Posted on May 17, 2014 under Storytelling with one comment

NAGGED

 

 

Surely it must be spring.   Our property straddles the town and county so we have the best of both worlds.  We don’t have to worry about the well going dry, yet we are so close to nature that we can see it and touch it.  So close, in fact, that a bear was seen at our next door neighbor’s garbage can a few years back.  Because we are in a quiet neighborhood and can’t hear any traffic, the sounds of nature are easily discernable … especially at 4:30 in the morning.

These days, the first sound we hear, even before our radio alarm goes off, is the chirping of dozens of birds.  Is there any sweeter sound known to mankind, besides the sound of your spouse’s voice?  If you listen carefully, there is a distinct pattern that repeats itself every day.  It never gets tiresome.

However, in the real world of humans, things are quite different.  Repeated sounds can sometimes get quite irritating and, according to a study out of Denmark, can be life threatening.

You see, researchers have discovered that men who are nagged incessantly by their spouses have a shorter life expectancy.  By ten years.  Men who are perpetually nagged are 2.5 times more likely to die than their un-nagged counterparts.  I haven’t yet delved into the research to see how they collected this empirical evidence.  I’m only guessing here, but they probably did a survey of some sort and then followed these men until they died.   For some it would have been a very short study.

I saw a documentary recently about researchers who followed 14,000 people in a retirement community in California for over thirty years.  A disproportionate number of these people are in their nineties and several are 100+.  How did they achieve longevity?  Besides good genetics, a healthy lifestyle and a glass of wine every day, many attributed their good health to companionship and, dare I say, intimacy.  Many of these folks were still “romantically inclined”.  It is quite obvious that nagging was not a part of the daily diet.  (Evidently somebody was being nagged!  – Editor)

I am here to state, unequivocally, that I am not amongst those poor men who suffer spousal indignation on a daily basis.  It is only occasionally that I am reminded of my shortcomings.

Of course, the study also questioned the naggers.  They were surprised and a bit miffed that their spouses had singled them out for their unending chastisements.  One lady, who requested anonymity, suggested that men need to be nagged “because they are defective”.  Well, that pretty well sums it up into one tidy package.

Ever since I read about the study, I am more conscious of the birds outside of our bedroom window.  I am tempted to contact a local ornithologist and ask about the habits of our feathered friends.  I am now starting to have my doubts that the sounds I am hearing are mating calls.

If humans can be nagged to death, is it possible that the animal kingdom is any different?  Could the constant din in the wee hours of the morning be a female bird scolding her mate?

I guess we’ll have to get a government grant and do a study.  It’s for the birds, if you ask me.

 

 

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.