Why are so many Canadians too lazy to work?

I am, for better or worse, getting to an age where I can remember a time fifty years ago. What I remember is that fifty years ago very few Canadians were too lazy to work. Whether you were a first or a tenth generation Canadian, the prevailing ethos stipulated that if you didn’t have a job, you were looking for one. Even when you took a trip on the pogey train, you knew that was a temporary vacation; you’d be back to the grind soon enough. Most everybody worked. In those days young people worked mainly to get out of their parent’s house and start an independent life. If you were still in mom’s basement at age 25, it was because you were working and saving for a place of your own, not because you were addicted to video games. Today, you can still be in mom’s basement in your 40’s, playing video games, and the world forgives you if you haven’t found a job yet that “agrees” with you. Which is why employers are “forced” to bring in temporary foreign workers. The Globe had a story the other day about the enterprising consultants who get rich off bringing TFWs into the country to do the jobs “Canadians don’t want to do.” The two iconic Canadian brands mentioned as relying on TFWs were Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire. No wonder. I’m a fan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Living Wage Project, and I can guarantee you no job filled by TFWs at either of those companies meet the living wage standard. That’s why Canadians don’t want to do them. Those companies need to up their pay, not import foreign workers. But today I happened across this story; Halifax is worried they’ll have a bus driver shortage if their foreign workers can’t get their work permits extended. That didn’t sound right. I dug up the collective agreement between Halifax Transit and the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union, Local 508. I know driving a city bus may not agree with some people. The split shifts are a bitch until you have enough seniority to avoid them, and you’ll no doubt meet your share of obnoxious a-holes, but even the starting wage pretty much meets the CCPA living wage standard, and after three years you’re about $4/hr ahead of it. So why do we need foreign workers to drive city buses in Halifax? I’m aware of the argument that there’s no point because you’ll never afford your own place anyway, so might as well stay in mom’s basement and beat the latest Call of Duty. And a universal basic income would be great because then you could slip mom a little rent money. Pass the Doritos. I don’t buy it. Check out this starter in Dartmouth. Ten percent down and you’re looking at a mortgage of under two grand a month - cheaper than an apartment and well within a bus drivers reach! Sure, it needs a little work, but back in the day we expected our first home to be a fixer-upper. In fact, I’m still living in one today! Local 508 is heading into contract negotiations soon. While I hope they score a decent contract - 25% over four years would be decent, I don’t believe that will end the reliance on foreign workers. Far too many Canadians just can’t be bothered anymore.

Tim Horton University and the enshitification of the academy

Pleased to report I’m down to buying just one print copy of the Globe & Mail per week, down from six. I still crave the page-turning, but I get my fix with the $8.40 Saturday edition. Rest of the week I read it online. Given the Farm Manager’s had an online account for over a year, this move was probably somewhat overdue. So just after 6 o’clock this morning I headed into town, picked up my Globe from the Korean Extortionist, grabbed a medium dark roast at Timmies, and settled in on a waterfront bench between the marina and the water treatment plant. You gotta admit Timmies is one of the few Canadian institutions that brings Canadians together instead of tearing them apart. True, I was put off when those Brazilian hedge-fund sharpies bought the brand, but that doesn’t seem to have diminished its appeal. As I was exiting the drive-thru I had to stop for a couple of Indigenous dudes walking by with Timmies cups. I had just got cozy on that waterfront bench when a carload of Indians (the other ones) gathered round a nearby picnic table, every one of them with a Timmies in hand. Oh Canada! But I digress. I usually head to the opinion section first. On the front page I see the headline “The Ghosts of Chicago.” Cambridge University professor of American history Andrew Preston has got a full-pager and then some doing a compare-and-contrast between the 1968 Democratic party convention in Chicago and the upcoming shindig next week. In my world that ‘68 convention is generally known as the “Chicago police riot,” but no matter. I watched it on TV. My dad was happy to see the police beating the crap out of the “hippies.” For me, that event sparked a life-long interest in anti-establishment politics. Preston, in his long-winded academic way, is analyzing the role of populism in 1968 vs next week’s convention. I was OK till I ran into this; Yet disaffected working class whites didn’t all turn to Nixon. Many instead turned to Wallace, who siphoned off enough votes from both Humphrey and Nixon - across the Sun Belt of the South and Southwest but also in the deindustrializing Rust Belt cities of Northeast and Midwest… That didn’t sound right to me. Far as I know, in ‘68 American heavy industry was alive and well. There were no deindustrializing Rust Belt cities in 1968. In my recollection, deindustrialization got going in the Reagan-Thatcher dawn of neoliberalism, and kicked into overdrive with the advent of “free trade.” So I did a little research. The term “Rustbelt” was coined during Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign in 1984. That’s 16 years after the '68 Dem convention. American manufacturing employment peaked in ‘79. There clearly was no “Rust Belt” in ‘68. The other day one or another of the annual university rankings came out. The FM was pleased as could be that two of our five (both hers) have graduated Canada’s top-ranked school, U of T. That’s where Preston graduated too, and then arrived at Cambridge via Stanford and LSE. Cambridge is consistently ranked in the top five worldwide no matter what ranking outfit you look at. And Preston is so popular at Cambridge he’s not taking any more applicants to his Doctor Phil program, according to his University of Cambridge website. I, on the other hand, hold a B.A. from the University of Guelph, consistently ranked between the 450th and 600th best universities in the world, no matter what ranking outfit you look at. Academic standards clearly aren’t what they used to be. Maybe Tim Horton's should start a university.

