PRIORITIZATION?

            What to do first? Build the deck? Cut out those bloody caraganas? Watch more hockey? Finish the staining on the staircase? Play some baseball? Fix or replace the front steps? Decisions, decisions, decisions. Therein lies the dilemma. What to prioritize.

            I’m fairly certain that regular readers of this column would be able to guess which of the above questions would be priority #’s 1 and 2 to me. I am also confident that you, Dear Reader, would be able to guess which of the above items would be priority #’s 1, 2, 3 and 4 to my wife. Numbers 5 and 6, (that’d be the hockey and baseball for all you bad guessers out there), wouldn’t even make the ol’ To-Do List to start with. Anyway, there’s that old wants and needs thing rearing its ugly head again, eh? I know what I WANT to do but I also know what I NEED to do.

            Now don’t confuse prioritizing with production, okay? That’s why we make priority lists. Just because we have determined which order things SHOULD be done doesn’t necessarily mean that’s WHEN they’ll get done. There are just too many variables to determine the actual finishing date of any given project. There are weather considerations, financial considerations, product availability considerations, ambition considerations, health considerations, (which may or may not be confused with the “ambition” considerations), as in… “I can’t possibly start that thing today I’ve got…um…something…uh…I’m hurt…yes, that’s it, I’m hurt. No, no it’s not because game six is on…no, no, you got it all wrong, I’ve got this…this…thing…and…it…uh…it…hurts.”

            Okay, I may have used a bit of literary license there but things sometimes get put off for various reasonable reasons, (some say excuses), but at least I know the order of importance of the things that I am putting off.        

            According to my dictionary

: pri-or-i-tize; verb/: to organize (things) so that the most important thing is done or dealt with first.

: to make (something) the most important thing in a group.

            You see, there are different kinds of prioritization. My To-Do list is part of the first part of the definition--identifying the first thing that most needs to be done…and try to do it first.

Things like…say…government spending fall into the second category of the definition--identifying the most important needs of our rate-payers…and then waste the funding somewhere else.

            Take health care for instance. I recently drove by the hospital that is being constructed in Kipling right now and I’m a bit confused by the structure. First off, I want to say that I am extremely happy that we are now getting this facility built in Kipling but if someone had had their priorities in order I thing we could have skipped the fancy schmancy roof lines and Star Trekky look for a plain-looking functional health care facility. Just saying.

            Thankfully it hasn’t been too often but I have had the unfortunate experience of being in a hospital in a lot of pain and I couldn’t have given a red-rat’s derriere as to the roof line or the “architect’s signature” or how appealing the exterior plaza is as long as my ailment was being looked after. What we need is function over form and performance over aesthetics.

            Then we’ve got the STARS Ambulance Lotteries and the Hospitals of Saskatchewan Lotteries and the Children’s Hospital Foundation Parade of Homes Lottery and bake sales and bingos and bottle-drives…to provide HEALTH CARE!! In the meantime CEO’s and managers and consultants and contractors are making zillions of dollars.

            Yes, yes, yes…go ahead and roll out your overpaid government accountant to do their scritcha-scritcha number crunching and tell me that the tax dollars returned to the public coffers via taxation of the upper-level executives who also pour their money into investments which fund the companies that employ the multitudes…blah, blah, blah…Explain it away. Justify it as you must. I don’t care how many numbers you throw at me…my opinion will not waver. In my humble opinion…our priorities are very clearly…out of sync.

“It is not an arrogant government that chooses priorities; it is an irresponsible government that fails to choose.”-Tony Blair (1953-).

FROM THE JETSONS TO CRACKBERRYS

Over fifty years ago, in 1962 to be exact, Hanna-Barbera Productions released a cartoon show called “The Jetsons”. Hanna-Barbera was an American animation studio that dominated American television animation for nearly four decades in the mid-to-late 20^th century creating such iconic cartoon shows as The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo and many, many others.

The Jetsons were a space-aged family living in the 2062. Father George, his wife Jane and their two children, Judy and Elroy lived in Orbit City with their dog Astro and cleaning robot Rosie. Hard to believe as it is, the Jetsons only lasted one season with 24 episodes and while it was revived briefly in the 1980’s, it was the original 1962-63 season that has made the term “Jetsons” synonymous with “the future” to this day.

