TubaOrNotTuba

After listening to my weekly Thurber story I came to a realization. My life has been devoid of practical jokes either by me or others . Sure there was that time that somebody pinned me into my room but that was just a college prank. I’m talking more about the kind of events the Thurber uses as a source of so much humour. I have never seen anyone get a random roller skate, or a cold boiled egg in their pocket. Perhaps these were the stunts of a past era. Even my own children have failed producing tales that I can use as historical fodder. I guess we grew up in humourless households. Actually even in the real world the practical joke seemed to have gone the way of the dodo bird. Not something that people aspire to or practice as regular activity. We have other things to amuse ourselves. Like cat videos if you will. Am I too old for practical jokes? Yes I think that is the answer. The sort of sense of humour that takes pleasure in creating uncomfortable situations for others is something of another age. Of course we still have the classic stories like Thurber on a Friday. I wonder if my life would have been different if I had hung around with people who took pleasure in the discomfort of others. My friends were not like that. At least, I do not think so. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. Right now I am anxiously awaiting the end of winter. Sometime this weekend the annual lobster fishery begins locally which will distract everyone for about two months. No time for practical jokes when you have traps to haul. Even in the mail I receive nothing of note. Unless you count those offers of another credit card. Instead I have the daily scourge of phone calls from people who really want to know more about me. Offering nothing in return. Is that the practical joke of the new century? I will have to give this some thought.

At one point I was ruled by rudiments. Let me explain. My life was music but rather than depending upon tones I depended upon mathematics. I had to count all the time because I had to take something as simple as a beat and subdivide it so many ways then it became unrecognizable to the average person. We had pages of notes on what to do and how to do it. Unless you’ve tried to complete a flam tap under pressure you have not lived. Unless you have counted the strokes in a roll and I do not mean a spring roll or a bread roll I mean the roll on a snare drum you cannot recognize how many ways there are to get it wrong. Believe me 5 Rook stroke roll and a 13 stroke roll have little in common. I also had the virtue of being the only person in my class in the percussion section. In a situation where you cannot be right or wrong I had to be right all the time because others would hear what I did. And so I went forward in life with more then a cursory attention to subdivisions. I learned how many ways you could subdivide a beat. Even when you were trying to keep the beat you had to be on that. I have never had a teacher who was an expert in percussion so I guess I got off easy. Anytime I had to go before a jury I was quite aware that I knew more than anyone else in the room about what I was trying to do. I learned, early on, that the biggest drumstick is not necessarily the best. Pretty hard to do something with finesse when your tool is a broom handle. Or a tiny pencil. Of course I made rudiments in the background when I should have been doing mathematics. That was how I rolled. Even now I will tap my fingers and say the magic words flam or paradiddle or single stroke roll. There were so many and it was more than just a memory game it had to be the basis of everything you did in a musical situation. Take it from me a snare drum does not make music. After all that I went on to other instruments that had more charm in this social situation but there is nothing that can replace the pleasure of getting the beat right on the headrest of your buddies car. Distracted driving? That was me your honour. If someone ever offers to let you join a marching band jump to it . There is more than the bass drum.

Slowly and with great moments of planning our next road trip is starting to be set up. Let me point out that I am nothing more than a spectator. Any of the efforts to choose and get reservations belong to my partner. So far we have reservations on a number of ferries as well as reservations in a number of campgrounds. We are early in the cycle which means that not every campground is open for business. They still won’t be a month from now. And so we must call and talk to people and get our names on lists and make sure that when we arrive we will not be left standing on the road. Tricky business. We do not know the actual area. All we have to go on are videos from others and what little we can glean from various advisory sites. But it will all work. Our last time out we went with no knowledge and no maps and no real destination in mind. This time around we are going in with both eyes open. We now know where it goes after you leave it on the various roads. One question has come up again in a game. If I am unable to see where we’re going will I still take pleasure from it. The answer is simple. Yes I will. Places come with a whole set of sensory inputs. The sounds and the smells are often as important as the sights. Although we will probably visit some small museums that is not the aim. We want to test the country. We want to take trails that go up and down again. We want to get wet if it rains and hot if the sun shines. Primary tourism. And since we are better equipped than our last visit to the area we should be able to do what we want on our own terms. As far as I know there will be little need to visit big shopping malls. And if we go to a cliff edge, we will move with caution. But that’s all in the future the near future. I will try to keep my blog on task.

