Posts by Jonah

Dan, our next competitor, in extreme grocery shopping, has pulled into the Costco parking lot, starting the clock. She’s flashing her membership card at the door and… 

Look at that, Tom, she isn’t grabbing a cart! It looks like she may be going for a two-store strategy here! 

The no-cart play will certainly limit her options, though should help increase her speed, Dan.

It looks like she’s heading toward the produce.  She’s picked up a 20 pound bag of potatoes!  That’s a good choice from Costco, as they have the best quality Russets, but a really bold choice to carry without a cart.

Now she’s slung the sack of potatoes over her left shoulder. That will make it easier to carry, though limit mobility with her left hand.

It looks like she just got distracted by the sweet onions, and… she’s picked up a bag with her right hand. The no-cart strategy will limit her two just two items at this point…

But no, she’s moved the bag of onions to her left hand while continuing to balance the potatoes on her shoulder! 

And now she’s picked up a carton of tomatoes with her right hand!  Surely this is all one shopper can carry by herself.

She’s bobbing and weaving through the other customers, who appear to be getting out of the way of an apparently crazy person…

And she’s stopped!  She has set down the tomatoes and is picking up a bottle of vanilla!  No wonder she had to come to Costco! But how is she going to carry four items?

She’s tucked the vanilla under her arm!  Now she’s making a beeline for the registers. There are several empty self-checkout stations…

And a Costco employee appears to be coming to help!  No, wait, the Costco employee is asking the shopper if she’d like a basket.  The shopper is shaking her head.  And the employee scans all the items for the shopper!  The employee asks again if the shopper wouldn’t like a basket.  But the shopper won’t have it!  She’s loading herself up again!  

She’s got the receipt tucked between the carton of tomatoes and the bottle of vanilla now in her right hand.  Will this even work to get out of the store?

And the shopper gets an assist from the receipt checker at the door who pulls out the receipt, marks it, and wedges it back!

Now it will be interesting to see where the shopper goes next, Dan.

She’s at a stoplight navigating to King Soopers, and Google Maps is telling her to stay off the interstate! She’s heading the back way.

Now she’s at King Soopers.  Surely, she’ll need a cart for the rest of the grocery trip.  

You’re right, Tom, and there she heads for the carts…

But those two are stuck together! She gives up and grabs another cart.

That setback shouldn’t hurt her too much for time, Tom.  She’s checking her coupons as she heads into produce.

Looks like she’s grabbed some celery and is circling back towards the arugula, but there’s a man standing in front of the cooler and he’s not moving.

She’s going for the side wipe action, reaching around from behind the man!  That’s a brave move!

She’s heading toward the mushrooms now, Dan, and, no, she’s heading back to the arugula!  The arugula she grabbed must be faulty!

OK, Tom, she seems happy with her new carton of arugula.  Now she’s heading toward deli.  She’s searching, searching.

An interesting quirk about this particular store, Dan, is that the prosciutto is with the cheese, not with the other processed meats. And it looks like this shopper doesn’t remember that.

I think you’re right, Tom, and… oh, she’s spotted it!  Now she’s heading toward dairy.

She has to backtrack now; she’s not finding the milk she wants.

She’s spotted it!  It’s on the top shelf and toward the back.  That must have been tricky to spot.

She’s reaching up and… it’s just out of reach!  This has got to be a major setback!

She’s abandoning her cart.  She’s heading back toward… kitchen gadgets?

This is a major development, Dan. There are no kitchen gadgets on her list.

She appears to be searching… searching… what could she be looking for?

I don’t know but… she’s grabbed a potato masher.  She’s heading back into dairy.

Is she going to settle for a different brand of milk, Tom?

No, she’s heading back to the same cooler door, and she’s poked the potato masher into the cooler!  She’s using it as a hook!  She pulls a quart of milk down to where she can reach it… and then another one!

