TubaOrNotTuba

Sometime during the last hour there was a traffic accident just up the road. Minor traffic accident. The kind that got a visit from the police after the fact. Required the use of a first aid kit. By a first responder. What makes this story interesting to me is that the first responder lives here. The ink is barely dry on a brand new first aid certificate. Already, that brand new first aid kit has been called into service period. It is odd how you can go for years and years without any need for such things and then, boom or bang, there you are. There was nothing special about the road today. No new ice or heavy circulation of vehicles. Just the way it goes period. And I wonder, not having actually seen the accident, if this was a full life saving event. Maybe, because who am I to judge? That being said I now see I need to upgrade all the first aid kits we have in the house and the car and the RV. If you do not have it, you cannot use it. And I am sure that those actually involved in the incident are happy to have had someone come by and give assistance. Sitting by yourself on a quiet country road. With blood dripping is not that much fun. What will be the next moment in our lives. I have taken several courses but I have never needed my knowledge or ability. A positive thing. Given the number of people who are out and about lacking due care and attention. I, intend to stay close to home, where I can find my own means to avoid moments of bodily harm. Although, now that we have a qualified first responder in the house, I am much less at risk. Did I hear mention of CPR training? From what I’ve heard that can be useful as I get older. Title a first response

Times change. The jobs that people do change. I just need to look around this neighbourhood. So many jobs are now gone. Take a look at the local village. No stores no post office no real service. Even the tracks are gone. There used to be a building over there where they stored the bus that took people to town gone a small building near the general store had a telephone operator. That job is gone. There were a series of small local schools. All gone. If we go over to the local fishing port not a single person goes out trying to catch codfish or macro. Lobster is still a big item though. You will notice that the sound of someone cutting down trees is just an echo of the past. We do not warm our homes with green firewood anymore. If you were to ask me what job should a young person try to learn I would be hard put to find an answer. Most of the jobs have moved on to the city. Far enough away that you do not travel back and forth at the end of each afternoon. I do note that there are still the same houses for the main part. They have been in place for over a century. My grandparents would still be able to find their house and the houses of many neighbours but I live in a place where the time has passed by. Of course, we have gained. The economy as such is still stable. But that is only one century. The lighthouse over at the point still shines at night but the position of a lighthouse keeper is just a point in history. We still have the same churches so I guess that is a good thing. In the fields I see no shape or cows or horses. All the fox is now wild. In sharp contrast we have windmills. I asked and all the electricity that is generated goes away to other places. We consume but there are no jobs associated with the technology. The traffic comes only at certain times of the year. Usually, a tourist on his way from somewhere to somewhere. It does not bode well for the population. Going forward in a century this will be a virtual desert.

Many of my day-to-day issues are caused by my own hubris. A reluctance to ask for assistance. The question was raised about the odd white powder sprinkled near the sink period. I knew the answer. I have been trying to measure a dose of stomach powder period. One tablespoon approximately. But the spoons I found would not fit in the opening of the container so I used that other tried and true method where you tap on the bottom, carefully until some falls out period. This is not a method recommended in the laboratory, nor in the average kitchen. I usually get through the effort but there has to be a better way. On a similar note I have just come in from the garage where I was trying to find a tire pump. I know it is out there but I did not find it. However, I can confirm the lawn tractor has a flat tire and the steering wheel is where it should be period. I will try again, another time. No, I was not trying to re inflate the tire on the lawn tractor. That is an issue for another day. Rather I wanted to firm up the tire on my bicycle. And no, I’m not trying to go for a bicycle ride either. A different issue. Since I did not find the tire pump where I thought it would be I now have two options. Look around for another pump or ask for assistance. That project is on standby for now. I find so many ways to kill time. Not always successfully. By the end of the day I am ready to go back to bed. My measure of success has changed. Lately, there has been a raccoon hanging around outside. I wonder if he could be trained to do jobs. They have the reputation of being highly intelligent.

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.