Rambling Josh

The Winter Olympics are upon us. For the next few weeks we have the opportunity to watch athletes compete in events they have spent the better part of their lives striving to achieve perfection in.

Some will come away with a medal and all the accolades that accompany it; two minutes on Letterman, a heart-to-heart with Bob Costas, a book deal, or possibly a commercial pedaling shampoo or lip balm.

The majority won’t come away with anything around their neck except a rash from their snug fitting uniform. They will quietly go home to accept a hug from Grandma and a consolatory pat on the back from everyone and their dog. Not that those things are bad, it’s just not what motivates an 18-year-old to forgo fun for 16 years of rigorous training.

Having Bob Costas paint a heart wrenching picture of all the adversity and heart ache you had to overcome on your journey to win an Olympic medal probably wasn’t a motivating factor during the years of training either, but like lip balm it comes with the territory.

Even if you never had to overcome adversity and heartache Bob will find something…You’ll sit down next to Bob, shiny medal hanging around your neck, the fake fire dancing behind you, and Bob will say, “Despite failing a spelling test in the third grade, a devastating set back, you were able to persevere and win the gold medal in ski jumping…remarkable story and truly a testament to what the human spirit can overcome.”

I enjoy watching the Olympics, but I’ll admit, it lacks the emotion it had back in the Cold War days when the Soviet Union was the evil Olympic athlete empire.

Every few years the Iron Curtain would slide open to turn its genetically enhanced super athletes loose to collect Olympic medals. It had better be gold or you would find yourself scrubbing toilets in the Kremlin. When I was a kid it was almost as enjoyable rooting against the Russians as it was rooting for the United States.

Nowadays we don’t really have a country playing the part of the Big Bad Olympic Wolf. I find myself feeling bad for the athletes from the former Soviet Union for all the hardships in their country and hope a few of them take home medals. The Russians are too tough to use lip balm so I’m not sure what benefits would befall the athlete on their return to their country. Maybe a vodka endorsement spot, “A gold medal makes the perfect coaster for my glass of Smirnoff.”

If only Afghanistan would put together a Taliban bobsled team. Ratings would skyrocket and we would get to see Bob Costas nervously chit chatting with them about the rocky road from Kabul to Canada.

Enjoy the Olympics and sappy Costas stories.

I also wanted to inform all of you that due to issues with lack of snow at some of the Olympic venues I’m proposing that Burke County puts in a bid for the 2014 games.

Does anyone know how to drive a Zamboni?

While watching one of my son’s basketball games the other day in a cramped elementary school gym I was pleased to see this particular gym had not one, but two climbing ropes hanging from its ceiling. In our safety conscious, wrap our children in bubble wrap society, I had assumed all climbing ropes had been removed from gymnasiums and sold to tugboat operators. After all they do present an opportunity for a child to fail and we can’t have that.

As an athletic trainer one of my duties is to prevent injury as much as possible and as a result, I am pretty adept at spotting potentially painful situations. So, looking back at elementary gym class through the eyes of an athletic trainer I have come to the conclusion our gym teachers were under contract from the government to speed up natural selection. No one ever died, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Gym class was little dangerous and a lot of fun…for some of us. Some could shimmy up the rope like a ring-tailed lemur, slap the beam it was attached to, and shimmy back down without incident. Of course some couldn’t, and as hard as they tried their butt never lifted off the big knot at the bottom of the rope. Face red, veins bulging, teeth gritted, arms quivering and that was just the gym teacher trying to help them.

The gym teacher, not wanting the climbing impaired child to leave with nothing, would then give the kid a big arcing spinning push. Over the top of their classmates, they would sail causing a variety of reactions from the kid seated on the knot. Some would laugh and smile and look down wide eyed at all of their classmates as they swooped over their heads.

Even as a 9-year-old you can tell when someone’s having fun or they’re simply terrified to the point of tears and other bodily leakage. We all like to play in the rain but not in the gym while seated under a terrified tot on a knot that is more concerned with holding on than holding it. No child was left below.

