The Milk Man

I signed up for home dairy delivery (a milk man) when YA was two.  As a single parent, “running up to the store” isn’t as simple as it sounds, and it felt like we were always running out of Yo-J or milk or eggs.  When a neighbor mentioned that she used to have a milk man, my ears perked up.  I contacted Kemps Home Delivery and two days later, I got a call from Mike.  He started deliveries the next week and he is still bringing us dairy and other assorted food items every week.

There are about 50 milk men in the Twin Cities area and Mike has been in business for more than 40 years.  He loads up his truck every morning at the Kemp’s warehouse and then hits the road.  I leave my order form (and payment for the week before) on the front door.  He gets those items I from his truck, puts them in my fridge, gives the dogs and cats a treat and leaves a blank order form with the amount of the order for me to pay next week.

Mike’s wife, Suzie, does the office and phone management and both of them are as nice as can be.  They have grown kids and two grandkids, who feature in the yearly holiday newsletter.  Every Thanksgiving, they help manage and run a project called The Thanksgiving Free Store.  It’s just what it sounds like, food and other necessities provided for those in need, absolutely free.  They spend the year raising money and getting donations, things like socks, backpacks, warm clothing, coats and food, lots of food.  I’ve been supporting this effort for quite a few years now.

Mike is pleasant and personable.  If I’m home on a Friday when he delivers, it’s always nice to have some conversation with him.  I’m one of his last deliveries of the week, so he is never rushed when he’s at my place.  When we first started deliveries, he used to leave my items in a cooler on the front steps, but after a couple of months, I gave him a key (he has a HUGE keychain).  I figured if we got robbed with no clear break-in, the cops would look to anybody who had keys first; I doubt Mike would want to put his only business at risk for anything I had laying around!

For the last couple of months, I’ve been worried about Mike.  The Kemp’s warehouse announced (without much warning) that they would only be open four days a week because there were only a couple of milk men delivering on Fridays.  We got our delivery changed to Tuesdays (not a big deal) but I started to think that maybe the milk man business was dying out.  Although Mike is close to retirement age, it would be better for him to retire when it’s good for him rather than for his business to shrink away.

Well, I don’t have to worry any more.  As someone who delivers food to your house, guess whose business has grown dramatically in the last three weeks?  In fact, the demand has grown so much that Kemps is thinking about re-opening the warehouse on Fridays.  And since Mike works alone, social distancing isn’t a problem; Suzy asked folks to re-instate the cooler system a couple of weeks ago, so Mike doesn’t even have to come in the house right now.  As soon as he drives off (Guinevere always lets us know when Mike is here) we go out and get our items out of the cooler.  The only ones really suffering are the animals, who don’t get their weekly treat from Mike!

Are you having anything new delivered to your place these days?

 

 

 

112 thoughts on “The Milk Man”

  1. A staple joke when I was a kid was about milkmen who had dalliances with housewives on their route. It made a rough sort of sense. After all, milkmen were the only males who had frequent contact with housewives. If one of the kids in a family had red hair, someone would snigger and speculate that the milkman must have red hair.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I’ve never thought about this old joke in all these years. But I do wonder when would milk men have time for all these dalliances?

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      1. Delivery men probably never had enough free time to hop in bed during their routes, vs, although before porn became so pervasive I think people needed less time to do some things than they now do. But the real difference between then and now might be in the vastly sharper pressure to be efficient now. FedEx and UPS drivers operate today under time pressures unknown in the 1950s.

        Liked by 2 people

  2. Milkmen were certainly a fixture in my childhood. Every house had an insulated aluminum box emblazoned with the name of a dairy on their steps—a milkbox. Our local dairy was Ewald Brothers and they were located on Golden Valley Road at Xerxes. Outside the dairy was a billboard with giant cow heads—guernseys, I think—the same cow head billboard that stands at the state fair grounds, or did until recently. Milk in those days was unhomogenized and came in bottles with a round cardboard plug with a tab that folded up and over that a crimped paper cover. The milkmen were in and out of their trucks so often, they drove standing up. I can still remember the sound of those milk bottles clinking together as the milkman brought them to the door in his metal carrier.

    I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with having my groceries delivered. That would mean someone else picking out my produce.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    That is an interesting story about the Milkman VS. I really enjoy the header picture, too. That is an ornate wagon.

