TubaOrNotTuba

My initial introduction to first aid came in the home. A small bottle our red orange liquid that my mother would smear on cuts at any opportunity. I remember that it was painful but my mother being a nurse assured me that that was part of the healing process. Later on, my father and my mother join the local military reserves. A chance to get away for afternoons of intense military training that seemed to involve one piece of apparatus. The triangular bandage. An odd yellow colour that I later learned had to do with age. These were leftover from the war. There was a training manual they explained the different ways you could fold a triangular bandage into useful pieces of something. I am still unsure what. You could make slings for a broken arm or things for a broken knee or slings for a broken ankle. The list went on and on period. Training sessions involved learning how to make the shapes necessary to cover various body parts. Like the ankle. And when the training session would be finished you would learn to reroll that bandage and put it away for the next session. No lives were saved but the intentions were genuine. When you are a small boy you imagine yourself on the battlefield wearing a collection of yellowed bandages while you wait for the enemy to advance period. The military also provided what they referred to as a first aid kit. Large bundles of wound stuffing. Small capsules that you could sniff if you fainted. More of that odd red orange liquid. And other training manuals. The military had a lot of books around our house. Did I mention that the first aid kit was made of metal? No cardboard boxes for these people. Getting a used first aid kit meant that you had a place to store all your personal treasures. Marbles an odd coloured rocks and other things found around the yard. In retrospect my military first aid training never advanced beyond that point. A good thing for the human race. We never had a chance to play with adhesive tape. Too expensive and obviously single use. Instead we could make any wound dressing stay in place with that all-purpose triangular bandage. I want to think that science and medicine have advanced beyond that point but I do not know. My life took a different path and I avoided going to war. Instead I went into the classroom which has its own war stories.

I am too stubborn for my own good. Today I’m working hard on language exercises and I feel like I’m climbing straight uphill. New material without the learning materials that should go with it. I have been trying to complete today’s exercises since dawn and right now it is dark again. To be fair I have not put this on continuous mode. I go until my back or eyes hurt too much to continue and then I take a break. But, so much for those earlier days would all seem too easy. I think this is what they call hitting a wall. On a better note, no pun intended, my guitar has come home period. A kind Samaritan took it upon himself to change my broken string period. Normally, I would have done this myself, but the guitar has different fittings than I’m not used to and I do not see them clearly enough to forge ahead. And so I reached out for assistance. Yes, I am too old to be so stubborn but I have had decades of practice. Think of me as being more like a donkey then a racehorse. And so once this exercise is completed, I will return to my language lessons and hope that I do not run out the clock. I still have time I think. I have never gone beyond a full day on any given set of exercises so I do not know what will happen. That is part of the learning experience. And when I go to bed tonight I will probably sleep.

There are tiny things that I notice around the house period. Stuff that is of little importance to anyone else but I will take a moment to make note of them period. We pump our own water period. And what I notice is that after each power failure some of the systems get bubbles of air period. I know a minor detail. But where it is noticeable is in the bathroom. The moment when I turn on the tap and wait for the hiccup. It always happens but only after a power failure the water starts to flow and then with a cough I get hit with a jet of water as the cap burps period. And then life goes back to normal period. Similarly the toilet sister goes through a bit of what seems to be unnecessary agitation. A brief moment when things are not as they should be. And then life goes back to normal period. I now wonder if an outside hose go through that. We disconnect all our hoses for the winter so I have no way to test it right now and I probably will forget about it in the summer when there are so many other things to keep my attention. But I wonder period. As it turns out I happened to watch a video of someone else who had installed their own systems period. A farm in the middle of the United states. Where they had to drill more than 200 metres down to find water. About 10 times more than what we faced. The people in the video spent a long time trying to get contractors to do their work period. Two or three years in fact. And they also faced a difficulty in getting insurance period. One of those you are too far from the road kind of stories I think. We had none of that which means that under my calculation we made a better choice of where to live period. For the record the couple in the video also lives in a place where potato farming is very important. But that is about it. Not much else of note around here today. We are in that quiet. Before schools go on March break. It does not affect me but I do pay attention.

