Happy Saturday!

Finally that 2000 mile back and forth week to Kentucky is over. Guess it serves me right for not doin it right the first time?
Though I saw nuttin wrong with the system the second visit... Warrantee board swap and I'm out and gone.

This is gonna be one busy busy weekend tho...
Clean the house
Trim the Christmas tree
Get the rock hard snow / ice off the driveways and sidewalk.
Make Christmas cookies.
and
Make a proper banner page for the new buliten board!

For those who haven't been there yet, come on out to http://www.firstgens.com/ and say hello. Join up, put up an  avatar (yes, they are allowed!) and post a picture of your Camaro or what ever (yes, direct attachments are allowed too, no more photobucket.)
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Back from Vegas!!

Hi all, cheated death again. Takeoffs still equal landings, always a good thing.
I'm gonna go thru some pictures, but we had a fine fine time.

In case I don't get back here tonight, I'll leave you with a thumb update.

It's healing right up. The black thing in the middle is a scab, and it'a about ready to fall off, another day should do it. The new skin is pretty tender, but will thicken up in time.

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Well, the weekend is in the record books.

It was an anticlimatic finish for sure, with an hour long cleanup followed by bye run finals in pro street and outlaw 10.5.
The drag radial final was a good one, then we left after another oil down.
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Off to Vegas tomorrow!!

Barely made it thru work today. Left around 3, went to heritage woods to try to help my Mom with her TIVO. Ever since Comcast went all digital, her tivo has been very confused. The cablecard got all the channels, but tivo's tv guide had no idea what was on them. So I managed to do a full setup on it, and believe it or not, it works!

Got a haircut too, if yer paying attention, it's the second hair from the left.So now Im, looking gooood for the trip. Got everything stuffed into my bad, 'cept my toothbrush and razor that I'll need in the morning, and the mini toothpaste I still need to buy. Wut's with the airlines these days, you can't bring real deoderant, and you gotta leave your shoes at the desk.

I'm hoping to line up a substitute blogger tonight, but she's off at an important girl-guides meeting and hasn't called me yet. Hopefully her mommy will read my blog and remind her to call?
In the meantime, I need to get my Walmart reading glasses and see if I can set up my windows mobile phone to talk to blogger. They say it can, heck the carned thing can do almost anything, at least they tell me it can, I dunno, can't see the darned thing without the reading glasses.

Anyway, here's where we're going http://www.streetcarsupernationals.com/oscontend.html
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Vegas here we come!!!

I bought myelf a plane ticket today... well Carol bought it with her credit card miles. I'm heading out to Las Vegas next weekend for the Street car nationals!

This will be 3 days of total insanity. "STREET" cars, with functional doors, painted on headlights, and 10 1/2" tires, running SIX second quarters at well  over 200 mph!
These cars are nuts, it's gonna be fun.

Of course Mark is joining us, as is Royce and a few other Team Camaro diehards.
Danielle, if you're reading this, hide in your Dad's  suitcase, we'll ditch the old guys and I'll show you Ceasar's Palace!

Look here for some cool  pics and videos http://www.camaros.net/forums/showthread.php?t=168730
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blog every night...

or that's what they tell me. I forgot to mention that yesterday I finally got my really cool map hung up. I found this on the web at a place called raven maps http://www.ravenmaps.com/ It's extremely cool, colored to represent elevation, it looks almost 3D. It's huge, at 37 by 58 inches, the scale is 1" to 50 miles. I got it framed yeasterday and hung it in my office to the right on my desk. I can look at it without even turning around! I wish I could have it at home, but our house is an "open floorplan" and we just don't have any walls that big. The maps looks like this:

So that was yesterday. Today I started taking my Epson 7000 apart to see if I coluld fix it. It's a really old 24 inch roll feed color printer, I want to use it to print vacation and car pictures to hang in my office and at home in my den. More progress on that tomorrow.

I took the vette home today. she's advertised on craigslist and autotrader, so I figured I'd wash her down inside and out and detail her real nice and fix / tighten a few things. So I got the pull handle reattached to the screen that covers behind the seats and started vacuuming. Well, I whacked my bad thumb on something hard enough to knock off half the scab!!! OUCH!!! THAT HURTS!!! Call me wimp, but I packed it in and went upstairs.

I found some tutorials on Microsoft Expressions web designer, so I'm trying to learn that so I can re-design and add to my webpage. BTW, my webpage is http://www.jimragtop.com/ It's all about my car, but it's very very old. I need to redo it to add n ew stuff on the car, and I want to put sections in for our travels, and also a section for this house.

