The year after I got my Nikon D3000 for Christmas, I attempted my first Project 365. That was in 2010, and I made it to about October before I ended up quitting. It’s kinda sad now that I really think about it, because I was much closer to the end…. But I quit because I felt that my photos weren’t of the quality I wanted.

I was tired of the boring days where I was sitting at home at eight in the evening wondering WTF I could photograph for the day. Yeah, it wasn’t fun and my photos had become rather sucky. I quit because I was tired of the mediocre photos just to continue with the project.

Project 52

Not too long after I started my Project 365, I heard about the Project 52. Instead of one photo every day for a year, it’s one photo every week for a year. Still a pretty intensive project if you ask me, but not quite as rough as the 365.

The idea popped into my head a few days before the new year, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it or not. I finally decided to just quit thinking about it and just do it. Even if I fail, I’ll still have used my camera more than I am right now. (Damn you iPhone for being so awesome and handy….)

My Project 52

Well, mine is going to be somewhat basic…. Of course, the end goal is to have 52 photos at the end of the year, one from every week.

I want the majority of my photos to be of cars, like I started with my 365 project. I think one a week will be much more manageable!

The whole idea is to be using my SLR, since the poor thing doesn’t get out much anymore. :/ I won’t be opposed to using my iPhone as the second camera in the project though, because I may not always want to bring my SLR with me. (Snowboarding trips come to mind, as well as autocross days where I can’t always keep track of my camera when I’m racing.)

I might require myself to edit the photos, but I’m not sure if I can keep that up. My husband bought me Photoshop Elements for my birthday last year and I’ve sadly not touched it… I’m determined to put it to good use finally. My iPhone photos are almost always edited on my phone, so no worries there. But it’s really about time that I learn how to do it with the photos I take on my SLR.

Really, if I can keep up with the project I’ll be happy, no matter what I manage to get done. I’m afraid if I make it too strict for myself I’ll get frustrated if life gets in the way again.

Sharing the Project

Of course, I’ll be posting the entire project to my Flickr, which could really use the attention I’m sure, ha. I’m thinking of either sharing the photo from every week on here, but not sure how often I will. I might just do a monthly recap, since it’s not that many photos every month.

Unless, of course, I have nothing else to share…. Then it’s kinda like backup content. Since, you know, winter is pretty boring here car-wise!

So, anyone else have plans for a big project in 2012, photo or otherwise?

So it’s been a while right? A pretty long while. So I figured it was about time that I share what’s going on here.

Since I don’t want this to be horribly boring, here’s the quick run-down:

• My hubby got back from his deployment, only to be sent somewhere else for two weeks after he was only back for two and a half weeks… I’m only now starting to feel consistently better. (That was my biggest issue — Being married and alone is a lot harder I think than it would to be alone as a single person, because I miss the person I enjoy spending time with…. Nothing against you single people!)
• The STi officially has some goodies now — a Nameless Performance exhaust (axle back, which is surprisingly helpful for her and sounds great!), Rally Armor mudflaps and some new pretty yellow foglight covers. I think I need good photos of all of them… (I haven’t even shared the foglight covers at all yet!)
• I have been slacking now mostly due to work. What should have four employees only currently has two, and I’m one of the unlucky two. It’s been a long time since I worked a 40 hour week, even longer since I’ve worked seven days a week. It’s kinda sucking, since I still have classes to worry about. (Only two, so that’s a good thing!)
• Oh, it’s cold now. So even if I wanted to do more car stuff…. There really isn’t. So for me to say I may be consistently blogging now would be a bad thing to do. I’ll run out of things to talk about, I know it.
• And, perhaps the biggest thing of all, I’ve recently decided to sell both my Miata *and* my 240sx. I’m just not into the huge projects anymore… I may or may not have been corrupted by sitting in a C63 AMG and realizing that I want more stock performance and less projects-that-eat-entire-paychecks-and-then-some.
• Despite the sales and my disdain of projects now, the S2000 stays, she’s more “mine” now (my driver at least, until the snow arrives…) and she will still get some goodies because I’m not done with her yet. At the very least, she’s getting the Bride seat that’s in the 240 right now and will be the first car I’ve ever had with a pair of racing seats.

