TubaOrNotTuba

The large delivery truck came into the driveway and turned. Then the driver came to the door with a large cardboard box. He did request a signature but he admitted that since nobody ever reads them I could put pretty much whatever I wanted on the imaginary line. So I did. The box contains the most recent sleeping bag to join our family. Not for me because I’m satisfied with my current model but it did bring back memories of bags from bygone times. Stretching back over a lifetime. And the first one that I can really remember was received after selling a lot of greeting cards. What it had as a feature was this plastic panel on one side. Supposed to keep you dry if you were camping in a mud puddle I guess. It was uncomfortable and cold and when I had a chance to replace it with something better I did so. The next bag of note actually had some quality. I had purchased a sack in a war surplus store in downtown Toronto between trains. The military can afford to buy good stuff and even by the time it goes through it’s lifespan it makes it into the surplus market you still have something of quality. I kept that bag for several years until the leakage of tiny feathers became too much for anyone to accept. So many feathers. Since then I have been a fan of fake materials. The ones that come with a tag. And that you can actually dry out and use to keep warm. My current sack has enough slipping up zipping options to make sure that I can get through the warmest of nights and the coldest. Yes I have tried it in cold weather. And now we wait for the next report card. Will the newest bag in the family be suitable for staying out in the winter. The one that will begin any day from my calculation.

I will begin with a bit of weather trivia. A local observation. Today was our first snowfall of the season. Not a lot and pretty much gone by mid afternoon. But that’s how it starts. Now on to some food based trivia. In this area a staple diet consisted of potatoes and fish period. With a few root vegetables thrown in for variety. One element found in most home gardens was the common carrot. Our parents assured us that this was a necessary element in her diet. Both parents. You need to eat your carrots to be able to see at night. An odd life skill given that we lived inside during the evening and that we did not rely upon our eyesight forgetting our daily ration of potatoes and fish. Turns out that this was an element leftover from wartime. In order to hide the reality of the new radar systems the military press circulated the myth the Commonwealth pilots we’re doing much better than their adversary because they could see better in the dark. Due in large part to a steady diet of carrots. As a child I had never thought much about it. My parents had told me this and that was all that was needed but in a place where carrots had to be grown specifically it seemed like a good idea. Whether we could see better in the dark than anyone else in the nation was unclear. We have been told. The carrot does not get much variety in the average diet. You boil them and you give them a dollop of butter and you put them on the plate and then you tell the kids to eat. Which they did. And which we did. Carrots were not something you ever left behind because of your eyes. To find out that this was not based on science but rather on an attempt to mask a military technology events seems funny a lifetime later. There should have been a better story that they could offer. And we heard locally because we had a Commonwealth flying school. A place for pilots trained before going off to war. Who better to spread the myth than those who most needed the skill.

As we move through life we start to realize that there are two sorts of questions. The first are questions where I want to know the answer. The second are the questions where I need to know the answer. A very carefully defined subset of the earlier class. Think about it for a minute. Right now as winter approaches people are getting their wood-in. Is that still a thing? It certainly used to be. I know because I helped get the wood in. Here’s the thing though. The way we heat our homes has evolved and if I look back to where my ancestors came from, which I can do, I realize that they have a bit of a problem. Heating your house with wood is fine, as long as you have trees available. I was looking at some video from the Outer Hebrides where a number of my people lived several centuries ago. It might have been that the loss of tree cover is a modern thing but I get the feeling that they have not had many trees hanging around waiting to be burned for a very long time. The hills are bare. So are the fields. What did those people do back in the day? I imagine that wearing more clothes was always an option but what did you do when you needed to heat the kitchen. Or the bedrooms. With no trees available to cut and dry and split getting a fire raging must have been tricky. I now want to know. The question is not evolved to need to know but I imagine that it will as I ponder. We have many things like that in our lives. If I want water I can go to the kitchen and turn on the tap but it is not very long ago that someone would have had to go out to the well and draw a bucket and bring it in. With all the splashes and wait that evolves. My mother would have been sent down to the stream to collect water for the classroom. When it was her turn. Getting a pump and a tap was a much later convenience. One that would have been appreciated. And as for heating the stove in that classroom, there was a reliance on the parents to provide their share of the fuel. Something that a school board has not had to consider for a very long time.