Let’s not forget the most thrilling and cringe worthy attempts at climbing the rope in gym class. Those who mustered every bit of strength they had and focused so intently on the ascent that they forgot about the other part of rope climbing…descending.

Climbing a rope is not like giving everything you’ve got to finish a running race where you reach the end and coast to stop. Some tried to coast to a stop after slapping the beam triumphantly. A coasting rope descent generally doesn’t turn out well.

Not much makes you cringe when you’re nine years old but watching someone slide down a rope and bounce off the knot will do it. You feel bad for the kid as they lay there torn between clutching their burning hands or their smoldering corduroys. You feel so bad you laugh…a lot…so much in fact you’re thankful that you wore dark pants.

I don’t know if climbing the rope in gym class held any educational value, but it is reflective of life. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s painful, and sometimes the knot that was your friend today can be a pain in the butt tomorrow.

Just after Christmas my wife caved into the peer pressure and took a bit of her life public with a shiny new Facebook account. She had been resistant but one can only fight the social wheels of technology for so long. My wife is an intelligent lady, but technological know-how is not her strong suit, it’s not even her leisure suit.

In our household I am responsible for the proper programming, setting up, and day-to-day operation and maintenance of all things electronic. Just one more thing that my mother prepared me for many years ago when she would call me at college and ask how to program the VCR to record Phil Donahue…it’s nice to be needed.

She would call angry at the VCR for not magically doing what it was supposed to do, and I would talk her through the process. “Do you have the remote in your hand?” “Are you pointing the remote at the VCR?” “No, not your middle finger, the VCR doesn’t recognize that signal.” “Are the television and VCR on?” “Okay, now listen close and follow my instructions so nobody gets hurt…namely the VCR.”

Nowadays I get similar calls from my lovely wife and if I do my job with minimum sarcasm and absolutely no remarks about her Polish technological wizardry, she’ll still speak to me when I get home. We’ve had a few technology induced “quiet times” prompting an emailed apology…from me.

I knew she would like Facebook because she enjoys visiting and staying in touch with her friends and had commented that not many people email anymore because they’re on Facebook. Well now she’s on Facebook and her friend list is expanding and she’s in touch with everyone whether she wants to be or not. Due to her and technologies love hate relationship she’s not an addict and Facebooks in moderation.

We all have people who we need to keep in touch with and people who need to keep in touch with us. For various reasons some friends are more than just a friend, they are a best friend and are always there for us as we are for them. When we’re ugly, they’ll be there, when we’re happy, they’ll be there, when the internet crashes and your Facebook friends list gets deleted they’ll be there.

They can’t be deleted and you can’t just pull the plug and walk away. Well, I guess you can literally pull the plug if they’ve given you the legal right to do so, but that’s another matter so we’ll stick with figurative plug pulling.

So as far as Facebook goes I guess it’s good for helping us maintain a little chit chat with acquaintances on occasion. But that friend who calls out of the blue when you’re feeling the same shade or the one you find yourself visiting with over a cup or a pint that’s your real friend’s list.

Most likely a shorter list, but what it lacks in quantity it more than makes up for in quality.

Here we are with another year gone by.

Does your balance scale of accomplishments tip towards the “Did” or the “Didn’t” for all you had planned for 2009? I think my balance scale of accomplishment accidentally got stuck in a box of stuff I hauled to the local goodwill store. It never worked right anyway.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions for the same reason I don’t make a lot of plans in general and that is that you avoid the disappointment of an unaccomplished plan by not making plans. Also, if you have no plans almost anything that happens is potentially a pleasant surprise…a pleasant surprise you didn’t have to break any plans to take part in.

I realize sometimes it can be dangerous not to have a plan. For instance, on Christmas Day the Chrest and Stevens family got together to celebrate Christmas at the Lignite Senior Center…as planned. If this event had not gone through any sort of planning process, we may have all starved or shown up on Boxing Day instead, but we all enjoyed too much good food and the company of family.

