Some folks got no larnin’

This was an expression that was used by some gentle folks whom I once met just outside of Ludlow, New Brunswick.  It refers to someone who may very well have some “education” but moreover, lack common sense.   It’s not that common it seems.

I’m not talking about this guy,  he was just out there this morning playing his heart out on the corner of Neubaugaße and Mariahilferstraße.

He actually didn’t entirely suck,  although I don’t recall what he was playing.  I know it wasn’t “Lady of Spain”,  but it was a recognisable tune.  Sometimes they’re not.  I rarely give money,  and only if the person can play better than I,  which was the case here,  but I still wasn’t feeling generous.  Not nice,  I know.

It was already getting kind of late,   the beggars and nut jobs were already out and about,  and the heat was building.  I wasn’t hanging around for any musical interlude.

I remember this one time we were in Halifax wandering around,  and there was a “gentleman”  there with a guitar. I was almost going to say, “playing a guitar”,  but that would just be wrong.  He was so BAD,  that I just looked at my brother and said,  “You should have brought your guitar!”   Because this guy was actually collecting money for well,  carrying a guitar around,  and beating at it in the general vicinity of where the strings are...  Kind of painful to listen to as I recall.

 

Where was I? 

Right,  I wanted to mention this little story.

 

These are snippets from both yesterday and today’s rag.   Apparently,  some jack-ass in one of the little towns nearby,  thought it might be a fun idea to have a little party at his house,  since his parents were away.   He made the mistake of putting it on Facebook.   When roughly 1400 people said they’d be there,  he got a little panicky.   At some point the parents got involved (maybe about time?)  and thought it prudent to hire a security company and then also contact the cops.   80 policemen were sent to the house on the night of the gathering to try and persuade everyone to go home. Only 700 showed up.  Not sure how they were able to count them,  but I’ll take their word for it.  Sucks when you have to bring in extra cops on a Saturday night and pay them overtime.

I think if I were on the local council,  I’d be looking to the family to recover those costs.  Just sayin’.

 

Meanwhile,   the jack-ass had long since made it public that the party was called off,  (like that was going to work) and had buggered off to Vienna.  I do realise that calling this young lad by that name is an insult to jack-asses everywhere,  and I do apologise.

The newspaper used the term “Witzbold”,  which is kind of like a “joker”.  I prefer jack-ass myself.

 

 

So,  the question is,  haven’t we learned about this kind of thing?  I don’t mean the slight lack of parenting skills,  that’s a whole other subject.   I’m talking about that whole “let’s put it on Facebook!”  thing.

I mean,  it’s been in the news.  It’s not clever to advertise any kind of gathering on a social media site like Facebook.

Do a Google search,  you’ll see.     There are some whacky stories out there.  Fill yer boots..

 

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

 

Thanks for stopping in.

 

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Dodging some weather bullets.

Since we don’t watch TV here,  I tend to miss out on some of the “news” that I’m sure many of the local yokels know about.  I don’t think we’re missing much,  but it’s then not until I see something in the local rag the next day that I realise there might have been a few ‘issues’ here and there?

When it comes to the weather,  I usually take a look at the sky,  and will decide whether we need to button up or not.  Sometimes the rain comes a bit unexpectedly,   especially if there’s just a passing cloud that decides to let loose right over our heads,  even though the rest of the sky is clear.  There’s something about the rain pounding down when it’s sunny out that I find kind of mesmerising.  A bit like the way a cat might be fascinated by a dripping tap.  Except that,  I’m not about to stick my tongue out and try to get a drink.  So maybe that’s not the best analogy.

 

Over the last few days we’ve been getting late afternoon thunder showers that have helped a bit in the heat department.  It’s inevitable that “something has to give”,  when there’s so much pent up energy.   Last night’s rain came long after we went to bed,  so it was annoying to wake up to the sound of rain in the wee hours and realise I had left the chairs outside.  Even though they are “outside” chairs, we discovered early on that the darned things tend to allow little pockets of water to collect,  that then decide to come out at precisely that moment when we need an extra couple places to sit inside.  Having little puddles of water on hardwood floors doesn’t really work,  so I just always bring them in. 

