TubaOrNotTuba

It does not take long. I voluntarily withdrew from the economy some months back. OK some years back. But I now realize that I have no more idea about the cost of anything. How much is rent? I don’t know. What’s a fair hourly wage for a certain job? I don’t know. What does the jug of milk cost? I don’t know. And on and on. If you told me that an apple was worth a dollar I would have to believe you perhaps it is worth a dollar. Money has become something I used to use. In a drawer there is a bag of pennies. I think. Wait, you mean that they do not use pennies anymore? Where have I been his life passed me by. I used to believe that the dog had a peaceful life. A bowl of food which miraculously appear at his place every day along with fresh water. Well, that is where I’m at. Maybe the real question is am I happy? By all measurable standards, yes. If any of my siblings come to visit they can figure out for themselves what it costs to live here. And I will ask them about where they live without realizing what any of the numbers mean. Somehow this is not what the economy wants. They foster tension in competition and other negative sentiments. I just am. And when the sun goes down far enough I will go to bed and wait for the next day. Reminds me of something I heard about a young child who worked in a coal mine. Found sleeping beside the wall. When asked what had happened the child explained that the mice had stolen supper and there was no candle so simpler to just go to sleep and wait to see what happened next. An old story that makes so much more sense now. Of course, the mice have not stolen my supper in a very long time. But it could happen.

I am fully aware that a forecast is nothing more than a good guess. Last evening when we sat down for the supper time weather TV local forecast and things went off the rails. Our broadcast suddenly moved to Nova Scotia. Different announcers and different forecasts on. And then about the time I had settled into learning all about the latest building plans for the big city over there we were back at home. A slight apology for technical difficulties and life carried on. Fast forward to now. Late afternoon. And that steady rain we had been told about has suddenly changed to steady snow, enough that shovelling might be needed. Now I knew this kind of thing could happen all it takes is a couple of degrees change in temperature or a couple of degrees of change in the direction of the wind and all of a sudden you live in a different place in terms of weather. It will not affect us. We have no place to go and no need to do so right away. I did have a moment of fantasy where I thought that if we lived in a big city we could call out for pizza. Let the problem be the driver’s not ours. That will not happen and we will just return to regular meals and regular forecasts. Probably, yes, we will watch the weather forecast this evening just to give us something to talk about. In this part of the world we pay attention to the weather. If I was the person who likes to bet I could spend all my available money I’m guessing. Instead I keep an eye outside and I listen to the videos. A lot of comedy interspersed with good music. And by tomorrow we will be on to another weather system. At this rate March may come in like a lion. And yes, such weather expressions mean nothing. We could have a whole easy month ahead or a dreadful one but before we know it the tourists will return and the beaches will be busy. One note. Our local cardinal seem to find the perch to be slippery or icy or sticky or something we’re not sure. Just changed.

Many years ago music came in packages. We called them albums and they cost more money than most of us could afford. However while at university I discovered an in. The campus radio station was a place that received in the daily mail, new record albums contributed by the various companies that had a stake in the business. Cheap advertising is still advertising I guess. There was a magical room filled with LP’s; too many to listen to, but from time to time we would sample. Take an album into a studio put it on the turntable, drop the needle, listen and put it away again. Assigning our own score if you will. I remember one album in particular always left me with unanswered questions. The artist was Captain Beefheart. I listened shrugged and moved on. Several times. Never developed a real taste for his music. So today I decided to go back and re-listen. In this case a full documentary on his life and music. Spoiler alert. I still would not buy his record. Outside of my interest zone. But with time I have become more accepting of stuff that is for lack of a better word; weird. I also see where he fits into the pantheon of rock musicians. He had some famous friends. From the documentary I have learned that he gave up music and took up painting. We all need creative outlets. And the next time I come across one of his albums I will have a better idea of what is going on. It should be noted that, that radio station is long gone, nothing but a memory. Music has a life to go down further… beyond simple moments. One does not always have a complete change of opinion even after many decades. I think we all know what we like.