This will help her accuracy, but it’s got to have hurt her time.  Yes, now she’s having to return to kitchen gadgets to return the potato masher.

But she got lucky at the register, Dan!  There’s an empty register with one of the fast cashiers!  He’s scanning her items even faster than she can pull them out of the cart onto the conveyor belt.

Oh, and she’s bagging, Tom!  This will help her time for sure.

And she’s paid, and she’s out!  What a remarkable grocery shopping trip with two stores, everything on the list, and under an hour!

Berck woke up with a sore throat on Monday last week. He took a rapid test and tested negative. But he was miserable all week. I brought him home chicken soup from Chick-fil-a, along with a chicken to make him chicken tortellini soup, except I didn’t have any tortellini, so I used ravioli that had been in the freezer since spring 2020 when I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get any floatable stuffed pasta in my grocery pick up order, so I ordered all four possibilities and then ended up with all of them. This was in the days of the mystery shopping bags that the hard working grocery employee would load into the trunk of the newer Audi, while I sat in the driver’s seat wearing a bandanna over my face and thinking, Please don’t get closer than six feet to my window.

Berck has been bitching about all the things filling up the freezer, so it was a good time to use the ravioli. They were covered in ice crystals, so I carefully rinsed each raviolo off before tossing it in the soup.

Berck complained of sleeplessness and also fatigue, and then I started making him take cough syrup because, yes, you are actually coughing and just because one of us can’t sleep doesn’t mean both of us can’t.

On Friday he was feeling better, which was good because the airshow was Saturday and Sunday, and we’d been looking forward to going to it ever since Jess said he wouldn’t be able to fix Berck’s crashed race car until after the Pueblo race, which was scheduled for the same weekend. I was hoping to be able to finish sanding the crashed nose of the race car on whichever day we didn’t go to airshow.

But Saturday I woke up with a sore throat and overflowing sinuses. I guess the incubation period was five days. I spent most of the day in bed drifting in and out of sleep feeling really lousy. Berck had impatiently complained that we couldn’t watch the HBO miniseries Station Eleven until I had read the book, which he had bought for me and I had apparently completely forgotten that I was supposed to have read it.

I didn’t feel like doing anything else, so I started reading Station Eleven.

This was a mistake.

Saturday night Berck asked if I’d gotten far enough in the book to watch the first episode, and I replied that I’d read about half. He decided that was good enough. The problem is that neither the book nor the television series are told in chronological order. But the television series is aggressively adapted (according to the show runner), so it turns out that, despite the both of us having read the book, we still don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’m not convinced this is a terribly bad thing, as the mini-series has introduced some really engaging and satisfying plot points. (Also, it took me a weekend to read the book. The television show is way, way longer than that.) It’s like someone read the book halfway through and then decided to write the rest themselves, kinda like DALL·E 2 trying to finish the Sistine Chapel, but make it “better“.

Mackenzie Davis is a perfect Kirsten (well, except for too much hair and teeth). She’s bad-ass and a little hysterical… and Canadian! The original is set in Toronto, but HBO has to set it in Chicago for its American audience.

Now, I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic narrative, and I always try to be prepared. I’ve been asking for a cross-bow for Christmas since I was a kid, and no one will buy me one. But I’m telling you that reading the first half of a book about how everyone dies of the flu and then watching the first episode of the mini-series based on the book while you’ve got the worst cold you’ve had in a year was a bad idea. Of course, it might have been the methamphetamines, I mean, pseudoephedrine, but I spent the night having intense dreams about knife throwing and then not really being able to breathe all that well. (Also, I need to practice gutting animals. I’ve been taught how to do it, but never actually done it myself. I know the important thing is not to rupture the gastro-intestinal tract. The one thing I know first hand is that, the moment you kill the animal, all the fleas immediately jump off it.)

