Emma's Back from Windsor

Emma returned home today from a week in Windsor with Jack. She left Windsor yesterday at 0550hr. and arrived in Moncton at 1158 today. She was a tired girl.

She had a great week and talked the whole drive home. There was no worry that I would fall asleep at the wheel for the drive home. :-)

Via Station Moncton

Tunnel from Windsor to Detroit

The Renaissance Center in Detroit

She saw a NHL game in Windsor

She has lots of stories and interesting experiences (my favorite so far is her adventure crossing the border into Detroit and the people (American) at the hockey game)

New Great Niece

Abigail Miriam Therese Andrews

born Feb. 25, 2010

to Katie and Ben.

She missed my birthday by less then 2 hours :-(

Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange

"Shoveling Snow"
by Ben Broderick from Duncan, BC

Last winter, like most of the country, we got a lot of snow.

Having spent a great deal of time in the Prairies and in the north, I am fond of this weather and everything that comes with it – including shoveling snow.

One night after work, in the middle of one of our large snowfalls, I went to work on my driveway. When I shovel our driveway, I usually do our neighbour’s across the street and sometimes the folks beside us too as our neighbours are older than us and not as keen on snow shovelling as I am.

But this year after the first big dump my enthusiasm for the second one was a little below standard. As I was looking, forlornly, at the snow deep on the driveways across the street and beside me, along came a couple of young men keen for an opportunity to earn some money. I knew I had one more driveway in me after my own was done, but not two. So I hired the young men to shovel my next door neighbour’s driveway, on the condition they not tell my neighbours I had paid them to do so.

The kids did a pretty good job, the younger a little whiney, but the older guy was a great worker.

As I knew he would, my neighbour came out to find out what was going on on his property. At first his approach was rather challenging. They told him, as per our agreement, that they were doing the work as a free community service.

When I was done my own driveway I moved across the street and found the going a little heavy there so when they were done I gave them some more money to help out again on the same understanding that they were just a couple of young people doing good things.

We parted company with three driveways done, and with me feeling very righteous over both paying the kids and refusing all credit.

A few days later, my neighbour, who is less than enthusiastic about the quality of modern youth, displayed a heart-warming change of attitude when he saw me in the street. He told me that two of today's wonderful young people had come and shovelled his walk without being asked and without asking for a thing. It was a wonderful testimonial to today's young folks he said, something I had never heard him say before. I felt doubly righteous. This feeling of smug comfort lasted a couple more days until my neighbour’s wife mentioned to me that her husband was so pleased with these young men that he gave them $20 for their work. The little buggers never said a word about that to me!

That pretty well put an end to my righteousness!

Too Early

Look what I found the last weekend of February peeking up through the ground......toooooo early. The winter has been so mild and the snow is going quickly. I can walk throuigh some of my perennials gardens which is unusual for this time of year and I suspect they think it is spring and will start growing.....time to wake up....but it's toooo early.

Time for a Change

The bet is on. I have decided to go my natural hair color.....which at my age is "GRAY". I went for a hair cut yesterday and my hairdressers eyes almost fell out onto her cheeks. She said "Are you sure you want to do this?" And as she was cutting my hair she commented, "We'll see how long this lasts!" Funny. Paul has made the same comment, "I'll see how long it is before you change your mind or you'll go gray and then out of the blue you'll start coloring again." Yes I know I did this ten or more years ago and yes I went back to coloring my hair and yes history may repeat itself but only time will tell.

Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange

"Coincidence"
by Jim Cowan from Toronto, ON

On a cold January evening three years ago, on a snowy street corner in North Toronto, I suffered what the medical professionals call a “sudden witnessed collapse”. I remember virtually nothing of the day itself, and certainly nothing of the next few, some of which I spent in a drug-induced coma packed on ice, “like a flounder,” as my wife would say. But, a double-bypass and three months recuperation later, and I was pretty much back to normal, twenty-five pounds lighter and on a much healthier diet and exercise regime.

The survival rate for such incidents is less than ten percent, and I wanted to meet and thank the people who had responded that day: the fire fighters and paramedics who brought me back from a “vital signs absent” state. And over the next few months, I did just that. A family connection in the fire department put me in touch with the crew, and my wife and I visited them at their fire hall. Getting to the paramedics was a bit more difficult, but eventually I met them too, and learned more about what had happened that day, and just how close I’d come to death. Their reaction was well summed up by one of the fire fighters, who said, “So often I go home and tell my wife about something like this, but we never know how it turns out. It’s great to see that this had a happy ending.

”But there was one big hole in the story. Who was the witness to my “sudden witnessed collapse”? All we knew was that a woman saw me fall into a snowbank, called 9-1-1 and stayed with me until the emergency crews arrived. However, as far as we could tell, no one had taken her name, and we couldn’t think of any practical way of finding her.

Last winter, we decided to take up ballroom dancing, which meant that once a week I would meet my wife at the children’s bookstore where she works, where in fact I was headed on the night of my episode. I don’t visit the store all that often, and usually stay for only a few minutes. I walked into the store wearing a coat very similar to the one from two years earlier, and the same hat. Just inside the door, a woman was looking at a book display, and she glanced up at me as I stepped past her.

“Excuse me,” she said, “but can I ask you a personal question?

”I stopped and looked at her, trying to figure out where we could have met.

Then she said, “Did you have a heart attack near here about two years ago?”

“Yes, I did,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “I’m the person who was there that night.”

My angel, as it turns out, is named Helen Healy. She had changed her plans that evening and was heading home when I passed her, looking, she said, “like a man in a big hurry.” She told me that when I was about fifty paces ahead of her, I staggered, grabbed at a bus stop pole, then collapsed. She quickly reached me, saw I was unconscious, and dialed 9-1-1. Incredibly, she said, although there was bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic just a few feet away, no one stopped. She pointed to my dark cap – the same one I was wearing that night – and said, “You have to get rid of that and get a red one. If I hadn’t been there, no one would have seen you.”

She started CPR but, as she notes, I am a big man and she is a small women, and after a while, she saw I was slipping away. The dispatcher told her that the ambulance was only a minute away, and at that point, she stopped the CPR and gave me a big hug. “Hang on,” she said, “don’t die on me.” Moments later, the emergency crews arrived and took over.

Both Helen and I had the same sense that while our first meeting was fortunate, our second one was miraculous. Even now I can’t accurately describe my feelings as we stood there talking, and I told her, hoping not to sound ungrateful, that I needed some time to sort out my reactions. Later, she told me that she found it “emotionally unsettling,” and we remain amazed at the coincidences that caused our paths to cross not once, but twice, on two snowy January evenings.

Emma's March Break

Yesterday Paul and I took Emma to Moncton to catch the train to Windsor. We left shortly after lunch. Along the way we picked up some snacks for the LONG train ride. She left Moncton at 1700hr. Friday and will arrive in Windsor on Saturday at 2040hr. We wanted to fly her up but she was timid about changing flights and also stated that it being winter the flights might be delayed and sure enough we and Ontario were having unsettled weather and flights were delayed. There were delays in Quebec due to the weather. She is now travelling from Montreal to Toronto.