TubaOrNotTuba

For some reason the conversation had turned to the utility of having a drone. I was confused yes this is one of those words that comes with a whole set of meanings. We were not talking about bees so I ruled that one out. I do try to modulate my voice so that wasn’t it. I consider whether or not we were talking about my getting a set of bagpipes but that couldn’t be it either. Not quite musical enough. And finally I realized that a lot of people talk about the idea of flying. By proxy. You see you can get tiny machines carrying a camera that will extend your visual range. Not mine but yours. I remembered from those days of flight simulator that what goes up must come down. Perhaps that’s a rule of gravity. In any case I knew that I could crash such a thing with the best of them. An expensive toy. I must point out that there are so much usable videos out there all with people looking around them selves from on high. The God view if you will. And if you take the time to check the wind and the proximity of obstructions and all the rules of the government has put in place you could probably have a lot of fun getting out there and seeing what is ahead of you. They now have drones that can almost fly themselves. Or at least land softly. As long as you avoid the open water or sea. I am not shopping for such a thing right now but I will not stop anyone else from going ahead. Technology has come a long way in my lifetime. We had paper airplanes with a virtual range of oh let’s say 100 feet. There were even ones that were powered by rubber bands. I would not trust such a craft to carry my camera aloft. I want something more robust. Thanks to other people I have a pretty good idea of what lies around my property. Out on the open road. Where I cannot predict my surroundings a drone could be useful. I will keep it on the thought list. If someone decides to gift us with their old drone I will try to integrate it into our lifestyle. I must check with my son to see if he’s grown tired of his own. Anyhow there you have it. My examination of a word with multiple meanings. Perhaps those bagpipes would be a good idea.

Go ahead. Tell me all about your new rig. Actually please do not do that. We have gone through a couple of sessions of shopping and right now we’re in that quiet time when looking at new rigs is not part of our daily bread. We learned along the way that there are many ways to describe the same thing . For those that review RV’s there are standard ways and then there is hyperbole. Actually, all we do now is look to see what is coming out new. Our way of forecasting our future. Someday there will be a better rig than we have now at that point we’ll decide what happens. Like the refrigerator. Or the sink. Those must go into their own place before everything else. And do not forget the beds. Please, do not forget the beds. What is probably the most important feature in an RV be otherwise he would just sit up front in the seats and sleep in a lunch over position. The manufacturers go to great lengths to try to provide new elements that will surprise you and right now the only way to get a detailed idea of what is happening is to watch endless videos from people who do not all have equal powers of description. Part of the price of entry. What I do realize is that we have been fortunate. We have not come up with very many things that were bad choices. Just expensive ones???. Back to the bed. We have had great luck there. No need to invest in secondary mattresses because we have been able to sleep on those that came from the companies. As for the other options, we have not found anything that says reach out and buy me, too. Not saying that won’t happen. After all we are watching videos that are the result of the dreams of others. But on the whole it is fun to see how many ways people can describe the same thing. There are some very imaginative individuals in this space. Title descriptive dialogue

Some of the best stories begin with long time ago. I have a lot of those. Different stages in my life I guess. One that comes to mind today is the strangest place I ever slept. It came about during a cycling trip to a set group of small islands just north of here. A windy place. Given two moments of very bad weather. And one of the evenings the combination of rain and wind an electrical activity left my partner and I seeking shelter. Real shelter, better than that of his pup tent. In a nearby marsh there was a small concrete building. About the size of a small home with a fortified door and a missing window. We made our own choice and climbed inside. Out of the rain and the wind and everything else. To sleep on a hard floor was no big deal and we knew this building was not going to blow away. As it turned out the building was the antenna centre for a loran system I’m not going to go into a technical explanation but I wish I had photos. Inside even while disaffected the place looked like a set from a Frankenstein movie. Lots of big switches and ways to let the electricity go to ground. What you want during a big electrical storm. And so without any more thought to the situation we simply spread out our sleeping bags and went to bed. In the morning weather had softened and so we climbed back out through the same window and looked at the nondescript shelter we had used for the night I knew little of what the building had actually been used for but there was no longer any worry. This was fully retired. Simply too expensive to remove all the electrical infrastructure. Including a huge antenna off in the field. I am not sure if the building still exists decades later. I should go on Google and ask the right questions. But it provided me with a dry night with little danger of electrocution and it gave me something to think about years later. The best kind of a once upon a time story.

