I started writing this incomplete blog last summer, and I never published it because I didn’t want any of the people sleeping around the house and yard to feel guilty.  Since then, each of them has found a nice place to rent, and the basement and back yard are free from campers.  Now this is like a little time capsule of a manic summer gone by.  Looking back it was a little like what I’d expect spending a week or two in a lifeboat awaiting rescue to be like.  I’m sure they felt the same way and won’t be offended any more.  So what the hell?  Might as well send it off into the internet and get it out of my draft box.

Well so much for being empty nesters!  Looking back to March 2016… (insert harp music here) I was writing a sad little blog entry about the last kid leaving the house and how we never expected any of them to return.  Oh the long lonely nights I was going to be having!  I wasn’t saying necessarily whether I was going to be enjoying those nights or suffering loneliness, but they were on the way.
Fast forward to August 2017, and let me tell you, the nest is a long way from empty. Actually it started filling up again not long after the delusional aforementioned blog. At some points since that time, we have had as many as 8 people living here in our little house. We have two people living in the living room on the floor and another one in a tent in the back yard. The lawn is covered with toys and sprinkler devices and the guts of a trailer under renovation. Every walkway is an obstacle course of bikes, toys, hula hoops and junk. The kitchen is currently free from the usual teetering stacks of Tupperware, but only because I have devoted an hour or so to cleaning it. Still, the kids need various amounts of help, and we are obliged to provide it. And for the vast majority of the time, the company is enjoyable. We do a lot more laughing than complaining. It’s just that there is a certain feeling of being squeezed for space that is more likely to increase as the weather cools in the fall and sleeping on the lawn or in a drafty trailer loses its glamour.  Another threat to the availability of space is the youngest offspring is eight months pregnant. Soon there will be another person here, albeit a really small one. Our lives will soon be divided between times we are tiptoeing around and shouting to be heard.
Storing sildenafil bulk it in a dry place at around 20 to 30 minutes to get completely dissolved in the blood and react. The size and shape of the premises for which you are facing otherwise it would just check for source viagra price online turn out to be a waste of money. Doctors and researchers https://unica-web.com/archive/1999/1999.html purchase viagra in uk show that if you lack it for example , weight gain, sleep debt, moodiness, as well as other medical problems. viagra brand online The result-oriented, quality medicines and treatments have gained them the goodwill and name they have in the market. There are some cultures that really enjoy being crowded together. The families in those cultures live together habitually. The idea of only eight or nine people in the house would likely make them feel lonely.   I wasn’t raised in one of those cultures.  We silly white North Americans like to spread out and prefer junk-free lawns.

See?  That wasn’t so bad.  And here I am 6+ months later, and the nest is empty again.

Well, it’s been six months since I lasted tallied up the 50/50 winnings in Burns Lake, BC.  As a recap, the little town of 2,000, roughly 0.05% of BC’s population, has been winning between 5 – 10% of all the BC 50/50 draws, and hauling in a small fortune.  First let’s crunch the numbers.

July ’17: 10 wins, $17,701

August: 13 wins, $31,465

September: 7 wins, $15,527

October: 7 wins, $20.906.50

November: 6 wins, $13,070.50

December: 6 wins, $16,647.

Last six months of 2017: 49 wins, $115,317.
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Grand total for the year: $202,014.

The average person in Burns Lake won $100 last year on this lottery.

I received quite a few comments on the previous blogs, mostly by people who think something shady is taking place.  I always kept away from saying I thought it was dishonest.  My position has been that there must be a huge amount of tickets sold there.  One person from Burns Lake wrote me to say there’s nothing much else to do there, and that I should concentrate on figuring out why so many million dollar jackpots get won in Ontario and Quebec.  That answer is easy: of the 36 million Canadians, about 22 million people live in those two provinces, and the winning of jackpots is distributed more or less the way you’d expect.  Burns Lake is to BC, population-wise, what Salmon Arm is to Canada.  If suddenly 7 or 8% of the 6-49 and Lotto Max jackpots were getting won in Salmon Arm, a few eyebrows would be raised, to say the least.