    In the 1960’s the milkman was a standard part of our landscape, with deliveries several times per week. Our local dairy was Well’s Blue Bunny, now known simply as Blue Bunny which specializes in ice cream. Yearly, we would have a field trip to the dairy to see the innards if the dairy facility and get free samples of—- cottage cheese. Not ice cream. Cottage cheese. One year Jimmy Miller spit in a vat of cottage cheese and all hell broke loose for Jimmy.

    Recently I had three spools of shoelaces delivered for mask construction. This is certainly a unique delivery at our house.

    Liked by 6 people

  4. I grew up in Ames, Iowa, where the dominant economic institution was what was then called Iowa State College. As it was an agricultural college, it was proud of its model dairy. That was our dairy.

    Most homes had those insulated boxes Bill described. They sat near the front door. In spite of the insulation, milk might freeze on a winter day, and then the expanding milk would push up a white ice milk cylinders topped with little hats, the cardboard plugs. For several years we asked the milkman top delivered ice cream (a gallon, in fact) each week. We cancelled the ice cream order when everyone in the family became chubby.

    The bottles by the front door were a nuisance. My dad took me catfishing once, which obliged us to rise at 5 AM. Woozy from interrupted sleep, I kicked the empty bottles lined up like ninepins at the door. The racket was memorable.

    In Des Moines, as I’ve noted before, milk was delivered by horse-drawn wagons. The horses knew which families “took.” With no direction from the milkman, the horses automatically stopped in front of each home with a milk subscription. The milkmen would run the orders to each door and come back with the empties. They originally used wire carriers to tote milk bottles, although the carriers morphed into plastic carriers that are still sold, but now are used as storage receptacles.

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  5. A friend who went through all her old sheet music & books dropped off a bag for me, after we had a zoom meeting where she showed them to me and I told her what I wanted to look at. Other friends have dropped off an iPad for me to borrow, some homemade hand sanitizer, some Red Rose Tea (hard to find here) and a mystery… In all cases, we either waved, or I opened the door and we talked from a good 6′ away. It feels so weird.

    We have lots of marigold seeds, from years of Husband saving them in the fall. He’s packaged them up in small packets for people to pick up from a covered tin on the front porch.

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        1. I am sitting outside on the deck in the sun, enjoying a light breeze and 60 degrees. Thanks, Mother Nature. I needed this.

          When I awoke this morning, I was possessed by the blues.

          Liked by 3 people

        2. Later in the day we took the dogs to the dog park which was more fresh air and sunshine. The dogs refuse to maintain a social distance, though. Maybe I should design doggie masks.

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  6. Hi-

    It was good to see a couple of you yesterday with the straw delivery. Yep, we all kept our distance. Fun to see the scraggly little yellow kitten we rescued turn into the big yellow fur ball at Mig’s.
    Lunch was take out from Pizza Luce. And then we got to see son and Daughter-in-laws new house for which they had just signed the papers. They’re home owners!

    We had a milk man too; but it was the other way around; he came and picked up the tank of milk.

    When I was a kid it was ‘Red’, and he had a cleft palate, although I didn’t know what that was of course. But I’d run down to the barn when I heard him coming and jump out and yell ‘Boo!’ and he’d jump and fake being surprised. He had to have seen me coming so he couldn’t have really been too surprised.
    Then we had a really large guy named Mike for a few years.
    Then Al became our regular hauler. Sometimes his brother drove – can’t remember his name.

    The trucks kept getting bigger and bigger. When they were small, they could turn around down by the barn. Then at some point, maybe a combination of it getting really muddy and soft down there and the trucks getting bigger, that they had to turn around up by the shop and back down to the barn.
    And they never liked our driveway in winter. We had a big enough tank we could hold milk an extra couple days if we had too.
    A famous story is when Mike was a new driver, he tried to down-shift as he was making the corner in the snow; the load “sloshed” and pulled him back into the ditch. Had to get another truck, had to get a pump, had to get a tow truck. Mike fell asleep in the truck and the exhaust pipe was plugged up in the snow and Dad woke him up and dragged him out.

    There was always business issues. I only remember selling our milk to AMPI. They just closed their Rochester plant in December. But at one point AMPI got out of the trucking business and the drivers had to own the trucks. I was such a small farmer / milk producer, that it was almost an issue for them to come down here. But we had good drivers and they wouldn’t let me just hang out there. After AMPI closed, I don’t know what happen to the local guys.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Aw shoot – had we been on your delivery rounds this year, you could have met our adolescent squirrel visitor… Amelia might have been amused. Cute little vermin. 🙂

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Yesterday was apparently adolescent squirrel day on the block. One of this guy’s siblings was already frolicking by the tree when Sammy (as I named him… it’s been slow on our block) plopped down, having fallen from some height. He seemed stunned, but Husband went out to inspect and said there was no obvious blood or injury. Then Sammy spent the rest of the day not wanting to go back up to where he had fallen down from – and for awhile seemed to think that inside our house might be a better option, even with the dogs staring out from the front door. Kept me entertained most of the day.

