DIARY
There
are more Rules of Life – for sure
by
Robert LaFrance
Last week’s column listed several
Rules of Life and I was thinking of adding another ten or so this week, but if
they are Rules of Life they are going to happen to us whatever we do, so why
bother?
Just one this week though – Rule of Life # 248:
You’re driving to town to pick up bibles or something and it starts to rain.
Your wipers do a good job of clearing the windshield except for one spot –
directly in front of the driver. It’s always in that one place. If you bought
$99 wipers it would be the same. Keep your money.
Still on the subject of vehicle
windshields and other windows, I have noticed the unintended consequences of
vehicles having dark windows; everybody seems to have them now. The result is
that people think that New Brunswickers are VERY friendly people. “Whenever I
passed anybody they smiled and waved,” wrote a certain Toronto Globe and Mail
columnist in last Wednesday’s edition.
I have news for him: I, and I think
most people, wave to other drivers because we can’t tell who they are and we
don’t want to take a chance. There are too many nut cases around these days.
Somebody with an ISIS-Mafia complex could start blasting away with a Kalashnikov.
Last Wednesday I was in Grand Falls
and stopped at Wal-Mart to buy some rechargeable batteries. Getting out of the
car, I carefully locked the doors because I had two Nikon cameras on the front
seat. When I came back out and got in the car, I saw that I had left both front
windows rolled down. Either Wal-Mart customers are very honest or have bad
vision because the cameras were still there when I returned.
Listening to a radio report from the
Rio Olympics, I heard a CBC announcer’s interview with a Canadian swimmer who
said he wanted “to concentrate on the performance and not the result”. It took
quite a bit of thinking for me to realize what that meant – nothing.
I have often said that life is far
too complicated these days. Last year we bought two heat pumps and ever since
then we’ve been getting hot water out of our cold water taps or vice versa. I
am sure that makes sense, doesn’t it? I (vaguely) remember when we bought the
pumps; the guy explained that in the winter they got heat from the ground
(which would be frozen at the time) but in the summer they would take moisture
from the air to cool off the house.
Let’s stop right there. I don’t have the foggiest
idea what I’m talking about. It reminds me of the medieval guy from what is now
Iraq. He said he didn’t trust his brother any more because one day he saw him
blowing on his soup to cool it and then, outside, blowing on his hands to warm
them. “Anybody who can blow hot and blow cold out of the same mouth can’t be
trusted,” he said.
We hear a lot about the problem of
mould (or mold if you prefer) in our houses. We have dehumidifiers running all
summer so we don’t get a drop of water leaking out in our basements and causing
mould, but look over there at Italy. Check out the city of Venice, whose skirts
are under water 24/7. Did you ever hear that Venice has a mould problem? No,
just gondolas running into each other.
More language problems: If we say
the Prince of Wales, how do people know we aren’t saying the Prints of Wales,
or the Prints of Whales? And where does Wales come into things anyway? Have you
seen Prince Charles there – or anywhere else – lately? Is he ever keeping a low
profile.
In the past 68 years or so, I have
often criticized NB Power in this column, but this time I want to praise the
company. About ten days ago the power went off here for about ten seconds –
just enough for me to lose part of a column I was writing – and I was annoyed.
Six hours later it went off again. I waited twenty minutes to call in a report.
I was telling the call centre guy about the outage (and outrage) when the power
came back on. “We’re really quite efficient, aren’t we?” he said. “You didn’t
even get a chance to finish your report.” I hate a wise guy, especially when I
see him in the mirror after being a victim of one-upmanship.
I will leave you, my faithful and
long-suffering readers with a question: Why, in a province that sees more than
its share of snow, do so many people buy white vehicles?-end-
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