Anyone who depends on the battery to get them through the day will know exactly what I mean. I am referring to the batteries that you can recharge. Over and over again. And unfortunately, as time goes on the efficiency dwindles. Drops close to 0 in fact. Consider your new cell phone which seems like such a marvel when you first unbox it. You plug it in and it says 100% eventually and then time goes on. That battery will return to 100% but I really do not believe we get the same amount of work out of the battery in the end days as we did in the beginning. I remember when you used to take flashlight batteries and tuck them away in that warm area near the kitchen stove in a couple of days later we had light. Not exactly rechargeable but close enough to make you happy. Now, we plan our life around how long a battery pack will last. Particularly our cell phone battery. Does anyone ever get through a whole day? The technology is there to make batteries that can last for years but as soon as we try to apply it in real life we are spending the rest of our time looking for a charger or a place to plug that charger in. It seems so unfair. I look at my tablet and realized that battery now lasts for a few hours. And then I am back to recycling my life. Waiting for the next optimum time. I developed a routine that sees me plugging in each night before bed. Not me but the battery. You knew what I meant right? On the other hand we have automotive batteries which do a different job and it seemed to last for years unless we abuse them. Why cannot industry figure out how to make things work better for all of us. When anyone talks about getting a new electric car I can only wonder how they’re going to handle that cycle of discharge. Will they be left sitting by the side of the road waiting for a boost. Or staying at home because the car is not up to the job. 

I blame the good weather. As we move through the month of October anyone in Canada realizes that winter is coming. Don’t just align from a TV show. And if you live in a home with a yard there are jobs that must be done before the snow comes period. However when the temperatures hover around 15°C the idea that you would have to put things away before the snow comes do not take centre stage. I’ve been thinking about all the stuff I have to do outside and then I found myself sitting back and saying well yes but it’s still nice out. The water hose? Well it hasn’t frozen yet. The furniture on the deck will all get put away before the snow comes I promised myself. Even the barbecue used as seldom as it is still needs to be stored away for the winter and I have done this year after year. Lifting that beast up and down a set of stairs is less fun than you might think. Maybe if I wait for the snow I can just slide it down. Not a technique I have tried but it seems plausible. Right now we still have all the leaves on the trees. And yes, I know that it only takes one windy day to change that. But it hasn’t happened yet. Outside it seems almost like summer. I am still able to go out in a T-shirt and shorts and feel like nothing has changed from six months ago. Or is it four months? Time passes quickly. Maybe I will wait for someone else to push my buttons. Remarks like you still haven’t put away your summer stuff? That can be what it takes. More than just a nod to eventuality. As for what to do with the stuff that comes inside we do have a clean garage and I can make it full of stuff easily. I can probably do it when others are not even looking. Get away with my vision of how the next six months should be. Or is it seven months? Spring could be late.

And then the man came and he put the warm back in the floor. That’s about the easiest way I can explain how we are lucky. Our home system for heating is a little bit technical and sometimes things happen. When we came back from travel last weekend the floors were cold. We have had this before and we knew exactly who to call. The technician arrived put in an hour to make sure of what he was doing and then left with everything back in order. Something I cannot do for myself. The technical is a circulating pump which I can imagine but not replace and so we depends upon my local company to take care of any such details. Which they do. I tried to imagine what it was like back in the day when you put together your system and if it broke you had to find a way to fix it. Probably things were simpler but they still would stop. If you did not have the skills to repair what had broken you could find yourself in a world of hurt as they say with the approach of winter I understand what cold means. This happened at exactly the right moment with temperatures still in double digits and with no storm heading our way. As I bid farewell to the technician I thanked him and said I hoped I would not see him again for awhile. He said you would be surprised how many people say that exact same thing when I come to their house. I wonder do I give someone a repair complex? I know that having spent years caring for the computer needs of a large group of people, things break. Part of the game. And the faster you can repair something that is damaged the easier the impact will be on the people involved. I always did my best to mitigate the problem. Anyhow we can probably put away the big blanket on the bed now because the house is coming back up to a state of normal.