If I was asked to describe what I did at work, the list could be fairly long. More than 30 years, you cover a lot of territory. What I can tell you is that there was never anything routine. I was given the challenge of trying new technologies in a world that was ripe for discovery. I worked with computers at a time when they were virtually unfamiliar to all involved. There was nothing that said we have already done this. Whatever I did I was in new territory and that removes any chance of comparison. I think that the largest single change that I brought to my sector was networking. We moved computers from being just machines to being machines computing and communicating. It all seems rather ordinary in retrospect but in the beginning there were no easy answers. When my director brought a really large book pile to my desk and said see what this is all about, I really was on my own. And so I’ve started with the first book and kept going until I had an idea of what might be possible. I installed my own networking interfaces and cut my own cables and configured the necessary software. The first day, with a small group of students, that we managed to chat from machine to machine told me that things were not going to be the same going forward. Even before we installed the 1st useful software. And in retrospect given that we kept that classroom running for another 2 decades we must have done it properly. I imagine that all the hardware is now gone and all the software has been revised completely but I did manage to sew a seed of interest among some of those students who went on to their own careers in computing and networking. For an educator it does not get better.

I recently heard a joke the ask is there a correlation between playing the lottery and being afraid of being struck by lightning. Probably. I mean, we all do things that put us in harm’s way because we believe that we have the odds on our side. But if you’re willing to contribute money to the government over and over again because you believe that you were lucky I have to wonder did you skip a year in math class? Do you understand what those numbers marked as odds indicate? No I do not put money on the lottery. A long time ago I read a book about the odds in various forms of gambling and it was clear from the first chapter on that the player never wins. Here, do a simple math question. I am not going to feed you the data points but try to figure out how many individual lottery tickets you would have to buy to tip the odds in your favour. If you answered 1 ticket you are just as correct as someone who wrote 150 million tickets. You cannot game the system the system is there to game you. The only reason governments put so much time and effort into setting up these voluntary taxation schemes is because they win. There it is. People fail to understand the simple things. Like when I see someone posting on Facebook that by placing this disclaimer Facebook cannot use your data. I’m not sure that’s how it works. For the record, if I place a photo on social media I do it with full recognition that it is out there as the saying goes do with it what you will which is why my photos seemed to be limited to showing the current snow cover on the line. By the time you see the photo things will already have changed.

Last evening, The lights went out. Just after supper had been served which is not a big problem because I know how to use a fork but I was very worried about missing the weather forecast. Of course, the Genny kicked in within seconds and life went back to normal. But I remembered when just after we had moved into the house something similar happened. This was before the generator had been installed and we had visitors over from the other side. From the shower the announcement that we had run out of water. Now that is not how it actually works but in the absence of electricity our pump does not bring water up from the bottom of the well to the house so we need it. Just one more reaffirmation that a generator would probably be a good idea going forward. We are now heading into a second decade of ultimate comfort. You know that I like to revisit the time of my grandparents when they would have gone out to the well and brought up more cold water. And then heat that water on the wood stove. I think we have a better solution now. For those of you who live in large areas where the electricity almost never runs out you cannot know the pain of having everything in the house stop. With the minor exception of the doors and windows. I did get my evening weather and it told me that it would be wet overnight and that it would freeze which it did but I look at the choices we’ve made in this house and I pat myself on the back. We planned ahead. We knew that things would not always be available. Case in point the lights and the water. And although the generator seemed at the time like a major expense it has proved in hindsight to have been worthwhile. Like that time when the wind blew for far too long and knocked everything out for over a week. Except for the lights in the water. I suppose that I could always go back to living in a tent. Closing my eyes at sunset rising with the new sun and kicking the campfire back into form. I don’t want to, so I won’t.

According to the news, one of our national leaders has died. Not of old age but rather from a fall. Nothing to do with the autumn. I do not know what happened, exactly. Was he balancing on the kitchen chair? Did he come around the corner too fast and do a slip slide on a loose carpet? I have been told that these are risks. So far in my life I have done remarkably little damage to my body. There was that thing with my nose a very long time ago but it was not a break. More of a slipped out of the notch and had the head put back in. I still have all my original pieces and no scars on my wrists or ankles or knees or shoulders or any of the usual places. That could change as I get older but I do have a solution. Find a good couch and get comfortable and stay there. Out of harm’s way. Forget trying to get to the top of that tree. As for running outside in an ice storm, that just sounds like foolishness. I gave up ice skating a long time ago. I’m going to try and make it through the next few decades without a need to meet a bone doctor. I know, they have better names for themselves but I’m going to go with the bone doctor thing. Has a bit of an old time tone to it. I bring this up because we’re in the middle of a minor ice storm. Just enough to put a glisten on the trees and close the schools. A minor thing. But if I was to become careless I could turn it into something much more important. Dramatic, even. I do not want to phone the family and say that I now have a cast or a sling or harness. Remember falls kill. Not waterfalls. I do not think this is something that affects only politicians. In any case I’m not going to take up a career of any sort that will leave me apt to get hurt. That’s part of the wisdom that comes with age.

