I CAN HANDLE THE HEAT

“Wasn’t that a corker!” my late Mother-in-law used to say when an unusual event occurred. I was thinking that exact thing on Tuesday the 19th of July when the temperature here hit 35+ degrees Celsius and the humidex went over 42 degrees or something. Even for a heat lover like me it seemed a bit excessive. That particular day we were in Regina, at yet one more health-related appointment, and it was so hot that we chose to keep the top up on the convertible and crank up the air conditioner instead to get some relief. It has got to be really, really hot for me to seek out an air conditioner for relief.
The excessive heat triggered memories of my “Alberta experiment” of the late 1970’s. You see, waaaayyy back when, I was a scrawny directionless twenty-one year old living in Kipling with my Mom and Dad and floating from job to job, enjoying my life of leisure, mind you, when my Dad and my oldest brother, who lived in Redcliff Alberta at the time, thought it would be a good idea for me to head out to Alberta with him and get my collective “act” together, so to speak. The prospects for employment were greater and more varied than in Saskatchewan and my job-hopping rut needed to be broken. So I was told.
To that end, in July of 1978, off I went with him and within a week of my arrival I had landed a job at the Domglas Inc. glass factory. Well, talk about heat!! Yikes! But, first of all, I will familiarize you with the summer weather conditions of southeastern Alberta, and more specifically, the Medicine Hat-Redcliff locations. It requires only one word…HOT. Okay, maybe two words…EXTEMELY HOT. But as long as there was a swimming pool nearby or a garden hose, even, for some respite, I didn’t mind the heat all that much. But standing in front of the bottle and jar-making machines at the glass factory was another story.
Domglas Inc. were the manufacturers of many varied glass products in clear, brown and green glass. They made the stubby little beer bottles that were the norm back then, (120 per minute, in fact), and they made whiskey bottles, pop bottles, wine jugs and Cheeze Whiz jars, oh how I hated making those Cheeze Whiz jars, they were so damn persnickety, along with various other glass vessels.
My job, as an Operator’s Helper, was to assist the Operator in producing the glass products that were being made in one of six huge machines used for that purpose. Without bogging you down with the finer details, it would stand to reason that the temperature of the glass had to be high enough to form the molten glass into the shape of the destined vessel in, first a blank stage (rough shape) and then the finished state of the bottle or jar in the mold stage. The Operator and his assistant would apply “dope” (lubricant) to the blanks and molds to make sure the molten glass didn’t stick to the forms. Of course, the more square inches of glass exposure the hotter it was for the Operator and his helper. Thus, making beer bottles was a lot cooler, (if I even dare to use that term) than making double 40 ounce whiskey bottles. Make sense?
Anyway, the air temperature in the general area of the manufacturing machines was in excess of 40-45C (or 104-115F to the “old school” folks) all of the time and in front of the machines it was a lot…and I mean a LOT higher. Management gave workers salt pills on a regular basis in an effort to show some sort of compassion to the wilting sweating masses. In fact, every bottle we made was a potential cigarette lighter. All you had to do was pick up a bottle coming out of the machine with your asbestos wrapped tongs and slip the tip of your smoke into the neck of the bottle and…voila…instant combustion! So I know heat! I am very familiar with heat.
I stuck it out at the old glass factory until I was too homesick for Saskatchewan and moved back to my favourite province a year later. By the way, the “Alberta Experiment” worked, apparently, as I came back a more mature person, a more dedicated worker and someone with a keen appreciation for safe working conditions and a too-keen knowledge of what HOT really is.
“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”-Russel Baker (1925- ).