Did I mention I live in a REALLY COOL HOUSE?
Hmmm, I'm annoyed. The house pics are on my wife's computer, which I cannot seem to access from my laptop. I think I'll go get em copying to the server,which I can access, while she's down in the backporch smoking. When she comes back, she'll say "Why's my computer dogging so bad?"
and I'll deny any knowledge. :)

ok cool, gottem. Our house is what's called a "Timber Frame." It's kinda built like a barn or an old fashioned church. The framing is heavy timber, joined with mortise and tenon joints secured by hardwood pags. The frame is then skinned to form the shell, but the frame remains totally exposed on the inside of the home. Here's a pic of the main frame for the great room in all it's naked glory.

If you are counting, that structure is mostly made of 7 by 11 inch lumber. Some is bigger, the bigest peices are 7 by 13 inches. The longest is 24 feet. The room defined by that frame is 55 feet long, 24 feet wide, and 24 feet tall. It's one big open room in the finished house, containing the living room, dining room, and kitchen.
When installed, that was 60,000 pounds of oak.

There is not a single metal fastener in that structure.
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Long day.

I had a lot to say tonight, but I'm just too damned tired, it's been a busy day. I took a bunch of pics, but am too lazy to resize em and post em. I did finish the smurf doors. I did take a new thumb pic. I did not injure myself on any power tools today. I'll post more tomorrow, but for now, I wanna read Team Camaro and rv.net, and go to bed.

Oh yea, I changed the setting so you do not have to log into google to comment, so let's hear from you!!!
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Sunday Night continued...

The pizza was good, and I got that first pair of smurf doors up. Those lil toy closets in the "billiard room" have been door free for nine years. Now the left side is done, and tomorrow I'll get to staining and varnishing the pair for the left. Thanks to my good friend Rob for making them.

It was good to make a lil run in the Camaro. Been awhile. No, it's not too cold to have the top down.

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Back from IOWA!

And my first favorite niece Cheryl in now a MISSUS!!!
Can you imagne such a thing, I mean "how'da thunk it?"

Since "I" am not getting old, how could "The Next Generation" be "mature" enough to marry?

It was a GREAT WEEKEND. Those of us who refuse to be old partied late Friday night, some were even doing shots of Jose Quervo. Jose went down smooth, too. I'll maybe have more on the weekend, perhaps with pics, later or some other time.

As usual, I'm busy as hell. How do "Professional Bloggers" with thousands of readers and sponsors and ads out the yingyang, people who are nowhere near as whitty or articulate as "yours truly" find the time?
I think they must be closet couch potatoes.

So, in a few minutes, I'ma gonna cruise my ole Camaro Convertible out to cop some pizza. (pic of Camaro here):

After dinner, I'll be in the "billiard room" putting up the first pair of smurf doors.

The webcam will be on, so if you want to see what a smurf door is, login at htto://www.Jimragtop.com:12000
Username team p/w camaro
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Birthday wish?

For my birthday, I'd like one or two stools so I'd have something to sit on in my mancave.
You know the ones, bar height, black leather swivel seats, either a nascar, NHRA, or craftsman theme.

Ya see, it went like this... You remember those doors from yesterday, right? I use varathane water based poly on all my woodwork (ding ding!) The first 2 coats  kinda build a base, but they also raise the grain a bunch. So then I smooth em out with some 00 steel wool before putting on the final coat.

That's where I am now. I just finished rubbing on both sides of door one. Without being able to switch hands (see  previous posts for info regarding unintended collision between thumb and table saw blade) it gets kind of tiring. So I go in the house to sit for a few, and babble-boy-Brian, who's at the dining room table doing homework while watching TV starts babbling at me about some TV show.

The only way to stop this and get him back on homework is to exit.
So here I am with my laptop out in the mancave, with nothing to sit on.

The webcam is on. More comments is you wanna know the password. Help me out here, I know this blog is new, but still, I don't wanna feel like I'm typing to myself.

OK, back to work.

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Mark and Sandra's visit

Moved from the old blog, originally posted last Saturday, Oct. 10, 2009

For the first time I can remember, I've done nothing on a Saturday.
From 10AM to now, I've just done nothing.
Exhausted. I can just imagine how Mark and Sandra feel.

This started last week when Mark .L.W asked me to look at a car for him. The car checked out, and I borrowed a trailer and brought her home.

