Bubble Drivers: T

Recovering from my worst virus in years.

Well, it figures. I went into the nursing home on Monday, both to visit my mom and hopefully to get the form signed to facilitate the construction of a ramp. I needed to obtain a piece of documentation from one of the nurse supervisors confirming why she needed the ramp and I said I was probably going to come in the next day (Tuesday) to finish the form and hopefully drop it off at Onondaga County Community Development. However, when I got back home, I took my temperature and it was 100.2° and I knew I couldn’t come in and risk exposing her to my virus.

I had had some of the worst diarrhea of my life on Sunday and I assumed it was just one of my usual IBS attacks and didn’t think much of it, but the fever made me reconsider and I was freaking out that I must’ve exposed my mom to it just because I pushed myself in there to finish the form. I had been cuddling with her because I wanted to provide some companionship. I was petting her legs and stuff and I was figuring there was no chance she didn’t catch whatever I had. Apparently, she actually didn’t as my fever got as high as 101.6° on Wednesday (which I think is the highest fever I’ve had in my entire adulthood) and I guess hers never got that high. I had been calling her all week and she never answered me, which concerned me because she almost always had before, but I noticed the volume on the phone in her room got a lot quieter and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it so maybe she just couldn’t hear it anymore. But apparently, she somehow didn’t catch the virus from me although I had sneezed out in the hallway because I didn’t want to do so in the room with her. There was no one around me in the hallway, but when I called in the next day, the nurses told me they had all gotten sick too. I think they might have been screwing with me though because they kept telling me the cooties virus was going around. At first, I assumed they were talking about something like Koudi’s or Kouti’s that I had never heard of because I knew cooties didn’t exist, but I think the nurses might’ve just been teasing me. At least I apparently didn’t infect my mom and I don’t even see how that was possible, and my fever finally broke today although I still have a cough. Maybe I’ll go back in on Monday.

I don’t know if I mentioned this yet (I don’t think so), but I just joined the Discord for the auto racing statistics site The Third Turn, a site that was a rival archive site for my own race-database.com, which I had abandoned. Although The Third Turn apparently started a year before mine, I had never heard of it until after I stopped updating in 2015 and I think (at the time) mine was bigger. I kind of envy that site’s success, but I don’t think it’s actually making money as I know the site’s creator is working for Fandom and the reason that site blew up so much bigger is that he is using open-source wiki technology so he has a ton of people entering results for him while I entered everything by myself, so I guess there was no way I could’ve competed with that anyway even as the fastest typist in the world. Anyway, I’ve been trying to chat there and I want to make some connections to Internet racing historians there, but most people there aren’t really responding to my comments yet.

One thing I forgot to mention in my S column was that with the drivers I dropped off my bubble in that column, the combined drivers between my lock and bubble tiers dropped below 1,000 drivers for the first time, giving me some wiggle room for what to do with the remaining spots. Although I made a last-minute decision while writing this to move Henri Toivonen back onto my bubble, I now have 981 drivers in my top two tiers, which makes room for me to include 19 drivers I currently have off my list, who will most likely be rising stars. But there are still several drivers I have in who I don’t really think deserve it (Rob Collard, Scott Goodyear, Dave Marcis, Didier Theys from this group, maybe Mauricio Gugelmin and Roberto Moreno; I could drop any of those at any point) along with some drivers in lower tiers who I think probably do (like Jean Trévoux and Ernie Triplett in this group). I also think there are actually a couple people I have in the lock group who I’m going to end up not going to list, and there might be people I have in the third tier who turn out to be locks. But I do think my instincts are good if I have now reduced my lock + bubble tiers to just under 1,000 and I think after I finish the last post next week with the V-Z drivers, I’m going to have just about the right amount of wiggle room left to eventually sort out the remainder of the list. I’m going to try to have that last column done before the start of next weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series finale, and then I’m going to go through all my statistical tables for each series in turn to do post-season analyses for most of the major league racing series, which will likely help me sort out most of my top 200 lists so hopefully I can finish them before the end of the year this time.