Hello All....I hope all of you guys are staying safe and healthy. Not a lot of activity going on but that is to be expected with the nicer weather but if you are running post your times.

I have been totally MIA for a number of reasons, most of them good. Work has gone from dead to full-on craziness. My wife and I have started to move ahead with getting me a fully accessible bathroom/office (more on this in a bit). The Wee Man was able to get back on the water sailing and baseball will start next week for him. The only bad thing was my Dad passing from Covid related issues. It is hard losing a parent but he made it to 89 and lived a great life until 85, the last few years were not great for him so this is better........but damn he has left my brother and I a mess of a house to clean up.

On the house project, as many of you know I was involved in a skiing accident in Feb of '18 that left me paralyzed from the bellybutton down. The house my wife and I are in is a great little 1800sq foot cape on a super quiet road. It is perfect for us but the physical layout does not allow a bathroom large enough to be fully accessible for me so we have been contemplating building out over the garage. We had started this project a year ago and then put it on hold for various reasons. We had used the same contractor that we had do our kitchen and opening up the doorways after I hurt myself but, for a number of reasons questioned if he was up to the task of this build. Enter contractor #2 a few weeks back. From the first minute in our conversation I liked this guy, he is local, has kids in the same school as our some and just seemed smart. He did a preliminary estimate which was within 3% of our original estimate so we started talking and the subject of the foundation came up. I am not a builder but I am mechanically inclined and I had asked the first contractor about the foundation and he said "it will be fine" and I did not think anything of it until contractor #2 asked me if any research had been done about the foundation. Long story longer last week he did some digging and was not impressed with what he found. In the meantime, my wife has had her eye on the real estate market this entire time but finding a house that does not need major work to make it accessible every day does not pop up every day...Fast forward to Saturday when my wife shows me this house a mile away from where we live, in the pictures it looks like it would work. Her best friend is a real estate agent so they went and looked at the house on Sunday and she comes home and tells me I am looking at it on Monday. Monday morning we had a meeting with our contractor where we discussed options on the foundation and it was quickly becoming evident that this project was going to take on a different scope. After that meeting, we went and looked at the house and it will work with minimal alterations....it is too big and has way more property then we need but it is a really nice house....We have made an offer that was accepted so crossing my fingers that nothing funky happens.

Now all of you are wondering how the heck this has anything to do at all with Mini-Z's and the M96WC. Well, the basement alone is 1800sq feet with huge spans between the lolly columns.....This means I can have the track set up on a permanent basis and I will have enough room to easily move around it to pick up cars, vacuum, make layout changes, and try different vantage points. It also would allow me to go outside the 8X12 square size.....obviously we would need to make sure everyone else is able to change up the size but it would be nice if we could use all the times on some of the circuits that use a big sweeper. The bad news is that the tentative close date is Sept 1st and I doubt with all that has to happen that I will have time to run before then.

Cheers,
Jim