DIARY
The
secret of canoeing and kayaking
by Robert LaFrance
I do a lot of thinking, always with
the hope that I will come up with a plan that works. The good results of doing
all this pondering range from ‘seldom’ to ‘rare’ to possibly ‘go on home’ but I
keep trying anyway.
One thought I had recently was: “Why
can’t I design a better fridge than the ones most of us have already?” Surely I
can do better than that, I told myself. When I look for jelly, it is ALWAYS at
the back of the shelf because I haven’t eaten jelly for two days. When I (and
you, don’t deny it!) put something in the fridge, it goes to the front and so
on.
The milk is on the top shelf, left
hand side, and it’s the only food item that can be easily seen in that miasma I
call our old Maytag. At any given time the top shelf could hold applesauce,
leftovers, car parts or non-food items such as my Aunt Maudy’s oatmeal cookies.
Here’s my idea: Insulting as the
phrase is to my Aunt Susie, I suggest that an entire fridge could be a Lazy
Susan, with circular shelves one could just spin to find the celery or…oatmeal
cookies if one were inclined that way.
Of course the fridge itself would
have to be cylindrical, otherwise there would be a lot of wasted space. Then of
course there would be wasted space around the fridge, so…
Forget it. It’s too complicated.
Now, where is that maple syrup?
************************
To paraphrase the late George
Carlin, when a columnist finds himself talking about bodily functions, there
are some subjects he’s missed, but I’m going to do it anyway.
I am often impressed by the number,
the large number, of euphemisms for things we must do every day. So-and-so has
to be excused so he can go and do “number one” and heaven forfend (as the old
phrase goes) if he misjudges and it turns out to be “number two” before he gets
there. My late Aunt Ella used to say: “I have to go see a man about a horse”.
Up in Tilley, if one had ‘the runs’ we called it “the nine flying axe-handles”.
No idea where that came from.
That’s enough of that.
****************************
My apple orchard is producing many
thousands of Novamacs, Libertys and Nova Easy Grows and the bears are happy.
This might have a bit to do with an
item I wrote previously, but I find the bears are getting a little too
enthusiastic with their No. 2 production. I have to walk very gingerly around
the trees because the bears leave their ‘sign’ (as father used to say) all over the place. “Two big men couldn’t shake
hands over that pile,” Flug said as we walked (gingerly) through the orchard
where my neighbour Rick had just cleared a big area with his ‘bush hog’.
He went on to say that his nephew
Calvin in western Saskatchewan had phoned him the night before. Calvin’s area
of that province had just had an earthquake that measured 6.1 on the Richter
Scale and Calvin was happy, Flug said.
“Yeah, you know how lazy Calvin is,
don’t you?” I said I did (lazier than a cut cat) but what does that have to do
with Calvin’s orchard?
“The earthquake shook almost every
apple off Calvin’s trees,” Flug explained. “Now he doesn’t have to hire apple
pickers.”
*************************
More thoughts and observations, some
of them even useful:
A warning to those whose lawns are
on hilly ground and who, at the age of 68, buy a riding lawn mower for the
first time – only mow UP AND DOWN, not across the hill. I wasn’t killed, but
should have been. Those seats are slippery.
I keep hearing that a certain
YouTube video has ‘gone viral’. What does that mean? Along the same line,
people say a certain Twitter subject is ‘trending’. It seems to me that the
definitions of these words are exactly what the speaker wants them to mean,
nothing more nor less. Reminds me of the George Orwell novel “Nineteen
Eighty-Four” and Big Brother, who invented his language called Newspeak.
I’m adding two more thoughts to the
Rules of Life Dictionary I am working on. (1) Raspberries are at their very
best tasting when they are so ripe that two thirds of them fall off the bush
before you can pick them, and (2) If you are alone in the house and sit on the
flush, the phone will ring. (I can’t seem to stay out of the bathroom today.)
There is one huge drawback about
canoeing or kayaking and the world’s scientists have yet to come up with a
solution. When you kayak downriver, you have to somehow get your craft back up
to where you started. My solution? Start well upriver from where you want to
START, ride down to your starting point, and go home from there. See, the
people who say I’m stupid are very wrong indeed.
-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment