Well the packing went well. And my suitcase is only 35 pounds. Hope I brought enough! Oh well, I wear the same outfit for a week at a time anyway. I was telling Kathy tonight that if my suitcase goes missing I am probably the best candidate in the world for that to happen to. I don't mind wearing the same outfit til the first of April. And the general Chinese population aren't known for their high fashion. Good thing I can eat like a pro with chopsticks...no food trail down my front.
Last night I was sitting here watching something and enjoying my Monte's dog when I distinctly heard a woman talking in my basement. Only now and then, not continuously. Scared the bejesus out of me! So I crept over to the top of the stairs until I heard it again. It was fairly faint but it definitely was a woman talking.
There are no radios or tv's down there. I had to go down but I have to admit if I had Bill's baseball bat right then I would have gone and got it.
I turned the lights on and slunk quietly down into the dark unknown. I went and stood in the middle of the very large room, and closer to the light. It tends to be really dark at the stairs end.
I waited. And waited. Suddenly, from over there, a woman robotically says, " The batteries are getting low. You must replace them immediately!" What the hell? It took a minute but I finally found a smoke alarm halfway up the wall by the freezer that was clearly in distress. Well it isn't anymore. Its off the wall and laying on the bed. Stupid thing! Who buys a talking smoke alarm anyway??? (shovel list)
I took Wrangler Dangler up to the dog resort this morning. Boy is he ever smart. He has only been there once. The resort is way out in the country, nothing around. As soon as we got near the road turn off where the resort is, not the actual turn off to the resort, he started to go nuts! How the hell he knew where we were is beyond me. He has the most phenomenal memory. He was so excited to be there, thank goodness.
I spent ages yesterday diddling with a fifty pound bag of dog food and thirty five zip lock bags and a giant box of dog bone treats. At the end of the ages spent, I had thirty five bags of dog food and dog treats. And that dog followed every single move I made. Every time I dug into the bag with the measuring cup he would do a little dance then when I put it in the bag instead of giving it to him, he would deflate a little. He did that thirty five times!
Well I am going to try to blog while I am over there. I think the wifi is going to be sketchy at best but some of the hotels may have business centres with internet. In the meantime be safe and happy peeps and I shall post all I can. TTYL
ps: if any Asians are reading this, please do not be offended by anything I say about Asians. I am pretty sure Asians have some pretty low opinions of us over here!!!! And rightfully so!
I am having a hard moment here so I thought I would post random stuff and take my mind off things. Sometimes, actually quite often, something reminds me of Monte and I just....well kind of get overwhelmingly sad. So I distract myself one way or the other. Right now I figure talking with all of you will help. I will let you know how I feel at the end of the post!
Packing. I have been packing. Our suitcase can't be over 44 pounds for heaven's sake. Thats okay for the skinny binny little people like my sister. But if you compare, lets see, a pair of jeans, hers will be a quarter of a pound, and mine are three pounds. My shirts are huge and weigh a ton, hers are tiny and weigh nothing. You get the picture.
And to top it off we have found out that at one part of the trip it will be 0 degrees and at another it will be 25. What the hell???? So now I have to pack two entirely different wardrobes...for three weeks. Sure...I am going to be one dirty specimen by the time I am heading home. Oh, and I have to pack a dressy outfit for supper with the Captain of the river boat. Come on!!!! I remember this was the part of cruising I didn't like.
Okay, lets see, what happened this week. Ummm...oh I saw an old lady's underwear fall down to her ankles. I felt so bad for her. But the younger person with her just helped her pull them up and she continued on. We were in Rexall.
I remember Mom telling me about Gramma. They were in Vancouver. Gramma was getting treatment for cancer. By then she was well into dementia. As they walked down the sidewalk heading to the clinic, Gramma's undies fell right down to her ankles. Mom said that Gramma stopped, looked down, and then gracefully stepped out of them and continued on down the street!!! Mom just left them there sitting in the middle of the sidewalk!
I did a stupid thing today. I needed to express post some documents down to Aryn today. I was at the post office in the back of Rexall. It costs 12 bucks to send express post. So the lady gave me the cardboard envelope with the forms stuck to it to fill out. And the print is tiny! And my eyes do not work together any more. Tiny up close print is almost impossible to read. Once I am looking at something four feet and more away I am fine.
So, with great difficulty I managed to fill out the TO part and then the FROM part. All done I hand it back to the post lady and she informs me that I did it backwards! I put the to in the from and vice versa. Shit!!! I had to pay another 12 bucks for a new one! She told me next time to get her to fill it out for me...its a service they offer to the blind!
Sooo, lets see. Two nights ago Kathy, Iris and I went to one of the most Canadian events one can attend. Mary Walsh from This Hour has 22 Minutes was giving a performance. Kathy got us tickets and away we went. What an amazing evening. She was so damned funny! She started as Marge, coat, hat, purse, the whole shebang! She walked through the audience and up to the stage, talking all the way and cracking us all up...and it was a huge audience.