Berck ended up going to the airshow without me, because by Sunday he was feeling peachy (he said it was the best weather for an airshow he’d ever been to). I got up and tried to do some dishes and laundry and then went back to bed and also finished the book. Berck and I have a deal that I clean the kitchen but I do it when I want to, and I really didn’t want to. So Berck has been cleaning the kitchen, which he does while sighing loudly. He also likes to listen to records when he’s in the kitchen, so if I position myself by a speaker, I can’t hear his constant sighing. He cooked me dinner, and I had a few bites. On Monday I heated up the soup I had made him, but I only had a few ravioli and put the rest of my bowl away because I didn’t feel like eating.

I now know that ravioli is the plural and raviolo is the singular, because in Station Eleven Jeevan is a a paparazzo, or otherwise known as a member of the paparazzi.

On Tuesday I had to drive down to Colorado Springs because I’m in the Novavax trial and they get very excited if I get sick because they want me to catch COVID so they can see if their vaccine is working. So even though I felt awful and hadn’t gotten much sleep, I drove down, nearly hitting a deer on our road. I was scared driving on the interstate because I felt like I couldn’t focus. But I survived. They had me sit in my car in the ally behind the clinic. Angel, the best phlebotomist at the clinic, came out dressed head to toe in PPE. She asked if I had been hydrating, and I admitted that while I had brought a bottle of water with me and had been planning to, I had forgotten to (the driving was hard enough to concentrate on). It probably helped that I was sitting in the sun so my veins were near the surface, and she got some blood in each of her many vials. “We just need a little,” she said. But when she took my forehead’s temperature, it was over 99. And when she took my pulse ox, it said 88%. I suspect that might have been because I was wearing a KN-95 in an attempt to keep from infecting anyone else. She had me briefly walk briskly, and it went up to 94%, which is about normal for me at 6,000 feet. She gave me a nasal swab. The physician’s assistant came out without even a mask and gave me a short physical. She listened to my lungs while I breathed and said they sounded fine. The trial coordinator said he would let me know if I tested positive but that it was taking him about 3 weeks to get PCR results back. He asked me to let him know if I tested on my own and came out positive. (I took my temperature for the vaccine trial testing app that night, and my forehead temperature was normal.)

I stopped by the office and someone brought some checks out to me that I needed to mail out, along with some envelopes.

Berck was curious, so he had me take an expired rapid test, though that meant I had to listen to him heavily sigh as he cleaned the kitchen while I was waiting around for 15 minutes.

I woke up in the middle of the night last night coughing uncontrollably, so I made my way to the bathroom as quietly as I could to down some Tussin DM and then went back to sleep in the other bedroom, because if one of us can’t sleep, it doesn’t mean the other person doesn’t get to either.

Today I felt much better, which is about how Berck felt five days in. I actually ate something, and we watched the penultimate episode of Station Eleven. I’m actually really curious about how it will end, since the book and television series have taken completely different routes. Will they end up with the same result just by different means?

I’ve found it funny and sad that the television show hasn’t really had to work hard at finding sets of rusting and overgrown abandoned buildings. They’re everywhere in North America. Perhaps we’re already post-peak civilization.

But any post-apocalyptic narrative where humanity lives on is probably a happy ending. Unlike my new favorite podcast, which I’ve listened through twice now: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-the-end-of-the-world-with-30006093/

I like to say that Berck makes the best Italian style pizza in the time zone. I say that because Arizona isn’t on daylight saving time. The best pizza in the hemisphere is actually Pizzeria Bianco, which has been on our list of places to go for probably over fifteen years. Unfortunately, eating there requires a 7 hour wait in line in Phoenix. That’s hard.

But now it’s probably even more impossible, because of this Netflix doc we just watched, and which I can’t help but highly recommend.

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/restaurants/watch-phoenixs-famous-pizza-maker-chris-bianco-on-netflix-chefs-table-14395540

“You gotta get that quart of milk, man!”

