We can’t say that the dog ate our homework, but we may have said “b*!@#” or “son of a b*!@#” once or twice in the past few days.

Last Thursday we were finishing layout of the first issue of LMD, so that it could be released on the scheduled day, last Friday. One page was left to be transferred and fitted, and then came what we thought was a simple computer glitch. It wasn’t so simple, as evidenced by this notice on the screen.

You can save a computer document every two minutes, but when you get that notice you’re kinda screwed, because in this case it doesn’t matter how often you’ve saved it; every backup is also corrupted and can’t be opened. It means you have to start all over, and that’s a full day of work. And that was on top of a trip to SpeedFest at Cordele, Ga., plus travel time (and here’s a confession: I have an aunt and uncle about a 40-minute drive south of Crisp Motorsports Park and I wasn’t going to give up the planned Brunswick-stew supper with him the night before the SpeedFest features) and some family commitments the next day.

Maybe it was fitting that the last page that was originally left to be laid out was the Pit Notes page, which contained a number of obituaries from the short-track world from the past five weeks … because our hopes of a timely release of this issue died.

So that’s why the issue dated January 24 wasn’t sent out to our mailing list until January 27. By the way, you can now get on that mailing list for no charge, because we have made it free this year. This will mean greater exposure for our valued advertisers, in addition to other benefits for you and for us. Just contact us through this blog or the LMD Facebook page to be included!

Best wishes to everyone heading to Florida Speedweeks soon, or other winter racing events such as those in Irwindale, Calif., or Myrtle Beach, S.C. … and also to anyone who sees a non-reversible error message on a computer.