Out Of The Slot – The Winter That Refused To End!

To my throngs of loyal readers-yep, all 2 of you!-I owe an apology for my long absence from my blog. This isn’t to say that cool things haven’t been happening at Drag City; actually, some VERY cool things have been happening, and posts on those advances are coming soon! But if you’re wondering why I’ve been so quiet lately…well, its kind of hard to explain. In part, I’ve been working a lot of hours; I just finished 2 50+ hour weeks. I’m glad to say that with some weekend hours I finally caught up on stuff at the office. But I’ve also found the weather to be quite challenging lately. Although this last winter wasn’t quite as cold as the previous year (although it was still plenty cold, believe me!) we have been stuck in a pattern of either rain or snow every single weekend for months. We haven’t had more than an handful dry and sunny weekend days so far this year, which is quite remarkable considering that’s its almost MAY!

Now, generally speaking, I enjoy the rain and the snow; I find both types of weather to be peaceful and inspiring in their ways. But they can also be downright inconvenient, especially to someone like myself who often travels up into the mountains for work. Mountain driving in blizzards really takes a lot out of you: it’s exhausting driving for miles at low speeds in blinding conditions having to pay rapt attention to everything your vehicle is doing every second, lest one slip result in catastrophe. With all the hours I’ve been working lately, that’s had an effect on my time and availability to race at the track and to update my blog.

The weather has also been taking its toll on my friend Patrick, who has made enormous efforts to come down to The City to see me in the most awful conditions when I wasn’t up in his neck of the woods working. As part of that, he recently completed purchase of another car, this one a 2006 Subaru B9 with a “boxer” flat 6 that we did a little work on to get back on the road. This has led to some really enjoyable time indoors with a companion, and all the food, music, movies, and memory building that goes along with winter days with good friends. Included in this round of nostalgia has been some recent purchases of DVDs of TV shows I enjoyed in my childhood (who else remembers the car-chase action of CHiPs and the cheesy humor of ALF?) and some really excellent feature films both new and old (Kenneth Branaugh’s recent Hercule Poirot flicks have been especially fun), and this is another thing that has pulled my attention away from the slot track.

Vinyl Paradise!

As part of this kind of “stuck indoors due to inhospitable weather” activity, the sudden appearance of this cool antique record player that I mentioned in a previous post has definitely been a distraction from Drag City, as I have found myself getting an enormous amount of enjoyment out of this new toy! Of course I have owned a full console stereo system with a Technics SL-1200 MK2 turntable for decades, but there’s something about this clunky mid 1960’s Singer-branded KLH automatic changer that has brought back into my life a nostalgic element that, frankly, I didn’t even know I missed!

My vast vinyl collection includes hundreds of beat up 45’s from the 1950’s and 60’s that I have acquired via various sources over the span of my lifetime; some were my dad’s and mom’s from their childhoods, some were gifted to me by my uncle, many were bought at a really cool collector’s record store in Pomona CA called “Randy’s Groovy Memories” back in 1994, and still more came from a friend and former roommate who once lived here in Colorado who professionally restored vintage jukeboxes and thus had thousands of records of every type imaginable.

Most of these records are a little too rough to spin on my “modern” turntable with the $300+ Audio-Technica cartridge, so most of them have been unplayed since at least the early 2000’s and many for much longer. This old record player has given me a chance to pull out the stacks upon stacks of these records that haven’t seen the light of day in decades, and I’ve brushed up on some clever cleaning methods and restoration techniques (such as soap-and-water washing and heat and weight “de-warping”) that have allowed me to nurse some of these slabs back to health in ways better than I thought possible.

I have delved deep deep into my shelves and closets to pull out records I had forgotten I owned, and it has been so much fun doing this that I’ve even recently bought some additional collectibles online, getting some remarkably cheap prices on original 1950’s and ‘60s pressings that I thought would cost much more than they have. Affordable fun has become almost impossible to find in “Biden’s America,” so discovering something I enjoy that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg has made me feel like a rich man indeed!

There’s been a few other issues as well; there’s been some long deferred maintenance on the 1:1 scale cars that I had to take care of, and of course there was “tax season,” which is always fun handing over more of your money for the elite to send to Ukraine while homeless people shuffle past your front door. And lastly, there’s been the most recent incident that drove me out of my basement during our last 36 hour bout of continuous rain, the bane of living in a distressed mid-century house: water in my basement, a problem which seems to be getting worse as the years go by in spite of my efforts to shore up the leaks. Cleaning up the mess this causes takes a long time and a lot of energy, sweeping, mopping, drying, and running half a dozen fans at full blast in the area where all my cool stuff is. The basement is a godsend in the roaring heat of the summer months, but during the rainy season its gets to be a real drag just trying to keep things clean.

There has been some racing, to be sure; in particular by buddy Shanon has dropped by a couple of times with his own growing collection of stock Auto World T-Jets to challenge my own “Super Stock” fleet, so that’s been fun. However, I assure you that there is BIG NEWS from the track, and its related not to cars or racing but to the diorama surrounding it. As time goes on and my collection of T-Jets just continues to grow, I am slowing significantly on my purchase of cars, because at this point I have most everything I want that is obtainable at reasonable prices. I am now facing getting into the really high-dollar stuff, like the Bauer T-Jets and some of the rare and highly collectible Aurora originals, and it seems that when the prices get to that level, I can always find something else to spend that money on.

As summer begins, it will be the diorama more than anything that I will be focusing on, and I hope that anyone who stops by this blog from time to time will enjoy watching these new layout elements take shape and perhaps get some ideas for their own projects as well as making any suggestions they see fit to improve mine! So although it may seem that things have slowed down lately, fear not, dear readers; the summer racing season is about to kick off at DRAG CITY!