Car Show Part I

It's been a week since we hosted the Abundant Life Cruise-In, so I can almost talk about it. Lol. It takes forever to plan a big event, you know? And then forever to wind down from it. I'm either talking about it non-stop... or I don't want to hear another word. Nothing sane in between.

Yes, I'll complain a lot. Phfffft  Comes with the territory of *me*.  I had a BLAST and I enjoyed meeting and working with so many great people. It seemed like all the cool car wives dropped in to say "hi" to me after they'd registered their hot vehicles, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy. :-D  So many great people.

No wonder I need to recover curled in a tiny ball in a quiet, dark room with my Nook!! Lol. I'm so not a extrovert.  Enough of me...

I still gotta download most of the pictures (of course) but here is the registration the night before... you can almost sense the quiet-before-the-storm:

If you could read those beautiful signs, you would see all the different classes to register in. Each table had a matching dash board to go on the vehicle... and then each registrant rec'd a ballot of a different color to vote for a different class.

Oh yes... no registrant got to vote for cars in the class they registered in. :-D  That's called... Trying to be Fair. So many car clubs come together and vote for each other at these things and everyone gets rather grumpy when so many friends win the trophies.

Oh yes... we had trophies!!!  Cast aluminum mounted on beautiful wood with the class and award and sponsor engraved below.  This is something we made for one of the former director's of the Cruise-In. A momento - the award casting and wood with the Dash Plaque below:

If you show your car at a lot of car shows... you want to collect these little tin plate dash plaques. We all make them every year to pass out to all the registrants. It's a collector's item, I suppose.

After the show we lined up our lil' go-cart next to this cool ride. :-D  That was fun. We took it for a spin, too:

It runs great!

To be continued....

Go Cart Continued..... putting the painted pieces together!

Here's what we started with:  Part I

Mid-Progress: Part II

And now Putting it all together!!  :-D  Painted with Camaro Synergy Green & a new Chrysler Silver:

The Abundant Life Church Cruise-In is tomorrow. TOMORROW!!!!!  I'll get pictures of this beauty on display!  :-D

Whopping BIG Monday! Still reading, of course.

This is one of those memorably BIG Mondays for me. Eep!!  (Panic squeak.) The car show we're coordinating is this Saturday. We're planning for 300 cars.  EEP!!! And 100 volunteers.  EEP!!!!  and a couple thousand people. EEEEEEEEEEP!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1 - it's time to finish the last-minute to-do's!!
2 - I can start worrying whether anyone will show up
3 - do I have all the decorations?  Can I set out the tables TODAY?!
4 - 'cause what if I'm missing something?
5 - Huh?!  What then?!
6 - I could add something to my to-do list today. Tomorrow my brain might quit working.
7 - how many ibuprofen can I take at one time?
8 - what does that have to do with an event?
9 - it's time to read a book.

Phew! At least I can keep reading!!  Which means Monday is awesome!

Thx, Sheila @ Book Journey.  It is my pleasure to celebrate this Monday regardless of what the week holds. (eep)



On my Nook, I finished Deepest Night a few days ago. OMG. What a hauntingly beautiful... OMG. This one ACHES with a sweet, sad... star-song. Shana Abe's writing is becoming a drug that I need periodically. How did I manage before discovering her last summer?

This morning I finished In a Treacherous Court by Michelle Diener. My plan is to enjoy the series while bookblasting awesomeness come Thursday. Because In Defense of the Queen comes out on Thursday.  :-D  There's a lot I want to say about that, but I should save it for the review!


I'm listening to The Fellowship of the Ring in the car while running errands. I checked out an old radio re-enactment of the book and recently passed a scene that was sooooooooo.... frightening-absorbing-harrowing-gripping that I forgot where I was. In fact, I was startled to realize I was driving the car. I could have sworn that the day was dark and gloomy and there were ring-wraiths on my tail and we were crossing a ford instead of sunny rush hour traffic just outside of the city.



Wow.

I had to drop off some books at the library yesterday and got sucked inside. (I was helpless to resist the vortex that is a huge building full of books.)  I came home with a HAUL... Legend, Crewel, Etiquette & Espionage, Of Poseidon, The Assassin's Curse, & Partials.  Some of these I've already read... and most of them (if not all) I don't have time to get to. But I like to encourage my library to keep stocked with good titles. Plus... once they're in my hand, it's really hard to set them down again. And I happened to have a nice carrying bag from dropping off so many books. It wasn't my fault I took more than I can read this week. Honestly. I'm innocent!!

