Finally returned from the 4th of July long-long weekend.
Exhausted.
Of course, we have no cable, no internet, and no telephone other than cellphones. The island is in a spot where the signal from the US is mostly lost, and the signal from Canada is very infrequent, since the territory of Bjekwanong lies between Canada and our place.
I decided I will start up my poetry blog again. I let it drop about a year ago, when we started the job of cleaning and selling my mother's condo, and then moving her closer.
Then my brother died suddenly.
This was followed by my wife's sister's passing early this year.
Things are better.
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7 comments:
Sometimes stuff just is! My Dad would never allow technology beyond a radio at the crib (holiday house) because he didn't want any work on his time off. We did stuff....together :)
viv
Back then - and now, too, come to think of it - we have 1 TV station from Wallaceburg, Ontario.
It is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with the call letters CBET. Every time I look at it I think it is Russian, or COBET : Soviet television (советский)
Wish foreign languages were comprehensible to me but I suffer from visual dyslexia so that was no go. I did try but suspect that immersion in the sounds would be my only hope and that is rather impossible living here. It's almost two years since Mum died now. I'm just happy she didn't get to see the mess the cowboy builder created with her small legacy! This too shall pass - must find out where that comes from.....
viv
Truly this is a puzzle.
You intimate foreign language are not comprehensible, then you say "cowboy builder", which is a thoroughly unfamiliar and unusual, hither-to-unseen expression.
I looked up the Waikato Times, New Zealand, and found some stuff:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/opinion/columnists/stephen-oliver/7997573/What-became-of-the-cowboy-builders-and-the-shonky-jobs
which clarifies "cowboy builder" and similar expressions:
"From every point of the compass they came, holed up for years in the dead end gulches of shonky jobs. The "Do It Yourself Boys" - masters of the celebrated dwang, joist haulers and concrete-pad lads, warriors of the skill-saw and angle grinder, the chisel champs and jackhammer jocks, the under-cut boys; the "no-job-too-small-for-cash crews" camped out in the wastelands of far-flung suburbia. Meanwhile, across the ditch, from Caboolture to Gundagai, the bad boys of the rivet-gun and crow bar gangs hearing the call - saddled up and rode out. Not one Trade Certificate between them."
Our cowboy builder had a certificate and references and still left us in a big mess with illegal stuff all over that we can't afford to fix. Not enough income to extend the house mortgage with either so no proper kitchen and an outdoorish bathroom it is for the forseeable future. Which is why I'm sitting here with a rug - he also left us with poor insulation, no back wall cladding and my nice new double glazed window is still sitting wrapped up on the drive. I suppose I should be grateful we still get to live here!
viv
Certificate and references?
I suppose we must ask that they post a bond to do work.
Honor and honesty are those virtues which children must learn, and which require 12 to 20 years to learn from the whole village. Our societies are failing quite spectacularly at this type of upbringing.
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