Everyone was packing up at the end of the Bill Miller Tribute Race at High Plains, and Nick was trying to talk Berck into coming to the SVRA race at Indy a month later. He said Lori was thinking about going, using Nick’s two-car trailer and her tow vehicle, and that Berck should come too, since Elliott Barron had promised to let us us have our own class for the faster RMVR Vees, or what the folks, who run using Monoposto rules, call “FV1” cars. “The three of us could be on the podium! At Indy!” All we needed were four cars.

So a month later we were on the 16 and a half hour drive (including stopping at the airport for leaded fuel). Elliott Barron had rented out some track-side garages for us to pit in (you can fit a lot of Formula Vees in one garage!). We got everything situated and then went to our Airbnb that Berck had managed to find, which was only a 12 minute walk to the track gate. Lori’s husband flew in from Colorado and her sister had driven in from Ohio. We all walked the couple of blocks to a restaurant on Main Street Speedway, where Lori told our waitress, “I’m racing at Indy!” and then went to the nearby ice cream shop, where she also told the staff, “I’m racing at Indy!” I told the story of how Berck had missed out on the podium experience at COTA last year, driving back to the Vee pits way out in the parking lot, since he had learned from racing with RMVR that in vintage racing there was nothing to win except the respect of your fellow drivers. On the other hand, it turns out SVRA awards medals, hats, bottles of Champagne, and bags of race car-shaped Mission tortilla chips. And at Indy, milk bottles.

Friday was practice, so Elliott Barron led the slow Vees out in his super shiny Pegasus, his son E.O. took the faster Vees, and his other son Hunter took the fastest cars. At home Berck had been practicing the course on iRacing, but unfortunately, it was a different configuration than the one being used this weekend.

I met Lori as she returned from practice and offered to help her push her car back into the garage, but she was too busy excitedly describing the course to me. Second practice was in the afternoon. My favorite part of the day was watching the pre-war Indy cars do parade laps.

We ended the day at a brewery/pizza restaurant on Main Street, where Lori told our waitress, “I’m racing at Indy tomorrow!”

Saturday morning was qualifying. Berck had to fix his brakes afterward, only to discover he had a busted brake line. Fortunately, the Barrons had a spare, and he replaced it without too much difficulty, especially with me to help him bleed the brakes.

Afterward we went over to the museum, where one exhibit explains that the 1933 winner of the Indy 500 sipped on a quart of buttermilk that his mother had sent with him so he could rehydrate after racing. Buttermilk is not offered as a choice for current Indy 500 winners; you have to choose among whole, 2%, or skim, though some drivers request chocolate milk but do not get it. Seeing the evolution of race cars, from basically wagons, that had replaced a horse with a motor, to the carbon fiber engineering marvels of today, was definitely worth admission. Lori told the ladies at the ticket counter that she was racing today, and they said they’d look for her out the museum window.

Nick qualified in P2 in his limey green Bandersnatch, behind the much faster Formula Continental that didn’t have anyone else to race with, and Berck in P3. The two of them decided to give the Continental plenty of room to get out in front of them at the start for the afternoon race.

There was a scary moment where I watched Simon, one of the CVAR drivers, fly off the track and into a tire barrier, which triggered a safety car. The marshals were unable to reconstruct the tire barrier in time, and the race finished behind the safety car. The Barrons swept the podium for the FV class. The workers on pit lane told Nick that there wasn’t a podium for FV1 and directed him to the paddock, but he drove into the winner’s circle anyway; Berck followed him. Lori, who had managed to finish ahead of the only other car in the “FV1” class, had gone back to the garages. I asked some spectators in the grandstands where the podium was and then hurried over to the other side of the Pagoda. Nick saw me and told me to go get Lori, “Quickly!”

