Rambling Man

I have been traveling this week to some really cold places and it is not that pleasant.  I had enough guts or craziness ( you may need to choose) to schedule a 3 city trip in the winter.  Traveling in the winter is a crap shoot at best, a storm somewhere in the US can wreck the best laid plans for connections, but it is so damn cold this year that the weather cannot really mess up the flying.   I was in Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wisconsin and those folks have not seen a mud puddle for months, wow !, it is frozen up tight.  I don't miss one second of that stuff.  My rental car had heated seats, so one body part could be kept warm.    I visited a couple of the kids in Milwaukee and they were nearly frozen in place but managing to survive.  I hope they don't lose their will against the cold. 

I have been continuing to run on the treadmill and have been upping my speed a little and I am feeling pretty good.  I could have run outside last weekend, but I was really busy planting a bunch of pine trees I purchased from the state of Tennessee nursery.  My knees are still sore on Wednesday after all the bending and kneeling to get them planted.   I ran tonite and I felt great, just had to be careful around the soreness.
 The biggest part of my outdoor tree work is completed.  I removed a bunch of trees in the front yard that were killing a great view of the West.  I have some more stumps to deal with, but I can spend more time on other garden projects and some running as the weather is quickly warming.
The flower picture was taken by Linda last weekend, and this week the daffodils will start to bloom.  And bloom they will, I planted about 500 bulbs during the knee recovery for Linda.  We are going to let every know it is Spring and 500 yellow daffodils should be a great way to scream it out.

I   titled this one  'Rambling Man' and I am  gonna ramble on.  

Many times you measure time with when you get a new vehicle.  So it is new red Chevy truck time of my life.  Actually my third new red truck-- one Dodge, one Ford and now the red Chevy.    I just picked up my fleet vehicle for work and now have a new red Chevy pick up to drive courtesy of Buckman.  A great perk and Linda and I will both not own a car!!  Strange but true.  We need to look into how we do insurance now, if I drive someone else stuff and screw up-- well I need to find out.   I have a 10 year old Volvo that is solid as a rock with lousy paint and I think I will donate it to our church or some other organization that deals with using cars to finance their works.   I hope it can help make someone life a little better. It has treated me great and is still fun to drive. I love those turbo thingies.

My brother and I visiting on the phone last week and we at one time worked at the same paper mill and actually at the same time for a year or so.  He was in shipping and I was snot nosed Process Engineer.   We were talking about various people that worked there and got stumped on an operator in the pulp mill that I last saw in 1989.   Neither of us could remember his name, we could only remember he drove a Ford pick up and had a wife that out weighed him be 200 pounds--he was pretty small.  Why do you remember the kind of pickup truck????  That is useless information.  Really,  why?  I remembered the last name today after several days of searching that cloud in my head.  I remembered his first name after 3 days--Dwight-- and the his last name as I was trying to take a nap today but just could not let it happen.   Dwight Miner was the operator's name..... I better write this one down--it burned up a lot of brain power.   It is amazing what is stuck in our brains after 25 years.... I go a room and forget why I was there and have to go back to where I started and remember why I went to the room but forgot why I was there... Everybody has done it, but if I can remember this worthless crap I should remember that I wanted a blue shirt or trash bag or pencil or charger or....  

I could ramble more, but you could already be bored.  I signed up for the Tennessee State Finals, which is held in June this year.  Hopefully I can get qualified for the Nationals in Minneapolis in 2015.  I will keep my hand in and see what happens.

Stay warm, sometimes that may be the only thing that keeps us going.