A few weeks have passed, and my life still steadily chugs on by at a rapid pace.
To touch briefly on the majority, I have been working a fair chunk. Because I now spend at least half of my time on the road, I have had some very lovely drives in the Auckland outter blocks. And I don’t quite know how I manage to pull it off, the weather is always absolutely grand. It’s almost like someone switches the rain as soon as I hop in my car. I’m really enjoying this side of my job.
On one such Friday, while I was headed to a few suppliers in South Auckland, I spied a Mini. Not just any Mini I’ll have you know. This was the ZM Online Italian Job Mini. A local NZ radio station was running a promo to the lead up of The Italian Job movie. The concept of it was pretty basic. If you saw it, whilst it made its journey from one end of NZ to the other, and were quick enough to tap on it’s window (thus heisting it), you’d be placed in a draw to win a trip to Italy. If you were the lucky person to be sitting in it’s passengers seat by 4:30 that afternoon, the 46K piece of Mini power was yours to keep. Pretty generous for a movie promotion.
I had barely followed the promotion at all, I’d never have any such luck of winning anything like that, but seeing it cruising down the Southern motorway was too tempting to pass up. The driver wouldn’t pull over for me to heist it. Fair enough, the motorway isn’t exactly a parking lot. Plus, it was only 11 in the morning. The chances of still being in the seat at 4:30 were slim. And I don’t think Traffic Control would approve of my Toyota loitering about on it’s own. I admitted defeat and continued on to my clients.
A couple of hours again I saw it again! I was headed futher south, and the Mini was too!. Again, no motorway stopping please. Damn. On with work again. I think I got back to the office nearing on 3pm. But I didn’t stay long. I knew where the Mini was finishing it’s travels. I couldn’t resist a challenge.The afternoon was mine to try and capture it. Long story short, I was within an inch or two of being the new owner. Half a second, one pump of a piston.. needless to say, I had an adventure for the day anyway.
That night I was shouted a very big night in town with a Jason and Friends. I hadn’t planned on doing anything, but they twisted my arm (it’s rather rubbery and easily manipulated). We had a mental night of fine food, lots of alcohol, bad DJs, and even worse Karaoke (which I skived from). I think I got home around 4am. Oh, I had a rather nasty bought of the flu too - but I wasn’t letting it stop me in my tracks.
Saturday involved striping all the bolted down bits in my car - she was going to the Drags at Meremere. I couldn’t resist in seeing what she would pull on a quarter mile. Chris did the manual labour and I watched.. I would have just got in the way, hehe. I ordered pizza for dinner for us both, then set about trying to fix Chris’s PC (we had already got it a new 40GB HDD, and installed Windows on it a few nights prior, it was not a happy PC. I’m still not a pro, but I definately have a few clues now. At least I thought I did.
Chris left, and I continued on with fixing broken geek stuff. I reformated, reinstalled windows, but the poor thing kept crashing. I think I gave up at about 1am, after a couple calls to my brother. Conclusions lead us to the Motherboard.
Sunday - D day for my car. I was shattered, up to my eye balls in the flu, but so full of enough excitement to get 10 kids amping that there was no way this day would be cancelled. We got to Meremere quite early. Jase (another Jason) came down as well with the Jonah Lomu *Fusion* Patrol. She be rather loud that one. Enough to make every single person stop and look when the volume went up, right up. I can still feel the bass booming inside of me now. Intense!
Back to the little Blue Ceres debut. I lost my license practising gear changes for the drags, it was about time she had her turn in the sun. Chris got the hang of her fairly quickly. Initially the times were all up in the 16 second mark. She even made it through to the third elimination round, after beating a few hondas, levins (my car was the fastest toyota of the day), a holden (much to his disgust), she was finally beaten. But her final run was a 15.6! All credit goes to Chris. He was still running on my street tyres, he broke into the 15’s, that’s all I wanted. I’m happy. And I know Chris had fun too :o)
I think I’ll ease the reading load to a stand still there for a couple of days. I still have more to write, all are carefully thought out in my head ready to spam you with. Stay tuned till next time, Mon Ami’s :o)
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