AC/DC

A couple posts ago this olelongrooffan did a blog about how things are in my life right now as I continue to Celebrate Life in every manner possible.

Well Counters, upon completion of that blogpost, this olelongrooffan went to check my email and there was an invitation from NissanUSA to come on down to MickeyMouseLand and drive one of their new electric Nissan Leaf automobiles for 60-90 minutes.

And on Friday, February 4th at the University of Central Florida campus this olelongrooffan will, shockingly, continue to

Celebrate Life!!

Southwest Airlines, This olelongrooffan Loves Ya

Just about a year ago, I posted a video blogpost over on Ormond Offbeat, my other blog, and you should check out this humorous video here.

And just to know the care Southwest provides their customers via this humorous attempt to get through those pesky pre-flight instructions or through their true sense of life and its requirements, should help all of us

Celebrate Life.

Sorry, No Images.

Today this olelongrooffan was driving home from work and crossing the Main Street drawbridge across the Halifax River/Intercoastal Waterway down in Daytona Beach. Just as I was approaching the the part of the drawbridge that actually draws, the barricade came down and the light turned red signaling to this olelongrooffan that, unless I was feeling like the Blues Brothers, I should probably stop the Comanche, midstream, as it were.

And I did.

Well Counters this olelongrooffan knew it was going to be a wait of considerable time as the huge sailboat the bridge had drawn for was under power via the jib out front and a brisk northerly wind.  I stepped out to stand on the sidewalk of that bridge and just watch it go on by. 

Sorry Counters, no pictures but it did happen. 

The pilot of that vessel as well as his first mate were in the open air portion of that boat and were bundled up in sweaters, jackets, windbreakers, hats and gloves.  They both looked at me as they passed and I gave them a big "thumbs up".  They broke into the same sh*t eating grin I was sporting and then they were gone.

And it made me realize something.

This olelongrooffan is one lucky sum beach.  And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

True, I am grossly underemployed and have pretty much blown through my life savings during my multiple years of un and under employment but those are the only two cr*ppy parts in the life of this olelongrooffan.  And while many would say those are pretty significant things, they are.  But as thejeepjunkie pointed out to this olelongrooffan a long time ago, "Don't worry longroof.  Something will come up for you.  It always does."  And I believe it will.

However, in the meantime, in my quest to Celebrate Life, I seem to find things that are pretty d*mn good for me.

Between my workplace and that drawbridge is the Salvation Army Center.  Today, there were a bunch of bundled up folks out front just waiting for a free meal and maybe a warm place to sleep.  And this olelongrooffan was not one of them.

And on just another, what could have been another mundane, work/home commute, this olelongrooffan got to see that adventurous couple on their beautiful sailboat and possessing their ability to Celebrate Life in the manner they see fit.  And Counters, when was the last time you saw a huge sailboat sailing in international waters with the entire world at their beck and call?

So, after seeing that couple and climbing back into my cool, at least I think so, rare, little pickup truck, as I was driving back to my little bungalow style condo two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean beach, this olelongrooffan got to thinking how great life is for me and about creating this blogpost to share my sense of satisfaction with you Counters, as well as the world in general.

I mean, this olelongrooffan has a roof over my head, a job, a cool means of transport, great friends, family I like a bunch living nearby or just an email or blogpost comment away.  I also have my health, the ability to scrape up a smoke and a coke when desired, and a great 88 year old neighbor who has taken to me like peanut butter and jelly.  Plus, I am a pretty d*mn good cook.

I'm becoming more tech savvy everyday and have the honor of you Counters being in my audience here at By The Numbers as well as my fellow Hoons over at Hooniverse.com. 

Yes, I got to thinking about all the great stuff this olelongrooffan has been able to experience on my quest to Celebrate Life, doing most of it is on a pretty tight budget.  And a couple times a year, I can scrape together a couple bucks to send my landlocked great nieces and nephews a Florida t-shirt.

If you have been Counting Along With Me, you know about all the cool car related cr*p I always get to enjoy and even find by accident.  I know that the "cars" tag here on By The Numbers is the most used one.  And you also will know how much those experiences are enjoyed by this old longrooffan!

Plus when I checked the mail over at that remote mail kiosk, there was a crisp twenty dollar bill inside a cool card from the Bus for a flatbed trailer I had purchased years ago, stored in thejeepjunkie's garage for so long he thought it was his and then stole it back from him to sell on ebay for $20, shipping included.  But the Bus found out it was in the possession of this olelongrooffan and bought before ebay and paypal could get their grubby paws on my sale.  Thanks Bus.

See?  Just another way to Celebrate Life.

