Worked out tonight. Stationary bike and wieghts. Endorphin city here, feels pretty good. I’m determined to get back to the tennis courts before the new year. I’m having a tough time without a competive sport to get my meaness out. It’s so satisfying to hit things.

Quinn played softball in gym a couple of days ago. She hasn’t played softball more than a couple of times in her life. And even though this was a gym class not very serious game, it was co-ed and I’m sure there was some competitveness stirred up. It sounds like she was the MVP. She pitched for her team and her tennis skills carried over at the plate. She also flattened a boy on a close play at second base. She could definitely be a power hitter. We’re talking about a powerfull young woman here. She’s strong and knows how to get all of her body into the point of contact. I’ve been trying to interest her in going out for track as a thrower, but she’s not interested. She said, “I like to hit things.”
It’s great to have such an entertaining child.

Playlist for a foggy rainy October night:

The tree is down and other than aching muscles and a huge blister on my thumb where I braced it against the manifold while trying to adjust the chain tension, I’m uninjured. It took two days, the first day ended when the chain came off and we couldn’t figure out how to get it back on. On Sunday I mustered up all of my limited mechanical ability and got it going again. We called Stephan, one of Quinn’s friends and hired him to help us pile up the brush. He came up with the idea of tossing most of it out in the cemetary. It’ll decompose, right? We threw it over the fence and he dragged it out to the little grove that you can almost see on the right side of the picture. That saved us a lot of work. I plan to take a tax deduction for my contribution to the bio-mass of the cemetary. Do you think it will fly?

This tree is coming down. It’s a flowering crab apple and is very pretty for about 4 days out of a year and looks like crap for the rest of the year. It also increases the shade in my garden, which is already too shady.

One of the YaYa’s husbands has a chainsaw and Beck emailed them to see if we could use it. He replied that was concerned about safety and how much chain saw experience I had. I replied, “An old UFSF woods rat like me? My only concern is that I might not be able to use it without a fire burning around me!”

He was apologetic about doubting my chainsaw machismo, but the fact of the matter is I haven’t used a chainsaw for about thirty years. And I never actually did use one in a fire. During that summer, all of us on the crew got a chance to use the saw and we were tutored by a contractor who was a real woods rat. An Idaho redneck woodsman of the highest order, he probably fed his family with elk and trout and knew the North Fork from mine dump to pristine mountain waterfall. I’ll never forget him telling us that if you used a chainsaw all day you’d have “muscles in your shit.”

Forest Service saws were used and abused and we waisted hours trying to find one that ran or was sharp enough or schlepping back to camp to trade an unstartable one for a functioning one. When you used the saw for Smokey, you had to wear heavy chaps, and the standard Smokey gear was steel toed boots, long pants, long sleeved shirt and a hardhat. That’s how I was dressed when it was my turn to run the saw. Of course, it was the hottest day of the summer and my task was to cut out a tangled deadfall at the bottom of small revinge were they were going to do a burn in the fall. It was probably the only humid place in Northern Idaho, unless you count the bottom of a mine shaft.

Everyone was a little apprehensive about the city kid (after all I grew up in a town of twenty thousand) college boy handling a dangerous tool. But I managed to come out of the experience unscathed, but hot and exhausted. I didn’t notice any muscles in my shit though.

So wish me luck. I’m going to call the Emergency Room and North Memorial so they can prepare for limb reattachment surgery. They’re famous for it.

It’s the wife’s night out tonight and the teenager is out hangin’ with her posse. It’s MEA the annual teachers convention that closes the schools from Tursday til Monday. Q is partying tonight having negotiated a reprieve from her month long grounding. Saturday she takes the SAT’s and then she and a friend are driving down to Ames to visit L at college. I’m a little worried about turning those two loose on the ISU campus. It may never be the same.

I’m curious to see how she does on the test. She hasn’t done any tutoring but shes a sharp kid and does well in tests. Like her I had moderately good grades in high school but did well enough on the tests to get in to Carleton. I don’t think the same credentials would get me in there today. They were trying to broaden there student body at that time and I think my artwork was what really got me in. That and the fact that one of the trustees was a golfing buddy of my Dad’s It’s not what you know, but who you know.

I kind of wasted the chance at a great education there. The art department had great teachers, but for that kind of money I could have gone to a high end art school. I probably would have just pissed my time away there as well. I wasn’t really achademic material and I didn’t have much drive. I avoided the science curriculum because I heard that it was very difficult. I was a Government and International Relations major until my dad died when I was twenty. Then, without him around to dissappoint, I switched to Art. I’m not sure I could have made it through any other way. I may have gotten through Carleton with the least number of papers written and science courses taken ever. I kind of blew the Biology Achievement test out of the water, so one of my Math/Science requirements was waved. But I chickened out on the Doctor track that so many went there for. At that time, the U of M was spotting Carleton Biology majors a half a grade point.

I’d love to say it was a great decision and that art has been a great career for me, but I was pretty lazy about that too and over the years I never really applied myself to that. I’ve pretty much devoted myself to the compulsion of the moment. First the guitar, then basketball, chess, computers, now I’m obsessing about building a website that makes money. I’m sure it will just be another lame attempt at e-commerse that brings in about 5 bucks a month, but I’m learning a lot and who knows.