So that’s pretty much the quick run-down. I have someone interested in the 240sx, but have yet to get any nibbles on the Miata. To be honest, I’m not surprised, I figured the Miata would be harder to sell and that the 240 would be more attractive to potential buyers.

I’m also throwing around the idea of FINALLY picking myself up a bike upon sale of both cars. I’m looking into an older (1970′s preferrably) Triumph. I’m a total café racer nerd and love the style to pieces, and think it’d be a great fit. (Not to mention the fact that bikes don’t take up much garage space and the S2000 could then finally be garaged!)

This is the newer Triumph Bonneville, but I plan on getting the older one.

So I guess wish me luck, heh. I’ve never really had to sell cars like these, and to be honest I never thought I would so I wasn’t really sure of what to do…. I want them to go to good homes, not just anywhere, but I also can’t hold onto them forever if I want to move forward, ya know? :/ It sucks.

I’ll try to throw some updates on here. I know the STi deserves some spotlight for her new pieces and just in general for being awesome. Plus she’ll be wearing her winter setup soon, which is just a set of the older STi’s gold BBS wheels…. They’re a nearly brand new set too, so I kinda feel bad for basically signing them up to be destroyed, but I like her stock set better.

Either way, I’m still definitely around Twitter, and Tumblr gets all of my Instagram (which I LOVE!) car photos. So I still kinda keep some updates around, otherwise I’ve been pretty boring car-wise…. You haven’t missed much really.

While it definitely wasn’t for my birthday (which is today, btw ), it was extremely nice of Audi to make me proud and bring home yet another win this year at Le Mans.

Audi’s Stunning Victory

First off, last weekend was the 79th running of the 24 Heures du Mans, or the 24 Hours of Le Mans for us English-speakers. It was an intense race through and through, and typical of Le Mans, only half of the cars that started the race finished.

Included in the retired cars were both of Aston Martin’s own cars, numbers 009 and 007, who were both retired in under five hours. (It turns out that the safety cars did more laps of the circuit than they did, sad!) Most notable, however, was probably the fact that Audi lost their number one and three cars, both to horrific crashes.

The best news is that both Allan McNish and Mike Rockenfeller are okay and actually both got out and walked away from the crashes. It was an amazing testament to the safety of the R18 that both of them were alright. Of course, here’s the videos for anyone who missed them:

There really isn’t any good video on Rockenfeller’s crash, but needless to say the R18 disintegrated upon impact of the wall, and it happened right after the Mulsanne straight. He did walk away from it and was sent to the hospital to be observed, but has been released and is at home recovering.

I do hope for a speedy recovery for both McNish and Rockenfeller, and it is truly amazing that they are both alright. Safety in racing has come a long way.

Despite losing two of their three cars, though, Audi’s number two R18 managed to pull off a victory!!! Three Peugeots could not catch one Audi, and it was definitely a good way to end an otherwise grueling twenty-four hours for the team. I’m very happy for Audi!!!

The No. 2 Audi that managed an amazing victory, a great end to the day that took its comrades away. (Photo Credit: AutoBlog)

As for the GT classes, Corvette Racing did quite well, snagging the GTE Pro win, eeking out their Ferrari 458 competition. I’m very proud of Flying Lizard’s efforts, and while only one of their cars finished (6th) I still think they did fantastic! As I said before, literally half of the cars that started the race did not finish.

More Than a Race

More than any other year, this year I kept up with the race as much as I could. I had to work, but I had an audio feed of the race for as long as I could, keeping up with what was going on. I was also obsessively following the twitter feed of the action, both from the official Le Mans twitter and from a few of the teams.

