OUT OF THE MOUTHES OF BABES

Our Grandson is turning four-years-old in a few weeks and his little sister is one-and-a-half-years-old right now and she idolizes her older brother. She bugs him incessantly, mind you, but she idolizes him. She follows him everywhere and copies everything he does. Actually, she might even think she’s a boy, too. Case in point: their Mom was getting them ready for a bath one night and little Ava, naked as a Jaybird, sidles up to the toilet bowl and makes like she’s going to go pee so her Mom snatches her up and puts her on the seat (she hasn’t started potty training yet) and little Ava scowls and fights to get down from her perch and then her Mom sees what she’s trying to do…Ava turns, facing the toilet, trying to go to the bathroom through her belly-button because she’s smart enough to know she doesn’t have the same equipment as her brother but she’s pretty sure he goes pee standing up so she must be able to do that, too. Kids, eh?

One of the many great things about Grandparenting is that you get to re-live some of the “kids do, (or say), the darndest things”. I say re-live because there are some cute and funny things that you remember your children saying as they were growing up but it’s not nearly as fresh as listening to the little ones in the moment.

Another case in point is just before we were to leave on our hot holiday vacation we FaceTimed with our daughter and the Grandkiddies and it’s cute that we can see each other in the iPhone but the sound is iffy some of the time and near the end of the conversation my wife tells the kids that we will make sure we bring them back some “Sea Shells” from our holiday by the sea. Well, our Grandson, Treyton, doesn’t know what “Sea Shells” are, but he says “okay”, and then a little later, just before we’re hanging up he yells into the phone, “don’t forget the CHEESE SHELLS, Gramma!”

So in that vein I will share some other cute little children stories with you. Enjoy:

“While walking through the mall the other day my three-year-old son said, “Mama, is this the mall?”

“Sure is,” I replied and then he stopped in his tracks and said (with arms waving and a funny British accent), “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most beautiful of the-mall?”

I started laughing and he said, “No, really, Mama who is the most beautiful?”

“At age five our granddaughter, upon seeing airplane tailings in the sky, asked me if God minded having those scratches across his sky.”

My five year old daughter told my husband this morning that “It’s easy to raise kids, you just lift up them.”

Says a Mom to her three-and-a-half-year-old: Mom-“Trey, just a second!” Trey-“What’s a second?”

Three year old Jack was watching his Mom breast-feeding his new baby sister. After a while he asked, “Mom, why have you got two? Is one for hot and one for cold milk?”

Brittany, (age four), had an ear ache and wanted a pain killer. She tried in vain to take the lid off of the bottle. Seeing her frustration, her Mom explained it was a child-proof cap and she’d have to open it for her. Eyes wide with wonder, the little girl asked: “How does it know it’s me?”

Five-year-old Melanie asked her Granny how old she was. Granny replied she was so old she didn’t remember any more. Melanie said, “If you don’t remember you must look in the back of your panties. Mine say five to six.”

 

“The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.”-Mark Twain (1835-1910).

THE MARIETA ISLAND EXPERIENCE

From Wikipedia: "The Marieta Islands were originally formed many thousands of years ago by volcanic activity, and are completely uninhabited. The islands are about an hour long boat ride west-northwest from the coast of Puerto Vallarta and are visited daily by hundreds of tourists, yet no one can legally set foot on the islands. In the early 1900s the Mexican government began conducting military testing on the islands because no one lived there. Many bombings and large explosions took place on the islands causing amazing caves and rock formations to be created. After a massive international outcry, started by scientist Jacquues Cousteau in the late 1960s, the government eventually decided to label the islands a national park and therefore protected against any fishing, hunting or human activity."

            With these islands as our destination point our group of twelve and another twelve tourists boarded a sailboat and we set off from the Marina Terminal in Puerto Vallarta. The ship that would take us to the islands was built in Holland in 1938 and is still used on a daily basis by Pegaso Chartering today. I can’t remember what we had to pay per head to go on this all-day excursion but even without the spectacular whale-watching and the snorkelling that came with the ride, it would have been well worth the ticket just to sail on that ship that day.

