Glorious spring weather. The hammock swing is up. I sat on the deck and drank coffee this morning. Did a little yard work. But now I’m beat and I’m going kick back. I’m whipped. I finally got my ass down to the club for a workout on Saturday morning. I fits in so well. I’m up two hours before the rest of the slugs and with tennis on Wednesday and Thursday, it fits into the cycle of pain pretty well. I’ve noticed that since I started playing twice a week instead of just once, my knees hurt a lot less. Duh.
All my life I’ve gone through an up and down fitness cycle. I was in much better shape at thirty than I was when I was eighteen. I wasn’t very physical when I was a kid. The forest fire thing changed all that. And basketball. I have trouble exercising when there isn’t a ball involved. After I had my ACL removed back in eighty when they weren’t rebuilding them like they are now, I gave up hoops and got really fat. Since then I’ve at least done some walking and played a little tennis, but nothing too serious. My weight stays pretty much the same no matter what I do. Now I’m beginning to think that I can get a couple of those lost steps back and I actually can, at 55 put my tennis game on an uphill curve.
Damn…I wish I could have the strokes I have today with the legs I had at 23. I love that wirey hard ass feeling you get when you’re playing a lot of tennis. In my experience there’s no game that builds cardiovascular fitness like basketball, but for muscle tone I think tennis is better. Don’t know why.

Corporate America is by it’s nature insane.
Can’t really say much other than I survived. This time.

My father was the Michael Jordon of cattle buyers.
He was a city kid who grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Which is on the west side of the Mississippi, but actually is south of Downtown. East of that is South St. Paul and to the south is West St. Paul. True. He got his training in the huge South St. Paul Stockyards, starting out as a drover, moving cattle around the yard on foot and on horseback, at sixteen. At one time he had a side business with Mike Farrel’s dad, speculating on buying and selling cattle in the yards. They called it the Emaciated Cattle Company.
When I was about five, he was offered a job buying cattle for Liebman Packing Company, which was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Hence the Packers. The job was in the West Fargo Stockyards, just over the border in North Dakota. He worked for them until the early sixties when Siouxland decided to build their big plant. They realized that they couldn’t buy enough cattle to keep the place busy unless they hired my dad. Even with the advantage of no trucking costs, they couldn’t compete.
Here’s how it worked. The feeders brought their market ready cattle to the Stockyards and consigned them to a commission company. The commission company would act as bargaining agents for them. The buyers would go out into the yards and bid on the cattle hoping to cut an advantageous deal. The trick was to be able to look at the cattle and determine the ratio (yield) of their “on the hoof” weight to their dressed weight, hanging in the meat cooler. Then if you knew the going price of dressed beef and the profit margin you needed then you could calculate what a fair price per pound would be. Remember there were no calculators then; he had a series of laminated cheat cards, but I also think he did a lot of the math in his head. He was not a high school graduate. Dad could walk into a pen of 25 cattle, spend five minutes and estimate their yield percentage. If he missed by more than a half of one percent, he figured he’d blown it. So when Dad offered a price, you knew it was fair, so it was kind of a no haggle proposition. And if he gave you a price and you turned him down and you found out you couldn’t do better…well you’d better not come looking for him to give the original price. When he worked for Siouxland, he was the head cattle buyer and had five or six or some number of buyers working for him. He bought more cattle than all of them combined and bought them cheaper.
Mostly the job consisted of sitting around in the shacks out in the yards, playing cards, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until some cattle would come in. Then out they’d go take a look, cut a deal and get back to the card game. There was some bullshitting done in the bargaining process. Once he took me aside and said, “You go over there and sit on the fence and when they bring the cattle in say, ‘Kinda skaggy aren’t they?’” I could say the men were rolling in the alley, but that would be really nasty.
So the owner of Siouxland came to town and personally offered Dad double his salary and he couldn’t refuse. He died when I was twenty. The business was going to auction selling and he had trouble hearing so he figured he would be obsolete before long. The West Fargo Stockyards is a ghost town now.
That’s him in the middle with the groovy glasses.

Warning If you’re a vegan or a PETA member or simply don’t want to think about where your filet mignon comes from, you might not want to read the following.

The highest point in the Fargo-Moorhead area is the manure pile outside the Union Stockyards in West Fargo. It was huge, they drove big dump trucks on it. It had roads up it’s sides. It’s still there. Settled a bit and overgrown with vegetation, probably the most fertile soil in an area known for it’s fertile soil. The soil in the Red River Valley is amazing. The silt from the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz. Black as oil, perfect growing anything, especially sugar beets.
In the early sixties, Siouxland Dressed Beef built a new state of the art packing plant across the road from the stockyards. Designed to kill cattle, sheep and hogs it was at that time one of the highest volume livestock packing operations in the world. That wouldn’t last long because that was a time when the size and efficiency of such operations was growing at an amazing pace. But at that time it was a showcase. The offices were on one side of the building, next to the kill floor. They were lined with windows so the office workers and plant managers could look out and admire the operation. Unfortunately the architects or engineers made a slight miscalculation. The conveyor for the sheep kill brought the freshly slaughtered sheep carcasses right past the window. They were swinging as they came around a corner on the line. They hit the window. So these windows that were put in so the white collar folks could admire the efficiency of their high tech plant were constantly covered by a disgusting film of sheep blood and gore. My dad was extremely amused by this.

ASAP
As Soon As Possible.
I hate that term. What does ASAP mean to you. Here’s what I think when someone tells me they want something ASAP. I think they don’t give enough of a fuck about it to care about when it gets done and what it’s priority is so why the fuck should I. I put it on the bottom of my priority list behind all the things from people who have taken the time to figure out where the work fits in their schedules. I can usually accomodate that. When you really never have any downtime, ASAP is pretty much NEVER.
This has nothing to do with my current shitty mood, though.

Do you ever want to run away and just start over?

“It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearin’ Milk Bone underwear.”

All the hilarious comments have cheered me up immensely and perhaps prevented a murder.

I got beaten up pretty badly at work yesterday. Square peg, round hole.

L took me to the Wolves game last night, part of my birthday present. Isn’t that sweet. Nose bleed seats but it was fun. We wandered around downtown afterwards while the traffic cleared.

My plants survived. It’s supposed to warm up now.

I’m not feeling very clever right now.

The technophobe in the cavalry uniform is Happy Easter, a character from Milton Caniff’s strip, Steve Canyon. OK so I’m old and had a comic obsessed youth.

I’m looking forward to going into work even less than a usual Monday today.

Last night I burned the audio book biography of Ben Franklin. I’d never get through it reading, so my next fifty or so trips between work and home will be dedicated to learning about one of my favorite historical figures. Printer, inventor, publisher, statesman, sex maniac, he had it all.

Like Fleener I rehearse anticipated arguments in my head. Compulsively. I say my parts outloud. Some folks think I’m crazy.

Last fall I planted hundreds of bulbs. It was hard work. They’re starting to come up now. It was supposed to get down into the low twenties last night. I was too lazy to go out and cover them. I AM crazy.

Yesterday morning there was one of those scary looking centi- mille- bunchapedes in the shower. It was about half drowned so I stepped on it and sent it down the drain. My foot went numb and stayed that way for about four hours.

No one else in the house has to get up this morning, but ollie the cat is sitting upstairs by the three bedroom doors meowing. He’s been doing it for a half hour. I’ve fed him, but he won’t shut up. He does this every day. As soon as he hears my feet hit the floor, he starts talking.

The black dog is scratching at my door.

OK a big pat on the back for the first person to tell me why I used this image. What’s the reference?

Happy Easter