I bought a riding lawn mower (August 24)

DIARY

The police get criticized no matter what they do

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Police killed another terrorist last week, this time in Strathroy, Ontario and naturally the police got blamed.

            It doesn’t seem to matter whether terrorists successfully blow up four dozen people at a shopping mall or get caught on their way to doing this, the police are always in the wrong, apparently. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Why didn’t they know this guy was about to do something like this? One of these days the governments will change their police departments’ application forms to include: “Are you psychic? How far can you see into the future and into people’s minds?”

            I once knew a guy who would have known how to handle the terrorist threat. His answer to everything was “Lock ‘em up!” In the end the entire population of the world would be in jail. Yeah, that would do it.

            I hear people saying things like: “The cops should have known that guy in Nice, France, was going to take a truck and run over forty people. He even said so on Facebook.” What he said was something like: “The evil Satan must die.”

            Speaking of terrorism, I have been listening to Donald Trump’s utterances for far too long now, but I have come to a conclusion. I have identified his mouth – it’s George W. Bush’s long-lost Weapon of Mass Destruction.

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

            It’s finally happened; I bought a riding lawn mower.

            Since I moved back to NB from the NWT in 1976, I have resisted getting all the equipment sometimes referred to as Boy’s Toys, Toys for Big Boys or riding lawn mowers, but this time I couldn’t resist. My apple trees are now big enough so I can walk under them, so obviously, being old and lazy, I decided that walking behind a push lawn mower was something I needn’t do any more.

            What kind of riding lawn mower should I get? I looked at all the specifications of various kinds and finally decided there needed to be only one specification: it must work. After initial adjustments, it now works, so if you drive by our estate you might see me zooming around nearly as fast as a snail gallops. If I ‘cross over’ at the age of 68, it shouldn’t be under the deck of a piece of mechanical mystery so I drive slowly.

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

            After last week’s diatribe in this column, I was hoping that by this time Canada Post would have ‘got right around’ (as my late Aunt Ella used to say) and found that missing envelope I had mailed to my daughter in Woodstock, but not a chance.

            Although her apartment was one of only two in her building, I would have hoped that my mistake of not including her apartment number on the envelope would have easily been overcome with ‘common’ sense, but I always have been an optimist.

When I send letters, I always put my name and my postal code, nothing more, for a return address and that should have been enough to at least get it back, but it wasn’t. I was under the impression that we were the only ones with that code, but it turns out that my sister-in-law’s house, 200 metres away, also has it. My enquiries of the post offices in Saint John got me the information that down there in that city they would simply say: “There’s no such address” and it would go into the ‘undeliverable’ box.

Just to recap, I sent an envelope to my daughter in Woodstock but it wasn’t delivered because I didn’t have (and didn’t know) her apartment number in a 2-apartment building. Then they couldn’t return it to me because there was another house with the same postal code here in Kincardine. Limbo.

Another little point: Last week my wife received a letter with the address “RR#6 Kilburn Perth-Andover NB” and postal code S4P 4S6, which is in Regina. (I changed one digit for privacy reasons.) Her real mailing address is 129 Manse Hill Road, Kincardine with a totally different postal code. Yet it got to her. Somebody explain this please.

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

I have been waiting for this announcement for a long time and Ford Motor Company has finally come through. Never mind that Tesla has had a self-driving car for quite a few months and maybe even years, FMC now says they will have one by the year 2021.

Seriously, that’s how the radio announcement went: “Ford Motor Company will have an ‘autonomous’ car in four years”.

One car? Seems like a lot of trouble to go to. Can you imagine how much that car will cost? A space mission would be cheap by comparison.

It seems that one of the great boons of this development is that people who have lost their driver’s licences would be able to just phone and ask the car to pick them up. However, I recall that when I lived in Vancouver (the last city I lived in) we had the same thing back in the 1970s. We called them taxis.

                                  -end-

Canada Post lost my envelope (August 17)

DIARY

Do you see a watch on yon wrist, laddie?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            One day last week I was dozing in my easy chair when I snapped wide awake because a (very) loud TV commercial came on. It was showing a Toyota zooming around some pylons in a big parking lot and narrowly missing people standing there. Then the car went over a ramp and came to a screeching halt in front of a stone wall.

            I write this from my hospital bed because I didn’t see the small letters on the lower corner of the commercial: “Professional drivers. Do not try this at home.”

It’s been that kind of a summer. I missed winning a $64,000,000 lottery by only one number wrong. True, I had all the digits wrong, but the number itself was incorrect too.