            Many of the tourists on the tour thought that we’d sail up to the islands and get a ride to a beach and then snorkel in the water around the islands for a bit and then be shuttled back to the ship for the ride back home. It was kind of like that, but not quite. About forty-five minutes away from the islands our tour guide informed us that we’d get within 600-700 meters, almost a kilometre, away from the islands and then they’d get us a little closer in the outboard shuttle boat and we’d then have to snorkel through a hole in the island to get access to the beautiful sandy beach inside the island. Easy, eh? For some…yes; for most…no!

            It was a bit of a shock for the non-confident swimmers, my wife being one of them, and the crew sent the more confident or experienced tourists on the first shuttle boat. I’ve been in and around water since I was a baby so I was anxious to get in the water and swim with the fishes. Deb, on the other hand, didn’t know if she’d even leave the ship.

I had taken an underwater camera along and got some pretty good pictures around the islands and in the caves. I was up on the beach when along came Deb through the opening in the rocks completely shocking the rest of us. She is not only a non-swimmer but a little panicky in the water at the best of times so it was some monumental fear-conquering that got her to that beach.

Once on the island, though, the effort to get there was well worth it as that beach was beautiful and completely surrounded by rock. There were other caves to explore and everyone who swam into the area warmed up on the beach and took in the breath-taking sites.  

As the tour was on a tight schedule our time on the island could never be long enough and we had to get back out to the ship, which turned out to be more difficult than getting there. The waves coming through the hole in the wall kept pushing us back in toward the beach but, again, perseverance prevailed and we all managed to get back to the ship safe and sound. At least the difficulty in the return trip kind of kept our mind off of the cooler water temperatures.

As a newbie hot holiday traveller I still have a hard time defining the top one hundred moments from our trip but the snorkelling off of the Marietas Islands is right there at the top. Next time, and there’s definitely going to be a next time, I think I’ll see if I can prolong my swimming with the fishes but I think Deb will file the one life-threatening I-think-I-can moment into the memory banks and be happy reliving the whole ordeal through the pictures.

“Always bear in mind that your resolution to succeed is more important than any other,” Abraham Lincoln.

OUR PUERTO VALLARTA VACATION

            I am not sure how to present this column to you. Here's the thing...we have just returned from our trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and we had so many amazing experiences that I might have to turn this space in the paper into a serial piece to fit all of the details in. I don't want to make anyone envious, mind you, but go ahead and feel that way if you must, because I always did when listening to other people's similar exploits but this was a brand new experience for a few of us on the trip and I just feel the need to share.

            We filled up a lot of our time with all of the touristy things to do, and, yes, of course, occasionally tequila was involved. We did a lot of sunbathing, city touring, constantly bartering with local "merchants" over souvenirs, golfing, a too-short-time snorkelling around the Marieta Islands, whale watching and the highlight of the trip, for me, was a parasail ride 110m, or so, above Banderas Bay providing a view overlooking the resort filled beaches and a pretty good look at the city from up there. My only complaint was that the ride was too short. Not bad for a guy who can't stand heights, eh?

            Another highlight would be the snorkelling at the Marieta Islands. Unfortunately some miscommunication with our tour guide ended up with a day-long sailboat whale watching ride with a tiny bit of snorkelling when we all thought we were going on a snorkelling/kayaking adventure with a bit of whale watching. We were a little more than surprised to hear that it was going to be the other way around as we gathered on the pier in the morning to board the sailboat.

            Sidebar here...if there was a low-light of the vacation, other than being sick on the way home, it was minutes before we were to go to the Marina and board the sailboat for the day's activities and our group of twelve was gathered in the lobby of the Melia resort at 7:30 in the morning and I thought it would be advisable to have one more bathroom break before we left for the Marina because one never knows where the next bathroom may be. As I was walking to the bathroom I was reading about the resort's destination wedding offers on the wall and the next thing you know I'm in one of the beautiful shallow pools they have all over the resort  on my hands and knees half-covered in water. Apparently it was very funny... for everyone else! I like to make people laugh but I usually prefer a different method to accomplish that task. Needless to say it was one of the more memorable moments of the trip that I'd like to forget.

