F1 Dumpster Diving

Try not to get blinded by the sun glinting off my head BTW. You may wonder what I am doing dumpster diving, in this fortunately fairly empty dumpster, on our recent weekend trip to the Indianapolis Grand Prix, well it's a long story.

We set off for our trip on Saturday, making good time with the exception of the roadworks on the Indiana Tollway. We arrived in Lafayette around 3pm, checked in, watched the end of the Cubs game, damn you Pierzynski, and then took off to do some shopping. We got some great bargains in the Old Navy and Eddie Bauer sales, had a snackette at some pizza joint, and then decided to head to Target to get some dessert before settling in for the night in front of the telly in preparation for an early start the next morning.

At 1:30am or thereabouts, I was paged for an outage at work. As I was on the call, I noticed that my wedding ring was not on my finger. Whilst on the call, trying not wake Lorraine, and trying to consult on the outage, I frantically racked my brain as to where my ring could be. I showed Lorraine, who was now fully awake, and she started tearing the room apart. It all started to come back to me!

Whilst in the Target parking lot, I had sent Lorraine back into the store to pick up something we had forgotten, and I decided to check the fluid levels in the truck. I topped up the coolant and checked the oil, and then moved to the back of the truck to put everything away, removing my ring and placing it on the back of the truck to wash my hands (you know where this is going don't you).

Several hours later, back to the phone call, now 2;30am and wandering around the parking lot in Target trying to find the ring, pulling up storm drains, searching grass verges, shining the torch around the place hoping for a glint of shiny metal. The store was closed, but we were able to ascertain that they opened at 7:30am the following morning.

We got to bed at around 3:30am, and were back up at 7am, to go back and look in the daylight. Lorraine, myself and a guy named Joe from the store hunted high and low to no avail. Joe also told us about the cleaning company that sweeps their parking lot on a Saturday night with a street cleaner type machine.

We called the company and they explained that they emptied their machine every night, and would have spotted if there was a ring still in there during cleaning. However, they also told us where their machine dumped it's sweepings, in the parking lot behind Walmart; and this is where I came in! The guy in Walmart, Adam, provided us with gloves and a stick to scrape around in the dumpster, unfortunately without success.

We finally made it to the racetrack around 11, having reported the loss to the police, left information with Walmart, Target, Prosweep and the Hotel. We missed all of the early non F1 action, but we did see the whole race and Michael's historic 5th win at Indianapolis. Apparently no-one has ever won 5 of anything there, so Jeff Gordon is hoping to equal that this year with the Brickyard 400. I took a bunch of pictures, including some of the requisite motorsport eye candy pictures for the boys. Apologies for the blurriness on one of the shots, but the camera was on and off autofocus all day, and it was off at that point, but the picture was too good to ditch. Check them out here!

This just in..apparently it is covered by our Renters Insurance, good ol' All State, although the deductible is $500, so it is only slightly better news.