Well I survived the night. No reaction at all. No hives yet either.

I might get hives from my job today though.

I think I’m going to have Lobster for dinner tonight.

I’m alergic to shellfish. Shrimp, lobster, crab. It didn’t start until about 7 or 8 years ago. I don’t go into anaphalactic shock or anything, but the last time I was weazing and my face got pretty swollen. Mostly I just get hives for about five days. Which I guess is bad enough.

On the way home from working out tonight we stopped for take out Chinese. We ordere spring rolls and I had about half of one eaten when I realized it had shrimp in it. I don’t think I ate any, but I was about to bite into a big chunk of it when I realized what it was.

And now I’m sitting here waiting to see what will happen. I told Quinn that she could have my iPod.

I suppose that I’m one of the few artists that really likes exel spreadsheets. I’m fascinated by data and I love to chop it up and I love to figure out ways to make exel do my bidding. So over the years I’ve kept most of my personel records on spreadsheets that did fancy calculations, like if Mary takes 3 hours of personal time and 2.5 hours of previous year vacation, how much total time off does Mary have left?

More often than not, my records were a mess, I would forget to input the info in a timely manner and it was hard to actually reference back to them, since I often couldn’t remember where I save them or what I named them.

I’ve done a one eighty. I’ve discovered the organizational wonder of the 21st century! The three ring binder. I’m amazed at how much more quickly I can find information, how much cleaner my desk is and how much less time it takes me to get my timesheet and payroll crap done.

I wonder how many tasks that we’ve given over to computers are actually easier and faster the caveman analog way.

Last week I went to get a cup of coffee at the office. Someone had brought in a nice cannister of mixed nuts, I filled a styrofoam cup with coffee and another with nuts. I went back to my work and started going through my standard morning drill. I absentmindedly reached over for a handfull of nuts and poured coffee into my hand.

On Sunday Beck and I were at the club, I was riding the recumbant bike and she was getting on the treadmill. The machine she was on was squeaking, which caught my attention, then for some reason I looked away. I glanced back at her in time to see her go flying off the end of the treadmill and land on her ass. Fortunately only her pride was injured.

Monday night I went to a High School basketball game between two powerhouse teams, one from a small town and one from the inner city. We were at the city school’s gym. There was a couple behind us that were a little on the strange side. He was round and she was rail thin with long stringy graying hair and an amazingly craggy face that gave her the appearance of a comic book witch. Kind of urban hillbillies. A student ensemble came out to sing the New Fangled Spanner and were executing the anthem in beautiful harmony when Witchy Woman chimes in about two and a half tones sharp. She gets about six high pitched words out and I’m beginning to get that nails on chalkboard feeling when the baritone voice of her partner comes in with, “Shut Up.”

And to top it all off Dick Cheney went quail hunting.

I’m flying to Omaha today for a meeting tomorrow.
I really hate business travel. Airports, airplanes, rental cars, hotels, expense accounts…all of it. Hate it.

Plan59

Last night, Rebecca and I met our committment to hit the club on Friday nights. Work out after work, late dinner at home and a rental. I got through my routine and headed upstairs to the locker room, with a quick stop at the gym to watch a three on three game. I had just enough time to hit the whilpool.

I was sharing the facility with an older guy, must have been in his late sixties, a barrel chested man, kind of overwieght. For the sake of the narrative, let’s call him Tubby. As Minnisotans do, we started talking about the weather, which has been unseasonably warm, I think it hit 50 yesterday. It’s more likely to be -20 here at this time of year than 50. Of course this led to global warming and Tubby wasn’t so sure he was buying into that theory. He was speaking of the inherently cyclic nature of the climate and brought up the fact that we’d had a January thaw back in “oh-tree.”

“When?”

“Yah, oh-tree.” The “yah” is clipped, German, not drawn out like a Norsky. I’m thinking, and understand that I’m riding a major endorfin load, “Oh three, you’re nowhere near that old.” I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone refer to the third year of this century as “oh tree” before.

“I remember because I had some property over in Wisconsin that had a pond on it. I was clearing the snow off it to make a skating rink and just as I made the last pass the tractor went through the ice. In five feet of water.”

“Did you end up leaving it ’til spring?”

“No, I got’er out. I wanted to get a wrecker, but all kinds of fish houses had gone through the ice too. They were chargin’ a thousand dollars to pull them out, and I sure wasn’t gonna pay a thousand (did he say “a towsand?”) dollars to get that old tractor out. But I got it out.”

“How?”

