Spring race

Race banners showed up downtown today so that can only mean one thing - spring race week at Bristol Motor Speedway is just around the corner.

The Ford Ecoboost 300 will take place on Saturday, March 17 followed by the Food City 500 on Sunday the 18th.

The city will be ready, as always, to welcome the throngs of visitors that will pack the speedway to enjoy the finest that NASCAR has to offer.

This great race and community experience can't be matched anywhere else on the circuit - and will be all the much better if the weather cooperates.

So keep your fingers crossed for great weather to go along with a great race.

Spillway

The spillway at Steele Creek Lake dam on a sunny March day.

A curiosity

February 29 - a curiosity if ever there was one.

It's a good day to prepare letters and memos - after all, it is February 29.

And this being agenda week, a lot of staff memos are being written to provide the necessary information to assist city council in deliberating on the matters requiring action at the March 6 meeting.  So we're able to memorialize this day in fine fashion.

February 29 - let's do it again some day.

Helpful tip

Here's  a useful tip to remember - don't worry about the things you don't need to worry.

Web site

Have you visited the city website - bristoltn.org- lately?

If so, you were among 13,849 others that did so in January - 65% of which were new visits to the site.

Over 38,000 page views took place from folks located in 63 different countries or territories.

And the good news is traffic is up 10% over January last year.

Nice

It's nice out today - but not quite this nice - but soon.

Check mark

Each of us should have written, personal goals every year that are meaningful to some part of our life to achieve.

I have several - including to run a 10K race this year (6.2 miles).

So today I tightened up the laces and ran my first 6.2 miles in quite some time - a warmup to see if I still had it in me. Run is a bit generous - a gentle jog is more descriptive.

In any event the run was successful with no apparent wear or tear. So I guess I'm ready to sign-up for a race and put a check mark next to that one when completed.

While running, I realized that many of you are not familiar with the Bristol landscape. So I will be regularly adding photo's of our community to help you connect these words with a picture.

Monument entrance sign to downtown Bristol. The center line of State Street separates Bristol Tennessee (right) from Bristol Virginia (left).