Saint Kohoutek

Photo Copyright - Victor Nuno @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/victornuno/22886588/

The wind has died and the stars are breaking through the haze of city lights. Sixty degrees at eight o’clock in the evening, and I am breaking a sweat in my coat. The dog trots ahead in the darkness, weaving across yards, following the scents of hidden creatures that have passed this way before. We round the corner and climb the hill, past the Russian Orthodox Skete tucked into the row of ramblers and split levels, distinguished only by the incongruence of the wooden gate, and the small Orthodox cross atop the roof. The dog sniffs out the wild garden growing in the front yard, and somewhere in the darkness, the burning eyes of icons watch us pass. My breath grows heavy, and my footsteps slow as we climb the hill.

Above the stars strain to shine through, and I try to make out the familiar shapes of constellations. Here in the city the figures of men and animals are incomplete specks of light, waiting for a divine hand to sweep away the screen of city light that keeps them hidden like sacred mysteries. I have seen the priests before, taking out their trash, looking like anachronisms in their long gray beards. How did they end up half a world away from their Russian home, on this frozen prairie? Three hundred years after Hennepin and the Jesuits, they have come to minister to a hand full of immigrants trying to hold onto their past. We pass in the dark, silent as savages.

My eyes surrender to the haze, and my mind wanders back down to the streets around us. The windows of homes glow with the flickering blue of televisions, and honey yellow incandescence. The dog pauses, and whines at something hidden, still as an icon in the shadows. I listen, but there is only the chant of cars passing on the highway. I give the leash a shake and we continue on our round.

How many seasons has it been? How many times have we circled these streets through the exile of winter, the soft promise of spring, the erotic embrace of summer, and the warm parting kiss of autumn? Sniffing the scents on the night air, listening to the rustle of leaves and the hollow call of owls, searching the branches of oaks for their silhouettes.  We repeat this journey like pilgrims, returning again to search the sky for the answers surely hidden behind the sheltering heavens.

Welcome to Anoka County USA

Another activity filled weekend at 20 Prospect. We are in the midst of the fall sports season, so the weekend was spent chanting dark incantations around the pool with the swimming cult, and sacrificing small animals to the hockey God’s at the SuperRink-TM.

Lil’ Miss 20 Prospect had another swim meet this weekend, in the far flung northern reaches of Anoka County, “Home of the Mullet Since 1982″. Anoka, or “El Norte” as some call it, is what can best be described as an “Ex-urban” area, meaning it is a rural county that in the last 10-15 years has become home to more and more suburbanites, looking for cheap land to build starter castles. The result is a bizarre amalgamation of soccer Mom’s, and bait shops.

To Twin Citians, Anoka is synomous with the redneck lifestyle. Our late governor, Jesse “the Mouth” Ventura, won Anoka handily during his surprise election. Which should not have surprised anyone, as professional wrestling is right in the Anoka County wheelhouse.

Of course, as a contrairian, I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for Anoka County. Living in the far southern fringe of the county, I have some affiliation with it. Although I lack the snowmobiles, and pickup truck required to make me a true Anokan, I compensate by using my wardrobe of acid wash jeans, and Slayer T-shirts to fit in. Anoka County gets a lot of grief, and folks look down their snooty noses at it, but I have to say most residents I have met love the place, and don’t much care what some yuppified resident of Minneapolis thinks of us. Besides, Slayer Rawks!

I am proud to report that lil’ Miss 20 P lowered her personal best times in all of her events on Saturday. Which was a relief, as I hate to make her sleep in the dog’s crate when she doesn’t. I know, parenting is all about tough love. She has to learn the tough lessons, that Mommy and Daddy don’t love slow kids. That’s just what good parents do. (Relax. I’m kidding!) No, she swam her little heart out, and we were very proud, not just because of her times, but because of how hard she worked to achieve it.

Now we are torn. Do we let her swim the 2012 Games in London, at age 12, or do we hold her back to the 2016 games in Rio? Sure, 12 is young to be in the Olympics, but her coaches know a guy who can fake the necessary documents. It would be a good experience for her, and help her to be prepared when Rio comes around and she is favored to win the Gold. Man, swim parenting is all about tough decisions. Agassi’s Dad had it easy.