She's a 78 Camaro, backhalved, tube chassis and full cage, certified for 8.50, and including a dana 60 / four link setup and some monster hoosier slicks.





And Mark and Sandra started talking about a marathon drive from Vancouver Island, British Columbia to yorkville, IL to pick the beast up.
This being Canada's Thanksgiving weekend, they snatched a couple extra days off, hooked the trailer to the pickup, and hit the road.

Meanwhile, it was decided by my better half that since we were having guests, we had to have a guestroom.

So we got to work cleaning out Brians old room, painting it, p;utting down the hardwood flooring, wall paper border, and quick buying a bed, bedding, and curtains.

This all went pretty well, except for that small incident Thursday morning when I knida got my thumb too close to the table saw blade while ripping the last row of hardwood floor. Nasty business, but I'll survive.



So Thursday afternoon, Mark and Sandra clattered into my driveway.

It was kinda funny. I'm checking my watch after the last phone call, looking out the front window... Finally, I call him again, and ask :didja get lost or something, u should be here?" And he says "Look out the kitchen window, we're in your back driveway!"

So Thursday we hang around here, Mark washes both our trucks, while I stand around with my thumb bandaged and leaking all over. Carol fixed a lasagna for dinner, and we all get to catch up a bit. After all, it's been almost 3 months since our west coast vacation together.





Friday, we got the car and all the parts secured and loaded, and around 1:00 we took off to show our friends the great city of Chicago.

We had lunch at Portillo's, and then drove downtown on Archer Avenue. we drove around Midway Airport, and through Chinatown, finally heading north up Lakeshore Drive.

We did a brief stop out by the Adler Planetarium, great skyline views there, but the wind was blowing hard off the lake so we didn't stay long.

Next we parked by Illinois Center and walked into Millenium park to check out the bean.

After that it was off to That Great Street, State street, and into the store I still call Marshall Fields, in spite of all the new Macy's signs.

It was still raining pretty hard so we drove up to Water Tower Place and found some parking. We didn't get too much time there, but the rain did stop so we decided to hoof it to the resturant.

After fabulous Ruth's Chris steaks with all the trimmings, we went outside to find the weather had mellowed considerably. We walked back downtown to see Buckingham fountain put on the hourly showw. At the same time, we could see the fireworks at Navy Pier too.

That 2 mile walk back to the car helped get dinner processing properly, and we didn't stay up talking past midnight.











And finally, around 10 AM Saturday morning, our good friends saddled up and headed west for Canada.

Mark and Sandra, have a safe trip back. Thanks for coming to visit!

Due to popular demand, here is the thumb.

It's actually healing nicely, I left the bandage off most of the afternoon/evening, and it's getting crusty and not oozing anymore.

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My Banner

I think I should start by introducing some of the characters in my new blog, featured in my banner. On the right is my family. My wife Carol, who puts up with me so well, and my 3 sons, Jake, Dann, and Brian.


Next is "the Bus" we bought her this past spring, when we discovered "camping." Yes, I know, living in a 36 foot house on wheels with all the comforts of home isn't camping. whatever, we like it so far. It beats the heck out of a tent.

Next one is the "Ragtop" in Jimragtop. I've had this 1968 Camaro Convertible for almost 10 years. I've rebuilt her from the ground up, I even painted her myself. She'll be a big part of this blog. Read more here .Jimragtop.com I haven't updated that website in years, in fact the majority of the current build flat out ain't there. If  you wanna see it, leave me a comment, maybe you can motivate me to update the site.

And finally, on the left is a pic from our vacation this past summer. Danielle is my best friend's oldest daughter, and we've spent a peice of our summer with them for four years now. I met Mark and Sandra on the internet, and it is both one our modern worlds wonders and horrors. You see, they live on the west coast of Canada, 2300 miles away...
 
Camaro motorhome canada convertible
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Hello World!

Well, after a quick start and stop on wordpress, let's try a blogspot blog. I think I like it all ready.

Here's my first post from the previous blog:
Welcome to my new blog. It’s hard for me to type today because I did bad things to my right thumb Thursday with a table saw, it’s hard to hit the spacebar.


Mark and Sandra went home today. It was good to see them, even if the visit was too short. We went to downtownchicago last night, and had lots-o-fun.

I’m gonna figure this blog thing out, change my theme, upload some pics, and be back ina while.

I think I need to put a bandaid on the thumb,too, I’ve been letting it air out, but the typing is not good.
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