                Anyway, the miscommunication turned out to be karmic as the whale watching was mind-blowing and even the crew said that it was an extraordinary display by the Humpbacks that day. I know they are paid to say that but you could read the amazement in their eyes, too.      

            At the risk of boring you I will not go on and on and on about the amazing week we all had in Mexico. Unfortunately all good things must come to an end and our trip ended on March 1^st. There was good news and bad news in that, too, though. What I thought had been a case of Tequilaitis, from my overindulgence on our last night there, turned out to be a little more than that. I’ve been sick since we left. I tell you that five-hour plane ride was a white-knuckler as I did my utmost to keep all of my bodily fluids inside my body. Sorry, enough of the details, suffice it to say that I am still not feeling well, three days on, but I am so happy it happened at the end of the trip and not the start.

            Despite the fact of how I came home feeling and because we returned to a nice March winter storm, as well, I would return to Puerto Vallarta in a heartbeat and the plans are already in the works for the next visit. I can hardly wait.

            “Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them,”-Bob Dylan (1941-).

FRUITY BEER? NO THANKS

I may have mentioned this before but I can say it again...I like beer. Always have. It’s certainly not a dependency and I don’t consume anywhere near the amount of beer that I did in my old “Weekend Warrior” days but I’m still known to occasionally drink a few cold ones. My Dad always said that my love of beer came from my Mother's Hungarian roots and pointed out how Mom's father and brothers enjoyed a cool one or two every now and then but that theory flies in the face of Dad's Welsh/English beer guzzling ancestry.

            In fact if you look up the top twenty countries by average consumption per person in litres of beer Hungary ranks 17th at 75.3 litres per person while the United Kingdom, (Ireland not included), is ranked 6th in the world at 99.0 litres per person. Canada, by the way, is ranked 19th at 68.3 litres per person and Ireland all by its lonesome is ranked number two in the world at 131.1 litres per person. Who's number one, you ask? The Czech Republic at 156.9 litres per person. These are statistics people, not judgements, okay?

            So anyway, short-story-long I like to experiment with my beer choices and try different kinds of beer from all over the world. My way of thinking is that you really shouldn't call yourself a beer drinker, though, if you've never tasted a Guinness. The Irish really take their stout beer seriously, too, so seriously that the original Guinness Brewery in Dublin has a 9,000 year lease on its property, at a perpetual rate of 45 Irish pounds, (roughly $26.00 Canadian), per year. Now there's a safe business model, eh?

            Our little Liquor Board store in town here is very good at bringing in a variety of beers from all over and, as stated above, I like to experiment every now and then so they bring something in and I try ‘em out. But now we’ve got some trust issues going on because I stopped in and was shopping around and they had brought in some kind of fruity beer from France called “1664 Blanc” and I was reading on the packaging that it is a wheat beer and it has a “Fresh & Fruity Flavour”. I was waffling and saying I didn’t know if I would like two of my favourite things mixed together. I like beer and I like fruit but I don’t know if I’d like a combination thereof.

The staff at the store assured me it’d be good and the beer company’s advertising stated that it “turns every beer moment into a sip of French pleasure.” Really? I beg to differ. If this is France’s version of beer drinking pleasure then it’s no wonder they aren’t even in the top 50 of beer drinking nations. My guess is that they like their beer to taste like wine or something.

My first sip of “French pleasure” was not so pleasurable. Yeeuchh! Ptooey. Those six bottles went down so slow it was terrible. Not even a near-frozen state helped it slide down better. Again, I’m not sure if it’s an English thing or a Hungarian thing but if I pay for something I’m going to use it. Even if it almost hurts.

I recall my famous words to the Liquor Board staff members quite clearly, “What if this stuff tastes like s…not good. Is there a money back guarantee?”

“Oh, no, no…you’ll like it”, they assured me…WRONG!

But, then again, as they say, “to each their own”, and one should never question anyone else’s tastes but, at the same time, I also recall a wise local store clerk who once exclaimed, “it’s good if you like it!” However, in this particular instance…I just didn’t. Like it, that is.

“Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness”-Stephen Fry (1957-).

 

HMMM...WHERE'S MY MEMORY?