I remember when the library was where you went to find books. So many books. All of the good ones restored in random piles on top of huge tables. The same ones where someone had been studying only hours before. The time between use and re-shelving could be long so you became very good at searching for your book among so many. And those tables were solid. They had to be. But overtime those same tables have become obsolete. A flagrant lack of places to plug in your laptop for the main. So when I saw a news article yesterday about how my local university had started a campaign to get finances to replace those tables I was more than surprised. After all 1/2 century is not that long in terms of academic progress. I have to congratulate the people who made the original purchase of those tables. They bought better than they knew apparently. Will the replacement tables be of the same quality? Has the university moved beyond random piles of books? Probably not because in academia change is anathema. If I was rich, and I’m not, I would simply write a check to buy the university all the tables if required. So important to learning. I spent years at those tables and little did I realize that they would still be in use so many decades later. I mean, I did not have a realization of how things would change. I am not particularly apt at foreseeing the future. But I fully believe the books would remain the foundation of learning. Not exactly. A computer can hold so many more books period. And search through the contents if you know what to ask. No need to question the person at the next table. Although I admit that was usually more for social reasons then academic.

After listening to my weekly Thurber story I came to a realization. My life has been devoid of practical jokes either by me or others . Sure there was that time that somebody pinned me into my room but that was just a college prank. I’m talking more about the kind of events the Thurber uses as a source of so much humour. I have never seen anyone get a random roller skate, or a cold boiled egg in their pocket. Perhaps these were the stunts of a past era. Even my own children have failed producing tales that I can use as historical fodder. I guess we grew up in humourless households. Actually even in the real world the practical joke seemed to have gone the way of the dodo bird. Not something that people aspire to or practice as regular activity. We have other things to amuse ourselves. Like cat videos if you will. Am I too old for practical jokes? Yes I think that is the answer. The sort of sense of humour that takes pleasure in creating uncomfortable situations for others is something of another age. Of course we still have the classic stories like Thurber on a Friday. I wonder if my life would have been different if I had hung around with people who took pleasure in the discomfort of others. My friends were not like that. At least, I do not think so. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. Right now I am anxiously awaiting the end of winter. Sometime this weekend the annual lobster fishery begins locally which will distract everyone for about two months. No time for practical jokes when you have traps to haul. Even in the mail I receive nothing of note. Unless you count those offers of another credit card. Instead I have the daily scourge of phone calls from people who really want to know more about me. Offering nothing in return. Is that the practical joke of the new century? I will have to give this some thought.

At one point I was ruled by rudiments. Let me explain. My life was music but rather than depending upon tones I depended upon mathematics. I had to count all the time because I had to take something as simple as a beat and subdivide it so many ways then it became unrecognizable to the average person. We had pages of notes on what to do and how to do it. Unless you’ve tried to complete a flam tap under pressure you have not lived. Unless you have counted the strokes in a roll and I do not mean a spring roll or a bread roll I mean the roll on a snare drum you cannot recognize how many ways there are to get it wrong. Believe me 5 Rook stroke roll and a 13 stroke roll have little in common. I also had the virtue of being the only person in my class in the percussion section. In a situation where you cannot be right or wrong I had to be right all the time because others would hear what I did. And so I went forward in life with more then a cursory attention to subdivisions. I learned how many ways you could subdivide a beat. Even when you were trying to keep the beat you had to be on that. I have never had a teacher who was an expert in percussion so I guess I got off easy. Anytime I had to go before a jury I was quite aware that I knew more than anyone else in the room about what I was trying to do. I learned, early on, that the biggest drumstick is not necessarily the best. Pretty hard to do something with finesse when your tool is a broom handle. Or a tiny pencil. Of course I made rudiments in the background when I should have been doing mathematics. That was how I rolled. Even now I will tap my fingers and say the magic words flam or paradiddle or single stroke roll. There were so many and it was more than just a memory game it had to be the basis of everything you did in a musical situation. Take it from me a snare drum does not make music. After all that I went on to other instruments that had more charm in this social situation but there is nothing that can replace the pleasure of getting the beat right on the headrest of your buddies car. Distracted driving? That was me your honour. If someone ever offers to let you join a marching band jump to it . There is more than the bass drum.

Slowly and with great moments of planning our next road trip is starting to be set up. Let me point out that I am nothing more than a spectator. Any of the efforts to choose and get reservations belong to my partner. So far we have reservations on a number of ferries as well as reservations in a number of campgrounds. We are early in the cycle which means that not every campground is open for business. They still won’t be a month from now. And so we must call and talk to people and get our names on lists and make sure that when we arrive we will not be left standing on the road. Tricky business. We do not know the actual area. All we have to go on are videos from others and what little we can glean from various advisory sites. But it will all work. Our last time out we went with no knowledge and no maps and no real destination in mind. This time around we are going in with both eyes open. We now know where it goes after you leave it on the various roads. One question has come up again in a game. If I am unable to see where we’re going will I still take pleasure from it. The answer is simple. Yes I will. Places come with a whole set of sensory inputs. The sounds and the smells are often as important as the sights. Although we will probably visit some small museums that is not the aim. We want to test the country. We want to take trails that go up and down again. We want to get wet if it rains and hot if the sun shines. Primary tourism. And since we are better equipped than our last visit to the area we should be able to do what we want on our own terms. As far as I know there will be little need to visit big shopping malls. And if we go to a cliff edge, we will move with caution. But that’s all in the future the near future. I will try to keep my blog on task.