I hurried all the way back to the garages. “Lori!” I shouted, “We’ve got to get you to the podium! Hurry!” I found an empty golf cart with a key in it (I have the Barrons’ permission to drive any of their golf carts). Lori’s husband Jeff sat shotgun and figured out how to put the cart into reverse for me. Lori had disappeared; I think she was telling everyone she’d made the podium. “Lori!” I screamed, “Get your butt in this golf cart!” Once we had loaded her up along with the rest of her entourage, I drove as fast as I could through all of the spectators looking at all the cool cars.

Lori helped get people out of the way by shouting, “I’m going to the podium! I just raced at Indy!”

I got as close as I could on the wrong side of the Pagoda and told her to run to the other side while I parked the golf cart. Nick got his wish of standing at the top of the podium draped in the Indy wreath. Lori stood in the 3rd place spot wiping away tears.

Berck was quite disappointed that they were all presented empty milk bottles. “Where’s my quart of Indy milk?” At least the Champaigne bottles were full. They also got Summit Racing gift certificates (Berck used his to buy spare brake line).

Then it was over to the suite Elliott had rented for us, where we drank Miller Lite and watched live F1 qualifying at Montreal, though that finished in time for us to step outside to watch the pre-war cars drive around the track again.

We caught up with Simon who was sore but otherwise OK after his crash, though it would take the Barrons all night to fix his car in time for the Sunday morning race.

The last Formula Vee race was Sunday morning.

Hunter Barron had a brake failure and went straight off the track. Nick managed to get in front of Elliott in the Pegasus, which was heavily smoking the last lap. Berck finished 2nd and Lori 3rd again in the “FV1” class, and E.O. got 2nd behind Elliott. Lori managed to get herself and her car to the podium without help and wiped away tears again.

Elliott put Nick, who was grinning ear to ear, in a headlock with the two of them wrapped inside the Indy laurel wreath atop the number 1 pedestal.

Nick invited Tip up to the podium, the man who originally built the Bandersnatch in the ’60s and had come out from Florida to watch it race.

I gave Elliott a hug and thanked him for his hospitality. Then it was time to load the car back onto the trailer and everything else into the truck, including the two empty milk bottles and one full bottle of champagne and get a head start on the 16 plus hour drive back home.

I first got involved in RMRV at driving school three years ago in the slow group of the Performance class.  The next year I passed the Competition class in my husband Berck’s Formula Vee.  Last year I worked the black flag corner.  But this was my first RMVR driving school as an instructor, and I requested to be assigned someone who had never been on a track. I got an 18 year old with her 2007 Rabbit on all-season tires that had a cylinder issue and a transmission that really didn’t want to go into third gear. But it was a manual, so I told her she’d definitely have fun. I just hoped Tech wouldn’t be bothered that her belly pan was attached with Gorilla tape, but I think they were distracted by the lack of a tow hook and the presence of hubcaps. For the first slow session, I showed her the line for a couple of laps, then we swapped seats and went back out on the track.

She drove the line perfectly.

Before the next session, I told her she could grid up wherever she wanted. If she got to the grid first, she could be in front. If she wanted to be in the back of the pack, she could wait at the rear until everyone else gridded up. “I think I’ll wait in the back. My car isn’t that fast.” We waited for a Porche, a Lotus, a few turbo GTI’s, and bunch of Miatas to get in line ahead of us. Then we had to poke around behind everyone else. I showed her how to go through the pit lane to get some space behind a pack of bunched up cars in order to actually get some fast track time.

At the next session she suggested we get to the grid early. “I think I want to go first.”

She did everything I told her to as soon as I spoke. She hit every apex. She hopped beautifully on the curbing through the S-turns. And most importantly, she trusted me when I said she didn’t have to lift off the gas and hit the brake until she was half-way down the short-chute coming off the banking into the first turn of the infield. She lapped car after car. She kept pushing and improving her performance. On the banking, I asked if she was driving flat out. “Yes,” she sighed, “This is just as fast as this car goes.”

