a royal purple cast

saw the hand specialist today. he thinks i broke a couple wrist bones, but it won't show up in an xray for a couple of weeks, so i have to go back just before x-mas for reexamination. talked to the cab company's insurance adjuster, she's right on everything, woo hooo.

fast eddie took the knuckle heads (his dogs, gus & sam) and gromit to the dog park, and reminded me of "paper", while we chatted when he picked up gromit. one of the bad things about being a 20 year driver is losing friends. i think pat powers was the first one to go, he might have out lived jim englekey, but it was back in that period of time. powers was a day driver back when i started, he drove 162, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm, m - f, and did a little part time dispatching, averaged 1 shift a week, weekend evenings. one night he had a splitting head ache, went to the VA hospital, and was dead the next day. god must have liked him as much as we did. anyway......................... about paper

if you ran out of money at the drivers poker game, it was acceptable to write say, "fast eddie owes $20.00" on a piece of paper, toss it in the pot, and take out twenty bucks to continue playing with. since anybody who needs to do this is probably a deadbeat, paper was hard to collect on. powers was always willing buy paper for 50% of face value. then he'd wait for an opportunity to dispatch when somebody who owed him money was driving. if a good shift was worth $100.00, and driver x owed him $25.00, he'd make it clear to the driver that he'd make at least $125.00, but powers got the first $25.00 right away. then powers would stuff the guy calls for his entire dispatching shift.

the other thing i recall about powers was the concensous opinion that if you were going to get in a bar fight, and you could only take one friend along with, powers was the guy you wanted to be out drinking with. his watering hole was the psha, which was the perfered watering hole for all the ball players. i never got invited to play ball.

is the fix still in? the more it changes, the more it stays the same, they say. Sandy Van Scycle once wryly made the observation that, "every body is doing something all of the time."

this has caused me to recall knutson, and yard runs, and my $3 bike, but those are to be seperate posts

powers had a real deep voice, i will never forget the voice or the man.