When she got to the stage she slowly, as she talked, unbuttoned her coat, took it off and she was in a bra and girdle underneath!!! OMG...soooo funny!!!! The theme to her performance was Feminism, Food and all the other F words! And she pinched the inch of overhang fat between the top of the girdle and her bra, made relevant comments about muffin tops then picked up hockey tape and wrapped it around herself...and it worked!
About half way through the evening, I felt something or someone smack my hair. It was really odd because the row of seats behind me weren't that close. After a couple of minutes a lady tapped me on my shoulder and told me that something had come flying from somewhere and landed in my hair! At first I thought a bug so I shook my poof pretty hard. But then another gal reached over and pulled a good sized round ball of oily foam out of my hair!
We were totally flummoxed as to what the hell it was!!! Meanwhile I look over at my sister and she is completely doubled over, killing herself laughing. I know I have a history with my stupid hair. I have had weird things come out of my hair, I think I even blogged about that a couple of years ago...you know....sticks, leaves, earrings, pencils....but this oily foam was a new one.
I put some on my fingers and smelled it. It smelt like industrial lanolin, you know the oil you get from sheep's wool. I can only figure it fell from above in the lighting or something. It covered a reasonable sized piece of my hair...and my hair at that spot was totally oily. And sheep must know something because today that part of my hair is shiny and smooth and really healthy looking!
Well I feel much better...thank you people, and I shall stop rambling now. Take care...love you all...TTYL
From the moment I started working in 1981, I have paid exorbitant amounts of income tax. One year Bill and I paid over 110,000 (part of that was a capital gains).
For the most part I am happy to pay my taxes. I mean after all look what we get in return. Schools, roads, infrastructure, legal aid, hospitals, medical....just a minute. Did I say medical?
Well its true. I have had operations, tests, and the occasional, every three months, doctor appointments to renew my prescriptions.
And today was the day. I took my last pills last night. So I started the process of finding a walk in clinic. There is no such thing as a family doctor here, at least not in a timely time frame.
I found the nearest clinic on google and read the instructions. Get there early. There is a sign up board outside. They will call you and tell you when your appointment is.
So I get up at 6:30. Do Wrangler and get him into the jeep. I decided to take him with me. And down we drive to the clinic. I got there at five to seven.
And...there is already a line up. No board to sign up outside. Just a line up. I get out and get into line. Veterans of this clinic tell me that a sign up clip board comes out at eight o'clock. You sign up and then you come back at nine. You wait inside until your name is called and you are given an appointment time to come back to. Sometimes that doesn't happen until ten or 11 o'clock.
As I stood there people started flocking towards the clinic. It reminded me of being in Burnaby at the Willingdon MacDonalds around eight at night. Crows fly into the field beside McD's from all over the lower mainland...slowly floating in until the sky is black with them. Before you could say Bob's your uncle, our lineup snaked down the long sidewalk and out of sight around the corner.
In this line up were young and old, some coughing, some clearly sick, leaning on the building, heads down, eyes shut. And an amazing amount of them would have someone hold their spot in line whilst they went over there to smoke. Everyone was shivering with cold and moving slowly from one foot to the other, rocking back and forth. And this was at seven.
As the hour went by more and more people showed up. One poor woman had two little ones about 2 and 4 and she had a newborn in a stroller. There was an old man with a younger person, the old man in a wheelchair. When they realized the system and how it worked the younger one put the old man back into their car and he came and stood in line.
Un frigging believable!!! Un frigging acceptable. I know there are those out there that say its getting better here in Kamloops but I sure as hell haven't seen evidence of that. And when the clip board did come by and I signed up, I noticed there were only fifty spaces for names. So if anyone was past that they were shit out of luck.
And I do have some opinions on how we could start to fix this...starting with Dr's salaries. In my opinion only, we need to pay our doctors more, way higher up the priority scale than free frigging day care, especially for households making 48,000 bucks. Having a kid is a choice, needing a doctor is not. Just saying.
Okay now its later in the day. I went back down to the clinic at nine. The waiting room had 47 people in it. All the people that were on the sign up sheet were there and a bunch of walk in hopefuls and a few that had appointments somehow. It took until 9:45 for her to call people up one at a time and either tell them to take a seat and wait or come back at a later specific time.
I was one to take a seat. At 10:25 I got called in to see the doctor. I was in there for about five minutes. The male doctor had the most gorgeous hair. I am pretty sure he was transitioning. Anyway after he did what I wanted (which did NOT involve taking my blood pressure or blood sugar...hah!!! I win) I told him he had gorgeous hair. He was so fricken pleased and even blushed! He asked me what my blood pressure was and I said 110 over 60 ....NOT...and he asked my sugars and I said 4 ....NOT.... and that was it!
Meanwhile, when I went out into the waiting room, the receptionist was busy telling everyone that they had reached their limit for the day, so had the other two clinics in the town and if it was important to go to the hospital.
I REST MY CASE!
TTYL