By the end of the day, I was running out of instructions to give her. Berck rotated the Rabbit’s tires for her, since the front all-seasons were getting chewed up. That night we walked the cold track… well, the infield… beers in hand (plus an extra in my pocket) for me, Berck, our friend Andrew, who we had promised a fun weekend, and Andrew’s instructor Willis, another Vee driver. (I’d had to search the coolers for a soda for my student.) I warned her that the apex and track-out cones would be gone the next day. “Cones?” she said, and I realized she simply instinctively knew the track.

She said goodnight and headed to her hotel room. She had planned to camp, but the gale-force winds on Friday had blown away her tent. Nights at the track are my favorite, where the Vee guys sit around and drink beer and tell stories about racing. I made them all laugh by claiming to be the reason Bill Miller finally doffed his racing shoes. His final race, the octogenarian hadn’t finished last; I had, driving Sterling’s Rabbit. I asked Jack if he’d swap students with me for a session in the morning. Jack has lots of experience driving Rabbits on track and gave me some great instruction right before the race where I crossed the finish line right behind Bill Miller. Jack agreed, if I didn’t mind riding in a $200,000 Ferrari. Mind?

I was actually able to give the Ferrari driver some good instruction, I think, though Jack said it was the same things he kept telling his student. I asked Jack about my student. He grinned, “She’s fast!” He said he told her to smooth out her turn in at corner 5 and to give the car a bit of a chance to settle between the carousel and the S-turns.

For the next session, I told my student that, because she was aware of other drivers, giving good point-bys, and passing safely, I thought she was ready to drive alone. Willis told the same thing to Andrew, who was driving our blue track Miata, and Willis and I went up to the roof of the classroom, where we could see the whole track. My student made sure to get to the grid first so no one would slow her down. Andrew caught up to her pretty quickly, and she would give him a point-by each time she hit a straight, but he didn’t quite have enough power to pass her. Willis was beside himself with excitement. This was also his first time instructing. “They are by far the fastest of the group, hands down, those two, for sure! Look at them flying through that turn!”

We ran back downstairs after the session and joined our students. Andrew was laughing and hugging Willis and me after his first time out solo. My student was dutifully checking her tire pressures. I asked her if the car was faster without anyone in it. “Well, of course.”

I asked Berck to take my student out during the lunch break in the Miata. She came back with a big grin on her face. “That was so much fun!” 

A corner worker on break from the black flag station at corner 5 came over and asked, “Who is driving this car?” pointing at the Rabbit. “You are so fast!” 

Berck rode with Andrew during a session, and came back laughing that Andrew couldn’t pass my student, even in a better track car. “You’re pretty fast!” he told her.

For the last session of the weekend, I asked my student what she wanted to do. Was there anything she wanted to work on? Did she want to drive alone or have anyone come with her? “I mean,” she shrugged, “You could come with me…?” Of course, we got to the grid early and started in front. This was a combined session with the faster cars (like the Ferrari), so I warned her there would be lots of cars passing us this session. I asked her if, during the classroom session we just left, she had noticed the way the car in the video had been taking turn 5. “Actually, I kinda fell asleep.”

So we worked on smoothness and tracking out more if the tires started complaining. Next we went up to the roof to watch the drivers from the competition school engage in their first race against the instructors. “Well,” she said as the checkered flag was thrown for the production car race, “I think I’m going to head out.” I still had to write in her logbook, so while she banged her hubcaps back into place, I explained to her what track camber and driving 7/10ths were so I could mark them completed. I wrote that she should work on smoothness, because smooth is fast, which is what Jack keeps telling me. Then I asked her if she’d had fun. She smiled, “Yeah.”

Then I had to run over to the Miata to put the top up because Andrew had left it down and it had started raining and I really didn’t want to drive back home up the pass in a snowstorm with a wet seat. (For the trip home, we had to swap the wheels for snow tires that Berck had the foresight to bring in the back of the truck.) I waved at my student as she drove past, wondering if I had actually taught her anything, and she enthusiastically waved back.

I hope I see her at the next race.