Texas World Speedway / College Station, TX

Eeeek! Almost a year since my last post. My bad...  I should probably update this thing considering we don't have any of the three cars above anymore, OR the mini cooper. LOL (dont worry...still have awesome mustangs :-p )But anywho...

If you follow our photo biz on facebook, you know we were out of town for a few days last weekend! What were we doing? Well Justin was racing our '08 Shelby GT500 around Texas World Speedway! Last fall, Justin participated in his first road course driving event through The Driver's Edge at MSR Houston. He'd wanted to do this for awhile and for years he had claimed just how great of a driver he was. He was hooked within the first lap! We finished that weekend, and once the 2012 schedule came out, we decided to figure out what else he could attend. Our first event of 2012 was last weekend at TWS. What a fun track!!! The history behind it is fun enough to just be there... but to get to drive on the same course...the same bank... as A.J Foyt, Darrell Waltrip, Richard Petty, Mario Andretti, and other household NASCAR names...... gah, way cool! It was sad to see the stands falling down tho...you can't go up there anymore. :(

So how does The Driver's Edge work? Check out the website if you want to read in depth...But it's a 2 day learning event. There's basically 4 run groups: green, blue, yellow, & red. Green & Blue groups have instructors riding along with you. Beginners start in green and you may or may not spend more than one weekend there. Justin was promoted to blue during his first weekend out at MSR, and got to run in blue group during the afternoon of day 2. I think there's also a "blue solo" group, and that he was just promoted to that! Getting to yellow will be a little more difficult tho. Green, Blue, and Yellow groups cannot take any passengers other than the instructors. Red can tho! And at any of the driver's edge events...it's free to spectate. And for a $25 charity donation, anyone can ride along in a run session with a red group driver or an instructor. Each group gets four 20 minute run sessions per day, and you also get classroom instruction in between. The Driver's Edge has mottos like "Your Performance Car Needs a Performance Driver" and "We Don't Care What You Drive; We Care How Well You Drive It." Everything you learn on the track, you can apply to your day to day driving. You'll see alllllll sorts of cars out there too - trailered Ferraris, BMW's with paper plates, full out race cars with roll cages and entirely gutted interiors, miata's of all different year models... It's like a car show really, but everyone just happens to be driving 'round and 'round really fast instead of worrying about how clean their car is ;)

As soon as we got home from Texas World Speedway, Justin signed up for the next event there in June! Buuuut, our next event is actually in April at MSR Houston. But guess who's driving? ME! I'm kind of skeered... I'm a drag racer. I don't do too well with turns. Hehe!

I didn't get to take very many photos this go 'round, because I headed back to Houston early Saturday morning to shoot a wedding. But I made it back to college station late Saturday night and captured what I could on Sunday. Here's a few!

Wish me luck in April!!! And if you ever get a chance to do a ride-a-long...do eeeeet! :)

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Car Shopping

Our new (to us) car shopping adventure started 6 days ago. Justin finally convinced me that getting rid of my black 2000 Mustang GT and getting a newer much nicer stock 03-09 Mustang GT would be a smart decision. Why? Well a couple of reasons... my car runs fantastic tho! 174k miles and it still runs like the day she was made. Nevermind the motor blew up at 63k and was rebuilt. haha. Anyway. I used to race that thing EVERY weekend at the 1/4mile dragstrip in Baytown, now known as Royal Purple Raceway. And I went all out. Slicks on the back, sometimes skinnies up front, seats out for weight reduction. The backseats are currently just not in the car and getting them back in isn't exactly an easy task. There's also holes in my carpet from driving in heels. My bad. As good as the motor runs, mods & all, the transmission is starting to get cranky! And she's leaking oil from somewhere. So, we decided we wanted to start from scratch again.