Surely the recent spat between Canada Post and that company’s management wouldn’t result in legitimate mail going undelivered, but so far that seems to be the case. About three weeks ago I sent a letter to my daughter and gave the street address in Woodstock. Four days later it hadn’t arrived and the post office people said it was because the apartment number wasn’t included. I didn’t even know she had an apartment number. Any letter I had previously sent or forwarded to her had arrived with just the street address. There are only two apartments in the house.

The next week she asked again at the post office there and was told it had been ‘returned to sender’. A week after that I asked in Perth-Andover and they knew nothing about it. I knew I had put on the same return address I always do – my name and postal code, nothing more, and that should have been enough.

Do we all know what it’s like when a computer file is ‘lost in cyberspace’? Such is the case here. Maybe current post office rules don’t allow for delivering mail without a strict apartment number in a 2-apartment building, but when I was a letter carrier in North Vancouver (1972-73) we were told to use some sense. “And don’t get bit!”

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

I know I rail on a lot about tailgaters and that I have even written a poem about them – “Tailergater, tailgater, look just like an alligator…” – but the one that followed me to town last evening was a real doozie.

It was either a soccer mom or a soccer dad driving a van. The first time I saw the vehicle was in the area of the Kilburn flat. Driving the speed limit, I was at the north end of the flat and the van’s headlights were half a kilometre behind. Zap! No more than twenty seconds later all I could see was the hood and the bottom half of the van’s windshield. He, she or it must have been doing 140 km/hr when I had first spied the vehicle. When the van got up to me it was in a passing area, but it stayed glued to my bumper.

The van’s headlights were on high beam. I slowed down and pulled over to the side but the van stayed right there. Then we met a pickup truck with about 40 lights at the front. The van driver behind me dimmed his lights in a courteous gesture, then once the pickup had passed put his high beams back on. Meanwhile I could only see coloured lights as I slowed down even more to persuade this idiot to pass and moved even closer to the edge. Eventually, after meeting two more vehicles, Mister Idiot did go by me – on a turn.

Is there a motto or a lesson to be learned from this story? Probably not, but if there is it must be this: “If you drive, stay off the road.”

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

            I mentioned in a recent column that the Australian accent gives the word ‘so’ three syllables and that was unfair. I do apologize after a visit from a couple of travellers hailing from the Melbourne area.

            After these guys spoke for a while I could see where an apology was in order. Truly, the word ‘so’ has FOUR syllables. Besides, some, perhaps many, Aussies ‘enhance’ their accents when they come to North America. In that respect they remind me of Glasgow, Scotland residents. Freddie Bardin, whom I met at the recent NB Highland Games in Fredericton, when I asked him the time said: “Main roch theena?”

This translates to: “Do you see a watch on yon wrist, laddie?”
                                                  -end-

D.O.T. was right all along (August 10)

DIARY

My apologies to D.O.T. and Aunt Esmerelda

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I am beginning this column with an apology.

            Over the years I have criticized D.O.T. (now known as D.T.I. but it will always be D.O.T. in my heart) for its road repair procedures, namely the whimsical filling of potholes, but I shouldn’t have been criticizing them at all. There has been ‘method in their madness’ (from the Shakespeare play ‘Hamlet’) all along.

            (And before I proceed I want to make clear that I have not criticized the ones who actually do the work, the ones we see with shovels. It’s government policy I criticize, and it started in the 1990s.)

            No more though. I now realize that the government and D.O.T. had a Shakespearean method in mind and we should be grateful because they just may have saved lives.

            This revelation came to me last week when D.O.T. workers filled a few dozen potholes on Muniac Road. This was only about three weeks after they had circled the craters with orange paint. At least then we could see where the potholes were.

            As I say, they filled a few dozen potholes and I thank them for that. However, there was one major one that didn’t get filled; I assume this was because they ran out of tar. Grateful for the ones they did fill, I was driving along blithely but cautiously when I spied that last one. Since I had been straddling it for approximately six months, I had no problem this time. Then on to Manse Hill Road, the thoroughfare that runs by our estate, to find that none of the three major potholes or the several minor ones had been filled.

            It was then I realized we should all be grateful to D.O.T. and its child D.T.I. for taking so long to fill potholes, and, when they are filled, sometimes leaving the road as rough as a drunkard’s breath on hangover morning.

