Last Couple of Weeks

Since most of you are probably tired of reading about sports and taking random quizzes, I thought I would actually share what has been going on lately.

As posted below, I just finished summer class and moved to Louisville. Prior to that, I have been taking class, autocrossing, going to weddings, and just preparing for the 2nd half of the summer.

Weekend prior to this, I went to South Bend, Indiana for a wedding of a graduate friend. It amazes me how the majority of travel in Indiana seems to be on 2-lane or 4-lane split roads, but not major interstates or parkways. The drive to South Bend actually was not all that bad. There were a couple slow parts as you traversed through towns and then the random stoplight on the 4-lane divided highway. While in South Bend, another grad friend and I took a ride around the Notre Dame campus, as it was right by the hotel. It was a very pretty campus with lots of green space and trees. It was very hard to traverse around campus because it seemed to have lots of gated access. The buildings all looked very nice and not too old either. I am sure that is not the case.

The weekend before that I came to Louisville for a wedding of previous co-workers from SHPS. It was a beautiful outdoors ceremony at Locust Grove with a very romantic and wonderful reception to follow. It was great to meet up with some old co-workers and enjoy a wonderful evening.

Since early May, I have completed now in 3 autocross events. After the second one, I was ready to hang my head in shame and go running off. I don't know that I have ever performed so poorly as I did at UK that day. Thankfully yesterday, I was able to redeem myself a little bit. I definitely was more aggressive and tried some new techniques. The biggest change was working on left foot breaking so that I could accelerate as I let off the break instead of only being able to do one or the either. It is amazing the amount of control you have over your car in that situation. At the same time, it can be easy to get confused especially as you are initially learning and hit the gas with your right and lets hope breaking with your left, when you really want to be breaking and not hitting the gas. That happened once yesterday and sent me into a wall of cones, or well lets just say did not assist in preventing me from going into the wall of cones. The wall of cones were history long before I hit the gas with the right foot instead of breaking more. It was a lot of fun and thankfully, the last run was a clean and fast run. I was actually rather afraid that I had taken out the last cone of the last slalom, but when I looked back in my rearview mirror it was still standing. After the event, I was talking with one of the guys and he said there was not one run that I did not hit that last cone in the slalom, usually on the top with the side of the car, but thankfully, I only knocked it over once on my second best run of the day :-(. Nonetheless, I still took out 6 cones yesterday to make the total for the year to be 11. I am fairly certain that is more cones than I have taken out in the previous three years of racing.

Those are the quick highlights from the past month and half. A tons of other things have happened but I will not bore you with all of that.