(And maybe a little crazy!)

To remain sane this week... I'm starting  Keeper of the King's Secrets immediately. I'll find something on my Nook for late-night, low-light reading, too... and I've pre-ordered the audio version of The Two Towers just in case.

Being me requires AT LEAST three books simultaneously.

And with that thought... I'm ready to tackle this HUGE EVENT COMING UP THIS WEEK!!!  AAAARRRGH!!!!!!  (I sound like the ring-wraiths in my head, screaming down towards the water. No worries, I won't frighten the kids. They may see me laughing and think I'm nuts, but that's not new.)

Go Cart Part 2 - All the Little Pieces - Primer! Cool Man's Garage

The T-Bucket Go-Cart is coming together!!  

After sanding it, Cool, Man fixed all the holes and rips and stuff with fiberglass... 'cause it's a lil' fiberglass thingame. (Technical Term.)

He used a high-build primer to fill in all the minor blemishes and then sanded it again. 

:-)  Fun stuff!  (Not really)

This cream color is the real deal. The blue is my camera shadow color.

I didn't take a pic of the frame/motor before, so here's the innards for you:

Thrilling, no?  Lol. The motor works great. The frame is really simple. The body just bolts on without much pizzazz.

I had mentioned the "tin can headlights" before... here they are, painted in chrome color, in case we were going to use 'em. They're ok... especially if we were turning this into a rat rod style (an enticing idea!)  We're not, however. This baby's goin' glossy-fine. In the background of this picture, you can see a hint of the lights we want to use...

What about a grill, huh?

Above is the old, lil' grill painted in chrome. It's ok..... but it would be cool to have a REAL grill, or something that LOOKED like a real grill. Cool, Man came upon this... uh... BBQ grill while he was out-n-about and his creative wheels started turnin'...  (to be continued!)

The old wheels have a couple layers of paint on 'em fading to a funky pink. Like... spilt pepto, or something. We have been searching for replacement wheels - either a couple more of these or a couple more wheels with spokes, but we'll be using two of each, like we got 'em. These won't remain in this color, though, so take a gander quick:

We're attempting to finish this by the Cruise-In. (And when I say "we" I mean my Cool, Man. Lol.) There is a Go Cart class that has gone un-challenged for years and this year... we are bringing a sweet lil' ride!

Hopefully.

To be continued....

If you missed Part I, go HERE. (Rare shots of my big boys!)

Cool, Man's Garage - Go Cart: Part I

I've been thinking of adding a feature of all the stuff that goes on in Cool, Man's Garage. There's always a project, always something new... neverending inspiration!

Go Cart

Prep. '31 Ford T-Bucket style go cart. We picked it up in rough shape. The paint is faded and peeling, but the motor runs great. We couldn't test-drive it 'cause the frame had to be welded together. We removed this piece to fix the frame and we're getting it ready to paint:

The boys helped sand it down... then Cool, Man applied short hair fiberglass to repair cracks and holes... and then the entire thing was sanded down again to be primed for paint.

Immediately before spraying primer on the body, they wipe it down to remove all fingerprints, dirt, oil... anything that will stop the primer from sticking.

We've enjoyed discussing what the front grill should look like, whether we should use the tin cans that came on it for the headlights, what colors we should paint it. This is a really fun stage full of questions. Most questions are answered by budget. Lol. But it's worth asking around to see if anyone has dream-parts lying around.

You'll never believe what we've come up with just by asking!  *rubs hands gleefully*

Summertime Fun - Cruise-in Style!

Sharing a bit of my summer...

Last year we helped out a lot with the annual Abundant Life Cruise-In at our church. Well... this year we... uh... (I have so many adverbs I want to put in here and keep mentally rejecting them) stepped up to coordinate it. (Yes, all of it.)

The best part... is WE. My honey and I. Working together. *cough* I mean, volunteering together. Ha!

The closer we get to August 3rd, the fuller my brain fills up with things that need to be done. Sometimes it feels like it short-circuits... or how I imagine it would feel if I had wires in my brain and they were sparking against each other so that I couldn't think of another thing. Not even how to eat.

Dinner last night was the spontaneous result of loving pizza and finding old rolls that could be used for crusts. I mixed the sauce in the can (yes, opened a can of tomato sauce and threw some spices in it and called it "pizza sauce" and even "dipping sauce"). We threw some cheese on that and baked it in the oven. Wala! The meal was a huge hit. I graciously accepted everyone's enthusiastic thanks as if I'd planned it ahead of time.