There are occasions when I sit down at the ol’ keyboard to write down something new for this space in the paper and I draw a complete blank as to subject matter. Conversely, there are other occasions when the things almost write themselves. You know, something will happen at home or at work, or I’ll listen to a newscast or torture myself by listening to John Gormley Live on NewsTalk980 radio, or something, and then bing-bang-boom the words are flying on to the paper. But those occasions are rare.

            Sometimes, if an idea strikes me, I’ll jot it down so that when I’m going through one of my idea dry spells I can pull it out later and expand on it. That’s if I remember where I put the damn thing.

            I can almost remember having a memory, if you know what I mean? Ahhhh, those were the days my friend. Yes, of course, I still have a memory but sometimes it doesn’t work so well. My long-term memory?…no problem…the color of my grade 2 home-room teacher’s eyes?…blue, the Hubbard’s phone number in Marquis, Saskatchewan, in 1965?…26, (okay, that’s an easy one), but why am I standing in the back porch right now? Not a clue. I know I came in here for something and I’m not leaving until I remember why or what.

A while back I guess I had put some notes away for future columns and totally forgot all about the cache. In my defense, I had put them on to one of our numerous computer drives so then I had to remember where I had stored my memory but I didn’t have anything to remind me of what I had to remember or where I had put the notes so then I didn’t remember I had even done it until I came across the notes by mistake. Make sense? Only we short-term-memory-challenged will know what I’m talking about.

            They say that doing brain exercises can improve one’s memory. Or at the very least stop it from degenerating too fast. That said, I found that information when I Googled “memory” but there’s so much information on the subject that there’s no way at all I’m going to remember a tenth of it.

            And it’s all cyclical, too, isn’t it? Stress affects your memory and you get stressed because you can’t remember stuff which increases your memory loss and around and around we go.

            And the stuff that we don’t want to remember we do and the stuff that we’re supposed to remember we don’t. Like the time you snuck out a little gas in the gym when nobody was there and then a bunch of people showed up and you couldn’t blame the smell on anyone else or the dog, or anything, and you keep reliving the embarrassment of the situation over and over again. No? Never happened to you? Me neither.

            Come to think of it, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, in your life is based on memory. Right at this exact moment in time every smell, every sight, every sound, every feeling is recorded and compared to an experience that you have already had. At its most basic, that’s it, that’s memory, which, essentially, is life.

            So my hope is that this will be a memorable column for you, Dear Reader, and with any luck I will remember what I wrote here and you won’t be subjected to reading about it again if I forget that I wrote it and I write it all over again.

            “Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”-Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592).

YOU DID WHAT TO MY EMAIL?!

It would seem to me that it was more than a little ironic that right at the time I was writing last week’s column regarding advances in electronic technology it was electronic technology that completely let us down. Mind you, as usual, technology didn’t let us down- the operator of the technology completely let us down. And our frustration wasn’t necessarily with the technological breakdown as much as it was with the customer service, or lack thereof, that became the most frustrating part of the whole ordeal.

            It all started when I bought my wife an iPhone for Christmas. Up ‘til now Deb’s had an old flip-phone with buy-as-you-go phone cards and she was quite happy not having to be a slave to her cell phone so I got to thinking that she should really upgrade herself into this century and get a phone where she can Facetime with the kids and grandkids and she can text and email and do all of those wonderful things that only a new cellular phone can do for you. Of course, these wonderful tools come at a cost. And not a low cost either, so in an effort to cut down on the cost of our two-member household paying an enormous phone bill we decided it would be a good idea to bundle up some of the phone services that we were using, make one of our cell phones our home phone and cut out our landline. Simple, eh? I guess not. Many, apparently, have done this. I wish we hadn’t because that’s when the trouble really began.

            We weren’t completely advised of all of the details that this little adjustment to save ourselves a few bucks would entail. We expected a couple of glitches, and there were more than a couple, but when SaskTel completely lost our email account information for four days we started to panic. Not only were we unable to send and receive emails, we completely lost everything. And I mean everything! Anyone familiar with email usage will know that it’s essentially a cyber filing cabinet and to lose all of the information stored in there could be catastrophic.

