Posted on March 5, 2014 under Storytelling with no comments yet

 

 

Every once in a while we need to shake things up, to find something to snap us out of our lethargy.  A new beginning or a fresh start.  We may be unhappy with how we look and feel.  We may have developed some bad habits that we would like to reverse or eliminate.  Sometimes it’s an attitude adjustment that is in order.   At least that’s what the Ivany report on the Nova Scotian economy is saying.

I am a strong proponent of setting goals, writing them down and monitoring them.  The best way I have found to do this is with something called “The 30 Day Challenge”.  You determine the behaviour to be modified, like reducing your alcohol intake by half, and then chart your progress for thirty days, keeping a daily log using a blank calendar page.  I’ll drink to that.

If you are a Catholic, you can take this one step further and take the 40 day challenge known as Lent.  For those of you not familiar with this tradition, it is a call to action for the forty days leading up to Easter.  One of the hallmarks of Lent is that it is a time of denying yourself one or more of life’s pleasures.  It is a time of fasting and abstinence.

Our parents’ generation didn’t have a lot of things to give up.  In our home town, not listening to “Scottish strings” on Friendly 58 for forty days would be a real hardship.  Some of us young whipper snappers would swear off listening to fiddle music during Lent … hardly difficult when we couldn’t stand hearing it in the first place.  Now, as adults, we can’t get enough of it.

When I was a child, it was a no brainer.  Almost invariably we were expected to give up sweets during Lent.  In our house, that was like asking us to live without water or oxygen.  We were a horde of sugar craving fanatics.   And heaven forbid that you cheat on your promise, for then you had to deal with your parents first, followed by confessing your weakness to a priest, along with all of your other transgressions.

And when Easter Sunday finally arrived and you could legitimately “come off the wagon”, you ate so many chocolate Easter eggs that you never wanted to eat sweets again … until the next day.

Another Lenten abstention that we had great difficulty with was the promise of being nice to our siblings.  No name calling, no snide remarks, no comments about appearances.  You know, all those things that brothers and sisters do to each other with impunity when they’re young.  I am sad to say that this particular promise had no chance of success.  Forget about being nice for forty days and forty nights.  The period of civility often lasted less than forty minutes, especially when you had to do dishes with an annoying sibling.

When we got older we gave up booze and smokes during Lent and even tried to avoid cursing, with varying degrees of success.

Many of our young people today march to their own drummer when it comes to religion, so the notion of fasting during Lent is as foreign to them as a rotary dial phone.  This is not to suggest that they aren’t spiritual.  They are building churches of their own.

What would today’s youth do if pressed into Lenten service?

How about giving up social media for forty days in a row?  Or for four hours per day?  Or for forty minutes each hour?

Stop the presses.  Are you serious?  Do you expect a young person to put down his smart phone and iPad?  Do you have the audacity to suggest that our youth forego Facebook and Twitter?   Just like giving up candy in the sixties, there would certainly be benefits, spiritual and otherwise.  They don’t have to call it Lent.

Lent, then and now.  Would it have been harder to take a pass on Scottish Strings back in the day, or social media in modern times?

I’m not sure.

I give up.

Posted on March 3, 2014 under Monday Morning Musings with no comments yet

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

 

 

I can’t tell a lie. Occasionally I will drop the f bomb but most times I am careful about cursing in public. The picture that accompanies this post was taken early Saturday morning on my walk down to The Landing. Locals will recognize this as the Wrights River. What I really want to say is how f….ing cold it was but let’s just say that is was bitterly cold, especially on the return trip, when there was the slightest breeze , creating a wind chill. Not complaining…just sayin’.

Every one of us knows someone who has to travel afar to work. While we would like to think that this a unique phenomenon, it is not. It is the story of Maritimers going back decades, maybe even centuries. Many of our grandparent’s generation travelled to the “Boston States” in search of work and countless of our people went to Ontario in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s to work in the mining and manufacturing sector. This era was immortalized by the movie “ Going Down The Road.”

I was talking to someone the other day who was returning from a visit to family in Alberta. He experienced some travel delays and got stuck at Pearson Airport in Toronto. What a warm, embracing place that is. He met a couple of Maritimers returning from Fort Mac after 21 days in a row of 12 hour shifts. They had been stuck in the airport for two days waiting out snowstorms. They were tired and irritated. I do not envy families that have to live this way.