So 6 days ago, Justin starts looking & test driving cars while I'm at work. We found a 2007 Shelby GT in black that was gonna be perfect. If they'd come down $2000. Trying to find something to match MY price requirements and Justin's mileage requirements was looking damn near impossible come Saturday. We drove 10 hours around Houston, using a full tank of gas, going to every dealership we could think of. We didn't find much. Prior to driving around we had searched auto trader across the US and back looking for options, and most of our local favorites had been sold already. Like the black Mach 1 we wanted at Lone Star Ford. That one was really crazy. We saw it online. Called. It had been sold. Tried to find it online again. It wasn't there. Headed over there anyway to see what else they had. Checked online. Saw the black mach again. Get there. It's definitely sold. I'm like, well stop making it pop back up online! lol We weren't mad, the lady there tried to help us out and find something at other dealerships. She found us a black 07 GT but the price was like 4k higher than another 07 we found in town with 30K less miles! I was like uh....no.  So we left empty handed to explore other options.

Long story short, Saturday was a waste of time. No one was open Sunday (not even in Dallas, we were gonna road trip!) Monday was spent looking online some more and calling places to see if they still had the cars we wanted. They didn't. Tuesday rolled around and after some more discussion, we decided to take a chance and not look at mustangs anymore (gasp!). We decided it might be better to just get me a new daily driver that was good on gas and just give me something to drive while we just plain fix my black mustang. It took awhile and lots of effort, but we narrowed it down to a few cars that I was ok with driving. Miata, RX8, 350Z, WRX, Lancer, Jetta, things like that. And out of nowhere a mini cooper got thrown in the mix (fully expecting it to be sold, and us finding something much cheaper). Again, nothing I found in my price range would satisfy Justin's mileage requirements. I said well, one or both of us are gonna have to budge just a little bit for this to work. In the mean time, Justin was still looking at some mustangs. Here's where the ugly part comes in.

Rewind back to Saturday. We had gone to Planet Ford on 45 thinking they'd have the largest selection for us (boy were we wrong). We told our salesman what we were looking for EXACTLY. Mustang GT/V8, Manual transmission, any color but red, silver, or yellow.    What does he point out and show me first? A silver automatic V6. *facepalm* So we knew this was a disaster. We let him show us a couple things "in the back" ...that had some wreck damage and lots of modifications. No thanks. Well Justin took a gamble on them again on Tuesday (our current place in the whole story!), and called them up because he saw a newer black GT online. I think it was like, an 07, with fairly low mileage (maybe 30k?) and it may not have had a picture online. He calls one salesman, tells him what he wanted to know, salesman says he will go hunt it down and take pictures, send them to us, and confirm the transmission type. Cool. This was first thing when the dealer opened. By lunch time, we had no answer, and Justin called again and go another salesman. told him the situation, the guy took our number and said he'd call us back. Well he called us back later that afternoon alright. He said yes, it was a manual transmission. He forgot to take pictures. and then we asked him the price. He said twelve nine. As in 12 thousand, 9 hundred dollars. We were stunned. We asked him, uh...are you sure?? He kinda stuttered and said yes, and we asked him to doublecheck. Because that car should've been at the lowest, what we wanted to pay 19,000 up to where some dealers had it at 24,000.  12,900 would've been impossible. Even at 100k miles, it'd be going for $15k at least. So we hang up. We dont hear from him again. We tried to call the first salesman back....voicemail. So we called the operator and THATS when we found out the car had been sold. like 2 days ago. The operator had to tell us that. Ridiculous!

So here we are after getting off the phone with the operator at Planet Ford on 45, and we set off to take a look at what seems like the best deal. A blue jetta at Westside Chevrolet. It was an older one (cause i dont like the new ones) with higher mileage than Justin wanted (I think it had like 72K) but a cheaper price than I was looking for (like $7800!), and if in good shape, was going to be worth it. What a joke! The front bumper was falling off. There were wires coming out of the incomplete dash. And it was filthy. They hadn't even switched out license plates yet. We left immediately.

I made Justin call Gillman Subaru north to make sure they still had the 2 other cars I was interested in. A mini cooper & a nissan sentra SE-R. We had a very pleasant experience there! Justin couldnt believe I was even looking at the mini. But guess what we took home!!!



My new daily driver is a 2006 Mini Cooper S w/ 6speed manual transmission! It's so much freaking fun! Every day I'm going to picture myself inside The Italian Job.

I know Gillman Subaru North lost money selling this to us, but the General Manager there was SO so so great. If the time comes to buy another car, we'll be heading there first, that's for sure.

I need a bigger garage.

I finally did it.