My question for the BC Lottery Corporation was why they aren’t printing the photos of big winners from Burns Lake like they do winners from other towns.  They used to publish a photo of anyone winning above $10,000, but now they seem content just to print the names of winners.  It was one of the first things I asked when I first wrote on this topic – is it a town-wide mania or are there a few people winning repeatedly?  Sadly (for curious people) the names of several $10,000+ winners from Burns Lake were never printed.  The only winner who got their name published was someone who lived elsewhere, but bought the ticket there.  BCLC  did write me back, but they only said the pictures and names missing was probably due to the winners not having picked their prizes up yet.  I hope the person who won $12,192 in March and never got named or photographed has picked their prize up, otherwise it will be expiring soon.

The response I got from BCLC came in October.  The woman who wrote the letter said there had been an inquiry into this situation, and that the town of Burns Lake buys between 6 and 8% of all the tickets sold in the province.  Since that matches their winning percentage, it would settle the matter.  She told me twice, in case I missed it the first time, that the numbers were drawn electronically in Kamloops and couldn’t be tampered with.  She also told me that if I wanted to know the identities of the winners, I could fill in a Freedom Of Information request, for which she sent me the link.  I stopped short of doing that.  Some kind of ‘stalker alarm’ went off in my head and I decided to let it go.  Why should I snoop on people whose only misdemeanour is being lucky?  I may reconsider, but it won’t be today.

 

 

When I was a kid, I had the same teacher for grades 4 and 5.  Her name was Mrs Davidson, but we weren’t related.  She was always on a rant about shopping Canadian, watching Canadian TV shows, stuff like that.  She hated how Canadians always seemed to measure their success by how they made out in the USA.  We had a national inferiority complex where we would always need to succeed somewhere else to be any good.  She never got too crazy because we were just kids, but looking back you could see it simmering just below the surface.  I had other people around me who were patriotic northerners, too, but I still think of her when I hear myself telling our kids not to shop at Walmart.

Mrs Davidson lived a long life.  The last time I heard, maybe six or seven years ago, she was still alive, but probably in her nineties.  She must have been aware of Gord Downie, and my guess is, if she understood his role, she would have thought of him as a hero.  Other Canadian musicians made it much bigger in the USA than the Tragically Hip, Gord’s band, but they did so partially by blending into the American scene and keeping their mouths shut about Canada.  I once asked an American friend of mine what Americans think of Canadians, and he said “they don’t.”  For Gord and the Hip, they started off by committing career suicide by singing a lot of songs with Canadian history and hockey as lyrical subject matter.  How where they going to break into the Big Time like that?  They weren’t, and they probably knew it, but they stayed true to their roots.  There are stories about them ‘touring’ in the states, playing shows in small bars to a lot of empty chairs, then on the Canadian leg of the same tour selling out sports arenas across Canada within minutes of putting tickets on sale.

Gord Downie died only yesterday as I write this.  It has been an emotional couple of days for me, and I’m sure millions of other Canadians.  The only bittersweet upside to the last couple days is that Tragically Hip music is being played all day on the radio. Besides his music, he will be best remembered, probably, for fighting brain cancer and raising money for research, and also for his advocacy for indigenous people.  Great causes, to be sure.  For me, the thing I will always admire him for is helping to slay the Canadian inferiority complex.  He was a great song writer and performer, backed by an excellent band.  He could have wound up in the California hills with Neil Young, sitting on a pile of money, but he chose to remain humbly Canadian and tell our stories.

