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Cossayuna Lake Ice Racing

Sunday, March 2nd, AMEC was holding a race on Cossayuna Lake, which is really local, so I went and spectated. Snapped plenty of nice pictures – check the Flickr set for all 105. I’ve included a few of the better ones below (click to make bigger).

They might be racing at Cossayuna again next week, and I was contemplating entering (running in the street legal class), but I don’t have any Blizzaks to throw on the Subaru, and I don’t want to run the MINI. Wheel to wheel racing, on ice? Contact does happen!

(“Ice racing??” You’re thinking? Yeah. It’s a great little niche motorsport in areas that have winters cold enough to support a season. The lake has to have at least a foot of ice before it’s relatively safe to race on. Then a course is plowed, and it’s run like any other event. Most ice racing is wheel to wheel, meaning everyone runs at the same time. The dedicated cars have scary looking tires with huge studs, but most clubs have street classes where you run studless Blizzaks. More info can be found at the AMEC website.)

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Un-frickin-believable

So it’s snowing hard today. We were supposed to get all of the snow yesterday, but it was raining till I went to sleep, so now it’s snowing all day today. Driving with the summer tires on is very scary. I couldn’t make it up one tiny hill on the way to campus today, because there’s a 90* turn just before it, which I had to slowly do so I didn’t slide completely off the road. Having to go full-lock just to go straight really sucks. Especially when the roads aren’t even that bad.

I’ll say this much: I’m never going to curse at other drivers who’re going half the speed I’m going in inclement weather. I’ll just assume they’re running the wrong sort of tires and cut them some slack.

First an absolute blizzard in the middle of March. Now inches of snow in the middle of April. What a POS winter.

Woot! Snow

Snowed In MINI

Snowed In 2

This was the MINI as of 10am yesterday. I think that was about the halfway mark – it kept snowing till 8pm or so. After shoveling out right in front of it, and a bit of the bank a plow had created at the beginning of our driveway, I was able to blast out.

I got stuck this morning though, trying to back out the entire way. A mistake, but I eventually rocked it out.

In this weather, the MINI is less go-kart and more toboggan. :mrgreen:

First Snow & New Buzzsaw Issue

Quantifiable snow today, enough to coat the ground briefly. By the time I got to campus, it had stopped and melted on all but a few cars. But it’s only downhill from here. I’m going to need to mount my snow tires soon. I was hoping to take one trip back home on the tires that came with the car, put as much mileage as possible on them. The fronts are pretty worn, past the wear bars. The rears still have a few thousand miles probably.

The November issue of Buzzsaw was put out last night. The design is nice and the writing is consistently good. My article came out pretty well, no huge glaring copy-edit problems and so it’ll work as a clip.

At 7pm there’s a free showing of An Inconvenient Truth on-campus. I haven’t seen it yet so today might as well be the day.

Otherwise it’s same old, same old. I’ve got a lot of work piling up, and not enough time to do it all.

Happy Turkey Day

Today I went to class, which was fairly typical. I stayed up till around two last night, working on a paper. Two down, two to go. I’m doing all right in that area.

And then, at six, we gathered together to go to the Thanksgiving dinner that the study abroad program put together. And, surprisingly, it was very good.

Most people decided to go, so we were a large group. We had the entire restaurant to ourselves, and it was (naturally) free for us. Champagne, two additional drinks, and a five course meal. The food was probably some of the best that I’ve had this semester. I had the ‘vegetarian option’, which usually means “crap alternative for the morons who don’t eat meat”. However, it was good. The appetizer was an odd red cabbage puree dish. The salad was very good, with roasted sunflower seeds and some sort of tasty dressing. The pumpkin soup was very good, much better than the previous bowl I had at another gathering. And then, the main course, which was some sort of mixture of vegetables wrapped up in a flaky crust, with sides of mashed potatoes and dressing. Very good. For dessert we had what everyone brought (we were suppose to bring stuff we made, not too many people did, I abstained altogether).

But regardless of all of this, I was in an odd mood. It was a merry time, lots of laughter, alcohol, pictures, etcetera. But I was still sort of down.

I came back to my room, and was about to just chill out, listen to music, go to bed. But I decided to call someone, and met up with a few people at the bar in our residence (quick aside: I live in a little cluster of buildings which use to be French barracks till 1992, when they were turned into student housing. And there is a bar in one of the buildings, administrated by the college. Only in Germany). Drank a few dollar fifty Becks, had a few laughs.

Oh, and it snowed today. First time that it actually stuck to the ground. I’m in a better mood now. A successful Thanksgiving Day after all.