Complaining
about a skiff of snow
by
Robert LaFrance
This is part of the weather forecast
for Wednesday evening, April 19: “Rain and snow in the evening...then all
snow.”
Now I ask you: “SNOW on April 19th?
This is communism. I don’t want to talk about it any more.
**********************
Looking at the good side of things,
my friend Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) won a pile of money in a lottery
and is going to take me and my wife out to supper/dinner. The bad news is that
he is going to put a $45 limit on each of us.
“Wrong, Bob,” said Flug, who was
reading over my shoulder as I typed those immortal words. “I said a TOTAL of
forty-five dollars and we’ll pick up the tip.” The ‘we’ he referred to was (or
were) he and his latest wife Janine Lewindowski-Smith-Jones-Lennon. She, like
Flug, has chosen the well-worn marital path quite a few times over the years. I
only report a small number of her blissful spouses, blissful now that she’s
gone from their marital beds.
Thursday, April 20, 2017 – I rolled
out of bed at 7:25 am to find that about three inches (approx. 34 kilograms I
think, in metric) of snow had fallen during the night. The previous evening I
had texted my daughter in Singapore that this snow was forecast. She asked me
if I was lying. In the morning I texted her a photo of the whited-out ground.
“Does this look like lying?” I asked. She said it was 32ºC over there and she
was about to leap into the pool.
Jump ahead to later in the month. We
ate at a gourmet restaurant named Belle’s Truck Stop. Their only dish, at least
that day, was beans. Baked beans, string beans, Jack and the Beanstalk beans,
refried beans – they know their beans.
Indeed, they serve so many beans
that a special carbon tax (just for them) is making its way through the House
of Commons and Senate as we speak. As we know, beans are the musical fruit, but
tough on the old ozone layer.
Flug, still looking over my
shoulder, said he wanted to correct something I had reported earlier in the
column. He hadn’t won a lottery; he had won a Phoenix.
For those to whom the word Phoenix
is not familiar, other than the Greek mythology bird that rises from the ashes
of other Phoenixes, we should remember that it is also a federal government
program that organizes payrolls. It has a few minor flaws, like depositing 12
cents into one civil servant’s account for her bi-weekly pay.
Flug, who receives a federal
pension, was one Canadian who did not complain about Phoenix. His monthly
cheque, usually $1277, was $24,339 last month. He’s hoping that Phoenix does
not slip back into its ashes anytime soon. “An honest man would inform them,”
he said, “but guess what?”-end-
No comments:
Post a Comment