We survived Christmas in spite of all the visitors. In fact, we all enjoyed a good time.
New Year’s Eve was very quiet and peaceful. The only fly in the ointment was the blizzard and extreme drop in temperature that befell us.
One of our neighbours across the street was transferred here from Vancouver Island late last summer. I feel sorry for him. After the snow dump, I saw him shovelling off his driveway when the snowplow went by. He smiled and waved at the plow operator, and shovelled off the little ridge left by the plow. A little while later, our neighbour was backing his car out of the garage, and as he went to close the garage door, the plow went by again. With a grim look on his face, he just shook his head at the operator. He had no sooner shovelled off that ridge as well when the grader went by on its first pass. My neighbour shook his fist at the operator, put some muscle into the effort and got rid of that ridge of hard packed snow just before the grader operator came back on his last sweep leaving another hard-packed snow ridge in his driveway. The neighbour flipped the operator the bird, threw his shovel at the grader and just drove over the ridge. In fact, the ridge is still there! I haven’t spoken to him yet. I think I’ll wait until April or May before I approach him.
I was talking to my brother Moritz back in Norway, and the day that we woke up to minus 30 degrees Celsius and a blizzard, they experienced a balmy plus eight degrees Celsius and sunshine! I guess Saskatchewan has somehow managed to absorb all the cold and snowy weather that should have fallen on Northern Europe. Oh well. Helping the world is what we Canadians do!
Ole owned a fishing and hunting lodge in Northern Saskatchewan close by a small town, but he closed it over the winter because it would be too cold to operate. He spent the winter in Florida. He was enjoying a cool beer with his friend Sven in the local tavern. “How cold is the winter in Saskatchewan anyway?” asked Sven.
“Well,” said Ole, “let me put it this way. One year I stayed at the lodge over the winter. It got so cold that I chopped up the piano for firewood, but I only got two chords out of it!”
“Wow!” said Sven, “that’s cold!”
“That’s nothing,” said Ole, “the local lawyer had to keep his hands in his own pockets to stay warm!”
“Then it must have been really cold!” said Sven.
“Yeah,” said Ole, “I met my neighbour outside and it was so cold that what we said froze in the air, and we had to grab a handful of sentences and bring them inside to thaw out for us to figure out what we said! Many chickens were seen running to the nearest Chick-A-Doodle-Do restaurant begging to be put on the hot grill to get warm!”
Ole said he had heard that an owner of a construction project in the small town near his lodge decided to get earmuffs for his Scottish foreman Angus, so that all Angus had to do was to flip a muff to the side so he could listen to his cell phone. The owner drove by the project on a bitterly cold day, and noticed that Angus wasn’t wearing the earmuffs, and his ears were bright red from the cold. He approached Angus and asked him why he wasn’t wearing the ear muffs.
“Oh, its kind of inconvenient,” said Angus.
“How so?” asked the owner.
“Well, they’re kind of warm and all,” said Angus, “but the other day an old friend of mine came by and offered to buy me lunch, and being Scottish and all I would have accepted a free meal, but I couldn’t hear him, so I lost out on a free lunch!
“Never again!” said Angus, “never again!”
Truls was standing in front of the Chick-A-Doodle-Do restaurant when he witnessed an automobile accident. He was asked to give witness at the court hearing. “How far away from the accident were you when it happened?” the defense lawyer asked.
“I was 11 metres, seven centimetres and two millimetres away,” answered Truls.
“Nonsense!” exclaimed the lawyer angrily, “how can you be so precise?!”
“Well,” said Truls, “I thought some smarty-pants defense lawyer would ask me, so I went and measured it!”
Lena had been charged with a moving traffic violation, and had to appear in court. The judge, with his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose, looked down at Lena and asked, “What is your occupation?”
“I’m a schoolteacher,” answered Lena.
A big smile of delight appeared on the judge’s face as he leaned back in his chair and said, “My dear, I have waited for many years to have a schoolteacher appear before me in this court! Now please sit down at that table over there, and in a neat cursive handwriting please write ‘I will never drive through a red light again’ five hundred times!”
Everybody I talk to is concerned about Mr. Donald Trump serving as President of the United States, and the impact, positive or negative, his policies will have on our economy.
Trump seems to be having a very informal relationship with his security detail, and I can only envision the day that somebody will try to attack him and one of the security guards will yell “Donald, duck!”
