DIARY
Making
a move in 1984
by
Robert LaFrance
I don’t remember a winter when so many
people were sick with the flu, bad colds, dysentery, sickle cell anemia, etc.
but then I don’t remember much anyway.
There’s always the danger of people
travelling from our winter to some exotic place like St. Leonard or the
Dominican Republic and spending their whole vacation kneeling before the white
porcelain goddess, as my friend Flug says. (My cousin Frank calls it the big
white telephone to Europe). “Don’t drink the water!” they are warned, but quite
often no one warns them not to use the ice cubes either.
Back to the point, I have done an
unofficial (I didn’t get paid) poll and have found that 34% of the people
vacationing in either Dominican Republic or Curacao came home sick and shaking,
and 24% of those going to Mexico did the same.
One fellow I
know was evidently thinking of vacationing in the Middle East, specifically
Iraq, but he didn’t realize that it gets cold over there too, in places. I keep
hearing about Ice-Us.
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On the
ongoing subject of technology and that kind of arcane stuff, how many of us use
texting to communicate? My cellphone is hardly ever cold.
My subject is
the item called ‘predictive text’ which is really only spell checking,
something that should be deleted from the computers of those of us who can
actually spell.
Predictive
text appeared on my first cellphone about a month after I bought it. I was
trying to text my daughter in Alberta and typed, or ‘thumbed’ this: “Hope to
see you around the middle of the month. Keep well.”
Before I
clicked ‘send’ I looked at what I had written and it seemed to be: “Hope two
car youth around the mango of the earlobe. Keep wild.” My phone had decided
that I didn’t really want to send what I had thumbed, silly me. I kept trying
to send the message, using different words, and hoping my cellphone would allow
me to send something reasonably close to what I wanted. The closest I came was:
“Leafs sure to win the cup this year.”
So how did I
get out of this scrape? I hope you don’t tell the boys at the club, but I
looked in the manual that came with the phone. What an idea! Within three hours
I had found the way to send PT into the garbage can and send the message I
wanted. Just in time too; knowing I would not predict that the Leafs could lead
the Kincardine Atom League, my daughter was about to send the police to the
house.
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It’s that
time of year again – income taxes. Brrr! It is time to gather up our T4s, T4As,
and all those other official papers and receipts and take them to our
taxidermists so THEY can make sense of them.
The first
time I filed an income tax return was back in the 1960s. I had been working on
Vancouver Island at a place that eventually became Strathcona Provincial Park,
near Campbell River. My T4 said that I had earned $1400 or so (can’t quite
remember the exact figure for some reason) and the province of BC had taken out
about $300 in tax.
I filled out
the return myself (really!) and a month later received every bit of that $300
in the mail. By that time I was back in Tilley, NB, and about to head for
Ontario, so that heavy bread came in very handy. A certain brick building in
Perth received part of that, but most of it went for bus fare as I headed for
my next career.
*******************************
More
nostalgia time: We moved to this estate in the summer of 1984, in the middle of
a rainstorm. My halfton and my brother Lawrence’s were full of furniture that
he and my wife and I had loaded from our house in Birch Ridge and then covered
with plastic.
You think I’m
going to say that the plastic blew off, but no, disaster took another form. In
Lower Kintore, in the heavy rain, with my truck heavily laden with furniture,
the left rear tire blew. I had a spare, UNDER the furniture. Say no more about
that. I still don’t know where I found those curse words.
Lawrence,
going ahead, got to the house and waited, and waited, then unloaded his truck
all by himself. This included a chesterfield and a fridge. When we finally got
there the air was blue, as they say.
An hour
later, everything was moved into the house and one minute later the rain
stopped. The air became blue again. My wife’s father, who would be our
neighbour, came in, saw all our stuff piled in the kitchen and told us to
either cry or come over to his house and stay the night. We did both.
-end-
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