Category Archives: George

Monday 24th September 2018 – WINTER IS ACUMEN IN …

… Lhude sing Rudolph.

I woke up this morning … "der der der der DER" – ed … to a heavy frost and a temperature of -2°C. Yes, we are going to be in for a belting winter and no mistake this year.

Frosts and freezing already. I’m not looking forward to it.

And due to some kind of confusion yesterday in the Great Satan, the phone seems to have gone on to New England time so it was an hour later when it went off, and by this time everyone had already left.

So I turned over and went back to sleep for a while, and had pleasant dreams of the High Arctic yet again.

But once I was awake again, I started work.

But not for long.

Darren and George came back. They had to go to Fredericton to pick up an engine, a big-bore Chevy 505 racing engine for a pulling truck. This meant uncoupling the big trailer so seeing as they were struggling I dressed and went to lend a hand.

Once we’d done that, I took the opportunity to leap aboard and we set off south-east, grabbing a coffee on the way past.

And as we were early, we stopped off for a meal. It was a good job that we were early too because it took half an hour for them to prepare our meal. “Something had gone wrong” with the order and I can guess what it was.

We were visiting a guy called George who is apparently the leading North American expert on gas-flowing cylinder heads and I would die to have a garage like his. He’d rebuilt this engine and we had come to pick it up to deliver it.

And if you think that I could talk, you aint heard nuffink yet. We were there for two hours – half an hour to load up and the remaining 90 minutes while he told us “a little story”.

We drove back via the yard where George (our George) picked up his truck, and then we came back here to find that in view of the weather we had run out of heating oil. What a fine time for that to happen.

And it took an age to locate a supplier who actually had a tanker on standby that had fuel in it ready for delivery.

Another thing that I did was to book my bus back to Montreal on Friday night, and a hotel for Saturday night.

And Brain of Britain has done it again, hasn’t he?

Sitting there wondering why hotels were so expensive and in the end booking a cat house even worse than the usual. And then suddenly realising, far too late of course, that the prices quoted are in Canadian Dollars not Euros and hence the difference!

Tea was potatoes, beans and vegan sausage for me and then I called it aday.

It comes to something when something even as simple is this is laying me out on my back.

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Sunday 23rd September 2018 – REGULAR READERS …

… of this rubbish will recall that I have given endless amounts of grief to all kinds of Border Patrol, immigration and security services in the past, and on occasions too numerous to enumerate.

And so I take my hat off to Officer Allen of the US Immigration Service who saw me today at Bridgewater, Maine today. If every Immigration Officer were as friendly, courteous and helpful as he, travelling from one country to the next would be an absolute pleasure.

Yes, I’ve been out and about on my travels today. But it was touch and go at one point.

What didn’t help was that, despite it being Sunday, I forgot to switch off the alarm and so that’s guaranteed to get me off on the wrong foot.

I was in the middle of the High Arctic too, doing a guided tour in, of all things, Bill Badger, the old A60 van that I had in the 1970s. When the tour was over, two people – a couple – came over to offer me their services and while I took down their details I knew that I wouldn’t ever be using them, for the least of the reasons being that there are only two seats in the front of the van.

With it being early, I loitered around for a while and then when others started to move around I joined in, had my medication (I’ve found it now) and a coffee.

We all poured out of the house where Amber’s boyfriend was waiting for us, and we shot off down the road to the border. I need a Green Card to cross over, and so I had my pleasant encounter, and then off to Presque Ile in Maine.

It’s my custom when I’m here to treat everyone to Sunday lunch so the Oriental Pearl Chinese buffet was the place to visit. They all tucked into the buffet while the chef made me a vegetable stir-fry with rice.

Next stop was Marden’s.

That’s like Noz only bigger and with more stuff, and many of the tools in Strider have come from there in the past. But today, I bought nothing. Strider and I won’t be going far so I don’t need much.

Back here I hit the wall again and I was gone. Three hours this time, and isn’t this becoming ridiculous? I dunno where I’ll be going with all of this and if I don’t sort myself out soon I won’t make my bus back to Montreal on Friday night.