What I ended up realizing is that this is the most I have ever followed the race and really been into it. While I’ve been cheering on Audi for years, it was really only left at that. I never really followed them on their journey to victory during the race.

It seems that I get more and more into it with each passing year. I feel like it’s indicative of my dedication to cars as a whole — Each year I’m more and more into it, no matter how much I thought I was into it before.

One of Flying Lizard's two very beautiful Porsche 911 RSR's. (They're one of my favorite teams.) Photo Credit: AutoBlog

While I didn’t get to actually watch a ton of the race, I still followed along. It dominated my thoughts for an entire day. I was seriously on cloud nine after learning that Audi pulled off the win.

In a way, it’s become a way to track my progress as I learn more about cars and racing…

And really, I wouldn’t have it any other way. GO AUDI!!!

Finally, after quite a while of contemplation and one random day where I decided, “Why not?” I can offer you a sticker supporting CarsxGirl’s message — Support the car girls!

Simple Design, Important Message

They’re a very simple design, just the words “I support car girls.” in black on a white sticker that’s only 4″ long. I figured your car’s real estate is precious and won’t ask for too much space. Of course, the CarsxGirl url is present but not in-your-face. It’s more important to get the message out there!

Here's what they look like!

Sticker Giveaway!!

Because I’m still tiny and want to spread the good word of supporting your car girls, I’m giving them away for one week.

Yup, for a full seven days (until April 11th) you can let me know how many you would like, up to a maximum of five per person.

After this week of giving them away, you’ll be able to get them for a whole $1 each. This $1 will go to producing more stickers and also helping run the site.

If you would like more than five stickers right now, you may purchase additional ones for the $1 each.

And, of course, if you’re just feeling nice and want to donate or buy your stickers instead I won’t say no. But that’s totally unnecessary at this point.

Sticker Trade

At any point in time, if you have a sticker you would like to trade for a CarsxGirl one I’m more than happy to! We can work out an even trade if your sticker is worth more than my tiny $1 ones. All I ask is that it be YOUR sticker, not someone else’s that you have.

To get your *FREE* stickers…

So, want some FREE CarsxGirl stickers? You gotta let me know you want them!

Please use the contact page on the blog to send me your full name and address, as well as how many you would like. (Remember there’s a limit of five, and if you request more be prepared for an invoice.)

I should be able to handle shipping to anywhere, so no restrictions there!

If you’re on Twitter, feel free to DM me there as well. Or email me directly. (meg (at) carsxgirl (dot) com) Whichever floats your boat. Doesn’t matter as long as I get it somehow.

So… Who wants free stickers?!?!?

I announced this on both Twitter and Facebook, but I wanted to make an additional announcement here and elaborate a tiny bit.

The announcement is that CarsxGirl has joined Tumblr! Please check out the new mini-blog here.

I wanted to add a few things to clarify why I’ve done this:

It’s not going to be replacing this blog, it’s more of a supplement. I wanted a way to quickly and easily share my random iPhone photos without making posts of nothing but random, unrelated pictures.

I chose Tumblr for it’s ease of use and lack of frills. I like that I can share a photo on there and have it automatically post to both my Twitter feed and Facebook page. This gives you another option for following along.

I decided to call it CarsxGirl [Real Time] because that’s what I’m hoping it will be — photos that I take and want to share in real time, with no scheduled delay like they often are here.

I plan on sharing random, one-off photos of cars, as well as sneak peeks of cars I’m photographing or events I’m at. It will probably be slow for a while until the weather picks up and I do more.

They won’t necessarily be the best photos in the world, but my iPhone does pretty good. This in no way is replacing my D3000 or my use of Flickr. Again, it’s simply a supplement!

So please, do check out the newest addition to CarsxGirl, and let me know what you think!

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. My last update was actually in December, but then for some reason my blog imploded….

So about two months’ worth of posts and my last couple of updates were lost. Lesson learned? Keep backing the data up. >_> I was lucky in that I had a backup and didn’t lose everything, but I did lose a fair bit.

