Car Photo(s) of the Day: a Two-fer.

Rainy Day E-type

The Annual Rain Festival (October-May) has returned to the Pacific Northwet. As such I doubt I’ll be driving the Jaguar much over the next several months. Oh well. The above shot was taken actually far from the Pacific. It is Frank Filangeri’s (I hope I spelled that right) S1 E-type OTS. Taken on the very wet New England 2000 Vintage Rally over eight years ago. My how time flies.

Just so that all that grey doesn’t get you SAD I’ve got a sunshine shot that can provide us with a little guessing game:

Lovely seaside, or lakeside, road?

I love this shot and love this spot. It evokes memories of places in England for me. So where is it? As many of you know, this car has driven many places all over this country. East coast, west coast, and all the way across. Is that the sea, or is it a lake? It could even be a big river or a reservoir! Could be Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Nova Scotia, Ohio, British Columbia, California, Idaho, Alberta, Montana, Washington, Oregon… or could it be someplace in between?

Take a guess of where this road might be located in the comments.


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John got it: Ebeys Landing Road on Whidbey Island. Very close to home… due west of my house by a short distance as the crow flies (and the crows do fly around here!) but a bit of a drive. Worth it though.

Thanks for playing everyone!

Site Maintenance.

Today is my 45th birthday. I’m celebrating by quaffing a bit of bubbly, processing some waste veggie oil into BioDiesel, and upgrading WordPress here on my website. Be patient while I perform this task. Be back soon!

Update, Monday: Well… that was fun! It seems I broke it for a while. Rog was right, I should have slowed down on the drinking and sped up on the RTFM’ing! 😉

The site didn’t break for any of you (except a few display items) but I managed to lock myself out of all the admin functions for about 18 hours. Logging in just sent me into a loop, as did doing a password reset… or even manually editing my user entry in the SQL database. Finally 9at the suggestion of one of my staff late last night (Thanks Josh!) I yanked all the site plugins and blew away my user passwd in SQL. That did the trick. I logged back in, was able to complete the upgrade, then went to bed. Finally fixed my passwd via a normal reset this afternoon and it seems all is well. I’ll start re-plugging my plug-ins again when I have some time.

Thanks for you patience and birthday wishes!.. speaking of which Sue & Nick took me to The Keg with my free birthday dinner coupon. I had a great steak (with bleu cheese & garlic… which woke me up later!) and some awesome wine.

Car Photo of the Day: Autumn run.

Here’s a nice shot. IIRC this was the very first time I actually opened the door and stuck the camera out the bottom for a shot. It was taken on the Mille Autunno rally about this time four years ago. In fact I’m pretty sure it was exactly 4 years ago today.

We were driving around the Sierra Nevadas with a group of old cars. I’m pretty sure this was taken as we rounded the west shore of Lake Tahoe.

A big buffet of blog.

Here is a veritable smorgasbord of Goolsbee news, and a heap of excuses why I haven’t been posting much since my return from the GTTSR (besides my backfilling those pages when I have had the time)…

That is 90% of Christopher’s worldly possessions stuffed into the trunk of his mother’s Jeep. Yep, weekend before last we ferried the elder Goolsbee child off to college. The Evergreen State College to be exact. The trip to Olympia was a traffic-choked adventure in and of itself, but I’ll spare you the boring details.

Upon arrival there was endless queuing and parking lot trauma, but eventually we managed to get Chris into his living space for his Freshman year. His dorm room is quite nice, on the top floor with skylights.

His mother was horrified, but I pronounced it “good.” He has this space to himself, but shares a bathroom with three suite-mates. The campus is nice, and we a few of the parent things, as well as paid tuition, room & board of course. We also made a run to some nearby stores (once the Jeep was emptied of Chris Crap) and stocked his supplies, desk, etc. Chris made a list for me of things he forgot over the next week and I’ll be visiting him later this week with that stuff, along with his bicycle, which we didn’t have room for on this trip.

Last weekend Nicholas attended a big dance at his high school. This required a clothing run, as he has outgrown just about everything. I swear he’s three inches taller than he was a month ago! Here he models his new threads:

Pretty studly eh?

His mom gave him a big hug and I shuttled him off to the dance in the Jaguar. That was my contribution.

Speaking of the Jag, I finally got around to giving it a good wash and wax this past weekend. The weather was glorious… a sort of Indian Summer after a few weeks of rain & cold. Sue & I took a drive as she had an errand to run down in Snohomish and actually suggested we take the E-type. I was planning to relocate it from the barn to the garage for the winter so it was a good excuse to take it out. As I was waiting for her to complete the task we drove to Snohomish for, I noted the car was seriously grimy from the long rain & bug filled road trip to Montana & back. When we arrived back home I washed it and pulled out the Meguairs wax and gave it a good rubdown.

Wax On!

Wax Off!

Pretty soon the rains will return in force and the car will go into hibernation until spring. I have a few projects to complete with it, but it will have to sleep in the garage as our damn cats have manifestly failed in the ONE real job they have, namely keeping mice out of the barn and therefore my car. Last winter I found signs of the damn thing all over the engine bay. Oh well.

So all this, along with some projects at work (involving more time with my nose in spreadsheets than I care to ever do) have kept me away from here for a while. Hopefully I can return to regular posting soon.