Gee, aren't computers fun? (June 8)

DIARY

This rainy weather is HUUUGE!

                              by Robert LaFrance

               I try and avoid referring in any way to the Billionaire Buffoon Donald Trump, but it’s looking more and more as if he might be the Republican candidate for the presidency of our huge neighbour to the south. That country did elect George W. Bush – twice, sort of.

               The reason I ‘must needs’ (as the English say) talk about the BB is that he has had some input in my speech and writing. Look in paragraph one and see the word ‘huge’. That’s a Donald Trump word. “The people from South Dakota are HUUUUUUGE!” he might say and probably has said.

               If you see or hear me saying that word, please shoot me.

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               On to other topics, this of course is the season when gardeners go crazy. Although one summer I had 14 gardens – I am not kidding – this year and for the past few I have had only two and they’re not huge. That year I had fourteen gardens strung around our estate I grew 14 varieties of potatoes, with the seed coming from Bon Accord Seed Farm. I had a root cellar back then and it was packed with apples and vegetables we never ate.

               To return to the present, I am sure that a support group – perhaps with the acronym WACGA – is needed for all gardeners. I, and many more like me if that’s possible, should not be  turned loose anywhere near a greenhouse or any place where garden plants are sold. The Wild And Crazy Gardeners Anonymous should step in and take the gardener by his or her hand and keep that person from buying enough plants to green the Sahara Desert.

               I’d like to say that it was Flug, or Bernie Saunders down the road who did this, but it was I, and only I.

               “What’s that?” my wife asked when I arrived from town. If course it was clearly a cardboard box but I didn’t sneer. Then she looked in the box that had once held 28-ounce cans of tomato soup. It was filled with garden plants and envelopes of seeds.

               Trouble was, I had enough greenery in there to fill 26 gardens the size of mine, and that was just the plants. The seeds, if they ever saw soil, would fill one of the late George DeMerchant’s potato fields where I picked the tubers when I was a teenager.

               Like an alcoholic or an out-of-control slot machine jockey, I just can’t help myself when I get near plants and garden seeds. I cannot picture the space that each of the plants is going to take later on in the summer. Last Tuesday, for example, I bought eight flats of 8 tomato plants each, which would fill one of my two gardens.

               Please help.

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               Another way the faithful and long-suffering reader of this column may help would be if he or she gave me a new computer. Any nerd will tell you that you should get a new computer every three or four years, especially if yours has suffered through many power outages, and any computer guy or gal will also tell you that Windows Vista was the worst piece of (scat) ever foisted on an unsuspecting public by Bill Gates. Well, guess what? My computer, bought in 2008, runs on Windows Vista.

               As usual, whenever I get on any subject, I think of the old days. I bought my first computer, a 486 IBM clone, in 1994. The late Bob Inman of Perth-Andover was my (unpaid) consultant and advisor. He had an older computer himself, a 286. As we were trying out what later became my computer, he remarked that it would open up a program – like a word processor – in five seconds, as opposed to 15-18 seconds on his.

               I thought he was joking, then saw by his expression (like mine in a greenhouse) that he was quite serious. “What would you do with that extra dozen seconds, Bob?” I asked. He said that wasn’t the point, and I later saw that he was right.

               To continue with the exciting story of my first computer: Bob told me exactly what to buy and we put it all in his car to bring it here. We carried a half dozen boxes to my office and he said: “You can do it all from here on.”

               I looked at the stack of boxes and said: “Bob, if you go past that doorway without helping me put this all together so that it works, I am going to find the nearest Uzi machine gun and shoot all the tires off your car.” Long story short(er), he stayed – for almost three hours. Aren’t computers fun?

                                          -end-