There is a belief that we are what we eat. I want to go one step further. Are you what you cannot eat? For example if you have specific food allergies is that because you have more than simple reaction to something in the food. I don’t know. I was listening to a podcast where food came up as a question in the discipline of voice. There is another field that I know absolutely nothing about despite having used my own for many decades. But if you change your diet you can also change characteristics of your voice. Apparently. I have not tried this. In fact the podcast dealt with the reactions of a young mother to what she was eating based on the reactions and allergies of her new child. Wait? Better thing? Then we really are what we eat. Or in the case of a new mother your child gets what you eat in all senses. Anyhow I’m going to listen to the more content just to see if I can learn some of the things that I never learned in the school. As for singing I’ve already tried that route and I will not be making it part of my lifestyle. It is so embarrassing to stand in front of a group of strangers and let them see just how unprofessional you are. And I am not talking about karaoke. Never did that either. What I want to learn more about is the way that voice sounds are produced. And here I realize that I know nothing at all. Other than something about vocal cords which I am supposed to be able to see if I look in the mirror but I do not. I will have to find someone else with more understanding of the science. It is a science right? I mean we all have a voice but they seem to have some people that know a lot more about it than the rest of us. Are they teachers? Usually not. They have found other ways to get through life.

Trying to figure out what sets off odd behavior in the case of the rich and famous is tricky. Right now the world is watching from the sidelines as the US tries to choose their next president. One remark I have one candidate against the other set up a round of simulated play. Specifically the remark by one that in an earlier age there had been a job in a fast food restaurant. The competitor did not believe the story and decided to set up a simulation. A chance to make French fries in front of a select audience. In a restaurant. Seems simple until you learn that they had to close the restaurant remove all involved people track the automobile traffic outside and allow cinema. Specifically making fries. No cutting of potatoes was involved this was just throw some fries into the oil wait till the bell sounds and take them out. Hardly seems worth the trouble unless you are really hungry. But that’s what happened. A complete distraction. A pointless distraction. It did not prove one way or another that the claim voted job history was correct. It was just all for the cameras. Please let this election cycle end because it is devolving into silliness. Next thing we will have a putting contest at driving range. Just to prove something. And when everything is done life will go on and the employees make their daily terrible minimum salary will return to the fries. You can check the story out for yourself because the national media has covered it. Again not sure why. Unable to discover what makes this worth the time for the rest of us.

Something that I have not had to do for many years is provide references. Nor citations. Nor footnotes. No need to explain where I have read something before. I admit most people avoid that sort of situation if only because they do not realize how important it can be in the world of academics. I was watching a video earlier where they were talking about plagiarism. And the first goal of preventing such activity is to provide references for where you got the material. The kind of thing that keeps libraries alive. I was a person who read all the time and so anytime that I was required to finish that activity in writing in paper was always a head scratcher. Where have they come across that particular nugget. The gold that makes suck up academia. Not always easy. You learn to put down your references as you go because to do them after the fact is painful. And have parity you do not always realize that what you are presenting as a fact was given to you in proper form by an author. In school we are trained to do citations and then avoid the activity as much as possible until we are forced into a corner. Think about it. When was the last time you had to take a book off the shelf and write down all the information that would allow someone else to find the book for their research. We get away from that sort of thing as quickly as we can. The number of teachers who stand in front of a class and give out hours and hours of information with no requirement to tell the students where originally came from is mind blowing. We still require the discipline from those who rise up the chain but for the average educator is one of those skills that they also learned to ignore.