glad you were able to have a good and safe time with the weather. So, you can add public relations skills to your vast repertoire after calming the masses while defending your firewalls. It has been a busy month without too much time for much of my normal October fun though I still love my 70’s and 80’s horror!