Early To Bed

Early to rise.
Makes me positive that Ben Franklin spent the better part of his adult life drunk.

Healthy?  OK, he has me there.  Thank God for that.

Wealthy?  All I can say there is, Ha!  Unless he was speaking metaphorically about the richness if life or some other foolishness.  It's entirely possible, considering he was drunk.

Wise?  Give me a fucking break!

I am up before the sun most days.  Morning chores to do before I go to work, force me to rise, if not shine, early.  In the heart of summer, it is not so bad because the days are longer and the dusky dawn comes earlier.  Now, unless there is a moon, it is full on dark when I get up.

My internal clock means that weekends are no different.  Up most days between 4:00 and 4:30AM, some mornings even the dog looks at me like I am nuts.

Once I am up and I am about my business, the day tends to go quickly.  Then I am generally in bed between 9:30 and 10:00PM or I am asleep in my chair.  I guess I am becoming sort of an old fuddy duddy.  Wait, who am I kidding?  I became one of those years ago!

Yesterday was no exception to the routine.  Up early to do chores and then service my windrower so I can try and get one last cutting of hay after the dew is off the grass.  My shop is about 5 miles from the farm and the windrower is very slow, so it takes over an hour to make the trip after greasing, oiling and adjusting.  It is a late 1960s John Deere 800 that has seen many hours.  I always cross my fingers that one of the 4 million intertwined and timed parts doesn't come flying off or apart.  Oil, grease and regular maintenance are key but it is old and there is one hell of a lot going on.  The sickle is moving back and forth.  The rake reel is spinning.  The draper belts are feeding the cut hay into the steel crimp rolls, the clutches are controlling the drive wheels, the belts are spinning shafts that drive what seems to be about 2 miles of chains.  The old Chrysler slant six that powers the whole contraption purrs like a cat.  The rest is noisy, greasy and, as in the case of yesterday afternoon, frustrating as hell.

I made it through about 10 acres of my planned 20, before a chain broke.  #60 chain no less.  In one of the many virtually unaccessible nooks and crannies that the men who engineered this torture device to frustrate those of us who are foolish enough to continue operating them.

So, today I will drive the pecker back to my shop (I will fix it another day) and then rake the hay that I have down and if the dew is not too heavy, I will round bale it tomorrow after work.

Hey!  Guess what?  Daylight savings time means I will be going home in the dark soon too!

Thanks Ben!  Fuck you!

On the bright side, I think I got sympathy sex last night!  Although that meant staying "up" past my bed time!

Joseph

Not good enough my friend.  Not good enough by a long shot.  You know who we are.  We aren't the kind of people you just dump and run.  Period.

We are all adult enough in this little circle of friends (that is what we are you know) to handle real explanations and certainly deserve a bit of warning.

I know that you will read this eventually and you should know that I am pissed.  Just as a friend would be.

Robert

A Young Man's Fantasy

My sister sent me some pictures from a concert she and a bunch of her friends attended last weekend.  Obviously, neither she or I are of college age anymore...long past actually, but coincidentally, I had shared a college memory with a couple of friends here just a few weeks ago.  The coincidence of her attending this particular concert, and getting pictures taken arm and arm with the headliner.....uncanny.

When I asked my sister if she had remembered my story AND if she had asked the headliner if she remembered, unfortunately she had not.....damned old age!  (and she is younger than I am)

Confused yet?  Here is the story.

I worked my way through college.  I had no loans, no financial aid, no scholarships and no help from home.  A full credit load and several jobs.   I was a janitor on weekends in a residence hall.  I tended bar.  I worked for a couple local farmers.  But, my favorite job was for the University as a manager of Technical Services - Tech Crew for short.  We were behind the scenes for the vast majority of University events.  We set up tables and chairs for banquets.  We worked in the Center for the Arts hanging lights, doing stage set up and the like. If there was an event or show we were there setting it up and tearing it down.  We worked for a wide variety of venues. Small one and two man shows, The Milwaukee Symphony, The Warsaw Ballet, Juice Newton, Meatloaf, Dan Seals, Richard Marx and the most memorable, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

For all these performers we were essentially stationary road crew.  We would unload the trucks and help their crew set up.  Depending on the size of the group, we might set up sound and lights owned by the university and run the sound and lights for the group.  The bigger groups obviously brought their own crew, but they always were happy to have our help and it was an opportunity to learn technique that we could apply to the smaller groups.  I was the only clean cut guy on the crew.  They were all hippies and a good group of guys...I was the boss.