Hey... right now I can use a few moments of "you did it right, mom!"

This picture (above) is my Cruise-In notebook. I took the picture while stopped at a light, picking up donations for the raffle.

And... that's the end of my lil' break. Time's up! At least I didn't share my to-do list. That would've been really... not-interesting. Lol.

What are you doing this summer?

Snapshot - Abundant Life Cruise-In

Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce @ At Home with Books. The requirement of posting pictures I actually take myself without the requirement of becoming a photographer first means... "near torture." The good news is, it's just pix, so you can skim quickly. Lol.

I honestly tried to take a lot of pictures of the Abundant Life Cruise In that we volunteer for. I did try. I did not succeed.

So first... from my own camera, I give you, the awesome possum Raffle that I worked my tail off getting prizes for:

Let's just gaze at that in awe for a few minutes... Aw..............

All those papers on the board are gift certificates.  Before anyone starts saying anything embarrassing like "all by yourself" lemme clarify that I am one of three people gathering stuff - or four, really - and I don't get the most stuff. I try to get flashy stuff (like the flowers) so everyone thinks I'm getting "so much" stuff. (Work smarter, not harder, right?)

I bought about $30 worth of tickets and passed 'em out among the kids. Dash got the winning hand - out of his set of 10 tickets (from me and probably 5 more begged off dad) he won, like, 8 things. Some people have all the luck!!  The other kids and I didn't win anything.  So, naturally, I confiscated a few things from Dash. "For the family." *cough*

Here he is winning that green t-shirt hanging up on the board:

He's the kid in the black car show t-shirt. Not that you can see it very well, but that was our show shirt that we all got to wear. There was a contest among the artistic ladies as to who could cut up their shirt the coolest. One lady had red ribbons tied and the shoulders and another woven through the bottom. My favorite sliced up the sides and tied them in knots, so the t-shirt was kinda fitted and textured. I cut off my sleeves neckline, but "fashionable" I was not.

Car show?  

I forgot that part. Obviously, I was rather "into" the raffle. *ahem*

There were some nice cars, too... I walked around a little, even though it was 100 degrees and all us Oregonians were withering in our black t-shirts.

See that big tent in the background?  (Hint: Past the General Lee and previous show winners.) That's the food tent with lots of deliciousness. The food guy (he has a name, I think) believes we set up the car show to compliment his food court.

Now I'm going to steal some pix from my honey, who focuses on the cars. (Weird!)

Well... and the goofy guy selling sno-cones. (He's a friend. I can call him names.)

We held the award ceremony inside the auditorium, which was a huge relief from the heat. It was fun sitting next to the Judge Coordinator as he monitored the crowd's response to his judge's choices for best cars in 40 different classes. (We had 240 vehicles enter the show, so 40 categories is not as excessive as it sounds. Or, maybe it is.)

The vehicle that won Best in Show got quite the cheer, as lots of people agreed with my Cool, Man's choice. Drum roll, please!

This '63 Impala was IMMACULATE. The paint is tri-stage with pearl, both the red and the white. The white leather interior is beautiful. The engine compartment is squeaky clean and shiny. Even the undercarriage (judged, too!) is clean. This vehicle was outstanding all 'round, which totally thrills me 'cause '63 Impalas TOTALLY ROCK!!

Next week I'll share some football fun. I experienced a lot of "conditioning camp" this week which included the "bobble head" league, which are 3rd graders. Lol. They wore their helmets, but not the rest of their gear, so the name is very appropriate!!

Snapshot - Classic Cruise-In's

Alyce @ At Home with Books hosts the Saturday Snapshot. August 4th is a BIG DAY for me... it's the 8th Annual Abundant Life Cruise-In. I'll be there from 7:00am 'til 4:00pm. Classic vehicles start arriving before 8am & I'm on the Registration table. I'm so excited, I can't sleep. Lol. It's going to be a lot of fun.

So, I'm showing pictures of cruise-in's we've attended the last couple weeks. There's a few going on every weekend all summer. My Cool, Man restored this '71 Chevy truck.

And... as I'm on the team collecting donations for our raffle, I had to take a picture of this other raffle. I bought tickets and won two awesome things off these tables. A dippin' dish I don't know what to do with & a basket of sundae stuff - tall glasses, long ice cream spoons & vanilla syrup. I should have gotten pictures of my prizes, but I just opened the basket and whipped up some sundaes. Lol.

