Random Noise

Somewhere around here I have a picture of Herman who used to sit on my knee while I gave him peanuts. Now that I have my cats though they don't come as close as they used to. My sister lives a short distance from the border and has raccoons which may as well be pets. They come in through the pet door and eat with her cats then sunbathe by the bird bath outside. Sometimes they get in the cupboards to see if there is anything else good to eat.

I have a chainsaw I'm not using. Just plead temporary insanity.

I've seen some of these places on Al Jazeera. In all honesty, I think everyone should experience this at least once in their lives to really appreciate what they have.

There are groups of natives that never accustomed to the "reserve" system and pushed deeper into their traditional territory to establish their own villages outside of the influence of government. Some of these villages are so remote that you can only get in or out by bush plane. Some are situated so that in winter they'll plow a road across the frozen lakes and use that as a seasonal transportation route to bring in supplies and construction materials. The villages themselves are far from primitive, with generators and solar power, a satellite phone service, satellite TV, and many modern conveniences. But the people there live off the land in the traditional style. It's their Key-Oh (the place I make my living). I was fortunate enough to fly into several of these villages over a period of many years when someone needed to be transported to a hospital for care, and often was presented with bannock (a type of bread) and smoked salmon or moose jerky to whet the appetite. There are trails that lead to the nearest towns and populated areas, many of which have been widened in more recent years to accomodate vehicles. Usually, the better part of a day's walking distance, you'll find a way-cabin. This is for the most part a place to seek refuge for the night and is typically a small log cabin with a wood stove, a box of matches, an axe, and of course the outhouse. Sometimes you'll also find fishing line and hooks so you can sustain yourself if necessity dictates you need to stay longer than one night. On occasion you may find the old style hand pump for pumping water but more generally just a metal pail that you can get water from the lake and heat on the stove. The way-cabins still see periodic use, more commonly now by canoeing and snowmobile enthusiasts that embark on wilderness expeditions. The only requirement upon leaving is that you either take any remaining food with you or burn it in the stove before leaving. Grizzly bears are well known to smash down a cabin door if they catch the scent of food inside.

My dad always hated the traffic especially around Seattle, so much to everyone's surprise we immigrated to north western British Columbia when I was 8 to start a lakeside resort. We had dirt roads and of course the classic outhouse. My mother insisted on having an indoor bathroom with a working toilet before winter because she wasn't going to trudge through the snow to use the "biffie" at night, which ended up being a good call because we had several nights of minus 40 degree temperatures that winter. I have dual citizenship so I spend time anywhere from Oregon up to Alaska and places between, though as I got older I developed a strong dislike of being surrounded by concrete and prefer a quiet spot in the mountains. My cats love hunting in the woods.

My mother was like that to the age of 86 when she had a fall in the bathroom one morning. She hit her head on the washing machine and had double vision for several months after that. I moved into the house so she could have a semi-independent life in her own home for her final years. She passed two years ago at the age of 91. I was always amazed at how the world changed during her lifetime. She remembered their first home with electricity and an indoor bathroom, the first radio the family had, their first TV, the first family car which her brother bought.

That's 10 inches of genuine snow.

Sasha & Casper -- "Ok, what happened to the grass? There used to be grass!"

That's exactly what happened in my niece's family. I've had Christmas dinner there and to sum it up briefly, there's a massive feeding frenzy followed by an "Ahhh that was good. Good to see everybody!" Then her husband and the three kids all dart off to their respective gaming areas and resume playing.

I'll agree to some extent. I had customers in my younger days where I wished that I could witness spontaneous human combustion first hand. Some customers seem to think, "I am. Therefore I deserve." That said though, if a customer politely asks a question, which most do, they deserve better than "uh ... I think it's down there somewhere, unless were out. I dunno ..." We also have a generation now in, or entering the work force that believe their social life is of greater importance than actually performing their duties while at work. A relative opened a Subway a few years ago and I occasionally do some maintenance for her. Over the past three years, I've noticed that the teenagers working there spend at least twenty minutes of every hour on facebook. I can go in most evenings and see the waste container is full, the bathrooms are out of toilet paper and the waste bins are full, there is spilled pop on the floor which hasn't been mopped up, and the staff will be sitting down reading facebook or twitter.

Happy dreams ... More happy dreams ... Ok, I'll share the bed.

Have you ever noticed how some places have an "employee of the month" or "salesperson of the month" plaque hanging in some prominent location? My suggestion is a "most useless tool of the month" plaque that you can hand to the store manager, complete with a photo of the person who gave you the worst customer experience ever.

I have a lot of native American friends who view July the 4th or July 1 (Canada Day) as the day the white man celebrates taking their land and claiming it as their own.

One day we were transferring a patient to another hospital for a CT scan, and along the way the patient asked if we could stop at a nearby gas station so he could use the bathroom. After pulling in to the nearest station, I saw an empty parking spot close to the building so I swung the vehicle around and started backing in. Watching the side mirror, I saw another guy quickly dart in to the spot I was backing into. Then the guy got out of his car, looked at me with that "Oh, darn, were you going to park here?" look, and headed into the gas station.