            They are making us better drivers, making us pay more attention to the road and so on. It also cuts down on distracted driving. I would say that anyone who can talk on a cellphone or even text her boyfriend or his girlfriend while driving would soon need dentures unless they slow down, way down. There is a legend that one distracted driver going south on Highway 105 just south of the Victoria-Carleton county line went off the road and hit Beechwood Dam, bounced back and became 4:38 pm on the floral clock there.

            Another upside (as they say) to not fixing every pothole is that tourists appreciate it. It’s an adventure for them. They can go back to Ohio, Delaware and New York and brag about the roads they have conquered in New Brunswick, Canada. It used to be that they would kayak down the Lachine rapids, but now they drive on Highway 105. When the New Brunswick government recently came out with a program to attract tourists to that highway I almost fell off my barstool, but it turns out they were smart after all and I was dumber than a fencepost.

            After all I have said about D.O.T., joking and otherwise, I must say they have filled many thousands of potholes, especially between the former Muniac Park and Bath and other places – in fact all over the area. D.O.T. is working on a much smaller budget than they should have and are doing a lot of good work.

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

            The following is a true story – well, almost true. I often rail about our being TOO clean, in fact so clean that if we stumble across a bacterium we immediately fall over in a pile. I know people who spray Lysol on every doorknob in their houses twice a day.

            Flug’s great aunt Esmerelda visited him last week just as Flug and I were getting home from town with some lemonade and several boxes of late raspberries. He was unpacking everything and putting the berries into the fridge when there was an almighty gasp from his dear aunt.

            “Leonard Romeo Dollard LaFrance!” she said. “You’ll die of ptomaine poisoning! Wash those berries. What might they have touched in their journey from Perth-Andover to here? I have some carbolic acid in my car. I’ll go get it.”

            Flug, who thinks ‘sterilizing’ is the same as putting food into a bucket and dumping rusty tapwater over it, said: “It’s all right, Auntie. I believe a person should eat a peck of dirt during his lifetime and I’m way ahead.” Esmerelda turned white, fell down and hit her head on a case of lemonade carelessly left on the floor. She just got out of the hospital yesterday. This just goes to show us that being fanatical and obsessive about cleanliness is dangerous to one’s health.

            This morning, in a wild flurry of researching for this column, I went to a health website called ‘Peck’ and read this: “Exposure to bacteria and viral organisms is critical to the development of a mature immune system. By constantly cleaning and sterilising our environment, we don't give our defence mechanisms a chance to grow.” So right.
                                             -end-

They want to 'enhance revenue' (August 3)

Where do I apply to join ‘other customers’?

                        by Robert LaFrance

            On the evening of Saturday, July 23, the power went off at our estate here in Kincardine. It happens, to us and to everyone else, so it wasn’t a big deal. After three or four hours it returned with a flourish.

            What was exceptionally annoying was that I was waiting on the phone for well over an hour and an half, just to report the power outage. Surely there is some mechanism for NB Power to have an automatic response when one phones to report a power ‘interruption’.

            Remember, this is the year 2016, when there are driverless cars that can go from Halifax to Vancouver.

            How hard would it be to have a computer setup that, once the customer punches in the location of the outage, can answer right then: “Okay big guy. We got it. We now know that you have a power interruption at your place. Light your kerosene lamp and read a book. Drink some lemonade.”

            Apparently this is rocket science. Instead, after I had I dialled NB Power and punched in the location of the outage on my smartphone, I waited and waited and waited. And waited – for 93 minutes.

            Even that wouldn’t be totally annoying, but every minute or two a Voice came on to remind me that “due to unexpected high call volumes” all their people were busy with “other customers”. My question was (if I could have found a human to talk to): who are these “other people” and how do I join that happy throng?

            Let’s go back to the phrase “unexpectedly high call volumes”. Because I planned to attend the Highland Games on July 23 in Fredericton, from Wednesday on I had been looking at weather forecasts. Each day I was seeing ‘possible thunder showers’. On Friday morning the weather people (my old crowd) were saying ‘probable widespread thunder showers and possible power outages’.

            So, NB Power, why was the power outage call volume “unexpectedly high”?

            Anyway, long story short(er), all is well and the power is back on. By the way, it was caused by an unexpected lightning strike. They usually don’t announce it before they hit trees and cats. And the bottom line is: Many complaints like mine could be avoided if we could just call in, report the outage to a computer somewhere, and go back to the lemonade and special brownies.

            By the way, the Southern Victoria Pipe Band played well in the Highland Games and I was back home Saturday evening, just in time for that lightning storm. Timing is everything.

