Blog

  • Breakfast on the house

    During the week I normally eat breakfast at home before I head into the office, but today I decided to splurge and get something on the way in.

    I drive right past a CFA, so it’s on the way, and they make a pretty good egg, sausage, cheese bowl-thing – so that’s where I stopped.

    It was a quarter to seven in the morning, so the place wasn’t busy and at the drive through window the manager meets me to talk cars for a few minutes.

    He looks over the Hellcat, nods, and asks the usual questions:

    • Hellcat?
    • Yep.
    • Supercharged?
    • Yep.
    • How much horsepower?
    • About 800.
    • How fast is it?
    • I’ve done a quarter mile in 11.7 at 127mph, and 0-60 is about three and a half seconds…

    After the usual questions he shows me a photo of his 2020 Shelby GT500 mustang. It looks pretty nice and he says it runs about the same in the quarter on a modded upper pulley and an E85 tune.

    Anyway, this goes on until the next car pulls up behind me and he hands me my food and drink – and tells me it’s on the house and to have a nice day.

    So, there ya go – if you’re looking for an excuse to buy a $70,000 race car, you can occasionally get free breakfast with it.


  • Always One

    One of the things Colorado is infamous for is its terrible highway interchanges. The most infamous of these would be the I-25 / I-70 interchange – lovingly called “The Mousetrap”.

    They rebuilt the Mousetrap in the early 90’s, and it is better now – but it still punishes tourists who haven’t planned ahead.

    Back in the 80’s I drove through the ‘old’ Mousetrap fairly often – it was one of those things where you had to be in the correct lane for where you wanted to go about two miles ahead of time… Unfortunately not everyone was a local and the whole interchange was basically someone playing marbles with cars for most of the day.

    It was so bad that in the 70’s Denver installed an airport-style control tower at the interchange to coordinate police and tow trucks.


    It’s “Orange Season” here in Colorado, which means the surface streets all tend to be one-lane traffic jams currently. So this week I’ve been trying my luck by driving up Parker Rd. to the Parker / I-225 interchange…

    And it’s a bit of a shit-show every day…

    See, thanks to Cherry Creek State Park, everyone in the above area needs to get to that one spot to get on I-225. And there are only two roads to do this; Parker Rd. and Hampden Ave.

    So every morning it looks a bit like this:

    The people coming in from the 2-lane Hampden entrance on the right have to cross four lanes to the left in about a half-mile to go south on I-225. Meanwhile the people coming in from Parker Road at the bottom need to merge right across the 2 lanes of Hampden people trying to go left to go north on I-225.

    To complicate this, if you look closely between the Hampden ramp and I-225, there are a couple of exits for the commercial park to the north…

    This is where, every day, someone with out of state plates will madly charge across several lanes of 50+ mph traffic to take that Vaughn Road exit…

    Something like this:

    This morning I was the lucky recipient of one of these out of state people cutting right a few inches in front of my bumper.

    No turn signal and no hesitation – just yanked it right.

    Apparently there’s a reason the hellcat has 15.7″ 6-pot Brembo brakes on it – and it’s to stop the 4400 pound monster before it kills some idiot Californian in a beat up econobox.

    I screeched to a halt, the cars behind me went three different directions, and I laid on the horn – to get flipped off for being in her way.

    I probably need to just stick to the surface streets despite the cone-zones everywhere… There are fewer out-of-state people away from the highways.


  • Weekend Update

    2017 Challenger Hellcat / 1968 Camaro Z28

    Friday afternoon, here at the office, my CFO came in and asked for a ride to pick up his Camaro from the shop – he had the front suspension redone, a motor mount replaced, and other small mechanical stuff done over at ProTech.

    I looked over the work and they seem to have done a good job and the cost was pretty fair.

    He hopped in his Camaro and I followed him back to his place to give him a ride back to the office, and the trip resulted in a lot of turned heads and thumbs up – so that was fun.


    Saturday morning I ran down to the King Soopers in Parker for groceries, and then in the afternoon I drove back down to Parker to have dinner at Hickory House – which is still the best BBQ in the area.

    Parker is a great place to drive around because it’s the last bastion of Colorado’s front-range car culture. So of an evening you’ll see everything from current-year Italian supercars to 1930’s street rods running around.


    Sunday I spent in my home office, sitting in the air conditioning, doing 3D model and texture work in Second Life.

    A friend wanted me to theme the ground level of their two sims, which I wrapped up Sunday evening. And I think I might shift my avatar from an anthropomorphic dragon to a feral dragon just for fun – so I picked up a few parts for this and will work on it over the week as I have time.

    And that’s the update from the weekend. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was fun / relaxing and that makes it worth it.