As for 20 Prospect Jr., he will be leaving us soon for a great Canadian boarding school that focuses on developing those all important hockey skills, like fighting. That’s the problem with the youth game in the U.S. All these mamby-pamby soccer Mom’s have taken the toughness out of the sport. They make the kids wear facemasks for cryin’ out loud! How are they going to learn to fight if they can’t hit each other in the face? It’s no wonder we haven’t won Gold since 1980.

So as you can see, life is busy at 20 Prospect now that the Front Porch has been packed up for the winter. So forgive the short post today. Our regularly scheduled pathetic prose, poor punctuation, and embarrasing stories resume tomorrow.

Eating Fleischkuechle at the Golden Café – Stanton, N.D. 1993

In my memory it was late winter. But in my memory, in this part of North Dakota, it is always late winter. Bleak, wind blasted winter, where the icy wind tears at your cuffs like an ornery dog.

I was in the lignite fields of North Dakota working at the Leland Olds Station, just east of Stanton. We had a vendor there with us, who had invented an isokinetic sampling probe for drawing coal samples from the coal lines leading from the pulverizer to the burners. This was a bit of an experimental project for us, and our local guru from the Denver office, a white haired mid 30’s engineer named Scott, was running the show to try to figure out if it would be worth our while to sign up to buy and distribute this invention. My friend Kent and I were just along for the ride, as it was a slack time in the office and we figured we’d try to make ourselves useful in the field.

The vendor was from Germany, and had brought along his teenage son to help with the demonstration. A sure sign we were dealing with the classic nutty professor entrepreneur. Spend enough time in any engineering field and you will come across these guys. Usually they are brilliant scientists and engineers, who were born with a lack of common sense, and personal hygiene. Most eek out a living as consultants, and spend their down time working in their basements and garages, dreaming up new inventions.

The nearest hotel was over in Washburn, which we made the decision to stay at for only a few days. It was a clean enough place, but eating at the same diner every night, and drinking 3.2 Bud & Bud Light at the local on/off sale bar got old in a hurry. Our lunches were spent at the Golden Fleischkuechle in Stanton, which was an interesting little café on the main street. Interesting because the proprietors, and their teenage daughter, spoke German. A language that oddly enough still exists in small towns sprinkled around Missouri and North Dakota, so isolated from the outside world that their inhabitants have been able to maintain their immigrant traditions far longer than those that settled in more populous places.

The first week was entertaining enough. I had taken a liking to fleischkuechle, which is a sort of deep fried ground beef patty that traces its origins back to the Fatherland, and really, what is there not to like about that? But I think the enjoyment of life in Stanton and Washburn went out of us one evening when our German visitor screwed up his nose, held his glass of 3.2 beer at arms length and said accusingly “Zis iz beir????” There wasn’t much point in defending it, so I just sighed, shrugged my shoulders and said, “well, that’s what they’re calling it here”. Shortly thereafter, we decided the 2 hour drive from Bismarck wasn’t such a bad commute after all.

After the Nutty German Inventor had returned to the Fatherland, we relocated back down to Bismarck. I always wondered what the German thought flying into a town named after Bismarck. If he beamed with Teutonic pride, it sure didn’t show. Mostly he exuded incredulity, and disgust at his surroundings. Fair enough, North Dakota, like fleischkuechle, is a bit of an acquired taste. The wind out there on the prairie was evil. It cut against your skin like blades of grass. Try as they might to keep the dust down from the coal pile, in that cold dry season, it found it’s way into everything.

Each day when work ended, we’d pick up a six pack at the gas station in Washburn, for the drive down Hwy 83 to Bismarck. We decided that our time in Washburn had qualified us to live the high life at the Bismarck Radisson, right next to the convention center in downtown Bismarck. I think it cost us a princely $59 / night at the time, but they had Killian’s on top in the bar, and after a week of 3.2 Bud, that alone was worth the price of admission.

It was just three of us on the project, after that. Scott, my friend Kent, and I. We were spending days drawing samples from the coal pipes, chasing our tails trying to adjust the air flow, and balance the coal flow between the lines. It was maddening work, and being three overly intellectual types with too much time on our hands, we spent a great deal of our time in the car arguing about the philosophic and scientific merits of our efforts. I contended that the pulverized coal was a two phase, compressible flow, the little solid particles being carried within the air stream, and that any attempt to balance out the coal flow by adjusting the airflow was pointless.