We were short handed for Joan Jett.  After helping them unload and set up, we divvied up the jobs that were not quite as fun as sound and lights.  I drew the short straw for front stage security.  We didn't see Joan until the end of the sound check and she came out on the stage....a very hard body all in black leather.  Standing next to me, she came up to about my chest.  She was a short gal.  Today, she shows her age (35 years later so do I) but then, she was definitely boner material.

On to the show.  I am standing with my back to the stage watching the crowd.  From where I stand, the sound is not great, but Joan works the crowd with all the favorites.  The few times I am able to look back, she is working hard, as is the band...sweating and rocking.  The night is uneventful until the last number before intermission.  Two gals are almost directly in front of me and they get into an argument.  Pushing, shoving, pulling hair and scratching.  A genuine cat fight.  I wade in and get between them and break up the fight, getting a nice fingernail scratch on my neck in the process.  I hold them apart long enough for two of my fellow techies to get there and to separately take them to exits and remove them from the concert.  I backed up to the stage and stood there until intermission.  Just before Joan left the stage, she tapped me on the head with her foot, which startled me and I turned around.  She kneeled down in all her tight black leather glory and told me "nice job there!"  I was floored.  All I could say was "thanks!" and look stupid.

Most nights, after work the bars were usually closed, so we would all walk down the street to a house where several on the crew lived that we called "the house of breakfast."  We had Grain Belt beer on tap and usually ended up leaving around breakfast time...hence the name.

Back to the concert.  Intermission ends and Joan and the band return to the stage and rock just as hard through the second set as they did for the first.  The second set was uneventful for me and at at the end, we followed the usual routine of helping to take down trusses and load trucks with lights, sound equipment, instruments and the like.  Usually the band gets on the bus and they are off to the next gig and the trucks have to race to catch up with them.  As we are loading out, there is Joan Jett smoking a cigarette and watching us with a couple crew members and some of the band.  I don't really remember who else was there because I was looking at Joan (as was the rest of our crew I am sure).  She had changed out of the tight leather and was wearing jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt and was very obviously braless.   It is lucky that we didn't damage anything we were loading.  Being ballsy and thinking about her telling me I had done a good job breaking up the cat fight, on a return trip from the trucks, I swerved over to her and asked her to come have a few beers with us at the house of breakfast.  She said, "Sounds like fun.  Where is the house of breakfast?"  I explained it to her and we finished loading out.  The whole time I am thinking, "Wow, I talked to Joan Jett and her rock hard titties!"  Now, I was pretty realistic and realized that she was just being nice, but it was still a fun fantasy to think that she would come drink beer with me!  And who knows!  Maybe my prowess breaking up two girls scratching at each other had her interested in more than just my beer!  A fun fantasy, but I knew better.

Anyhow, at some point during the load out, Joan disappeared and we finished up the job.  We all walked to the house of breakfast for a few beers.  A couple of the guys were giving me some shit and could not believe that I had the balls to ask her for a beer.  They were laughing, but I know the admired me asking.

So, we are sitting at the bar in the house, drinking ice cold Grain Belt beer and laughing and joking as we always do when in walks Joan Jett and I think her road manager.  You could have heard a pin drop!  I jumped off my stool and got behind the bar and gave them each a cold beer (in the cleanest glasses I could find).  We made some small talk.  They drank some beer.  I had a boner.

