First Flight In Thirty Years – Lessons Learned

Last week my mother was admitted to hospital and since she is a frail 89 years old, things didn't look very positive. My sister contacted me and said that mom wanted to see me and one of my brothers if it were her time. I'm too broke to afford airfare so my family pitched in and set up a whirlwind visit for me. I am deeply grateful to all those who made that happen.

This all happened on one of my days off which was good, but it doesn't mean I wasn't busy. That morning I tore the roof off my mini woodshop and using materials I've scavenged, put a proper roof on it. Just after finishing was when my sister called.

I had time to shave, wash my hair, change clothes, pack a quick bag and eat. By that time all the flight info came through and Francine got to bring me to the airport in Moncton.

1) That brings me to my first lesson on flying: Don't wear steel-toed work boots. I had planned to switch to me work shoes before leaving the van, but I forgot. Yes, I set off the metal detector and after removing everything else remotely metal, set it off again. Temporarily baffled I looked down to think and noticed my work boots on my feet. I padded through the detector with no problems after that.
2) Lesson two became evident well into the flight. Go to the bathroom before you get on the plane and if at all possible hold it till you get off. That bathroom was so physically small I was almost unable to use it with the door closed. I accidentally kicked the door several times trying to find a comfortable position. My knees were okay, but there really wasn't a place for my size thirteen feet. Yes, I bounced my head off all the low places on the ceiling between my seat and the washroom.
3) If there is any chance that you will need to fly somewhere any time in your life, don't watch Air Crash Investigation episodes on Youtube. I experienced the worst air turbulence ever on the way home. If someone said we suddenly lost several hundred feet of elevation on our way out of Toronto, I would have believed them. Shortly after that the pilot warned us that it would be rough all the way to Ottawa. It got better after that. I'm sure God was laughing his head off. In Ottawa, I worried when I saw how small the next plane was, that would take me back to Moncton.
4) I'd make a terrible airline pilot. The weather cleared before getting to Moncton and the view for me was spectacular. We got enough fuel? Never mind the flight plan. There something way over there in the distance and I want to have a closer look.

I appreciate my niece Stacy for picking me up at the airport, navigating through Toronto and entertaining me at the same time. I'm not used to that many people or cars. After all my current hometown has a hand-painted welcome sign that says population 20.

My sister Minnie who took the time to set this all up, giving me the opportunity to spend some time with both my parents and then driving me to my brother's place.

Hank and Katie for providing me with a bed, breakfast, a ride back to the airport and good conversation along the way. The coffee and donut were nice too.

A big thank you to everyone else involved that I wasn't told about. Swinging all that on such short noticed was a feat beyond me and my means. It was so nice to be able to spend some time with mom and dad.

Cloying

This is officially my most unfavorite word and I'm seeing it everywhere. Some people dislike the word moist. I happen to hate the word cloying. Who decided this word has to be in every new piece of fiction I read?

What I think happened is that some bright light at a NaNoWriMo group event decided everyone should use the word cloying in a sentence while working on their manuscript. If you've ever been to one of these write-ins, you'll understand what I mean. After accomplishing the task, everybody forgot to edit it out of their finished manuscripts. For some reason publishing house editors must have been reluctant to interfere with creativity and now this stupid word has been foisted on the whole world.

There has been some interest in having me as a NaNoWriMo group leader in Sackville. If I had the time, I might even consider it, however, I would never challenge my group to use that word. I'd choose something like egregious. Now that's a word I like. I can even use it in a sentence: Please stop the egregious overuse of the word cloying in descriptive writing. (Better yet, don't use it at all).

Free Government Housing in Canada is a MYTH!

Rant time! I keep seeing posts on Facebook saying that people are upset that a minimum wage hike to fifteen dollars per hour is disqualifying them from free housing. I know the source is American, but this is being enthusiastically shared by my Canadian friends. I don't know how the system works in the USA but I have been in the Canadian system and this is not how things work.

This rant is for everybody who has never had to live in the Canadian government housing system. Government housing is subsidized it is NOT free for those living in it. It costs 30% of whatever your gross income is, be that welfare, employment insurance or wages. Since the program was created the costs of food and transportation have skyrocketed. When the program was created 30% was comfortable, now it is far from it. I don't know how many provinces do this but in New Brunswick they add a charge for heating so we effectively were paying 35%.

Our experience shows that the “free housing” experience gets worse than that. You don't get any discount for getting sick and missing work for a few days. I worked my butt off in the call centre I was working in and earned a couple of nice big bonuses. When my rent was calculated, the housing system based their calculations on my wages with bonuses. That might sound fair, but I got those bonuses only the first month of the year. Their math pretended I got that every month. By their calculations they didn't take 30% of my bonuses, they took all of it and then more. My new rent was 50% of my income. I appealed the decision and was denied. I went to our political representative and was told that it was more important for us to pay our government subsidized housing rent than it was to eat. Otherwise, we'd end up living on the street (this is not an exaggerated paraphrase). We borrowed money to put electricity in our hunt camp did some other upgrades and moved back to the place where we'd been forced to leave two years earlier.

Social services in Canada has consistently advised every time we pointed out that we didn't have a humanly possible to follow budget, to ask for money from family/friends or borrow it from any credit cards we might have.

While living in government housing, I got to talk to other young families. They are all stuck in the same hopeless battle. If they aren't getting help from somewhere, they cheat the system by working under the table. The system is badly in need of an overhaul. I'm all for punishing cheaters, but you have to give the people who aren't cheating a chance. Please only punish the egregious cheaters not the poor single mom earning an extra thirty bucks babysitting each week so that her kids can have enough to eat.

If my readers don't get anything else out of this, stop believing this free housing fairy tale. It doesn't exist in Canada the way you think it does.

