Posted on May 15, 2014 under Thursday Tidbits with 2 comments

Fruit of the Vine

 

 

“Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine;

When ya’ gonna let me get sober;

Leave me alone, let me go home;

Let me go home and start over”

The Fireballs 1968

 

Seems like a good way to start Thursday talking about wine. I suspect a fair bit of the grape will be consumed this long weekend along with some suds and rum. Speaking of rum, I was talking to someone the other day who was having the damdest time shaking a scratchy throat. I have told her on several occasions that gargling with rum ( preferably dark ), would fix her right up. Worked for me back in my rum drinking days. Oh yes, you have to swallow the rum. If it doesn’t work, wait a few minutes and try it again. It may not fix your throat but you’ll still feel better. Any other home remedies?

I wrote a story a few weeks back and almost forgot about it until I saw someone talking about wine on FB. This weekend would be as good a time as any to publish the story called “ Bottoms Up.”  It’s the story about a boozer who hits the jackpot. He made so much money on his “investment” that he was able to buy a brand new truck. Stay tuned.

You will be happy to know that there will be no further stories about gas, gas prices, lineups at the pumps etc. I received a restraining order ( only joking ) from the gasoline dealers association who are tired of me poking fun at them. High gas prices are no laughing matter.

I just saw this and had to add it to this post. Do you absolutely worship the bagpipes? Lots of you do. I like the bagpipes and the three week period surrounding the Highland Games just about gives me my annual quota of bagpipes. Anyways , there are two guys in a bar and one says to the other, “ let’s drink until the bagpipes sound good.” Another classic is the bagpiper standing on the street corner with his case on the ground looking for tips. The sign posted behind him on the wall says , “ Pay or I’ll play.”  “Will ye no come back again” …. to my website, all you hard core bagpipe players?

Nagging leads to shortened life expectancy. So say a recent study out of Denmark. If you are a man and are nagged by your significant other , over a suitably long period of time, you will die sooner than the un-nagged. Not my words. I will interpret the findings of the study in the upcoming story “ Nagged to Death.” My editor changed a few words! Just sayin’!

Hope you have a terrific long weekend.

 

 

 

Posted on May 14, 2014 under Storytelling with no comments yet

Looks like a fleet of Lemmings

 

 

In my late teens, I worked for $1.00 an hour pumping gas at a Shell station on the outskirts of town.  I knew enough to top up someone’s oil and even learned how to fix a flat tire.  There was no such thing as self-service.  And the price of gas was around 35 cents a gallon.  When I bought my first car, a Volkswagen Beetle, you had to squeeze the nozzle to get $5.00 worth into it.

Oh my, how the times have changed.  It’s hard to get personalized service anywhere, including gas stations.  You have to pump your own fuel and top off your oil and windshield wiper fluid.  Gas has, by and large, turned into a loss leader (lost litre?) of sorts, as many service stations have become giant convenience stores with gas as an afterthought.

The price of gas has become a national obsession, along with the weather.  There was a time when weather just happened.  It wasn’t dissected and analyzed by 24 hour weather channels.   And every time there is a whiff of an increase in gas prices, it sets in motion a sequence of events that can only be called bizarre.

There are only three certainties in life: death, taxes and an increase in gas prices on a holiday weekend.  Gas prices in this province recently reached an all-time high.  There is so much attention being paid to this that some young entrepreneur should get a license for a new cable channel devoted entirely to “stories from the pumps”.

The announcement of an anticipated price hike in gasoline triggers a Pavlovian response.  You can predict with certainty that the morning paper will show lineups at the pumps the day before the scheduled increase.

So it was with some bemusement that I picked up the paper, saw the stock picture that we are all familiar with of long lineups of vehicles, and started to do some calculating.  I’m going metric here but the same principles apply with the price per gallon.  Maybe next week I’ll go postal.

The pundits had predicted a price hike of 3 cents a litre, which in and of itself was not a big deal.   But this was hard on the heels of a 12 cent jump the previous week.   With visions of angry sheiks and troubles in the Ukraine dancing in their heads, drivers raced to their driveways.  And the lineups started to build.

I will admit that we own a small, fuel efficient car that we don’t drive much so these gyrations in price rarely cause heart palpitations. Back in the days of the minivan it was a different story.  I feel sorry for people on fixed income who get hurt every time the price of anything rises.  And long haul truckers.

The tank in our car holds forty litres of fuel.  Assuming that the tank was nearly bone dry, I would have saved about $1.20 by driving up the road and taking my place in line.  Hoping all the while that I would beat the midnight changeover time.

But there is a pretty good chance that I would burn that much in fuel while having the car idling in the long lineup. Or by turning it on and off as I moved along in the queue.  Surely this would add to environmental degradation and impact my carbon credits.  At best, I may have broken even on the deal.

The guy next to you is complaining all the while about being a pawn of the government and the oil companies.  This same guy then drives his rig to Timmy’s for his double-double and idles for another ten minutes while he lines up with a bunch of other environmentalists. Yup.  He sure saved a lot on gas by going the day before.

This just in.  The price of gas is expected to drop 5 cents tomorrow.

Stay tuned for the next installment of “Pandemonium at the Pumps”.

 

Posted on May 13, 2014 under Storytelling with 5 comments

Beauty is in the sty of the beholder

 

 

When you live in a university town, there is a constant ebb and flow that follows the school year.  Students arrive en masse in September and leave in late April.  You see a lot of moving vans and teary eyed parents.  The tears are a mixture of sadness and apprehension that their children are preparing to leave the nest forever.  At least that’s the hope.

After a year or two of living on campus, many students opt for off-campus housing in the form of rental units.  There’s only one thing worse than helping your children move and that is the delicate task of helping them clean their apartment when the lease is up.  If you want to see tears, watch a parent clean up after a horde of quasi-adults.

There is a hierarchy of dirt.  There is our own, our children’s and finally, that of total strangers.

We can all deal with our own squalor, as bad as it might appear.  We have moved a little bit more than the average family.  Once it was a move to the county to accommodate a flock of chickens and a few roosters that graced our property in town.  There is a longer version to that story including our haphazard attempts at corralling and transporting the flock.

At the best of times, doing the final cleanup in your own home is soul destroying work.  But it can be worse.  A lot worse.

Inevitably, your children will want to leave home.  Some say they will be gone for good by the time they reach the age of thirty.  It starts in high school when they plead to share a summer rental with buddies.  A piece of advice to parents: under no circumstances, allow your teenage child to do a sublet with buddies.  Ever.  Even if they guarantee never to come home again.  One memorable year, we were pressed into action and undertook the cleanup of the rental at the end of the summer.  It is hard to describe what we encountered upon entering the house but, by all accounts, we should have been wearing hazardous waste suits.  Fukushima looked like the Public Gardens in comparison.

As bad as it seems, cleaning up after yourself and your offspring is mere child’s play compared to cleaning a complete strangers’ grunge.  Recently, a friend moved to Halifax and was taking up residence in an apartment.  The sign outside the building said “ready for occupancy”.  Unfortunately it did not contain the disclaimer that the preferred occupants would be recent hires of Molly Maid.

The young woman, about to attend law school, took one look at the filth left by the predecessors and was already pondering her first law suit.  A small tear welled in the corner of her eye.  She and her mother rolled up their sleeves and formed their own version of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  The place was rendered spotless with the help of Mr. Clean and a bottle of Yellowtail merlot.

I would like to be filthy rich some days.  If I could just skip the filthy part.