I guess the thing that really gets me stoked is learning. I just love to dive into a discipline and absorb everything I can about it. Up to a point. I never really push things to the logical end. Once I become moderately proficient, I loose interest. I can’t say it hasn’t been fun though.

Wow, I didn’t realize that was what I was going to write!

And this.
dooce

101 Words.

This morning I entered the office elevator on the ground floor. I used my security card and pressed three to get up to my cube farm. As I pressed the button a dismbodied voice asked, “Are you going to the fourth floor sir?” I froze, my palms began to sweat, I was thinking hard…was this a trick question? I began to stutter, “Ummm….there is no f-f-f-fourth floor!?!”
The voice said, “I mean third.”
“uh….yes?”
“My toolbox is right outside the door, be careful.”
“Thanks.”
I got off, there was a toolbox there. I still don’t know where the voice was coming from.

Wow, that’s a relief. I got pissed off and cranky last night. For awhile there I thought I was the Stepford Husband.

Is it possible to be too happy? I know, if that’s the least of my problems…shut up! You might be wondering if I can’t really write without something to bitch about and talk about a stretch, bitching about being happy.

It’s the meds of course. Since the shrinks put me on the newest stuff nothing seems to bother me. Well I do get a little irritated that since the software rollout at work, I’m clueless about solving problems that people used to rely on me to solve. But it’s a minor irritant. And it’s not like anyone else can figure the problems out. Oh and I suppose that part of it is that I really like my new boss. It’s a lot easier to go to work every day.

Well I guess I’ll just shut up and continue walking around in this slightly manic state with a shit eating grin plastered on my face. Soon people will start thinking of me as the village idiot.

Steve Rector was one of the regulars at the Black Forest Inn when I was bartending there in the late seventies. He had gradurated from Carleton the year before I came as a freshman. He was an English major who wrote poetry. At that time no one was hiring poets, so he got a job as an inhouse copywiter for Honeywell, at there corporate headquarters that was near the bar. He hated it and after a stint living in the woods, he came back to the cities and started working at the Black. At that time he was the only person who worked as a cook, a waiter and a bartender at different times. In ’73 he decided that if he was going to go back to living in the woods, he needed a reliable way of making a living so he went back to school. Medical School.

We became pretty close during his Med School years. We played tennis, basketball and softball together. We fished and we spent a lot of time exploring the countryside. He had a friend in Arizona who had some connections with the Indians down there. He had a bag full of capsules of ground peyote in his freezer. Peyote is excellent for playing tennis and for bartending. Fishing too.

Once, we were driving around rural Wisconsin, four of us, his future wife and my future wife in my Ford F-100 pickup. We saw a dirt road that wound through a cow pasture and drove right past the “road closed” sign. The road was pretty much all clay and it had been raining. After a few miles it started winding it’s way up hill through the woods. We came to a sweeping right hand turn and about half way through it, it became apparent that there just wasn’t going to be enough traction to get around it. The truck started sliding backwards toward the ditch. I finally got it stopped, with the rear tire inches from the edge of a four foot drop off, which, had we gone down into it, there would have been no alternative other than to go get the farmer and have him pull us out with his tractor. Pull us out with his tractor back onto the road that he’d put a road closed sign on. We really weren’t in any shape to be dealing with irate farmers.

The road bent into the direction that the truck was pointed so there was no chance of just letting gravity back us onto the road and backing down to level ground. We had spent a few minutes looking over the situation and shaking our heads when I came up with an idea. We needed to add a foot of width to the road. There were plenty of flat rocks in the ditch and I’d help build a wall our to flat rocks to support a pipeline at a mine site in Idaho. We decided that we needed to build a wall, five feet long and four feet high and just wide enough to get the truck turned into the middle of the road. So Steve and Nancy and Beck and I worked for about an hour and a half, stacking rocks until we had a nice little rock wall built up against the side of the ditch. I got in the truck and carefully backed it out of danger. And then backed it the rest of the quarter of mile down to level ground where we could turn around and drive away. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so good about an accomplishment. It was particularly sweet because I admired Steve so much and felt like he was the smart one in the group and the one who could really jump in and solve problems in a tough situation.

When he graduated from Med School he did his internship at the University of West Virginia Hospital’s emergency room. Beck and I went out to visit him there once and we had a great time romping in the WVA woods. After his residency he travelled in Sri Lanka and Nepal and then came back to the Twin Cities and married Nancy, another Carleton grad who waitressed at the Black. They returned to West Virginia and the ER, bought and remodeled a hunting lodge that was built into the side of a cliff, with five levels the lower four of which were tucked into a crevass in the side of the cliff. The lower level walked out onto the valley floor. I never saw it but his poetic talents gave me a vivid picture of it. They had a couple of kids and he went on to become the head of the Emergency Room at the University Hospital.

In the early eighties one of his coworkers notice that he was acting irrationally and he replied that he’d been suffering from headaches. They decided to do a CAT Scan and discovered an inoperable malignant tumor. He died nine months later. I talked to him on the phone once after I heard about it. His first word were, “The bad news is, I’ve got brain cancer and there is no good news.” We talked for a long time. I told him how much I admired him, and he thanked me for that, because he was kind of feeling that his wicked wit had made people dislike him. I really never heard anyone say anything bad about him. In fact he was kind of a folk hero the BFI crowd. The next time I called Nancy said that he had lapsed into incoherence and couldn’t talk.

Here’s to you Steve. Where did you put that peyote?