Metal Shop Girls

In the late 90's the road of life shat me out at the front of a shop class at the local high school.

I'd hated high school myself, but in the fullness of time I came to the realization that steady day shift and summer off might not be a bad gig.

So I became a welding teacher.

You didn't see a lot of girls in the shop classes those days. But they might hang around because their boyfriend was in the class.

What bothered me was, a few years after high school, the girls would be working at Tim Hortons for min wage, and the guys would be at Bruce Power making fifty bucks an hour.

So I figured I needed a sales pitch to get them in the course.

You don't need a penis to be a welder.

By the second year about a quarter of the class were girls. 

They were tough bitches. And, the one thing I least expected, they talked to me.

And I don't mean about the welding lesson. For some reason, a lot of these gals seemed to think I needed to know when they missed their period, etc.

Then it occurred to me, they just need somebody who will listen to them.

I'm not their boyfriend, I'm not their dad; I might be the only dude in their world safe to tell stuff.

I'm really having trouble with my dad. I wanna get a tattoo, and he's gonna kill me...

I ponder this.

What's the tattoo gonna be?

Oh, I want a butterfly. I've got it picked out at Zap's tattoo shop downtown.

I ponder that...

So where you puttin' the tattoo?

She turns around and pats her left butt-cheek. I ponder that.

How often does your dad see your ass?

Long story short, I inadvertently solved a problem in this young woman's life, just by applying a little common sense.

I've got hundreds of stories like that, which is a gift even more precious than the Teacher's Pension Plan.

Thanks!

Illusions, confusions, delusions, and hallucinations

(note downward spiral implied in title)

It's been a seriously strange couple of weeks here at Falling Downs.

The Farm Manager finds it "unfathomable" that her 89 year old mother has passed.

Just a week ago we were finding it unfathomable that she was still with us.

But there you go. What is fathomable and what is unfathomable depends not on what's actually going on. It depends on perspective.

For my part, travels to and from the Ivey Eye Institute have been facilitated by my dear sister and my 87 year old father. These trips take us through the heart of Letterkenny country. Dad and I stopped off at Timmies in Listowel last night. The place was crawling with uptight young farmers, the kind of guys who drive $90,000 pickup trucks but fret about the price of corn.

And who can blame them for fretting?

Apparently you're no longer allowed to have your own mechanic fix your John Deere tractor anymore. That's the proprietary preserve of Deere's corporate technicians. No wonder those young farmers are fretting. Some of them own two, three, or more half million dollar tractors and they can't keep them running without the blessing of Deere HQ in Moline.

One of the big motivators that keeps young guys in farming, and bear in mind that 100% of the young guys in farming inherited their farms, is the illusion of independence. How independent can you be when the price of your crop is determined by foreign markets and your tractor repairs have to be done by head office?

Nevertheless, a hundred acres of raw land with no buildings, down in Letterkenny country, will set you back over a million bucks. A hundred acres doesn't make a serious farm in this day and age. Folks just plunk down that million to "add to their holdings."

And of course, none of those guys have a million bucks sitting around. All that expansion and consolidation is financed by bank lending. As soon as the banks get nervous, the entire house-o-cards is gonna collapse.

Good luck to those stoic young farmers when that happens. Timmies can only hire so many.

Sometimes we move from confused and deluded right into the realm of hallucination. That's when you're able to convince yourself that all is going according to plan, when, in fact, it's all going to shit.

It's the existential variant of "I meant to do that."