Over a period of more than three decades I took the bus to work. City bus with the number on the front. And I had to use a series of buses because the city was at large. I learned quickly to pay attention to the clock to make sure that I was at the street corner at the right time to catch my bus. Whatever it happened to be at the end of the afternoon. I did sort of a return but not always the same route. Very standard things. There were however some small exceptions. Particularly, late at night you will catch the last bus of the evening. The bus driver usually had fewer passengers than on a regular run and he or she also wanted to get back to the garage and end the working day. Shortly after leaving the depot or the stop, the bus driver would ask if we were going all the way to the end. And when you were the last or second last person he would often switch up the game. Simply shorten the route. Drive in straight lines, where before he would have had to go around multiple corners. And getting close to the end meaning close to my house he would ask whether he could turn left or right at the next corner. That was the shorthand for where can I drop you. I have been driven right to my front door on certain runs. On the street were city buses rarely ever traveled. I admit it felt really special. Like having a 40 foot limousine with a private driver. Do I miss the city bus? Probably. It was never strenuous and I rarely had to run to get to where I wanted to go or walk long distances. I think public transit is a wonderful thing. I think my kids have caught the bug because all of them also used the city bus. One of the better things about city life.

I try not to be frightened by the things I cannot see. However after listening to a podcast about super bugs my stress level has risen. Turns out there are many things in hospitals that are not only difficult to see but that are difficult to control. We have given such power to the antibiotic that it now controls what we can and cannot fight. I almost wish for those days a lifetime ago when penicillin was all there was. Laboratories have developed many stronger things for lack of a better word and those things have been abused by doctors and hospitals figuring that they had the answer to every question. Turns out if you use your weapon too often the edges get dull. Soldiers from bygone era knew that one but those who worked in hospitals were fully convinced that they knew better than nature. And so, now, we have bugs we cannot kill. More than one of them. I will not be going to wander around the hospital anytime soon, I hope, because there are too many people that come through that have fallen into the bug trap. I remember that for anyone who works in the school you quickly learn that a classroom full of students is a classroom full of pathogens. For the main part we have that part under control. Or we did. From what I learned in the podcast even the names are designed to strike fear. If you can’t say it or write it, you can’t fight it. Surely there would be better spells in the future but in the United States the pharmaceutical industry has stopped certain strains of research because the profit was no longer visible to them. I know, invisible bugs. However the choices of what to research in the lab are driven as much by shareholders as by disease. A train that is out of control. I have no real involvement in stock markets and it makes me wince to watch how certain people figure the only thing to worry about in life is whether or not their investments are doing better than last year. Hence, the problems with research being limited by money. In short, things are not going to get better anytime soon. Will we all die of a super bug? Probably not, but some of us will be a lot sicker before they are well.

I worked for many years in a small office. The place where I learned that the boss always has a more comfortable chair than the worker. Even though the boss was rarely there. But, my workplace was not dangerous. I say that after watching some more videos about people working in the fishery. Not fishing with a pole and line. The fishery. At sea trying to harvest from the bottom. Today I learn some more about scallops. Specifically that you spend an awful lot of time waiting for the tow to come in so that you can see whether or not you brought anything on board. In other words always a mystery. It gets worse because once you have some harvest you must clean it so that other humans can enjoy it. The amount of money you make is a consequence of that. And always the unknown of whether or not you will find anything on the ocean bottom. While you wait for the weather to change. That was the other part it seems that going to see is a constant battle with the elements. The water is cold, the winds are strong and you live waiting to see whether or not you will actually earn any money. It does not seem to matter how big a boat you have. And As for a chair? A bit like the office where the boss always has a better chair even though he is rarely there. I wonder whether or not I would want to work under conditions that are so close to nature period. The answer is simple. That’s why I chose to work in an office. Am I lazy? A little but I also fear for my life, every day. And while helping a secretary to sort out the word processor problems might have seemed challenging, it was always just a question of whether or not I could undo what had been done before I got there. Yes, I had other jobs that were more physical but that results are the reason why I spent so long in school. I figured out that the school years compensate for the physical. And schools on the whole are at least warm and dry. As I say I’ve been watching too many fishery videos and I realized I dodged a bullet.