Oh the people we know!

I received this true set of stories from a very reliable source and since I am so late with today's thot, I am sharing it with you! Enjoy, it is about as close as any of us will ever get to the world of, well, multi-talented people who are there when it counts without any expectations of glory and fame.

I know you always love a good Father ( ) story so last night right before I left he showed up to make some pictures of a quadropalegic friend blowing out the candles on his 80th birthday cake (no small feat since he can't move his head) and we started talking. It always amazes me how much ( ) enjoys listening to people tell stories no matter how mundane. He was laughing as I told him about the time I got hit by a car on my bike and flipped over the hood to the shock of the driver, or fell out of a tree when I was young and it reminded him of this time he was in Guatamala. He was being chased by the drug cartel and he had to leap off his horse and slide down the mountain with his knapsack in one hand and gun in the other raised over his head as he slid through volcanic dust to hide in the sticks until the military rescued him. When he got home his sister was pulling out his laundry and was terrified when she saw the holey blood soaked bottom of his pants (she is a doctor and thought he had been shot in his rear). Interesting story (Very Indiana Jones) but then he asked if I had ever heard his 9/11 buttermilk story.

It started when he was working in south Chicago. The Steel Workers Union had hired him to go in undercover to assess the working conditions at an iron ore smelting factory. The people supervising the furnaces above where they produce the coke for the iron, walk catwalks above the giant furnaces and have to wear wooden shoes because anything else gets too hot to stand, and the fumes are overwhelming and toxic. It's so hot that any sort of breathing mask or respirator is unbearable to wear. To compensate old timers would ingest buttermilk, the fat of which would absorb the carbon molecules and at the end of each 90 minute shift they regurgitate it along with the majority of the toxins.

So when he went to New York to work disaster relief and ground zero after 9/11 officials were having severe problems having enough proper equipment for rescue workers. Not only were there not enough respirators they clogged easily and were very uncomfortable. ( ) marches into the Mayors office amidst all the tumult and confusion and asks the mayor if he knows where he can find buttermilk. I can imagine their reaction at this time of crisis but in the end they find him a supplier in an Italian company in Jersey. "You want what? buttermilk? How much?" again slightly baffled, but the next day, and every day after that, at the aid station where workers were being organized a semi truck arrived filled with half gallon jugs of buttermilk. ( ) proceeded to teach them how to swallow the buttermilk tensing their chest and holding it above their stomach so that it coated properly, and then how to regurgitate it at the end of each day. The doctors said nothing but quietly shook their heads and it seems the buttermilk defense of toxic fumes never made any headlines.

How can this guy listen to stories about me falling out of a tree with such interest? Anyway I thought you would enjoy that.