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

            Other major news in our province:

            The Saint John Transit Commission, according to CBC Radio, has made some scheduling and other changes to “enhance revenue”, according to a company spokesman. Isn’t it interesting how times have changed in the accounting game? In the old days those changes would have been implemented “to make more money”.

            Some things are stranger than fiction. Last week the news story went around the world that the city of Mosul, Iraq, had set a new temperature record. According to the CBC Radio news report, people in that place – as if they didn’t have enough stress – were suffering under an air temperature of 55ºC. People were heading for Baghdad for some relief. It was only 54ºC there. A temperature of 55ºC is the equivalent of 131ºF. Can you picture Achmed and Gimsel meeting on the street? “Quite a scorcher today, huh?” says Achmed. Gimsel doesn’t answer. He’s a little spot of grease on the sidewalk.

            I’m going to have to drive to Moncton this afternoon and visit Flug who is ‘incarcerated’ there. That’s almost like being in jail. On July 7^th he was all set to leave for the Cayman Islands to visit his money and was going through a baggage check at the airport. The highly educated and intelligent security guy was asking what was in a small bag in Flug’s suitcase and he answered “toothbrush, toothpaste, stuff like that, and lip balm.” The security guy heard “lip bomb”. You’d think Flug would be more careful in airports; three years ago he shouted across the airport lounge at his friend John Lallaree: “Hi, Jack!” That joke’s been going around for years; you would think Flug had heard it, but he only had eyes for Yew, his girlfriend at the time.

            There must have been a major TV documentary about bacteria on food, because every house I’ve been in lately has smelled of Lysol and other toxic chemicals which seem to be the rage nowadays. We’re supposed to wash our hands 87 times a day, preferably with carbolic acid, in order to stave off all the dread diseases we come into contact with every day. My friend the Perfessor said the other day: “No wonder people get sick; they don’t come into contact with a germ until they’re in their forties!”
                                                      -end-

The word 'so' has 3 syllables (July 27)

DIARY

The future of nostalgia looks good

                        by Robert LaFrance

                In 1940 Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with Tom Wolfe) published a novel called “You can’t go home again”; it was immediately banned in Germany, so it must have been good. He didn’t care though, since he was dead by that time.

                Author John Steinbeck’s book ‘Travels with Charley’ contains this comment: “You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.” Of course we can go home again, and I prove it at least once a month by going to Tilley and taking a look at the house where I was born on May 11, 1948.

                Even if I weren’t actually able to visit the old homestead – where my sister and brother-in-law now live part of the year – I can go there any time in my alleged mind. Over there is the barn where I hid the pup who later became my dog Rover; over there is the garden spot where I  regularly fed corn to the raccoons, not voluntarily; at the edge of the woods is the spot where my cabin used to stand, and lots of other memories hang around the place. The big hay field across the road where I slung (slanged?) square hay bales onto a trailer.

                This morning I was thinking about the time I learned from the Perley brothers how to build a log cabin. My father, Fred LaFrance, was working for Aubrey and Ivan Perley, yarding logs and doing some sawing so Uncle Percy’s truck could take the logs to the mill in Rowena. I often was out in the woods and talking to Aubrey and Ivan about things, and one day they offered to show me how to build a log cabin.

                I was about twelve at the time, full of p*ss and vinegar, as Ivan used to say, and I like to think I was actually some help as they built their cabin right at the edge of a little stream where I would catch trout for our dinners. Eventually the cabin was built, and they christened it with quarts of Moosehead pale ale. This did not involve smashing a bottle of that amber liquid against the hull of the cabin, but at time it was close.

               There is a lot more to this story, but I ain’t saying another word. I had nothing to do with shooting that moose. It would have been illegal for me – but not for them – to do that. I will say it tasted good served with potatoes baked in the coals of their fire as we took a break from working on the cabin.

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

               I feel as if I should be commenting on the big news stories of the day – Donald Trump, the murders in Nice, France, terrorism in various countries, the attempted military coup in Turkey, but you are safe; I am not going to.

               Instead, let’s talk about Australian accents. As one who watches several TV shows made in that country (Miss Fisher Mysteries, Dr. Blake Mysteries, etc.), I have come to the conclusion that many Australian speakers are ‘word rasslers’.

               Take the word ‘so’. One would think there wouldn’t be much anyone could do to that word, but one show I watched last evening had a character saying the word ‘so’ and I am sure he pronounced it using at least three syllables.