There were a lot of futuristic devices in the show that seemed pretty far-fetched to the early 1960’s viewers but in retrospect so many of the things that were marvelled at back then seem to have come to fruition.

Take the very first episode where Jane is at home working out to an in-home exercise video on her futuristic large 3D flat-screen television or how about George sitting in his easy chair reading his evening paper on a computer screen? Sound familiar?

In other episodes George has to fix something called a “computer virus” at work and everyone on the show uses video phones. A tanning bed, which wasn’t introduced to North America until 1979, was used in one show with tanning settings that included “Miami” and “Riviera”. And while flying space cars have yet to land in our lives, the Jetsons show had moving sidewalks, like we now have in airports, treadmills, that didn't hit the consumer market until 1969, and their repairman had a piece of technology called...Mac. Hmmm.

Although it’s not 2062, yet, we are now living in the 21^st Century and the amount of change brought to our lives, thus far, is staggering. The changes in computer technology, the Internet, Smart phones, e-readers, e-cigarettes, social media-(i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al), and reality television are all products and services that weren’t available prior to 1999; or if they were offered before the turn of the century they would have been in their infancy.

So much change in so little time. I can recall living in the little hamlet of Marquis in 1969 and our telephone number was 26 and the phone came complete with a hand crank on the side that you rang to get an operator who then placed your call for you.

Now, I’m holding my Crackberry and it’s a phone and a camera and I can get the internet and emails on it and I can text with it and I have a library of photos on it and it’s a video and voice recorder and a flashlight and a weather forecaster and calculator and a clock and a calendar and a filing cabinet…oh, how far old Alexander Graham Bell’s invention has come.

At this rapid pace of change, your guess is a good as mine as to what we might be seeing in technological advances in the very near future. Suffice to say that if we are as forward thinking as the writers of the Jetsons show were back in the 60’s then the sky is, literally, the limit.

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change”-Heraclitus, (534BCE-474BCE).

THIS DAY IN HISTORY

            Happy Victoria Day everyone! It’s a gloomy, rainy, long-weekend Monday which makes it a good day to relax and put the feet up and be thankful that we’re not big campers or we’d be out there packing everything up in this nasty weather. I have experienced my share of packing up the camp in the drizzling rain and I don’t miss it today at all. To me, having another Victoria Day-May Long Weekend come and go by so quickly is depressing enough so closing out the weekend on a rainy, gloomy note kind of fits the mood.  

            Turns out that it could be worse, I guess. I could have been Anne Boleyn. You remember Anne don’t you? King Henry VIII’s second wife? On this very day in 1588 she lost her head…literally. She was beheaded for treason. I was curious to know what other people were up to on this day in history and this was the first item that came up. Poor Anne.

            Or I could have been in New England or Eastern Canada in 1780 when everything went dark in the middle of the day. The day is referred to as “New England’s Dark Day”. The event occurred on May 19^th, 1780 when an unusual darkening of the day sky was observed over the New England states and parts of Canada. The primary cause of the event is believed to have been a combination of smoke from forest fires, a thick fog and cloud cover. The darkness was so complete that candles were required at noon. It did not disperse until the middle of the next night. Since the communication technology of the day was so primitive, most people found the darkness to be baffling, inexplicable and more than a little disconcerting.

            Of course there’s always a little bit of irony in history, you know? The date of May 19^th was both the date of Marilyn Monroe’s famous, or infamous as it were, sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday To You” which she had sung to US President John F. Kennedy at a celebration of his forty-fifth birthday in 1962 amid rumours that JFK had an affair with the blonde bombshell and May 19th also happens to be the day that JFK’s widow, Jacqeline, passed away in 1994. Hmmm…

            Other notable events from this day in history include the day French explorer Jacques Cartier set sail for North America in 1535. Jacques Cartier was the first European to describe and map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River, which he named "The Country of Canadas", after the Iroquois names for the two big settlements that he saw at Stadacona (Quebec City) and at Hochelaga (Montreal Island). Thanks Jacques.

            More historical events from May 19^th: The Spanish Armada, with its 130 warships, set sail from Lisbon, bound for England in 1588. In the United States in 1864 the Union and Confederate armies launched their last attacks against each other at Spotsylvania in Virginia. Spotsylvania? Whatever.

