The Long Pause

While surfing the web tonight I came across a video that pretty much wraps up the way my life has been for the past couple of weeks.

While my life hasnt been that boring there hasn't really been anything more exciting to write about except the crazy weather. Which has been very crazy, even for Missouri.

I'm the type of person that is relaxed in a truly wicked thunderstorm. While conditions have been perfect for the past couple of weeks. Every storm that has crossed the Midwest have been spectacular, but always just miss my hometown. I am all ready this year too. Installing programs into my computer that access the NEXRAD radar coming out of Springfield and set alerts to warn me when severe weather is in the area.

So far nothing.

Short Trackin'!

Well a little about me. This weekend I took a tip on down to the West Plains Motor Speedway. I love this track. I have never found a dirt track that throws more intense racing action in your face anywhere.

Anyway it was the third night of the 8th Annual Dirt Works Justin Stanfill Memorial modified event. I was excited all week long about going. Talked to several of the teams as they passed through Rolla on their way to the track. While it was warm and in the upper 50's all week, I woke up to snow in Rolla.

I bundled up as warm as I could to survive, cause I knew the only think keeping me from the track was them canceling it. Weather be damned.

Its always nice to be able to hear those engines roar to life for the first time in a season, smell the fumes and keep the dust off the track out of your eyes. All to see a hundred or more of the bravest drivers in the Midwest go door to door for only 25 spots in the nights main event.

We showed up at the track around seven o'clock and racing didn't end till midnight. While we froze out butts off we couldn't have seen a better show.

Congrats to Jeremy Payne for winning the nights feature and Eric Turner for winning the overall point battle of the weekend.

What did the general say to his troops?

Well I haven't written in a while, not due to lack of time mind you, just a lack of inspiration. Today I am inspired for it is my birthday and despite the slightly depressing fact that I am now one year closer to my inevitable but gloriously heroic death, I find little ways to celebrate.

All the normal things I enjoy, like messages from family and friends. People who you never talk to calling you up and just saying hello. While those things are pleasant its the weird things about a day like this that I enjoy

Like checking your email and getting tons of messages from forum administrators wishing to congratulate you on not getting killed for another year. All using automated systems to send out generic messages of good tides. You sift though each one as you look for one genouine email. Finding long gone forums and websites annual greetings still being sent out even though the site no longer exists. Finding messages from places you have long since quit visiting either due to lack of interest or the fact that third graders were taking over pretending to be twenty year old women. It really is a small part of my birthday I do enjoy.

Another of my favorite rituals of my birthday is not a cake, candles or spankings, but the one time a year I really indulge my carnal desire to eat meat. Going out and buying the biggest steak I can or can afford and savoring its every last bite with a room full of friends doing the same.

And last but not least is the period after the festivities are over where I watch the clock like a hawk till midnight trying to find ways to recapture my younger days and find ways to make this birthday feel like all those I had as a child. Checking the clock every five minutes and thinking only four more hours of my birthday left. Knowing that in four hours it will go from my birthday to Monday. And I will have to wait an entire year to perform the ritual again.