Of course you did!

I'd been planning that detached retina for months. I'm surprised nobody has caught on.

Bieber goes full SJW

Justin Bieber, being a good Canadian, has dabbled in all manner of worthy causes. However, he has lacked that signature social justice issue that could take his brand to the next level. You know, a signature issue like Jerry Lewis had with muscular dystrophy, or Elizabeth Taylor had with AIDs research.

But that could be changing. Biebs is on fire over the new lids on Timmies take-out cups.

Right on! It's about time somebody addressed this outrage!

I've had a heart full of sorrow ever since those Brazilian hedgies took over our beloved Canadian coffee chain. First they took out the garbage bins at the drive-thru.

WTF?

Sure, they're happy enough to sell you stuff, but oh no, don't expect them to provide a garbage can for the refuse. You can either throw that out the car window or drop it into a municipal garbage bin in your local park. Either way, the Brazilians are off-loading responsibility for their garbage.

Then they took out the napkins when you buy a donut. They figure you can just lick your fingers and wipe them on the bag the donut came in. Doesn't sound like much, but selling two hundred donuts per hour across four thousand stores adds up to a lot of napkins. Some young Brazilian twat with an MBA bought himself a Porsche with the bonus he got for that insight.

And still there was no public outcry.

But now, the lids. They don't open properly when you fold the tab back. If you push the tab in you're looking at esoteric tongue manipulations to get at your coffee. They're stupid and they don't work.

This is a bridge too far.


Thank you, Justin, for calling them out on this!

Another reason to avoid Timmies

The first change I noticed after the Brazilian hedgies at 3G Capital took over Tim Hortons was they did away with the garbage containers in their drive-throughs.

Doesn't seem like a big deal on the face of it. After all, you're offering a convenience to the customer; a bin to collect yesterday's Timmies trash as you're going through the drive-thru today. And what does it cost them to provide this service? Next to nothing. A couple of times per day some min wage workee spends five minutes changing the bags in those garbage bins.

But here's why I'm an obscure blogger and brilliant big-picture capitalists are billionaire hedge fund managers. I figure emptying the trash costs next to nothing. The big-picture MBA types realize that "next to nothing" across thousands of stores equals enough of something to warrant stamping it out.

Here's another "next to nothing" the sharpies at 3G have eliminated; a serviette with your donut. You used to get a paper napkin when you picked up a donut at the drive-thru window. No more. Although a paper serviette costs next to nothing, the MBAs at 3G correctly concluded that next to nothing across millions of apple fritters per day could make the difference between a new Porsche and a used Dodge van when it's time to spend that annual bonus cheque.

There's a guy piloting a new 911 Turbo down a Brazilian expressway today who thanks you for licking the donut glaze off your fingers and wiping them on the bag your donut came in.

You don't even miss the serviettes, do you!

But these are mere micro-agressions. (micro-agressions! Am I with it or what?! My kid with the Social Justice degree from York University would be proud!)

Here's some more serious shit (macro-aggression?); Burger King animal feed sourced from deforested lands in Brazil and Bolivia. It appears that our brilliant 3G Brazillian hedgies who own Timmies and Burger King and Popeyes are all-in for raping the wilderness to get cheap cattle feed!

You can bet the guy who came up with that idea is driving more than a Porsche...

I'm guessing Bugatti or Maclaren.

A double dose of Drumpfobia in today's Globe and Mail

Rolled into Wiarton this morning to fork over five bucks to The Korean for my Saturday Globe. Ya, I know, I can get the whole damn thing online, but I'm one of those old-school guys who just prefers to turn pages, even at that extortionate rate. Hell, I remember having the Globe and Mail delivered to my door every morning for twenty-five cents per.

Times have changed, and not for the better.

As luck would have it, the line-up at Timmies was way shorter than you'd expect in tourist season, so I ducked in for a medium with milk.

The folks who run this franchise made what is to me an incomprehensible decision recently; they spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on putting a second order board in the drive-thru. There's still only one drive-thru window, but now two cars can place their orders at the same time. Overall, this doesn't improve service or speed up your trip through the drive-thru, but it does provide the illusion that the line-up is shorter than it actually is.

It also makes a trip through the drive-thru far more stressful than it used to be. I don't care what kind of a peace-loving pacifist fairy you might be, you'll be pissed off when that car that pulled in after you makes it to the window before you. Frankly, I'd give up Tim Hortons altogether, but I'm addicted to whatever it is they put in their coffee. (Rumours were rife not long ago that the magic ingredient is nicotine, but corporate HQ denies this.)