JULY'S ODD NEWS STORIES

In an effort to prove to myself that I’m still mostly sane I like to look at how screwed up the rest of the world is. To that end the World Wide Web is an amazing source of information to use as a tool to prove my point.
Take this following story for example: Three girls from Midway, GA., were trying to raise money to go to a waterpark and they thought that a lemonade stand would do the trick. But then they met the long arm of the law — their local police chief.
The Police Chief told the girls to “shut it down” citing the city requires business and food permits ($50 per day), even though the stand was at the home of one of the girls. The Police Chief said, “We understand you guys are young, but still, you’re breaking the law.” He also cited HEALTH issues because, “We (THE AUTHORITIES) were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance.”
Seriously!? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Slow crime day boys, or what? Did your own kids have a stand set up down the block or something? Some people should not be put in a position of authority I guess.
Then in the category of “Huh?” there’s the story of New York scent artist Christopher Brosius who has made his name with fragrances recalling childhood (such as Clean Baby Butt??, Green Bean and Baseball Glove-{now that one I can understand}), but felt it was time to approach the next frontier -- to make a perfume so exclusive that no one could smell it. By Brosius' reasoning, the scent's chemicals would provoke whatever reactions scents provoke in those exposed to it, but the actual scent would be undetectable to the nose; hence, no one would know why they were reacting as they were. By trial and error, he combined jasmine, sandalwood and natural amber, and scaled them down in power, yielding what he calls “Where We Are There Is No Here”. Perfume with no scent? Hmmm. I could sell you a truckload of that stuff, I’ll tell ya, and I think I’ll call it…”Water”.
This next story reminded me of a scene from the movie “Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail” when some characters were pulling a cart through the medieval town yelling, “Bring out your dead!”, and one old guy kept protesting that he wasn’t dead but they threw him on the cart anyway.
There’s a Florida woman who says she’s having numerous financial troubles because a bank error declared her dead last November. The woman and her husband built their home in 2007 and the couple took out two mortgages through the Chase Bank USA but the bank notified credit-reporting agencies that the woman had died. The bank even sent a letter of condolence to the family, saying someone from the bank would be in touch about the mortgage. The woman says she notified the bank officials that she was alive and also went to a local branch to correct the mistake. A month later, a lawsuit she filed against the bank alleges, credit agencies were still reporting her dead.
You know what? The really, really scary thing is that a new report states that by 2050 we’ll have 9.3 billion residents on this planet which, by virtue of basic math, will increase the number of stupid people and crazy events. Yikes! “Be afwaid, be vewy, vewy afwaid.”
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”-Mark Twain (1835-1910).

SQUEAKY WHEEL GETS THE GREASE

Without boring you with all of the details I can tell you that there is some question as to the success of the back surgery that was performed on me in late April. As with all surgeries you cannot rule out the possibility that the surgery may not be as successful as one would have hoped.
Since I had not had back surgery before I was not sure what to expect afterward. More pain? Less pain? Total relief? A nerve in my spine had been pinched off for nearly eight months so the possibility of immediate relief was pretty low. However, I was expecting that I would eventually have less pain and numbness in my leg and I was prepared for a long but successful recovery.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the possibility that, eight weeks after the surgery, there would be no relief at all. Neither was my surgeon, who immediately sent in a request for, yup, you guessed it, another MRI, (just as my hearing was starting to recover from the last one, no less), to see what the deuce was going on in there now.
All of that aside, it’s the timeline that is, once again, almost more irritating to me than the pain in my leg. Considering the fact that the injury happened late last August I thought that I would be fixed by now. So here we go again…another six-to-eight-to-four-to-twelve-weeks waiting for another MRI, and then depending on the results, who knows how long until we can figure out where to go from there.
I was telling an old friend, who had worked in the health care system for years, about my nearly one-year odyssey through the system and how frustrating it was and is. She gave me the name of the “Health Advocate” at Sun Country Health Region and my friend told me that I have to call and nag and nag and call the CEO of Sun Country and the Premier and my MLA and the Minister of Health and the Ombudsman and anybody else that I could think of to get quicker results. “Squeaky wheel gets the grease, you know.”
Really? That’s what it takes? I know that’s how it works, but seriously? Do we all have to lie on the floor and kick our feet and cry and whine like a spoiled child who’s been told he has to wait for his candy? That’s the key to getting looked after? Only angry people get the fast service? Unfortunately it’s the truth, but should it be?
I was in the retail lumber business for over twenty years and I can tell you that the last person I wanted to give the five star service to was the guy at the end of the counter who was demanding service over all the other people ahead of him in line. His time is just so much more valuable than anyone else’s time you know.
Ask any waitress or waiter how they felt about the customer who whistled or rattled the ice in their glass, or yelled “Hey You!” for more service? I’m sure they were just sooo eager to run right over and attend to that customers demands. Ha!
I have never wanted to be that guy so up ‘til now I’ve been the dutifully patient patient and have been standing in line calmly waiting for my time to come up but now the patience has run out of this patient, if you know what I mean? I want some service and I want it now! I guess it’s time to get the old anger on if that’s what it’s going to take to get some service around here. I’ll stamp my feet, I’ll hold my breath ‘til I turn blue, I’ll scream and scream, I’ll cry crocodile tears, too, if that’s the program that we have to adhere to. It’s not how I WANT to handle the situation but, unfortunately, it’s how I HAVE to handle the situation.
“Abused patience turns to fury,”-Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