Several years ago our hospital got a foreign nurse, and I won't state any further than by foreign I mean from overseas. During her orientation at the hospital, there was a bed ridden patient who suffered periodic diarrhea from a medication he was on. When his next impending event presented itself, they propped him up and slid a bed pan under him, then left him alone for a few minutes of privacy. When this nurse came back, she pulled out the bed pan and proceeded to the bathroom where she began pouring the contents into the toilet. In so doing, she spilled over the edge of the toilet and down onto the floor. Deciding that wasn't working well, she began pouring the bed pan into the sink until the drain got clogged, so finally she just dumped the bed pan and its remaining contents into the waste basket. I had a friend that was on the housekeeping shift that night, and when she got called for a cleanup in that particular room she was asking "what? I cleaned that room twenty minutes ago!" Heading down the hall and back to that room, she discovered the mess in, on, and around the toilet, the bathroom sink with plugged up drain, and waste basket. Have a good Friday everyone, and if you think you're having a shitty day, remember, it could be worse!

When I was in college ('81-'82) I had good grades until I got into business accounting. That's one thing I could never wrap my brain around and as far as I was concerned, if you had a plus sign in front of the balance, then you were ahead. That class really dragged my grade average down. The bonus for me was this was a time where word processors hadn't really hit the scene yet and the instructors were typing up assignments on the old Gestetner sheets for duplication. My primary field of study was computer programming, so I wrote the first word processor the school ever had on the mini computer in the computer lab. I ended up graduating with a 4.0 grade because of that. I've only encountered it twice, but I can tell you in all honesty that doctors who need medical attention for their own family call a specialist or practitioner well known to them. The nurses I know will only see certain doctors. There are a lot of things that go on in hospitals that the unknowing average patient doesn't have the slightest clue about.

When a new extended care facility opened in the community, the local college started an "Extended Care worker" program. I happened to know one of the nurses that taught a few courses for it. There were some students she had that failed miserably. For instance, when changing a bandage you remove the old bandage and dressing, then clean around the area and apply a new dressing with a new bandage over it. You don't simply wrap the new bandage over the old one and call it good. The students that failed complained to the administration and the nurse was informed that the college "doesn't fail students." She needed to give them further instruction and let them keep trying until they got it right. After two or three months of this, the nurse resigned in disgust. Having a high GPA in one subject doesn't mean you'll achieve it in ALL subjects. I once watched a guy with a masters degree in business fail a first aid exam by missing a very critical step. He failed to check for a pulse before beginning CPR, and this can actually cause cardiac arrest in a living person. After failing, he ranted about having a masters degree, but that certainly doesn't mean "I'm going to kill you so I can help you."

I find that more tolerable than being in a busy cashier line where they can hold a captive audience and then hearing "Ok, give the nice lady your money!" "Ok. Twenty five, fifty, sixty, sixty five, seventy, seventy five, eighty, eighty five, eighty six, eighty seven, eighty eight, eighty nine, ninety, ninety one, ninety two, ninety three, ninety four, ninety five. There! Ninety five cents!"

I'm not sure if you're listening in your car or at home, but I always use Internet Radio. Just select your favorite music style and pick from any number of stations. Christmas music free.

My niece generally watches what the repair people do and tries fixing the problem herself if it happens again. Over the years she became the "go to" person in her office for getting things working quickly.

My sister is much older than me so I was still in my early teens when she had kids. Several times I got 'volunteered' to babysit (I had no say in the matter). I invented a game called "Hide in the tent," which involved propping up a blanket and telling the girls to hide in the tent. Both of them would crawl inside the blanket and I would tie all four corners of the blanket together. Eventually they would get tired and fall asleep from trying to escape and I had a peaceful evening watching TV. Well, one night I forgot to untie the blanket before my sister and her husband got home so my being 'volunteered' to babysit came to an end. Disclaimer: No children were harmed in the creation of this post.

And then the kids get older believing someone should buy them the new iPhone, or a new computer because the old one isn't fast enough, or a car, or rent money because their job sucked so they quit, or ...

Other than my parents, brother, and sister, I never got gifts from anyone in the family. Maybe those of us who are of Dutch heritage are a little more stingy in that regard, hence 'going Dutch' at a restaurant. When I was young they used to say "don't spend it all in one place." That's probably an impossibility, or at least very unlikely now.

They might put you in that special hell and give you a Windows computer.

My problem has always been the space for the name, and in particular the surname. I'm of Dutch ancestry so my surname has three entirely separate words which usually overflow the space provided. The second part of that problem is that people who do data entry seemingly have difficulty with a surname that has spaces in it, though I'll acknowledge the fault is with the software at times. In the end, one or more words get joined together, on some occasions the third word followed by the first two, or more bothersome to me is when someone thinks one or more words is irrelevant and drop them entirely.