Well, Justin made me do it. Remember when I bought IRaceInHeels.com? Well it had just been sitting there. Justin had been recently messing around on another forum one of our friends owns and he got this wild hair up his butt to make me load forums on my site finally. So it's officially under construction. If you go to IRaceInHeels.com currently...you'll this nifty little splash page that I put up in all of 5 minutes last night:




We're working on it. There's just not enough hours in the day. Wish me luck!

Crash Averted.

Our precious mustang cobra saved our lives Saturday.

I'd like to thank it for having upgraded brakes and hella awesome suspension.

We were on our way home from the car show in Kemah saturday night (ask me if you don't know which one I'm talking about). Justin drove there, so I'm driving home and doing about 55/60 mph. The oncoming traffic is stopped at a red light and I see this truck pull out right in front of me. I figure it's going to speed across real quick and turn left. I was wrong - the pickup truck stopped. In my lane. I'm on the brakes hard. Right at the last second I pulled off the brake and yanked the wheel to the left. If I was going to hit, it was not going to be a head-on collision, it was gonna be the fender. But I yanked the wheel left and let out and ended up in the turn lane of oncoming traffic. Thank you Lord.

People - please drive with common sense. If you're pulling out of a gas station or something and you have the option to pull out at a stop light instead of crossing the highway - take the stop light. I swear it won't delay you that much. You may think you're time is precious, and it is, but not as important as yours and someone else's life. Had we been in our truck - we probably would've hit head on with their driver side door and killed the other driver. Had we been in my other mustang, we'd all be seriously injured.

On a separate note - the weather this weekend was so dang beautiful. We did have the top down quite frequently. And tho I didn't have any formal shoots scheduled, I did get to have some play time with my sister and try some new things out that will do nothing but benefit all of you!

Have a great week everyone!

Softball Ouchie

Some of you know that Justin and I play co-ed softball in Pearland. This season our team is...can you guess? The fastbacks. Surprising right? Even more surprising? We actually didn't pick it out! The new season started this past weekend, and we put up a good fight, but lost one and won one. Here's our color & logo:

Well, I started the season with a bang. Justin is our short stop, and I pitch. Ya, I'm pretty much the only girl pitcher we've seen in the co-ed league down here. Weird? But anyway - in the last inning, I got a line drive hit back at my ankle. The same ankle that's been hit twice before while not on the mound. Can you say ouchie? I walked it off immediately and finished the game, but as soon as the game was over i felt my shoe digging into the swelling and off I went to meet Mr. Ice Pack.

First photo, from the end of the game (the lump, is not my ankle) - 2nd photo @ 48 hrs later.

New Pages

See up there underneat the title?! there's some girls names...and some other odd names... well im talking about the mustangs in our family! I could've just made them each their own blog post...and heck, i still might...but now they're visible all the time...

I just figured the blog could use a little more mustang love :)

Trash The Dress!

I cant believe I havent posted this yet!

that said...

A few weeks ago was my trash the dress session. I know I was facebooking and tweeting about it...but not here. My bad. Trash the dress. What dress? My wedding dress. *gasp* but whyyyy. I'd rather have this artwork than a big box with a stuffy dress in it that i'll never wear again. It was soooo much fun.

Here's the scoop on my photog(s).

My wedding photographer, Leslie Spurlock (from McKinney/Dallas area), and her 2nd shooter Todd (from San Antonio) were in town for a wedding at Moody Gardens. We met at my place of work early Sunday morning (with permission of course!), and then we went to a car wash! My friend from highschool Megan, of Greathouse Photography, was in town for a few weeks and with Leslie's ok, she tagged along for the session too. The last thing I expected...Leslie posted a preview of my pics immmmmediately. even before the wedding she shot the same weekend. They were fabulous and I cant wait to see the rest of them. She just got back from a wedding in Italy tho! And i told her she could wait to edit my photos til she got back since she had so much to do before she left. As a photog myself, I can relate to what little bit of stress that may have relieved her of. lol! Megan was a sweetheart tho, and I didnt expect her to just load her memory cards on my computer, but she diiiiid. And then she let me edit them. wowzers!! Want to know why I think that's cool?...

well if you visit Leslie's FB fan page, Greathouse Photography's FB page, or my FB page...you can see how each of us saw the image because they're all edited differently :)

Oh you might want to see them huh? Here's a few!