TRIBUTE TO THE BEKEVAR CHURCH

“The church still stands and really is a symbol of the faith and the hope of the Bekevar community at that time, because they built a large enough church to seat somewhere in the neighborhood of between 250-300 people when there were perhaps a lot fewer families in the area. It was a great thing for the people to get together at the church. In the springtime they would speak about, discuss before and after the service, their hopes for the summer and the fall and the seeding and what they were doing and the acreages they were putting in to crop and so on…So these things had helped to keep the community together.”-The Rev. K. C. Doka--as quoted in “Peace and Strife”-by Martin L. Kovacs © 1980.
Previous to 1911 the twin spires of The Great Church of Bekevar were not visible for miles and miles around. Also, before 1911, we didn’t have zippers, or insulin, or penicillin, or life savers (the candies), or two World Wars, or talking motion pictures, or television, or radio, or rockets, or robots, or band-aids, or bubble gum. So much has changed in the world since 1911 but the main symbol of the faith and hope of our Hungarian pioneers endures still.
So many baptisms, marriages and funerals were performed in that building. How many romances and relationships were spawned at the services and the “szureti vigalom” (vintage merrymaking) Bekevar picnics that were held annually at The Great Bekevar Church? Countless descendants owe their very lives to the community of Bekevar and its heart and soul…the church.
My maternal grandparents, Joseph and Elizabeth Vedres, lived in the Bender and Inchkeith areas during the 1920’s and they and their children attended many services and community gatherings at the church while they resided in this area.
Although the building has not been used for anything more than the occasional wedding or ceremonial service, since the new Bekevar Presbyterian Church was built in Kipling in 1967, the structure remains a huge part of Kipling and District’s heritage.
Back in the 1970’s, prior to too many vandal attacks, the church remained furnished as it had been when the last regular service was held in the building. The doors were unlocked and the church was open to locals, site seeing visitors and many former area residents who would occasionally come back home and drop in for a nostalgic look at the old building.
As with any old seldom used building The Great Bekevar Church could be awe-inspiring during the day and very spooky at night. Truth be told, it could be pretty spooky during the day, too. Stories of Bekevar’s ghosts were passed from generation to generation and many a time the imaginations of the area youth would spark new stories of their sightings. Just driving by the place at night would cause the hair to rise on one’s arms and neck and make your sweetheart snuggle a little closer proving that, once again, Bekevar could always bring people together.
On July 10th of 2011 the 100th Anniversary of the building of The Great Church of Bekevar will be celebrated. What an opportunity to honour the courage, faith and foresight of our pioneers and celebrate the enduring symbol that was left as their legacy.

“It was proposed on October 15th, 1910, by Janos Szabo that for the joint celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the congregation and the commemoration of the Rev. Kalman Kovacsi’s “faithful functioning also for ten years as pastor of the congregation…a church be built in masonry and worthy of the congregation by October 6th, 1911.”- Excerpted from “Peace and Strife”-by Martin L. Kovacs © 1980.

