My New Job

I started a new job last week. I had to. They didn't want me showing up at my last job anymore. Even though I had been with them for 28 years, through three corporate owners, three locations and umpteen downsizings, reorganizations and reviews, suddenly I was the red shirt beamed down to the planet. Expendable. I`m unsure what I did to become surplus stock, but it must have been bad. After all, they didn't just lop off me and my position, but closed the entire warehouse and ceased distribution in Western Canada. I feel so responsible! I suppose I should explain to people that the job I had was with a different company than The Pipestone Flyer.

Many assume I make my living from writing this column when, in reality, what Brian gives me for my hours and hours of fashioning each weekly masterpiece would only be enough to qualify as beer money if I quit drinking alcohol. Until the hearty handshake and the heavy-hearted heave-ho, I actually worked for a multi-national conglomerate that sold and distributed a vast array of staples from the staple mines that riddle the bowels of the earth. Luckily avoiding the mines, my main tasks fell into two categaries; order desk and warehousing. The order desk is where you answer telephones and explain to people why we are out of a particular staple and how many arms and legs it will cost them to place the backorder.

The job I had for the other half my career was in what they call "shipping and recieiving".

Shipping is a job where you pick up heavy staple boxes off a rack and put them on a pallet, while receiving is picking up heavy staple boxes from a pallet and putting them on a rack. I really liked shipping better than receiving but then, the jobs were as different as night and dark. I remember so well, how badly I had wanted the job when I first applied. I had been working at McBain Camera in Edmonton and had never heard of the sage advice against "dipping your pen in the company ink". This led to me wooing a considerably younger version of Cupcake. (That is, if wooing means to be finally cornered into proposing.) When we began dating and, ultimately, living in sin (Woohoo! The good old days!) we realized that working together, playing together, socializing together and sleeping together might possibly be too much togetherness. I became highly motivated to find a new job somewhere... anywhere other than McBain`s. It was a tough economy then, too. The early 80`s. The big bust, and I ain`t talking Pamela Anderson. Interest rates were at 20% on mortgages. Unemployment was high. Gloomy economists were talking about The End of the World As We Know It, years before R.E.M and Great Big Sea.

Unemployment was huge. In fact, when I got the job, I had beat out 127 other applicants. The guy that made the hiring decision told me long after I came onboard, that he picked me ahead of the others because, in my skill set list, I included "morale booster" with such important workplace abilities as telling jokes and spinning yarns. Also the fact that he didn`t know I lied about having forklifting experience helped greatly. So I started out in the lowest rung of the corporate ladder, since they had yet to recognize my obvious genius and corporate leadership skills. Instead, they felt I had other assets to draw from, namely the aforementioned picking up heavy boxes and putting them down again. Still, as easy on the brain as that sounds, the fact that you have to pick the correct box up and set it down in the correct place every time weeds out many warehousing wannabees. After about eighteen months, I was transferred into the service department to fix staplers. I am not sure if they recognized my incredible potential and wanted me to have the widest field of expertise for their products as possible or I was a lousy shipper but they still wanted to keep me.

Eighteen months and 15 bazillion T5-8 pusher spring replacements later and I was given another position: the order desk! I knew I was on my way. I knew that OD`ing was a stepping stone to sales, then management and inevitably to the CEO`s office. My career path was set. It was great. I loved the order desk job lots. I got to talk to customers and help solve their staple-related problems. I was the face of the company to many and I loved feeling like an ombudsman between them and the big, scary staple empire.

Then, in the late 90`s, my career path became so lost, a bloodhound couldn`t have found it. The Graph Jockeys and Chartoholics in Head Office decided they needed more Control. They sent the order desk jobs to their Canadian head office in Ontario, shortly after Cupcake`s job had suffered an identical fate. She was, as they say, not amused. The company did, however, decide to keep the warehouse in Edmonton and make it into the Western Canadian Distribution Centre. I could keep my employment if I went back to being a warehouseman. I had come full circle. Oh sure, eventually, I became The Boss in the warehouse but it was harder to take than those gigantic pills they make you swallow when you have a sore throat.