Following the Christmas dinner we didn’t really have much planned because generally the food part is of greatest concern and everything else is left to chance. This is when things can get dangerous…especially in Lignite.

Some had gone home to lapse into a food coma while some of us pushed on and visited, put together jigsaw puzzles, ate some more, and had no plans. That’s when somebody said, “There’s a bunch of people coming with masks on.”

Sometimes when somebody says something it confuses you for a second. A bunch of people with masks? How many is a bunch? What kind of masks?

I briefly thought it may be a hostile takeover and glanced around the senior citizen center for a weapon to defend our supply of leftover turkey and juneberry pie. I found a cane someone must have forgotten during a moment of spryness and pried the non-slip rubber tip off to make it look more menacing.

Then as the first few of the “bunch of people in masks” started to enter the building it all started to make sense….Julebukking. These were Norwegian terrorists disguised in old bridesmaid dresses, leisure suits, and muskrat coats, wearing a variety of masks to hide their identity. If I wasn’t in Lignite I may have been frightened. If they weren’t in Lignite they may have been shot at.

You hate to try and guess who people are and run the chance of upsetting them. It’s kind of like being stuck in a room with a bunch of irritated women and being asked to walk up to each of them and guess what size underwear they wear. When faced with Norwegian terrorists in leisure suits and irritated women it’s best to keep your mouth shut.

We waited them out and the Julebukkers finally gave into the relentless heat of the senior citizen center and removed their masks to reveal their identity. I was right… they would have been upset with any guesses I had. Thank you to the Nielsen, Bloom and McEvers families (my aunt, Suzie slipped in amongst them as well) for making an unplanned visit and keeping the tradition of Julebukking alive.

According to my research the tradition of Julebukking is still observed in parts of North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ketchikan, Alaska. They say the practice of Julebukking is dying out…they also say there is never anything to do in a small town. They’ve never been to Lignite.

Happy New Year.

October 17, 2007

The kids and I kicked off our school year a few weeks ago. Back to the scheduled life of academia we go for another 9 month tour. I don’t care much for schedules and routines so it’s always hard for me to get back into the having to be places at certain times mind set.

I much prefer the flip-flop frame of mind I dawdle in over those glorious summer months. It’s a tough monkey to get off your back. Well actually that’s not a monkey I just haven’t had time to get my back waxed with all this work stuff going on and with the winter months approaching I may just hold off until spring.

For those poor souls that don’t know or have never experienced a “flip-flop frame of mind” you have some homework. I know summers has drained away like the public pool water leaving nothing but 3 months of sunscreen sludge and lord only knows what else clinging to the sides, but there’s still a few warm days left to complete your assignment.

Here’s the assignment: Put on your normal lace up, pull-on, Velcro, whatever you normally constrain your feet to shoes, and go for a walk, either around town, out in the yard, do some yard work, some house work, mow the lawn, walk the dog, go door-to-door collecting dryer lint and old toothbrushes, whatever just move for awhile. Once complete take note of your frame of mind and proceed to step two.

Step two entails slipping those nasty bunion riddled fungus fortresses into a lovely pair of flip-flops. It may feel strange at first with that strap between your first two toes but just like the thong underwear you dabbled in last year you’ll get used to it.

Now repeat whatever form of “walk about” you performed in part one of this assignment only this time with your knew friends Flip and Flop along for the mosey. Stop scrunching up your toes they won’t fall off if mind your speed and keep the hustle and bustle to a minimum.

Don’t fight it or you’ll end up with Flip or Flop lying lifeless behind you while your tender feet attempt to navigate the rocky road back to the scene of their spontaneous removal. They fell off for a reason, you need to slow down, you need to access your “flip-flop frame of mind” and become one with the thingy between your toes and let Flip and Flop be your guide to leisureness.

Now some activities are not safe for flip-flops, such as mowing the lawn, but strolling past the lawn mower to the hammock is a perfectly safe pursuit. I know there are also times you may feel the need to rush about and hurry, hurry, hurry and flip-flops just wouldn’t be practical. As a certified Flipflopologist I recommend you avoid those times.

