Monday, March 31, 2008

Moving, but not at a snail's pace

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon packing up the guest bedroom, and converting it into the baby's room.
We ventured from store to store, picking up the necessary items, then returned home and made our place a bigger disaster than before. As Ali says though, "it has to get worse before it gets better...."

That motto can actually hold a lot of bearing to many things. Take for example my first (of soon to be many) visits to my massage therapist. It was rough going for the first day, but then I was actually able to walk comfortably the entire following day.

As I was driving home today after dropping the wife off at work, I saw one thing that made me want to pull this lady out of her car, "and give her a good talking to".
She was driving, one hand holding a coffee, the other holding a cigarette. Usually not a big deal right? The kicker was noticing the baby carrier in the back seat. She was kind enough to have the cover over the baby's face though....

In Manitoba, they are trying to make it illegal to smoke in a car while carrying children. This has already become a law in the East coast, and hopefully we will follow suit soon. I would love to be in charge of writing those tickets. I'd cut in front of the car, get out, and slap the ticket square on their foreheads. I'd be that guy that Ali complained about. Call it a stupidity tax.

As mentioned before in Ali's blog, I was surprised to see the hostility shown towards us while we were in North Dakota. I know it was only two Emo kids who probably aren't hugged enough by their parents, but it got me to thinking about growing up in a small border town.
We used to be chased out of Minnesota as kids, sworn at as teens, and given the finger and told to "go back to Canada" more times than I can remember.
I felt like telling those two jagoffs in Grand Forks that if it was not for the fact that Canadians are carrying the local economy right now, they would not have a mall to hang out at. They wouldn't have understood what those big words meant though.
As I said earlier, I have only really experienced this in smaller towns across the U.S.
When I was younger, we took a trip down to Kentucky with nothing but good memories. We spent one Christmas in Arizona treated like royalty. I talked to many interesting people in Las Vegas.

Do me a favour, my American friends - tell small town people to be nice to us. We're harmless. We're Canadian.

3 comments:

Rock Chef said...

I had a friend for Vancouver who did a lot of travelling alone. He was always careful to have prominent Maple Leaves on his jacket and rucksack. He felt that everyone seemed to like Canadians. Getting confused with being American was not so good, though.

Chris said...

John - Are there still those Americans posing as Canucks while travelling through Europe?

Rock Chef said...

It would not surprise me - Canadians are much more popular than Americans.