Aaaah, another week of “I wish I was in Waseca” weather. No thank you Hawaii, no thank you Mexico, no thank you Arizona. It’s melting here just about every day. No mosquitoes with the new zika virus. Their little wings get seized up at night. It is just really nice weather.
There is one drawback. We have had freezing rain. That is not nice. I stepped out the front door and almost landed on my kiester. The driving public has been separated into those who know how to drive and those who are in the ditch. Personally those in the ditch are right where they should be. The deal is simple. Learn to drive on ice or stay home and slow down.
Most of the cars in the ditch are those little front-wheel drive units. They give you a false sense of security. They will go like crazy on ice, but they will not stop or turn. You can get going and you think you are all right, but when something happens and loop de loop you are in the ditch.
I had a car like that once, a little Chrysler Dynasty. It got almost four miles to the gallon. It was front wheel drive and we had it for a number of years. I was in Regina once on school board business and in the night came freezing rain. Next morning when we wanted to go home the highway was encased in ice. Cops had to close the highway it was so bad. Semis were in the ditches, cars were in the ditch. I waited until noon and then the Dynasty and I started out. We went 20 and 30 mph, passing vehicles in the ditch right and left. A journey that normally took six hours now was nine or 10, but we made it and I was glad to be home. I was worried about the valley at Lumsdon but after slowly going down, the car went right up.
Later we purchased another car but I kept the Dynasty and it got used as a kid car by our youngest two children. Some mornings, after a weekend with son Mike, I would look the car over and wish it could tell me where it had been. Later I used it as my campaigning car and had many more adventures on the roads going and coming from meetings. After that I horse traded the car and some cash on a deal where I got some canola spirals and a mini seed cleaner. It was a good car.
I want to take objection to writer Lorne Lapshinoff on the subject of the handling of the government finances by the Harper government. He appears to be a real Harper Hater. He states in his column that Harper took the $1.8 billion surplus in the EI fund and use it to balance the pre-election budget in a partisan, self-serving effort to get re-elected.
He also states Harper felt he was entitled to take the $3 billion contingency fund set aside to help Canadians in case of a crisis and instead also used it to help his re-election ploy of a balanced budget. He also states that other assistance programs that were casualties of Harper’s pre-election plan to balance the budget at all costs include not spending $97 million tagged for social services in 2015, therefore further adding to our current strains and shortfalls. Lord love a Billy goat. Is that the only reason you are anti-Harper, because he balanced the budget? That is how you run your personal finances and that is how a government should work, otherwise we are in real trouble!
Lapshinoff made a prediction for 2016 and I will make one, too. Trudeau will do absolutely nothing, zero, zip, nada. He is going to spend his time doing photo ops. The oilfield workers are going to be left twisting in the wind. But he has nice hair.
Quote from Larry at the coffee shop: “Drinking won’t hurt you, it is what you say after that gets you in trouble!”
Joke of the week by Brian Gibb: A woman came home and found her husband in bed with a much younger woman. After much screaming and yelling the younger woman grabbed her clothes and ran off. “What is going on here?” demanded the wife. “Well,” said the husband, “this young lady rang the doorbell, she was lightly dressed and cold. Her car broke down on the road. Well I had to let her in to warm up,” he said. “I noticed that she needed warmer clothes. I also noted she is about the same size as you and you have some clothes you never wear. So I took her up to the bedroom and looked in your clothes closet. You have 15 or 20 dresses and I picked one out for her, because you don’t wear it anymore. You have about 30 pairs of shoes and we picked out a pair since you can’t wear all those shoes. She needed a warmer coat and you had a half dozen coats so I gave her one that you haven’t worn in a long time. She was all decked out with warmer clothes and she asked me, ‘Is there anything else laying around your wife doesn’t use anymore?’ So there we were …”