My Expanded Waistline

During the past ten months I have been very limited as to what I can and cannot physically do. Due to my back injury and slow recovery it appears that I have lost a large portion of my calorie burning abilities. Apparently, walking from couch to fridge and back or lifting one’s fork, spoon or chopsticks continually to one’s mouth does not constitute exercise. Consequently there’s considerably more than a little “muffin top” over my trouser’s waistband; it looks more like an over-yeasted loaf of bread, if you know what I mean.
This was never more evident than a couple of weeks ago when I tossed aside my usual wardrobe of expandable waistband sweatpants or pajama bottoms and attempted to put on a pair of dress pants that I hadn’t worn since last summer. Hah! When I tried to do up the clasp it wasn’t even close. Deb tried in vain to fasten the gap together with a safety pin and she almost lost an eye in the failed attempt. Yikes!
That incident got me all nostalgic for the old days when I could eat anything I wanted and as much as I wanted and I still couldn’t gain a pound. Aaahhh, those were the days. I had always been active enough through sports, working out and physical work that I never really had to worry about it too much before. On top of the expanding waistline my cholesterol was climbing through the roof, too, so now I had more than one reason to watch what I was eating.
I definitely had to change my eating habits. I would have to eliminate the szalonna (bacon drippings with bread) or 1/2 litres of ice cream at one sitting and I would have to eat more chicken, fish and fresh veggies. I’d also have to take a hard look at replacing my usual high-calorie beer with something like Molson 67 or some other low-calorie beer but I have a real hard time paying more for less, you know?
Anyway, in an effort to eat more lean meat we picked up some ground chicken and some ground turkey instead of ground beef. Although I’m no Blue Seal Chef I do know my way around a kitchen but I was lacking recipes for cooking ground chicken or turkey. I was guessing that you can’t just substitute ground beef with ground chicken or ground turkey and have the same results so I Googled some recipes to try.
I found a number of recipes but the first one to catch my eye was the Apple-Chicken Sausage recipe. The recipe looked simple enough requiring only ground chicken, an apple and some seasoning; make them into patties, fry and voila--sausage--or a close facsimile thereof. The red flag should have been raised when the recipe called for enough poultry seasoning for seven stuffed turkeys, but what the heck do I know, right, so I threw it all together and fried them up and they smelled pretty good but…Yech! I think that whoever thought that this concoction would taste like sausage hadn’t really tasted sausage before. It was close, but there would have to be considerable experimentation with the ingredients requiring lots of time and too much wasted ground chicken to perfect that faulty recipe. As usual…”too smart, too late”.
This whole episode just reinforced in me that anything good for you isn’t going to be easy. Sure it’d be nice to live off of Cheezies and beer, like I use to, but those days are long gone and as we age and draw nearer to our expiration date, (and attempt to delay the inevitability of that day), we sometimes just have to make adjustments whether we want to or not.
“For the first time ever, overweight people outnumber average people in America. Doesn't that make overweight the average then? Last month you were fat, now you're average - hey, let's get a pizza!”-Jay Leno.

Kipling's Flooded Marsh Brings Back Memories

A little while back I ran into my good friend Brian Tennant and he invited me to join him on an adventure similar to Huck Finn and Old Jim’s ride down the Mississippi River but our adventure would be on Lake Kipling or as many locals refer to it: The Marsh. Our raft would be the Tennant’s pontoon boat, on which Brian had mounted a sail, and our Mississippi would be The Marsh. This was going to give a whole new meaning to the term Prairie Schooner.
Anybody with any history around the Kipling area would be familiar with The Marsh and I would venture a guess that not many of them would have had a chance to see a sailboat on it.
Today, if you Google “The Kipling Marsh” it shows an aerial view of a dry pumped-out marsh which is far from the unbelievable never-before-seen water levels that it’s at this year. Prior to the mid 1970’s, when The Marsh’s landowners started to pump the water out, there was a fair amount of water in it but, again, nothing like it is today.
Back in my high school days of the early 1970’s I recall my friends and I spending a lot of time engaged in activities around or near The Marsh. It was usually around this time of year when we’d go for a swim in the dugout, just north of Lawrysn’s and almost at The Marsh, to cool off on a hot June day. Some of the participants even went sans all clothing, but not Reverend Hubbard’s boy, though. Nope, not me. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Many of us would often walk the two + mile stretch of grid road out to the old Voroney farm, currently Kevin Puffalt’s, to visit the Voroney’s teenage kids Audrey and Robert, all the while singing American Pie, or something, at the top of our lungs to ward off the evil spirits lurking in the muddy waters of The Marsh. Walking back in to Kipling at night was always interesting, too, as you could often see the yellow eyes of some sort of wildlife creature off the road and the marsh flares would give off a very eerie greenish-blue glow over the cattails and reeds. I’m told there’s over seven feet of water on top of that grid road right now.
Once we had a cold snap in the early part of October and the marsh froze solid without any snowfall. We skated and skated on that ice for hours and never crossed the same path twice.
Back in the day, Kipling was a great destination for duck and goose hunters as there were thousands of the migrating birds out on The Marsh. My avid hunter friends would have a heyday out there, too. Of course every prairie boy worth his salt had a .22 rifle and we’d go out shooting muskrats or mud hens.
The current water levels are dire to the landowners as one farmer told me he has two full sections of his land under water. The threat of flooding to the town of Kipling is real and scary if that water is not pumped away before next spring or if we get a few inches of rain in one downpour like they recently experienced in the Weyburn area but it’s also kind of neat, to have a lake so close to town. Maybe “someone or they” should buy up the property and turn it into a resort. It’s just a thought. Maybe I enjoyed that sailboat ride a little too much.
"We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain.