Stopped at the Wiarton International Airport on the way home. They were having their second annual cars, planes and motorcycles show. Unfortunately, the cars, planes and motorcycles were far fewer in number than what I was promised in the promo piece the Farm Manager read me out of the local paper yesterday. Three hundred cars? It was more like three dozen.

Must have been the weather... or maybe I just showed up too early.

But at least I got to go home and tuck into my Saturday Globe earlier than I'd expected.

The most jarring thing about today's paper was that I read Southey's column just before I read the style section. Southey's dad was my economics prof in one of my past lives, and he used to bring little Tabatha to campus from time to time, so I feel a certain affinity.

Little Tabatha became a writer for the Globe, and apparently she's currently on a tour of Madagascar. Her reporting from Madagascar is bleak in the extreme. That's why the promos for $700 sandals in the "Style" section left me feeling somewhat discombobulated. Seven hundred bucks for a pair of sandals? Really? Most people who live in Madagascar do so on less than that. For a year.

I must say I really appreciate that automotive writer Pete Chenney has got his car column into the style section. Today he had a fine article about the hardtop version of the Shelby Cobra. Well worth a look. His column is generally the most interesting thing in Globe Style.

But let's get on to the Drumpfobia, shall we!

Today's Globe and Mail Trump-bashing is left to the husband and wife team of Elizabeth Renzetti (page two of the main news section) and Doug Saunders ( page seven in the Focus section).

Liz has a nice piece on view about how a couple of grannies are gonna put the boots to grandpa Donald Trump. It's kind of pleasant in a vapid way if you're a Clinton fan, which I'm not. But at the end of the day, I'd say if American politics comes down to Grannies bashing Grandpas, maybe America is really a gerontocracy, and not the plutocracy or oligarchy that so many sentient observers claim.

HRC getting the endorsement of Elizabeth Warren does do wonders for Clinton of course. It's almost as important as Trump getting the endorsement of establishment GOP guys like Newt or Chris Christie. Hillary is so far to the right of Trump that most of the PNAC crowd has no compunction whatsoever about supporting her, which tells you everything you need to know about Hillary. Getting the nod from one of the few genuine "progressives" in the Dem camp means the world to her campaign.

So Renzetti's story about the grannies getting together to take out the evil grandpa has at least some element of human interest.

Husband Doug's column, on the other hand, is just plain silly. Yup, time to erect a "cordon sanitaire" around the buffoon. After all, that's how they've been side-lining the radical right in Europe...

Really?

Perhaps Saunders' analysis had some legitimacy a couple of years ago. But the so-called anti-immigrant radical right has been radically on the up-tick since the refugee trickle became a flood. And whether that influx is a trickle or a flood depends entirely on the whims of Sultan Erdogan, our erstwhile anti-democratic NATO ally, who alone has his hands on the refugee taps. Europe has been busy trying to buy him off, but the wily Erdogan knows when he's got his adversaries over a barrel... and does he ever!

Yup, it's a mess, and it's gonna get way messier, especially if HRC's greedy grasping hands ever seize the levers of power. Which is not to say that things would be better with Trump at the helm. Trump is an unknown quantity. He might be better; he might not. At least with Trump there is a glimmer of possibility that America might change the disastrous course it's been on. With Hillary it will be full steam ahead.

So even though there were only a few dozen cars on view when I got to the Wiarton International Airport, a couple of them were very nice. There was a very pretty 1970 Cyclone GT. Unfortunately it had the 351 two barrel. That's not gonna stir up a lot of wind, nevermind a cyclone. The Mustang 50 I drove to the airport would probably have ten lengths on it over the quarter mile.

There was also a lovely '68 Impala SS with a 396 and four speed. I'm a sucker for the full size Chevy's from that era. Drove a '67 Impala SS for awhile, with the 327 and a powerglide. Also had a '67 Belair wagon for a few years, with a 283 and the powerglide. Paid two hundred for it, drove it for a couple of years, and sold it for two hundred.

That's cheap driving!

Texting ticket at Tim's drive-thru

Canada was rocked by the news this week that one AJ Doust scored a $287 fine for texting in the Timmies drive-thru in Beaumont Alberta.

Yup, texting in the drive-thru.

That's why we pay those Mounties $100,000 per year; so they can bust the scallywags texting in the Timmies drive-thru. Because there is absolutely nothing better for the RCMP to do in Beaumont Alberta.

