Category: life

where everything else happens

Whoo hoo!

In the spring, I entered some of my Jaguar photos in a contest sponsored by parts supplier SNG-Barratt. I liked the idea of the 65E earning some cash for parts, especially since my eBay quest for an air filter cannister has been fruitless – some guy named “George” has outbid me for every single one that has come up over the past YEAR. WTF? I give up George, you can have them all… every rusty cannister from now until eternity is yours. I’ll cash in my parts voucher for a “new” one from SNG.

As soon as I got the invite I burned a CD and mailed it off to the UK (The USPS has very good rates for overseas express mail) a week or so later I received an email from an Art Director there who praised my work and said that I was the entrant so far who “got” the idea of the contest, placing Jaguars in highly scenic or interesting shots. He had nothing to do with judging, but did want to send me a thanks. It felt great.

So here I get the big news in email yesterday and … they’ve misspelled my name! Oh well.

They also picked the “Miss January” shot.

Luck, or lack thereof.


Above: Ouch!

Though I don’t put a lot of stock in superstition, I am usually a very lucky guy. Life has rarely dealt me any serious whacks. Today however, is Friday the 13th. Something I didn’t even think about really… except perhaps when I updated the voicemail message on my work phone.

So I’m working from home today and at lunchtime I head out to the barn and prep the 65E for a weekend Jaguar club event. The Seattle Jaguar Club is having their “Fall Colors Tour” tomorrow and I haven’t even looked at the E-type since the Going to the Sun Rally finished up last month. I took it out once for a brief drive since then… mostly because the weather has been crappy most weekends since I came back… or I’ve just been too busy.

So I push the Jaguar out of the barn and get ready to wash it. The car number stickers from the Montana Rally are still on the car so I decide to take them off. The first one comes off pretty easily… after I was able to pick enough off to grab a handfull. It shreds up as I remove it, and I toss it in the garbage. The second one comes off in one big sheet until I’m about halfway down when it goes *pop!* and to my astonishment it peels a chunk of clearcoat, along with a layer of paint right off the car!

My heat sunk.

I stared in disbelief at the sticker, now shredded and hanging halfway off the car and held up by my limp hands. I wanted to cry.

I gathered my wits and gingerly pulled it the rest of the way off without further injury. I wandered around in a daze for a while… trying to think of what to do. I went inside, tried to collect myself, and wrote a note to the E-type mailing list to see what the collective mind suggested. I got some good advice (as always) and even some leads on good paint guys nearby (Thanks Roger!)… we’ll see how it turns out.

You can see the full set of damage photos here.

As you can see, 13 is NOT my lucky number!

I feel the earth move, under my… um… butt.

I was sitting in the living room, enjoying a wee dram of Glenmorangie, when I felt the whole house wiggle. I iChatted a friend, who lives in Olympia, which is 100 miles away from here, and asked if he felt it. He said no, so I knew it could not be a very widespread one.

The image above is from a the nearest seismograph from my house in the UW network. It is located in Trafton, just off of Jim Creek road, which is as the crow flies maybe a kilometer from my home.

I have no idea where exactly on the Richter it measured, but my guess would be in the “low fours”.

Odd week.

It was an odd week, this first week of October, 2006. At work, our “we have power” message is finally starting to see some traction in the marketplace. I celebrated my forty-third birthday. The NHL opened their season. My car was voted “Reader Ride of the Week”. My friend Peter Lalor (see blogroll) passed away.

A lot to digest.

The worst nurse in the world.

My wife had some minor surgery today, and it is her fate to be married to a guy that is completely lacking in the whole “nurture” gene. I mean… I can barely take care of myself, and a neon tetra in a bowl at my office – thankfully one is a cold blooded animal requiring very little care, and the other is a fish.

Somehow I managed to not kill my kids when they were babies (but let me tell you, there were a few close calls when I was left alone with them!) I am just not really cut out to care for anything… sorry. At least not anything actually alive. I’m fine with inanimate objects. A car, a computer, a network, my right leg… all will do fine under my not so watchful eye. But a human being, and especially my wife? She’s doomed.

Thankfully, she’s pretty self-sufficient and is not so bad off. She is on pain meds, and has tasked me with monitoring her medicine intake. Now THAT is something I can do… read the labels, enter the intervals into my Treo, set the alarms, etc. The key will be whether the Treo alarms will actually wake me up in the middle of the night. I sleep through everything but earthquakes greater than 5.4 on the Richter scale. For some inexplicable reason, I’ll snooze through a 5.3 and under, but once the wave or shake hits 5.4 I am bolt-upright and ready for action. Go figure. We’ll see. Hopefully she’s back to her high-functioning self again soon.

If she were to ever become incapacitated in a major way, we’d have to make polygamy legal so I could pick up a spare wife to take care of her (because I’m too cheap to actually pay somebody to be a caretaker!)

Seriously.

Hey, I’m famous!

OK, so not really, my CAR is famous. The 65E has been selected to grace AutoBlog this morning. They chose it for the “Reader Ride of the Day” I’m honored.

Last time I was linked from there (the photo of the aston martin up on blocks sent by my friend Jerome in New Zealand) my traffic shot through the roof, and I picked up a few new readers. Welcome folks. I’m a Network Geek who works for a Web Hosting and Colocation company headquartered in Seattle named digital.forest. We’ve been around for over 12 years, which in web-time is a geological time-scale. I rarely talk about work here though, as this is my personal site. I mainly talk about, and really more often just SHOW PICTURES of cars. I attend vintage rallies in my Dad’s old Jaguar, and love to photograph old cars. The most common “feature” here is a “name that car” photo of the day, where car geeks look at things and display their depth of obscure car knowledge. The reigning big-brained car geek is Roger, who knows (almost) everything. So if you know your stuff, hang around and see if you can outwit him. 😉

Thanks to Damon & Alex over at Autoblog for the pick. Again, I’m honored.

–chuck

My son, the (potential) teenage terrorist.

My son is hoping to further his study of languages by spending a semester abroad, in either a Spanish or German-speaking country next year. In order to accomplish this we tried to renew his US passport. He had one 10 years ago, when we were in the UK, but it has long ago expired. Besides, he is about 2x the size of the photo in that passport, since he was six years old when it was taken. He’d be embarrassed to travel with that photo, so we had a new one taken. His mother took him and his photo (and birth certificate, and Social Security card, etc etc) down to the post office in Everett today (a 30 minute drive) because in order to get a new US Passoprt he must appear IN PERSON, with his parent, since he is a minor. We brought along the above photo.

The fine civil servant refused to accept the photo, and sent them away.

The reasons? The background is “too blue”… and the words on his shirt.

For those of you not aware of what turns the crank of the under-18 crowd, it is a quote from this clip. I gave him the shirt for Christmas, and I think he hasn’t taken it off since. Yep. Refused a passport due to a video game cartoon T-shirt.

When my wife enquired as to why, the outstanding, ever-vigilant civil servant hero replied: “It is all because of 9/11”

My wife replied, “None of the 9/11 hijackers had a US Passport.”

The government representative had no response to that.

So we’re going for a second try next Monday with this photo:

Ah, the magic of Photoshop!