Just like the above mentioned thong underwear, over time you will learn to love this form of footwear and the frame of mind it will produce. Another reason I support the flip frame of mind movement is that while wearing them you can’t sneak up on anyone, creep around in the dark, or flee the scene so flip-flops would also decrease crime rates.

Lower crime rates and decreased stress levels. What more can you ask from modest footwear?

You’ve got your assignment now go forth and flip-flop.

On August 17th through the 19th 27 riders participated in the 2nd annual “Highway 212 Gut Check.” The “Gut Check” is an endurance race across SD, via Hwy 212, to raise funds and awareness for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.

Participants have 48 hours to make it from the SD/WY border to the SD/MN border which is “normally” 412 miles. This year the SD Department of Transportation and Mother Nature teamed up to “dampen” the spirits of more than a few of the participants.

As fate would have it, on that very same weekend South Dakota got more rain than it had all summer, three days worth. As fate would have it, SDDOT decided it was time to replace a bridge along Highway 212 creating a 22 mile detour.

Twenty-two miles may not seem like much to the “normal” person, that’s smart enough to drive a car instead of a bicycle, but on a bike, in the rain, against the wind it adds up to about 2 extra hours of butt numbing fun.

Oh, alright it didn’t rain the entire race; the first 50 miles were dry and hot with a STRONG head wind. Then it began to sprinkle, then it began to rain, then it began to come down like the tears of a bike rider who’s trying to ride across South Dakota…against the wind.

Did I mention the wind? When I organized this event last year I checked all the available resources to find the predominant wind direction for the middle of August was from west to east. For three fateful days in August of 2007, the 17th through the 19th to be exact, the wind howled from east to west.

For those of you that don’t know and don’t care to find out a tail wind will allow a knucklehead on a bicycle to travel along leisurely at about 20 miles an hour. For those of you that don’t know and don’t care to find out a head wind will allow a knucklehead on a bicycle to travel along painfully at about 12 miles an hour.

When I crawled out of bed and gimped down the stairs on Monday August 20th I looked out the window to see my fickle old friend the West wind back from his three day hiatus. If you could kick the wind I know right where I’d kick it.

Jay Stevens, formerly of Lignite, also participated in the event. His sister Terri and Joyce (formerly Morgel) of Portal came from Bismarck to be his SAG. My wife and kids accompanied me as my SAG. SAG stands for Support And Guidance and Jay and myself had and needed plenty of both.

Seventy-five miles into the race at Mudd Butte SD, in the dark, in the rain, in the wind, in the lightening, Jay and myself decided to form the Mudd Butte Leapfrog Team A.K.A The Mudd Butte Merger. From that point on one of us would ride about 10 miles while the other dined and rested in the dry warmth of one of our SAG wagons and then switch.

The Mudd Butte Leapfrog Team, a rocket scientist and a college professor, made it about 300 miles before our backsides told are brains to knock it off.

Of the 27 riders, 19 were in the solo division, and of those 19 three finished the race. The rest of us tried, and most plan on trying it again next year. Trying and failing is much more gratifying than not trying at all. All in all we raised about $4,600.00 for the CCFA. Jay raised over a thousand himself, and found himself a permanent place on the Mudd Butte Leapfrog Team.

Thank you to all that donated to the cause and helped spread the word about the event. I was very pleased going from 4 participants in 2006 to 27 this year. For more information on this years “Gut Check” visit: <sdata.national.edu/GutCheck2…>

Dust off your bike and get it and yourself ready for next year. The Mudd Butte Leapfrog Team is currently accepting members.

For those of you keeping tabs on my cabin building progress, or lack there of, I’m happy to report that it has a roof on it now. Well it did when we left but that was two weeks ago so it may just be a pile of warped lumber, bent nails, and stripped screws by now, which wouldn’t be much of a surprise since that’s what we started with.