But later on I came round and surprisingly, had a new lease of life. I could even manage a sandwich. George was back from Winnipeg so he came round and we all had a chat.

But now I’m off to bed. I need to be on the road tomorrow and I have a lot of things to do.

But first I need a good night’s sleep.

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Sunday 31st October 2010 – I ATTENDED HALLOWEEN TODAY

First time ever that I have done something as North-American as this.

family taylor carving pumpkins centreville new brunswick canadaAfter what can only be described as a leisurely brunch (with my “never ever call me before midday on Sunday” I would fit in so well here) we all sat down at the table and started pumpkin-carving.

First job was to top and then to empty 15 or so pumpkins and that led to seeds and flesh everywhere. Darren had a pile of images and so we photocopied them and used them as templates for the carving.

We sellotaped them to the pumpkins, pricked out the patterns and then joined up the dots with a small knife. And considering that I’d never ever done it before, my group of bats, my witch and my “screaming skull” came out quite well, and I was so impressed. Little Amber even did a freehand carving of Strawberry Moose (you can see him modelling for his portrait) and that was pretty impressive too.

carved pumpkins illuminated centreville new brunswick canadaDarren’s friend George took a few pumpkins down to the gate and I set the rest up in the living room and put tea lights in them so that I could photograph them.

On a long exposure (which counteracted the flickering of the flame) the image came out really well and the effect is pretty good.

strawberry moose zoe taylor halloween centreville new brunswick canadaAfter Hannah and I had lined the drive with flaming pumpkins Rachel and I took Zoe, Amber and Amber’s friend (and Strawberry Moose who had donned a tutu and a bumble bee headgear for the occasion) out trick-or-treating.

It was all terribly tacky as you might expect but it was also fun and you can’t spend a Halloween amongst a family here in North America and not participate in the entertainment.

And tomorrow I’m moving on. My time here is up. I’ll be driving to Bathurst where my journey started in 2003 and heading north from there. The idea is to go around the shore of Northern New Brunswick and then round the Gaspe peninsula to Matane and then take the ferry over to Baie Comeau, where the adventure really began, and that will be the Great Circle route completed.  

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Saturday 30th October 2010 – TODAY HAS BEEN QUITE CIVILISED …

… and hasn’t it been a long time since anything like that ever happened?

In fact we had a recycling day today and with Darren’s big pick-up truck, Rachel, Hannah and I did a tour of the neighbourhood picking up glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminium drinks cans.

Once we had a full load on board we went off to a recycling plant in Bath about 10 miles away from here where we weighed it all in.

The plant was quite interesting – it was a simple hand-sorting operation where you tipped out your containers onto a kind-of counter and two people hand-sorted the cans and plastic and they also weighed the glass bottles, not by scales but by eye.

And having seen the price is on offer for scrap over here, not only do I now understand why in several cities that I’ve been to and down several roads that I’ve travelled I’ve seen gangs of people picking up the litter, I’m also going to bring over the scrap aluminium off the two caravans that I dismantled and weigh it in over here.

giant inflatable pumpkin blown away by wind centreville new brunswick canadaIt was quite a windy day over here too and so the highlight was definitely this giant inflatable pumpkin that was busily making a bid for freedom down the highway in the general direction of the USA.

What you don’t see in the photo is the guy from a nearby house who was giving a rather desperate chase after it. 

Thanks in no small measure to the long piece of rope that was tethered to it the guy managed to restrain it but it was touch-and-go at one stage and my money was definitely on the pumpkin.

cadillac convertible centreville new brunswick canadaI was also taken out old-car spotting too.

Darren took me to see his brother-in-law who lives just down the road. He has an old Cadillac convertible that he has restored from a rusty heap and had taken it out for a run-around this morning. And so we headed off down the road to catch him up.

pizza hut houlton maine usaThis evening we all went out for pizza to celebrate Halloween and a good time was had by all. My pizza is the one in the foreground – the vegetarian one without cheese.

If I’m very lucky tomorrow I might get to spend some time with my great-nieces but the trouble with teenagers is that they always seem to have a much different agenda to any agenda that anyone else is ever planning. So I dunno.