After a couple beers, a couple of joints got passed around (believe it or not, I always passed on the pot....no interest...it did nothing for me).  Everyone was laughing and then Joan brought out some coke...that was the end for me.  The fantasy ended at that point.  She hung around for another half hour or so (by that time it was approaching 5AM) and she said her good byes and left.  Before she left however, she did come over  to me, gave me a hug and a peck on the cheek and said, "thanks for inviting me kid, it has been fun!"  Off she went.  There I stood, again with a boner.  She called me kid....I was (and am) only about 4 years younger than her.  It didn't matter, I was still drooling.

An Era Ends Happily

One of my earlier blogs on here dealt with change and the pending sale of my Great Uncle's house.  The closing on the sale was Friday (yesterday).

On Wednesday, we were hit with a pretty major wind storm.  We had waves on the beach higher than in the last 30 years.  My fire ring was washed away and the font stoop on my house was about 3 ft from where the waves ended their  violent travels up the beach.  The windows got a good washing from spray and my wife's comfy swinging chair blew away (to be recovered this morning from up in the woods behind the house.).

I saw none of this because I was out in a bucket truck attempting to put up lines and clear downed trees.  I have not heard what the winds gusted to or even what the sustained speed was, but there was lots of damage.  I came in at around 3AM, to my own house without power and slept for approximately 2 hours before going out again on Thursday for another 17 hours of repair.

At one point, I drove by my Uncle's house and quickly turned around in the driveway to make sure there was no tree on it or other damage that was immediately visible.  I honestly don't remember if it was Wednesday night or Thursday Night.  After about 6 or 7 hours of sleep, myself and my crew were back at repairs on Friday morning early.  Every occupied home and business had been restored on Thursday evening and no one had been without power for more than 20 hours - most significantly less and Friday we had 5 unoccupied homes to make repairs in order to get power to.  I honestly did not even think about the closing that day.  I had already signed the necessary paperwork and did not need to attend the closing.  Around 3 PM yesterday afternoon, I came in the office for a quick bite to eat and as I was sitting there the gal in the office said to me, "so!  you are officially down one home today!"  I was a little puzzled and then realized, "Wow!  That was today!  I completely forgot!"  We had a couple more hours of work ahead of us but, I called the young fellow who was buying the home and told him that I would meet him there when I was done and give him my keys, the garage door opener and just give him a couple tips on the house and property.  He sounded excited.

I remember my first house. I bought it before my wife and I got married.  It was in a small town in Southwest Wisconsin and my mortgage after down payment was $14,000.  We were living about 4 hours away from the home and I was scheduled to start a new job about 30 days after the closing.  As a side story, I left a job on a Friday, got married on a Saturday, left the state alone on a Sunday and started a new job on Monday.....I won't kid you and say it was not stressfull!  In any case, I traveled for the closing and I remember vividly how excited I was to actually own my own home!  I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of an empty house.....an empty house that I owned!!!!! the night of the closing. It was an old house that needed some work, but it was a great house!  Big! Built in 1890 something.  Huge kitchen, dining room, living room, parlor and 4 bedrooms!  I don't remember exactly, but I think my monthly mortgage payment on a 15 year note was something like $170.  With extra payments, I actually had the house paid off in 3 years....just in time to get another job and another house!

In any case, I could relate to this young man's excitement.  He and his soon to be wife have a 3 year old son.  As I said in that earlier blog, this town needs young couples and kids.   I showed him where the septic cover was, where the clean out was (all buried under the dirt and hard to find when a pump out is necessary).  I showed him which breakers turned on the water and the water heater and I shook his hand and congratulated him on owning his first house.  I think I already mentioned that he was excited.

As I drove out, I thought about my Great Uncle and Aunt and thought what a change the old house was about to go through.  Good changes.  The most important changes?  A change in who mows the lawn, who checks on the house after a storm, who makes the minor repairs that every home, occupied or not needs from time to time.  A change for the best.

Now all that is left is to pay off the final debts of my Uncle and Aunt and close the estate.  The bills will be paid next week and the estate will be closed as soon as I receive satisfaction paperwork.  By my calculation, I will end up with $78.78 in my pocket when it is all done.  I am almost as happy as the new owners.