Timmie Nation was properly perplexed, but thank God Larry Fedoruk came along to do the 'splainin for the RCMP. Larry wants us to know that the perp was "steering with his knees while texting with both hands" in that drive-thru...

Frankly, anybody working that hard to ingratiate themselves with the RCMP probably has something to hide.

And how hard is it to inch your car ahead a few feet every thirty seconds? Do you even need your knees?

Anyway, according to our man Fedoruk, other folks in that "drive-thru" were aghast that someone might be texting, and waved their arms in the air to alert our intrepid Mountie to the audacious law-breaker in their midst...

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Pay it forward

Thanks for the break, Bill.

That was the last line in a reminiscence I wrote a couple of years ago about my time at Harjim Machinery Works out in Victoria BC.

Bill gave me a break.

When he didn't have to.

I don't know if Bill is still around or if Harjim is still in business, but I think that the concept of giving someone a break could use a little encouragement.

The other day I pulled up to the drive-through window at the local Timmies, only to be told that the guy in the black truck two ahead of me had picked up the tab for the next half-dozen strangers behind him.

He was paying it forward.

The very definition of a "random act of kindness."

Try being kind when you don't have to be.

Try giving people a break when you don't have to. It'll make the world a better place in some small way.

Pay it forward.

Before Tim Hortons became the plaything of hedge funds, did Tim Hortons ever have to apologize for

this?

Ya, dousing sleeping homeless people with buckets of water is what made Timmys a Canadian icon.

I rest my case.

Tim takes it dry

Where's Eddie Shack when you need him?

Eddie once had the idea that he would be the next Tim Horton. Not on the ice, but in the world 'o donuts. For a few years you saw Eddie Shack donut stores here and there around Ontario, but alas, things never really caught fire for Eddie.

We got the news today that 350 Timmies employees, mostly head office folks with many years of service, got pink-slipped due to the new ownership of the venerable coffee and donut chain. It's all about synergies 'n efficiencies, don't ya know.

Mainly of course it's about making some filthy-rich hedge-fund shit-bags even richer.

So, what do you figure the future prospects are for some loyal employee who has worked at Timmies HQ for the last thirty years? I'd say they're pretty much screwed. Maybe, with a bit of luck, they can get a job passing coffee out the drive-thru window at their local Timmies.

I hit one of those pretty much every time I'm out and about. I'm inclined to boycott Timmies, but here's the problem; the success of the chain was built on the backs of the local franchisees. The gal who has the seven or eight stores in these parts is an incredibly hard-working woman who has a reputation for treating her employees well, and has always been actively engaged in the community. I don't want to boycott her.

If we had such a thing as government for the people, Industry Canada would not have rubber-stamped this deal. We do not have government for the people, however.

We have government for international capital.

The same government that allowed hedgies to destroy 5000 jobs at CP Rail while lining their pockets to the tune of billions.

The same government that allowed Caterpillar to shut down a perfectly viable locomotive manufacturer and destroy 400 well-paid manufacturing jobs in Ontario.

We need government that governs for the people of Canada, not for multinationals, hedge-fund managers, and international finance.

There's an election coming up soon. Obviously we've got to rid ourselves of this loathsome Harper crew. The tragedy is that there are no viable contenders on the horizon. Do you seriously think Trudeau will stand up for Canadian workers? He'll offer more in the way of banal pieties, but that will be that.

Regrettably,  now that the NDP has expunged their roots from their mission statement, I can't see anything changing with Mulcair either.

Canada needs to grow it's own Alexis Tsipras, and soon.

Top National Post columnist exposed as delusional by pot-addled blogger

The National Post is the flagship title in the Postmedia stable, a Canadian newspaper franchise that has been enjoying a death spiral for years.

Postmedia was a Lazarus play conjured up by a few money guys who bought the outstanding debt of Izzy Asper's crashed Canwest media empire for pennies on the dollar a few years ago. They stuck Paul Godfrey in the captains chair for a million a year, crossed their fingers, and hoped for the best.

Over these last few years Postmedia has tried all sorts of desperation strategies trying to stay afloat; they've sold off the corporate real estate, fired virtually everyone who gets a real paycheque, farmed out all their editing and production, and still they're haemorrhaging more red ink than the last wagon-builder in the age of the motorcar.

While rumour has it that virtually all copy across the Postmedia chain is now produced by a handful of unpaid interns working out of a Tim Hortons in Burlington, it looks like a few of the old stalwarts are still given real office space and actual column inches to carry forward the illusion of continuity in the pages of the crumbling media empire.