Writer’s note: comments and questions regarding this column may be addressed to hubbar@sasktel.net. Also, previous “In My Humble Opinion” and “Random Thoughts” columns can be found on the following website: http://pnhubbard.blogspot.com/.

Father's Day Post

The other day I was engaged in a conversation with a few people regarding the never before seen bodies of water, that are to be found everywhere in the southeast corner of our province this spring, when the subject of fish and fishing came up. Apparently some fish have been moving from body of water to body of water, during this spring’s flooding, resulting in fish being found in ponds and sloughs which normally wouldn’t have any fish in them at all. This is big news to people who actually fish, I guess, but I do not fish, so the tidbit of information was interesting enough but not completely compelling to me.
Well, you should have seen the look of incredulity on the faces of the other conversationalists, who happen to be avid fishing enthusiasts, when they found out that I had only gone fishing maybe four times in my life. You know the look. That look people get on their faces when they find out you don’t share their love of turnips, say, or Canadian rye whiskey, or American Idol.
“How can you not love ______________?!” (Fill in the blank with one or all of the following: fishing, turnips, rye, Idol…), you are asked by someone with their eyes bugging out and their eyebrows lifted to the top of their foreheads!
I was reminded of a conversation that I had had with one particular brother-in-law of mine who was Mr. Outdoors, you know, fishing, hunting, trapping, canoeing etc. after he found out that my son, who was then nearing ten years old, and I hadn’t gone fishing together yet. I responded that I was nearly forty years old (at that time) and my Dad hadn’t taken me fishing yet! You cannot pass on a skill that you never really learned, can you?
I have joked with others that my theory on why my Dad never took any of his nine kids fishing was because his fishing and hunting trips were to give him a break from his children! Truth be told, I am not exactly sure why Dad never took any of his kids fishing but my guess would be that watching a bunch of children around open water or in a boat with sharp hooks, filleting knives, fishing rods and fishing lines flying to and fro would be a far cry from the relaxing experience that he was seeking.
Based on my four real experiences with fishing I’m not all that broken up about Dad not sharing his fishing time with me. Besides, we found other ways to bond. Dad would often hit high flies to my brother Gord and me for hours on a sunny Sunday afternoon and how many hours did we spend in front of the TV during Hockey Night in Canada, feasting on popcorn or Mom’s cinnamon buns, sharing the love of the Leafs and the hatred of the Habs. One time Dad brought home a broken down old bicycle that he spent the entire weekend refurbishing for me. Man, did I put the miles on that one!
Although my first three fishing experiences were filled with boredom, sun burning, smelly slimy stuff, more boredom, mosquito attacks and an empty fishing line, solidifying my thinking that this is a huge time waster, the last fishing experience that I enjoyed was…well…enjoyable. You see, I finally got to share that father-son fishing time with our son Nolan.
Back in the 90’s, when the kids were little, we were staying at some friends’ cottage at Crooked Lake when Nolan discovered a fishing rod in their tool shed.
“Dad, lookit this!!,”-he cried out, “ Can we go fishing?”
I started mumbling about fishing licenses and bait and trying to be nonchalant about my fishing ignorance when I thought, Oh, what the hell? What are the chances of catching anything anyway, right?
So I found a plain hook in the tackle box, tied it to the line and, lacking anything wormlike, I attached a piece of steak gristle, leftover from supper, onto the hook and we made our way down to the dock.
I let Nolan cast the line out, thinking he’d be pulling weeds around for a while, ‘til he got bored, and then we could move on. Well, well, wouldn’t you know it; we snagged a nice sized perch. Now what? I didn’t have anything to club the flopping creature with but luckily there were some other kids fishing off the dock that helped us out.
Fortunately Nolan and I got our picture taken with the prize because it turns out that it was the one and only fish that we have ever landed together. We tried and tried to get another one on that vacation, but as fate would have it, that one exciting catch was all that we were allowed. It was all we ever needed.
“Dads are stone skimmers, mud wallowers, water wallopers, ceiling swoopers, shoulder gallopers, upsy-downsy, over-and-through, round-and-about whooshers. Dads are smugglers and secret sharers.”—Helen Thomson.