Each pulverizer had four pipes leading out the top of it, running varying distances, and twisting turns, to the four corners of the furnace. The goal was to balance the flow of the coal so that we could control the fuel / air mixture at the burners, and better reduce the emissions of Nitrogen Oxide. Scott and Kent both argued that with enough science, it was possible, they only needed to fine tune the isokinetic probe to be able to accurately measure the coal flow within the pipes, then adjust accordingly. I argued that even if they could achieve that, the data would just be a snapshot in time, dependent on many variables beyond their control, each one of which would throw off the balance as soon as their backs were turned. Most days we were back in Bismarck long before the argument was finished.

We’d shower, scrub the coal dust from under our fingers, inside of our ears, and around the collar of our shirts, and then meet in the bar for a drink before dinner. After a beer or two we’d head out to the Ground Round, or some other chain restaurant for dinner. Scott would look at Kent and I, both in our early 20’s, and ask “Should we get a pitcher?”, and so the long beer soaked evenings would begin. For our part, we always said yes. We knew that Scott really wanted it, and who were we to deny him? This scene repeated itself for days, until one morning Scott met us in the lobby for the drive out to the plant and told us “Sorry guys, but I am just going to stay in tonight. I woke up this morning, fully clothed, sitting on the bed with my laptop open. I just can’t keep up with you young guys, so I’m going to stop trying.”

I don’t think I had ever been more relieved to not drink beer. Kent agreed, we both had been quietly amazed by Scott’s apparent drinking problem and we were wondering how much longer we could continue to keep up with him.

The job continued for a few more days before the phone rang, and my boss in Denver informed me he’d found me a paying gig out in Pennsylvania. So I packed up the Jeep, and started the drive back to the Twin Cities, across the long bumpy expanse of I94, to fly out to Scranton. Such is the life of the service engineer. You never know when the call will come, or where your next stop will be. Driving that interminable highway home, with the wind pushing me along, I wondered how much longer I could keep it up. I was into my 3rd year of this life, and had already worked in close to 40 states. Pennsylvania held some hope and promise of paying a visit to friends and family. But for the most part, I think I just looked forward to seeing the color green again. For years after that trip to Stanton, little flecks of coal dust would settle onto my dashboard whenever I turned the defroster on.

Descent into Keene Valley – 1990

There are times and places that float like a mist in the border country of my memory. If I try to focus my mind on them, they slip away like fog, leaving behind scraps of scenes that could be either dreams, or memory. Try to pin them down, and they disappear only to reappear later, in the periphery of my vision, when the seasons change and my senses recognize a forgotten scent. Then the mist creeps back into the corners of my consciousness, and I remember.

I had made the drive down to rural Hartford, from our apartment in the country that morning, jacked up on cheap coffee, replaying over in my mind how I would answer their questions, and sell myself. With sweaty palm’s the drive seemed to take forever, but I made it in time for the afternoon interview. This was my third round of interviews with ABB Combustion Engineering and it would all be made, or broken by this trip. I needed this job badly, before graduation dumped me into the back bedroom of 20 Prospect, over educated, under employed, and awash in debt.

The interviews had ended well, but late. I took my suit coat off, and loosened my tie, not wanting to let the feeling go. Alone, in a strange city, with nothing but my car, and a briefcase full of empty notebooks, and corporate brochures, I felt so grown up. No, I wanted to savor this feeling of freedom.

I climbed back into the car, and began the four hour drive back to Potsdam. It was the middle of the week, and I had blown off class to make the interview. Winter was ending in Connecticut, and already the brown grass was showing through the scraps of snow around the office parks. If all went well, I could be back in her room by 9 o’clock. She would want to know everything about the interview, what they asked me, what the position offered. I couldn’t wait to tell her.

Traffic was flowing fine all the way up I91 to Springfield, where I pulled onto the Massachusetts Turnpike and headed west. By the time I reached Albany, and turned onto the Northway, the sun had already set. Traffic thinned as I got north of Glens Falls and the highway began climbing into the edges of the Adirondacks. Just tractor-trailers, and myself, climbing and descending the hills, playing leapfrog on our way North.