Nature is benevolent when get viagra australia it comes to masturbation, whether they engage in a fast dissolving 100mg tablet. This results in end of romance between the two and finally resulting in problems in their purchasing this levitra 20mg canada day to day life. For work, women dress smartly with her hair and makeup done perfectly. viagra 25 mg There are many supporters of this concept as the solution of the problem is only gaining right manner of detoxification, the full release viagra generika of the body waste is the only act that can help you to get back the healthier lifestyle. Mrs Davidson and I think that’s a great legacy.

 

Our youngest daughter Andria just went through the unenviable predicament of being pregnant in the summer.  It wasn’t the hottest summer or anything, but it was enough to keep her hot and irritable for a few months.  Finally, on 18 September 2017 she ended the misery – just as the misery was ending on its own in meteorological terms – by giving birth to a boy, Kingston.  We teased her for months about naming the boy Gordon, Gord or Gordie, but her and her guy weren’t having any of it.  Instead, they named him after the town our favourite Gord, Gord Downie, is from.

Close enough!

It’s times like these that make you consider the bigger picture.  My grandpa Don Davidson was born in June 1899.  In his lifetime, the changes he saw were staggering.  At his birth, there were no airplanes, cars were invented but were owned only by a few rich people with resources to burn on such wastes of money.  He would be married with kids of his own before cars overtook horses as the most common ride to town.  Almost no one had a telephone.  Recent wars were being contested by armies with horses and single shot rifles.  Queen Victoria was old but humourlessly in command.  Rates of child mortality and death during child birth were, by our standards, astronomical.   Most of those births took place at home, and most doctors didn’t have a medical degree.  According to one source, there was a grand total of 10 miles of paved roads in America!  The changes my grandfather saw in his lifetime, which ended in 1997, were mind boggling.  He died in a world of lasers, space travel, heart transplants, the internet, genetic engineering and instant global communication.
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What changes little Kingston is going to see in his lifetime remain to be seen, but they could be enormous.  We look back one human lifetime ago, and the world seems closer to Medieval times than to now.  Years from now, when little Kingston is an old man, the world of today will probably seem like a primitive, inhospitable time.  He will get to bore his grandchildren with stories about the astonishing lack of technology and backward social thinking that were prevalent in his youth.  Look around you.  Most of the crap in your house will be rustic antiques by then.

I would like to try to guess at some of the things that might be invented by then, but I’m not sure I could.  Only know this: they never intend to let us own flying cars.  They have already been around for 60+ years, and they are going to take off (pardon the pun) in ‘the next year or two’ at every point in time since.  Maybe when the self-propelled cars become a mainstream technology they could let us have self-propelled airplanes or helicopters, secure in the knowledge that Joe Sixpack and his violent tendencies aren’t zooming around trying to bully other commuters in the air.  Or that the crotchety old prick from up the street isn’t going for a speed limit minus 20 km/h scenic Sunday drive in the fast lane during rush hour.

My guess at what the world of 2100 will look like is this.  Much like the life expectancy seems to have peaked, and the next generation is expected to live shorter lives; and like the level of education is steadily declining, so I would expect the rate of technological change to slow too.  Thomas Edison doesn’t exist any more.  Inventions are made in company laboratories and the patents are owned by giant corporate conglomerates.  The US military gets to review every new patent, and anything that looks like a way of killing the opposition is snatched up.   A number of interesting ideas die here.  Nuclear fusion might squeak through.  T-shirts with animated designs are probably not that far off now.  In a similar vein, TVs might be able to encompass entire walls with circuitry overlaid with paint-thin reactive panels.  They could invent a device that mutes molecular excitement, cooling things down very quickly – the opposite of the microwave oven.  Canada will win Olympic gold medals in hockey in perpetuity when sports officials secretly begin breeding Mario Lemieux with Hayley Wickenheiser.  Space travel will get going in earnest with speed of light (or close to it) vehicle speeds.  Space tourism may become a big deal, and Kingston may well leave the planet at some point in his life.  Domed cities seem to be a future thing of the past, as they would have unintended greenhouse effects and block a lot of the vitamin D that was destined to enrich the people living under the dome.  Maybe people will explore the idea of living below ground part of the time, especially since any two-bit dictator can get his hands on a nuclear recipe online.  Sci-fi movies predict that aluminum foil clothing will become popular.  What would be an enormous help to future generations would be finding some way to get the idiot religious leaders to tolerate each other before they end human civilization over some 2000 year old book.  The Price Is Right will continue unabated as foreseen by the Barenaked Ladies.  A time out will need to be called to pause the following for some years: over fishing vulnerable species; over breeding various dog species into retarded, ornamental blobs of barking plasma; genetically engineering food which can survive huge doses of insecticides but pass the poison on to the consumers; and allowing any Kardashian access to vanity surgery.