It’s not the worst thing in the world though, because I was on a break and what not. But I’m ready to get back in the game and share what I’m up to.

This month I’ve gotten to go to two car events, yay! And have photos from both. And will probably share.

Plus an announcement to make that I’m pretty excited about.

So I’ll be spending some time spiffying up the blog and updating pages and all that good jazz. It definitely needs to be done, both stuff I lost and otherwise. (Everything was reset back to July 2010, haha. Yeah, ouch.)

Enough talk though, I have work to do behind the scenes. Keep an eye out for it. Just wanted to say I’m still here and CarsxGirl is on its way back into the blogosphere.

June is an exciting month, because what I consider to be the greatest race in the world takes place then (oh, plus my birthday… hehe) — the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The Race

Why do I say it’s the greatest race in the world?

You’d just have to watch it, but it’s brutal. Insanely brutal. It’s one thing to go out and race for a few hours. It’s another thing to even run the 12 Hours at Sebring. But it’s a whole other level to run the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

I don’t think it rained this year, did it? I didn’t watch the whole thing! But it usually does rain for part of the race, making it incredibly chaotic when it does.

It also asks a lot from the cars, as well as the teams. This year especially saw many, many cars not finish.

Audi’s Comeback

Last year was a very sad year for me — Audi didn’t win. Peugeot did.

It was then that I realized how much I actually cared about the race… I didn’t think I did so much. This year I started watching ALMS more and I very much enjoy the series. The 24 Hours is the big highlight, though.

This year I watched some of it on tv. I saw one of the Peugeots blow up live. I ended up recording the last three hours of the race, and watched it Sunday morning. By then, I already knew who won…

It was Audi, with a 1-2-3 podium sweep! Woohoo!!

It’s kinda sad how it went down — all four Peugeots running were out of the race by the end. Audi was hoping for a showdown between themselves and Peugeot, not for Peugeot to blow up. I think most people were hoping for that too.

Endurance Racing 101

Then again, I think the way it happened shows just how awesome Audi is at racing at Le Mans.

Peugeot pushed their cars too hard. Sure, they were fast, but the cars couldn’t take it for the entire race.

Audi, on the other hand, proved to be reliable. All three of their R15′s finished the race, leading Audi to win their ninth time at Le Mans.

I hope Peugeot learns from their mistakes this year and comes back next year better. I have no doubt that Audi will continue to improve.

Besides…

The Audis are so pretty, aren’t they? I think they are….

Sleek, beautiful and deadly.

How they looked at Le Mans.

Being jobless doesn’t bode well for your car hobby, ha.

But…

I am here! Where is here? Here is Spokane, Washington. Apparently a town that loves its motorsports… This is fairly apparent after a fun-filled Memorial Day weekend.

Okay, I’m kinda lame and didn’t do a whole lot over the entire weekend, but Saturday was an absolute blast. I have a ton to share already.

First Things First

This is more of an update than a post per se, but I definitely need to get back into the groove of things and what better way than to start off June with what you can expect? Hmmm?

So yes, I’m back, kinda settled in and we’ve got internet. That means I’m back online, woohoo. It’s funny how I missed it, yet not having it was kinda freeing…. Ah well, I may limit my time a bit but I shall be around more than I was as a moving nomad. It wasn’t that fun to me.

Adventures to Share

I definitely have a few things to share in the coming weeks! Being away from writing actually brought me a ton of ideas, so I’ll be putting them into posts for your reading enjoyment.

There’s the moving up here, showing how practical sports cars can be and, best of all, the adventures that we’ve had here already and what’s pending in the future.

There’ll be local event coverage of all shapes and sizes as I sample all there is here. (Though I’m not so sure I want to get into the bike stuff, honestly…) That basically boils down to car spotting, go kart racing, track days and weekly drag nights.

I'm excited to be able to share some local coverage more frequently than just once a month!!

I don’t want to spoil too much, because I have plenty I want to get to, in due time.

This month promises to be a good one!