In 1911 the first American criminal conviction that was based on fingerprint evidence occurred in New York City. Thomas Edison spoke on the radio for the first time on May 19^th, 1926. T.E. Lawrence, "Lawrence of Arabia", died from injuries in a motorcycle crash in England on this day in 1935. And last but not least…who could forget that tragic day in 1992 when Mary Jo Buttafuoco was shot and seriously wounded by Amy Fisher who was Mary Jo’s husband Joey’s teen-aged lover? Got it? I know it doesn’t rank up there with Jacques Cartier or Lawrence of Arabia or anything but it dominated the news for weeks and weeks and weeks.
            My boring, gloomy May 19^th won’t compete with these kinds of historical events but reading about them has kind of brightened my day a little. As we all know, in so many cases, as bad as we have it…it can always be worse.

“I get a bit gloomy when it’s gloomy.”-Catherine Zeta-Jones (1969-).

MAY LONG MEMORIES

            Oh no, here it is...deja vu all over again! Remember a few weeks ago when I rehashed a column from '08 and in it I said, "I for one, wouldn't be too disappointed with a few more weeks of ugly weather. I'm not hoping for it! But if it happens, it might ease my guilty, sports-addicted conscience." Well guess what? It's a complete replay of the events that happened after I wrote the original article, too.

            The weather has stayed nice and "indoorsy", except for maybe one or two days since I put that article in the paper, making it quite comfortable in front of my TV but doing absolutely nothing for the garden or the lawn!

            In that article I also said, "Now, as then, I am not accepting responsibility should the weather continue to be un-spring-like for the foreseeable future." I am sticking to that statement, too. It's not my fault!

            Come to think of it, with the Victoria Day long weekend coming up in a few days, I seem to recall just as many, if not more, crappy weather long weekends as nice ones. Perhaps it's just that shivering beside a campfire with snowflakes swirling down is more memorable on a May Long Weekend than a nice warm sunny one.

            I was combing through my May Long memories and I recall a group of us guys back in high school trying to camp out in the bush down south of town through a two-day down pour. We tried to make the best of it but we finally had to pack it in and surrender to the nasty weather. It wasn't among the greatest long weekends I've ever spent but forty years later I can recall every memorable, soaking wet moment.

            Ditto for a camping adventure my brother Gord and I endured with our sister Dot a couple of years before at Kenosee Lake. The day started okay, as many of them do, and by 8:00pm we were bailing water out of the tent and packing things up in the car. Talk about a downpour! Luckily a couple of the Krecsy boys were down at the Lake, too, and let us stay in their dry cabin for the night. Again, not a great time but very, very memorable.

            A generation later and it was the same thing for our three kids. They'd plan and plan and plan and pack and pack and pack and then...downpour! Can you see a pattern here? I don't even want to guess at how many washing machines were worn out washing all of those long weekend muddy, soaking wet camping clothes and bedding.

            Now, I do recall one Bike-a-Thon event from the early '70's when we school kids were trying to raise funds for a swimming pool and the route was from Kipling to Kenossee Lake and it was so blasted hot that the asphalt from the highway was sticking to the bike tires. They didn't even have the piers, the buoys or the big slide out in the water at the beach, yet, but a bunch of us ran down and dove right into the water to cool off anyway. Every other leap year, or something, the weather can be nice, I guess.

            I shouldn't even tell you this but Environment Canada is predicting a pretty decent weekend for this year's version of the Victoria Day Holiday Weekend. Not a heat wave, mind you, but 18C on Saturday and no rain predicted so far. Remember, though, that anything after two days is a crapshoot. I don't want to bring you down but maybe pack an umbrella and a rain slicker if you are planning any outdoor-type activity.

            As much as I've enjoyed watching indoor sports I am as sick and tired of the cold weather as anyone and I'm ready for some heat. Bring it on. It's time to stop watching sports-it's time to start playing sports.

"It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent." Dave Barry-(1947-).

 

HOW'D THEY GET IN HERE!?

            It was about seven years ago that I installed a wood burning stove in our living room. It has been a great addition to the house for both aesthetics and function. In fact, during the fifty-four hour power outage caused by the big snowstorm in late April of ’11 the stove provided us with the only source of heat and a means to cook our food.

