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Issue #1133
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The Ontarion

Nova Scotia Sus

Russ

Doug

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The Ontarion

Hello everyone

Here’s another trip back in time? I keep thinking of my high school days and all the great times we had as teenagers! In grade nine i got started on a bad habit by a friend named Joe Doczi! We were instant friends and had a great time together. We discovered we were both roller skaters so we formed a club with a few other friends that scared. We decided to call our club THE TORNADOS!

Our jackets were purple coloured with a roller skate in the middle of the tornado crest on the backs that was designed by Joe! We were so proud of those jackets that we even wore them to school! At that time there was a dress code at KCI and a vice principal by the name of Ross Dunford! One day he called Joe and I into his office and accused us of forming a gang of all things! We told him that we were not a gang but a skating club and just having fun! He was really a nasty man at the time and demanded we stop wearing the jackets to school! Of course we decided to hell with him and wore them anyway! We I guess we compromised and would take them off before we entered the school and would carry them in to school and hung them in our lockers! All the kids thought they were cool and that we caved in to “THE BROW” which I guess we did but they weren’t facing of “THE BROW”! We called Mr Dunford “THE BROW” because he had the thickest black eye brows you’ve ever seen! Eventually the whole school knew him by that Monicer and the mere mention of his nickname name struck terror into the minds of the other students!

One time there was a set of twins by the names of Ron and Ray Kmart and they were friends of ours too! That day Ray and I were fooling around and play wrestling on the balcony above the girls gym and “THE BROW” walked by and yelled at us “you two into my office NOW”! So we followed him to his office! He accused us of causing a ruckus and told us we were suspended for three days and we’d better not miss any home work and to show the work to him when we returned to school after the tree days! While yelling at us, he stood face to face with each of us and when he was doing so with Ron, Ron waved his hand back and forth between them and said “JESUS CHRIST, BRUSH-YOUR TEETH!”

Well you’ve never seen anybody so angry as “THE BROW” after that remark! He in turned, yelled a Ray that he just earned himself another week of detentions after class each day right in Mr Dunford’s office that of course was the worst place to have to work off a detention and I was just glad that it was not that said what Ray had said! Of course we both laughed like crazy when Ray made that remark and that really pissed “THE BROW” off! Soon the whole school heard about Ray’s brave deed and he became the hero of the student body!

That. Was just one episode during my grade nine year but, it will never be forgotten, at least by me and I’m sure Ray would also remember it as well! What “Rebbels we were back then!

That was only grade nine but eventually years passed and after graduation from KCI another friend of mine married “M Dunford’s” daughter and I was invited to their wedding! The reception was held at a curling club called The Granite Club! Of course “Mr Dunford was there and he actually shook my hand and mentioned the incident with Ray and we actually had a good laugh about it! As it turned out he was a very nice man that I got to know that evening and we met on many occasions again over the following years through my friend Larry and Mr Dunford’s daughter Marg! As it turned out, Ross was actually a decent guy once we got to know him out of school! Just shows that you can’t judge a book by its cover! Ross is gone now and left me and I’m sure many others with colourful memories of our days at KCI!

That’s about all I have for this week!

Please take care and thanks for tuning in this week again!

I’ll look forward to talking to you again one week from now!

Goodbye and good health my readers!

Greg

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Nova Scotia Sus

It's Thursday the 8th of Feb. and my first day back to work after our major snow storm from last Friday evening to Tuesday. High winds blew night and day creating huge drifts. Both our entrances kept blocking with snow as we kept digging out hourly. Luckily our doors open in so the shoveling could be done although throwing the snow was getting harder over high banks. We now have narrow paths and tunnels to each door. It's darker in the house since the windows are all covered with snow. Quite a challenge but grateful the power did not go out and the satellite dish still worked with a bit of brushing off. My biggest challenge was that I ran out of chicken food and no way to get more. So we made lots of pop corn and table scraps from all three of our houses here to get us through. I even cooked noodles for them. They didn't suffer. Getting back and forth to the coop was a challenge but nature created a nice drift with almost bare ground showing around our shed.

Zane and Dave started clearing the driveway on Tuesday with his plow truck and our tractor when the winds finally died. It was hard going and both got stuck at different times luckily able to help each other out. Finally we were all cleared but the road was not. So we are not going anywhere soon.

The big plows started making a one way road path in case of emergencies. That was a help but dangerous if you met anyone so we stayed put.

Sus

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From Russ

Oatmeal porridge and woolly caterpillars

"We're going to get it sooner or later", my dad used to say about winter. So far this winter I've had the snow (slush) plowed only twice, and my good neighbor has shoveled snow from my ramps and deck but twice also. I have a feeling Old man Winter is lurking just around the corner, waiting for the early spring that Wiarton Willy has predicted.

