Day 29: negative cash flow

Hey, who jacked my wheels?!

It's been an expensive month for me.  Let me catalog a few of the items.

Christmas gifts for my honey V.  $XXX but worth it to keep her smiling!  Especially when I'm blowing all this other money on my cars and toys ...

The $20 app I mentioned before, Harry's Lap Timer Pro on the App Store for iOS.  Better than a dedicated lap timer with neat features like Google Maps integration, and video overlay functions.

I also threw another $3.99 at another app, Gas Manager for iOS.  It tracks your fuel mileage and consumption every time you go to fill up at the gas station, for multiple cars and lets you display the data in various charts and logs so you can nerd out on the statistics.  The app is free to download but after you've entered 10 fill ups you will have to buy the app to continue adding more.  I found myself using it and liking it so I went ahead and bought it.  What the heck, a holiday milk shake at Sonic costs more than $3.99 these days.

Some Subaru camber bolts for the suspension.  They allow some adjustment for more negative camber on the front tires, to improve cornering response.  These are pretty damn expensive at $7 each so $14 for a pair.

New racing brake pads and brake fluid upgrades for the BRZ.  Ended up being overkill since the track day I attended was wet and rainy so we were relatively easy on the brakes, but it will pay off the next time I go to the track on a dry day.  About $200.  As an added bonus, my brakes now squeal like a hoopty whenever I come to a stop.  But that's racing, buddy.  Function over style.

A Berk Technology racing catless front pipe, plus the cost of the install at a local muffler shop when we realized that we couldn't get the original part off without cutting off an impossibly tight nut.  About $320 with installation.  Hard to say if the sound has changed much but the power seems slightly improved.

Berk FP removes the secondary cat from the exhaust, improving flow and performance.

The guy didn't want any photos taken while he was installing the pipe, so here is a super secret spy shot.

Track day at Thunderhill.  $195.  I did get a free T-shirt out of it too!  Yay.

I also woke up one day and found the rear tire on my Lexus IS350 had gone flat.  My poor Lexus has sat idle at home on a spare.  I thought it was just a tire puncture and took it to a tire shop.  Turns out it was a bent and cracked rim not the tire. As it turns out this set of wheels is pretty rare now and no longer in production.    And I just found out that the wheel cannot be repaired.  So I'm stuck with 3 wheels that won't match with anything else I can get.  I guess I will go back to my original 18" wheels and have to buy another new set of tires for them.  Estimate that will cost me around $600.  Ugh.

Back to more happy things.  Got some new toys for my game room display shelves, these were mostly inexpensive but a few are hard-to-find collectibles.  About $50.

My new FIVE:AD spoiler arrived for my BRZ.  I have dropped it off to a paint & body shop to get it painted and hopefully will have it installed in the next week or so.  $300 + $165 paint & install.  That makes it about equivalent to the factory spoiler cost but I like the style of this one better.

I've been using the same racing helmet for around 12 years now, it's a replica of Jean Alesi's F1 Playstation helmet.  It was SA95 certified which means it meets 1995 standards of safety.  They come out with new standards every 5 years so the current standard is SA2010.  For track days and gokarting places they generally allow helmets from the past 2 cert periods.  So, it's time to retire the old helmet and spring for a new helmet.  I ordered a new Pyrotect full-face helmet but this time it's in a plain-looking gloss black finish.  No fancy F1 racer designs this time around.  That'll be another $300 from the bank account.
My old helmet will go on display in my game room, seems appropriate given that is where I play racing games like Gran Turismo on my PS3.

Hmmm have I spent all of my year-end bonus yet?

Day 2: going loopy

Sunday ... a wet and windy morning.  Last night it was pouring rain and I can see some minor flooding in the streets and the neighbor's backyard.  Our back yard seems to be holding up well but a few things got blown around and had to be relocated.  The most amazing thing was our giant stainless steel BBQ (which is on wheels) managed to get blown halfway around the side of the house.  That's some crazy wind right there.  I don't think there's going to be too much going on today, we are probably staying home.  It gets a little dangerous when I am sitting around on the internet for too long, it tempts me to go shopping online and buy something expensive. :)  So I better go do something else...  like work out on the elliptical WHILE shopping online hahah.

Is that distance in feet?  meters?  yards??  I dunno.