For several years now the eyes of the world have been turned to the South. Watching the turbulence around a former president. Waiting for something to happen. So many times I’ve heard the statement but will anything ever really happen? Unlike reality TV this all plays out in very slow motion. A sloth by any other name. Even the news that there have been huge financial injunctions against the man and his companies does not really mean very much. This is all invisible money too much for any of us to count. However sometimes we have little incidents that do make you go; «oh really!». Yesterday the sheriff and his deputies arrived at a small airport in southern Florida. And they flew away on a Boeing 757 that belonged at least in common jargon to that former president. A seizure against a huge debt. Like everything else it will take time but I’m left to wonder. When you no longer have a private airplane and you refuse to fly coach does that mean that you stay home. No more heading off to a quick rally in some place that I would have to use the map to find. Even more, the chance of flight in the sense of getting away from us all to another country has just dropped dramatically. Maybe there will be a moment of accounting. I may have to wait for the movie version which is still some years away but the script is being written line by line Somehow I doubt that he has a backup plan. Just like the rest of us. If anyone ever shows up and tries to seize my personal airplane I will laugh and laugh. From the news stories that was not his reaction.

I am lucky to live in Canada. One simple reason. All those people that phone me with ways to try and get to my money know so little about us as a nation. Today a call to let me know that my social insurance number had been compromised. I’m not sure what that would mean since all it allows me to do is pay taxes but anyhow, I asked the person on the line to please repeat the message for me in the other official language. A very quick way to get a dial tone. You know, should I want to call someone else to let them know the bad news. Or good news. I’ve been handing out my social insurance number for most of my life. It used to be the way that we got through the meal checkpoint at university. No number no food. And despite all the efforts to have been made to get my information not one caller has ever offered to pay my taxes. It really does not matter. I know that if my number was truly compromised that I would not get an anonymous caller from the government to let me know that. They have much more direct manner for dealing with people. It would be a shock though. To go online to pay my taxes and find that there was no longer any need to do so because I was no longer me. As my kids might say, sweet. Seriously though I wonder if the people who put together these scripts ever actually test them or is this some kind of fever dream that comes to them after a long night with beer. At one point we took the time to destroy a lot of old documents. For the main part pay slips. All of them containing my secret number. More secret than that and you get a big fat prize I guess. For those that want to know the real story you can actually test the validity of one of these numbers. Too complicated to detail here but I did it as an exercise many years ago. One of these add these digits to these digits minus these digits and see if you get a number at the end that looks like the last digit of your number. Like a magic trick for those that do not understand magic. So I will go back to waiting for more phone calls. Probably from Amazon which seems to have sold me a lot of old iPhones. Still waiting for delivery.

I invite you to look to humour for truth. This afternoon I caught a short story where someone was asked if he had ever bought anything that he really didn’t need. We all can think of things like that and in this case the man said that he had bought a butter churn. As the story continued he was asked if he had ever actually used it and he replied, once. A turn full of butter is a lot of butter. Now I know that churning butter was something that would have happened in my grandmother’s home. The family was large enough to need butter among other things but what I really wonder is how do you store all that butter. They had an ice box I remember it because it stood just outside the door in the back porch; a pain really because you had to buy ice for it. And that one ice box was used for all the things in the kitchen that needed cool storage. There was no freezer. Just the well as far as I know. That meant that the kind of things you do in a farm like butchering a hog had to be planned out. There was no room for large amounts of anything. Unless you had a really good bunch of neighbours who were willing to take on your excess and then share theirs at a later point, you had to plan for what could be kept and what couldn’t. Think about it. What would you do with a gross weight of pork chops. Sort of like that butter it had to be stored somewheres. The proverb, «waste not, want not» applied first of all to those who lived on small family farms. Given that I would love to revisit in my time machine the comforts of the kitchen with my grandparents, I now want to know how they handled excess. We do it through timely trips to the supermarket but they had no such luxury. The local stores were good for things like bread, yeast, molasses and big sacks of flour. I figured that the first canned goods to come into her kitchen had something magical called condensed milk. Available only after a factory had opened in the city and you could load a few cans on the train. A very different lifestyle from what we have now.

When did bottled water become a thing? No need to answer. I really don’t want to know. I just think back to the way things used to be. Like when we have one of those pumps outside the door and if you went up and down the handle enough times you got a bucket of water. Not a glass. A bucket. By the time I got to school we had a water tap in the cloakroom. Apparently that was upgrade from the good old days when you got a bucket. And you had to be there to watch 20 or 30 people line up for their chance to turn their heads sideways under running tap. We were so modern. Sometime later I moved to a new school that had a faucet, a drinking faucet out in the hallway. The water was not cold but if you could trick someone into holding the handle for long enough you could get it down to a temperature that was suitable. And then that same person had to wait until 20 or 30 people lined up for their chance to drink sideways from that water fountain. By the time I got to college we had a cafeteria and I cannot remember ever getting a glass of water. Let the record show that we had unlimited chocolate milk so who would be fools to go for a glass of water. And so life went on until I got to the workplace. In every meeting room there were supplies of water in small bottles. You would take one go to your corner like Gollum with a ring and think that you had hit the jackpot. And now I live in the country we’re having unlimited supply of water from the tap. Progress. In fact, I have not filled a bucket with water for years.