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

               If it weren’t so serious, the Donald Trump phenomenon would be hilarious, or Hillary-us because apparently she is the cause of the world’s problems. Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s latest wife, read a speech that had large chunks directly plagiarized from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama, the current president’s wife. The irony of this is strong enough to excite an electromagnet. But the funny part was afterward, when Trump’s minions tried to explain it away. One said Michelle Obama “didn’t invent the English language”, another one said that 93% was okay, just that 7% was plagiarized, and a third said that Hilary Clinton caused all the kerfuffle. He didn’t explain how Ms. Clinton forced Melania Obama to plagiarize. As I keep saying, it’s a weird country.

            Talk about coincidence: Three weeks ago I found an old pool cue at a yard sale and shelled out fifty cents for it to use as a walking stick – looking very British, old chap, what? I was strolling along Kintore road day before yesterday when a Toyota Lexus stopped, then a head peered out. Immediately I recognized Cliff Thorburn, former North American and British snooker champion, whom I had met when I lived in Campbell River, BC, about a hundred years ago. I told him how to get to Plaster Rock and then he noticed the pool cue. “Could I look it that?” he said. Turns out it was the cue (proven by his initials scratched in the wood) with which he had won the Los Angeles Billiards title in 1981. He offered me $100 U.S. on the spot, but I live in the Scotch Colony. We settled on $250.
                                                           -end-

I will be an 'award-winning columnist' (July 20)

DIARY

Some things, like King James, can’t be explained

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I just came in from my front garden where I picked peas for half an hour, enough to feed any two pigs – not mentioning names – for half a day. Looking over my journals from previous years, I can brag that this is the earliest I have ever picked ripe peas. My beets, romaine lettuce and onions? I don’t want to talk about it.

            Another thing: I drive here and there and often see roadside gardens that are beautiful and geometric, but mine are about as neat as a missed hockey hip check. I saw one of those during the playoffs and was impressed with how a player could hurl himself over the glass and up to the fifth row.

            On to a gentler subject – books - last Wednesday evening, when I was visiting Clyde Nigel St. John (pronounced Sin-gin) at his cottage in Lower Kintore, I was impressed by his book collection of several thousand volumes, most of them about British history before Brexit. I might have been less impressed than some, because I have 500-600 books, almost all about Canadian and New Brunswick history. Still, I was impressed, since his cottage was really a cabin. Every wall was filled with books. Of all those tomes, the one that impressed me the most though, was the King James Version of the Holy Bible – now get this – SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR.

            Listening to a CBC radio program about the mistakes Albert Einstein made in his General Theory of Relativity (published 1916) I was astonished at how wrong he was about certain things. I know my relatives are quite baffling too. Relativity, get it? The common tater, a scientist, spoke for half an hour and then conceded that Einstein was right in 99.9% of his theories. If I had done that well in school, I might have gone into something complicated, like meteorology, the study of meteors.

            Yesterday morning one of the ladies in the UCW, CWL, DAR, or the YWCA asked Flug why he never wears shorts. I almost choked on my lemonade. I have seen Flug’s legs, back in Ottawa when we were both on the Parliament Hill Co-Ed Field Hockey team. However, we did make it to the nationals that year, in Nepean, Ontario. Since Nepean is right next to Ottawa and we were two of the only three teams in the league, the other being Maxville, ON, it was quite convenient. We won, by the way, because Flug`s legs (that looked like folded up pancakes laced with chokecherries) kept the other teams helpless with laughter.

            Ah, we were young athletes them. Now I don’t understand athletes at all. My daughter Kate played all season with the Fredericton Gladiators women’s tackle football team and went on to make the Maritime team, but I’ll never understand why anyone would play tackle football. Her Maritime team will be playing in the nationals next month in Regina and I wish her and them all the best. Like Swahili, I’ll never understand it.

            A quick question: Do you often use the phrase ‘of course’ when answering a question? It was only yesterday that I finally realized that ‘of course’ doesn’t make any sense.

            CBC Radio and MPBN Radio (PBS) occasionally play music from other lands and I have to admit I rarely am able to get any joy out of it. I mean, I grew up listening to Hank Williams and Don Messer. Am I really going to enjoy a sitar concert? Back in the 1960s the Beatles went to India and learned the True Way from a sitar player named Ravi Shankar, and even got him to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. I watched it and couldn’t make head nor tails of it. Rap gives me the same feeling. Maybe some people think it’s music, but I don’t.