Well, that's about it Counters.  Just wanted to share how fortunate I feel in life and this olelongrooffan looks forward to every day and the experiences tomorrow will bring.

This olelongrooffan hopes you Counters do the same and will continue to Count Along With Me as I

Celebrate Life.

Just A Quick Weather Comment

Even though there is a "freeze warning" down here in the Birthplace of Speed for overnite on Wednesday, this olelongrooffan is proud to note that the Sunshine State was the only State in the Union, including Hawaii, not to have received any snow during the last couple days!

You Counters out there stay safe and warm.

BTW, horsefarmer this is the image I was asking you about last year.

And know this about that...pointing out cr*p like this is how this olelongrooffan continues to

Celebrate Life.

For Your Reading Pleasure, Here Is Something I Posted This Over At Hooniverse

Sometimes even I can't believe the sh*t this olelongrooffan gets away with.

This weekend is The Roar Before The 24. It is a test session for the Grand-Am racing series out at the Daytona International Speedway in preparation for the Rolex24 Hours at Daytona the end of this month.

I wanted to head out to capture an image or two of some of the race car transporters, such as this privateer GT transporter below,

as they arrived and went through the NASCAR Turn 1 tunnel. It is shown below after the tumulteous rain storms we had in these here parts the summer before last, the summer before the infamous Daytona 500 pothole incident.

And I knew that without one of these,

there was no chance in hell this olelongrooffan was going to be in the garage area at the Daytona International Speedway this Chamber of Commerce weather bearing Thursday afternoon.

However,

End Road Work

So, this olelongrooffan has been working on this blogpost for about three months.  I just couldn't get into it enough to gather it all together.  Last week when I was having lunch with my Golden State based blogger buddy down in FantasyLand, he asked me if this olelongrooffan ever got "Writer's Block"?  I mentioned that I did and even had it now based on many reasons, most of which are not worthy of publication here on By The Numbers.

Know that this olelongrooffan is doing all I can to work through those issues in the only manner I know how...repress them....wait...address them head on and I have been doing so just getting through them one at a time.  In my own way this blogpost is providing me the ability to address another issue, this time it's writer's block. 

And please let me point out that I have edited this post 3 or 4 times and have upgraded to the new template my blog provider offers and I have yet to conquer the new HTML style so the formatting of this post is pretty much up for grabs.

So anyway Counters, here is another rambling, drawn out, kind of all over the place blogpost so go ahead and refresh those cold beverages, this olelongrooffan ain't going nowhere anytime soon.

If you Counters, especially you NASCAR fan Counters, remember, during the running of the Daytona 500 last February, gosh another year has flown by, a pothole developed and then developed again in between NASCAR turns 1 and 2.  This olelongrooffan had blogged about it a couple different times, both here on By The Numbers and over in the Hooniverse.

The powers that be over at International Speedway Corporation decided that rather than merely repair the area of the "patch" they would repave the entire surface of the track, runoff areas and pit road.  To the tune of nearly twenty million bucks!

Well, starting the day after the Brumos 250 Coke Zero 400 last year, Lane Construction, the firm who has also repaved several other ISC tracks over the past few years, began dismantling the track accessories to commence that road construction project.  This olelongrooffan blogged about my first visit to the repaving extravaganza here, back in July, 2010.

I followed up with another visit the day I sold Bert's car and got what I think is one of the most intimate images of the repaving that I captured during the entire process.  And here it is.

That is the repaving of NASCAR turn four.  That Cat is holding up the paving machine up against the wall.  I shot this from the Oldfield grandstand out at the Daytona International Speedway.  Incidentally, all of the grandstand sections are named for race car drivers including Oldfield, Earnhardt, Johnson (that would be Jr.) etc.

Now, I must admit there are a ton of images around these tubes of this repaving and Jesse over at JustaCarGuy has a whole post dedicated to the equipment used in the above image.  (In that first image, Oldfield is in the background.) But with all due respect for JustaCarGuy, this olelongrooffan was there LIVE in person and that is something I will never forget!  It was pretty cool to see this road building equipment in action here on NASCAR turn 4, especially when you see what is coming up once this olelongrooffan finally shuts the h*ll up and gets on with this post.

So, anyway, a few weeks later this olelongrooffan was out and about and decided to head out and check out the latest on the only road construction I like to be around.  Bonus!  They were reinstalling the catch fencing on NASCAR turn 4 and I was able to get this image of those dudes in d*mn near the exact location as the Cat above.  I captured this one at "ground level".  That road you Counters see was the one being constructed during my first visit out to the repaving festivities.
Meanwhile, they were still tearing up the pavement in the runoff area of the tri-oval.  Those tall signs just over the top of that pavement removal equipment are at the beginning and end of pit road.

