No More Home Mail Delivery? How About This...

Today, like most every other work day, I received a handful of junk mail in my mail slot, delivered by the post office.  Most of my bills and other correspondence now come through the internet.  Most cheques are automatically deposited to my bank, so I really don't have much true mail.

On top of my daily junk mail, every week, on Thursday we receive to our door a rather large bundle of advertising spam from grocery, electronic, and drug stores, fast food restaurants, duct cleaners and other "you can't live without this" sellers of stuff. 

Recently it was announced that Canada Post would be terminating all home delivery. Hmmm. Home delivery of the mail ending.  Isn't that what the post office is supposed to do? Deliver mail?

Undoubtedly this will bring a lot of hardship to the frail and elderly and prove to be an inconvenience to others like me, who live in the older homes that are affected by this cut-back. I'll probably end up going to the box only once or twice a week. For many years, owners of "newer" homes in subdivisions were cut off from home delivery in favour of communal mailboxes some distance from their homes. Maybe they thought the new home owners were more fit and able to make the daily trek. Doesn't sound fair does it?

We pay big taxes and a dollar for each stamp, so let's make the mail more like our garbage. Service to every home. Let's bring back home delivery to everybody, subdivisions and all.

The High Paid Help:
The average Canada Post letter carrier makes $50,000 per year. (over $4000/month) CLICK HERE to verify.  A $50,000 a year mailman who gets sick days and a taxi to and from his route shouldn't have to carry cheap flyers should he? No! He should carry mail and only mail.

The Low Paid Help:
The boy who slugs my Starmail ads every Thursday makes about $360 per year ($30 a month).  He probably lives nearby and has a large wagon to carry the weight of all this important media. His mom or dad is likely his "sick day" relief and he gets no ride.

The Remedy:
Get the government out of the ad distribution business. Let's let the Starmail boy handle all the junk mail and give him a handsome raise. If companies want their flyers delivered by Canada Post, stamps are $1. each, or $0.85 in a booklet just like everybody else pays. I doubt you'd see many ads if they were charged at the full rate. Now get rid of a bunch of the high paid letter carriers and just keep a few to deliver only the real mail to every house ONCE A WEEK like our garbage pickup.

Better yet, let the Starmail boy deliver everything, and hey, maybe he could also, for a little extra, read the gas meter while he's here.

Problem solved.
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Bye Bye Bicuspid #15.

My First Lost Tooth...
The periodontist fixed up the gums of several of my teeth over the last year or so, but there was one tooth that he seemed uninterested in saving and another he felt had little hope of survival. For the past few weeks the tooth that he was not interested in was starting to hurt so yesterday I went to my family dentist.

"The tooth is toast." was his diagnosis, "It's got to come out." "Do you have insurance?"

Hmmm. That sounded expensive.

"No." I said, "I was hoping you had some sort of loyalty plan."

"Well it's a good thing you're loaded because this is going to cost you." He chuckled.
"I'll pull the tooth now, and in the fall we'll see if the bone has regenerated enough to allow an implant. If not, you'll need a bridge."

That was it! A faithful friend of about 55 years, and two hundred and fifty bucks, both gone in a flash. The hole where my second premolar (bicuspid) lived. (fifth from the part in my teeth, known in dental school as #15)  It bled a bit but there was no pain even after the freezing disappeared. So long old buddy. You were missed at dinner last night.

Hopefully an implant (left) will work $$$$ Ca-ching. Otherwise it's a bridge for me. $$$$ Ca-ching $$$$ Ca-ching!

Canadian Tooth Numbers (Patient's Right and Left)

You can read about Canadian (and International) tooth numbering and why my extracted tooth was #15 if you CLICK HERE.

As is often the case it seems, Americans have a different way than the rest of the world and number their teeth as below:

American Tooth Numbers

Universal or American numbering system. Orientation of the image is "doctor's view" so left and right side correspond to the patient's right and left, respectively. In this system #4 is the extracted tooth. Confusing or what? CLICK HERE to read about all the systems.
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Spring At "The Ponds" and Tree Art.

Click on any picture to enlarge

It was a lovely warm day so we decided to go over to the "ponds" and see Spring arriving. While the weather was warm, in the high 60's F, there was little sign of the new season yet. This year everything is late. It was only a week or so ago everything was still covered with snow and the temperatures have been double digit low.

Even so, there were birds and Wendy noticed this pretty Kestral perched atop a sign at a distance of about 300 yards (a long zoom so the picture lacks detail).

A visit to a forest is quite different this time of year, and without the leaves blocking the view, we noticed all sorts of other things that we would not see later in the year.

Deadwood makes interesting photos. Maybe I'll call it "tree art".

This area used to be home to the Parkwood Veteran's Hospital cottages for chronically ill veterans injured by such things as poisonous gas in WWI.

These people are all gone now so the future of this fine looking community event building is now in question. Surely there could be a use for such a lovely old structure, especially since it looks in very good shape for it's age. It is situated on a knoll with a lovely view of the pond and one would not imagine they were in the midst of a city.

Click the pic to enlarge this panoramic view of the Westminster Ponds.
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Happy Easter Everybody

An old postcard from over 100 years ago.

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You'll Be Thrilled To Know...

Everything looked fine. Because of my history I get one every five years but if you're over 50 you really should too.  As they say "Don't die of embarrassment!"
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When It's Cold I Miss My Hair!

To see more funny hair-do's CLICK HERE for the original article from The NY Daily News.

I'm thinking a trendy, new Kim Jong-Un wig but it may not keep me warm enough.