          Liked by 4 people

  7. Living where we do, we have lots of deliveries. I received notice yesterday that Jung Seeds will not fill any more new orders because of such a huge volume of orders due to the virus panic that they can’t hire enough help. We ordered in January, so it won’t be a problem for us.

    We are waiting for an order from King Arthur Flour. I will order graham flour from Swany White next week. The Schwan man is busy in our town, but we don’t order from him.

    Our milk man in Luverne was Virgil Thompson. He was married to Ilse, who my mom explained was a “DP” or displaced person he met in Germany when he was in the Army in 1945. He delivered for Terrace Park Dairy out of Zioux Falls.

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      1. Oh, the drama at my Great Uncle Willy’s farm when it was thought that my Great Aunt Emmy was carrying on with Herman Bushell, a DP who worked as a hired hand for Willy during the war!

        Liked by 4 people

      2. I hadn’t heard the term DP before in this context, so I looked it up, and I’m wondering whether or not the term was applied correctly about Ilse? If she was the bride of an American soldier, presumably she arrived in this country the same way I did, as a “regular” immigrant. Was the term in general use to stigmatize foreign nationals who arrived in this country during or after the war? Does anyone know?

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        1. I think she was displaced in the sense she was a refugee in Germany itself after the war, displaced from her European home in Eastern Germany.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. To clarify, I’m thinking about the way the terms “illegal aliens” or “undocumented aliens” today give you a pretty good indication of how the person speaking or writing is perceiving the individual(s) they are talking about. I’m also thinking about Will Weaver’s short story “A Headstone Made of Wheat,” and how the German war bride was perceived when she arrived here. Any thoughts?

          Liked by 2 people

        3. Well, I know that Ilse and Herman were accepted in our community because so many people had immigrated there from Germany, and felt an affiliation with the refugees. There was a lot of anti-German sentiment in Minnesota toward immigrants like my Maternal grandmother and grandfather during the First World War, and they understood what it was like to be an immigrant.

          Liked by 2 people

        4. My Great Grandfather Lundsmann, a farmer, was apparently arrested in 1918 for being a German national in possession of a shotgun. What farmer doesn’t need a shotgun?

          The State of North Dakota was formally censured by the US Senate during WWI for not being patriotic enough because of all the German immigrants who lived there.

          Liked by 2 people

        5. There also was a Dutch guy who was able to move to Rock County after the Second World War because he had been active in the Dutch underground during the war and was rewarded by the US with the opportunity to immigrate. His daughter, Gert, lived in the same town house complex as my parents did, and I went to high school with her daughter. Gert was a Teen during the war.

          Liked by 3 people

  8. I felt sorry for the UPS guy (I work with his wife, Annette, a Developmental Disability Program Manager) when he had to carry two, 50lb bags of flour to the house. He also delivers our Christmas tree every December.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Your Christmas Tree by UPS still amazes me.

      I’ve been doing a lot more Amazon ordering. Not sure if it’s just because I have more time to sit and think about all the stuff we need? (yeah, right, “Need”?? Or “Want”??)
      Some of both. And I’m aware I’m creating demand at these warehouses and I’m not sure that that’s a good thing.
      And I’m not taking away things from local vendors or business’. I ordered a welding helmet, I ordered a “Y” optical cable for our Apple TV. Odds and ends like that.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Amazon has become a lifeline for me. My daughter insists she enjoys doing my grocery shopping, so we go with that. Since I’m unable to drive a car, everything I buy that doesn’t come from the grocery store is something I order from Amazon. It feels odd to order little stuff like plastic hair scrubbers, and Amazon will often try to force you to buy multiple copies of cheap items, but that’s the way I roll these days, living carless in a society designed for car drivers.

        With interest, I read screeds arguing that Amazon is the modern incarnation of Satan, a cruel force that is destroying the retail-rich world I grew up in. That’s an interesting perspective, but for me not a realistic one. There is one workable way for me to be a consumer now, and I can’t afford to avoid it because it is altering the economic structure of this country.