Life, at least our life, is based on a series of small mysteries. Right now the question on the table is how do we turn on the heat in the RV. Not the electric heat because we have that one figured out. Rather the one that involves propane. Now let me set the scene. We know how to turn on and off the propane supply. It does work in the kitchen stove. It probably works in the hot water supply although since the tank currently contains that funny red liquid we use for winterization we cannot test what is going on. And finally there is a proper furnace in the RV we have a propane alarm we have thermostats but the mystery remains has the propane supply been closed for the furnace or has it never functioned. And like all small mysteries we don’t know. There was a question given to that larger group. The user group. And so far we are analyzing their answers to our question. In the middle of winter the urge to go outside and play in the cold is less. Realistically, we will have to wait until the better days when heat will no longer be a true issue. Now, why the fuss? We do not plan to head off into the mountains and try to tough things out. We do not plan to add the RV as an extra sleeping space. At least not right now. We just want to know because that’s what mysteries are. A push to find an answer. Is there an owners manual that explains this? Not sure burger I have been told that that option has already been examined so now I am trying to catch flies or past time or whatever else you do in the dead of winter. I trust my sleeping bag but I am not going to leave the house and see how that works out. Probably, not having heat means that the tiny creatures of the fields will not be heading in the RV for shelter. At least, we hope so. Irish Spring soap is the answer to that question, and getting some ultrasonic noise thingies off Amazon. We might have one but it’s hard to tell whether or not the absence of mice is due to that or just the weather. Or perhaps the fox is helping. As you can tell, I just do not know.

The sun is setting. I really should go and turn on the lights. A simple task. We have fancy switches that you press I know, time to take and look, the lights are on. It was not always that simple. I am the oldest of the siblings and I can remember when you had to get the lamp out and make sure there is oil and trim the wick and remove the chimney and light that wick and put the chimney back and put everything away safely. All for a single flame, I have been told that it was better than a candle but not by much. And it required that someone took the time to go to the store and buy a can of oil as well. Kerosene. Something like what we used to make jets planes fly. Anyhow when I tell my younger sisters they learned to read by lamplight they think that I am joking. Making up the kind of stories that only an older child could tell. But I remember when we got the lights as expression went when polls came down the road and they strung wires and transformers and moved a community from the last century to the present one. A pretty big deal because it meant school could go on past sunset and a church could be lit up for service and you could get a TV. Life was more than lamplight. Now as I usually do, I took the time to watch a video on the technology of the kerosene lamp. Developments that were necessary a century ago. I have seen a lighthouse that had a row of oil lamps around the tower. That too in its time was modern technology. Let the record show that I do not own a kerosene lamp. Too much trouble when we live in a world where even a simple flashlight gives more light. I am not someone that waxes nostalgic for the good old days. As they say I have been there and done that. Growing up by the railway we still had oil lamps on all the switches. Just enough light to show whether the switch was red or green. And someone still had to go out and fill the switch lamps. That all went away when I was still young. Of course so did the railway. Something else that my siblings have missed.

I have seen a lot of odd transportation technology over the decades. That horse and buggy at my grandfathers. Curves with round fenders. My first airplane which was probably a DC3. Ships and trains. But the artist and most memorable was the car that became a boat. I can narrow it down to within a year or two and I remember exactly where it happened. Something about a festival where someone came all the way up from Halifax with their amphibious car. I watched it roll down the bank into the river and then travel slowly across the channel and then come out the other side intact. This was truly novel. I wonder why the idea never caught on. Probably because people were too set in their ways they had been told that cars were cars and boats were boats and that was all was meant to be but I know more now I wonder if the owner took his vessel out fishing. I wonder did he does off road the way people do now with their jeeps. I wonder if he spent a lot of time washing and waxing the sheet metal. I have never been someone who needed to wash his car all the time, although, I had neighbours who had that inflection. But this little car they could cross the river and keep on going that was special. It was not a home-brew. This had been manufactured I believe in Europe. And I do not know if the vessel came from Europe to North America under its own power. Seems implausible. Locally we have a lot of boats and nobody else ever drives their boat down the road although I have seen many boats on trailers at the opening and closing of the fishing season. Maybe the fishermen need to embrace the idea of an amphibious craft.