Problem with Pay As You Go

Barb and I share a Rogers pay-as-you-go cellphone. Barb puts $100 on it once a year. Then if she renews it before the end of the year, she can carry over any unused value. She last renewed the cellphone when we got back from Florida.

I use the cellphone quite a bit for my ball teams. I also brought the cellphone to Pike Lake when I was there for my Dad's funeral. The real estate agent who was selling my Dad's house would call me on the cellphone even when I got back to Ottawa.  This frustrated Barb but I didn't complain.

While I was in Pike Lake, I tried to check how much money was available. I didn't know the PIN number that Barb had put on the account. So I changed the PIN number to one I knew.

Later Barb tried to access the account. However, she didn't know that I had changed the PIN number. So she wasted a lot of time without getting through.

Then my sister visited for the weekend. She texted me to tell me when she would be arriving. I didn't get the text. My sister thought I was rude not to reply. I told her I didn't get the text. She resent the text, I didn't get it the second time either.  We thought she must have been sending it to the wrong phone number.  Daphne said she was sending it to the same number that she had in the past when it had worked.  It was very mysterious.

After Daphne went home, I phoned the cellphone account to change the PIN back to Barb's number. The administration site told me the cellphone had expired. Barb checked the amount of money available on the phone. She thought it said $8.20. She didn't have her glasses and the print was very small. I rechecked it. I found out that the amount was really $0.20.

Since it costs 40 cents to receive a text, Daphne's texts couldn't come through. So Barb went on line and put $100 on the account.

We were surprised that Rogers hadn't informed us that the cellphone account was running out of credit. However, we were happy to fix the problem. I might need the phone in the next couple of days for my ballgames.

Pickleball Trip with a Control Freak

Barb is really into Pickleball. She plays nearly every day.

She is even travelling all over Ontario to play in competitions. She recently travelled to Oshawa with three other ladies to play in a women's double and a mixed doubles competition.

The women who “organized” the trip is the so called Pickleball Ambassador for the area. A couple of days for the trip, Barb and the other ladies, who were travelling together, received an email for the ambassador. In the email, the ambassador explained every little detail about the trip: when they would leave, what they should bring, where they should eat, what they should bring to the gym. It was the work of a super control freak. One of the ladies told Barb confidentially that she might not be able to take it travelling with such a control freak.

Barb didn't let the control freak bother her. She won Gold in the women's doubles and Silver in the mixed doubles.

Sarah Badgers Through

I have a nickname for Sarah based on the Honey Badger. There is a video on Youtube about the Honey Badger. The Honey Badger is a bad-ass. He doesn't care about any kind of problem that he faces. He just goes ahead and gets whatever he wants. I call her Sarah Badger.

We were driving to Indiana to visit Barb's friend from Florida for the long weekend. It was a 12 hour drive. During the drive, Sarah was working on a poster for her summer job at the university. She had a moral quandary because she was supposed to show her experimental results. However, her experiment wasn't working and the methodology was not very well controlled.

I tried to help her while driving but I didn't know what to do. When we got to Indiana, Sarah was still working on her poster. She worked late into the night and then got up early in the morning and finished it up.  Then she emailed it to her supervisor at the university.

When she got back on Tuesday, she printed it out.  The competition was later in the week. The poster competition was for all of the undergraduate students who were working at the university. There were about 50 of them.

Sarah won third prize. I told her that it was great that she “badgered” through her problems and got what she wanted.

Adventures in Canadian Health Care

Laura's Ontario health insurance card expired on her birthday. Fortunately, she was able to renew it in Mount Forest before she left for England.

On the way back from South Africa, Laura began throwing up on the plane. When she got to Vancouver, she went to the hospital. They asked for her health card. She showed them her temporary card from Ontario. 

They also wanted to see identification. All she had was her Vancouver driver's licence. She had to explain the long story about working in Vancouver two years ago.  Then she went back to school in Halifax last year. However, her home address was still Ontario. Fortunately, they accepted her card.

She was diagnosed with urinary tract infection and given introvenous antibiotics. Then she was given a prescription for an oral antibiotic and released from the hospital. She had a bad reaction to the oral antibiotic. So she went back to the hospital the next day.  She got a prescription for a different oral antibiotic.

A couple of days later, she was feeling better. 

She was hoping to work on the new Tim Burton movie when she got to Vancouver. But by the time she was feeling well enough to work, the Tim Burton movie was wrapping up. We saw pictures of Laura at the wrap party on Facebook. She got to meet Tim Burton at the wrap party though which was a dream come true.

World Travelling Daughter

After Laura came to Mount Forest for my Dad's funeral, she left for London to volunteer at the World pole dancing competition. She spent the weekend in London with some competitors from Halifax. 

Then she started on an adventure around England and Ireland to visit my relatives.

First, she had to figure out the train system because she couldn't rent a car with her current credit card limit. She got to Preston first to visit with my cousin Ruth and her family. 