There were only a few other Hoons out there interested in observing the repaving process, usually 4 or 5 fans there each time I visited.  I spoke to (of course) a few of them on different occasions and they were always from out of town.  A couple dudes I spoke to were on their way from Savannah to Miami for a business meeting the next day and decided to take a break from their I-95 based drive to head east for a few minutes to catch this process.  Like this olelongrooffan, they will have a memory that will last forever.  And they are truly fellow Hoons.I must point out that Lane Construction, economically, did not remove all of the catch fencing surrounding the Speedway.  They just removed it in the areas of NASCAR turns 1-2 and NASCAR turns 3-4 where the use of that Big Cat was necessary.  (sorry, in high school i had a buddy with the nickname Big Kat and just had to slip that in there.  RIP Frank.)

And just to get the scale of just what was involved in replacing the catch fencing around NASCAR turn 4, I got this image from up in Oldfield.

Note that at no time was any of that equipment allowed on the newly resurfaced track surface.  H*ll, even when this olelongrooffan attended the Turkey Rod Run swap meet out at the track, we had to walk across sheets of plywood laid upon the new track surface.

So this olelongrooffan is confident that you Counters are saying to yourselves, "Okay Longroof, what the h*ll is this post all about.?"

Well Counters, just a short three weeks ago, NASCAR held its first testing of the new pavement out at the Daytona International Speedway and this olelongrooffan was there, LIVE and in person.
Along with a whole bunch of other fans.  (here is where I can't seem to figure out the formatting so hang in there.)  Anyway, I am once again in the Oldfield grandstands along with many other folks and enjoying this Goodyear tire test session.
So, as you can see, substantially more people were interested in the test session than in the repaving process.  And it was pretty cool in and of itself.

As you can see in the first image of these crowds and in the above image, we were able to stand pritnear the catch fencing to observe this test session.  During a race, there is a Volusia County Sheriff's Deputy monitoring the catch fence area and informing we fans that we cannot stand right where we were standing that day.  H*ll, the Speedway even had free coffee and soft drinks for we Hoons who chose to attend the events of that day.

I captured the following image from high up in the grandstands, an area this olelongrooffan seldom visits. I observed something interesting during this practice session. 

Most of the cars in this session were outfitted in primer grey colors but in addition to their numbers, not surprisingly, ALL of them were sporting their primary sponsors decals.  NASCAR is a business after all.

And just for fun, I got a couple videos with my elcheapo 28 dollar ebay digital camera which is definitely not a video camera. The first one is from high up in the grandstands and the cars don't seem to be traveling all that fast.

I then moved down to the area at the catch fence to get another.  To paraphrase Robin Williams, this olelongrooffan loves the smell of expended race fuel and burnt tire rubber first thing in the morning.

Yeah, those cars, I found out later, were doing around 190+ miles per hours as they zipped past!

When this olelongrooffan arrived, all 18 of the Goodyear test session attendees were on the track at the same time and were running in a pack.  It was awesome, coming around NASCAR turns 3-4, they were 3 and 4 wide at speed.  Something I had not previously seen either in person or on the boob tube.  I also observed that, and I don't know whether this was on purpose or not, but it seemed to me that individual racecars could accelerate to pass the leader, even when the leader was running in a two or three car draft formation.

It should be an exciting Speedweeks down here in the home of the World's Most Famous Beach!

Anyway, after about twenty laps or so, Goodyear called the cars in to check tire wear and for about the next hour, as long as I stayed, there were at most one or two cars running individually on the track.  I soon grew bored of this display and decided to move on to racier images, so to speak.

However on the way out, I noticed they were putting a shiny coat of paint on the rear of the home of the Daytona 500 Experience (oh sh*t, there is a whole nuther blog I forgot about).

After I cut through the gift shop and the home of the Richard Petty Driving Experience,

this olelongrooffan spotted this license plate on the rear of:  Can you Counters out there guess what it was?

If you guessed the 2010 Camaro pace car then you win the prize.  Not sure what that prize is but you win it.

Why a Pace Car would need a license plate is beyond the grasp of this olelongrooffan but this one had one.

I'm just curious. Who pays the insurance?

Anyway, even though this post has been a writer's block h*ll and a formatting nightmare, know this olelongrooffan's going to pull on through and I hope you Counters will too.  And remember to join me in 2011 as this olelongrooffan continues to

Celebrate Life.