        Liked by 4 people

      2. I saw the photo of you in your new welding mask on FB. Pretty cool. Do you need it for welding or did you intend to use it instead of a mask?

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        1. The actual intent is Welding. It’s bulky and might be hard to actually wear to town. But at least my glasses wouldn’t fog up so much.

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        1. “kids” today use an eggplant ‘meme’ and I think it’s supposed to be sexual. I haven’t asked and I don’t want to know. I just don’t understand it.

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  9. I love this post, vs. I’m amazed that this sort of delivery is still feasible in a big city today. Thanks for evoking these wonderful memories from my childhood.

    We, too, had a milkman with a horse-drawn buggy who delivered milk in glass bottles to our doorstep. I recall those “little Hats” Steve described in the winter. Our milk wasn’t put in a box, just sat there on the doorstep, and if you didn’t retrieve it soon enough, birds were sure to have pecked holes in the cap and helped themselves to a treat.

    We also had an ice delivery man, who’d come once a week or so, and replenish the large blocks of ice in our icebox. The bread man delivered a variety of baked goods on a weekly basis, his buggy was also horse drawn. He’d announce his presence by ringing a large brass bell mounted on his carriage. The cheese monger made weekly rounds on a tricycle. Up front was a specially constructed box with a cover hinged in the center of the roof-shaped top ridge. That thing must have been heavy to pedal, fully loaded with all kinds of cheeses. He’d announce his presence with a special call.

    Once or twice a year another vendor on a bicycle would appear. The knife sharpener/rag man had a sharpening stone in front of the handlebars, and he’d sharpen knives, scissors, and other implements that needed sharpening. He also collected clean used rags. He’d announce his presence in the neighborhood with a loud melodic whistle like the one in this video. I’m sorry that you won’t be able to understand the lyrics, they are wonderful:

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    1. I remember a guy driving up in a station wagon stuffed full of bins of bolts and nuts. Dad knew him, he must have been a regular traveling salesman. I don’t know what else he had in the car besides the hardware; if he had anything for mom or the house or what.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Texting my siblings this morning; my brother remembers the guy in the car. Compared him to our childhood version of Mr. Haney. Said his car was amazingly packed! And dad bought a welding helmet from this guy. One we still have, but I just don’t use. Other kids remember the Watkins salesman coming down.

        Liked by 2 people

    2. When I was in Nicaragua a couple of years ago, I learned to listen for the women selling fruit in the morning. The father in the house where we were staying had particular favorites from different sellers and knew them by the sounds of their voices (there were two who sold mamon chinos, and he would only buy from one of them).

      Liked by 4 people

  10. Husband’s grandfather w as a produce man in Eastern Ohio. He had a truck and would call out “Vegetables ” as he drove.

    Today we received seed potatoes and shallot sets from Fedco Seeds in Maine. Husband also received his last two cheques from the tribe. We were worried with the increased chaos from the virus that payment would be delayed a long time.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. We didn’t have milk delivery, at least as far as my memory goes. But our neighbor (and my best friend’s dad) drove a milk truck for picking up milk from local dairy farmers to take to the local creamery. I strongly remember the metal milk containers – shaped like way oversized milk bottles.
    I do have Amazon Prime but have never ordered very much from them. Now I order even less for a couple of reasons: 1) They have plenty of “priority” orders to take care of, and 2) There really isn’t anything urgent that I need (except for my youngest nephew’s 5th birthday gift – he lives in VA). I am waiting for a check from the school where I am the choir accompanist. The job is volunteer but I do get paid for the three evening school concerts – rehearsals are not paid. I submitted my invoice right before the schools were closed. Now it’s a waiting game…….

    Liked by 5 people

  12. I order food to be delivered about every 5-6 days. Too high a risk to go out. As billinmpls says, tough part is produce, but also meat. Two funny things as result.
    They tell you to order squash by pounds. I learned 3lbs gives me a nice sized acorn squash. This time the shopper took it to mean 3 squash. She brought 3 of the largest acorn squash I have seen.
    You cannot buy fresh meat that way. I guess too hard to enter fresh meats in system. I had lots of meat in my freezer ahead of this because I buy that way. But I was low so a friend offered to shop to build back up my supply. He did a great job. But I asked for some boneless pork chops. He asked how much. So off the top of my head, I said I guessed maybe ten pounds. Turns out 10 lbs of boneless chops amounted to 36 chops.

