An otherwise completely uneventful entry into what I hope will be a good year.
I hurt my back on Thursday Morning…bending over to pick up my jacket, of all things.
Ready to go to work, all dressed, shoes, keys, badge, the whole 9 yards. My windbreaker fell off the chair and onto the floor. I bent over to pick it up and *SPROING*…that was that.
I called the bossman, told him I wouldn’t be in (that was at 9:25 – I start work at 10am…I feel so guilty!), but rather that I was loading up on Tylenol and going back to bed, where I would be laying flat the remainder of the day.
Which I then did. Man, I hate Daytime TV.
Birthday comes, back still not better. So I got up and showered, took more Tylenol, and waited a bit to see how it was gonna be… Not good.
Called Jim again, let him know I wouldn’t be in again, and went back to bed…again… On. My. BIRTHDAY. *grumble*
Got feeling a bit better around 3pm, and was able to sit in front of the computer for a while.
There’s a new mod for Rfactor out…”Super Karts”…
My friend Jason deVriese and I fired it up and took laps around the Nurburgring. It’s astonishing…They’ll go *160* MPH, and just about turn on a dime… 🙂
Now, The Green Hell is 13 miles long. And the Superkart holds 2.3 gallons of fuel. That’s just barely enough for two laps – and it’s not enough for two, if you’re not conservative with your fuel usage… Ask Jason how he knows this.
Actually, I’ll tell you, because it’s funny.
We were racing, and I’d spun out a couple times, so he’d gotten *way* ahead of me…when I see his little marker in game slooooow down…. He said he’d run out of gas, so I backed out of the throttle (I was in 2nd place, there was one more guy quite a long ways behind me…) and tried to complete the lap based on fuel economy (thus winning the race…)
I finally reached him, and he was stuck at the Carousel… 🙂
OK, it was funny to me…there are over 100 completely non-descript corners on this track, and he parks it at one the the two “signature” corners on the track.
We wound up spending the whole evening racing the Karts… Nurburgring, Bristol, Talladega, Indianapolis, Monza, Essington, and a couple of the RFactor fictional tracks…Orchard Lake and Joesville…
What a blast… 🙂
In the middle of that craziness, Val made a birthday dinner fit for…an…Italian…king?
Manicotti and garlic bread. Yep. Definitely getting old. 🙂
Home baked cakes don’t work out so well at altitude, either…
So, any birthday blahs in that department are TOTALLY overshadowed by the rest of the festivities.
She got me the Firefly DVD set *WEEEEEWT* BOOYAH!
and something I’d never seen before.
An unstuffed pillow.
See, they sold these things at the PX during WWII. They had different designs on them (Love you mom, love you sis, that sort of thing…) and they were designed to be small to mail home, and then be stuffed to become a pillow.
She found one at a militaria dealer at a recent craft show she went to.
It clearly has the image of a B-17 pulling a Waco glider, and several parachutists in various states of descent on it, along with the words “Camp Macall, North Carolina”
That’s where Airborne troops trained in WWII after they became jump qualified at Camp Currahee.
Guess that means I’ll be putting together an airsoft Airborne kit sometime soon…it’s a sign or something… 🙂