 

 

It seems we’ve been kind of lucky.  There’s been some stuff happening in the weather department.  I had heard about the floods in the UK,  since they’ve been getting more than their share,  but I wasn’t quite aware of some of the craziness going on in the rest of Europe.  I’m not going to bore you with the details,  but there have been mudslides and all kinds of *fun* stuff.  Just the same though,  I still think it’s a far cry from losing your home to a forest fire.   I mean, it’s going to suck if you have that one house down by the river that gets filled with water or washed away,  but at least it’s not going to spread to your neighbours.  So when you do get back home again,  assuming you had the good sense to get out in the first place,  at least the muck can be shovelled.   Might be a little stinky, but the fumes aren’t going to asphyxiate you either.  It’s all relative.

For me anyway,  I think the threat of fire would be considerably more difficult to deal with.  There are some memories that do seem to stay with a person over the decades,  and I can recall vividly from my childhood the fear of seeing the smoke from a forest fire that was burning within a few miles of our old farm back in Nova Scotia.  We used fire in the early springtime to burn off old grass,  so fire was not something to be played with,  or fascinating in any way shape or form the way it might be to any other little kid.  That shit scared me.

 

Of course,  when I say “farm”,  I’m speaking in the broadest sense of the word, since we mostly referred to it as, “the pile of rocks”.    They didn’t call it “New Scotland” for nothing.

Ever go out and harvest rocks in the spring?  Seriously,  it was as if they grew out of the ground,  since that was another thing I do seem to recall about “farm life”.  Filling a utility trailer several times with all the rocks we had picked off the field before we could do much else.  Very hard on the hands and the back,  but even harder on the equipment.

 

The one other thing that I recall that was quite back breaking,  was picking wild blueberries.  *segue alert*  Thankfully,  there was some kind of “reward” at stake, so that was a good incentive. I don’t think I would have been at all motivated if we had been picking for someone else.  There’s really nothing quite like the intense flavour of wild blueberries.  Of course,  it’s always a good idea to scan for bears,  depending on where you are.  I don’t recall anyone mentioning that kind of thing in the Annapolis Valley.  Maybe they didn’t want to scare the bejeepers out of me?   I’ll have to ask my brother if there were bears around.  Wow,  talk about a potential for child abuse.  Made to pick blueberries,  and there might have been bears too?   And here I thought my parents we kind and loving.  Hm, better not dwell on that too much.

OK, before you get any ideas,  it wasn’t like they sent me out into the blueberry patch while they waited from the safety of the car,  with the windows rolled up.  That would have sucked.  I’m sure I would have remembered that too.  As a matter of fact,  as a young kid whose age was still in the single digits,  I don’t think I picked too damned many blueberries at all.  Probably more of a nuisance to have around than much of a help.  Let’s keep it real here if possible.

 

All we can hope to find here in Wienerland is cultivated blueberries of course,  and they’re certainly tasty enough.  Once in a while I’ll pick some up so that T.C. can have them along with some yogurt for her daily rations,  or better yet,  added in with some pancake batter…

That was Sunday’s breakfast by the way.   Pancakes with blueberries.  Once in a while I put in a request.  They were awesome.

I sort of ate the evidence before it occurred to me to maybe take a picture,  but if you’re reading this from anywhere in what we would consider to be the “civilised world”,  surely to GAWD you know what I’m talking about.  Use your imagination.  Or head off to

But I learned something.

 

 

You’d think that blueberries are blueberries,  right?   Well mostly.  The berries were all fine and dandy,  it was the cleaning end of things that was a pain in the rear.   The package from the left is from France.  The package on the right is from Austria.  For whatever reason,  and I’m not about to make any generalisations about either the French or the Austrians,  the package from France was considerably harder to get to the state where a person might actually want to consider eating the berries.   There were leaves,  twigs,  little stems.   Were they using four year old kids to pick these things? 