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    1. I certainly agree about selecting both produce and meat myself. Picky me. Several times I have tried grocery delivery, and the produce quality trips it up each time.

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  13. My maternal grandmother immigtared to thecUS in 1914 when she was 14 years old. They lived in New York City for three years prior to moving to Minnesota. She told me about the Italian vegetable vendors who pushed carts laden with the biggest, reddest tomatoes she had ever seen.

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    1. Wow, so they moved to Minnesota the year before the flu pandemic broke out in 1918. I suspect that was probably a lucky break, although I don’t know how hard hit NYC was.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. The 1918 epidemic hit the Midwest hard. A key person in our family was killed by it. My aunts talked about it to us when we were kids. They certainly never forgot the experience.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. There is a terrific movie about life on the Great Plains shortly after WWI. I’ll bet you know it, Renee. Sweet Land is adapted from a Will Weaver novel. Great cast, and it is fun to have a movie whose plot is not predictable.

      Liked by 4 people

      1. Except the screenplay diverges significantly from the original short story, to the point that it doesn’t make sense. It’s beautifully photographed, though.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Did you know that Sweet Land was filmed in 24 days in October 2004 in and around Montevideo, Minnesota? It used a lot of locals as extras and their antique cars and farm implements as well.

        Liked by 6 people

        1. There was a play version of it produced a few years ago. I didn’t see it but knew people in it and they said it was really well done.

          Liked by 1 person

  14. OT: While I’ve never been poor, I’ve never been wealthy. That’s one reason I’ve worked to become an informed consumer. When I spend money on something, I want it to be reliable and functional. That makes me an ideal candidate for Consumer Reports. Fortunately, CR has a strong line of YouTube videos you can access at no cost. You might be occasionally annoyed by CR’s constant, gentle pressure to subscribe to the magazine. But that’s acceptable in view of how well CR researches products and issues. My father-in-law, rest his soul, avoided consumer mistakes by buying everything from Sears. “If you get it from Sears and you don’t like it, you can take it back.” My preference has been to use CR to guide me to good purchases so I don’t take things back.

    A CR YouTube report has to use a viewer’s time well. Obvious observations will not make a viewer want to subscribe or click on more videos, so CR videos work hard to deliver content that is not obvious. A good example is this short video about making a home office comfortable and productive. “Thanks” to the virus, this is now an issue we all need to consider.

    I appreciate CR research when buying a product I’ve never used before. This report on robotic vacuums is a good example. Since these things apparently work well, cleaning a home or apartment without adult supervision, it is tempting to speculate about other products that might make our lives easier. I need a machine that finds important papers and files them where I can find them.

    A major problem with YouTube is the anonymity of folks who post content. Anyone can do it, which means there are no guarantees of accuracy or balance. If I owned a car dealership, I could create a web site that pretends to evaluate different car models but would actually be a sales aid for the autos I sell. One way to correct for that is to favor videos from known sources, like The Atlantic, America’s Test Kitchen and CR. They have a reputation for fairness to protect.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I recently learned that Julius Rosenwald, who was part-owner of Sears and Robuck in its very early days and was instrumental in its move to become a general dry goods company, was a philanthropist perhaps ahead of his time. He gave a lot of the wealth he earned from Sears to historically black colleges, as scholarships for African Americans, and to build schools in the rural south.

      Liked by 3 people

  15. I was texting with my siblings yesterday about if they remember our milkman. (bulk truck driver). None of them do, which isn’t really surprising to me because I’m the youngest (by 8 years from my next and 15 from the oldest) And when my oldest sisters were around it’s possible dad was still hauling cans into town. Not sure when he put the bulk tank in. Then my brother was never interested in cows or farming so he wouldn’t have run down to the barn in the first place.
    However, brother remembers a milk truck tipping over and spilling a lot of milk on the side of the road and all summer that area stunk of spoiled milk. I’d never heard that story before. And even the spot where it tipped over is gone as my dad had the road rebuilt. I maybe vaguely remember that area of the driveway but today you can’t even tell there was a hill. And my mom, she thinks she must have lived somewhere else as she doesn’t remember any of this. 🙂

    Liked by 5 people

      1. As far as I know they do. I always thought that had to be the worst job ever. And it used to be you got a check for, maybe, $25 / dead cow. Then it dropped to $5. Then we had to pay them $25. No idea how it works now.