            In the entire time that we’ve had the stove in the house we have never had a problem with birds nesting in the chimney or coming down into the stove or anything. Not until last week that is.

            Because the house is two stories high there must be close to twenty-five feet of stove pipe and chimney coming out of the top of the stove. I’m pretty sure that there’s a bird-screen on the chimney cap, too, so the first bird that breached the screen had to be really determined to make our chimney its home.

Due to the length of our cold, damnable winter we had run out of fire wood a while ago so we weren’t using the stove a lot in recent weeks making it easier for the birds to hang around the top of the chimney. I am uncertain as to the sequence of events but I’m pretty sure it started with one sparrow getting through the screen and making its way down the pipe to the stove itself. Once he got in and chirped away it appears that others followed.

Now, before I go any further with this story I will have to tell you that birds freak me out a bit. I’m not exactly scared of them but they’re off-putting, you know. What with their tiny spindly, scaly feet and beaky faces and weird noises and flapping and caca-ing everywhere and everything…they’re just weird to me. Oh yeah, and they’re stupid, too. They don’t call ‘em “bird-brain” for no reason.

So anyway, Deb’s home for lunch one day and hears something scratching and making noise in the stove and she knows it’s a bird but doesn’t want to open the door and let the damn thing out into the house so she leaves it in there, because birds freak her out, too, especially when they’re invading her house, and she’s hoping that I’ll deal with it when I got home from work.

When I get home all is silent so we go about our business and there’s like six hours of hockey to watch and I don’t particularly want to deal with the bird invasion anyway so I ignore the problem hoping it will go away on its own.

All was quiet for a day or two but then the noises started up again and then they stopped. Deb came home for lunch and there was no noise coming from the stove so she figures someone has to check this out and slowly opens the stove door and finds one of the poor little things passed away in the stove. She suits up like it’s nuclear waste and disposes of the dead bird and thinks that the problem is solved.

She told me about her discovery and I’m thinking I better get a fire going and keep the little buggers from coming down the chimney so I stopped on my way home after work and bought a box of fire logs and I started to get a little fire going. Then Deb gets home from work and I’m showing her how there isn’t a direct hole into the stove from the chimney and how I couldn’t figure out how the birds were getting into the fire box and I was poking into the stove with the poker when two of the blasted things fly out of the stove! Yowza!

I’m not sure which of us had the higher scream but we both jumped back out of the way as the two sparrows flew around the house…thankfully scared s---less! We opened the outside doors and after a few attempts to fly out the windows and walls the birds finally found their way out. I poked around again in the stove as the “EZ-Burn” logs didn’t burn very easy and there was lots of smoke but little fire and AGAIN another of the stupid things flew past my head. Sheesh, how many are in there anyway! Thankfully, three was the answer to that question.

So far so good, though. That was quite enough excitement for us that day. It’s been a few days since the bird fiasco but I guess I’m going to have to fix that chimney cap and make sure we burn a bit more in an effort to keep the invaders at bay.

“Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.”-Gertrude Stein (1874-1946).

COW FARTS?

           Hooray, hooray the 1^st of May…don’t be so quick putting that parka away! As our progress into warmer weather continues its slow pace one is left to question the validity of Global Warming, isn’t one? Especially in these parts it is. Following one of our coldest winters in recent memory, and the cold weather continuance around here, a little global warming doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. But, then again, one has to be careful of what one wishes for doesn’t one?

            Maybe you don’t believe in Global Warming anyway. In doing my research there was so much information regarding the subject of climate change and global warming that one could read the information for days and days and still not reach a definitive conclusion.

I’ve found that one thing’s for sure, though, the differing opinions are either politically based or scientifically based, (and often an amalgamation of both), depending on the motives of the speaker at the moment. Both parties seem to fudge their climate statistics to back their arguments…pro and con...once again, depending on the speaker’s agenda. And if you think that the mass media are going to produce accurate findings then think again because the news is a product to be sold and there is no obligation by the seller of the product, (news), to be accurate…just sellable.

On one hand science has a difficult time telling us what the weather’s going to be like next Tuesday, let alone in 2099, but can there be little doubt that the effects of 7.3 billion human beings, with all of their varying habits, has got to be affecting good ol’ Mother Earth in some form or another?

