Watch those curly light bulbs (Aug. 31)

DIARY

Flug’s problem with an Ottawa woman

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Every once in a while, like the rest of us, my friend Flug says something intelligent.

            “It won’t last,” he warned me, as if I were expecting more. As registered males of the human race, we are dull as dishwater, except for occasional flashes of mediocre thought, or, in this case, brilliance.

            Flug was relating a story about telling a lie and having it come back at him like cucumbers or radish. The lie occurred several years ago when he told a lady in Ottawa that he was the owner of a trucking company in New Brunswick. Remembering that, she wrote to Flug in Tilley (he lives in Kincardine now, but we can always count on Canada Post) that she was coming for a visit, perhaps a long visit. It wouldn’t take her long to realize that Flug’s ‘trucking company’ was a 1999 Ford F150 with lots of rust.

            “What will I do?” he moaned. “She’s on her way here and she is going to shoot me.” I was thinking that he deserved shooting, for that lie and many others, but I was and am his friend.

            “I’d say shooting is the least of your worries,” I commented. “What about Roseanne?” That was and is his wife, either the 16^th or 17^th. “When she answers the door and it answers back with this Ottawa woman, you are going to be in the deepest of doo-doo ever seen in these parts. Have you thought about going on a sudden vacation?”

            He hadn’t, but ruled that out because he was in the middle of a business deal involving the purchase of another trucking company, a 2006 Ford F150 whose asking price was $1500. We talked for a while and didn’t come up with anything, but figured Ottawa wouldn’t be there for at least two days. “We gotta come up with SOMETHING,” he said. Where he found the WE he didn’t say.

            This is when he said something intelligent. “You know Bob, telling a lie is like chicken pox. It doesn’t seem like much at the time, but you look around five or ten or thirty years later and bazooka! You’ve got shingles which is the chicken pox coming back to hit you with a stick. If only you hadn’t gotten chicken pox in the first place.”

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

            On to an entirely different subject (and leaving Flug to sort out his own shingles) I was sitting in my office earlier today and working on this very column when the light in my office started flickering. After four or five minutes of this, the bulb started to make a buzzing sound after which I leapt (if one can leap at age 68) to the switch and turned it off.

            Of course five minutes later I forgot about this and went back to my office. When I turned on the light it made an even louder buzz and crackle. After once more turning it off, I went to the downstairs cupboard and got a 60W incandescent bulb. I specify because the one that made the noise was one of those curly fluorescent bulbs, you know, the ones that were the answer to all our ecological prayers a few years ago. We would do away with the incandescent ones and live happily ever after because these ones would each last 20,000 hours and take half the power. And Goldilocks was a nice little girl except for her minor problem of being a food thief.

            For the reader’s information, the curly-fries bulb was the Noma brand, made in China. Asking around, I have found that those bulbs made in China have caused many a problem including worry because they contain mercury.

            So I decided to change all our house lighting to LEDs (light emitting diodes) and went to the hardware store which is located right near Jim’s Pool Hall and behind the club. I looked at the price tag - $4,320. I said to the clerk: “So how many LED bulbs does that buy?” He gave me an odd look and said it was only the down payment on one bulb.

Now where did I put those candles?

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               One of the Olympics events reminded me of the Victorian era in England. In the late 19^th century, people were urged to refrain from saying words like ‘leg’ because it was risqué, so they had to refer to a table ‘limb’. In Rio one of the events was the ‘women’s breaststroke’. Times have changed. I don’t know how many Victorian heart attacks would have been caused by women’s beach volleyball. I’m still recovering.

            By the way, the Ottawa woman who was headed this way phoned Flug (Richard LaFrance, no relation) Saturday evening and said she’d just met the love of her life in Cabano and was going back with him to Fort MacMurray. Just so you know.
                                          -end-

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.

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            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-