Friends

I spent today with my friends.

I am fortunate to have as many friends as i do. There are very few people who can say that they could rally eight or ten people who would show up at a moments notice to help out if they had to.

I am one of the fortunate few.

But here is why. Regardless of the fact that I have wayyyyyyyyy too many things going on in my own life, in my own garage, and in my own home to have any spare time; I spent the better part of today, and last week saturday, and the sunday before that, elbow deep in someone else's project.

Today it was "Foose's" firebird.

Foose in my best friend, or one of them, i'm lucky to have to define that. He is a body man by trade, and I think, would like to run hot rod shop rather than a body shop. In any case, today I changed the springs in his project car. He wanted it lower.

I learned a little about fooses life today.

Bear in mind. Foose makes his living working on cars for other people. He cant afford to do it for free, and he does have a family to support. So he works like 60 hours a week to keep things running.

But today, a couple guys he knows brought in a race car. Racing in our area is not a high budget operation.. If you want to race, you basically go get a junkyard car, make it run, and weld in a roll cage. But it has to look nice. This is the part where foose gets involved.

Since he is a local businessman, I would imagine that foose gets a lot of sponsorship requests. I have no idea how many he actually takes up, but I don't think its a whole big bunch. I think you probably have to be a pretty good guy to get him to sponsor a race car. Because in our part of the world we take things in trade.

If foose sponsors your race car, guess who's going to paint it. good guess.

If you've ever painted a car, even a low buck race car, You're starting to get the drift of where i'm going with this tonight. It's a ROYAL pain in the ass. Especially a race car. Nothing is prepped properly, nothing is sanded well enough, and foose is a perfectionist.

SO, in between working on my own project on his car today, I watched him do his damnedest to make this old rusty, dented, and not prepped well enough car look good.

I was amazed how well it turned out. Which speaks volumes for foose.

The nuts and bolts of tonight's thought is thus. Good friends, and good people, are hard to come by... If you find one, make sure that you do all you can to take care of them any way possible. They will do the same for you.

Till next time,
Greg