I had a very nice weekend up in Brainerd, Minnesota for the NHRA drag races. I have a lot of pictures to share, and will post them to the pics page when I have time. I’ll probably do that this upcoming weekend. I have midterms this week so it’s really not going to be possible at the moment.

I drove up there Saturday afternoon after my Physics class and had a nice fun evening. The campgrounds are full of people and it’s always the friendliest place in the world. Everyone drives by on their creatively constructed transporters built out of things like golf carts, ATVs, or salvaged cars. I spent a lot of time out in the sun, and got my first sunburn in a while. It’s not too bad, but I’m hoping it doesn’t start to peel or anything.

It probably wasn’t the best idea to go up there for a couple of reasons. One being time, I really could have used the weekend to prepare for midterms this week. And the other reason being money, it’s awfully tight right now with all of the printing I’m having to do for my final Portfolio. For some of the pieces I have to print them multiple times to get them perfect, and at $15 per page it gets awfully expensive after a while.

But ultimately it was a good thing I went. I’ve had a very tense, stressful last few months and its only going to get worse as I get more anxious about graduation and finding a job. A night out and a day of doing nothing but watch cars fly down a track at 325 miles per hour is essential to just resetting my mind and relaxing. Hopefully next year I’ll be able to spend a full weekend there, and hopefully go out to a NASCAR race in Kansas or Chicago, maybe even Michigan.

I started getting into auto racing back in the mid-90s, when NASCAR was on ESPN and just gaining the huge popularity that it is now. Jeff Gordon was winning his first championship and Dale Earnhardt was struggling. I started watching at a time when it was unpopular to like Jeff Gordon and it was popular to like Earnhardt. In fact, it’s still pretty much that way. I didn’t have anything against Gordon, i’ll admit that I rooted for him. But I saw reasons not to like Dale Earnhardt Sr. He had become popular by racing dirty. He’d spin people out to get ahead, and if you know anything about racing you’d know that just isn’t right.

As you probably know he was killed in a crash just a few years ago. I was watching that race with a friend, and we cheered when he hit the wall on that last lap. We felt pretty guilty about cheering when we found out that crash took his life. It was very sad.

His son is filling his shoes, in a way. It seems the huge amounts of people who rooted for Earnhardt Sr. jumped on the Jr. bandwagon right away, just because of who his father was. It baffles the mind how so many can be so hateful toward drivers like Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, when they have worked entirely on their own from the ground up to get to where they are today, yet they have an extreme amount of respect for Dale Earnhardt Jr., when he’s been basically handed his career only because of his father’s legacy.

But no one said racing fans were fair or even mostly intelligent people. This weekend at the NHRA races, I swear I heard Larry the Cable Guy’s phrase “Git’R'Done!” about 8 billion times. It got really annoying after a while. It was only funny the first couple of times. Then again, I don’t like overuse of slang. It’s one of the worst fads out there. Speaking like an ignorant moron is considered cool among a vast number of people, and I just can’t seem to ever come to understand that. That’s a topic to rant on another time, for now I’m out of time.

I’ll talk to you tomorrow.