GRAND CHILDREN STORIES

Here are a couple of cute kid stories and, yes, I'm talkin' about my little Grandson the super-cute, (aren't they all?!), little bugger Treyton Perry Laverdiere. Yesterday he was jumping on the trampoline with his Mom and his little sister, Ava, when he thought that they should take a break from jumping and lay down on the trampoline and watch the sky for a while. He was lying there with his hands behind his head and said, "Aahhh, there's nothing like a nice sunny day, hey?" He's three-and-a-half. And today his Grandma was talking to his Mom on the phone when his Mom says," NO, no...Treyton...I said you couldn't do that! Take the kitty out of the bag!... Because!...thank you, yeah, Mom, he thought it would be a good idea to carry our kitten Lucy around in a grocery bag."
A few weeks ago a whole pile of us were gathering at our daughter Meghan's house for her Ava's 1st birthday and as some folks began to arrive the doorbell rang and Treyton yelled out, "C'mon in. Nobody's home!" And then he put the slyest grin on his face and lowered his eyes as he got a bit shy when everyone laughed! Soooo damn cute! If I say so myself.

AUTUMN'S HERE...GET USED TO IT!!

I guess I’m finally warming up to Autumn; what with Thanksgiving being upon us already and the Summer-like temperatures sticking around ‘til the end of September and everything it’s been a rather smooth transition from Summer to Fall.

I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Thanksgiving feast as it seems we haven’t had to use the oven for cooking our meals since we entered barbequing season so many weeks ago. That roast turkey and all of the fixings are going to be such a nice change from grilled everything, if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, I love barbequing, but nothing beats a good old fashioned Thanksgiving turkey dinner. Come to think of it, I’m going to start fasting right now in preparation of the gorge-fest that I will be enjoying this upcoming weekend.

There are certain other advantages to Fall, I guess, like how easy it is to find your golf ball in the bushes now that the undergrowth and leaves and stuff are all thinning out and there’s a little less guilt if you sit in front of the TV watching football instead of doing yard work or the never-ending home improvements because the daylight hours are shorter and the thermometer starts dropping lower and lower. And then there are all of the great tastes and smells of the garden harvest processing as we prepare salsa, and spaghetti sauce and beet pickles and chocolate zucchini cakes et cetera et cetera.  I’ll tell ya, nothing tastes better than garden fresh produce.

In fact, this year I think we have had the best and most bountiful crop of tomatoes since the “Crippled Crop” of ’02. Let me explain. By “Crippled Crop” I mean Debbie and I were crippled and the tomato crop was most abundant. That was the year that Deb broke her ankle in a “golfing” ??  accident and had to get it screwed back together and everything and I had just had surgery on my left shoulder so she was limping around on crutches and I was working with one hand and we had to process all of these tomatoes that we had grown while we were both still healthy. Sheesh! Turns out we got it done somehow. I guess “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

This year, we’ve been giving away tomatoes and we have made two batches of salsa, plus spaghetti sauce and we’re still eating fresh tomatoes with every meal. I’m not complaining I’m bragging. I guess you could also say that I’m very thankful for the bounty.

While I am still a little saddened by the fact that we will soon be mothballing, (it’s just an expression, folks, we’re not really going to be using mothballs), the summer clothing we can also look forward to getting that Autumn clothes collection out and wearing something different. That’s another thing we Canadians can be thankful for...cold weather clothing.

We can’t change the inevitable so we might as well get used to it, don’t you think? Take the good with the bad…accept that time will march forward and regardless of how we feel about it we should embrace the new season.

“The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.-Henry Beston (1888-1968), “Northern Farm”.

GREED RULES!!

You know what I want? Yes, okay, you’re right; there really isn’t enough room in this paper for THAT list so I’ll narrow it down to what I really, really, really want.

Are you ready? Then let’s play the old greed card right off the get-go…yup…money…I want lots of it…and I don’t want to earn it either. I want to win it, inherit it, find it, not steal it, but one way or another I want it. There’s no question about it, I want money.

How much money, you ask? Lots…like pro-sports-athlete lots; like movie-star-work-ten-weeks-a-year-and-get-twenty-million-dollars-per-flick lots, filthy, stinking Bill Gates/Oprah Winfrey kind of lots. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

What would I do with it? To be perfectly honest, I’d probably have to pay for some rehab or something somewhere down the line, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

            Now, here’s the thing folks, while I’m being perfectly honest, I wrote everything up to the beginning of this sentence last week sometime and I can’t really remember what prompted my lust for cash or where I was going with this whole “lots of money” thing, but if I had to guess, and that’s exactly what I’m doing here, I would guess that it was a combination of several consecutive things that flicked my greed switch on.

            First off, as I have mentioned many times to you, summer ended, and that’s a real bummer to me, so maybe I’d like to be able to jump in a plane and chase summer around for a little while. Well, more than a little while I guess…like…‘til next May!

            Then, you know, I was just trying to catch up on a little bit of sports action by flipping through the sports channels on TV and all I keep seeing and hearing about is how these billionaire owners are fighting with millionaire hockey players trying to decide how they’re going to divide up the old NHL profit pool and all I can think about is how people are so stupid to keep going to these arenas and paying a hundred bucks for a ticket in the nose-bleed bleacher seats to ONE hockey game and eat six-dollar terrible-mostly-warm hot-dogs and drink eight-dollar-mostly-cold beer wearing a hundred-dollar replica team jersey and then they whine and snivel because their teams won’t be playing this year because somebody said, “it’s my puck and I’m going to take it home ‘til you play nice” and, once again, they completely ignore the real people who have put all of that money into their profit pool and if I was filthy-rich enough maybe I’d start a whole new affordable hockey league and then all the greedy NHL owners and players could just go…away.

            And then, I was putting a sky-window into our roof and I was up and down the ladder like twenty-seven times in five hours and my body was just aching, but I don’t really mind the work, per se, but I was thinking that it would be nice if I had a body that actually worked again and if I had enough money maybe I could afford to pay someone to fix me or replace some of my worn-out parts like the Bionic Man or even Frankenstein, but with my own brain and not the hideous appearance or the villagers coming to kill me part, and, yes, with oodles of cash, I might be able to arrange something like that. I know, I know, if I had oodles of cash I could pay someone to do the work for me but that takes the fun out of it, too, and you’re missing the point.

            And that leads us right back to reality, now, doesn’t it? The chances of me coming into bagfuls of money are as slim as having my body parts replaced or taking the greed out of professional sports but thinking that it could happen was kind of fun there for a little while, wasn’t it?

 

“Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.” -P. J. O’Rourke (1947-).