I'll be taking lots of pictures of "my" show to share with you for next Saturday. I can't wait!!!

Lovin' Summer!!

The giveaway I'm hosting with I Am A Reader, Not A Writer starts tomorrow!!  :-D  I can't wait!!  You gotta love summer and the idea of Lazy Summer Days even if they are more a figment of the imagination vs. reality. This summer has been anything but lazy for me. In fact, my muscles ache when I lay down to sleep as if I'm working out. Lol.


Keeping four kids busy is a bit of a workout, it's true. VBS (Vacation Bible School), swim lessons, football camp, soccer camp, nerf gun wars... house cleaning. (They'll be experts after this summer!!)

Organizing my house and moving everyone around is also a bit of a workout. I even hammered a bit. Those cheap bookshelves still work even after they get wobbly if you add a bunch of tiny nails to the flimsy back cardboard thing. Do you use those cheap bookshelves?  I've got 'em all over the house. Lol. I rock with a hammer. Lol.


The car show I volunteer for is comin' up fast: August 4th.  I also remember the date as day #1 of the Summer Wrap Up Readathon. I won't be reading too much that first Saturday, but that's just how this summer's goin' for me.

Our Awesome Car Show....


The Abundant Life Cruise-In goes from 10am - 4pm. So, cars are lining up to get in about 8am. We try to get there by 7am. I help out at the Registration table. My Cool, Man heads up the judging team, so he watches cars as they arrive - right after he parks whatever we're bringing.  Our kids wear the t-shirts, too, and help the maintenance guy keep up with grounds and stuff.  They look like a gang, almost, with their friends... only they're polite and respectful of cars, especially, which makes them look like a cool classic car gang. If that exists.

To register for the show, everyone pays $15. They get a Goodie Bag full of whatever fun stuff we could find to put in there. They also get a 10x13 picture of their vehicle, which is unique to our show.  We have a photographer team and a graphic artist onsite printing the pictures so everyone can take it home by the end of the show. If they pre-registered, they get their handmade wooden frame for free, otherwise it costs a few bucks.  We also have t-shirts, of course... I think we're charging $15/shirt this year except the volunteers will get one for free as a "thank you" for volunteering - along with a free lunch.

Lunch!!  We have a full food court!!  Hot dogs, hamburgers, pulled pork sandwiches... corn on the cob, french fries... hand-dipped ice cream sandwiches, caramel corn, sno-cones... it's like a mini-fair!!

We also get a bounce house or two for the kids who come as well as a face-painter.

I'm on the team that helps get raffle prizes and fun stuff for the Goodie bags. (Which is where I'm getting my main work-out right now!) So far I've gotten tickets for a fee bowl at Mt Hood Lanes for every Goodie bag, coffee mugs or gardening gloves, & fun coupons. Other volunteers have gotten free cheeseburger tickets, bogo minigolf tickets, water bottles and more coupons.  The Goodie bags will be worth the $15 registration fee all by themselves!!

The funnest thing at the show (I think) is the raffle. We get so many prizes that they start drawing tickets and giving stuff away as early as 10:30 and continue steadily 'til 3:00. Lots of people buy $100 worth of tickets and win lots of cool stuff. We make more money for the food banks on the raffle than we do for the lunch!!

I love finding creative stuff for the raffle. We always want a lot of prizes that the car-guys wanna win, obviously. Like free oil changes or car washes. This year we're getting an exhaust system - how awesome is that?!

I like to find things for the wives, too, since so many of 'em get to come and hang out in the sun all day with their spouses. Accent on Attitude gave me over $850 worth of fashion purses and Avon products. Terra Casa gave me a huge gardening pot worth over $250.

Today I'm picking up a golf basket and cat, dog & wild bird baskets and a salon basket. We've gotten gift certificates to Enchanted Forest, the Aquatic Park, Baskin Robbins and tons of restaurants. One of the ladies on our team gets over 20 different Starbucks prizes.  I'm telling you... we have the BEST raffle around!!

That's not counting the signed basketball by the Blazers I'm working on. I seriously hope we get that!!

There's something about putting on a great big event that I find exciting. I've never claimed to be very organized, you know? Even tho I lose my notes all over the place, I'm enthusiastic and creative. :-D  And... maybe a little tired and behind on my reading.

Ya gotta love summer, though.  My homemade blended coffee was delicious!!  Sounds like just what this summer day needs!

What are you up to?!