“It just came to me. I kept thinking about how to get it out and one moring I just woke up and it hit me. I knew it would freeze again so I put posts in by the wheels and jacked it up to the water level, then when it froze over again I just drove her right off.” He included an explanation of the finer points of his technique, but he was vague and I couldn’t visualize how he accomplished this, other than “the bucket” and chains were involved. I was very impressed with his inginuity but even more so with his ability to accomplish something that must have been a hellacious amount of work. I’ve been in similar situations and it’s brutal for a young man.

So the question is, was he pulling my leg?

I stopped at the on my way home from work to buy raisins for the Cuban dish I was going to be making. I bought a cucumber, lettuce, spinach, a green pepper, Ruby Red, V8, a small container of ground cumin and some chicken breasts. But no raisins.

I’m reading Moby Dick. It’s for my book group. I’ve tried to read it a couple of times before and not been able to get by the archaic language and the shear volume of the volume. But now I’m finding it immensely entertaining and actually a pleasant, if not easy, read. This is good because I’ve been having trouble reading for several months now. Can’t concentrate long enough, just can’t sit still. Really can’t get motivated to do anything but play the guitar and even that’s been haphazard, with no real direction or growth to it. A lot going on lately. Nothing I really write publicly about, other than saying that the uncertainty of my job situation is making me nuts. Let me just say that I’m feeling better now.

I scheduled surgery on my left big toe for March 1. It’s felt like someone was driving a hot ten penny nail through it for about a year now. And no it’s not gout. They’re going to clean up the joint and “decompress” it, shave some bone away so it has more room to move up and down. Six weeks in a surgical boot. I’m glad it’s my left foot, so I can at least drive.

It seems that some alien force is sucking the hair out of the folicals on top of my head and forcing it out through my ears! Next they’ll be stealing my bodily fluids.

Last weeks mining disaster brought back memories for me. I may have told this story here before, but I’m going to tell in again. I graduated from College after Winter Quarter, having skipped two terms my senior year to do the European vagabond thing and come back to finish the following spring. My friend Bill had graduated on time and had been living up in the Twin Cities since. Bill was the son of a hard rock miner from Wallace Idaho in the Silver Valley of Idaho’s panhandle. Wallace at that time had the only stop light on I-90 from coast to coast. The Valley was so steep that it was the last place they’d managed to build the freeway. We decided that we would drive out and get high paying road construction jobs for the summer and then, well I don’t think we had any plan after that.

Wallace is quite a town. It’s main industry is silver mining, with a bit of logging thrown in. It’s on the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, know in those days as the Lead Creek by the locals. It was a nasty leaden color from the mine tailings that flowed into it. It had about fifteen hundred people and five very public whore houses with neon signs. Gambling was winked at in the bars as well. If you took 90 west to Kellog, the next valley, the landscape went from beautiful pine forest to a moonscape, no vegetation grew because of the pollution caused by the huge smelter there. Kellog had a suburb called Smelterville, practically in the shadow of the plant. The children of Smelterville had dangerously high levels of lead in their systems. The smelter closed down years ago and Bill tells me the valley has come back nicely. But at that time, when you drove through you would get a taste copper in your mouth, like you were sucking on a penny.

So we set off to make our fortunes in the West. After driving all night we arrived in St. Regis, Montana, just on the other side of lookout pass from Idaho. As we walked into the restaurant, Bill froze. There in a newspaper rack was the headline, “93 Miners trapped in Sunshine Mine fire.” Bill’s dad worked at a different mine, but he was on the fire rescue team, so Bill knew his dad was down in the burning mine. We had our breakfast and drove over the pass, through Mullen and into Wallace. Bill’s mom greeted us at the door in tears. His dad had gone the work the day before, worked all day and then went down into the Sunshine and had not come home. No one really knew anything. The first thing Bill did was have his mother cut his long hair, so as not to cause any extra stress when his dad got home.

Mr. Benson, also Bill, got home, but 91 men died. The Silver Valley is a tightly knit cluster of communities in an area where flat land is scarce and every little valley is a town. A pall was draped over that valley that summer, it felt strange to be an outsider, I was probably the only one around who hadn’t lost a friend or relative. But then again, it was the most memorable summer of my life and looking back the people had an amazing resilience, life went on and was vibrant. We never got the construction jobs. We hooked up with a crazy Italian contractor, learned to build a stone walls, crashed around the mountains in various states of altered consciousness, played a form of basketball that involved navigating a curb at about the eight foot mark and brick window sills protruding at thigh height on the baseline, Bill broke his ankle, the contractor fired me immediately, I got a job with Smokey the Bear and Bill went down in the mine. And we played the grooves off Working Man’s Dead.