TubaOrNotTuba

One of the more important lessons I remember from high school is that it is not what you say but how you say it. Consider sitting in English class while you study a play by Shakespeare. Good material but if you remember any one person you had better classmates than I. We were all less than mediocre. I bring this up because I’ve been listening to different podcasts and there are some outstanding presentations if you take the time to seek them out. One of my favourites is a broadcaster with more than four decades of experience. Someone who has been writing his own material on a daily basis for all that time. And it shows. He can take something as mundane as a report on a baseball game and turn it into virtual poetry. Not the material but the presentation. I wish I had those chops. Keeping my attention for almost an hour is outstanding. Proof that the material is robust. But it is the presentation that draws me back. We have not had a great politician in this country for decades. Seriously we have a Prime Minister with a background in public speaking and drama who can lose my attention within seconds. The reason why we remember political speeches is because the mixture of presentation and material brings things to a whole new level. Churchill was never part of my life but I will stop and listen if he comes on a broadcast. A ghost from back when public speaking actually mattered. I was listening to our current provincial Prime Minister this week. About as memorable as the last bag of potato chips. And he prides himself as being a public speaker. How sad. Oh well. Still raining. Doing another reset on winter.

I just spend some time trying to determine what qualifies as a traditional meal in this area. After all I live on an island where a lot of potatoes are grown and people catch fish but that is not the response. Before my adult life I was often offered bowls of stew. Essentially a meal made with root vegetables and if you’re fortunate some chunks of beef. And there was a strong divide between the recipe used by my grandmothers on my mother’s side and on my father’s side. Two different households. If I placed a bowl of stew from either kitchen you could tell it apart immediately. My mother peeled her carrots my father did not. If you boil an unpeeled carrot long enough the skin will be removed and it will appear in the mix of food in the bowl. A very different texture. My grandparents came from similar backgrounds but different villages and now I’m wondering was this the only reminder of the life from where they came. You can see why this would leave me curious. Place the two areas on a map and you could cover the areas with a teacup which incidentally was a very common beverage in both houses. It was not another question of religion or language or family size. Could it be that I’m looking for something that has nothing to do with background and everything to do with how much time my father was willing to spend in the preparation of carrots. Seriously that is the only factor that makes any sense. My dad did not like to scrape vegetables so he did not. And if you were to ask what do I do? the answer is simple; of course I peel my carrots. Maybe I am on my way to removing a terrible food product from what my grandchildren and great grandchildren will eventually consume. I have checked with commercial products; canned stew; restaurant stew and other place’s stew I never found unpeeled carrots. There, you have it: a complete history of a food from my home. Everything else prepared by my parents used identical recipes. The only differentiation comes from the carrots.

This seems like a good day to change the bedding. Take all the covers off and do a quick wash and dry. And then re make the bed just like every other time. What I do need to do but have not, is to flip the mattress. A beast designed to hold two adults comfortably and thick enough that we’ve been able to rely upon it for a couple of decades. Heavy. One that would profit from being turned on a regular basis. In this case from end to end rather than from side to side. Geometry. A tessellation as they say in math class. And what I quickly realize is that the mattress is too large and heavy for it to be an easy one person job. Yes, I can probably manage the job but I might pay with a round of back pain. Commit myself to bed for a couple of afternoons. And so I hesitate. Soon, I tell myself. I will get someone else and we will make a team game out of it. In the good old days you could change a whole mattress by going and finding a Bale of hay. Not anymore. We have a huge construction with lots of wire and test you inform another stuff that I hope to never see. That would mean that the mattress was broken. Perhaps from some idiotic attempt to flip it single handed. A new mattress is expensive and it requires one of those shopping trips where you go to the city and trips from store to store trying to test out a mattress that you cannot really test. Believe me, flopping on your back and spending 5 minutes is not enough. In sharp contrast we have other beds that are designed for camping. Much smaller and much later. But I do like my bed; no stress about going there night after night. Except for that urge to flip the thing around. I will work on that idea. Beats sleeping on the floor.

We have just received a request from a neighbour. Wondering if we would be willing to babysit a pair of small dogs. I am fine with the idea but there are questions. I do not know these dogs nor their size nor their specific temperament. I don’t know how they react to fox is outside the window. Like right now. We have had a pair of foxes that have been arguing all afternoon nose to nose tooth to tooth loudly. How would a strange dog react to this. So far we have said maybe but I do know that it will require a special kind of dance. Based on experience getting two dogs outside at the same time is tricky unless you simply open the door and hope for the best. And what about at night? Will these dogs expect to take their own place in the bed even with strangers. We’ve been through that. Dogs that decide that the foot of the bed under the covers is there best place. What do two dogs do. I somehow doubt that they sleep in shifts. We shall see. Life is nothing more than a set of challenges, right? My own gut feeling is that two dogs is no worse than one dog or three. You just have to make sure that the door opens at the right time. And that I do not trip over the water bowl. Been there and done that. I do have to remember the Amazon delivery truck will upset the balance, but not to the rescue. I will see how this goes. And in passing the dates are not fixed apparently. I did my due diligence and asked that question.

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.