A danger flight in rural Quebec Oct 14/20

 

Moving to the USA where it’s safe

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            Somebody told me the other day that Internet companies in the U.S.A. sell their wares at a much lower price than companies in Canada and I believed her. She worked for Verizon so she should have known the truth (a hard commodity to find nowadays, especially in that country I just mentioned.)

            My bill last month was the equivalent of a monthly Rolls Royce payment. The company stung me for close to $150 for just normal service. I called them and the woman who answered (in a totally unintelligible Mumbai accent) listed a bunch of things they were charging me for.

            If I understood correctly, I must pay a portion of the prime minister’s golf fees – and I didn’t even know he played golf – and repairs to some hydro lines in Ernfold, Saskatchewan. I owed either $29.23 or $45.10 to Rogers Communications for the use of some WiFi equipment (although my service carrier is Bell Aliant) and for repairs to a tractor owned by the village of Aroostook.

            Then at the end she said that she had missed an item – something to do with Donald Trump’s golf fees – that came to $634.22. It sounded like that anyway, so now my total monthly Internet fee is about $680.

            Later that day my cousin Vinnie in Presque Isle, Maine called to say hello and compare Covid data. The subject of  Internet came up. I told him that I was paying $680 a month and he said: “That seems a trifle excessive. I pay $30 a month for the highest speed package.”

            So I guess we’ll be moving across the border where the Internet fees are reasonable and it’s safe and sensible.

                                                *****************

            It’s been a windy fall after that blistering hot summer. Some readers may have noticed. No sooner did the leaves turn very beautiful than I said to my dog: “Fang, get ready for heavy rains and strong winds in less than two weeks. It happens every fall, but at least while we’re waiting for the S-word and the W-word we can enjoy the leaves.”

            No sooner did the word ‘leaves’ come out of my mouth than the wind came up and up and up and the rain started pelting down and down. All those beautiful leaves were flung to the ground in a matter of hours – no minutes, no seconds. I looked out our southern kitchen window and the fall colours were there; I walked over to the fridge to get some cream for my coffee and looked out the eastern window to see that all the maple and apple tree leaves had fled the scene. It was February already.

            Oh well, there has to be some kind of reason for my being depressed. The next step is when the S-word starts falling in gentle 2-foot drifts. (I just noticed that if one takes away the hyphen of ‘S-word’ it spells SWORD. Can’t argue with that.)

                                                *******************

            Have we harvested everything out of our gardens yet? I sure have, except for potatoes, carrots, herbs, second lettuce crop, Daikon radish, and several other crops. I’ve been busy with other things, like eating, sleeping and watching TV. I’ve been so lazy that I hired a carpenter to shingle the small roof of my new equipment shed. I was kind of embarrassed about that, but then I spoke to the Perfessor’s sister Joleen. A healthy woman of about 55 who doesn’t work outside the home, she hired a woman to clean her house once a week. “It just got to be too much to think about,” Joleen told me. I was going to make fun of her until I remembered the equipment shed that is only slightly smaller than Joleen’s house.

            Every year at this time I send out greetings to the people now serving at Alert, Nunavut, both military and civilian, because they will not be seeing the sun again until early March.

            I worked for Environment Canada, the weather service, in the 1970s and reported on whether it was cold in Alert as February ground its way to a balmy spring. I worked there 54 weeks in a row, but I’m not so sure what I did during that last week, since it was a big surprise. I had expected to be gone the week before and, in my disappointment at not seeing my name on the Hercules C-130 passenger list, I walked to the Junior Ranks Mess (bar) and stayed there. The next Thursday morning I was somehow on the scheduled flight to Trenton, Ontario via Thule, Greenland. I think. After 54 weeks working 450 nautical miles from the North Pole, I was rather tired.

            Mentioning those Arctic Heroes at Alert, Nunavut reminded me of an airplane flight I took to a little weather station at Nitcheqon, which is located about 300 miles due north of Trois Rivieres. I had been vacationing in Tilley, NB, in the house where I was born, and went from there to a 5-week relief job in Nitcheqon. What I remembered most was the trip itself. I took the train to Quebec City where I hopped on a QuebecAir DC-3 to Baie Comeau, Mont Joli and then Trois Rivieres.

            After an overnight stay, I climbed on another DC-3 and couldn’t help but notice that there was a hole in the passenger door, a hole surely big enough to put my size 11 boots through. Oh well, I thought, it’s not a pressurized plane anyway and my seatbelt will hold me in.

            Another minor detail: just before be locked that alleged door, the co-pilot carried on an outboard motor and put it behind the seat of the only passenger – me. He didn’t tie it down or secure it in any way.

            Halfway to Nitcheqon it suddenly got dark and the plane started bouncing around. My fingernails were blue, and as a bona fide weatherman I knew that pilot had steered us into a cumulonimbus, with its tremendous up and downdrafts.