            Another quick question: What the hell is a ‘research analyst’? I keep hearing people being described as such, and I could be listening to…well…Swahili again. Yet no one questions it. Does this person analyze research? Does he or she research analysis? One of the great unsolved mysteries of life in the 21^st century.

            One of the descriptions I also tire of is the adjective ‘award-winning’. At a media event last week, a newspaper guy from the National Post was introduced as an ‘award-winning  columnist’ (it could have been Communist) and I wondered what was the award he had won? Nobody said. Accordingly, I am going to carve a plaque – this would be an award – out off a piece of birch and have Silo the bartender present it to me. Then I can be introduced as ‘an award-winning’ columnist. Or Communist.

            Now I have to find someone who will introduce me.

                                        -end-

Heavy summer activity (Jul 13 column)

DIARY

Totally irrelevant unconnected thoughts

                        by Robert LaFrance

            When I am out pruning apple trees, resting in my hammock or piling wood until I put my hand on a snake, I often think of subjects to write about in this column. Trouble is, these short thoughts don’t have any connection with each other so I can’t write an entire column on any of them. Hence what follows:

            It is said that everyone should have a ‘bucket list’ of items they want to experience before they cross over to the next world. One of mine is making sourdough bread. It seems like such an easy thing to do, but after nearly seven decades on this planet I have never done it. My friend Flug has done it, during the time he was a Parliament Hill barber, and it is said that Donald Trump has even made it. I suppose that would be a great reason not to make it, but I am fearless.

            Speaking of Donald Trump…no, never mind.

            I have been watching the European Soccer Championships, the Euros, and am amazed at one thing that is not directly associated with soccer down on the field. Occasionally the camera operators will zoom in on someone (usually a gorgeous woman, but as a married man I don’t notice that) and of course that person’s face will appear on the huge screens at the stadium. Invariably that person will wave at the screen instead of at the camera. I’m not sure what that says about soccer fans, but there you go.

            On the subject of tattoos, I am amazed at the number of people who have opted for them. Athletes of course are among the most enthusiastic of these people. David Beckham, now retired from professional football (soccer), seems to be covered with them from his ears to his chest and possibly other places I don’t want to know about. I suppose my question would be, as it is by most people who look at tattoos, is: what happens when you decide you don’t want your tattoos any more. Not one to describe a problem and not suggest a solution, here is mine: get your tattoo artist to completely cover your tattoos with flesh-coloured tattoos, whatever your flesh colour may be. However, I would guess that most tattoo artists may be hard to find, but the French Riviera is a good place to start.

            Rolling pin time. Feeling energetic one afternoon last week, I grabbed the old weed-eater and started trimming around some apple trees, then moved over to trim the long grass near the house. Then, like the proverbial moth to the proverbial flame, I started weed-eating (sounds unappetizing, does it not?) around my wife’s dahlias. Of course I cut one of those off first thing…When I regained consciousness and with a rolling pin depression in my skull, the world was a different colour, almost luminous with flashing lights. Just think, back in the Sixties and later, people used to take LSD and get a similar result. It was much cheaper this way.

            We drink quite a bit of skim milk here and have found that it is quite hard to get the covers off the 2-litre plastic jugs. I could do it all right, but I’m sure that someone with little hand strength would have had a tough time dealing with that particular problem. Then, a few weeks ago, the milk company made a change in the design of the covers. They are now much easier to take off. However, they are now almost impossible to put back on. More and more I’m finding that the world is run by incompetents who don’t leave their offices, labs or ivory towers long enough to see ‘how the other half lives’.

            Talking to a professional genealogist last week, I was once more impressed at how complicated the whole thing is. If they get one name wrong in a family tree, that can result in a whole series of mistakes and have one be the descendant of Jack the Ripper instead of Jack Kennedy. I did my own family history in the late 1980s and found it quite fascinating that my line of LaFrances (same line as the Grand Falls LaFrances) originally had the surname Pinel. About 1650 a carpenter named Gilles Pinel came from Aunis, France, to Quebec City with his wife Anne Ledet. Then over the next hundred years, the family name went from Pinel to Pinel dit LaFrance to LaFrance and here I am. Blame them, not me.

            By the way, Gilles lived to be almost 70, but in 1655 his father Nicolas left the scene at age fifty when he was blasted in a battle with First Nations people. The weapon used was an arqubus, or an ancient musket. We LaFrances do tend to take the wrong road.

                                                     -end-