Exiting the Northway, onto US 9, I left even the trucks behind, and turned up and into the mountains. When US 9 turned off towards Elizabethtown I continued on to NY 73, and the trees closed in on the sides of the road, until only a tunnel of pines remained. The banks of snow rose like hay bails along the shoulder. The road narrowed, but I only drove faster. It was past 7 o’clock, and I had the road to myself. The little 2.2 liter engine in the Plymouth strained on the climb, but I wouldn’t let up. I knew she was waiting.

Through the heart of the High Peaks and the winter desolation, I kept on the gas. Husker Du was blaring inside the car, but outside only the silent trees saw me pass. I was driving too fast, and I knew it. One patch of ice, one deer in the road, one misjudgment of a curve, and all could have been lost in darkness, and ice, but there was no thought of slowing down. I threw the car into the turns, and downshifted on the descent to save the brakes. When the road straightened I jumped back on the throttle and accelerated over the frost heaves, the car leaping forward into the small cone of light in front of me.

Down into Lake Placid, and on through the slow, sleepy, towns of Saranac Lake, and Tupper Lake, I caught my breath. When I turned onto 56 to follow the Racquette River out of the mountains and back across the blue line, the race resumed, but the adrenalin had faded. Around 9 o’clock I pulled into the parking lot outside her dorm. The lights from inside glowed like gold. Stepping from the humid warmth of the car, my breath billowed like fog in front of my face. I put on my coat, and stepped forward toward the lights.

To run like a deer over the frozen landscape, chased by the wolves of doubt. To step out into the clearing, with your breath billowing before you, was a primal sense of being alive. Standing outside of her dorm that night I didn’t know what stood waiting in the dark around the next bend. Looking back now through the shifting fog of memory, I realize for the first time that I didn’t care.

On Memory

I believe in an objective reality. That there is only one version of reality unfolding in space and time. However, our perceptions of this reality are limited by our perspectives. Each one of us views the events that occur around us through our own set of eyes, and our own set of prejudices. We wear so many lenses that sometimes we color our own perceptions to such an extent we become blind to the reality of the event. And sometimes, we are so limited by our angle of seeing that we cannot possibly hope to understand the event unfolding before us.

 

So it is no surprise really that if we cannot truly grasp the present around us, we can only dimly understand the past. Our memories of events are not only limited by our original perception of them, but by the difficulties of time. We do not have a camcorder to record history as it happens, but only a memory distracted and confused by the swirling of events that never stop long enough for us to write them down. So when we do find a reason to pause and reflect, we are at the mercy of our fuzzy memory. And all memory is fuzzy.

 

Not even photographs or recording can eliminate the fuzziness. Pull a photo from an old family album often enough and your memory of the event that occurred becomes lost, painted over by the perspective of the photographer. In fact, record enough memories with a camera, and you will eventually lose the ones that went unrecorded. Until we sit in a rocking chair with an album on our lap, to remind us of a life lived only as snapshots in time, a random sequence of frames from a film long lost. We can piece them together, but the picture can never be complete. Eventually we are forced to use our imagination to fill in our own forgotten past.

 

I think that the Maker intended memory to be fuzzy. It makes it possible for us to live with the pain of the mistakes that we made, and the pain that we have inflicted, and suffered ourselves. Our fuzzy memory also gives us comfort and hope, as we can remember the perfection of a past that surely never existed. I call these the “warm fuzzy” memories. And this blog is wrapped tightly in them. Soft, warm, and sepia toned like an old photograph of a time we no longer remember, except in our imaginations.

 

The decline and fall of Western New York

The past week around 20 Prospect was a long one. Trips home to Batavia are always full of memories and mixed emotions. It is hard to see what Western New York has become. Just because it has been in such a long slow economic and social spiral for a long time, does not make it any easier to take. In the some ways, it makes it even harder to accept. Surely by now the local government and populace would have figured out that what they are doing isn’t working and tried a different course of action. Maybe they have, and maybe the results have just been inevitable. Surely there comes a point in any disaster, where the course of events have progressed too far for the outcome to be changed. Maybe that is the fate of Western New York. With declining population, and the 30 years long flight of industry from the Great Lakes states, the result is a dwindling tax base that only reduces the resources available to government to try to actively manage their way out. What they are left with is boosterism, empty slogans, and long shots. Perhaps that is why they seemingly have given up on initiatives to stimulate small, human scaled, economic growth, and spent their remaining money on “magic beans”. Casinos, sports stadiums, and other developer boondoggles. Everything but the proverbial monorail.

