Raising Cane

Not that many years ago. Well it was before the advent of the internet being available on a cell phone or perhaps the internet was not available at all. My guess is that this memory is from the mid 1990’s.

I was being driven across the German countryside by a good friend named Klaus Wenske. Klaus knows that I like German sausage, and many times he would introduce me to a new wurst. Germany has the best wurst. That day it was Bockwurst. We stopped for lunch at a roadside diner and enjoyed some Bockwurst on a bun with mustard. It was great lunch which included a Bock Beer. I asked Klaus if Bock Beer and Bockwurst had the same origins. He was not sure. He explained that the Bock Beer got its name from the male deer with antlers on the bottle (we say Buck and they say Bock).

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Things you read, smell, taste, trip over, find or see can trigger memories of days gone by. This posting was triggered when one of my kids sent me a message on FaceBook that Zelda Rubinstein, who played the medium, Tangina in Poltergeist had passed away. She was a small medium. 

For this story, it was circa 1984 and we living in Salt Lake City. I had transferred within Varian to become their product manager for power grid tubes at the Eimac division in Salt Lake. Our new home, well new to us came with cable TV with several premium channels including HBO. It was kind of comical because in "those days" the control of which channels were visible in the home were determined by which traps and filters were installed by the cable installer. Since the advent of digital cable, those days are far behind us. The previous owner of our home must have paid for several premium channels and the cable TV company had not come out and changed the installation. We received several premium channels. The comical thing was that every few months during the years we lived in Salt Lake, the cable company would call and ask us if we wanted to "upgrade" our cable service and get some premium channels. We of course graciously declined their kind offers. We felt that paying for an upgrade would degrade our service.

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When Its Not Your Time To Die!

A friend in Israel sent this video to me! It truly is remarkable.

Tough Choices, But worry not!

The solution is at the bottom of the post!

Which do you prefer?

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It was 2005 and Cheryl and I had owned our Mini Cooper S since early 2003. For a couple of years we had been towing that poor little car behind our motor home and traveling great distances. Cars behind motor homes suffer as they are bomarded with stone chips, mud and other debris kicked up by the tow vehicle. Our Mini suffered a little more than most, primarily because of the idot driving the motor home.

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It was a while back when Jody our younger daughter attended OU (Ohio University) in Athens Ohio. Athens is a university town in south eastern ohio. Jody was an undergrad with an interest in speech therapy. One of her assignments was to do a study of speech patterns and dialects within the state of Ohio. The paper she submitted was quite interesting and I got to read it during one of our visits to OU. She interviewed students at OU and she learned that terms like "kitty corner" and "catty corner" although perhaps universally understood are not spoken by everyone. In some parts of Ohio, we say 'catty corner' and in others we say 'kitty corner'.

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Good fences make good neighbors, or so they say. We moved into a brand new subdivision in 1974, and that summer I organized a “fencing party” on our side of the street. We had the owners of about 10 homes over at our house one Saturday afternoon in the spring. The homes were all in one row on one side of the street. They backed onto a well established subdivision that had been built thirty or so years earlier. We discussed the need for fencing between our homes as some of us had dogs, some had children, etc. We discussed the advantages of wood vs. chain link, and we broke into committees with a plan to get back together the next week after researching costs and material choices, etc. The decision was made that we would build a cedar fence with horizontal planks alternating from post to post. There were one or two abstainers who got fences anyway as we were to build ours around them. Materials were purchased by the group and work began. The toughest weekend was the first where we mixed cement, cut posts, rented a motorized post hole auger, and about six or seven of us installed 160 four by four cedar fence posts. What an exhausting job that was!

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I think I stole this list from someone who stole it from someone else who perhaps stole it from Dave Barry. Want proof [Click Here]

19 THINGS IT TOOK ME 50 YEARS TO LEARN

1. Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
2. If you had to identify in one word the reason why the human race has not achieved,       and  never will achieve its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”
3. There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness”.
4. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
5. And when God, who created the entire universe with all of its glories, decides to deliver a message to humanity, He WILL NOT use, as His messenger, a person  on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.
6. You should not confuse your career with your life.
7. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
8. When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
9. Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.
10. Never lick a steak knife.
11. Take out the fortune before you eat the cookie.
12. The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.
13. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.
14. Never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
15. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.
16. The one thing that unites all human beings,regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers.
17. The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.
18. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.
19. Your friends love you anyway.

