Why I'm more comfortable in old houses

Because I'm old?.. ha ha...

This will be a little self indulgent, but it's my blog. If you're hoping for some insights into global geo-politics, might as well skip this one.

When my folks arrived on these shores in '56 we started at the bottom. My father's first job in Canada was shovelling coal at the Kloepfer Coal Company. With a hand shovel.

That was when coal was still the number one home heating fuel, not yet eclipsed by furnace oil. Just to frame it for you, the milkman still came by in a horse-drawn chariot in those days.

After the coal-shovelling gig Dad got on delivering lumber for Stewart Lumber. That's another iconic Guelph brand that has gone the way of Kloepfer Coal and so many others.

There used to be an outfit called J.P. Hammill and Sons, which made denim jeans. They made them right there in Guelph back in the day.

That was the pre-free-trade era, obviously.

After a brief spell in the lumber truck, Dad got on at a factory. Omark. They made saw-chains for chain-saws.

In the overall scheme of things Omark was a rung below the top-tier industrial plants in Guelph at the time, but several rungs above J.P. Hammill and the like. Back in the day, every immigrant (and everybody else too) understood the concept of rungs.

Dad held that Omark job for ten years. I know that because I recall he got a watch from the company for ten years of service. A half-decent watch, I might add. Couple of rungs above a Timex, for sure.

During those years we lived in a succession of old fixer-uppers, on Neeve Street, Derry Street, and eventually in Elora, first house on the wrong side of the tracks as you're going into town, except the tracks aren't there anymore.

Those were all houses that had challenges, but they were also houses where I felt safe, comfortable, and happy. Life was simple, and simple comforts were all you needed.

The experts who get paid to study this stuff say that your personality is pretty much fixed during the first five years of your life. What you became then is what you're always gonna be.

Till I was eleven or twelve years old Dad went to work in a factory. It never occurred to me to aspire to anything other than one of the top-rung jobs in the factory.

Then Dad, not long after he got that watch, got a real estate license, and that sort of kicked the entire rung system off its moorings.


Elora was the greatest place. In a winter storm we'd get snow-drifts in the kitchen. One Sunday Mom accidentally killed a mouse that happened to be scurrying by the door as we got home from church. Got squished between the floor and the bottom of the door.

But I was happy there.

That's why I'm more comfortable in old houses.

Canadian Trumphobia not as bad as originally feared

Here's a story from CBC that says Canadians are making more trips to the USA since the election of you-know-who. That figures. Canadians tend to be a smug and hypocritical lot. They may despise that vile man in the Oval Office, but Girl Guides aside, they're still gonna cross the 49th if they can save ten bucks on a tank of gas.

On a related note, here's a point of view on the Muslim ban that hadn't occurred to me. Seems that within hours of its implementation the high-traffic freight crossings from Ontario into Michigan and New York State were getting seriously bunged up.

Here's why; back in the day, when the Teamsters were a serious outfit and the vast majority of drivers were members, driving truck was a respectable career. If you were a Teamsters driver in the middle sixties you were solidly "middle class" income wise.

There weren't a lot of guys named Mohamed in the Teamsters at the time.

Thanks to fifty years of deregulation and union-busting, truck-driving has become a shit job, and you know who takes those. As has always been the case, the recent immigrants end up in the shit jobs. When the Irish were recent immigrants, they got the shit jobs. Same with the Italians, the Ukrainians, the Poles... everybody started out at the bottom of the ladder.

When my dear Daddy got off the boat in 1956, his first job was shovelling coal at Kloepfer Coal in Guelph -  with a hand shovel, not a power shovel.

Guess who you're likely to find behind the wheel of the typical big rig today? That's right - a recent immigrant, and a lot of those guys have Muslim names.

So Mohamed pulls up to US Customs with a 52 foot trailer loaded with a million dollars in auto parts from Linamar or Magna. Customs guy notices driver was born in Somalia.

"Ya'll park that rig in the lot over there and come in for a chat, Mohamed."

Well guess what? If the driver isn't crossing that bridge, the truck ain't either!

That million dollars in auto parts is heading for a Ford or GM or Toyota or Mercedes plant somewhere. Thanks to the magic of JIT and all that stuff, those car plants cripple up pretty quick.

Team Trump may take their sweet time returning calls from lawyers for the ACLU, but they pay attention right smartly when lawyers from GM and Ford are on the line. By the end of day one dozens of those trucks were parked and Team Trump knew they had a serious problem.

Judge James Robart's overturn of Trump's travel ban was actually a huge face-saver for Team Trump. Anything else you're reading is just spin and optics.