I have only one beer glass that’s worth a dipper of piss.  It’s a glass I got from the beer store one time when there was some promotion for Molson Canadian on, and they gave away a big glass with “Canadian” (surprise, surprise) and some maple leaves etched into the side.  It’s the one glass I own that not only holds a full beer, but also has a little extra room for clam juice – or foam, if I’m in the state of being in which I no longer pour carefully.  My glass and I are a team on the weekends.  Oh the fun we have!

Enter the kale-guzzling, wheat germ drinking, yoga pant clad kids.  They need to stay hydrated at all costs.  So they open up the cupboard and rummage about for  a suitable vessel from which to quench their thirsts.  They push aside all the lesser glasses, ones that could easily hold enough water to replenish their needs from their latest zumba class, pointless kayak adventure or hike up the Chief.  But NO!, they dig in the cupboard where my one hefty mug is cowering in fear in the back row, like the tall kid in the elementary school class picture, and fill it with filtered water.  Then, to add insult to injury, they take a couple of timid sips and leave it on the counter, three quarters full and dirty, where I have to come along and put it in the dishwasher for them.  Of course, that wasted water goes on my semi-monthly water bill, too, if you want to split hairs.  If this scenario had only happened once or twice I could let it go, but it’s become a regular thing.
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Let this be a lesson: if you get all worked up, for god’s sake use a condom.  You will thank me later.  Or buy a second good beer glass, whatever works for you.

Condoms are cheaper.

Well it’s been another six months since the last update on the Twilight Zone-esque winning streak of Burns Lake, BC in the BC 50/50 lottery, and it’s time for another look in.

I am writing this a week and a bit late because when I was at a recent wedding – our oldest daughter’s – I was talking to some people who were going to Burns Lake.  I was hoping they would do a little journalism for me and ask around about the 50/50, maybe visit the black hole of BC lottery, the Burns Lake Husky station.  It turns out they weren’t interested in the job.  They only wanted to do fun stuff with their family.  How selfish!  Anyways, I know nothing more about the crazy winnings there than I did before.

2107 started out with 7 50/50 wins for Burns Lake in January, netting the town $21,372.50.

February was an atypically slow month with only 3 wins for $7,066.50 – although 3 wins in 112 draw is still about 60 times more than they should win based solely on population.

March was back on track with 4 wins for $18,542.50, including a $12,192 win.
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April was the best month of the year so far, 9 wins for $23,030.

In May they won 3 draws but only won $7,430.

June picked up a little with 4 wins and $9,255.50.

Grand total for six months: 30 wins, $86,697.

I don’t think there’s anything crooked going on, although I have been made aware of certain people writing the BC Lottery Corporation to complain about this little village of 2,000 winning around 100 times more often than their population would suggest they should.  Each time someone wins over $10,000 the BCLC photographs the winner for its website.  So far, no picture of the winner of the $12,192 from March has been pictured.  Either that prize hasn’t been claimed yet, or the winner avoided getting photographed.  I was hoping to see if it was the same man and woman who won during last November’s Grey Cup, but I guess I’ll have to wait.  As for complaining, I won’t.  If it turns out to be the same couple (or friends or whatever), I say good on you!  Maybe when the province isn’t quite as on fire as it is right now I’ll drive up and do my own journalism.

