Meat.

"Traci, you've just eaten six pounds of beef-- now what are you going to do??"

"I'M GOING TO DISNEYLAND!!!!"

Yesterday the available IM staff went to a company lunch at a new restaurant in town, "Claim Jumpers," in appreciation for the incredibly constant, challenging work that we do. While, personally, my biggest daily challenge is simply not pummeling non-IM Bee employees, the rest of the staff faces larger, more difficult challenges: not pummeling the customers, for example. Or our vendors. Or, at times, each other. (Okay, just not pummeling Julian. JOKE!)

In my in-depth investigation of an appropriate restaurant to attend, I asked a coworker if Claim Jumpers sells steak. It was clearly a moment of acute stupidity on my part. There are more remnants of dead animals in the lobby of this place than Jack-in-the-Box sells in a year. (And they sell dead-animal remnants like no other. Remember the 80s kangaroo scare?)

Vast menu. As a woman who's usually tormented by decisions, I was surprisingly quick to choose the rib eye. It was easy. The menu called it, "The most flavorful of all steaks." After a ringing endorsement like that, how can you not order it? What I want to know is, who decided this? Was there a panel? Were they sitting there, dressed in starched, white, lab coats, adroitly ranking various cuts of meat? (Who can guess the word of the day?)

As promised, the rib eye was quite tasty, and as a bonus, VAST. It was an immensely, humongously VAST cut of meat, in point of fact, which I have plans to finish for breakfast. (WASTE NOT WANT NOT!) But disirregardless, as my friend Sara says, of the vastness of my selection... my coworker ordered (to the raised eyebrows of the lanky waiter) the Ore Cart (not the "Org Chart," as I had first presumed).

The Ore Cart includes: Beef ribs, baby back ribs, and half a chicken. That, my friends, is one VAST, HUGE pile-o-meat. I almost felt awkward sitting next to it, were it not for my extreme awe. (Coworker's name and image have been removed.)

Fully loaded Ore Cart.
My coworker ate it all.

Empty Ore Cart.

WHAT, you may be asking, does this have to do with training for the LifeCycle ride? Three short words: protein is good.

That's really all I have to say.