Aug. 27, 2008 - Reunited, And It Feels So Good

Hallelujah! My weekend husband has come home to me! Now, before you get all worked up wondering what kind of bigamist relationship I am involved in, and start writing letters to the editor, let me explain.

As you know by now, my husband, Toby, travels every Thursday to Sunday 36 weeks a year with the NASCAR team he works for. This doesn’t include extra days for testing. So, just like most wives of NASCAR crew members, I rely on a “weekend husband” to help me out with household chores and yard work that require extra muscle.

My muscle, Lance, a tire carrier for the No. 38 NASCAR team, flies in only on race days. So, he is home to help me out on Fridays and Saturdays. We have a wonderful relationship. Lance helps me lift furniture, hang paintings, retrieve boxes and luggage from the attic. When I broke my toe, he came straight over to wrap it and apply an ice pack.

One duty he performed for which I will be forever grateful, is the night my appendices started to rupture and Lance rushed me to the emergency room while his twin sister spent the night with my son. Lance stayed with me all night, calling my husband constantly with updates. He helped me fill out medical forms, watched me cry in pain and napped in a tiny emergency room chair for eight hours while awaiting my surgery. That is a lot to expect of a full-time husband, much less my part-time helper.

So, this season, when Lance was cruelly ripped away from me as his schedule changed and he was sent in as an “early guy” on Thursdays, I was devastated. Who would help me go to Lowe’s and pick out Toby’s Valentine’s present? Who would I call if I broke a bone or had a car accident? Toby even missed him, as his “honey-do” list grew by leaps and bounds. Even NASCAR’s weekend off in July was a nightmare for Toby when I made him hang cabinets in our laundry room. He grumbled the whole time and said, “Isn’t this Lance’s job? He is on duty on the weekends.”

However, yesterday, I finally got the call, Lance is back to just flying in on race days. I swear when I received the news, the sun came out from behind the clouds, the birds started singing, and today, all is right with the world.

Aug. 13, 2008 - Eavesdropping Is Fun

I always swore I would never be one of “those wives” who sits in the pits listening to their scanners and acting like they were involved in the actual race.  However, I have to say that after several long races I decided I better hurry on down to Racing Electronics and buy one for myself. You see, there really isn’t much else to do during the race if you are in the pits. Rarely can one see the entire track, and you end up watching on the pit box TV just like you would do at home. Also, it is much too loud to hold a real conversation.  Therefore, it’s a scanner or a book, and from experience I know how many nasty looks one might garner if is she is caught reading a murder mystery during a NASCAR race.

I discovered that eavesdropping is actually a lot of fun, especially during practices and caution laps. So, after much unsuccessful begging with David Gilliland, driver of the No. 38, to let me be his spotter and enduring his joking imitation of how I would actually sound, I thought it would be fun to come up with a list of the top 10 things you never want to hear from your NASCAR spotter.

The Top 10 Things You Never Want to Hear from Your NASCAR Spotter

10. Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about my raise.
9. Take five. Smoke them if you got them.
8.  Man, my ipod just went dead!
7. Dude, that is so going to hurt tomorrow!
6.  Hold on, my cell phone is ringing.
5.  Uh-oh! I shouldn’t have had that second burrito for lunch.
4. Was that your car making that noise?
3.  What number are you again?
2. Can you repeat that? I fazed out for a minute.
1. Nobody move, I think I lost a contact!

Aug. 7, 2008 - The Good, The Bad And The Naked

There has certainly been a lot to blog about in the motorsports community lately. So much so, that every time I sit down to write a blog another situation comes up that I think would be better to share my thoughts with you than my previous idea. I finally figured out a suitable solution! I will combine all of my random thoughts into three separate categories: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The Good consists of the fantastic NASCAR commercials. After two years of lame Super Bowl commercials, I have to say that I look more forward to NASCAR commercial breaks than those few rare funny over priced Super Bowl ads that don’t have some scantily clad chick wriggling against a car, horse, hamburger, or whatever object some ad executive can think of.

My first place award goes to the new NAPA commercial starring NHRA Funny Car driver Ron Capps and NASCAR pilot Michael Waltrip. Their childhood game of slapping each other is hysterical, and if you have met them, you know the casting on that commercial was perfect.

The second place award goes to the Tylenol Rapid Release “Ask the Drivers” commercial. With a panel consisting of Jeff Gordon, Elliott Sadler, Jimmy Johnson and Kevin Harvick answering “Dear Abby” manly-type questions, you cannot go wrong. However, after seeing Harvick and his wife interact in many situations, I would say that they should not have given the line about finding a new girlfriend to the most hen-pecked driver on the panel to deliver. Oops, did I say that?

The best overall award goes to the Wrigley’s Juan Pablo Montoya commercials. They totally fit his personality and I like the fact that they actually poke fun at drivers and their sponsors. Keep up the good work, boys! Of course, the Juicy Fruit commercial also has a yellow and black zebra in it, so basically that just throws you to the top automatically!

The Bad category consists of — what else —the Brickyard 400. It was awful, horrible, and not even worth mentioning beyond that. Well, except for the fact that since my husband is a tire specialist, and the big crisis over tires, there were numerous shots of my husband throughout the race. I am sure you saw him, as he was the cute one in the fire suit!

The Ugly category hands down goes to Formula One driver David Coulthard as pictures of his naked rear end aboard a yacht in St. Tropez garnered nationwide headlines such as “David Coulthard is the butt of his own joke,” and “Race car driver gets cheeky in St. Tropez.”  I realize that people do things differently in France and other cultures, but here in the South, and as a mother, I would just like to tell him to put on some drawers, and to remember my motto “never put your clearance merchandise in the front store window”!