Another week of beautiful weather, another week gone. The end of May will soon be on us. Where did the month go? It seems like it just began and now it’s gone. The only down to this weather is it would appear we are in a big drought. I had the hoar frost marked for May 25. May 14 and May 17 were a bust, no rain. We got nothing but cool weather. One night it got cold enough to turn the tops of the wild oats yellow. Unfortunately they survived. They have been here longer than most of us, so that’s what they do. Come hell or high water or frost, they survive.
I don’t have any hoar frost rain possibilities until June now. There is a saying that everyone should be aware of, in a drought all signs fail. By the time you read this you will know if there was any rain May 25. Here is to having all my fingers and toes crossed. We need rain!
My man Jaco and I were snooping the other day. We were fresh air inspectors, spies you might say. We were digging in our fields and also the neighbours’. There is an amazing amount of crop seeded in the dust. There is that saying, seed in the dust and your bins will bust. Hope this is true this year, but so far it looks like drought. It was difficult to find a canola crop that the seed was not in the dust. That stuff will not be germinating until we have a significant rain. Some of the earlier crops that did germinate have had two strikes against them already. One was the frost nights and now that the temperature in the day went up to 27 C and the flea buggers hatched by the hundreds. I hear by the grapevine some people have been spraying. Flea buggers, nothing but pestilence and plague. Who invented those things, anyways?
On the home front, the guys have got the eaves trough on the house done. We didn’t use ladders and a front end loader after all. I had some scaffolding at the elevator and we brought it home and used it. It was Jaco’s suggestion and this time it was a good one. I had to go and buy some scaffolding planks as the ones I had seem to have evaporated. There has been a lot of evaporation at that elevator. Hammers and little handy-sized pipe wrenches go bye-bye. The wind blows the shovels away, too I guess. ‘Cause they just disappear. Some of the guys who visit my elevator should have been raised by my mother. Don’t lie, cheat or steal she said and she backed it up with a big black strap. I didn’t have a big black strap, but I tried to teach my children those values.
The crew had one Texas gate planted in the ground and the hole mostly dug for the second one. We ran out of time, so next week we will go down there again and finish the job. We used the tractor and front end loader. Would be easier if we owned a backhoe, but we don’t. We had some welding to do on one gate so since Quinny was going do the welding, I told Tye he was on fire control and I got him to get a long handled spade out of my truck. He looked at me funny when I told him that he was on fire control, but within two minutes of the welder starting, Tye was fighting fire. You need to stop it before it gets away, you need to snuff it out when the fire is small. I don’t know where that kid has lived before but anytime you are field fixing, either wet down the area where you are working or someone must be there to control the fire. In a drought like this, if the fire gets away there will almost be no stopping it.
In political news Rachel Notley has stated her NDP government is going to raise the minimum wage in Alberta to $15 an hour. It is started. The job killer scenario has started. That is what the NDP do. That move will kill small business. I have hired lots of people at minimum wage and some are just not worth it. The government expects you to pay someone who knows absolutely nothing at $15 an hour. You have to stand there at their elbow to teach them what the job is. Maybe it is different serving coffee at Timmy’s as that is repetitive, but other jobs like farm labourer have a dozen different things you have to do and a screw up could cost the employer hundreds of dollars. There are many jobs that take more training and experience. This wholesale raising the minimum wage to $15 is a bad idea. It will cost people jobs and benefit no one.
The other side of the coin is, people can’t make a living at $10.70 an hour. Well guess what? You can’t make a living at $15 an hour either. If you do the math at 40 hours a week you will get an extra $172 a week. But wait you don’t get that. The government taxes for Canada pension, unemployment insurance and income tax takes about one third so you are now down to an extra $115. Who won here? Not the worker. He will still struggle to make ends meet. Not the employer, all he has is increased costs. Sad. Really sad. We will have a riddle now, the winner is … you have three guesses and the first two don’t count. The answer is the first letter of the word is a G ___ lord love a billy goat, are they going to balance the budget on the backs of the minimum wage earner?
Joke of the week: An old guy was out cutting his lawn. He was riding along on his mower, big grin on his face and you could hear him whistling over the sound of his ride on. Two old biddy neighbours stopped him and said, “You seem really happy today.” “Yup,” the old guy said. “I went out last night and I got lucky.” The old biddies covered their mouths in shock thinking the worst. “Yup,” the old guy said. “When I went to go home, I found my car on the first try.” As my uncle Harold used to say, “Ooooh boy!