While I felt bad for these guys, I immediately thought about the other half of this equation. For many of them, there are wives and children back home. I thought of the wives taking care of children, going to work and having to shovel snow just about every day.

So what happens when an exhausted and cranky husband arrives home and finds a cranky, exhausted spouse standing at the door with a couple of sick children in tow? I’m struggling with the most appropriate title. I’m thinking either “Head on Collision” or “Train Wreck.” Do you have a good title for this ? I have the story written and it is in the lineup for editing.

Another story I’m working on is about client service. A friend of mine was at a Halifax watering hole on the weekend and left in disgust after poor service. I know the feeling. I’m not sure which is worse: bad service by a waiter or waitress with attitude problems or no service ( being ignored ). One of the reasons I am not a shopper is that I have had one too many episodes of being ignored in a store where it was obvious to anyone that I was lost and looking for help. Coming soon, “The Invisible Man.”

I would like to give a big shout out to Jean Pearcey of Jeanious Designs. Jean graciously offered to design the poster for the fundraiser on April 24^th. You’ll get to see it later in the week. It is awesome.

I have all the sponsors for the show confirmed as well as the authors and musicians. Tickets will be on sale within a week. Might make a good Easter gift as the show is the Thursday after the Easter weekend.

Don’t put the long johns away just yet. It seems like we are going to freeze our asses off for at least another week before we turn the clocks ahead and beg for Spring.

Have a great week.

Posted on March 1, 2014 under Storytelling with no comments yet

 

 

As the winter of our discontent grinds on, I am threatening to buy stocks in companies that manufacture salt and sand.  We have been averaging about two storms a week, causing havoc and interruptions in our daily routines.  There has been only one full week of school since Christmas.  A present from Santa, perhaps?   Businesses have been forced to close, and many important events like bingos and crib games have had to be cancelled.   And, shovelling snow has become the new national pastime.

This winter has been particularly challenging for my wife, as I suffer from arthritis in my back and can’t help with the shovelling.  Early on in the winter, she approached the task with vigor, possibly even enthusiasm, but lately, even she is getting annoyed with Mother Nature.

She was outside the other day, ministering to the driveway, as rain overnight had turned it into a miniature skating rink.  She was applying liberal amounts of sand to protect us and our tenant from the possibility of a spill.  She refuses to use salt as it might harm the flower patch, if spring ever arrives.

The sand was applied in the usual high traffic areas, but when I saw her start to sprinkle sand in an obscure part of the driveway where no person could possibly set foot, I scratched my head.  “Don’t go there”, I quietly thought to myself.  But being the fool that I am, I went there and received a terse reply … and “the look”.

Later in the day, on my morning walk downtown, I saw runners going by, slip sliding on the sidewalks.  Despite the valiant efforts of the town’s public works crew, ice continues to be a constant enemy this winter.   The crew doesn’t worry about flora and fauna and pours liberal amounts of salt on the sidewalks and roads.  It would be hard to imagine surviving winter in a northern climate without salt.

Quite frankly, it would be hard to live anywhere without salt.  For centuries our forefathers used salt to preserve fish and meat, before the advent of refrigeration.  And what is better than a feed of salt cod … as long as you make sure you let it sit in water for several hours before cooking.

We are constantly warned about the evils of salt in our diet.  Of course, these days, it seems that everything is bad for us.  Despite this, I choose to sprinkle a bit on most things, even though I am routinely chastised for applying it without first seeing how much salt is already in the food I am eating.  Men do so many things that are wrong in the eyes of their beloved.

And of course, there is potassium nitrate, the clinical name for saltpeter.  For decades there was a rumour that injecting saltpeter into the food chain for the military would suppress male ardor during long periods of time away from their loved ones.  It seems to me that the lousy military food alone would do the trick.

Despite my wife’s protestations, I will continue to champion the merits of salt.  How else could I proclaim that she is the “salt of the earth”?

Recently, on Groundhog Day, it was determined that there would be twelve more weeks of winter.  Now that’s what I call “throwing salt on the wound”.