            That lasted five or six minutes until my fingernails turned flesh-coloured again. The co-pilot opened the door to the front and asked if I was all right. He explained that we had gotten caught in a thundercloud and an updraft had taken us to twelve thousand feet from our regular altitude of three thousand.

            We landed without further mishap about twenty minutes later and just before supper one of the met techs (weathermen) and I went fishing on Lake Nitcheqon. I caught a 3-pound trout that the chef poached for supper. It turned out to be a good summer.

        -end-

Women dance backwards Sept 30/20

 

Transferred to Timmins, Ontario

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            I was surprised – no, astonished – to learn that the Perfessor got a moose licence this year. He was the inspiration of the original expression “he wouldn’t hurt a fly”. It didn’t take long for me to learn that I needn’t have been surprised – or astonished.

            “That’s one moose that will live another year,” he told me last evening as we were driving to Plaster Rock for the beautiful scenery and people. I only get up that way about once a month these days but always enjoy it.

            Enough pandering and back to the Perfessor’s moose licence: “It makes no sense anyway,” he said as we drove by Linton Corner on our way to Goodine Corner. “All the information (as if a government would hand out information!) refers to a ‘moose licence’ but what are we licensing a moose to do? Get shot that’s what.

            “It cost me a lot of money to get my so-called moose licence but maybe somewhere around Riley Brook or Wapske or Victoria Corner or Lerwick a moose will still be walking around come October.”

            “Unless he walks in front of a logging truck,” I commented. To which he mumbled “barbarian”.

                                                *******************

            Speaking of hunting, I have been getting some compliments lately. Last spring my wife bought me a vivid Hunter’s Orange jacket, one that is so bright it hurts the eyes. I was in the grocery store when Meyer Lansky of Portage said to me: “No question, you are certainly bright in spite of what everyone says.”

            As to my everyday activities, I have been watching a lot of YouTube, even though much of the content is about Donald Trump, and am enjoying some of the old dance numbers from the 1930s and 1940s. I wasn’t even born until 1948!

            Fred Astaire is the one on the screen more than anyone (for good reason), and I am sure people think of Ginger Rogers as his best and favourite dance partner, but I have been surprised to learn that he said in at least three major interviews that his favourite was Rita Hayworth. I didn’t know until this past spring that she had been a dancer since age three, and not just an actress. She was Mexican, not American, in spite of the fact that her movie studios tried to say the opposite.

            (Note: One dance critic said that female dancers have to be much more skilful than male ones because they have to dance backward and in high heels.)

            I recommend that you check out some of the dance numbers that Miss Hayworth and Mr. Astaire perform. Search for “Shorty George” and “Sway With Me”. Fabulous.

                                                *******************

            Lazy as I am, I have been putting in some time converting the root cellar I built in the late 1980s to an equipment shed for garden tools and a safe place for mice, rats, porcupines, ground hogs and squirrels. It’s been going well, if you look at it from their point of view.

            I went out there early one recent morning (about 11:00 o’clock) and apparently roused them all from a sound sleep or their breakfast, because it was like Toronto’s Union Station as they rushed out in a mob and headed for the woods.

            The only thing I can figure out is that some of those rodents and small mammals must have long memories and were still remembering the 1990s when I kept apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots and other foodstuffs in there. Surely there’s nothing edible in there now unless the gas companies have been putting actual corn in their ethanol.

          Besides the constant turmoil in the U.S.A. because of their distorted leadership – if it can be called that – there are street demonstrations in many countries, most of which I can neither pronounce or spell. I can spell Hong Kong though, and I can pronounce Azerbayzan. All the street marching and rioting – often instigated by the police – reminds me of some words by the great essayist E. B. White in a piece called Unity: “Marching is futile unless there is a destination”.

          This was written in the 1950s, during the Cold War when everywhere in the world people were hitting the streets with no particular goal in mind except getting rid of the present government and replacing it with a worse one. He referred to those places generally as being ‘At sixes and sevens’, meaning confused or in chaotic disarray.

          My third cousin Glenna Hilroy recently took her driver’s test and was successful. By that I mean SHE was successful and can now legally drive her 2100-pound Gremlin. Which means that it’s time for the rest of us to watch out because Glenna is probably the worst driver ever to (sort of) get behind the wheel of a car.

          When I say ‘sort of’ I mean she doesn’t technically get behind the wheel because she is four foot six tall, with ‘tall’ being a wildly inaccurate adjective. She has two choices – sit on her car’s seat so she reach the brake pedal, or sit on half a dozen cushions and be unable to reach the foot controls. It’s quite a sight when one meets her on the road, either way. When she sits on cushions she will be speeding and without her cushions she can’t be seen. A driverless car. Get away!

