Turkey day

Well my hope for a fix for my problem at work went out the window yesterday.  It was back to a regular hanging schedule. Damn it.  I have made another 4 or 5 changes since yesterday.  It’s very hard to keep things straight at this point since I have made so many tweaks.

So tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  Today was a throwback to the days when Ali was a regular employee.  She actually got up and went to work with me as well as Nicki tagging along. (Nicki was extremely excited)  The reason is after work all of us are going to the local running club meeting.  I am doing a presentation about options available to the club as far as automatic timing of their races.  We hope to get off the inefficient, slow and error prone card system that the club has been using forever.  I am hoping the club goes with an RFID based chip system made by a German company called DAG.  It seems to offer a lot of value for the money.  If the club does go for this it is going to be my baby to make work.  I look forward to the challenge of getting it off the ground.  I think runners that participate in the races will really appreciate modern timing methods being used.  My role in each race would be rather critical and I kind of like that.

After the meeting we are going to be picking up mom to stay over at our place tonight.  I know mom is less than thrilled about staying over although I can’t quite tell you why.  It’s no problem for us accommodating her and we have most of what she needs at the house already, plus we just enjoy having her over.  It will be cool to have mom there first thing Thanksgiving morning to watch the parade, cook food and stuff. We will make our normal round of phone calls as well.  Calling my grandmother on holidays has become a real challenge anymore.  She apparently is getting to be real senile or under siege from Alzheimer’s.  Any attempted conversations I have had with her in recent years are as painful as you can imagine.   Any questions you ask are generally greeted with one word replies and you realize that she doesn’t even really know who she is speaking to. It is pretty miserable.  I still think we need to make the effort.  Last night I put the pool heater on to get the water cooking.  It has a long way to go, the water was 69 degrees when I started.  It was up to 74 this morning.

The rest of the four days off will probably involve a lot of painting related activities mixed in with normal housework crap. 

When I worked an Entre/Ameridata/GE this was the time leading up to the famous Friday after Thanksgiving tradition, the Turkey Bowl.  For a span of 5 or 6 years a bunch of us would leave work early Friday afternoon, put on the sweats, spikes and football jerseys and hit one of the local playing fields for a lively game of “two hand touch” football.

It was always great fun and always filled with controversy.  The one year a friend of Tim’s almost got into a fight with one of the managers, Paul over overly rough play.  Then there was Johnny Bravo, a guy that bragged about how good he was at football (and everything else for that matter) but when put to the test in a game, came up majorly short.  Speaking of short, Bob Sensenig was a staple at early Turkey Bowls.  Bob always insisted on being QB even though he was barely 5 feet tall and had no arm.  Emmett was a Turkey Bowl powerhouse even though he was much older than most of the other players.  The one year when I was playing against him I fell and got my head trampled by his spikes.  I’m pretty sure I had a concussion.  Mike Lien was deceptively fast and powerful despite his short stature and hairy face.  Charlie was a little fireplug, throwing his body into harm’s way regularly with no concern of injury.  Tim was tall and lanky like me.  He made a few plays but his strongpoint was insulting the opposing team.  Rusty was a big boy whom we relied on strictly for blocking and short yardage situations (which there were none of).  And of course who can forget Heart Punch Kliney.  He earned his nickname by punching oncoming rushers in the heart area of the chest as they approached.  He was ruthless.

Early on in the Turkey bowl phenomena we would get together at a bar after the game and drink our aches and pains away.  As the tradition was dying down, the after game bar visit went away.

It was a great time.  I miss the camaraderie I enjoyed working with that group of people.  Only one Turkey Bowl was ever captured on film.  I was able to recover this footage from the NFL Films vault.