From Megan's camera, with my edits:

And here's a few of Leslie's!

Las Vegas 2010, Part 2

On the day we decided to grab a rental car - we made 2 trips. First stop Hoover Damn, 2nd stop, shelby factory. Check out the live camera on the website! they only do one tour at 10:30 in the AM...we didnt read that...we showed up about 3. We wondered around and looked at the cars in the showroom. One of the HR ladies happened to walk through the actual factory door, and we got to talking to her for a bit. She let us go in the back, with the cameras off, but it was a neat sight. We're mustang freeeeaaaaks, so we enjoyed every minute of it. Here's a few pics from the showroom.

Life in the Fast Lane

Literally. I know you know how busy i am. But we got a new car. yes, it's a mustang. One of our dream mustangs and then some. We got....

a 2003 Mustang Cobra Convertible. Dark Shadow Grey. #2473 of 5082 verts that year. of those verts...446 of them were DSG. Semi rare car. hehe!

Check it out:

Sorry..i dont do that whole, posing in front of my car in the bikini thing. HA! And what a beautiful weekend it was to go cruising with the top down! Come on summer!

With the arrival of the cobra, one of the other 3 mustangs has got to go. Justin's silver supercharged 2000 GT is leaving us...but we know where she's going, and we'll see her often.

We've had some great photoshoots lately, softball games have started, and my bestie is getting married this weekend!! Hope you are all getting more rest than I am :)

You can have it any color...so long as it's black!!

Id been without my black beast for a week and half. But I got 'er back!! Back with a brand. new. paint job. Been a long time comin. I figure, it was cheaper than a new car. And it's still running like a champ. Even if it wasnt, im not sure i could get rid of it. So - off went the car to Welsh Collision Center. I'm sure my car will be on the before and after page soon. Brad says my car sold him to two more customers while it was parked out front. bwaha. So go see Brad if something unfortunate happens with your vehicle...you can tell him me and Justin sent you :-p


Who thinks the weather right now in Houston sucks?! i do. I can deal with cold. this wind is horrid. I wanna go DRIVE! and take new photos. cause right now im confined to the driveway in between rain clouds. and that just gets old.

My favorite part of the whole car is the spoiler. It was A.W.F.U.L.

 

Much better now.

Another pic before it was completed.

 

I shall have sweet dreams now.

You're on my heart just like a Tattoo...

I have a tattoo on my wrist. I get questions about it... a lot. It's pink and black. I could probably give you just one try to guess what it has to do with...

Justin hates it. Ya, i covered it up for the wedding... but he hates it all the time. Like wants me to get it removed hates it. maybe ill want something really big one day and bribe him. lmfao

but here's the story:

If you know me in real life - or if you're smart enough to know that banner up there is me - you'll know i drive a black mustang GT. Shortly after purchasing it, i discovered the Black Mustang Club. I've been a member since early 2005 and I'm member number 02612 of over 12,000! I've been there awhile... since joining, I've become a moderator, a member of the graphics team, a preferred member, and a member of the tattoo crew. And might I also mention, the club was founded by a wonderful woman named Lisa - who owns our club mascot Danni, as well as several other fabulous cars. Lisa then opened her own performance shop, BMC Performance. Can you see my tattoo anywhere? It's part of the BMC Performance logo, which has in turn become a staple icon of BMC as well. Minus last year, but picking back up this year, we have annual BMC National gatherings where members all over the US (and Canada too!) drive or trailer their black 'stang to the meet location and we all hangout for 4 or so days. I've met some awesome people through the years and the BMC truly can feel like family sometimes. At nationals, we have track days, and a car show, and a cruise, and whatever else we can, depending on the location that year. I've been to two - Dallas & Nashville. At these events, Lisa offers to pay for your BMC related tattoo and everyone heads to the tattoo parlor. 18 people, myself included, got one in 2007. Lisa and i have the same one, in the same place - except mine's pink. I chose the pink swoosh symbol rather than the BMC letters. I figure, even if i dont have a black mustang my entire life, well ill still be accepted there, and the checkered flag base of the swoosh design will always stand for racing - which will always be party of my life. So there ya have it.