Just a quick note from me:

As of today, we are officially in the process of moving. That basically means limited Internet access for the next week and some. If there’s anything odd going on here, please email me and let me know, I’ll still be on top of that.

Otherwise, I still have posts scheduled to go up and will be doing my best to keep the blog running smoothly in our transition. Next update I hope to be posting from Washington state!

It’s really no secret that I’m not entirely thrilled with where I live. Around here, most people aren’t into my sort of car scene… We run with a pretty small crowd. It’s no surprise that the coasts are much more conducive to the type of automotive lifestyle that I would like to lead.

Good things come to those who wait?

My husband happens to be military, so it’s not like we can just pick up and move whenever we feel like it. For anyone who ever wondered how I got stuck in Arkansas, that’s how… Thank you, military. It was thoughtful of you, really.

Thankfully, we now have a timeline of exactly when we will be leaving. And I am horribly excited to go where we’re going next…. Spokane, Washington!! Fairchild AFB is where we will be making our next home. (It’s also cool that a good friend of ours is going to the same base at the same time. He’s the owner of the 350Z I talked about here.)

Um, yeah, excited!!!!! We’ll be about four hours or so away from Seattle, which is a huge deal to me because I’ve been obsessed with Seattle for some time. Have you seen some of their cars? Yeah, dope.

Plus the proximity to Portland. (Tuner companies galore.) And the land of the best cars in the States — California. (Maybe you can argue it’s not, but it certainly has the most it seems.)

For all my envy of the West Coast lifestyle, I’ll be out there living it… Well, sort of. Much, much closer than I am now and I am so impatient to get the move over and done with and start our new life!

I really believe it will give me a better chance to expand my automotive writing and photography, though working it all out with my schooling may be an issue…. We’ll see. I’ll get it all figured out.

Keep a look out — June 2010, we’ll be heading west! I’ll be sure to document the entire insanity trip of figuring out exactly how to move a house full of stuff, two people, one cat, possibly two fish and three cars across multiple states.

Dream Cars, Revisited

Since I didn’t just want to throw that up there by itself, I’ve decided to do something of a “retro” post for myself. Over on my first hint of an automotive blog, I stole a Facebook quiz and expanded on my answers. It had to do with naming five cars you’d like to own.

I mean, woohoo, five! I, uh, quickly found out that five was not enough…. But the five that I did pick were fairly tell-tale of my taste in car couture. Let me share the list with you, originally posted here, and then tell you why I dug this up.

Foxie’s Five Cars to Own (Someday!)

1. Ferrari 550 Maranello

2. Porsche 911 Turbo

3. Honda NSX

4. Lotus Exige S

5. Nissan Sil-Eighty

And….?

Okay, so why did I dig up the list? Well, I was just thinking of something as I was mulling over what moving means to me.

I’ve had days where I wondered if we would ever get to leave. We had people tell us that we’d better like it here, because chances were good we were staying for a while. It felt like everyone we knew was getting orders to Japan or Germany, and we were just trapped.

Now, though, we have something crazy good to look forward to. And that’s how I feel about my 240SX project. I am stoked to have that car in Washington. I have a feeling the engine swap will be so much nicer to do up there, where people know Japanese cars and there are probably way more SR20DET swapped 240′s than there are here. (Only a few here, by the way, but there are some.)

Best of all, I’ll have the car in a place where more people can appreciate the work put into making my Sil-Eighty. And I’ll get to have one out of my five dream cars. When I came up with the list, I had no idea that I could even build my own Sil-Eighty. I had actually put it on the list because, well, it really was a car I felt I couldn’t get. How ironic that the one I felt was furthest out of reach would become the first on the list for me to get…?

Here’s hoping that Washington’s proximity to Japan makes it easier to get a set of Volks! I’ve got my heart set on a gorgeous set of white TE-37′s for what’ll be a completed, black Sil-Eighty.

The next few years of my life are looking a lot sunnier than they did just a few weeks ago.