She was also able to visit with Ruth's brother Billy and his family. 

From there, she went to Whitby to visit my cousin Gail and her family. 

Then she was on to visit my cousin Stuart and his family in Hull. 

Then to Manchester to fly over to Ireland.

In Ireland, she visited Tipperary to meet my relatives on my mother's side of the family. 

Then she went to County Wicklow to visit with my aunt Carrie and her family and my aunt Violet and her family.

There were many pictures posted on Facebook by my relatives.  So we could see where she was.

Then she went back to England and met my cousin David and his family in Shepton Mallet. 

Then back to London where she had lunch with my cousin Paul. Paul dropped her off at Heathrow to fly to South Africa.

There she was planning to meet up with a school chum who was running an art school. She planned to volunteer there and see the sights of South Africa.

Then back to Vancouver through London. In Vancouver, she will be back working in film production and lighting.

Requiem for an Irish Man

My Dad was born in a little farm house in Ireland. He had six brothers and three sisters. The boys were wild and fought like cats. But my Dad had fond memories of growing up on the farm.

He never did well in school. However, he valued the education of my sister and I. He always said to me “Knowledge was no burden to carry”.

Later in life, he bought a set of World Book encycloypedias. He used to read them in bed. He would come down in the morning talking about canons and camels and castles. We knew he was reading the C book.

When my grandfather retired from farming, the Taylors moved to a big house in town. The boys became fancy dressers who loved big cars. They would come home from church on Sunday afternoon, open the hood of their cars and start changing the oil or fiddling with the carborator in their Sunday best. He continued to do this all his life. My Mom used to get furious at him.

He lived at home until he got married at the age of 36. Apparently, on his wedding night, he sat on the edge of the bed and cried about having to leave home.

Shortly after he married, he and Edwina came to Canada for the job opportunities in carpentry and teaching. He always regretted leaving Ireland. He went back many times to visit. He used to say to people that he has lived in Canada for 50 years but he only lost his accent 10 years ago.

When he left carpentry, he worked in real estate. He would get listings by going door to door. He would talk his way into the house and convince people to put their house up for sale over a cup of tea. One time he was forcefully told to go away in sign language by a deaf couple.

His most famous client was Tim Horton when Tim Horton was starting his famous business in 1966. I remember in 1967, my Dad taking me to the opening of the first Tim Horton's donut shop in Burlington. Tim Horton brought the starting lineup of the Toronto Maple Leafs there just after they won their last Stanley Cup.

He went from real estate into the hardware business. He bought a little Home Hardware store on the Hamilton Mountain. I used to help him on my summer vacations. My aunt and uncle and cousin lived in an apartment in the back of the store. One day my aunt gave us a mattress, she didn't need anymore. We put it on the roof of the car in the morning. In the evening, we got in the car and started to drive home. Pulling away from a stoplight outside the hardware store, my Dad cried, “Oh the mattress!” I looked back and saw the mattress bouncing down the road on its edge before being driven over by a bus.

He learned to play golf with my sister, me and my friends at a little executive golf course in Clappisons Corners north of Burlington. Little did we know that it would become his major passed time in later life. Before he retired and started going to Florida, he even played golf in the winter in Hamilton. He got his picture on the front page of the paper putting on a snow covered green. They had to shovel little paths with their clubs to get to the hole.

My high school friends in Burlington used to tell me about playing golf with a little Irishman who was telling jokes and singing songs who turned out to be my Dad.

His other favourite passed time was taking Sunday drives. He continued that tradition long after everyone stopped doing it when gas prices increased drastically in the 1970's. He loved to take friends and family on long drives in the afternoon to see the sights. He would often drop in unannounced to see old friends and have a cup of tea.

When he could no longer drive, he enjoyed Daphne taking him for long drives to do her errands. He passed that “going out” gene on to Daphne and at least one of his granddaughters. So we know his “going out” and his “love of golf” genes will live on through his offspring.

Die Dove

Ever since Sarah was a baby, Barb and Sarah have had a cute way of saying goodnight or goodbye. They say “Die Dove You” or “Die Dove” for short which is baby talk for “I Love You”.

Since Sarah has the Rogers My Ten on her cell phone, she can phone home any time of day to talk to Barb for long as she wants. She is working at University of Guelph this summer. She usually phones home to talk to Barb on her lunch hour when she is sitting outside eating.

One day she was talking to Barb but Barb had to go out of the house. So Barb handed me the phone to finish talking to Sarah during her lunch hour.

As I was talking to Sarah and heard the call waiting beep.  So I hung up on Sarah.  We had finished talking.  I picked up the waiting call from my brother-in-law Truman. He wanted to tell me about how my Dad was doing in the nursing home.

As Barb was rushing out the door, she ran over to me and yelled into the phone "Die Dove" thinking Sarah was still on the phone. I don't know what Truman must have thought.