I left not because of a desire to leave. I left in 1990 because I could not manage to land one of the relatively few engineering jobs available. I left out of a perceived necessity to get that high paying job in my field that was the sole focus of my college education. I don’t regret it. I needed the money, and there was no doubt that I preferred to leave home for an engineering job, than live there and be under employed. Academics and Front Porcher’s can complain about the siren’s call of the meritocracy that lures the educated youth of small towns to leave their homes behind, but they cannot deny the economic incentives that exist. Complaining about them is as effective as complaining that water flows down hill.

I am sympathetic to their arguments, but I am pragmatic as well. Until someone comes up with viable ways to offer economic opportunity in places like Western New York, the kids of Batavia, Tonawanda, Rochester, and Lyons will continue to leave. I wish I had a solution, but in the end I have little else to offer than some empty promise that staying behind and building something better is a worthy endeavor deserving of their lives. Pretty hypocritical for a guy that left it all behind and moved away. You’d think the least I could promise would be a job driving the new monorail.

All Souls Day

Another crisp fall day on the Front Porch. The porch furniture is put away for the season now, and only piles of maple leaves, drifted into the corners of the porch remain. The latecomers to a 2 month long party of leaf dropping, they seem to rush down from the branches with the slightest breeze in a hurry to catch up to their friends before the season is over. And it is almost over.

Already the orange, red and yellow has yielded to the russet, gold, and brown of November. It won’t be long now before the whiteness returns to bury them all. I don’t mind. Its time. The clocks have been turned back, and darkness will come quickly in the late afternoon. All the little instinctual things that civilization has yet to breed out of the human race will come to the fore. Sleepiness, exhaustion, and that nesting instinct to gather nuts in the face of another winter.

The past week was a great one for navel gazing here at 20 Prospect. The results of my conference presentation last Thursday continued to ripple out at the conference on Friday. I had several attendees come up and complement me in the hallway, and offer encouragement and advice on continuing my work. I had an offer from Agder University in Norway to enroll in their International Management PhD program. Of course, I’d have to quit my job and move to Norway for 3 years and live on a graduate students income. I was very flattered, but obviously declined. I received several unsolicited offers of advice on where to pursue my PhD to get the most out of my dissertation, and be best prepared to teach at the University level. I also was approached by one of the Academic presenters about co-authoring a paper together in the future. Contact information was exchanged, and thanks given, but ultimately the best complement was someone telling me they couldn’t believe I wasn’t an academic. That one made me feel warm all over. Sitting around the lunch table with University Professors from major business programs and have them accept me as one of their own was pretty danged cool. So, hurray for me.

But that is not the only thing inflating my ego this week. About an hour before I was to present on Thursday my blackberry buzzed with an email message from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wanting to publish an excerpt from this humble little blog in an upcoming piece on local bloggers, in the Sunday Magazine section. Of course, they promised to maintain my anonymity lest this blog catch the attention of my Dark Corporate Overlords and I be sent off to a corporate gulag in rural China. They also didn’t mention the context of the piece, so it might very well be a column making fun of the most self indulgent, and pathetic blogs in Minnesota for all I know. Still, let’s live in the moment for another week or two before I am humiliated in front of my adopted hometown. Not that I haven’t been humiliated in front of a hometown before, just that it is usually at my own hands.

In other Front Porch news, 20 Prospect Jr. has moved up another level in hockey. The coach pulled him aside before practice on Sunday and asked him if it would be OK if they moved him up from C to B Mites. He was a excited, and I allowed myself a few seconds to beam with pride in the heady drug that is youth sports. So I’ll be busy this week interviewing potential agents. Can’t wait too long before we start thinking about how to maximize that future signing bonus.