The Smell Of Blood

Some of you know that I worked in two very well known packing houses where meat was processed.  The first job, in the engineering department of a processor that has a first name (wink), was a job where I did a bit of traveling and did electrical surveys of several of their plants and also worked on two that they were building.  I worked on the electrical layout of grow-out facilities and on fiber optic communications backbones for plant automation.  This was a good job, and interesting, but it was the second packing house job that was the most fun.  This job was actually a subsidiary job that followed the first one.  I had been in the plant I ended up at full time several times as an engineer and got what I considered to be a very good job as a maintenance supervisor because of the first job.  Some of the stories that I told on that other site occurred while working this job.  I actually met my wife there.  I joke many times that the smell of blood could not overcome the smell of romance…or perhaps it enhanced the romance.

Overall, the guys and gals I worked with at this plant were a good group.  Fun loving, hard working people.  It was always in my nature to start early and work late and I covered all three shifts during my tenure, working double shifts most weekends.  We ran 7 days a week.  The first year, I worked 362 days and as I said, most weekends I worked doubles on Saturday and Sunday.  It honestly never seemed like work, because we had a lot of fun on the job.

Contrary to popular myth, the packing houses I worked in were spotless facilities.  The quality of the products, both raw and processed, was excellent.  The whole “lips and assholes” premise is bullshit.  I still eat the products made in those facilities and have absolutely no qualms about it.

My wife worked on the line “molding” meat.  Essentially what this means, is that she worked on a high speed packaging machine loading stacks of bologna, ham, turkey and whatnot into the formed packages prior to them being vacuum packed.  Yes, those packages of lunch meat that you buy in the grocery store are loaded into the package by hand.  Many times slices must be counted and inspected as part of the process.  The packaging machine would evacuate and seal either two or four packages at a time and would run 80-100 cycles per minute.  On our particular lines, 4 “molders” would be working in order to keep up with production requirements.  The lines were moving!  When I first started, one of the mechanics who worked for me asked, “want to see something funny?”  “Sure,” I replied.  He reached up and pushed the emergency stop button.  The line quit moving and all the gals that were loading meat started leaning in the opposite direction of the movement of the line and two of them actually fell over.  The brain and perception is an amazing thing.  They were pissed and swearing.  We were laughing.  My wife was one of those gals.

As I said, the people working were always up for fun.  By today’s standards, the sexual harassment lawyers would have a field day…for both the men and the women. If a line was down and you needed to work on it, it was standard practice to determine who was working on the line and on what side.  That way you could avoid being groped and likely slamming your head into the bottom of the equipment when you crawled under it.  Anyone who worked there, soon became “stump broke” in short order and you learned not to flinch when someone grabbed or fondled because that just ended up in a lump on the head or the whole room laughing.  I remember standing at the toolroom window, waiting for the attendant to bring me a part I needed to repair a line and having one of the the mechanics who worked for me come up behind me, stick his hands in my pockets and begin to dry hump my ass.  The attendant coming to the window witnessed this and witnessed my non reaction and laughed and said to me, “well, you are officially an old timer now.”  This sort of “insubordination” would never be tolerated in some of the places I worked later and quite frankly, it is a shame because it really did build camaraderie and mutual respect in spite of its appearance.  I was still the boss, but I was not a stuffed shirt who could not be trusted.  We really were a team.

When I started, I went through the usual orientation and paperwork routine that is common on most first days.  Sign up for insurance, fill out W4, figure out where the bathrooms are….the usual.  The second day, I started in what was called the “Turkey University” (and now you may be able to guess who I worked for).  Every salaried employee was required to go through this session, which lasted one to two weeks.  You started out on the live dock unloading live birds from the semi trailers and worked your way through the plant on most (not all) jobs and at the end of the session you were loading finished product onto the trucks and had a forklift license.  It was an excellent program that gave every salaried individual a taste of what it was like to work the line jobs.  Taste is actually an excellent pun, because when working in further processing, where the meat was actually cooked, the knock ends that oozed out of the casings when the bologna and other products were cooked were quite delicious warm!

