I Can Haz Grate Summer?

Man, some summers are just too spectacular to let go without a wrap-up.  And this summer...oh boy.  I almost hesitate to write about it because I don't want to sound like I'm bragging.  But it was a good one by any standard.  Even if you consider that I was homeless and sleeping on people's floors (and once in my car) from May through most of July, it was a damn fine summer.  I see the living situation as a testament of the amazing friends I have to let me impose on them.

I suppose a season this great doesn't happen without a decent lead in, so let me set the stage:

I had been applying for a job with the government, and as often happens with the government hiring process, it was taking FOREVER.  So as a backup plan, I had researched MBA programs and spent the winter and early spring applying to those programs.  At about the same time, my family-tight friend and roommate of three years, Mzungu, decided to take a position in Kenya and announced he would be leaving when our lease was up at the end of April.  I was very excited for Mzungu, but dropping him off at the airport was a very sad day for me.  By this time, I had learned of my acceptance to Thunderbird, so that was my one small consolation.

Knowing that so much change would be coming at once, I pushed myself to stay active and to pack as much in on the east coast as I could, in case I don't make it back that way.  I got a new, more aerodynamic haircut that even a Vietnamese stylist couldn't screw up:

   
They can't screw it up mainly because I do it myself now.  So much easier.  So much less stressful.  And cheap.  No shoulder massage afterward, though.  Everything in life has tradeoffs.

I also ran a few races.  First was the Charlottesville half-marathon. It was a blast running through the UVA campus and the wooded farmland outside of Charlottesville.  We visited James Madison's estate, Montpelier, on the way back to DC.

The first weekend in May, I joined a team with Mr. and Mrs. Dirty Harry, as well as Lady Justice for an Amazing Race-style run around the city.  It was probably more exhausting than the half-marathon, to be quite honest.  Fun though.  As much as losing is ever fun.  Got to see a lot of parts of the city I'd never visited.

The following weekend, I went to the second leg of the Triple Crown of horse racing, The Preakness.

It's called 'The People's Race' because they let the riff-raff populate, and sometimes copulate, on the infield while some crappy rock band like Nickleback provides the white trash mood music.  We, of course, had grandstand seats so that we could actually see the race and avoid the ruffians.  Which we did, for most of the day.

Don't ask me about the hats.  I have no answers for you.

Notice the Jaegermeister tent in the infield.  It was that sort of scene.

 

A group of us did go as a diplomatic envoy into the bowels of the infield to mingle with the commoners and collect data on their habits. 

The Diplomats

Ultimately, we found their rituals to be savage and uncouth.  For $20, they would sell you a red plastic cup that entitled you to free beer refills all day as long as you didn't lose your cup, and could still raise your hand to the tap.  One clever wildling had duct-taped the cup to his hand, but had, in his exuberance, consumed far too much of the frothy beverage to stand up, let alone make the return trip to the dispensary.  Cleavage was in abundance, male and female, both on the chest and lower back.  It felt like the third day of a KISS tribute band festival.  So after completing our information gathering mission, we beat hoof back to higher ground and watched the rest of the races.  I made some bets and subsequently got hammered on them, but I was mostly just picking randoms, and had no expectation of winning.  It just makes the race more fun when you have skin in the game.

The following weekend, a group of about 15 people decided to drive to Hilton Head Island, SC, to run a mini-triathlon.  Hilton Head is about ten hours from DC.  The race started at 6 AM on Saturday morning.  I had taken Friday off in order to make a leisurely day of the drive.  Plans sometimes change.  My friend and current roommate, Bullit, had to leave town for a business trip. He wouldn't return to DC until 5 PM on Friday and had no way of getting to the race on his own.  So I stuck around to pick him up that evening and drive down together.  It was a lucky thing we did, because we ended up picking up one more travel companion that had meetings early on Friday and would have been unable to go without our late caravan.  Together we pulled out of DC around 5:30 in our Nissan Cube rental car, SC-bound.

The problem with the late departure is that we didn't get checked in to our hotel and get to sleep until 3 AM on Saturday.  We slept for two-and-a-half hours and hustled to the starting area.  I'll tell the rest of the race in pictures:

Most of our group preparing for the swim portion

 Yes, 50-year old Moobs beat me in the swim.  Shut up about it already.

Unless you want to look like Jack Tripper, spend the extra $15 and rent a racing bike.

 DONE!  Can we go to the beach now?

Not yet.  Lunch at the Salty Dog first.  Refueling after a race is important.

 Darkness washed over The Dude, and his sleep was glorious.

 

The following weekend was Duck, which I've detailed here and here.  The weekend after that was tubing the Shenandoah, which I detailed here.

So for those keeping track, we're now at the second weekend of June.  This was the weekend of the demolition derby in rural Maryland.  A demolition derby so big, they needed different weight classes.  There was the compact, four-cylinder class with its Mazdas and Sentras and Corollas.  There was the V-6 sedan class.  There were the 'exotics,' minivans and cross-overs mostly.  And then there were the SUVs/trucks.  Driving a '78 Chevy Suburban in a demo derby sounds like it would be so much cooler than it actually was.  Those big ships were too heavy to get any speed in such a small space and their steel was too strong to do much real damage.  Surprisingly, the compacts were the most fun to watch, because they were flying around the field.

To be continued...

...soonish.