Kidding of course. He did move up, so he’s in with his classmates now, and no longer skating with the kindergartners and first graders, Now he’s in with the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th graders where he’ll have to really bust his butt to keep up. I hope it doesn’t discourage him, but I doubt it will. He’s just happy to be with his friends again, and not just their little brothers. Youth Hockey is an interesting subculture. So is youth swimming. Lil’ Miss 20 Prospect swims with a USA Swimming Club, and the similarities between hockey and swimming parents is uncanny. God help us, but I sincerely hope that Mrs. 20 Prospect and myself don’t start drinking the Koolaid of youth sports like so many of these parents, who fail to realize that the odds of little junior winning a gold medal, or signing a professional contract are about as good as winning the lottery.

And yet the last time I checked the lottery wasn’t exactly having a hard time selling tickets. As a kid I used to sometimes be disappointed that Mom and Dad just sat quietly in the stand during my games and didn’t seem to care too greatly whether my team won, lost, or whether I scored. In fact the only time I can remember either one of them becoming greatly interested was when I split my chin open during the Cal-Mum game, and even then it was out of concern about potential dental bills. Now, I am eternally grateful for their lack of interest. They treated it for what is was intended to be, a fun activity to keep me healthy and develop life skills, which is just what it did. I only hope I can find the restraint that they modeled when the scouts from the Maple Leafs come to 20 Prospect Jr.’s practice next week.

Conference Life

Last day of the conference on Business Ethics. So far the presenters have been in unanimous agreement that business should be ethical. Maybe next year I should propose a paper arguing against ethics just to liven things up a bit.

It has been an interesting experience. I’ve presented at some ASME conferences before, but those were to a very technical crowd, and one that is dominated by folks from the business world. This conference was primarily academics. The similarities and differences are telling. Some observations…

Combs are still optional in academia

They get the “pony tailed consultant” types showing up at their conferences too, cornering unsuspecting presenters looking to latch onto them like leeches to extract business and/or original thinking.

This conference being sponsored by the Vincentian Colleges (Niagara- St. Johns – DePaul) begins each day with a short speech by an overweight, gregarious, ruddy faced priest. Made me feel like I was back in High School, and I mean that in a good way.

Academics aren’t very nice to each other. Odd.

I am as knowledgable about certain subjects as several of these professors. Seriously, even reading and studying on my own. What do they do all day?

My presentation was mostly well received. Not being an academic I was a little worried about that. Only one guy jumped on me when I stated that some HR Performance Management systems are unjust. Since he taught in an HR program he took some issue with that. But, several others chimed in to my defense, and I held my ground that when Human Resource performance management systems begin to manage people as resources, instead of humans, by imposing arbitray measurements, they are indeed unjust. The lefties in the crowd (which, this being academia was damn near everyone) nodded in approval.

As for the rest of my trip, it was bittersweet in the usual 20 Prospect way. WNY in autumn can be achingly beautiful. But still the ruins of what was, and the ghosts of what might have been were all around. Seeing family was wonderful, but seeing the real 20 P and all the other places from my memories really tore me up inside.

Farewell Batavia, until next time…

Business Ethics is not an Oxymoron

The true purpose of my trip to Western N.Y. is not to gorge myself on Pizza and Wings, but to participate in a conference. I will be presenting here in Niagara Falls. I will not be representing my Dark Corporate Overlords. Instead I am just there to embarrass myself in my capacity as a (former) Grad Student. Wish me luck as I expound upon the Dehumanizing Evils of Six Sigma and Scientific Management.

St. Paul, Minnesota – 1992

This story begins with fate. For it could only have been fate. A planned mid-winter maintenance outage at the Minnesota Power plant in Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota called me from my temporary home in Denver. Winter and summer were our downtime, as the nation’s power plants ran full force to heat us and cool us. So it was strange to be called to the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota the first frozen week of February.

My best friend Chris was in his second year of Graduate School at the U of M, so I flew out on a Friday to spend the weekend in the Twin Cities before heading up to the range. Living alone in hotel rooms, in anonymous towns, it was nice to be able to re-connect with people who actually knew your name.

