Lucretia/My Reflection

There is nothing quite like the feeling of sitting in an airport for longer than it would have taken to drive the distance home. Yeah, next year the Dan Ryan Expressway through Chicago better not be under construction because I'm driving to Milwaukee. I got less than three hours of sleep last night which is not enough normally, but when I woke up yesterday morning in Milwaukee, I was already tired. Race weekends are great fun, but bloody exhausting. Too much sun, not enough sleep in a bed that is not my own, in addition to the whole no sleep thing last night has made me pretty much useless today. I'm trying to do my usual reports, but have no brain power for anything. Blog entries are a different story. ;-) Or not.

My goal is to get through the day and into bed by 8:00 p.m. tonight or maybe earlier, depending on how damn tired I am at 7:30. How sad is that? It's broad daylight here at 7:30 and I'm contemplating going to bed like I'm 8. Getting old is not for the weak of heart! ;-)

The weather in Milwaukee was the best it has been since I started going to the race four years ago. It was sunny and around 70 every day (my poor ears are fried since I have no hair to cover them, and I was stupid and only used SPF 30 on Saturday). Saturday there was a great breeze, well, it was a wonderful breeze/wind for those of us in the grandstands sitting in the sun, but it was not fabulous for the drivers. It was blowing in such a way that good, experience drivers were being thrown into the wall in Turn 4, not a single rookie hit the wall (maybe during the race, but I can't remember for certain, as my brain is home asleep on my lovely feather pillow). I think the reason might be that they're (the veterans, obviously, not the rookies) more comfortable with the race track and therefore were pushing it, knowing the usual limits of the corner, but the wind had other ideas. It was just crazy, especially since in the previous three years that we've been going, we haven't had a single incident during any of the practice or qualifying sessions.

The good news about sitting in the airport for so bloody long is that I got over 200 pages read of my new book. I knew I was going to have some time to waste at the airport (I just didn't know how much time) and as I was close to the end of the book I started on Thursday, I picked up the Alex Zanardi book at the track. I finished the Caleb Carr book I was reading in time to get up to the seats and watch the 1972 Mark Donohue car from the Indy 500. That car had a very impressive provenance, ending with Rick Mears. I never realised before that Mark died on my b-day. Glad I wasn't following auto racing that closely back then as that would have sucked. Anyway, if I finish this book this week, I'll have finished half the number it took me an entire month to read last month. And to decide what is next. I have the latest John Sandford. I'll never understand why John Grisham is more popular than John Sandford. Mr. Sandford keeps me interested and guessing all the way to the end. Grisham makes me bang my head against the wall wondering if it's ever going to end, and couldn't he just kill off all of his characters as none of them has any redeeming qualities (okay, that's The Firm, his others might have redeeming characters) and then when it does, it's done in so haphazard a manner that I want to kick myself for wasting good reading time on his dreck. Thankfully, I've only wasted my time on two of his books. Anyway, if you like good fast-paced, detective-esque books and aren't scared off with a bit of violence, definitely check out John Sandford. I have read everything he's written as John Sandford (he's a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and this is his pseudonym).

I think this post is extremely disjointed, so I hope it makes sense. I'm just hoping at this point that I can stay awake until 7:30. I'm ready to crawl under my desk and take a nap!