The Squamidian Report – April 18 / 09
Issue #360
Including:
The Ontarion
Hi All,
As soon as I send out today’s addition of this newsletter, Sue and I will head in to the train station in Vancouver to pick up Carol and Al. They have supposedly been relaxing on a cross-country train excursion for the last several days. Perhaps they will fill in the details next week.
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The end of an era has come upon us. After a six year run, the world famous Canadian comedy known as Corner Gas has ended. They could have kept going a few more years but the writers and actors decided not to run the show into the ground like so many shows are, and all have new projects to move on to. Corner Gas was far more successful than the creators and writers ever dreamed. It was never crude or stupid like the average American sit-com. It never used stereotypes or vulgarity in an attempt to be funny. It was simply well written and clever. The characters represented every ‘normal’ person you’ve ever met.
The last ‘new’ episode ran on CTV last Monday evening. It will be repeated again this evening (Sat. April 18) on the Comedy channel, at least out here it will. Don’t know for sure about anywhere else in the country. If you are able to catch it, you might also find two accompanying programs, Inside Corner Gas which is quite interesting, and CTV’s eTalk Today. Don’t waist your time watching that one. It is poorly done and stupid like all the other eTalk programs.
As most of you know, I’ve always been a fan of the show, its characters and it’s setting. We’ve even got pictures of us on the set from when we did our bike trip last summer. Even the location for the show, Dog River, (Rouleau, Saskatchewan) was genius. It’s the kind of place, in the middle of now where, that you’d expect to find the Dog River characters. Hope you enjoyed the show as much as I did.
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In preparation for this year’s motorcycling season, I’ve had two new tires put on my Harley. Bikes go through tires much faster than cars do. Very much faster. A bike tire must be very strong but have soft sticky tread so that the tire resists slipping out when cornering. The trade-off is that soft tread wears down fast and as safety is the most important aspect of tires, they must be replaced before they wear out, not after. Bikes tend to go through two rear tires for each front tire. So, as I had already replace the rear a year ago, it was time to do both.
We have a weird old biker dude here in town who is a Harley tech (I think I’ve mentioned him before) who will supply and install a tire at less than half the price that a dealer would charge, and they are the exact same tires. Anyway, the bike is now ready for the open highway. Bring it on.!
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I had been putting off dealing with my now old computer all winter. Now that I’ve run out of time (nice weather, back to work etc) I decided to buckle down and do it. It has been 5 or 6 years now since I built this computer and I’ve never re-installed the operating system. As you know, Windows systems tend to collect all sorts of digital junk and dead end bits of code that slow the machine to a crawl and start to cause errors and shutdowns.
I used to love doing that kind of stuff but it has been years since I was doing it all the time as a hobby. Now it is just stressful and time consuming. However, it had to be done so I formatted my C: partition and re-installed the operating system and all the necessary programs which are about half as many programs as were on it before. Of course I had to jump through Microsoft’s Product Activation loopholes and then do all the updates that my old version of XP required. Actually, I had to do the whole thing twice. That brain dead Product Activation suddenly decided that I had run out of time to activate after I had already done it, and messed up my system. So I ended up re-formatting and re-loading everything. Second time through it went just fine.
One problem I had to deal with was my Email address book. I had backed up everything to several different places and all my personal data on my D: partition came through just fine. But when I imported my address book back into the ‘new’ version of Outlook, it just brought over all the names and addresses, but not my ‘groups’. So I had to re-create my Squamidian mailing lists. Not a big deal but it took time to find and copy the names. So if you now get your issue at a wrong address or not at all, let me know so that I can fix it.
doug
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THE ONTARION REPORT
Hello
Everyone!
Well,
I’ve finally witnessed the true end of an era that was significant in my life.
On Wednesday evening of this past week I attended the annual “Retirement
Banquet” for the Waterloo Professional Fire Fighters Association. On that
occasion the banquet was held to honour the final five members out of 24 of the
association that started their careers in the spring and summer of 1973. The
occasion for the hiring of the 24 of us was the opening of Waterloo’s second
fire station on Westmount Rd at University Ave. We were trained from March of
that spring until the opening of #2 Station in October ’73. We trained and
trained and fought fires, rescued ducklings from storm drains and kids from
swollen creeks, freed men trapped in industrial presses, cut people out of
wrecked vehicles and yes even cried when we returned to the stations after
pulling the lifeless body of a young child out of a smokey black house fire in
the middle of the night. We broke windows to ventilate burning buildings and
cut holes in the rooftops as well so we could let the smoke out to enable us to
find the “seat” of the fire so we could extinguish the flames. We breached
concrete block walls, climbed our 100’ aerial ladder to access upper floors and
worked in the middle of winter to stop many a major fire from destroying a
block of buildings in the uptown area of the city. Many times we spent more than twenty four hours working on a
major fire in below Zero Fahrenheit snowy weather with the wind howling down
King St like a run away freight train. There was more than one occasion where
we had to call in flat bed trucks so we could load the frozen 50’ lengths of
fire hose on the trailers and have them taken to the board of works garage so
they could be thawed out and cleaned for reloading on the fire pumpers. No
doubt every one of the guys that were hired in that group of 24 remembers what
I’m talking about.
It’s
totally amazing to me that that 36 years has gone by so quickly. With this
being the retirement of the final five members of that particular hiring spree
it sure hit home for me. I have never missed a chance to attend this function
unless I was working a shift over that year’s banquet evening. It’s a chance to
see people that were a significant part of my life and are no longer in it. I
can’t say I was close friends with all of these guys but I will say whenever we
had to respond to a call we were as tight as two coats of paint and as close as
any brothers could be. If we were at odds back at the station for any reason
that was all forgotten when the bell rang. Many a petty beef was carried on
after the call but in the final analysis any such arguments or disagreements
were resolved and forgotten. It’s a fact that in any profession or place of
employment there is a modicum of discontent and I’m sure you all know there are
“less than desireables” in the crowd no matter where you work or who you work
with. That’s just a fact of life! I will say however that the fire service
breeds camaraderie that is beyond compare. This past Wednesday’s celebration
was one that brought to an end an era that could only be held in several
volumes of written true stories if one took a notion to put pen to paper. It
was announced by the association president John Dietrich that we now have 56
healthy retired former members of the Waterloo Professional Firefighters
Association. With a total staff of firefighters numbering 112 now in Waterloo,
we retirees represent a pretty positive outcome for those looking forward to
collecting their pensions some day. The
end of this era tugged at the strings of my heart when I realized that this
chapter of WFD’s history is finally closed!
That’s it
for now folks!
Thanks
for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you all again next week in The
Ontarion Report!
Bye for now… Greg.
PS: Of
the original 24 people hired for the opening of Station #2 twenty three are
still with us. The 24th member, a friend of mine and one of the
nicest guys I’ve even known passed away when he was drawn out to sea by an
undercurrent in the ocean in the Dominican Republic in 1999. His name was Alan
Gross and I dedicate this edition of The Ontarion Report “The end of an Era” to
his memory!
“Rest In Peace” Al. Greg.
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Have a good one..
the doug
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