Greetings from my room at the Paramount Plaza Hotel in Gainesville, just south of the University of Florida, home of the Gators. Turns out, this is a nice place with a full-service restaurant (which means room service, for those of us who are anti-social) and it's a breeze to get from here to the track. Especially on rain-drenched Thursdays when no one else is going to the track.

I got up at the crack of dawn today, just to peer outside (I'd show you the view from my window, but shots of the parking lot are so last year) and the much-predicted rain was coming down steady. Not hard, not torrential, but "you need a rain coat or an umbrella" steady. Around 8:30 or thereabouts, I left here and swung through Mickey D's to grab a sausage and egg McMuffin and a large coffee, and then off I went. It was still coming down pretty hard when I got to the track, but as I pulled up to the pit area (it's not impossible for us to drive right to the pit on Wednesday or Thursday) I could see Annette and all the guys hard at work, still putting up the transporter awning and the hospitality area. Ouch... Everyone was soaked.

I got involved immediately, although I have to admit that the main awning for the hospitality area was up by then so I wasn't standing out in the pouring rain like they had been, and a few hours later we had the whole circus put together, zipped up, and ready to go. Do I feel bad that they all got soaked and I just got inconveniently damp? Yes. I owe them all something, I'm just not sure what. Dinner is always a good option. Or candlesticks...

Once all that fun stuff was done, the guys got the new car out out of the trailer and I, therefore, got my decal file out as well. Time to get to work, stickin' them vinyl bits on a shiny new body! I went through my collection and discovered I was only missing three sponsor decals, and two of them will be available at the track tomorrow while the third is being shipped to us, so I knew I could proceed.

The car has to pass tech inspection before it can race, of course, and at first the guys were assuming they'd be heading down to get that done pretty quickly, so I figured I could at least get a head start and stick a few of the big ones on before they left for what could be many hours. Then, Tim returned from where they do the inspections to report that a long line of cars, motorcycles, and other race vehicles were all in line and the whole process wasn't moving very quickly, so the guys might as well keep working on the car for a while. He had the bright idea to send one of our other vehicles down there to get in line, to effectively "hold our place," and since that spot was right behind the NAPA team, those guys promised they'd give us a heads-up when our spot was getting close. What this did for me, selfishly speaking, was give me the opportunity to nearly finish the car, in terms of associate sponsor and contingency sponsor decals. No argument from me on that one, I can promise you that.

I plowed through nearly the whole thing, and starting with a blank canvas like this gave me a shot to fix some of the things that had been bugging me about how I did the '09 cars. In the end today, I was happy with the placements and the look of it all, and nothing jumped right out at me as be horribly crooked, so I'm good with it. After one lap, we'll see how good with it I remain. There are simply a few spots on the car that are not good places to stick decals, due to either a proximity to the flame-spewing headers or due to the fact they have to be folded over various lips, ledges, or curves. None of those things are friends to decals that have to ride along at 300 mph... I still have more decals than space, though, so I have to put stuff there and hope for the best. Like I said, we'll see how bad it looks after its maiden voyage...

Right now, I'm missing my Autolite, Aeroquip, and T-Shirts Unlimited decals, as well as a big Ford logo for the back window, but all that will be available tomorrow so I'm calling it a 90 percent victory on a very sloppy and rainy Thursday. Good work, me. To mark the Autolite and Aeroquip spots, along the bottom edge of the car, I put small strips of masking tape with each sponsor's name written in Sharpie, and that reminded me of a funny story from the CSK days...

One year, I was doing this exact same routine when it came time to do super hi-res photos of the car for the huge vinyl wrap that would go on the transporter. Since the car has to be seen as going "forward" on both sides of the trailer, it has to be shot from both sides as well, and I totally forgot I only had one Clevite sticker in my file that day. The photographer did his thing, and a week later the the trailer was wrapped and everything looked perfect, until I noticed that the enormous photo of the race car on the right side of the rig showed a small piece of blue masking tape, with the word "Clevite" written on it in my handwriting, right where the real Clevite sticker would end up. We left it like that and didn't fix it. Just our little inside joke...

The Finkster arrived this afternoon, in his motorhome coming up from Fort Myers, and he was quick to report how absolutely awful the rain had been on his drive up here. It was the sort of deluge that caused everyone but John to pull over and sit it out, but he says the motorhome does just fine and his visibility was good, so he kept going. All of that really heavy stuff missed us, which brings to mind the all-time classic Carl Spackler line "I'd keep playin'. I don't think the heavy stuff is going to come down for quite some time..." I guess Assistant Greenskeeper actually DOES mean something...

Throughout the last few days and into the actual rain event here on Thursday, the Friday forecast has really looked bleak, but once I got back here to the hotel I checked on it again because all those same forecasts got this afternoon all wrong. While it was raining this morning, just about all the forecasters were showing a break for a few hours and then heavy downpours late in the afternoon and into the evening. That never happened, so I chose to have hope that things were improving, and according to some websites (the ones I prefer to believe) we now have a pretty good shot at racing on Friday, and the rest of the weekend still looks good. Let's go with that and get ready to rumble...

Oh, BTW, the car did pass tech inspection, so we're all good to go.

One of the last decals to go on the car went, actually, inside the side windows. There's a Ford Mustang owners club near where Tim lives called the Central Illinois Mustangers and they sent us a few decals. Our team is from Central Illinois, and we race a Mustang, so now we're honorary members of the club! I wonder if we have to pay dues?

Okay, it's almost 7:00 p.m. now and I'm getting hungry. Being an anti- social sort, I think I'll have room service...

But, before I go, a couple of words about the final two photos in today's gallery... The first one shows a momentous and important moment in Woodbury, Minn., and I got the shot just before I left for the airport on Wednesday. Yes, say it with me, the first spot of open water along the edge of the pond! Ain't no stoppin' spring now, brother. It's on, it's coming, and it's happenin' fast. It was 48 and drizzly up there today, so I'm sure much more has melted by now. Heck, the daffodils are probably shooting up out of the ground.

The final shot was sent to me by longtime blog reader Richard S., who works for DHL and is currently based in the Philippines. He's an airplane fanatic just like me, and we often get involved in email threads about old airlines, our favorite old aircraft (I do miss the old TWA version of the L-1011), and other "airplane stuff" so this time he sent me a shot of a specific plane at the Manila airport, with the caption "No matter how much you fly this year, I bet you won't be flying on this bird."

I think he is right. It's a Mongolian Airlines jet, and I have to say that I didn't know there was a Mongolian Airlines. Too bad for that, too, because I might have been able to reach Genghis Khan Platinum Elite status by now...

So that's it for tonight, which for most of you is probably tomorrow. I doubt I'll be able to write anything on Friday, and with Dick Levi and a huge throng of LRS guests joining us on Saturday I'd assume a blog is not in the cards for that day either. Hopefully Sunday will be a long and productive day, and then I have to drive down to Sarasota once we're done at the track, so I'll do my best to get something written and posted by Monday morning, before my sister and I go see my mom... Deal? Deal.

Wilber, out!