One of my favorite pics of all time, with two of my favorite legends...and they signed this one for me!

Any excuse to use the forklift will do, but race cars and rust simply don’t mix.

If this nitro driving thing doesn’t work out, perhaps I can find some work in a local paint and body shop.

Our trailers were some of the last to go out for shortening (that sounds odd), and when they came back I think the lettering on the sides read, “Aaro”!

We always have a $30 gift exchange at our Christmas party. With the way the economy has gone, and the government raising the debt ceiling and printing more currency, I just stuck $50 in an envelope and figured that’s about right!

The historic Mission Inn. Ronald and Nancy Reagan honeymooned here, but I doubt they got to see lights as cool as these. And, those bells!

Is that a Princess and a little companion that I see? Hey, is that gold dude the prototype for the Wally?

This is one of those “sliding pin” deals, where you can push on the back of the wall and “transfer” an image to the front. Jason sure can jump high, but clearly I forgot to adjust my “J” to be read correctly (I do get extra points for wearing my “Rain for Rent” Warren and Coburn shirt!).

Jason and his fellow demolition contractors just before blowing up a 60 foot high wall of earth and rock. The blast sight is down past the boys, about 1/4 mile away at the bottom of the quarry.

The water was so chilly I was tempted to put on my firesuit and helmet!

This may be classified as child abuse, keeping the young ‘uns up past midnight. By the looks on their faces, Jason and Layla need to lay off of the Jack Daniels!

Jason had a wheezing that necessitated using a nebulizer for several days. He wasn’t happy, so we told him it was part of his Jedi pilot training to fly an X-wing fighter.

Layla held down the pool table, Jenna wrapped presents, and those two guys in the background looked like they were having a toast.

I started typing this blog on the 11th, and it won’t be sent to Phil and Candida for posting for several more days, but I would be remiss if I didn’t comment about yet another big loss to our sport. Earlier today TC Lemons, one of the most colorful, entertaining (and THE best storyteller I have ever met) and enjoyable people ever to handle a torque wrench died in his small house located on the property of Garlits’ Drag Racing Museum. I am sure that Phil Burgess will do a fitting tribute to a man who I was fortunate enough to become friends with, so let me digress back into my regular blog. Godspeed, TC. It may not be freezing in hell, but you’ll show ‘em how to do fire burnouts in heaven!

I love my job, but it does have its drawbacks. Some of you may think I’m talking about all the travel, appearances, stress, time away from home, etc. I’m actually referring to the fact that it makes me do superfluous things in the off-season. I shall pause while you look up that word...

Yeah, I keep plenty busy once the Winternationals roll around, but there are certainly some “lulls” between the Pomona events that even raising two small children can’t quite fill. Hey, I’m not exactly laying on the couch all day watching History Channel (though that REALLY sounds appealing to me!), but without having a race car to keep me busy working, I’ve gotten into some projects that probably didn’t need my attention.

My Super Comp Blackbird is going up for sale, and don’t ask me why I decided to wait three years too long to act on this (though it has a lot to do with my wife thinking we should save it forever, and apparently she thought we’d have our own museum for storage by now). It’s tough to part with that car, but with two little ones and a busy travel schedule, I haven’t raced it in far too long and it’s becoming an eyesore (Jenna says the same about me: I just sit around and am an eyesore... but I’m not for sale!).

I noticed that the tongue of the trailer was really faded, and the Tuff-Tow (dolly wheels mounted on the tongue) assembly had started to show surface rust. Being as that I had LOTS of free time on my hands, I thought it prudent to remove the entire assembly, sand everything down, prime, and repaint. Did I mention that I was also able to include the forklift into this little project? Yeah, except for trying to “rattle-can” paint the tongue in a light wind, it actually was quite enjoyable. And, it looks bitchin’ now... makes me want to NOT sell it!

Some of the stickers on the trailer had faded to the point that they looked terrible, so out came the heat gun, razor blades, and elbow grease. (The razor blades are for slitting my wrists for starting this project.) While I was at it, I changed the oil on the generator. Yep, even my trailer runs Valvoline NextGen now!

I bought four tubes of that trick self-leveling caulk (that sounds kinda weird!) to use on the roof of the RV. Though we don’t have any leaks, experience from past units has taught me to be proactive. After a couple of hours with a scrub brush, putty knife, vacuum, blow-gun, and a copy of War and Peace, I was finished. I had purchased four tubes, thinking I would redo the entire roof, but it actually looked pretty nice up there, and I only used one tube. So, what does one do with three tubes of self-leveling caulk...?

Is it me, or does my trailer seem to be in need of a roof re-seal! Let’s see: gasket scraper, putty knife, wet towel, vacuum, compressed air, and three wire brush attachments ought to do the trick here! And, what do you know... it took exactly three tubes to redo the entire roof and vent. Man, do I feel good now.

Lest you think I frittered away (sounds like a line from a Pink Floyd song) my entire holiday season, I actually did pack some useful things into that time:

I flew back to our shop in Indy in mid-December to have a seat insert poured for our new chassis. Even though, technically, each DSR seat should be identical (thus being able to transfer the old seat insert into the new car), it probably wouldn’t be that easy. First, though Norm, Joe, and the entire fabrication staff are awesome, duplicating an aluminum shell is nearly impossible. Secondly, after several hundred runs, the used insert resembles an old pair of shoes (comfortable, but well-worn and in need of replacing). It was time for a fresh butt pad. I scheduled my trip so that I could attend the DSR Christmas party. Don always goes all-out to thank the entire staff, and he rented the ballroom at a downtown hotel and had some great catering brought in for all of us.

