Where in the world is my GPS?

The days are getting longer now – good thing

                         by Robert LaFrance

            There is something in the human soul that makes that human look out the window and, the worse the weather is, the more he wants to get out there on the road.

            I say ‘he’ but that was only for the convenience of my rather tortured English, for the list of culprits is about evenly divided between X and Y chromosomes. One Medford woman was famous for driving in the worst possible weather, and practically refusing to get behind the wheel if the sun were shining. “Where’s the fun in that?” she would ask no one in particular. One day last week she said to me: “I hate it after December 21^st because the days start getting longer—more daylight and safer driving. As I said - where's the fun in that?”

            Indeed, back in the early 1960s, during the storm that included a tornado which struck Henry Baker’s place, also in Medford, she jumped in her 1957 Plymouth Belvedere (with the push-button transmission, remember those?) and headed immediately over there to see if she could drive through a tornado. Alas, there was only one, so she had to be satisfied with driving through a vicious wind and rainstorm during which trees were toppling left and right.

            But that’s going back quite a way. If you can see a road or a street from your living room window, look out there and count 25 cars. The drivers of at least three of those are crazy persons, willing to go out on icy roads on summer tires and daring the guardrail to mess with them.

            Probably it’s time to be specific. You know that I am talking about one person only and you know it is neither Flug nor I since both of us are wimps, woosses, and scaredy cats. No, it’s my neighbours on the other side and down the hill a ways, along Highway 105.

Both Elroy and Jeanatan Fitzgovus are crazy about driving in bad weather. Let there come a severe thunderstorm with embedded tornadoes and they’re away in their 2007 Nissan. Remember that wicked rain we had a year ago? The one that took out bridges and moved houses? They drove around in that. In Muniac where the road almost washed out they zoomed by there and almost went down the fifty feet into the raging stream. And they thought that was a lot of fun.

Flug and I were home playing crokinole and cribbage and sipping on some lemonade.

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

Some people make life needlessly complicated, don’t you think?

Everybody knows by now that last Tuesday morning we had an earthquake in these parts. Its epicentre—and by that I mean its centre—was alleged to be somewhere in Tilley, near the late Hiram Kinney’s camp. Most of us thought it was indigestion, brought on by the Toronto Maple Leafs winning a game.

So there we all were at the club the next evening and watching the Channel 9 news which was telling us that the ‘quake had measured 4.8 on the Richter Scale, which at one time I thought was an instrument for measuring the weight of fish, so we were all discussing that and comparing it to the 5.9 ‘quake in 1982.

Bellison said he had heard about the ‘quake from an iTunes radio station, meaning he had to fire up his computer, open up iTunes, and so on; Handley said he had been listening to his satellite radio, and Myers found out from an Internet website and blog by a famous seismologist at UNB Fredericton.

“How did you find out?” I asked Gary Mawman Jr., who is about as high-tech as the average moosefly.

“Oh, I got up, looked at the wall, and saw that all my pictures were hanging crooked.” Gary is called a Luddite by some, he’s that low-tech, but I am starting to think the same way.

Who needs all this technological stuff (I hope that’s not too technical)? True, we all want to know what time it is, just so we’re not late for supper, but we really don’t need to know much more. Okay, it’s nice to be able to cook an omelet on an electric stove, that is, in a frying pan on an electric stove, but we don’t need anything more than a stove.

Maybe a fridge so stuff doesn’t spoil, but that’s it. Now and then I use the microwave to heat up some food, but really, let’s not get out of hand. Yes, I use a computer and word processor and email for this column and go to town in my 2011 car equiped with all kinds of bells and whistles, but that’s enough. No need to be high-tech.

Now where is my GPS? And by the way: Merry low-tech Christmas. Go X-Box!

                                            -end-