Grill Glove Love

Generally speaking, I'm one of the easiest to get along with people you'll ever meet. I do, however, have a sense of humour and that means that just sometimes, I can be a pain in the posterior. This was one of those moments.

I sometimes work in the kitchen at my place of employment. Favourite post is working on the grill. Most of the other work stations are less than perfect for my tall skinny frame. I can work them but my lower back will start protesting.

Grill gloves are plastic disposable hand gear with some heat resistance for handling raw meat. After handling the raw meat, they're peeled off and thrown away. This is to avoid contamination of the finished product. If you take them off just right, you can trap a significant amount of air in the glove especially the fingers and then pop them. I've gotten rather good at it.

One of my co-workers finds the pop sound annoying and I find his reaction amusing. I was having fun popping the gloves when I was finished with them. Anyone who's ever gotten into popping bubble wrap, can understand my mind set. Hey, it's therapeutic. Don't knock it.

I managed to get three pops out of one glove, three separate fingers, a personal best. This was when my co-worker's requests for me to stop went from polite to more hostile demands.

“Pop! Pop! Pop!”

“Arrgh! Just stop already!”

I gave it a rest for a little while. Didn't want to rile him up too much or too fast. I waited for him to forget about it before doing it again.

“Pop!”

“Hey! What did I say to you? Don't do that anymore!”

“It was just thumb. Relax.”

“Just stop. Okay!”

I knew I was starting to push his buttons but I had a great way to finish this and I had to have one more go.

“Pop!”

He turns glaring at me, but before he can say another word, I say, “That was the middle finger.”

The rest of us laughed our heads off over that.

Beating the Facebook Algorithims

Little irritated with the folks from Facebook. I appreciate that they're a business and they can do whatever they want but I have an account in the hopes that it will be useful to me.

I have an artist friend that I tried to connect with several weeks ago. Because I sent him a friend request and he confirmed it immediately, I thought we were successful. I was puzzled in that none of his posts were showing up on my feed yet my son was seeing new posts from him daily. This a common occurance with some of my Facebook connections and I find it more than a little annoying. Usually going to my friend's wall and liking a few items just to give the system a kick will rectify the problem at least temporarily. My kids go a step further by tagging their friends in comments regularly. I find that inconvenient but I couldn't even do that in this case because Facebook somehow unfriended us. We'll try to rectify this when I get home this evening. I know that this instance is not an isolated one and I don't think it's a glitch. I promote my writing on Facebook and at times it seems to be getting more and more of a challenge. I know that they prefer I spend money to promote stuff on their site but I haven't got much in the way of funds.

I have two purposes for being on Facebook. Number one is to try to keep up with family and friends. The other of course is to promote my business efforts including my writing. This isn't the first nor the more upsetting incident. The worst was easily loosing track of a good friend and finding out they tragically passed away and I didn't find out until several months after the fact.

In the face of their mysterious algorithims, I have a plan. I will be going through my friend list as I have time and try to kick the system back in gear. I will also begin tagging people regularly. I will try to do it without sounding weird, annoying or inappropriate. It's a daunting challenge

New Hardware

While doing the weekly shopping Francine and Mieke stumbled on an inexpensive tablet keyboard compatible with mine. They knew I wanted one because writing articles with my thumbs is a pain in the posterior. So in the name of helping me become more productive they brought one home.

I'm giving it a test run as I write this.  It is functioning like a very small laptop. I like it but it will take some getting used to.  The keys have to be depressed quite far to register but they are small and close together. I'm grateful for inheriting my mother's hands. Dad would likely hit four keys at a time.

Brandon upgraded his laptop on the same day. That means his previous laptop got passed to Mieke and her's got transferred to me. I get to learn Windows 8.1 and work with a completely new set up. Once I get used to it all. I should be more productive. Granted I'm going to have to steer clear of the online games. There are a few that I have not played in quite sometime because my previous equipment wasn't up to the task.

Writing this wasn't too painful, so I'm looking forward to the coming writing week.

Church Shooting

I rarely comment on current events especially divisive or emotional charged ones. Right now I am really bothered by an event that occurred in South Carolina. It's been all over the news. A young white man went to a church prayer meeting. The members of this church are black. After being there for about an hour he went on a shooting rampage that left nine church members dead. I do not have words - evil and satanic come to mind but don't begin to describe how I feel.

I'm as physically white as a person can possibly be. Blond hair blue eyes, I wouldn't be surprised if you went back twenty generations in my family tree and still didn't find someone with an olive complexion. I only knew one black kid growing up and he was in a different grade at school. I believe he was descended from slaves who escaped to Canada through the underground railway but I didn't really know him very well.

My first real encounter with black Americans was on a family camping trip. We were camping in upstate New York and wanted to attend a church service. I was probably about eleven years old at the time. My dad found a likely candidate in either the yellow pages or some campground flier. We got all dressed up in our best and drove to this if I remember correctly Baptist church. When we got there everyone was black except us and a couple other guests. We assumed that we wouldn't be welcome and prepared to quietly leave. They made sure we knew that this was not true and insisted on having us share in their worship service. So we attended with them. It turned out to be an unforgettable cultural lesson and I mean that positively. I think that this event has influenced my view of other races more than anything else I've been exposed to since that time.

Without a doubt this is why this church shooting bothers me so much. These were good people. People who extended the hand of fellowship to someone who was obviously different. People who prayed together and wanted peace. How much damage has been done to what little trust there is between the races? I pray that for all our sakes that this damage can be healed. I pray for the victims and their families. We all bleed the same and we all hurt the same when we lose loved ones especially in something as senseless as this.

A world without racism would be a much better place.