Basically, in a nutshell, the process was as follows:  Live birds are stunned, killed and bled out.  Feathers are plucked, the birds are inspected by the USDA (at many stages during the process), eviscerated (gutted), cleaned, cooled, trimmed and cut.  The meat is then processed depending on what final product is being made by being ground, spiced, cured, mixed and then finally stuffed into what looks like a 6ft long hot dog the diameter of your average slice of lunch meat.  These hotdogs are put on racks and cooked.  Once cooked, they go to a cooler, and then a blast freezer (-40 deg F, which puts about a ½ inch crust on the outer ring to make them slice easier).  From the blast freezer the racks of meat are brought to the slice/pack room and are sliced by a Formax hydraulically operated slicing machine (wicked blades!).  Stacks of meat are then weighed, inspected, sometimes counted and installed in the vacuum formed pockets and then sealed and boxed and shipped to your supermarket.  There are many sub processes and variations depending on the product being packaged and made.  For instance, the deli sliced meats are folded before packaging and then only a partial vacuum is placed on the package (so as not to crush the meat) and CO2 is injected into each package to displace O2 which will cause the meat to turn green.  It is all a complex process that very efficiently blends automation with good old fashioned hand labor.  Quality and Cleanliness is always at the top of the list.

It could be a dangerous place to work as well.  Sharp knives, moving equipment and high production can lend themselves to accidents and injury.  More than once I was the guy searching through turkey necks or a tub of meat for someone’s finger.  Finding it and putting it on ice and rushing to the hospital hoping it could be reattached.  One accident that I will never forget (and will not go into great detail here for obvious reasons) was when a fellow in the offal (gut) department decided to unplug a Hobart grinder with his foot and got sucked in.  We had to cut his leg out of the machine with a plasma cutter.  He did not lose it and recovered.  It was an awful situation.

One time, the Hobart grinder that was used to pump offal (guts) into the rendering truck came apart and turkey guts were covering the floor of the truck garage.  This was second shift and because production could not be stopped and no one from a further processing area or cooked product area could be in a raw area, 3 of us supervisors spent the whole shift and into third shift shoveling turkey guts up and into the rendering trailer.  Not a fun job.

I had been working there for over 2 years and was on third shift at the time.  I was walking through the live and evisceration area, making sure that all the maintenance projects that I had assigned my guys for the evening were complete.  The cleanup crew was busy spraying caustic on the floors and then following that with highly chlorinated water and then finally a steam rinse.  The floors were steaming as I watched the cleanup guys dragging their hoses away and the lines were starting.  Already birds had been loaded onto the freshly cleaned and sanitized shackle conveyors and were making their way through the evisceration process.  Once the birds were eviscerated, the carcass was dumped into what was called a chiller.  It was full of cold water and paddles moved the carcasses from one end to the other where they went up a short conveyor and slid down a chute to be rehung in shackles for a trip through the boning process.  The purpose of the chiller was to bring the carcass temperature down to approximately 46 deg F because the meat could be removed from the bone much more completely and efficiently with the carcass at that temperature.  At any given time there was approximately 3000lbs of birds in each of two chillers.

As I was walking around the exit end of one of the chillers, floors still steaming beneath my feet, a slight misalignment of the exit conveyor caused two turkey carcasses to drop to the floor right in front of me.  Thinking nothing of it (the floor was steaming and had just been sanitized with chlorine), I bent over and picked up the birds and threw them back in the chiller.  No sooner had I done this than I felt a small hand on my shoulder and spun around to be face to face with the USDA chief veterinarian who was in charge of all inspection in the facility.  She reached in her pocket and pulled out a tag and handed it to me and told me to shut down the chiller and tag it out.  The tag said, “do not operate by order of the United States Government.”  Her day was just beginning and mine was coming to a close with a kick to the head.  I did as I was told and as I was doing so, she was paging the plant manager, the plant engineering manager and the production manager and summoning them to the scene.  Once they arrived, we headed to her office.  As all of this is going on, I am certain that I will be fired.  I am hoping that when they fire me, they will not dock my pay for the 3000 lbs of birds that I am certain the USDA will order to offal and disposal.