And this wasn’t a discovery I made on a morning when I had gobs of time to leisurely pick all the cr*p out of a sieve full of blueberries.  No,  this was a normal weekday morning,  when I really and truly can’t dawdle too flippin’ much in the lunch making department.  And no,  I’ve never been able to prepare lunch the night before.  That’s when I have even LESS desire to stand there picking over blueberries.   Or *gag* make a sandwich.  Besides,  since there’s no preservatives in the bread whatsoever here,  it has to immediately go into the freezer if it’s not getting consumed right after coming from the bakery.   So that “night before”  thing wouldn’t work anyway.

I’ve probably made you move your eyes back and forth quite enough.

 

Hopefully the weather is treating you well,  wherever you may be.

 

Thanks for popping ‘round.

 

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Pretty much the extent of it.

Um no.  That’s not me.  I was a little perkier than that this morning at about 9:30.   That was when I realised the pecans I bought were the kind you snack on.  “Salted and roasted”  or something like that.  It’s not really a “language” thing.  It’s more of a “put your damned glasses on so you can see what you’re getting” thing.   So I had to make another short trip over to the Merkur in the Westbahnhof.  (West train station)

I knew I could get them there,  since I had found them there in the past.  It’s often a little tricky to find certain little things I find.  Some shops as simply too small to carry all the quirky little things,  and it can be a minor challenge to keep track of what is available where.

There’s the usual flock of tourists coming or going,  and it almost never fails that I end up giving someone directions if they’ve just come from the station.  It can be confusing if you just emerge out onto the street with no real sense of where the heck you might be.  This morning it was a young couple with backpacks,  looking at a map,  speaking English. 

English is quite often the common language of the confused I find.  Anyway,  the young gentleman (whose first language was not English,  but I didn’t ask)  fetched his “Ipad”  or whatever it was called, and brought up the directions,  and come to find out they had walked right by the store where they were supposed to make a turn, but they had gone the wrong way.  I’m not sure why any directions would include a store as a landmark,  but I know I’m not up on all the latest technology.   Plus,  I like to have a pretty good idea of the direction I need to go right after I come out of the station.  But maybe that’s just me.

Hey,  when I first set foot in Paris,  I had no map,  and there was certainly not the technology that’s available today.  I relied on finding my way by dead reckoning.  It wasn’t until after a day or so that I picked up a little fold up map of Paris,  that I still have to this day.   Paris hasn’t changed much in 34 years.

So I didn’t think about it at the time,  but afterwards it occurred to me that,   you can have all the fancy gizmos you want,  but if the directions are confusing or misleading,  you’re still screwed.   Human intervention is usually a requirement.  They were looking for a youth hostel that I hadn't heard of (‘cause youth hostels are such a big part of my world)  on a street that didn’t sound all that familiar either.  Come to find out it was over on the other side of the Gürtel.  I don’t usually wander off that far. 

So that was my big excitement for the morning.  Big whoop. 

There was a brief plan afoot to get out of here somehow,  with the idea that maybe there’s some material down at Komolka with Travelling Companion’s name on it.  A person who has sewing as a hobby can never have too much fabric.  I mean, as a woodworker,  I’d have gobs of wood hanging around too, if it didn’t take up so darned much room.  I’m just saying  I ‘get it’.

She tends to drive up Mariahilferstraße when she comes home from work,  and as the traffic is usually stop and go,  it would seem that there is always a moment or two to peer over at the entrance,  where it just so happens that all the new fabrics are on display.  Clever bastards.

That’s how we ended up with those Swarovski light fixture by the way,  but that’s another story.  Too much looking around.  At that particular time it so happened that I was at the wheel,  so don’t immediately think there was some gawking and driving going on.  I was watching the road,  don’t worry.   Need better window blinds.  Or something.  Or maybe the city needs to take away that particular traffic light?   That would work.  No stopping equals no window shopping.  

The thing is though,  it’s another hot day,  and the stores aren’t necessarily air conditioned.   Eeep!  

I’m not going to even say how much neither of us don’t want to do that.   The grocery stores are air conditioned thankfully,  but even then,  I get those chores out of the way in the earlier hours.

We’ll just stay here where it’s nice and comfy.  Thanks.

 

I think that’ll be the extent of my ramblings.

 

Try to stay cool,  wherever you may be.  Enjoy your weekend.

 

Thanks for looking in.

 

 

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