Just to catch you up to speed me and a good friend of mine, Paul Richter, were granted permission about five years ago from our lovely wives, for reasons unknown to us at the time, to buy 22 acres in the Bull Mountains of Montana. The Bull Mountains are located about 30 miles north of Billings and we’ve been attempting to build a log cabin up there for a few years now.

An authentic, we pealed the logs and hacked them up with a chain saw, log cabin. It’s been a mostly enjoyable project, with intermittent bouts of, “Why am I doing this?” sprinkled about.

Paul and myself found out a few things about ourselves and each other during our roof raising expedition. No not that Paul enjoys wearing women’s shoes and singing Barbara Streisand hit’s while doing carpentry work. That I already knew, what I didn’t know was that he’s a terrible carpenter, and he can’t carry a tune in a rusty nail bucket.

I knew I had a few gaps in my carpentry repertoire and I was counting on him to fill those gaps. As it turns out we have the same gaps, not as many as our roof, but close. After the first full days work on the roof we were sitting back admiring, or sulking, over our craftsmanship when I said, “That doesn’t look like a full days work.” To which Paul replied, “Yeah, looks like about two hours of work.”

Two hours for someone that didn’t spend high school shop class building spice racks and shoddy shelves. Two hours for someone that realizes that jerryrigging one screw up will only lead to more advanced jerryrigging on a bigger screw up caused by the first jerryrigging. Jerryrigging is a viscous cycle in the construction of roof by two educated idiots.

My wife tried to comfort our battered, splintered, and bent nail ego’s by telling us that it looked great and we were doing a fine job. However, I was suspicious of her sincerity after her and the kids burst into laughter shortly after she said it. It wasn’t so much the laughing it was the finger pointing that really hurt.

The Environmental Protection Agency wanting to use our cabin as a poster boy to stop logging didn’t do much for our confidence either. Jesus was a carpenter, but if he had a hand in this cabin his Father would have sent a natural disaster to rid it from the earth.

When our lack of carpentry skills became more and more apparent Paul and myself just kept muttering to one another, “It’s just a cabin.” That phrase became our mantra whenever something wasn’t level or square. Yes we said it a lot. Half way through the roof building project the level and square were banished for insubordination.

We established early on that nobody with any carpentry skills or anybody that has ever been near something built by a carpenter is allowed within 300 feet of our cabin unless they sign a waiver stating that they will not point, laugh, snicker, raise eyebrows, or make any mention of the words level and/or square. You are not allowed to view the cabin during daylight hours or under the light of any moon greater than a crescent.

If you do solemnly swear to the above limitation you will be granted permission to view and use the cabin. There’s a lot of lumber in that roof, heavy lumber, topped of with steel roofing, steel with sharp jagged edges.

If you need anything I’ll be sleeping outside in my tent.

My family went camping with the families of two of my good friends last weekend and we all had a great time. There were 13 of us in all, six adults and seven yard apes. We only camped for two days but my family alone needed an SUV full of stuff to do it.

Loading all that stuff into the vehicle always makes me think back to my early college years when I would move home from college for the summer and all of my stuff would fit in the back seat of my tiny little car. My “car” was actually a glorified roller skate powered by two geriatric squirrels and a hamster with a club foot.

It was small but everything I owned fit in it with room for at least one medium sized hitchhiker and his pet chimp, if he happened to have one. Now it takes Noah and bunch of cubics to go on a two day camping trip 30 minutes from where we live. Its nobodies fault, except for possibly my wife and kids, because I only brought two things.

I brought my guitar and a coon skin cap. You can brush and floss your teeth with the tail of the cap, place it over a rock for a firm but ergonomically correct pillow, use it as a cereal bowl, and I’ve heard some people actually wear them.

As for the guitar well it’s uses are endless, firewood, strings for snaring wild game (using the hat as bait of course), cereal bowl, wash basin, tennis racket, fishing net, and I’ve heard some people actually play them.