Yeah, It's A Little Chilly At The Taj Mahal Tonite

And even though this olelongrooffan doesn't have a garage, I do have a couple really warm blankets and can continue to

Celebrate Life.

thejeepjunkie's New Toy, Revisited

Last fall, September 6 to be exact, this olelongrooffan did a post about a beat-up old flatbed trailer thejeepjunkie had traded two match sticks and a case of Natty Light to acquire. You can see that post here.

Well, subsequent to that post this olelongrooffan has seen the progression of the refurbishment of that old flatbed, even gotten images of it at various stages.  I stumbled across them while organizing some images on my trusty olelaptop this past weekend and thought you might enjoy them.

When we left this trailer in early September, thejeepjunkie had taken it by thesungoddess's house and her first comment was "When are you going to stop hauling home rusty old junk?" To which thejeepjunkie responded, "Well, I ain't dead yet!"

We rendeavoused over at a buddy's place and proceeded to remove the wood from the floor of that trailer.

The next time this olelongrooffan spotted thejeepjunkie's new toy, he had removed the bent crossmembers and our buddy was pressure washing all of the old paint and rust off it.  You alert Counters will note the shiny wheel and new tires in the following image.



This image is actually a before shot of the frame.



As is the one below.

Well, this olelongrooffan didn't see that toy for quite awhile although I was responsible for picking up the new fenders for it at a marine supply house down in South Daytona one afternoon.  In typical Lee fashion, I drove the twenty or so minutes south to that supply house and the two women working there were just wonderful.  They wanted to know if it was going to be run through thejeepjunkie's shop and I replied no, I have cash.  Yeah, one of them said, if we write it up through his shop, you can still pay cash and not have to pay any sales tax.  Yeah, that was a tough decision.  So anyway, we loaded those fenders and skirts up in the back of thejeepjunkie's new ride and this olelongrooffan beat it back up US 1 to thejeepjunkie's shop. As I backed into the parking spot reserved for thejeepjunkie, I sat in his ride listening to some story on NPR that I found interesting at the time. 

thejeepjunkie comes out and checks out his latest acquisitions and states, "The skirts are the wrong size."  I immediately fire up his new ride and head back on down to those wonderful ladies and their marine shop. 

Upon entry, they both looked up in surprise.  I mentioned thejeepjunkie's observation and one of them grabbed a tape measure, unsure if it was the skirts or the fenders that were wrong.  It turns out it was the fenders that were stored away in the wrong location in the warehouse and we simply swapped them out with both of them apologizing the whole time.  "Don't worry about it," I said, "I know you did it on purpose just so you could see me again!"  They both cracked up laughing and this olelongrooffan bid "ta-ta."

Now, last month this olelongrooffan got to see thejeepjunkie's new toy up close and in person but as it was after dark, no images were able to be captured by my less than perfect image taker.  But know this Counters, it is beautiful.  Dark metallic blue with those black wheels and a shiny new hitchhead.  The lights work all the way around and thejeepjunkie tells me it pulls straight on down the road.

"So jeepjunkie," I asked him, "now that you have this is it kind of like when you got your 2A and the dog who caught the car?  I mean what are you going to do with it?"

"Well, longroof, tomorrow I am going to go pick up my newest toy!"

And he did.

thejeepjunkie had found this cool old U-Haul trailer in the same field he found that beat up flatbed in and talked the owner out of it.

This nice thing about this one is it is perfect to haul behind his yellow CJ2A on the beach trips he makes with thesungoddess, the Kid and the Kid's sister.

Plus, he doesn't need a new tongue for this one!

And knowing thejeepjunkie is such a wheeler dealer and some of that has rubbed off on this olelongrooffan really lets me

Celebrate Life.

Cadillac? Retro?

First off let this olelongrooffan wish all of those Counting Along With Me a Happy and Prosperous 2011.  I spent the week between Christmas and New Year's  in Fantasyland visiting with friends and family down that way.  I also got treated to lunch by the author of Tamerlane's Thoughts, a blog I follow daily.  It was a great trip but I am glad to be home.

Anyway, last month   during the Turkey Rod Run over Thanksgiving weekend I captured an image of this highly modified Cadillac Sedanette of early to mid 50's vintage.

One thing I have always liked about this design Cadillac was the mini fins and tail lights on the rear of it.  I think it is much more subdued than those in later years.

Well, anyway, when I was down in Fantasyland, I saw a bunch of high end cars and got a glimpse of the rear end of the 2011 Cadillac Sportwagon.

This olelongrooffan was delighted to see the treatment of the rear tail lights on this one echoing the look of the early 50's Sedanette.  I guess there is a sense of history over in the Cadillac Design Studios.

And it is finding cool, obscure sh*t like this that really allows this olelongrooffan a way to

Celebrate Life.