My wife has been going to a clinic in Vancouver that specializes in hormones.  It is called the Westcoast Women’s Clinic.  Turns out they also deal with men who aren’t smart enough to be put off by the name.  Yes, she talked me into going there to discuss my middle aged hormone levels with the all-female staff.  The first step, which happened a couple months ago, was I had to spend a 24-hour period peeing in a plastic bottle.  Then I dashed off to UPS with my frothy little jug and mailed it to a lab in the states.   Today’s trip to the clinic was to go over the analysis of it.

The staff probably looks forward to dealing with male patients as an opportunity to get even with us for all the sins of our gender.  They looked pretty harmless with their free tea, their impeccably clean washroom and twinkly music, but there was a sinister undercurrent brewing.

My consultation was moving along in a cordial fashion as we discussed this and that hormone level, when suddenly my doctor dropped the bomb:  “I’m going to have to give you a prostate test.”  To which I explained that I already had a blood test that showed I was the owner of a happy, normal, non-troublemaking prostate.  This didn’t satisfy the villainous she-devil.  “Those tests aren’t that accurate and it was done several years ago,” she retorted, adding “I can’t prescribe anything without knowing if your prostate is healthy.”  I tried bargaining, offering to sign – even write for her – a waiver that would not hold her responsible for anything that resulted in not screening my happy little prostate mechanically, but she said that was “bad medicine.”

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At this point, reader, I was viciously violated.  Her finger was amazingly strong, pushing me to and fro on the bed as she probed about with a force and vigor such as one might use to operate a jack while changing a tire.  I continued  to try to strike a deal to no avail.  Then she left, no doubt to celebrate her conquest with an office wide round of high fives or other secret sisterhood rituals, leaving me sore and bow-legged in a little puddle of lubricant.  This was not my finest moment.

What do you know?  After all that, it turns out my prostate is happy and healthy, not causing anybody any trouble, just like I told her.

 

Well, it’s tax season again.  Time to wonder where all that money goes.  Income tax on individuals only came into being as a ‘temporary’ measure to help finance WWI.  Prior to that, taxes on businesses kept the government running, usually with a surplus.  Of course, in those days there was no enormous bureaucracy built around the collection of taxes, so they could get by with less revenue.

I thought it would be a simple matter to pore over the data and find how much of our tax dollars are spent paying the wages, benefits and retirements of those who collect the taxes.  I could find the Canada Revenue Agency’s operating budget and number of employees, but – as an example – nothing concrete relating to heating and maintaining the stone edifices of Gatineau, Quebec and an office building in every major centre of the country.  If someone would like to crunch those numbers, have at ‘er.  The point is the CRA is a monster.  I found a report that says the CRA costs $4.2 billion a year, but the verbiage of the passage is so wrapped in bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and accountant phrases that, with my non specialized vocabulary, I can’t fully comprehend what we’re getting for our $4.2 billion.  Does that include wages, bonuses, benefits, retirements etc of all the employees?  Is that the hydro bill?  People like me can’t figure it out, and I’m pretty sure that’t the point.

I heard an idea that I think is worth repeating.  I would love to pretend it was my idea, but it wasn’t, and I came across it long ago enough that I don’t remember where I heard it.  If I ever find out (or remember) I’ll get right back here and credit the owner.  The idea is that the country could replace the CRA (the original idea was American, so the IRS) with a very small streamlined office handling taxation.  Every transaction would be taxed at say 20% without any income tax taken off your paycheque.  The tens of thousands of highly paid bureaucrats sucking at the tit of the old system would be weaned off to find other work; the hundreds of edifices could be sold off or made into affordable housing.  Suddenly criminals and churches would be paying tax too, and with so much more of our money left to spend, the economy would flourish.   The monster would die, and our hard earned tax money could efficiently get to the hands of the government.