          I won’t say how I happened to do this, but last evening I was hard up for reading material and found a 2017 hiring manual for federal government civil servants. As one who spent a few years working for the federal government, I was surprised (but not astonished, see above) to find several of my suspicions being proven accurate.

            Chapter one, page 23, subsection 12: “As an office manager, if you see someone doing something good, make a regulation against it and apply severe discipline to the ‘worker’ involved. Drop his or her pay grade and send him to Timmins, Ontario, for at least six months. Then he’s off to Nain, Labrador, but only for a week in the summer (flies) because it’s a pretty spot.”

        -end-

Banking: I am being selfish (Sept 16/20

 

Is it piling or stacking sticks or logs?

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            Every fall I am amazed at the amount of sawn-up stovewood that goes by this place and even more surprised at the amount of stovewood I have to pile. I am even more surprised by the fact that I don’t find piling wood a brutal hateful job as I used to.

            Before I go on to a dozen or more totally unrelated topics, I want to comment on  what we might call the ‘nomenclature’ of stovewood. On TV the narrators refers to burning ‘logs’ in the fireplace or stove and where I would refer to ‘piling’ wood they use the word ‘stacking’ it. Can somebody explain that? I can’t picture myself putting a log in a fireplace. A 20-foot rock maple log would take a while to burn.

            By the time this column appears in our local newspaper the New Brunswick election will be history. I have a feeling it will be a majority government in which case, if a certain party gets into power, we had better start cringing, because Perth’s hospital will soon be suffering because of all the money that Covid-19 has cost. Governments cut health and education but never their own perks.

We who live in this area all know that Horizon Health has been champing at the bit for ten years to close Hotel Dieu; this is their big chance. They have moved the operating rooms, laundry services and food services to the city; the wild horses will close everything they can if they have a majority government.

            In a recent column I referred to my friend ‘the late Jamie Solosky’ and was rather surprised a few days later when Jamie phoned me and noted that he was neither late nor feeling under the weather. “That was my third cousin once removed Judy Solosky,” he said, and that wasn’t the worst of it. “Judy, while often late, is not that kind of late,” he said. “She is habitually late and in this case, reported in a community newspaper, she was two hours late for church. She sat on the church step for four hours until someone – a reporter – came along and rescued her.”

            It reminded me of the story I once wrote for Brunswick News: “SVHS students tackle pottery”. At least that was the headline. The story was about poetry.

                                                *******************

            In the past month I have received four notices from the four banks we deal with (we are very wealthy and can’t trust our huge portfolio to any one bank) and every one of them said that that bank was NOT going to increase any service charges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

            Four time I received one of those notices and had to quickly sit down before I fainted. Instead of simply not raising those specific charges, the banks began their letters by saying something like this right here: “(Such and such a bank) have scheduled up to a 300% service charge in several areas…” and then they went on to say that because of their love of the community and its people they were going to forego that increase. Hidden in the text were several hints that when the pesky pandemic is done the banks will return to their old style of  vast increases in service charges.

            When my son was about fifteen, I took him into a certain bank in Perth and opened an account for him, in his name. At the same time, to help him understand the process, I opened an account for myself. Each of us had an account balance of twenty dollars. We ‘high-fived’ each other.

            A year or so later he and I went in to that bank to deposit some money. No problem for him to deposit his money, but they couldn’t find my account. Finally an assistant accountant dug it up among closed accounts. He showed me that for each of ten months after I had deposited the original twenty dollars, the bank had taken $2.00 service charge. They had only taken $2.00 from him, starting when he had turned sixteen.

“What service did you perform to justify taking my money?” I asked. “You borrowed twenty dollars from ME and, instead of rewarding ME, you charged ME.” He then gave me to understand that I was being selfish and not aiding and abetting the bank’s piracy.

                                    *******************

I am glad to see that the St. John River, that flows through Perth-Andover every day (to quote E. B. White about a river in Maine) is once again being used for recreation. Other than a couple of annual bass tournaments, it was underused and almost unused for years.

Now the village of Perth-Andover has spent a good deal of money to set up a dock and recreation area and people are using it. I have not seen the river that busy since the 1980s when a post office employee named Lindsay Mutch persuaded people to get everything from pontoon boats to World War II Russian submarines out onto that body of water that is often called “The Rhine of America”. I wouldn’t know; I have never seen the Rhine River.

To change the subject from river water to filthy swamp, I have some advice to give to all those millions of Americans who want to get Donald Trump out of the White House (from where he will have to be dragged kicking and screaming): Don’t pile it on so much.

Trump, possibly the most despicable (alleged) human being ever to be U.S. president, has at least twenty criminal charges against him, but people have heard it all. Ease off and let him shoot himself in the foot where he already has those famous bone spurs, the ones that kept him out of Vietnam where all those ‘suckers and losers’ died.

