Labor Dave weekend and Car Racing
Labor Dave weekend at the Gorge, a second-place finish at the 24 Hours of Lemons, and Corvo gets to shed 250 pounds for North Americans. Plus a demon's casino, a lunar eclipse, and a new heat pump.
How's everyone doing lately? Are you excited for fall and the kids going back to school? I always find this time of year exciting, as the weather starts to get a bit cooler, the sailing season wraps up, and we start looking forward to ski and snowboarding season and making plans for next year.
These past couple of weeks have been a blast. I've had the chance to take some friends sailing, go car racing at Pacific Raceways, and enjoy a wonderful weekend at the Gorge watching three nights of the Dave Matthews Band and meeting some wonderful new friends!
While Catherine and I were over at the Gorge for Labor Day, Alex and Victoria took Airborne out and had a nice quiet weekend in Poulsbo.
Car Racing
The weekend before last, the Close-Enough Engineering team went to Pacific Raceways to race in the 24 Hours of Lemons. There were five of us driving this event: Kyle, Andy, Eric, me, and Curt Hayes. The car was running strong on both days (Kyle replaced the plugs and the coils), and we had our best showing yet, with a second overall, only two laps behind the winner, and that came down to a pit-stop mistake. I drove the first stint on Saturday; it was raining a bit at the start, so the order of the day was to keep the car on the track. 😄 Which I was able to do. All of the sessions for both days are published in this YouTube playlist if you are interested in getting a sense of what the track is like.
After my stint on Saturday morning, I ducked out of the track to go to the Celebration of Life for Ken Kasmar, a coworker from my Disney days. It was good to catch up with some folks that I haven't seen in years.
On Sunday, the racing was just as good as on Saturday; there were some great battles, and the car felt like it was on rails! Thank you, Kyle, for putting together such a strong car and great team!
Bec's birthday event
Bec's birthday was Saturday as well, so that evening a bunch of us met up at the Fog Room for some drinks, before heading to an interesting interactive performance called "All In". The premise of the show was that we were all patrons at a demon's casino, and we were playing games of chance with the currency of years of our lives. There was a bar with NA drinks to buy, four different casino-style games where you could wager your years, and around the space were various puzzles that rewarded years for solving them. The interesting part was that all the "employees" of the space were actors with rich, interesting backstories and inter-character drama revealed to the players over the course of the evening. Part of the fun was to chat up folks and get the characters to reveal the story - so think of it as part puzzle room, part party, part improv. There were on the order of 10 characters in the space, and probably at least 80 "patrons".
Weighing Corvo for North Americans
With the North American championships coming up in the middle of October, one of the things we have to do is weigh the boat to make sure it is not too light, so we got that done over the past two weeks. This involved taking EVERYTHING off of the boat, emptying the water tank, and the holding tank, and then picking the boat up with a load cell to measure it. Corvo is about 250 pounds heavier than it needs to be. There are a couple of options to reduce that weight, like removing the extra battery, deinstalling the autopilot, and we can remove the v-berth boards. So that will be a project these upcoming weeks as we close in on the regatta.
Labor Dave weekend
The highlight of these past two weeks was heading out to the Gorge for four nights of camping, and three nights of music watching the Dave Matthews Band. My friend Clayton invited us to join him and his posse for camping at the Wildhorse campground and hang with them at the shows. So we headed out early on Thursday to meet some folks in Vantage so that we could all roll into the campground together and stake out some of the best spots. What a magical weekend it was. The shows were sublime. Friday night was cold and windy, and we were a bit underdressed, so we made up for that Saturday night and Sunday night. We played a bit of setlist fantasy, where we each picked 52 songs that we thought the band might play over the three nights. We got 1 point for each song played, 10 points if he opened a set with the song, and five points if the song was in the encore. The first night they played the Album Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King all the way through, which was super special. By the end of the second night I had taken over the lead spot, but the scoring doesn't yet include the third night - so we will all have to wait to see who won.
The folks that we met were awesome, so much fun, so warm and welcoming. We socialized, shared meals and stories, and I feel like we have made some new really good friends.
Here are links to the setlists for each act from the weekend:
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
This week
When we moved into our house, over 30 years ago, we replaced the oil furnace with a gas furnace. The time has come to replace the gas furnace with a heat pump. This will set us up for reliable heating _and_ air conditioning for the foreseeable future. The installation starts today, and should be finished by tomorrow.
This Wednesday is the last weeknight race of the season. It's been a great year of sailing, and we now have a couple of weekend regattas coming up, before the North Americans in October.
Love you all!
Dan W
