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Back in June 2023, at LPR's Autocross #5 at Salinas Airport an interesting thing happened.

As I went into full brake at the finish of my first run, the drivers side headlight shot out of the car. I'm sure it gave the timing station quite a start as it bounced across the tarmac.

In late 2021, we began a terrace project to our lower hillside. We had come to find through a property survey that we had approximately 100' of slope to manage. In an effort to comply with Firewise principles (brush cutting, defensible space), we figured that grading, retaining and adding astroturf would give us more space for kids and dog training. Along the way, we built in some additional steps and planter boxes.

The project finished just prior to the Winter of 2023 and the heavy rainfall we had. We some minor damage to gravell paths but that's fixable.

Here's some shots.

Lynda and Leo went down to Carmel to drink some coffee and watch the Poodle Day Parade. If you didn't know, Carmel is a hot spot for poodles. Here’s a few shots of the scene.

Sure, we had rain (20" ?). That brought out flowers! Lot's of violet purples this season.

For a short period of time in 2021, I had two Porsche 911's. But, you can only drive one at a time and the 2013 is a lot faster...

So, the black 2001 996 went up for sale. I included some track wheels and tires in the sale. Due to the pandemic, it actually sold for slightly more than I bought it for. I held it for six years and put over 60k miles on it. Here's some shots.

Well, its the end of the season for me. My last days to participate were the 10/28-29/23 dates at the Salinas Airport. Car felt good and both days I felt like I was improving my line and dropping my times throughout both days. 

The location is smallish but it works. Below are a collection of photos taken by Gorilla Tornado, Craig Boyle and myself.

The image above was from a harvest yesterday, 12/1/23. There is at least one more pack of peppers to pick.

So, I may not have picked a peck, but I've had a pretty successful harvest this season. These were Costco pepper plants (Jalapeno and Fresno). They got fertilized and watered when dry. Plenty of 100+ days in the greenhouse this summer. My strategy was to do fewer plants spaced further apart. It seems to have worked.

So, we've got a new Junior Guard. I was one back in the early 70's. Brad was one in the 1980's. Now we've got a new one. It's a huge program with at least 60 9 year olds. They don't do pillow fights anymore but I see lots of good discipline and it gets used on me when we play games... e.g., "ok, I'm the captain and Lynda is the LT and you drop and give me 10".

During a group buy from Apex, I bought a set of 19" forged wheels for the track. In early 2023, I finally got a set of Falken Azenis RT660's installed. I've put a few days of AutoX on them, but haven't got to the track yet. 

The Santa Cruz mountains took a lot of rain this season. I know I dumped my 5 gallon bucket at least twice. We saw some erosion on our new pathways that will have to be fixed.

In this shot, we see the beginning of a 5 day outage where one huge douglas fir took out more douglas firs as well as the power and utilities coming up hill. We did ok on solar and batteries for a few days but given the weather conditions and position of the sun, we fell back on to our dual fuel generator.