Once we all reach her office, she proceeds to read all involved the riot act.  I think the words “idiots” and “lack of training” was used quite a number of times.  I am still certain that I am fired.  She turns to me and demands, “Explain yourself! Why would you do something so ignorant and blatantly against proper procedure?”  I could only be truthful and say, “The floor had just been sanitized and was still steaming.  I was the first person to walk through and I could see the cleanup crew dragging their hoses out.  I would eat mashed potatoes off that floor (this got some raised eyebrows from my bosses who were sitting there silently staring – glaring at me).  I never thought a thing of it.  Those birds were just as clean as they were when they fell off the conveyor.  I was wrong, I am sorry.”

She was silent for a moment and finally replied, “and that is exactly the reason and the only reason why I am going to let you off the hook.  Don’t ever do something so stupid again or you will be responsible for a whole lot of meat being tanked and a complete drain and reclean of a chiller!”  She looked at the production manager and said, “you can start the line.”  He practically jumped out of his chair and ran down to remove her tag and get the line started again.

We all got up to leave and I am relieved at not being responsible for a loss of product, but I am figuring that I will still be fired for doing something so boneheaded.  As we are walking down the steps, the Engineering Manager, my boss, pushes past me without a word and heads for his office.  I plan to follow.  The Plant Manager, who is directly behind me on the stairs, puts his hand on my shoulder, stops me and leans in to whisper in my ear, “next time, look around before you do that.”  He pushes past me also and heads back to his office.  I am floored.  It is never mentioned again.

I had lots of interesting experiences in the packing house and quite frankly a whole lot of fun.  When I moved on from that job, it was bitter sweet.  Some of the friends that I made there have died.  Some of the friends have drifted away due to distance.  Some of the friends I am still in contact with.  Every once in a while, someone will stop in to see me here, some that I barely remember.  They have come here as part of a vacation and decided to look me up.  I guess I made an impression.  Whether I remember them or not, they all made an impression on me.  I left there with a new wife.  There are stories about how that relationship developed that I could tell, but perhaps I will save them for another time.  I left there with a whole raft of experiences and new skills.  I left there with the smell of blood still fresh in my mind.  It remains there to this day.

Out of the Frying Pan

And into the water.

I took my first swim of "summer" last night.  The air temperature was 64 F.  This made the water seem much warmer than it actually was.  I guess it might have been warmer if I had been wearing a suit.

This has been the summer of no summer for us.  Cool to say the least.  Usually in May, I am launching the pontoon boat that I turned into a raft for the kids (complete with diving board).  With the kids gone and the water so cold from nearly 100% ice cover this winter and a late break up, I just did not have the ambition to do it.  so there it sits on my ramp, forlorn and forgotten and unused.  I sank a 55 gallon drum full of cement with a long chain through the ice as an anchor years ago.  It is in about 30 feet of water.  Another hindrance to the launch of the raft was the fact that my float (an old heavy bleach bottle) that I tie off to the chain about 4 feet below the surface to avoid being captured in the ice....was captured in the ice and I will either have to dive for the chain or grapple.  My wife and I have only been fishing once this summer.  We told ourselves early on that we were going to try for at least once a week.  Needless to say we did not make it.  I bought an old boat about a month ago.  It is in remarkable condition and will be very nice...if I ever get it in the water.  It is almost too late for this year. 

Now the streets are being rolled up in this little town.  I always loved fall.  But we have had fall all summer this year and a bit of heat would be nice.  It is likely that I will need to put a fire in the stove this weekend because predicted highs are in the low 50's with lows in the 40's.

It would be nice to have a few more hours in the day....but then days are getting shorter too.

I need to figure out a way to become less busy and still be able to pay the bills.