Which must be why we still get to read Jonathan Kay in the pages of the Post.

Jonathan's reactionary far-right opinions are often entertaining, and his fellowship with the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies gives you a heads-up on what to expect, but the sad truth of the matter is that Kay is far more often than not simply full of shit.

Here's a Kay editorial from over two years ago celebrating the imminent demise of Bashir al Assad. Not only was Assad a gonner, but he was going to take Hezbollah with him, and all these marvels were occurring "without the West firing a shot."

And here is yours truly calling the bullshit at the time.

So where should you go to get the no-shit truth on world affairs, the National Post or this pot-addled blogger?

Tim Hortons spreads 'em wide for Warren Buffett's Burger King tax dodge

Wow! That's a lot of A-list capitalist scuz-bags for one headline!

That's the beauty of the blogosphere, ain't it?

You can work as many A-listers into your headlines as fit.

Seems my home province of Ontario has become a tax haven.

I'll let the Globe and Mail, Canada's newspaper of record, explain how that works.

Suffice it to say that we are taking pride of place in our race to the bottom!

What the Temporary Foreign Worker scam says about Canada's education system

In the first place, it says Canada's education system isn't graduating students that Canadian employers want to hire.

While viewed in isolation that statement may be true, my common cause with Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe types pretty much ends there.

While Canadian high school students consistently score well on international tests, few outside the education establishment are aware that huge swaths of students, those streamed into "basic" or "essential" or "locally developed" programs, never participate in the tests.

Those students are the victims of the self-esteem obsession that has guided Canadian education for the past thirty years or so.

The kids who come from backgrounds that are more affluent, more educated, more motivated, have the resources available to overcome this self-esteem obsession.

They have books in the house and parents who encourage them to read.

The kids who don't have that, have a system that tells them reading is redundant, that "viewing is reading," and that their feelings are paramount.

As long as those kids feel good about themselves, everything is hunky-dory.

So after ten or fifteen years being told how great they are, these students graduate into a world where they quickly discover that feeling good about themselves doesn't translate into employable skills.

Canada graduates huge numbers of youths who are functionally illiterate and struggle to do math at a grade two level.

But they feel really good about themselves, at least until they realize how unemployable they are.

Then they are stymied, because that other pillar of the Canadian system, having critical thinking skills, turns out to be as ephemeral as their self-esteem.

There are tens of thousands of unemployed youths in Alberta, the province that needs to import tens of thousands of Temporary Foreign Workers to man the counter at the local Tim Hortons.

If Alberta youth had the slightest grasp of what "critical thinking" means they would be organizing, demonstrating, and raising hell...

At least if all that "critical thinking" bullshit in the mission statements and curriculum overviews of their high schools was anything other than jargon designed to hide the fact that the system is failing them.

If "critical thinking" were a bona fide part of their education, they'd be picketing and boycotting those fast food joints until the wages offered could provide an acceptable Canadian standard of living.

The Times Square Bomber

Couple of years ago, before I was full time here at Falling Downs, I was heading up for the May long weekend.

Gathered up all the necessities for a holiday weekend at the farm. Filled up my gas cans at the Sunoco. Also picked up some propane tanks for the BBQ. Three tanks. Figured that should get me through the season. Stopped off at TSC to get some fertilizer. If the weather holds this is always a good time to get some planting done.

No holiday weekend is complete without some fireworks. Stopped at Flamin' Fred's Discount Fireworks. Went all out. Bought two boxes of the Aerial Avalanche variety pack and a Burning Schoolhouse.

Stopped at the Tim Hortons in Hepworth to grab a coffee and a muffin. I come out, and holy shit! The car's overheated! There's steam and smoke filling up the interior and pouring out the hood! Damn! I knew I shouldn't have left it idling.

I reached in and turned off the ignition. The clouds gradually cleared. Opened up the hood. Looked like I'd lost the fan belt. Couple of the locals in the parking lot came over. Looks like you lost your fan belt. Yup. Fan belt.

Luckily the garage around the corner was still open. Not only did they have a belt but were good enough to lend me a couple of wrenches. That doesn't happen every day. Had the new belt on in twenty minutes.

So I was on my way. Had a great weekend. Weather held up. Kids loved the fireworks. Used the BBQ breakfast lunch and dinner all weekend. Got the roto-tiller through the garden plot.

It was only much later that the thought occurred to me; if that fan belt had broke in Times Square and my name was Faisal, I'd be in jail right now.