It seems we need so much stuff nowadays, and if we don’t need it we want it, and if we don’t want it we think someone else might. Whatever happened to the days when all you got for Christmas was an orange and you were happy to get that? I’ve heard of them days but never was on the receiving end of such a Christmas miracle.

I think it’s because kids back then had what every kid always wants for Christmas, a pony. Everyone had pony’s back in those “all I got for Christmas was an orange” days. The parents were sitting around putting their Christmas list together, see the kids frolicking around with their ponies, and think “They’ve got a pony what gift could possibly rise above a pony?”

I’ll tell you, “Nothing.” That’s why they got an orange; they topped out the Christmas list. So keep asking for a pony for Christmas if you are prepared to receive a nice juicy orange for every Christmas thereafter.

Not a fruit basket or fruit cake, just a chocked full of vitamin C solitary orange. But then what do you care you’ve got a pony and an orange to ward off the sniffles during cold and flu season so you can ride your precious pony all that much more.

What do ponies and oranges have to do with camping with good friends and too much stuff? I don’t know….they’re both sweet, stinky, and hairy. What makes people drag all their stuff out of perfectly good houses with perfectly comfortable beds to sleep in a musty damp tent on a half inflated air mattress that has the sleep number comfort level of a sack of shoes?

The pure enjoyment of waving flaming balls of marshmallow around on hot pointy sticks while you’re hopped up on Hershey’s chocolate of course. Try that on a pony.

The word on the streets is that the Lignite Centennial was a success and I for one am inclined to agree with those words on that street. My family had a great time. Sierra and Jackson made several new friends that they can get in touch with again at Lignite’s 125th Celebration.

I was happily pondering the 125th until I put my minimal math skills to the test and discovered that I will be 60 years old in 25 years. Now for those of you that are sixtyish and have had time to adjust to being in a state of advanced age this may not be such a big deal but for a youngster like myself this ponder was a startling revelation and I don’t care to hear another word about it. I’ve got to stop pondering, it always turns ugly.

Back to present day bliss, I’ll concern myself with the future when it rears its bald, bifocaled head. No offense to any and all of you that may be bald and/or bifocaled or are closely acquainted with someone matching that description.

Speaking of…..I hope everyone got a chance to climb the rock wall, I know my kids sure enjoyed it. I was unaware that it was free until the Sunday after the celebration, my son apparently wasn’t aware of that little fact either since he kept asking me for money. I guess he was the only kid they were charging.

The style show was enjoyable despite the homely, hairy lady in polka dots. It ran like clockwork and thanks to Kathy Fagerland I got my dress wearing fix out of the way for the week. It’s just so hard to come up with a good excuse to wear polka dots, a wig, a handbag, and sensible shoes. I apologize if I tainted the allure of polka dots for all in attendance. With a little therapy my family and friends will hopefully learn to embrace and accept me for who I am.

The music was good both Friday and Saturday night and everyone seemed to be in jovial spirits at the street dance. No fights, well, no good fights. Just a lot of laughing and general tomfoolery or gabefoolery in my families case.

I heard that the 5k fun run was well attended. I had every intention of participating in the event but my body and mind got into an argument with my mouth and stomach the night before and were defeated terribly. It seems that my right arm defected and joined ranks with my mouth and stomach rendering the remainder of my body and mind helpless and at 8 a.m. Saturday morning useless.

Besides that the softball tournament had left me feeling and walking like I was celebrating the 125th. So I set out in search of some magic elixir from the local drug store to ease the pain. I found it, I drank it, it eased the pain, I repeated. The magic elixir didn’t make me run faster but I must have spilt some on my bed because it was whirling around like Marry Poppins during hurricane season.

All in all it was a wonderful weekend and it was fun to see Lignite buzzing with activity. During the celebration I actually meant it when I told my kids to watch out for traffic. Like most things of this nature it went just as fast as it came, but like a sack full of fireworks, it was fun while it lasted.

Thanks to everyone that worked so hard to make Lignite’s Centennial Celebration a success.