Over a period of more than three decades I took the bus to work. City bus with the number on the front. And I had to use a series of buses because the city was at large. I learned quickly to pay attention to the clock to make sure that I was at the street corner at the right time to catch my bus. Whatever it happened to be at the end of the afternoon. I did sort of a return but not always the same route. Very standard things. There were however some small exceptions. Particularly, late at night you will catch the last bus of the evening. The bus driver usually had fewer passengers than on a regular run and he or she also wanted to get back to the garage and end the working day. Shortly after leaving the depot or the stop, the bus driver would ask if we were going all the way to the end. And when you were the last or second last person he would often switch up the game. Simply shorten the route. Drive in straight lines, where before he would have had to go around multiple corners. And getting close to the end meaning close to my house he would ask whether he could turn left or right at the next corner. That was the shorthand for where can I drop you. I have been driven right to my front door on certain runs. On the street were city buses rarely ever traveled. I admit it felt really special. Like having a 40 foot limousine with a private driver. Do I miss the city bus? Probably. It was never strenuous and I rarely had to run to get to where I wanted to go or walk long distances. I think public transit is a wonderful thing. I think my kids have caught the bug because all of them also used the city bus. One of the better things about city life.

I try not to be frightened by the things I cannot see. However after listening to a podcast about super bugs my stress level has risen. Turns out there are many things in hospitals that are not only difficult to see but that are difficult to control. We have given such power to the antibiotic that it now controls what we can and cannot fight. I almost wish for those days a lifetime ago when penicillin was all there was. Laboratories have developed many stronger things for lack of a better word and those things have been abused by doctors and hospitals figuring that they had the answer to every question. Turns out if you use your weapon too often the edges get dull. Soldiers from bygone era knew that one but those who worked in hospitals were fully convinced that they knew better than nature. And so, now, we have bugs we cannot kill. More than one of them. I will not be going to wander around the hospital anytime soon, I hope, because there are too many people that come through that have fallen into the bug trap. I remember that for anyone who works in the school you quickly learn that a classroom full of students is a classroom full of pathogens. For the main part we have that part under control. Or we did. From what I learned in the podcast even the names are designed to strike fear. If you can’t say it or write it, you can’t fight it. Surely there would be better spells in the future but in the United States the pharmaceutical industry has stopped certain strains of research because the profit was no longer visible to them. I know, invisible bugs. However the choices of what to research in the lab are driven as much by shareholders as by disease. A train that is out of control. I have no real involvement in stock markets and it makes me wince to watch how certain people figure the only thing to worry about in life is whether or not their investments are doing better than last year. Hence, the problems with research being limited by money. In short, things are not going to get better anytime soon. Will we all die of a super bug? Probably not, but some of us will be a lot sicker before they are well.

I worked for many years in a small office. The place where I learned that the boss always has a more comfortable chair than the worker. Even though the boss was rarely there. But, my workplace was not dangerous. I say that after watching some more videos about people working in the fishery. Not fishing with a pole and line. The fishery. At sea trying to harvest from the bottom. Today I learn some more about scallops. Specifically that you spend an awful lot of time waiting for the tow to come in so that you can see whether or not you brought anything on board. In other words always a mystery. It gets worse because once you have some harvest you must clean it so that other humans can enjoy it. The amount of money you make is a consequence of that. And always the unknown of whether or not you will find anything on the ocean bottom. While you wait for the weather to change. That was the other part it seems that going to see is a constant battle with the elements. The water is cold, the winds are strong and you live waiting to see whether or not you will actually earn any money. It does not seem to matter how big a boat you have. And As for a chair? A bit like the office where the boss always has a better chair even though he is rarely there. I wonder whether or not I would want to work under conditions that are so close to nature period. The answer is simple. That’s why I chose to work in an office. Am I lazy? A little but I also fear for my life, every day. And while helping a secretary to sort out the word processor problems might have seemed challenging, it was always just a question of whether or not I could undo what had been done before I got there. Yes, I had other jobs that were more physical but that results are the reason why I spent so long in school. I figured out that the school years compensate for the physical. And schools on the whole are at least warm and dry. As I say I’ve been watching too many fishery videos and I realized I dodged a bullet.