Even the barber has to be careful with this cut. CLICK HERE to read about it.
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What Kind Of Garbage Is This?

Wendy managed to find 3 bags (and 1 cardboard box which they may refuse to take) of long, ornamental grass cuttings. Our neighbour across the street outdid us with 52 bags at last count. Imagine. This is happening city-wide. I find the whole thing grossly obscene.

Today we bagged up the remainder of our yard waste that we couldn't mulch last fall. It's mostly long ornamental grasses that tend to tangle in the mower and don't grind up well. Unfortunately we are not supposed to burn this stuff anymore so, according to the rules of the enviro-dummies, we crammed it all into three biodegradable paper bags. Running out of bags, we used one cardboard box which, according to the web page, might be a no-no.

The city has officially designated this week as "yard waste week" and says it will pick it up some time during the week. Great! It's Spring, the rainy season, and we have our garbage out in paper bags which will likely sit out in the wet for up to 5 days. Duh! Does this make any sense to you?

It makes me so annoyed, I didn't want to waste any more time writing about it, so...  I Googled the key words "genius, paper bags, yard waste" and came up with this nicely written 2006 essay by Jeffrey J. Brokaw .

I’d like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the genius that decided that yard waste, such as sticks, branches, and pulled up weeds, should be stuffed into paper bags for disposal.
You, sir, are an ass.
Sticks and branches, as it turns out, don’t fit all that well into paper bags. They catch on the top of the bag on the way in, and once you get them in, they poke through the sides. The alternative is to spend perfectly good hours of your life, that you’ll never get back, breaking up sticks into segments no longer than 8 inches.
Interesting factoid: we used to be able to burn the damn things in the backyard.
Apparently, this is viewed as progress by many people. Many people, unfortunately, are stupid.
Even thinking about this system for any length of time — say, for 3/10 of a second — reveals how inefficient it would be. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that putting groups of sharp things into a paper bag causes some problems.
But, alas, stuffing sticks into bags is our reality. I imagine thanks are owed to various groups: the Enviro-weenies that push this lunacy, the profit-motivated waste hauler that happily charges $1.95 per yellow sticker to put on the bags, and the brave city government leadership that signs on the dotted line. The net result is that you either (a) perform this stupid slave labor yourself, (b) pay somebody else to do it, (c) ignore your yard, or (d) dump all this stuff in the neighbor’s yard.
So, for me it looks like (d). Go ahead and call the cops, I don’t care. I’ll deny everything.
This work by Jeffrey J. Brokaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Update: Tuesday April 15. Snow overnight. See picture below.

High winds gusting to 60km knocked the box over but everything seems OK except for the snow covering. I used some duct tape to attach the bags to the pole yesterday to help prevent the bags from blowing onto the street. Hopefully the bags will not become too soggy.

Gone!

Update 2 Wednesday April 16:
 There! Out of sight, out of mind. How much did that exercise cost me in taxes?
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A Hairy Experiment.

Click the pic to enlarge, back button to return.

What does Wendy look like with blond hair, bangs and a pony tail? What do I look like with hair? This is my latest "artsy" poster (36" x24") for my friend Ann in Tennessee.  These are really collages where I start with a basic scene and add bits and pieces from my own collection and around the internet. To see my other Coke related pictures go to "my Artsy Porfolio" by clicking the tab above. Ann's 50's Diner is the place to be on a Saturday night. Click the picture to enlarge it.

The original scene was a diner somewhere in Thailand. I changed it a bit.
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Ice Fishing On Sarnia Bay.

Smooth, clear, blue ice. You can see why they used to harvest ice blocks here. Click to enlarge.

A lone angler watches his line through a hole in the ice. There's still fairly thick ice in the bay, even though the lake and river are breaking up.

 A still picture just can't do justice to the sight of the fast-moving ice floes passing under The Blue Water Bridge.

Spiles and pilings were heaving this winter as the ice played havok with some of the docks in the marina.

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I Blue It!

Click picture to feel cool.

Looks like a view out the window of an airplane at 30,000 feet. This picture was actually taken down the St. Clair river near Courtright. I didn't like the buildings visible on the US side of the river so I substituted a pure blue sky. It looks more like a lake than the river now. The new dock is made from engineered wood as are the chairs. It gives a surreal look of a computer generated scene but it really is from a photo. The flowing ice reminds me of clouds so what is usually up, is down and down is up. Confused? So am I.

This is the original shot. See how I magically removed the steel security cable, the inflatable water toy on the chairs, and made U.S.A. completely disappear.
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Fair Weather Cat.

Click to enlarge.

The fine weather this week has melted a lot of the snow and the little animals are back in great abundance. Dash wants to stay outside forever. From his vantage point on our back deck he keeps track of squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, mice and birds.

Signs of spring are emerging.

As the snow recedes, it reveals all kinds of hidden objects. The long grass on the golf course is all matted down and balls show up like Easter egg treats.

But all that's round is not treasure.

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Scotland Seceeds From the U.K., Chooses Bitcoin.

 New Flag for the U.K.

Here is the new Union Jack without the Scottish, white on blue background St Andrew's Cross.

St. Andrew's Cross (flag of Scotland)

 Scotland officially separates from England today. Could Scotty be too frugal to produce his own currency, so they adopt Bitcoin instead?

Scotland to use Bitcoin

Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond has insisted an independent Scotland will adopt Bitcoin as its currency if the UK government continues to refuse access to sterling.

Salmond told reporters he wasn’t sure he even wanted to use sterling any more, insisting that he’d heard good things about Bitcoin and its ability to make financial transactions easier.
Read about it CLICK HERE.

April Fools!
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