Enjoying the gaps (between the storms)

Another weekend for which the sophisticated Weather-out-the-Window(tm) is wholly redundant. When the windows are shaking from the thunder and the electrical power is as unreliable as a politician's campaign promises, there's not much point in even getting up to look. Brave Sir Hogarth is certainly living up to his sarcastic moniker - he has spent the weekend either clinging to the closest pack member or trying to find a deep cave (or the illusion of one) to cower in. Not a big fan of convective weather, he. Not at all. Nor am I of the associated 15G25 winds, to be fair.



We were able to squeeze in one significant outdoor event which thankfully was completed mere minutes before the onset of what were to ultimately become a 48 hour series of violent thunderstorms. Saturday morning was the scheduled date for the Grove City Independence Day Celebratory Parade, Grove City apparently having decided to beat the rush for the true 4th of July celebrations a week hence. Kinda like the Michigan and Florida Presidential Primaries, but without the incumbent loss of interest on the part of the participants.

In any event, this parade was to serve as the coming out for the Central Crossing High School Marching Band's new debutante of the clarinet, one Ms. Co-pilot Egg. And me with a spanking new camcorder and a complete lack of product to spend against my 500MB weekly allowance at Vimeo.com. That presented a prodigious intersection of opportunity and desire, the results of which you can see here in glorious HD:




I'm very happy with the performance of the $50 (half off sale from Amazon.com) shotgun mike that I bought for the camcorder. It's a big, goofy looking thing in comparison to the tiny camcorder, and it had (I recently reconfigured the mounting method) the unfortunate trait of being somewhat of a camera hog (it kept dipping down into the video frame), but it did a wonderful job of capturing the music without a whole lot of the background chatter.

As long as I had a few more minutes on the computer before the next storm came along and knocked out our power (7 or 8 outages in the last 24 hours already), I went through some of my pictures from last week to see if there were any more that I liked. I had forgotten about this one:



Here's one from the Indycar museum trip that I took a second look at:



And, at the risk of re-defining the Chronicles as a "car blog," and also as further proof of the old "An idle Google is the devil's playground" trope, there is this:



After repeatedly chanting the mantra to myself that "A Cobra makes no sense, A Cobra makes no sense..." I got to wondering if there is a kit car based on the wonderful Mazda Miata chassis/engine. And, as you can see, there is! It's a pretty spiffy looking kit, too:



And a hot (yet economical!) little street car once completed:



Being a kit car, there are naturally various ways of putting it together:



And there are dealing-with-the-real-world options available:



200 hours to build. The kayak took 80. Having hours to burn, albeit often interrupted by power outages, I looked at every page in this build log:





A car like that would make a lot more sense given the type of driving that I do and the price of the fuel required to do it than would the voraciously gas-hungry V-8 and straight-line handling qualities of the Cobra. Which is not to say, mind you, that the issues of dollars and facilities aren't absolute show stoppers. They are. But still... something to daydream about on days when the thunderstorms keep me out of the sky.