Regardless of your stance on Climate Change there can be no doubt that human habitation is adversely affecting our planet in some way. To raise awareness of this fact April 22^nd was designated as Earth Day and it was celebrated around the globe. My research states, “Founded by Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day was first organized in 1970 to promote ecology and respect for life on the planet as well as to encourage awareness of the growing problems of air, water and soil pollution.”

Of course the observation of “Earth Day” came with some practical and some impractical solutions to lessen the negative affects people have on the planet. Take our eating habits for instance. It has been calculated that if the United States alone could reduce the national cattle flatulence production by 25% it would be equal to removing the greenhouse-gas emissions of 1.25 million cars! I know! Who’d have guessed? Cow farts?

To that end, the United Nations is promoting the reduction in the consumption of meat and dairy products by encouraging humans to consider vegan diets and replacing our beef consumption with…say…bugs! That’s right…insects! Apparently they’re a great source of protein and their gas-passing isn’t quite at the level of our bovine meat providers.

Insects are already a large part of many Earth residents’ diets but I just can’t seem to get excited over a huge dish of larvae stir-fry with a side of chapulines (grasshoppers). If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll get my protein replacement from shake powder and tofu; keeping in mind what I’ve said in the past about an “acquired taste”…if you have to “acquire” a taste it may be best to stick with your initial assessment, which was probably…”yuck”.  

We’re pretty much in cattle country around here so this livestock reduction talk will probably fall on deaf ears because one man’s pollution is another man’s livelihood and I don’t see too many Saskatchewan cattle producers and feedlots switching over to grasshopper or beetle herds in the foreseeable future but I guess it’s nice to know that there are options.

If you get right down to the nitty-gritty of the whole Global Warming/Climate Change/Earth Destruction conundrum it comes right down to science. Science and its advances have led us to this point in the Earth’s ecological history and I am hopeful that science will find a way to reduce or even reverse the damage humans have inflicted on Mother Earth with it.

“You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we’ve elevated the economy above ecology.” David Suzuki (1936-).

APRIL FOOL'S DAY

       Another April Fool’s Day has come and gone. Did you get caught? Did you catch someone? In the past I have stated in this column that I am anti-practical joke because I find them neither practical nor funny…usually. Laughing at the expense of someone else’s embarrassment strikes me as “cheap humour” but there is always an exception to every rule and April Fool’s Day usually provides that exception.


       Case in point…a couple of years ago my youngest sister’s first-born son had just begun a relationship with a girl while he was in his second year of post-secondary education. The struggling student was, as many do, juggling his and his parent’s finances around considerably to get through school. His mother didn’t object too strenuously about his new girlfriend but warned him that he had better “stick to the books” and “get your education” because there was a long, long life ahead of him to “sew his wild oats”, or some such words of wisdom.

       Can you imagine her dismay, displeasure, disappointment and shock when, on one particular early April morning, while everyone was rushing to get out of the house to work and school, he announced that he was getting married and he showed his mother a picture of the huge $4,000.00 diamond ring that he had just purchased on lay away from a prominent jewelry store downtown for his new-found girlfriend?

      “Do you think she’ll like it?” he asked.”

       I’m afraid I cannot relay her reply in this g-rated newspaper but suffice to say there was some “colourful” language involved as she challenged both his memory and his intelligence while raising her blood pressure to dangerous levels, turning her face to shades of red very rarely seen as her window-rattling screaming alerted nearby neighbours that she was more than a little displeased with something going on in her house. It was an A+ conniption fit if there ever was one.

       His laughter enraged her all the more, so between his giggles and her yelling it took a few moments before he could get her calmed down enough to look at the calendar while he finally blurted out “APRIL FOOLS!”

       They were THIS close to riding an ambulance together to the hospital. She from a heart attack and he from a Mother attack! See what I mean about “practical” and “funny”? It’s a subjective subject if you ask me and it all depends on whether you are the joke-ER or the joke-EE.

       My sister eventually got over the shock of it all but she swore she’d never get back the year of her life that her son took away from her that April 1st morning!



“The first of April, some do say

Is set apart for All Fool's Day;

But why the people call it so

Nor I, nor they themselves, do know,

But on this day are people sent

On purpose for pure merriment.”

-Poor Robin’s Almanac 1790.