And I'm sitting here drinking a hot coffee and eating a warm carrot muffin, and thinking back to the bad old days when I worked the midnight shift for our local electrical utility, and about this time of the morning, felt like I had maybe three weeks to live, if I was really lucky. Constant shift work is very debilitating, and also puts a serious strain on your domestic affairs, because it's almost impossible to sleep in the daytime anywhere there's other families with little kids raising hell nearby. So I spent a lot of those years being sleep-deprived and bitchy and miserable, and it's no wonder all that resulted in two divorces. It's a wonder we all survived as well as we did.
Now that I'm retired, I can sleep whenever I'm tired, and stay up whenever I'm not, and eat whenever I'm hungry, and please myself about when to do it. It's sometimes fun to stay up in the wee small hours of the morning, when the rest of the world is sleeping, and there's no crying baby next door interrupting my train of thought, or making me wonder if someone's abusing the little darling.
The world is a rather contrary place. These six high-rise residential towers here were originally designed and built as 'adults only' type accommodations, without any of the usual amenities associated with families having children. Along came a provincial government trying to solve a housing crisis by ruling that former 'adults-only' premises would now admit families with children, and here we are with little tots in buildings that have no facilities for them. No play areas, no bikes allowed, no this and no that - it seems everything's a 'no-no' if you're a kid around here. And being one of the very oldest kids around here, I thoroughly resent that, and I'm sure other kids do too. But you can't argue with politicians and their lawyer pals. And most politicians are the kind of people who would steal a red-hot stove and then go back for the smoke, if they thought you weren't watching. That's because most of them were lawyers first, and ever since ancient times, there's stories about lawyers. Like the one about the two farmers disputing the ownership of a cow. While one farmer pulled on it from the front, and the other pulled on it from the rear, the cow was milked by a lawyer.....
So, if I'm up during the middle of the night, and somehow manage to find among my 72 channels of nothing on TV something worth watching, how do I do that without annoying the neighbors while listening to it? Simple: I have a set of wireless headphones that work very well. I set the TV sound to 'Mute', crank up the volume to the transmitter unit, turn on the headphones, and enjoy my show without anyone else hearing anything. Those headphones are 'JVC' of Japan, but made in..... - do I really have to tell you? Sometimes I wonder how we made things before the Chinese got into the act. A lot of things used to be made in Japan, and now the Japanese are farming out the work to the Chinese. Pentax and Nikon cameras are two recent examples, and they work very well, too. Are we looking at the decline and fall of North American industry? I could argue that we are, and it's probably our own fault.
No comments:
Post a Comment