Posted on December 15, 2014 under Monday Morning Musings with no comments yet

Deck the hall

 

 

Christmas decorations run the full gamut from minimalist ( a charitable term for our effort! ) to completely and utterly over the top. I must say that the simple expressions of the season have the greatest impact on me. I saw this display outside the door of an apartment in my mother’s building. I thought it understated and tasteful.

Yeah, yeah, I know you have been breathlessly waiting to read the story about our pathetic outdoor Christmas decorating job. Well, wait no longer for you will get your first seasonal wish with the publication of “Deck Orations” tomorrow. It took me exactly 25 minutes to decorate our front deck and that included a bathroom break and a phone call.

For those of you who get my stories by e-mail, I invite you to actually go to my website now and then.  I have put a fresh look to the home page and have some new testimonials. www.week45.com… just in case you’ve forgotten the address!

It was kind of ironic last week when I was going on about the new 10 digit phone nonsense that we’ve been subjected to. Bad enough to dial 10 numbers but when I put my own number to contact me for books,  I added injury to insult by having 11 numbers. Some of you actually called me and ordered books. Thanks a lot. By the way, as things pick up steam, I wanted to let you know that I will deliver books to your home before Christmas if that will make your life easier.

Surely you all remember the song “The Wheels on the Bus.” As you may know, there is a new transit system in the town and county of Antigonish.   The good news is that this is a terrific low cost service for all citizens who cannot or prefer not to drive. The bad news is that it is currently underutilized and if the community doesn’t use it, they’ll lose it. Last Friday, I decided to try it out. I got on at the top of Hawthorne Street and drove the entire route. For the princely sum of $2.00 you can travel all day. ( this is the cost for the town route )  As much as I love walking , there will be days when having the option of a bus will be very attractive. Why not check it out.  www.antigonishcommunitytransit.ca

Show of hands. How many of you ever listened to an NHL hockey game on the radio on a cold winter’s night with Foster Hewitt or Danny Gallivan calling the action? The recent death of Jean Beliveau whisked me back to an earlier era when watching a hockey game on a Saturday night was almost as important as Sunday mass. Surely you remember adjusting the rabbit ears to try and get a grainy black and white picture on the old RCA.  Looking for a pure nostalgia piece? “When We Were Young” should do the trick. Coming soon.

Have a great week.

Posted on December 13, 2014 under Storytelling with no comments yet

Rolling on down the highway in Italy

 

 

When I think of Italy, images of famous landmarks race through my head.  It would be difficult to travel through this country without stopping to see the Coliseum, The Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Pompeii and the canals of Venice.  Italy simply oozes history and culture.  And while I can’t say this with a great deal of certainty, surely we owe a great debt to the Italians for inventing pizza.

There are other more obscure landmarks that don’t have the same cache.  Take the toll booth near Foggia on the Adriatic Coast, for example.

With every passing year, the “user pay” mentality has swept the globe.  It’s hard to travel anywhere these days without encountering toll roads.  They are a necessary evil to ensure that the highways and byways are well maintained.

Nova Scotia has always been a trend setter, and long before the Cobequid Pass came into being we had our very own toll booth just a mere half hour up the road at the Canso Causeway.  You see, Cape Bretoners realized that it was a privilege to enter their domain and charged mainlanders and tourists a modest fee to spend time on their hallowed ground.

I recently travelled to Florida by car and, by and large, the toll booths are occupied by very pleasant attendants.   However, every so often there is a stretch where you simply pick up a ticket as you enter the Interstate and place it in a machine as you pay and exit.  No human interaction required.  It’s like an ATM in reverse.

Friends of mine were travelling in Europe this fall and were wending their way through Southern Italy.  They came upon one of the unmanned pay stations on a toll highway.  There were about a dozen booths, with several accepting cash and credit cards.  In order for the barrier to lift, payment had to be rendered.  Not remarkably, my friends chose the one with the shortest line.  This strategy is occasionally fraught with danger.