I spent a little time reading the long and tedious user guide for the navigation in my Subaru, and playing around with it.  Hopefully that will help me get familiar with it, I did notice yesterday that I was struggling to put in a location and get directions to someplace.  It was far easier to use Siri on my iPhone and get the directions on that instead.  But now I need to take some road trips to test out my newfound knowledge.

Put together the Hot Wheels loop track that I bought... pretty cool but it's a little hard to get enough speed on the car to make it all the way around the loop.  Needs MO' POWAH!

I also played around with the suction cup camera mount that I got on Amazon... plan to use it during my track day at ThunderHill later this month.  Not sure if I like this one, I have some doubts about its ability to hold on to the back windshield. It feels like it will fall off from too much vibration or shock.  I'll test it out for a few days and if it's not good enough, I'm sending it back.

If you hate reading my verbose rambling and just like the pretty pictures, you can follow along on my adventures by following my Instagram page:  http://instagram.com/pmok_mr2/

Or view the photos I take in a new Photobucket album I set up.  http://s78.photobucket.com/albums/j118/pmok_mr2/37days/

Day 1: the journey begins

Farewell, Sweet Movember.

I started the day off right by getting on the elliptical and putting in 30 min of workout.  One of my goals during my vacation will be to continue working out, getting exercise from various activities and trying to lose some more weight.  It's going to be tough as there is lots of good food (and bad food) calling my name.  Prime directive #1, satisfied.

The month of November has now passed, and it was time to shave the moustache I had growing for Movember.  Can't say I did a whole lot to actually promote the awareness of men's health issues and testicular cancer, but I did what I could.  Which is to say I grew a moustache, and now it's time to shave it off.  V was certainly happy about that, she doesn't like me growing a moustache.

Then it was off to the Great Mall in Milpitas to meet a few other car club members, fellow owners of BRZs and FR-Ses.  We met in the covered parking garage area so we didn't have to stand out in the rain, so we were able to hang out for a while and talk about cars, racing, and other guy stuff.  The weather was a little too wet and the roads too slippery for anyone to want to go for a mountain drive, so we decided to stop by a Toy Drive charity event and car meet at a local high school.  I popped into the mall before we headed over, to pick up a toy to donate to the cause.

I don't shop for kids very much, and I don't have any myself, so I'm never sure what to get.  In the end I generally get something that I would myself like and hope that works out for the intended recipient. I left the store with a box set of 2 helicopters, a firetruck and a police car.  I also got some Hot Wheels looping track for myself.  Awesome.

We got to the meet a little late and the weather was generally dismal, but it was quite heartening to see this massively long row of tables nearly all covered by toys that people had donated.  That made my day.  And so, prime directive #2 has been met.

It was funny, that at the car meet, one of the other owners asked me if I got a lot of reactions or compliments on my car, and I said, honestly, I had not seen a whole lot of reactions like that since getting the car (aside from other owners of the car, at these car meets).  People seem to ignore me or maybe I just don't pay enough attention while driving to see what other people in cars are doing, maybe they are freaking out and going gaga and I didn't see it.  I thought it was just that in the Bay Area, we have plenty of nice cars around and people just take it for granted - I certainly will gaze admiringly at a Ferrari or Aston Martin when it rolls by but a lot of people just seem to not notice.  And my car is certainly not that nice or expensive.  Generally I just drive it to and from work so there's not much time for human interaction.  But then it was lunchtime and while I was standing around near my car I got like 2 compliments within 5 minutes.  Interesting.

I took these two panoramic shots using my iPhone 5, it really is quite useful for these kinds of pictures.  If I had tried to take them with my SLR I would have been cutting something off in the process, or wishing I had a wide-angle lens.  It's not perfect but here it seems to get the job done.  OK these aren't shots worthy of the Ansel Adams gallery or anything, but I do believe I've managed to hit directive #3 too.

Bonus discovery of the day!  Perhaps not huge news to the most tech-savvy geeks out there, but I realized that you can use the iPhone 5 as a wireless access point to tether things like iPads and laptops to the 4G data service on Verizon.  That basically means I can now use my iPad or Nook tablet anywhere I go, without need for an independent wifi source as long as I've got my phone and I'm in a 4G service area.  So in theory I could type out lengthy emails and blog updates on the road, wherever I go.  Geek-o-rama!