For what feels like the first time in a month, I’m at home working at my desk. I’ve only been home for about four hours now…and I’m still kind of weirded out that I’m not in a hotel room or driving through the night like I have been the last couple of weeks. It’s been a fairly strange time here at BangShift Mid-West, and to be honest, I’m doing this brain dump to kind of catch up with myself, because I’ve been going non-stop for a while now.

The randomness started with the Angry Grandpa Chrysler’s build at BFNY Performance up in Cleveland. I had stopped in at the shop after covering the NMCA race at Norwalk, and knew what to expect from Erik, but I was nervous because I wasn’t just taking a car apart (which I’m excellent at), but I was putting it back together (something which I haven’t done in a while) and was going to improve it. And not just any car, but my daily driver, a car that my wife and I depend on. It’s not like we have a good backup plan…her Mustang needs a 100% brake job and some upgrades to be daily-driven and dependable, and we all know where the Project Raven Imperial is at (read: doing it’s part to keep my front lawn from floating away.) In two days we accomplished what I expected to take a week or more to do, and when we got the car down and did preliminary testing, things looked promising…which made the disappointing test and tune at Beech Bend all the more of a kick straight to the junk. But it’d have to be put on hold…

Unless you’ve been, you can’t completely understand the enormity of SEMA. This year, the show-going population seemed to be at an all-time high, the cars were gorgeous, the trucks…look, I can only be so nice about “pavement princess” style diesel trucks…and of course the controversy involving the knockoff artists being busted in the middle of the show didn’t help matters any. Lohnes and I were running around stupid for the entirety of the show. The only breather we got was the small bit of time we gave ourselves to get ready for the Gran Turismo Awards, and all I’m going to say about what went down there was that as soon as the winner (Brian’s pick, the 1951 Ford) was announced, all hell broke loose in a good way. That didn’t help matters the next morning, of course, but we’re professionals and with cameras in hand and looking presentable enough that we wouldn’t scare people away, we were back to the grind. I got real lucky to eek in a quick vacation with my wife in Vegas that Friday as well, which paid dividends shortly after…

No matter what, I was going to the final MSHS race at ATCO, if for no other reason than to have Erik look over what the Chrysler was doing, to kill the tires one more time this year, and to maybe, just maybe, meet the 13.xx/100 MPH goal before the year was up. You can read the story on what went down there, but I want to point out the contributions that my wife, Haley, made on this trip. First of all, she voluntarily rode in the car with me, twelve hours straight there, two days back (made a small side trip), with me moaning and bitching the whole way because the head cold from hell set in and I sounded like someone filled my sinus cavities with rubber cement. Oh, yeah…I was a hacking, snotty mess. Most people would run like I had bubonic plague. Not her. The entire race day, the temperature wasn’t anywhere close to fifty degrees out. I’m a bit of a bitch in the cold, but she genuinely does not do well…yet, instead of moaning or staying where it was warm, she had snatched up the camera and went berserk, and when I nailed a new personal best, I’d get a text from her before I made the turnoff in celebration. She even tolerated the wait while track crews cleaned up the mess left behind when the engine in the Challenger belonging to John Lewis puked everywhere, just so I could try to test for the 12-second area, and calmed me down when I returned to the pits in a near-rage because I had royally screwed up the launch. She’s a damn good woman and I’m amazed that she tolerates my crap.

So now we are home…and, hopefully, things will calm down for a bit. Grandpa will get the right converter installed and will make a few more drag passes, then that project will be done for quite some time except for the occasional racing action locally. The Mustang might see some work this winter…for sure, I want to get the brakes done so I can drive it a bit, then I might tackle some minor restoration work and start hunting for a 302 to replace the sad-sack 4.2L in it now. The Imperial…all I’m gonna say right now is “we will see”. Read into that what you will. But for tonight, I’m going to do what needs to be done: hammer in stories, take a moment to think about Chad and Daphne, and check out the first attempt at long-exposure shooting I tried out in the front yard. I think I need some work…but like everything else, it’s a start, and it can only move forward from here.