Mind you, I have an important decision to make. Do I go out trick-or-treating with Amber and Zoe tomorrow night or do I stay behind with Hannah and hand out the candy?

But all three of them have decided that once Halloween is over I can take off my halloween mask. I don’t seem to be able to convince them that this is my REAL face.

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Sunday 21st February 2010 – Today got off to a really bad start.

Yes – someone rang me up this morning – at 09:41 would you believe. And what is worse is that this certain someone had already been told twice about ringing or trying to ring me on a Sunday morning while I’m having my beauty sleep – and with a face like mine I need as much beauty sleep as I can get.

The answer to this is of course simple – you transmit your message to the offender by beating it into his skull in morse code with a pickaxe handle. I have never known that to fail and it may well come to that of it happens again.

It was a gorgeous day today as well though – at least in the morning. So much so that I had the heater on in here and I also did a load of washing. But I have this magnificent way of summoning up the rain. Never mind your rain dances, or seeding clouds or whatever I just hang some washing up and down comes the rain. But not before we had 26.1 degrees in the verandah – the highest total since 21st November of our Indian Summer. Spring can’t be all that far away.

I caught up with the mailing that has been outstanding for a week and I also sent out the circular for the Anglo_French Conversation Group. And one person sent me a mail back saying “please take my name off your list”. This person is the webmaster for the Reseau Rurale – the organisation that co-ordinates the activities of the Alternative Community around here.

As you know I don’t see eye-to-eye with the Reseau following the events that I have described earlier surrounding the legendary Goatherd of Teilhet – so much so that they are refusing to e-mail me the details of their events so that I can broadcast them on my radio show (you’ve no idea how far some people will carry a vendetta – cutting their noses off to spite their faces is nothing compared to the activities of this lot).

But this takes the biscuit.

Readers of my outpourings in its previous guise will recall the events of September/October 2008 when the webmaster’s car broke down. I was out one night until after midnight trying to fix it for him and then when it was diagnosed as being irrepairable it was “run me here” “take me there” “fetch me this” “carry me that” every blasted five minutes. Not that I minded, of course – we foreigners out here are all in it together – but the moment he bought a car (and it was me who found it for him and made the appropriate enquiries about it) that was that and he hasn’t spoken to me since! That’s gratitude for you!

The answer to this though is of course “power”. You give some henpecked, downtrodden person a little bit of power and they can’t resist using it to the fullest, most extreme limits possible … and this blog is?” – ed … so really you ought to feel just a little sorry for people like that. But it makes you wonder what else goes on in their lives that they feel the need to behave like this. Still, I don’t care. I’m fed up of trying to “understand” people and “making allowances” for them – no-one does it for me after all. I think that at the end of the day the only answer is the pickaxe handle and the message in morse code.

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Saturday 1st August 2009 – Saturday is a sort-of day of rest …

… so I didn’t set the alarm clock this morning.

And when I woke up my mobile phone had gone flat and so I didn’t have a clue about the time, so seeing as I was wide awake I reckoned it was getting on for 10:00 so I hauled myself out of the stinking pit to find that it was 08:15!

After breakfast I went up onto the scaffolding at the side of the house and gave it all a really good soaking in xylophene and then walloped some of the brown staining all over it – nice and thick. That won’t rot away any time soon.

By now it was 11:30 and as there’s not much to eat round here I wandered off into St Eloy and the LIDL and Carrefour. I didn’t meet Bill today (just for a change) and once stocked up (to a value of 20 Euros) I dropped by on George but he was going out so I came home.

In the afternoon I cleaned up my room (you’ve no idea how much rubbish was in here that had gathered over the last 4 weeks) and the verandah so I have places to eat ond cook again. All of this was done to music as I coupled up the hi-fi seeing as the power situation is resolving itself more permanently. Even now at 02:00 I have Lindisfarne going on in the background.

And I noticed on Facebook that Terry was praying for rain. And he got his wish almost as soon as he posted for we had a tropical storm. In 3 hours or so about 17mm of rain fell on here. That’s some going. I’m glad we got the roof on in here beforehand.

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