Well,
you never miss the dry water
by
Robert LaFrance
During the Hurricane (tropical
storm, etc.) Arthur power outage, we were reminded once again how important
electricity, and especially the availability of a good water supply, are to our
everyday lives. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to say: “You never miss the water
‘til the well runs dry”.)
Too late; I’ve said it.
That thought occurred to me on
September 9 as I was suffering through a sinus cold and was sitting in my easy
chair in the living room while a vapourizer was wafting medicated water
droplets into the air around my aching head.
Meanwhile, in the basement under my
feet, a dehumidifier was humming and taking water out of the air while I was
adding water to the air above. Did that make sense? Of course not, but what
does?
Our heat pump fans were both humming
and taking heat from the moisture of the air; in the bathroom the clothes
washer was cleaning some of our clothes and alongside it the clothes dryer was
tumbling and steaming the water out of a previously washed load. I could hear
somebody washing dishes in the kitchen.
While all this exchanging of waterly
fluids was taking place inside the house, it started to rain. A few seconds
later I received a text from my daughter in Calgary; she informed me that
Calgary had received 35 cm of snow in two days. She sent me photos from her 16th
floor apartment. The snow wasn’t quite up to her balcony, but close.
*****************************
As one who has closely followed
election night events for decades, I can say I’ve never seen so many upset
people as those wanting the results one minute after the polls closed on Sept.
22.
While it is true that ‘tabulating’
the votes took a lot longer than the computers gurus predicted, it wasn’t
exactly a Tabukistan election. There it could be a week, a month or never
before the people find out who won. Indeed, they might then find out there was
no such candidate as the one who won or the winner has since switched parties.
Here in Canada, people, especially
those at ‘Election Desks’, were outraged that they couldn’t dramatically
broadcast a winner before 9:00 pm, but whoa, are they and we losing
perspective, just a tiddly?
We’ve all gotten spoiled over the
years so that we expect the winners declared with an hour or – if it’s really
close – an hour and a half after the polls have closed. Jeez, that’s hardly
time to sit down and have a jar of lemonade at the Elks Club.
It seems the problem with the
‘tabulators’ in the NB election was merely that the people at Election Central
(if there were such a place) had to wait for the data cards to be brought in
before everything was official, but they already had the unofficial numbers and
those are rarely wrong. For security reasons some people went home with their data
cards in their pockets while the folks at Elections NB were waiting for that
‘official’ data.
It was all a pig in a poke, a crock
of beans, a murder of crows etc. because we did find out eventually, although
those who sold tranquillizers of various sorts made a killing, so to speak. I
think we should all calm down and remember that the most powerful country in
the world, just to the south of us, went about five weeks in 2000 before the
Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush would be their next president. And
we’re complaining over a few hours? Look what THEY ended up with.
****************************
Sometime in the past year, a huge
news item went almost totally unnoticed by the Canadian and American media. I
have checked CBC, CTV, TV Ontario, Knowledge Network, all the big U.S. networks
as well as Google and even the Perfessor who lives in Lower Kintore. Not a word
about this.
During the year to which I referred,
there have been massive news stories on oil spills, wars and skirmishes between
Russia and Ukraine, ISIS terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, global warming,
elections (see above), traffic accidents, plane crashes, the Alberta oil boom,
factories closing – you name it – and I have never seen one sentence about one
of the most important stories since a Canadian corvette sank two German U-boats
within an hour of each other in 1944.
I refer of course to the Oreo Cookie
makers changing the bag so that now the gourmet cookie eater only has to open a
recloseable paper or plastic tab on the side to get at those delicious
offerings. Before, it was like rocket science – open the top of the bag if you
were able, then pull out the inside holder, then reclose the bag as best you
could. It’s so easy now that I just eat four or five cookies rather than the 10
or 12 that I used to.-end-
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