This "early spring weather" is both good news and bad - good because of using less heating fuel, not wearing-out our long johns, and preserving our winter boots - bad because the trees are coming back to life - they are tapping Maple-sugar trees in February (normally in March). The "soft fruit" trees are beginning to bud, and if they get hit with a hard frost (and likely will) there will be no fruit!

Some areas in South Western Ontario will no doubt suffer drought conditions, as there is no snow covering the ground and there was no rain to speak-of last Fall. Lake Huron keeps getting lower, and lower as it evaporates - no ice anywhere now!

Last Sunday I saw a 'live' woolly caterpillar beside some sprouting Daffodils in my garden! My son said he saw a Robbin in Kincardine (but I think it must have been one that remained here over winter, and not a returned bird). The lawns in my area have remained green all season - likely to see my neighbor running his riding mower soon. There is no frost in the ground so that migrating Robbins will not starve. Love to be a Robbin, until mealtime.

Last fall I stocked-up on Kellogg's oatmeal as it is a staple for the long, cold, winter months ahead - to date I've not made oatmeal porridge! Cold cereal suites me just fine. Let's hope I'm not eating hot oatmeal porridge in April and May? How do you take your porridge? I put a little butter, salt and pepper on mine. You say you don't eat oatmeal porridge? What in the world is wrong with you??

I'm off for a ride on my 3-wheeler upon the bone-dry roads when the temp reaches double digits this afternoon!

Uncle Russ.

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From Me

How’s it going…..eh?

Firstly, an eye update: From what I can tell it is not normal to feel the procedure happening the way I did during the first eye surgery, so the other eye’s procedure should not be near as uncomfortable. As for the ‘new’ eye, its coming along very nicely. I can see through it way better than I ever could before. The only issue right now is that the ‘new’ eye (meaning the one that has had the cataract surgery) no longer needs corrective lenses but the old eye still does. So, I can either wear my glasses so my old eye can see, or not wear them so my new eye can see. The old eye is the dominant one so its actually easier to still wear my glasses. The solution is to simply pop the lens out to the glasses. The good thing is that the old eye get done on the 22^nd and after that both will be happy.

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Back in early January I replaced both mine and Sue’s computers. Both units were very old, old to the point where they would no longer do security updates, old to the point where they could no longer access secure web sites such as on-line banking etc. They both ran just fine but we needed units running the latest systems in order to be able to do the things we needed to do. Both our computers were Mac mini’s and both were replaced with the new, much more capable and powerful Mac mini’s. (Face it, us guys do like ‘more power’). Transferring all our data from old to new was fairly easy, with a few glitches along the way but nothing too bad. However, the new machines are both running the latest Mac O/S, Sonoma 14.2.1 which is a different architecture than the old Intel based chip sets. So, some of the programs I had been running have not yet been updated to run on the Mac silicon chipsets. That not a problem but it is a nuisance. For instance, when each Squamidian is finished, I used an HTML editing program to convert said issue into Web format for uploading to my web site. I can’t do that on my new system because I can’t find an appropriate HTML editor app that works on the new O/S. My clumsy workaround was to simply pop the document file onto a USB stick, then plug my monitor into the old Mac mini and fire it back up, copy the document onto the old computer and process it there. That worked but it was awkward.

To that end I started pestering Ryan for ideas and help in somehow setting up my computers to I could work on my new one and access the old one through the new one, networking so to speak. He was of course more than willing to help but is also away a lot and not available much to set up the two systems so they could talk to each other. I started mucking around, reading various help pages and eventually got to the point where I could get the new Mac’s to ‘see’ the old Mac, and get the old Mac to agree to being seen. Good first step even if it did take me a week to do. Then, I finally figured out how to do ‘screen sharing’ on the old system which lets the new system ‘see’ the screen of the old system (whether or not the old system’s monitor was turned on meaning I didn’t need to connect a monitor to it). With file sharing also permitted, I could then run the old system through my new system. Very cool, I could have both ‘screens’ showing on my monitor and could do anything on either system using one keyboard and one mouse. That means I can now drag my documents or whatever from one Mac to the other, and do whatever I need to do. Very cool. I shyly admit I’m quite proud of myself. One little but meaningless issue is that I can’t seem to copy and paste between them, I must ‘drag and drop’ each file using the mouse, which is actually a ‘file transfer’ procedure. Not a problem, just something I had to figure out. Pretty cool, eh?

Doug

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Have a Good One
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