Chris was working in the labs at the St. Paul campus, and living in a flea ridden dump on Temple Court with two other grad students, and two filthy slobbery hounds, in a rental we lovingly called the “Schweine-hundt house”. He was soon to be engaged to his lovely wife Sue, who had recently moved out to St Cloud, to attend grad school in close proximity to him. So my arrival was a re-union of sorts and at the tender age of 22, reunions always promised drinking, and laughter. (Still do actually)

Friday began with happy hour at Ciatti’s on Larpentuer, where the lab crowd gathered for cheap eats and beer, and it ended sometime after bar close, with my face buried in a bowl of Beer Cheese soup at the Embers on University, merrily slurping away much to Sue’s horror and amusement. I had yet to be domesticated, and my manners pretty much reflected a life lived in power plants, and among Union labor.

The plans for Saturday evening were much more low key. Dinner out with some couples who were friends of Chris’. My expectations were set pretty low, so I was surprised when one of the couples showed up at the Schweine-hundt house with a lovely single woman in tow. She wore a brown leather bomber jacket, big round glasses, and had long brown hair. This was not on the published itinerary for the evening, and things began looking up.

We met for Pizza at the Green Mill on Grand. Three couples, and two single – unattached kids. We were seated next to each other, and began to talk. She was a nurse in the cities. She grew up and went to college in Wisconsin. Her connection to the lab crew was through her nurse friend Jennifer, who was married to one of Chris’ lab mates. Her being there was accidental. She had no plans for the evening, and had just tagged along because she was leaving in the morning with some friends for a girls trip to Jamaica. She figured a dull evening out for pizza was a good way to pass the time until her trip.

When dinner was over we headed to O’Gara’s for drinks. I started telling her my story, which was always a tough one to explain. “You live in Hotels?” You don’t have an apartment? You travel around the country? They pay you to do what?” I had a hard time believing it myself, and I had already been doing it for a year and a half by then.

O'Gara's - Photo Copyright romadden84 @http://www.flickr.com/photos/romadden84/449975029/

When I asked her what she wanted to drink and she said “Let’s get a pitcher” I knew I was in love. When she let me beat her at darts, I knew it was mutual.

We were laughing and having and wonderful time, so we were stunned when the couples stood up, yawned, and announced that they were calling it a night. It was only 9:30! We were just getting started, but we had both ridden along as third wheels and had no way of getting home. So we said an impromptu good night, and I sulked in the back seat of Chris’ K-car all the way to the Schweine-hundt house. In the morning, I left for the Iron Range and she left for Jamaica. Our destinations could not have been more different.

I spent the week working and freezing my arse off up on the range. The temperature hovered below zero the whole week. The folks up there were a lot of fun though. They are the descendants of the immigrants who came to work the Iron Mines in the early 20^th century. A mix of Eastern and Southern Europeans that makes it culturally different from the rest of the Scandinavian dominated state. I was shocked and amazed to run into folks who actually knew what a Croatian was. The gregariousness of rangers is legendary compared to the frosty Minnesota-Ice of the Scandinoovians, and I did not want for invitations out for a beer in the bars of Eveleth or Virginia.

When I passed though town on my way back to Denver, I asked Chris to get me her phone number from her friend Jen, but I had little hope of ever seeing her again. We didn’t do much work in Minnesota, and I seldom was within a days drive of the place. My next job took me to Price, Utah, and from there to Rock Springs, Wyoming, and I was quickly back into the Spring outage season. It was weeks before I heard from Chris. He had gotten her phone number from Jen, but forgot and left it in his jeans pocket when he did the wash. It seemed that fate was surely against me seeing her again.

So I was amazed when I returned to the office in Denver, and heard that I had a phone message from a girl in Minnesota. She had called the previous evening, thinking that the number that Chris had passed along to her was for an apartment, and not an office. I stayed late at work that night, as my colleagues left the office, smiling and asking me who the “mystery girl” was. When the phone finally rang I just about jumped out of my skin. We talked for an hour, and made plans to talk again.

Weeks went by, and the phone calls continued. I wrote letters, and when the outage season was winding down, I drove out to see her for the weekend. Eighteen hours one way, for a 1 day visit before returning. I did it again 2 weeks later. And so it began, a long, long courtship, over an ocean of prairie. Three years later we would be married. On a crisp October day, in the great state of Wisconsin she would become Mrs. 20 Prospect. God willing, may she always be.

Happy Anniversary Mrs. 20 Prospect