Moose FM CFZN 93.5 - Haliburton

I don’t know if it’s the heat or maybe the lack of quality TV lately or maybe just the fact that I’m getting older, but….food has just not tasted that great to me lately. It happens to me every once in a while, I think the last time I went through this was during the 2^nd season of Seinfeld, and I remember because, besides my wife and kids, food is like the most important thing in my life and lately it just ain’t doin it for me. Now because of the heat I’ve been BBQ’ing pretinear every night. Pretinear is a word, a colloquialism if you will, meaning “close to”,  I’m not sure what colloquialism means.  Anyway I love BBQed food but for some reason its just not satisfying me, don’t get me wrong I’m still getting plenty and at my regular times and I’m not letting on to my wife that there’s a problem I still make all the appropriate noises and don’t let on that I’ve eaten elsewhere in search of satisfaction, I don’t think she suspects although there was a close call with a marinara stain. Anyway I’ll continue to power through in hopes the problem solves itself, maybe suggest my wife spices things up a bit in the kitch…..wait a minute, my has been home on vacation for the past two weeks and being on holidays she’s a little more….lets say romantic….that’s probably it!  I’m oversexed and it’s ruining my appetite! She stills has 6 more weeks of holidays....all in all not a bad problem to have.

Hot, steamy, sweaty, car seats burn bare legs, sand beaches so hot they burn the bottoms of your feet, and as little clothes as possible. Summer in the Haliburton Highlands baby! And there is no other place I’d rather be. Cool misty mornings turn into beautiful sunny days spent on the dock and in the water, the heat brings out the smell of the pine trees and the mossy smell of the forest floor. You can hear kids laughing and screaming as they’re being dragged behind boats in tubes, boards or skies, bikini clad beauties soaking up the sun and as the afternoon sun starts to fall the smell of meat sizzling over the BBQ permeates the air, as the sunset gives way to star filled nights people in very slow boats are trying to coax fish into their vessels and then as darkness falls you can hear the giggles of the skinny dippers enjoying a night time dip the way God intended. Paradise Found!  I’m going to print this and put it in my wallet, I’m gonna need it next February.

So the Canada Day holiday is upon us. A chance to reflect on being Canadian again and if your like me I always kinda cringe when I see those Canadian stereotypes perpetuated in the media. Sure I like hockey and I live in an area where the annual snowfall is 2 plus metres and I spell metre different than they do in the states which is why my spell check has it underlined, but being Canadian is more than that.  OK I like poutine, and I have no problem with beaver….c’mon I mean as our national symbol. Still I’m more than a Canadian stereotype, yes I refer to Mac’n Cheese as Kraft Dinner, I eat Smarties instead of M&M’s, I’ve celebrated the May Two four weekend in sunshine, rain and snow, and I love Canadian Beer, I do say “eh” and “give er” proudly but I don’t say “aboot” and don’t know any Canadians that do. Yes I’ll admit that I know what your talking about when you say Hinterland Who’s Who,  and I remember Rusty the Giraffe and the Friendly Giant as well as Don Messer and His Jubilee and 2 of my all time favorite shows were The Littlest Hobo and The Forest Rangers.  Man the evidence is starting to mount, I mean I didn’t have a problem with Don Cherry being in the top 5 Greatest Canadians of all time, I proudly wear a poppy every November, I truly believe that Canada from coast to coast is the most beautiful country on the planet and it’s citizens are the freest people in the world and I stand tall and proud every time I hear “O Canada”    Wow maybe I am a stereotypical Canadian……lucky me!

Freedom Baby I’m sticking it to the man! Well the man being Ma Bell and freedom meaning I cut my land line, it just sounds better the other way. But yes I took the big step, joining thousands of others in North America in freeing ourselves from phones with wires, unless of course you have a portable phone…but you get my drift. For the past few years myself, my wife, and our two children, all have our own cell phones and really the only people that call the home number anymore are tele-marketers and Highway 407. I’m really not sure why the 407 calls because every time I call the number the automated voice leaves I get another auto-mated voice saying I owe them 12 dollars, even though I haven’t used the highway since 2004 and when I try to argue the point I just get another automated voice and so on, I once spent an hour and twenty two minutes trying to speak to a human being but it never happened, so I believe Aliens have landed and taken over our toll roads and are slowly trying to drive us mad with automated phone calls, but I digress.  So anyway last week after calling Bell and cancelling the land line I had to call the 3 people who still call me on my landline to tell them that from now on to call me on my cell. First call was to my Mom, “well do I have to do anything different? What if your home when I call?” I said don’t worry Mom if I’m home when you call I’ll just go outside. She thinks cell phones only work outside. Next call was to my Dad who said “if I never called you on a landline why in god’s name do you think I’d call you on a cell”, couldn’t argue with that.  Then I put a call in to Beyonce, OK Beyonce’s fan club. You see I sent her a fan letter a couple of years ago saying that if she was ever in Canada and wanted to ya know hang out to just give me a call. Oh I know what your thinking, like she’d ever call me, well your probably right but it would keep me awake at nights thinking that she could be sitting in a hotel room all lonely, dialing my number and getting “I’m sorry that number is no longer in service”.