        Liked by 3 people

  16. OT – Can’t wait till we’re through this crisis, though heaven only knows when that will be. Meanwhile, I’m doing what I can to learn new stuff, try new recipes, and generally doing whatever I can to amuse myself, stay sane. This video made me laugh:

    Liked by 6 people

  17. I have no memories of a milk truck as a kid – though I’m pretty sure I remember a friend having milk delivered and thinking it seemed pretty swell. I worked at a group home after college that had milk delivered each week – with the way our residents went through it we never would have kept up otherwise. Had a whole fridge in the basement that was pretty much just for milk (and some ice cream).

    Me… I finally had to resort to ordering TP online. We were down to our last two rolls and had not found any in our trips to the store for the last couple of weeks (including the grocery store, Walgreens, and Target, on different days and weeks). Not sure when we might find any again, I bit the bullet and ordered some online. The very next day the grocery store had more in stock when Husband went out. We should now be good until Mother’s Day and beyond.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Oh wait… our last two meat share CSAs have been delivered to the house (rather than me meeting my farmer friend in a parking lot). I don’t have to worry about who is picking out my cuts, because I know they will be tasty – they raise Highland beef cattle and Mangalitsa pigs. We also get some chicken from another farm that we have as an add on. I would not have guessed that there was a big taste difference in something as simple as ground beef until I started getting meat from my pal in Stillwater. If they still had dairy cows I’d buy their milk, too.

      Liked by 5 people

      1. I agree, Anna, it makes a big difference where you get your meat.

        I have never had Mangalitsa pork. Cooks on Crocus Hills offer it from time to time as a crop share, but it’s outrageously expensive, so I have passed, so far. Their current crop share offerings are fiddlehead ferns, morel mushrooms, and ramps. The fiddlehead fferns and ramps are tempting, but the morels are $50 for one pound, so I think I’ll pass.

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        1. I know a spot, but I’m not telling. I know that Krista does too, but she’s probably not telling either. How about you, tim, do you know one? We haven’t heard from you in a few days, hope you’re OK?

          Liked by 1 person

  18. Look what happens when you neglect the Trail for almost an entire day!

    The plastic hair scrubber mentioned by Steve is also called a scalp massager – we had one when I was little:
    https://www.vermontcountrystore.com/shampoo-brush-and-scalp-invigorator-set-of-2/product/H1575?&adpos=&scid=scplp39572&sc_intid=39572&utm_source=google&utm_medium=paid%20search&utm_campaign=SC%20Shopping%20-%200%20to%2015%20-%20Desktop%2FTablet%20-%20Non-Brand&sourceid=7SCNBDT1

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  19. Hey all, look what you did this weekend!! Sorry I haven’t been on much, got bad news on Friday and spent most of the weekend dealing with it mentally. So in two weeks I join the ranks of the furloughed in America.I’m not worried, but I’m also not happy. We’ll see how this resolves it self over the next couple of months. I figure either they’ll need me back or I’ll retire a smidge earlier than I expected to.

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    1. Oh Sherrilee, I’m so, so sorry, but also greatly relieved that you’re in a position of this not being a catastrophe in your life. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do that would be helpful.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Thanks…I actually felt like I was keeping this from the other baboons over the weekend (although I did tell Ben when I saw him on Friday). And I knew that I would get comfort and support, but I think I really just needed to wallow in it for a couple of days.

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        1. Well shit, at this point every day feels like a weekend, and not just for those of us who are retired, so feel free to lean on us, or at least me, if you need to. This pandemic is no joke, and the consequences are going to be felt for a long time to come. For once in my life I seem to be in the perfect place at the right time. I’m retired, in a stable financial situation, in a state with sound leadership, what more can I ask for? I still have a few of those Bob Dean dollars that I can spread around where they are going to do the most good. Sending you a big baboon hug, vs. Like all baboons, you are dear to me.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. Bob Dean was a man I met on the banks of the Rhine in Basel when I was eighteen years old. I’ve told the story on the trail before, so I won’t repeat it now.

          The long and short of it is that though he was a causal acquaintance, he became a major benefactor in my life. Without him and his generosity, I would have never been able to go to college. He died before I had a chance to repay my debt, and I’ve been paying forward ever since. One person can make a huge difference, that’s the lesson I learned, and you never know when that one person is you.

          Liked by 1 person

  20. Hello,
    Very nice text. When i was young i thought, that it’s good to work in big company like a manager or director. It was my purpose. Then i had a lot of problems in finding good job. Now i think, that you gonna to do you want. so, if you like to sell milk you should sell milk.

    Like

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