An artist is supposed to leave his mark. Perhaps not musical artists but there are other mediums. So I spent some time considering what I had available to me in the short term. Near the top of the pile was the idea of being a sculptor. There was a lovely block of cheddar in the fridge but I quickly realized that my art might fall victim to a passing rodent or dog or someone on a midnight raid in that same refrigerator. So I looked outside. Right now we have some snow although the rain is doing its best effort true move any traces. I considered going down to the beach where there are literally tons of sand available I have worked with sand before. I built a couple of castles in my youth but the problem with sand is that wind and waves tend to destroy what man has put into place. Up the road, in a field, there were blocks of stone. On closer inspection I notice that people had already engraved their names into the surface. A way of showing ownership I imagine. I could gather rocks along the beach to make, I don’t know, a hammer or an axe. Like I saw in a museum. Or I could go online in order a large piece of again I don’t know marble or granite but that invites hours and hours and hours of physical effort to create whatever. Yes, I know some artists will tell you the object is hidden inside the stone but I do not have the patience to search for anything. I will probably go back to the refrigerator, cheese did look good. I mean all the parts I don’t use in my sculpture can serve as supper. I just need to read a bit more about the imagined permanence of cheese. The life of an artist. Especially one with virtually no experience.

I have been recalling moments in music education. My education. Depending highly upon my peers. I admit it. The majority of what I learned, I learned from others. All instruments and technologies confused. Yes, it was. Confused, I mean. I can remember my first introduction to recording. From a lad two streets over who wanted to sell me his reel to reel tape recorder. He made it sound absolutely wonderful. With a razor blade and a lot of time I could make a recording from the sounds around me. Forget the fact that I was not old enough to shave and the razor blades were in some ways dangerous. The deal fell through because I did not have enough money on hand. And then we moved and in my new neighbourhood I learned that others collected music. For the main part in LP format. Someone next door who loaned me my first Led Zeppelin album. Someone else, three doors down, who introduced me to traditional blues. I doubt that he knew that, because we could only access his record collection when he was not at home. Others in my class had different artists’ LPs. We lived in a world of musical anthologies. There were bargain basement LPs that contained 20 or 30 songs from the hit parade. When we met people in our class that actually could afford to buy real records from one band at a time, it was an eye opener. Or ear opener if you will. By the time I made it to college I had people in my residence that not only had good budgets but eclectic musical tastes. I was able to profit from the open door policy. You know, where they would leave their door open in the evening while they played what they wanted to listen to and the rest of us soaked it up. For all you modern people that depend on playlists from the Internet I doubt that you ever will have the kind of variety that we had on a daily basis. I know that it gave me a broad taste in music. Something that I managed to play into a personal collection of recorded cassettes. I was a mellow man with a very limited budget. I have, as life continued, managed to get rid of most of the media, but not the memories. It often takes only one or two notes to bring back memories of moments from so long ago. Going forward I will continue to discover but I doubt that I will ever have as broad a range of content as I did back in the days of high school and college.

It was pointed out, in one of those seen in passing moments that the advertising for my neighbours company is still online. My neighbour passed away several years ago and I do not know the status of the company but it is interesting to see what he actually used to sell. In this case systems for people that are living off grid. Things like solar panels and pumps and the other sort of material you would use to bring comfort to a small home. I gave myself a pat on the back because I know an awful lot more about such things then I did a decade ago. I know some of the better questions to ask. What is the strength of a submersible pump. What is the required current for such a system. Are the materials still available? Back when I lived in the city I knew nothing of such things. My water came out of convenient taps in various rooms in the house. My electricity arrived at a pole outside the house. I had never considered, back then, what may be required if I was living in country that was away from services. I know now such things also serve farmers. Getting water to the livestock as an example. I also know more about what happens when you live on top of a big rock. Or, in our case a big sand dune. Changes the strategy. And for what it is worth the systems installed by our neighbour are still, as far as I know, still functioning fully decades after his work. In other words, he knew what he was doing and he did it the right way. Am I going to disconnect from the grid and put in my own pumps? I hope not. I also have working systems. But I know that if push came to shove I could get water into my kitchen with little effort on my part. Money does not equate with effort other than in loose terms. All that from an advertisement. After all, analysis of a situation, is the first step in getting a solution to a problem. Or at least recognizing that you have a problem.