There’s no getting around how impressive our facility is, what with more than 100,000 square feet of building, loaded with the best nitro equipment money can buy, but something was very different this visit. Guys in the shop joked that it looked more like a flea market than a fuel shop, and I could see what they meant. Apparently (and this issue came to a serious head between the Vegas and Pomona races) most nitro teams had upgraded from 53’ to 56’ trailers several years ago. Without delving into each states DMV handbook (I can hardly read, anyway), it appears that only a handful of states allow the larger trailers, and California won’t even allow you to purchase a temporary permit (just ask Steve Torrence, who had to flatbed his trailer OUT of California and missed the Pomona race entirely) to enter into our beautiful, overly-liberal state. Long story short (bad pun), we had to have our entire fleet of 14 race trailers shortened 3’, and this was not a cheap proposition. Also, each trailer had to be completely emptied onto the shop floor prior to heading out to be shrunk, creating that aforementioned “flea-market” appearance. So... if anyone is in the market for a three-foot trailer, we have several of them and are willing to deal!

I finished servicing our motorhome, taking care of the Hydro-Hot, generator, and other regular maintenance. It’s still up for sale, but I don’t mind hanging on to it if no one is interested. It seems that people freak out at a unit with 105,000 miles, but for a diesel pusher that really is fairly low mileage. We’ve dropped the price from 110,000, which is just below the NADA value, down to 89,500. It will be up on eBay for several more days if anyone is interested, or you can get hold of Jenna: jennabeckman@att.net. Just don’t tell her you want to trade for landscape services... she might just do it!

We hosted our annual Christmas party and had about 40 friends come and spend an evening at the Chateau du Beckman. This year Tom Bayer beat Jenna in the final of the reaction time challenge. Jeff Arend and I complained that we don’t use our thumbs to launch REAL race cars, but those gripes fell on deaf ears.

We headed over to the Mission Inn in Riverside to see their Christmas Festival of Lights, which looked to me like a bunch of lights strung across a hotel... but I digress; the Inn dates back to the late 1800s, and has a tremendous amount of history. 10 Presidents have visited, and Nixon was married there. They have an impressive collection of bells (if you’re into that sort of thing), with one dating back to 1274! Einstein, Pulitzer, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Helen Keller have all seen the Inn (well, technically I guess Helen didn’t see it).

We headed over to the Discovery Museum in Santa Ana to check out their Star Wars display, as Jason’s world revolves around all things Skywalker lately. They had many of the actual props from the original movies there, and my little Jedi dug it.

Jason and I accompanied my friend Randy Sullivan, who runs an earth-moving business (that really sounds like a fancy term for DIRT moving, as only gravity seems to be able to actually move the EARTH...and I digress yet again).

Randy got us on site to witness some serious ground excavation, as in the type done with high explosives. I’ve seen plenty of this sort of thing on the learning channels, but to witness and feel the ground move under your feet was really cool, and I think I’m signing up for the next big bang!

I bought one of those bitchin’ Go-Pro cameras at Costco (a warehouse discount store with fantastic prices). I’d been wanting to get one for surfing, but once I saw the $139 price tag, I couldn’t pass it up. The video it takes is spectacular, but I don’t know how to pull a still image from video. You can set it to take photos, but with this unit the quickest it will snap is one picture every two seconds, which is nearly useless for surfing, where the average ride only lasts about 5 seconds. Still, I tried the photo mode on one outing and got a couple of decent shots.

I’ve been able to go out and hit the surf 4 times in the past month, including two days in a row when Jenna was sick of me and banished me to the beach. It’s tough to realize that I’m not nearly in the shape that I’m used to being in, and I hadn’t touched a weight for nearly 3 months. I had done some tendon damage to my right forearm about a year and a half ago, and it’s been aggravating me on occasion. As we got towards the end of the year, I didn’t want to stress the arm too much and affect my driving, so I just laid off working out. Unfortunately, even holding my daughter tends to cause some pain, so I went in and got X-rays and an MRI. With our insurance plan, writing that co-pay check for $536 hurt more than my arm! Still, I need to get this handled so I can get back to working out regularly, and I want to be able to throw a baseball with Jason.

We celebrated Jenna’s 33rd birthday (I know, she’s WAY too old for me... but she’s such a great organizer that I’ll keep her around) and the last day of 2011, and we showed the world what true party animals the Beckmans really are. Brent and Staci Cannon hung out until about 11:30, then Cindy and the family watched Dick Clark (c’mon, Dick.... enough with the spray tan!) drop his ball on Times Square. Weird, I can still remember when I was about 10, listening to my mother talk about the year 2000, telling me that I would be 33 years old when it arrived. I couldn’t even imagine being that age, and now I’m married to a gal who is... and she’s a lot younger than me... ouch.

Next time you hear from me, we will have done our 2012 testing out in Florida. You’ll also have heard what’s new for this season, not just for our team, but for all the nitro drivers. I still am amazed that Larry Dixon won’t be behind the wheel of a dragster (so far as we know). Fickle sport.

Stay tuned, keep your roof sealed, may the force be with you, and just say “NO” to Obama-Care!