Moving to the USA where it’s safe
By Robert LaFrance
Somebody told me the other day that Internet companies in the U.S.A. sell their wares at a much lower price than companies in Canada and I believed her. She worked for Verizon so she should have known the truth (a hard commodity to find nowadays, especially in that country I just mentioned.)
My bill last month was the equivalent of a monthly Rolls Royce payment. The company stung me for close to $150 for just normal service. I called them and the woman who answered (in a totally unintelligible Mumbai accent) listed a bunch of things they were charging me for.
If I understood correctly, I must pay a portion of the prime minister’s golf fees – and I didn’t even know he played golf – and repairs to some hydro lines in Ernfold, Saskatchewan. I owed either $29.23 or $45.10 to Rogers Communications for the use of some WiFi equipment (although my service carrier is Bell Aliant) and for repairs to a tractor owned by the village of Aroostook.
Then at the end she said that she had missed an item – something to do with Donald Trump’s golf fees – that came to $634.22. It sounded like that anyway, so now my total monthly Internet fee is about $680.
Later that day my cousin Vinnie in Presque Isle, Maine called to say hello and compare Covid data. The subject of Internet came up. I told him that I was paying $680 a month and he said: “That seems a trifle excessive. I pay $30 a month for the highest speed package.”
So I guess we’ll be moving across the border where the Internet fees are reasonable and it’s safe and sensible.
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It’s been a windy fall after that blistering hot summer. Some readers may have noticed. No sooner did the leaves turn very beautiful than I said to my dog: “Fang, get ready for heavy rains and strong winds in less than two weeks. It happens every fall, but at least while we’re waiting for the S-word and the W-word we can enjoy the leaves.”
No sooner did the word ‘leaves’ come out of my mouth than the wind came up and up and up and the rain started pelting down and down. All those beautiful leaves were flung to the ground in a matter of hours – no minutes, no seconds. I looked out our southern kitchen window and the fall colours were there; I walked over to the fridge to get some cream for my coffee and looked out the eastern window to see that all the maple and apple tree leaves had fled the scene. It was February already.
Oh well, there has to be some kind of reason for my being depressed. The next step is when the S-word starts falling in gentle 2-foot drifts. (I just noticed that if one takes away the hyphen of ‘S-word’ it spells SWORD. Can’t argue with that.)
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Have we harvested everything out of our gardens yet? I sure have, except for potatoes, carrots, herbs, second lettuce crop, Daikon radish, and several other crops. I’ve been busy with other things, like eating, sleeping and watching TV. I’ve been so lazy that I hired a carpenter to shingle the small roof of my new equipment shed. I was kind of embarrassed about that, but then I spoke to the Perfessor’s sister Joleen. A healthy woman of about 55 who doesn’t work outside the home, she hired a woman to clean her house once a week. “It just got to be too much to think about,” Joleen told me. I was going to make fun of her until I remembered the equipment shed that is only slightly smaller than Joleen’s house.
Every year at this time I send out greetings to the people now serving at Alert, Nunavut, both military and civilian, because they will not be seeing the sun again until early March.
I worked for Environment Canada, the weather service, in the 1970s and reported on whether it was cold in Alert as February ground its way to a balmy spring. I worked there 54 weeks in a row, but I’m not so sure what I did during that last week, since it was a big surprise. I had expected to be gone the week before and, in my disappointment at not seeing my name on the Hercules C-130 passenger list, I walked to the Junior Ranks Mess (bar) and stayed there. The next Thursday morning I was somehow on the scheduled flight to Trenton, Ontario via Thule, Greenland. I think. After 54 weeks working 450 nautical miles from the North Pole, I was rather tired.
Mentioning those Arctic Heroes at Alert, Nunavut reminded me of an airplane flight I took to a little weather station at Nitcheqon, which is located about 300 miles due north of Trois Rivieres. I had been vacationing in Tilley, NB, in the house where I was born, and went from there to a 5-week relief job in Nitcheqon. What I remembered most was the trip itself. I took the train to Quebec City where I hopped on a QuebecAir DC-3 to Baie Comeau, Mont Joli and then Trois Rivieres.
After an overnight stay, I climbed on another DC-3 and couldn’t help but notice that there was a hole in the passenger door, a hole surely big enough to put my size 11 boots through. Oh well, I thought, it’s not a pressurized plane anyway and my seatbelt will hold me in.
Another minor detail: just before be locked that alleged door, the co-pilot carried on an outboard motor and put it behind the seat of the only passenger – me. He didn’t tie it down or secure it in any way.
Halfway to Nitcheqon it suddenly got dark and the plane started bouncing around. My fingernails were blue, and as a bona fide weatherman I knew that pilot had steered us into a cumulonimbus, with its tremendous up and downdrafts.
That lasted five or six minutes until my fingernails turned flesh-coloured again. The co-pilot opened the door to the front and asked if I was all right. He explained that we had gotten caught in a thundercloud and an updraft had taken us to twelve thousand feet from our regular altitude of three thousand.
We landed without further mishap about twenty minutes later and just before supper one of the met techs (weathermen) and I went fishing on Lake Nitcheqon. I caught a 3-pound trout that the chef poached for supper. It turned out to be a good summer. -end-
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