The car in front of them pulled up to the pay machine and the occupants inserted their toll card, followed by a credit card.  It appeared that the payors were experiencing some problems.  Their cards were entered and spit out several times in rapid succession.  My friend tapped his steering wheel with a tiny bit of restlessness.   When he saw the driver of the car exiting to stand in front of the ticket apparatus, (a no-no according to the strict rules at these booths), the thought ran through his mind that this was simply a doddering old person having a senior’s moment.  “How difficult can it be to pay a ticket?” he pondered.

Extremely challenging, as he was soon to find out.

Mercifully the ordeal came to an end and the car ahead pulled away.

He pulled the rented Volvo into place and briskly placed his ticket and credit card into the pay machine. Nothing.  As he had observed with the previous road warrior, both items were shot back out like a bullet.  Several more attempts yield similar results.

Feeling a “Pompeii like” eruption simmering, he noticed a green button with words written in Italian.  While he claimed bilingual status (English and Dutch), he had not studied Italian at school and he concluded that the button was for help.  He pressed it and, not surprisingly, the language on the other end (from an automated voice) was Italian.  “I can’t get your machine to accept my card,” he explained as his blood pressure bumped up a few notches.  The driver behind him watched with some bemusement as my friend flailed away, trying to explain that he didn’t speak Italian.  He even tried a few words in Dutch.

And a long line of cars accumulated at the booth.  A few cars honked their horns, adding to his cumulative angst.

There is something called a “mercy rule” in baseball.  When one team is running up the score and the result is not in doubt, the game is shortened by several innings.  The young male driver in the car behind my friends decided to come to the rescue.  He was Italian and spoke flawless English.  He took the toll ticket and rubbed it before inserting it into the ticket device.  Not quite “genie in a bottle” type of rubbing but with a similar magical outcome.

It took a few tries but eventually the machine gobbled up the ticket and credit card, spewed out a receipt and the barrier lifted.

My friends proceeded down the highway and took the exit for The Vatican.  They wanted to report the reappearance of “The Good Samaritan”.

Posted on December 11, 2014 under Thursday Tidbits with one comment

I’m a basket case when it comes to sweets

    And so it begins. Two weeks and counting until the big day and temptations abound. This is kind of a lousy time of the year to stop eating sweets, but let’s face it, there’s no good time if you have a sweet tooth. I might take a serious run at this gift basket on Christmas Day. Luckily the temptation will go away on Boxing Day when my son, Peter and I head out on our big transcontinental trip.

It didn’t take long to get feedback on yesterday’s story called “Just Ask a Woman.” It sounds like I am preaching to the converted. Most women have intuitions that don’t require expensive surveys, especially when it comes to children.

I mentioned the other day that I was working on some new stories. This is hardly startling because I’m always working on new material. So, when was the last time you thought about your spleen, or your toenails? How about a molar, your kneecap or your sacroiliac? We rarely think about body parts until something goes wrong with one of them. In other words, we take our bodies for granted. Like many others of my ilk, I spent summers as a child at the beach, long before it was fashionable to wear sunscreen. I played golf for the better part of 45 years and was exposed to harmful rays of the sun, especially with a depleted ozone. As a result, I accumulated some skin related problems over the years and ended up under the care of a dermatologist in Halifax. “Skin in The Game” is a lighthearted look at a fairly serious subject.

I will be signing books once again this Saturday from 10:00- 1:00 at the 5 to $1.00. Now I know full well that not all of you are Scots and don’t object to paying sales tax. For those of you who do, you can also buy books directly from me and save yourself a wee bit of tax. Just give me a call at 902-870-1125. Don’t you love having to add the 902 when dialing? You’d think we lived in New York. I mean, our population is dropping. If anything we should be eliminating a digit or two.  There was a day we used to call the operator and give a two digit number to get in touch with a friend.

Stay tuned for “Deck Orations” this weekend and coming up next week is “Taking Its Toll.”

Have a great weekend.