While watching a video this morning I came across a new word: quintal. A unit of measure no longer ordinarily found that was common when people were salting fish. I have only one memory of salt fish. Many years ago a coworker gave me a gift more to test if I was too stupid to know what to do with it. This offering came with instructions. Soak, rinse, repeat period. After that I was on my own. I understood what I had in hand, salt cod, and with potatoes, I was able to prepare a meal and then the next day report that it had been very good. Anyhow, the video I watched today was of an old fisherman who talked about the days when he would quote in his story fish by hand line all day and then come back and spend the night in the hold of the ship splitting his catch and salting it. This would go on for days. Turns out that there’s not much salt fish around anymore and if you did have a quintal you could sell it easily. In boutique shops. A delicacy for many. I think I’ll stick with my current diet. Apparently too much salt is bad for you. The idea of spending all night cutting fish and storing it to be dried seems like more work than any of us want to do now. But, we now have refrigerators. As someone else might say count your blessings. I’ve only seen cod drying on the flakes one time. Not around here. We used to catch enough fish like that to do a meal or two but no large productions. We left that to folks in other provinces. We had potatoes and they needed our food as much as we needed theirs. Happily, potatoes took little preparation for storage. Just some big bags and a cool cellar. Also, I have never had to measure any food in quantities of 100 kilos at a time.

One of the cell phone companies used to have a series of ads where the tagline was can you hear me now. It was fun because we could all imagine how you end up in such a situation. Well I am now trying something similar. Not with cell phones but with walkie talkies. Three of them arrived yesterday and we do not know how long the batteries will last. We are now doing this simple things. One person drives up and down the road talking at intervals saying can you hear me now. Well I can tell you with a walkie-talkie is that the reception varies constantly. Each time you go around a curve or down a hill things will change. But that has little to do with battery life. Instead we will try to figure out whether or not the batteries under charge last for enough time for us to use the radios while traveling. The kind of thing where one person goes into a mall and talks to the other. This is not military discipline. What I do know is that having a radio can be a lifesaver in certain conditions and it can also be a way to raise your aggravation level two extraordinary points. Am I not hearing the other radio because the battery has gone down or because the person is actually out of range. Something you learn from experience. When I first started playing with radios we did very little point to point work. Usually we had a repeater in the middle and that changes the whole game. If I was more concerned I could get a small repeater going here but that would serve little once we started traveling. So we’ll go with our tests that are far from being scientific but that will give us a baseline for saying whether or not we can go beyond the limit of the property while talking to the other. Just to note our property is not large. For those of you who say why don’t you just get a cell phone the answer is simple have you looked at cell phone charges recently. I am not rich enough for that. I really shouldn’t talk about cell phones because that too, is far from being constant. I live a long way from that tower and if I turn my back the cell phone reception can go away. I no longer want to climb trees. But we shall see or hear. And perhaps by the time summer arrives we will have a system in place that makes sense to us.

We returned from our road trip with some issues to face period. A whole house full actually. The floor is cool. Not cold because that would be exceptional but cool. And so we did the only thing we did could do we called someone who knew how to fix it. Called this morning by breakfast and they were here just after lunch. With all the necessary pieces. And now the floors are getting warm again and I can move on to other things. It did not require much effort on my part I have to admit. As well we have received a small box of radios. Not the kind that bring you tunes but the kind that you carry around with you and talk to friends with. We just have to wait for the batteries to charge. There were some initial tests come by someone driving up the road in my listing and for the first few minutes we could hear each other fine but then the battery from the factory went to zero and now we’ll do test tomorrow. I have had small handheld radios before and these seem to be well made. At a reasonable price unlike some of my others. A step forward towards the next step if you understand. It was fun to see the guys that came this afternoon to work on the floor. At least one of them has been here before it was good to show him how things have evolved since last visit. We’re lucky because locally, there are some very qualified people who undertakes things like repairs to cold floors. On the same day. Imagine for someone in the big city getting repairmen in can take a long time. Enough to make you want to learn how to do it yourself. Mind you that’s not the only reason but most of us aren’t willing to take on a career in plumbing or electricity. A shadow to my kids.

All that is really needed is a seat in the lobby. Near the reception desk. That is where all the answers will be found. For example this morning we had no coffee. A rare thing in a large hotel. But then, later in the afternoon I learned that the water softener had broken. Turn the coffee they did make into something salty. I would have used fresh water if I had been asked. I was there for most of the afternoon and after the first few minutes no one noticed me I was just that little old man sitting on the couch quietly. And so I did I stayed put and waited to see what else goes on in a lobby. Did you know that hotel has different rooms for everything. And that they have a different price for those rooms. No wonder it takes so many people around the desk. Basic accounting. I learned that if we wanted to stay for another couple of days we would not have been able because they were down to nothing left except the bridal suite. That did not interest me much. Our trip in the area was done and within hours we were back home. Good weather all the way except for darkness. I know darkness is not weather but when there’s nothing else going on that’s all you notice. And by the time we got home and unpacked and got in the house it was still dark. We’re getting very good at this kind of thing. Still have to deal with some minor problems. The floors are still cold. Outside there’s still work to be done only under the house but that’s the materials problem. I’ll just go to bed tonight and let that be something to think about in the morning.