                                                           -end-

Whadya mean, bad roads? Sept 2/20

 

Go ahead, accuse me of lying

                                    By Robert LaFrance

            I was gobsmacked last evening when it started raining and continued raining all night. Then I cursed: After a drought, I had nothing else to complain about and would have to actually have to come up with a non-weather subject for this column.

            Ah, well. Into each life a little rain must fall.

            I considered turning to U.S. politics, but that would be like shooting big fish in small barrels. Donald Trump’s latest crimes, Jerry Falwell Jr. and family’s sexual escapades, more cases of Republicans trying to shut down the post office so many people can’t vote on November 3^rd…it goes on.

            Zucchini…Who can possibly not be interested in zucchini? I was at the Irving one day last week and joined what seemed like a vital discussion of that particular squash. Several of my friends, acquaintances, and guys I didn’t like at all were standing near the guard rails and talking about zucchini. Eventually they got so excited that they sat down on a nearby park-type bench.

            George was saying that he had never had such a crop of zucchini and Gary was saying he hadn’t either, except that Gary’s was his worst ever, probably because he had fertilized that bed with bone meal, much beloved by various rodents, like squirrels and chipmunks. After his fourth replant he abandoned that particular bed, like a disgruntled husband, and planted all squash in his compost pile. He quoted from E. B. White: “The bright and fraudulent pictures in a seed catalogue”.

            Excited yet? Me either, or me neither, depending on your use of English.

            It went on from there and became a heated discussion only when Artram said that anybody who didn’t know that bone meal, made from the ground-up parts of animals, wouldn’t attract vermin must be missing a screw or at least have a loose one or two. Gary nearly stood up to argue but decided against it, probably because Artram had retired in 2017 as the Saskatchewan Rough Riders’ best and toughest defensive lineman in history.

            I backed off from that exciting discussion and went in search of another subject for this column.

            So I went up to Mary’s Bake Shop and Luncheonette for a bowl of her blistering hot chili. Whenever I have sinus problems I have some of that and breathe freely for days afterward, even if people in the same room as I don’t.

            Most of the available tables were full of social distancing folks who were not talking about zucchinis. Occasionally I could hear the name Trump coming from a group of people who were apparently not talking about the American dictator wannabe, but about a certain game of cards that had taken place the previous weekend. I never did find out if they were talking about the game 45s, Texas Hold-em (can’t seem to get away from the good old U.S.A.), euchre, or Hearts, but by that time my mouth was afire from the chili. I was hoping it would spread to my ears but no such luck.

                                                *******************

            Over at Mister B’s eating establishment, the subject was roads. I thought “oh, no, not a brawl about the state of our roads!” but it wasn’t a brawl at all. All four people at the table were agreeing with each other. I sat quietly (as I always do) at a nearby table, ordered (requested, I mean) an Alpine while I pretended not to listen, although my ears were expanded to their full extension.

            Their discussion – should I say venom? – was directed toward a foreigner (Moncton travelling gent) who had unwisely said that rural areas shouldn’t be snowploughed in the winter (the best time for ploughing) because it cost too much. Only the cities like, coincidentally, Moncton, should have its streets cleared of the white stuff because nothing goes on out in the sticks anyway.

            I wondered how this chap had escaped with his life and quietly asked that question of one of those four chaps. He looked at me quizzically for a few seconds, than pointed out the big picture window at the back of Mister B’s, right next to the pool cue stand.

            There, twisting slowly in the breeze and hanging from a hemp (for extra strength) rope, was the former Moncton resident, one who had clearly been talking when he should have been listening. Pinned to the front of his shirt was a piece of Bristol board and on it were the words: “I guess I was wrong”.

            Speaking of Stompin’ Tom Connors, and I know we weren’t, but I just wanted to echo some words of that great Canadian nationalist who thought Canada was the place to live and grow, and not that place that spawned Donald Trump, an entity who never met Stompin’ Tom: “The greatest land on earth, the land of meat and mirth, and I can’t think of another word that rhymes with mirth…”

                                                *******************

            My father, Fred LaFrance, died a couple of decades ago after, as they say, “a period of failing health”, which makes sense even if the period is a minute or a month. He had lived at home in Tilley almost all his adult life. When he was eighty or so, he started going blind. After that he began proving that, far from being harmful to the human body, some kinds of mold – or mould if you prefer – are great.

            One day I visited him on Churchland Road and, after I looked in the fridge, noticed that his bread, cheese and doughnuts were covered with blue mold. I asked how often he got somebody to check his food supply. “Herb was in here yesterday,” he said, and before I could say anything, he grabbed some Danish blue cheese (which was really cheddar) and took a big bite. He lived for years after that, which should teach us all a lesson. Note: Don’t try this at home. I could be lying.

                                                                                    -end-