I don’t really have anything today. My job is keeping me ultra-busy, not to mention Agile, but Agile has always been how I do my best work. But it all leaves me with not-a-lot at the end of the day.

But then I looked at Facebook when I got home and Our Northern Correspondent had posted a whiteout photo at the moominbeach and then The Beautiful Jan had shared a photo of snow-mobiles driving up Ashmun Street in Sault Ste. Siberia. I immediately recognized that this is I-500 weekend and that brought back what few I-500 Snowmobile race memories I have.

1969: First year of the race. I was a high school freshman and I didn’t have Bad Boyfriend yet. I can’t exactly remember if I went to that race or not but I remember a few things about it. It didn’t end until very late at night and even though we didn’t live near the racetrack, we could hear the roar of the snow-mos the whole time. Oh, and the grocery stores in our little outpost city ran out of things like bread and milk.

1970: Bad Boyfriend “took me” to the race (i.e., it was a *date*). At the time, it was the worst date of my life because we argued about some trivial thing and he left me to walk ALONE along the dark side of the track wondering how the heck I was gonna get home down to Superior Street and lamenting that BB didn’t “luv” me any more. Sigh. I f-i-n-a-l-l-y made it back to the area of the grandstand and, of all things, THERE WERE MY PARENTS! They weren’t there looking for me, just going to the snow-mo race. Being my parents, they didn’t even *ask* where BB was. They simply welcomed me and drove me home with them. THAT’S WHAT PARENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO DOOOO, IF ANYONE DOESN’T KNOW THAT. (I have certainly had worse dates since then – another time – or not).

1972: Playing the national anthem at the start of the race with my high school band on my flute with FREEZING FINGERS. Did I have glubs on? I can’t remember.

2012: It was many years before I attended the I-500 again. I happened to be up there dealing with End-of-Life issues with The Commander in 2012. Dogmomster came up for that weekend, so I walked over to the race site and bought some tickets to the race. I don’t have anything much more to say about Dogmomster. Things were definitely different back then and I can’t say we didn’t try because we certainly DID!

As luck (good and bad) would have it, 2012 was an unusually warm winter. The bad luck was for the snow-mo race. The temperatures soared to something like 40 , which turned it into a Mud-mobile race. What a mess! I got some photos and am happy I didn’t get close enough to get splashed with mud.

The good? I drove down to The Planet Ann Arbor the next day. I suffered from GREAT TREPIDATION about leaving my mother in hospice care without me being there but I had to get home for a bit… I also had to drive the Ninja, which doesn’t like icy roads all that well. I had warm weather all the way down and the roads were dry. Thanks be to whatever benevolent entity looked after me that day.

P.S. Bad Boyfriend was NOT a bad person. My parents liked him well enough. He just wasn’t a good BF for me at age 15/16. My parents were right about that. They never said a word to me about what they thought and they welcomed BF graciously but I knew they were concerned. More on that some other time. Maybe. Or maybe not.

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