Duchess Jane

Today is the first day of a mini-vacation for me, a 5 day weekend.  I started it off by waking up to the overpowering stench of skunk, courtesy of my roommate's dogs.  Wrecks was, of course, cuddling up to the other dogs, so now he smells like skunk as well.  Awesome.

Wrecks had an adventure yesterday afternoon, when he gave his security detail the slip and escaped from the walls of the compound.  He was on the loose for 30-40 minutes, during which I was driving home from work in a panic and DuMom was designing his MISSING PRESHUS BABEEEE WE HAZ REWARD flyer.

But he was found.  And now that he's gotten a taste of the world outside that really solid fence, he spends most of his outdoor time sitting next to the gate, staring up.

------

Earl is a great name for a hurricane.  That said, be safe, eastern friends.

------

More soon.  I promise.

------

This week, years past:

2009:   A big jump.

2008:  11 Hooters passport stamps in one day, Chicago by Motorcycle

2007:  Awkward cohabitation moment

2006:  I accepted red velvet cake as a bribe for Reader of the Month/Millennium

Dear Luke,

Your "Rain Is A Good Thing" has been a topic of conversation many times for me this summer.  First, because it's rained a lot here.  Secondly, because of the central idea:  rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey, whiskey makes your woman allow you to have sex with her.

Now, there's obviously much to be said about that, but my friends have focused mostly on the part about corn making whiskey.  Because by and large, my friends prefer rye or malted barley. 

So if you could record an alternate version of the song using other grains instead of or in addition to corn, that would be great.  That would really help me tap my toe along to you getting your lady friend drunk for the purpose of sex.

Oh, wait.  Shoot.  I forgot something.  There's apparently a third choice.  Elderly diabetic urine whiskey.  Don't forget those whiskey fans.  Rain makes something, something makes you pee, pee makes whiskey, whiskey makes your baby feel frisky?  Obviously, I'm not the songwriter here.  Get to it, professional.

Thanks,

Jane

Sent from my Sweet Mobile Internet Robot®.

This website seems to have become an entire summer of Weekend Updates followed by Take No Prisoners, with nothing in between.  Wait no, not nothing.  Just a lot of living, and some of it can't be spoken of here for awhile.  I'll come back to it.  I promise.

-----

Last night, Jim said to me "Your weekends . . ." and then just shook his head.  He'd made that mistake, the one where you ask me what my plans are.  Silly kids.  There are 9 different plans, with 12 different possible wrenches in those plans.  This weekend is more of the same.  There is one plan that I'm hoping to make work, and that's the one where I get to feast with BLC and Amy.

-----

Despite contrary rumors you may have read on Twitter, I did not cause any of Jack Roush's plane crashes.  To the best of my knowledge, I haven't caused ANY plane crashes.  Yet.

-----

I will be in East Lansing and Ann Arbor, MI near the end of September.  Frenemies in those areas, please let me know if you'd like to hook up.  And I mean that in the "you bring me Blenheim's Ginger Ale and I put your picture on the internet" sort of way, not the Biblical sense.

My October is going to be wild and will involve a LOT of travel.  If you are in the Indianapolis IN, Grand Rapids MI, or Duluth MN areas and want to meet up, please let me know and I'll give you more details about the dates and reasons that I'll be in/near your fine cities.

-----

I can't stop watching this.  I've tried.  It just keeps playing and playing and playing.

I ganked that from somebody's Facebook wall.  I'd give credit but I think it was posted to every one of my classmates' walls at some point in the last week. 

-----

This week, years past:

2009:  I addressed some issues the internet was creating in my offline life.  A year later, I'm happy to report that I've solved those problems, with a combination of expecting better of people (giving more and getting more back, because that's how love works in the Church of Wags), Clowns In My Coffee and blissful ignorance.  I've never been more surrounded by love and peace.

2008:  Hope.  It got audacious there for awhile.

2007:  I cleared out some bookmarks and waxed poetic about Super Dave.

2006:  I became the Rockefeller of pessimism and found a sock monkey dress.

2005:  Installed some software and officially converted this space to a blog, after years of posting one essay at a time, old school HTML style, and taking it down when the next one went up.  SinginInTheRain contributed some Accidental Haiku via email.

Last night, Dad and David took the pavement winged sprint car out for the first time in a couple of years.  It was a TV Race for the Must See Racing Xtreme Sprint Series, so if you're a Comcast Sports Net viewer, you may see it cross your screen at 4 am sometime in the  near future.

Dano and I thought we arrived late, but because the ambulance wasn't on site yet, the practice session that was supposed to begin at 3 didn't get started until 5 pm.  Our first two hours looked like this, queued up with nowhere to go:

The ambulance arrived and practice was under way.

One thing I love about the Hoosier Outlaw Sprint Series is that their initials are HOSS and I'm a fan of them on Facebook, so once every couple of weeks, I get an email that says, "Jane, you have a new message from HOSS."

How many of YOU get regular communication from Hoss, huh?

It became obvious very quickly that David's prediction of a sub-10 second lap on the quarter mile track would be coming true, and it did.  During qualifying, three cars got under the 10 second lap officially, one unofficially (Jason Cox bobbled on his 2nd lap and ran a 3rd unofficial lap that was under 10 seconds, but didn't count for anything but pride).

I hereby declare that I will no longer be referring to a racer's "game face" or "race face".  It is now officially known as the Ray Face.  The kid means business, yo.  He may put his pants on one leg at a time like the rest of us, but once his pants are on, he wins races.

Here is proof that Dano is some sort of ethereal extraterrestrial entity.  Or his head, burdened by being known only for that hair, has decided to emit light to attract attention.

One of the other divisions on the card was the mini cup cars, which are tiny tiny little NASCAR looking things where the driver crawls in a hatch on the roof.  They are tiny.  And walking around them always makes me feel like I'm totally high and have turned into a giant.  They also make the track look like a real superspeedway (a name that I reserve for 2+ mile tracks but Slinger uses to describe its 1/4 mile).

David started 12th in the A main and finished 7th after 60 quick quick laps.

Wags came up for the race and quickly joined the cult of people wearing this exact same shirt.

My real camera battery died and the last half of my night was taken with LLoyd the Droid.  Not obvious at all, huh?

One picture that I didn't get but wish I had is with reader/commenter Scott, who was there to announce the night, and gave me a couple of shout-outs on the PA, which cracked me up like crazy (and made the people sitting next to us in the stands give me the wary "who is THAT" stare).

Had a great time and can't wait to knock some more dust off of that sprint car wing!