Most of our trip to the mainland has been forgotten except for our trip to Fundy National Park. The Bay of Fundy is like a funnel open to the sea. When the tide comes in the water is compressed between the walls of the ever narrowing funnel. Tides at the Hopewell Rocks are said to be the highest in the world as the tide rises up to forty-six feet. That’s roughly six stories high every day.

It’s still 1971. Well, back to my story. Several years before when I was a teenager, my family, Mum, Dad, Penny (my sister), and I, along with the family dog, camped at Fundy National Park. We had been forced to go to an overflow campsite called Bennet Lake. It turned out to be one of the most gorgeous campsites at which I’d ever stayed. Bennet Lake is a small lake at the top of a mountain with a few rather rustic campsites. It lacked some of the amenities of the main campsite below but it was heaven. When Cheryl and I and the two dogs arrived at Fundy National Park, I asked if we could camp at Bennet Lake. The answer was no. Bennet Lake was an overflow campsite and until the main camp filled, no one was to be sent up there.

I questioned the park ranger and was told that if we came back after four in the afternoon that we might be able to go to Bennet Lake. We toured for a few hours and returned a little after four and the main camp was still not full. The ranger scoured his map and board and was kind to us. With only a few campsites left at the main camp he was sure it would fill up, and he booked a campsite at Bennet Lake for us. It was all that I remembered, a small quiet mountain lake with a group of rustic campsites at one end.

From earlier in the trip, we remembered to pitch our tent and attach it to the side of the VW Camper. The dogs would sleep on the tent floor while Cheryl and I slept on the bed in the van. As evening drew nigh, several other campers found their way to Bennet Lake since the main campground below with several hundred campsites was full.

As we retired following a nice campfire evening with some of the other campers, it started to rain. It rained and rained and rained and rained. We barely slept through the sound of thunder and the torrents of raindrops striking the fiberglass roof of the camper. Rarely did we use the port-a-potty in the camper as we’d always walk to the facilities provided at the campsite. With the rain, thunder and darkness, that night we used the port-a-potty.

We awoke the next morning, and it was still raining. I looked into the tent through the sliding door of the camper and there was Newf, our small dog, standing up while Taffy was still asleep laying in about six inches of water. The floor of the tent was waterproof and had a lip all the way round to keep water out!. The rain and wind had caused the tent to separate a little from the camper, and I guess it had simply poured in.

We began the job of cleaning up, as were the other campers around us. It was a sorrowful sight. The rains were still bucketing down, and one by one and couple by couple we started to gather under a large lean-to type structure perhaps thirty by sixty feet in size with open sides and rafters above. People began claiming space and hanging up their totally drenched belongings. Tarpaulins were hung on the open sides to keep the rain out.

Some of us had food still above water while others did not. We had a wonderful community breakfast. Those with stoves which worked and those with bacon, eggs, cereal, pancakes and bread came together to cook one of the warmest, friendliest breakfasts that I’ve ever had.

By mid morning, we had managed to squeeze the water out of most of our belongings, dried the dogs and we were on our way. We were not prepared for what we saw next, The car radio was on and the skies were clearing. We happened to hear that parts of the Fundy area received thirteen inches of rain overnight, yes thirteen inches of rain! No wonder we were wet. As we approached the main campsite, things did not look normal. We could see picnic tables and coolers floating around, the occasional roof of a camper, and perhaps an antenna or two on cars which were simply underwater. People were scrambling everywhere seeking high ground.

It was a terrible day for the people in the main campsite. We thanked our lucky stars that we had waited the day before for a spot at Bennet Lake. We helped a few people where we could. Later we would learn that the campers at Pointe Wolf which was one of the more rustic campsites were cut off from the main site for several days while the waters receded.

We were lucky that day. We headed off back to North Sydney Nova Scotia, enjoyed a trip around Cape Breton and took the overnight ferry to Port aux Basque Newfoundland.

I will never forget that storm!

I'm sure that you get emails from time to time, many of which you simply find uninteresting and you're so happy that you have a delete key! And then every now and again, one arrives to make you smile or simply think. This email did a little of each. I realize that the original author of this does stretch reality a little but it's a good read anyway!

It was entitled:  A Little History Lesson

I might add that those of us who don't know our history are doomed to repeat it!

The  US  standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in  England, and English expatriates designed the US railroads.

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