And, yes, all of you cyber-geniuses with your condescending head-shaking and all-knowing grin going, “tsk, tsk…why didn’t he back up his information?” I’ll tell you this, NOBODY does! Okay? NO-BODY. Well maybe the 1.6% of you cyber-geeks do it but besides them…NOBODY.

Anyway, we get on the phone, the first time, for one-and-a-half-hours of waiting and going from this rep to that rep to another rep all the while nobody can figure out where our stuff went and “Oops, sorry, there’s not much we can do about it now” answers and…”Perhaps you can send us the details of your problem in an email…” “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!? YOU LOST OUR EMAIL! (expletive, expletive)”

Then we’re on the phone the next night again and they say they might be able to restore everything but “please give us twenty-four hours to work on it”. Okay…twenty-four hours and two minutes later we’ve got our email restored, with none of our old information by the way, and a new/old email account to boot and then the stupid thing stops working all together again.

Up until then we’d been fairly polite when dealing with these people but now I’m past agitated and this has been going on for, like, four days, and, believe me, I was in the retail lumber business for over twenty years and I’ve had my share of ticked off customers to deal with and I don’t like ‘em and I don’t particularly like companies that turn me into a ticked off jerk customer, either, and it’s a real shame that you sometimes have to be one to get any satisfaction but that’s just what happened. I turned into a class A (as in ass) jerk and they restored our stuff a few hours later. All of it!

I’ve always believed in the adage that, “you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”, but, as with all things, there are exceptions to every rule.

“The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”- Jeff Bezos (1964-)- CEO Amazon.com.

TECHNOLOGY ADVANCES?

A co-worker of mine just went to Las Vegas to attend the Consumer Electronics Trade Show where so many tech companies were showing off their new gadgets with all of the latest in technological wizardry. If you are into that sort of thing, it’s THE place to be, I guess. From new fangled Smartphones, to the latest in computer technology, to smart watches, to even bigger screen televisions, there’s something for everyone’s inner geek.


I am pretty sure that since the beginning of time someone has tried to predict what the future holds as far as technological advances go. It's amazing to go back to the old Popular Science magazines and see what was predicted for the future forty, fifty or sixty years ago. Flying cars in everyone’s driveway, jet packs, robot maids, Earth colonies on Mars, underwater Sea Cities, time travel, full meals in a pill and domed cities were all past predictions of what the future had in store. Some of these things are making there way closer to fruition while others are still a long way off yet.

Like a lot of other people I am both fascinated and intimidated by all of the new technological advances. Sure, I have my share of gadgets like my Smartphone and a tablet and I’ve even managed to become more computer literate than I ever thought I'd need to be, but, on the other hand, these gadgets are time consumers and are advancing far quicker than I can keep up.

For me, it’s a patience, or impatience, as it were, kind of thing. Being a slow learner and a member of the “I’ll read the instructions later” group I just don’t want to spend the amount of time that is required to educate myself on the equipment’s functions. I want to be able to do it right now! But it never seems to work that way, does it?

Take this Jawbone thing that’s the latest health and fitness gadget. According to my sources, “the UP by Jawbone is composed of a wristband that syncs with an app on your iPhone or iPad to inspire you to live healthier. The hi-tech wristband uses motion sensors that detect movement and algorithms to chart your sleep patterns and wake you up at the best moment during your natural sleep cycle. ('like that's a good thing?') You can use the UP app to track your food habits by keeping a food journal of all of your meals. To ensure you stay productive, you can program the wristband to give you a gentle reminder to move every now and then by setting it to vibrate if you haven't moved in a while."

This is all very neat and everything but should one really need a piece of jewelry to remind them of something that they should remember anyway? Despite its high techiness and its ability to track your algorithms I'm thinking that this UP unit is still going to require a fair bit of administration to chart your menus and eating habits and if you aren't a really efficient data entry clerk your exercise time might be eaten up by the programming time. Just saying.

Yes, I'm as interested as anyone with life being made easier by technological advances but one always has to be careful with relying on technology as a replacement for human thought and action.

"The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite"-Thomas Sowell (1930-).