I will admit that being The Boss was kind of cool but it didn`t last. I was only in that capacity about 18 months when the Graph-holes struck again and deemed our operation to be expendable. So now I have a new job. It`s at another staple company! On the order desk!! Life is good!!!

Mega-Sized Calmar Fair

Most weeks I sit staring at the blank screen on my laptop and wonder how I'll fill this space. After writing a humour column for 14 years, it is sometimes more difficult to select a topic than it is to write about it. Not so, today, however. I have more selection than a mega-sized dollar store and every story would have something to do with the amazing Calmar fair.

I'm sure you're thinking “How amazing can a small town fair be?” After all, Calmar is seriously small I mean, it's so tiny, no word of a lie, we've had visitors drive right through town thinking there would be more to it. There isn't, sadly. (Dear Calmar Chamber of Commerce, I was just joking.

What? We're so small we don't have a Chamber of Commerce?) Seriously, though, you might think that, being a town of just 2000 souls, the fair would be lamer than a one legged pirate. Instead, the entertainment was so wonderfully varied and plentiful, I thought I was in a town twice as big in size and sophistication. Sure there was the obligatory features; the pancake breakfast served from 8:00 AM until oh-my-gosh-they-keep-coming-lock-the-door-quick, a parade featuring elected officials waving out car windows, fireworks that rivalled those on my wedding night (wink wink) and a dance featuring an ocean of barely legal partiers trying to see who can out-drink each other while wildly leaping about in what passes for dancing nowadays and we can't forget the three day slow-pitch tournament with a beer garden right at the diamonds, a marketing move as clever as placing a Dairy Queen next to a fat farm.

In addition to those wonderful things that make a small town fair a small town fair, however, they had some additions that made this year's fair arguably the best ever. First of all, the town was celebrating 20 years of hosting the Mega-Market; the garage sale that is more like a bazaar in some exotic land. Vendor's tables line both blocks of main street and there are tons... er... tonnes of other yard sales all over town. People come from all over; like legions of bargain hunters on a dream safari. Then, at the stroke of 11:00, seemingly all transactions stopped when the parade began. I know from experience there was a time when Calmar had the quietest parades you could ever imagine. There were no marching bands, no music on the floats.

The whole thing would kind of slip by un-noticed like it was staffed by ninjas. Not this year. There was music. There was colour. There was flash and pizzazz and there was a large contingent of Jamaican cadets who had flown in for an exchange with their Alberta-based counterparts. The aforementioned parade, almost cancelled a couple years ago due to lack of interest, ended up longer than the actual parade route. And the crowds! I have never seen people five deep along main street in my life. It was like people had heard the float riders were tossing twenties instead of candy.

My fellow thespians with the Calmar Prairie Players had run off 200 little handbills for our melodrama at the beer gardens but we could have used ten times as many if we were to give one to every spectator. It was such as switch from the night before when you could have rolled up the streets and put them away in the shed considering the lack of traffic. Speaking of the Prairie Players, our small but vital troupe staged a melodrama called “Calamity in Calmar or Dark Doings on the Finley Farm” in the beer tent at the ball diamonds.

Paula Bosse had penned it just for the Prairie Players and we are hoping to negotiate with her for the rights to put it on YouTube. After all, if you compared on a per capita basis, with over 300 people viewing the play “Calamity” was a bigger hit than Cats was in New York and without the annoying show tunes, too! With the big Apple boasting a population of 8,200,000 people, they would have to draw 861,000 Cats fans in a single day to equal our record.

They would definitely need a larger beer tent than we had, though. We can't forget the wheel nuts over at the Show and Shine, either. Not that I understand these folks one iota. Cars are a tool to get from one place to another and to provide a place to sit while you wait to place your Timmy's order. However, having been to past shows, I'll admit the older models are pretty neat. The effort to reclaim those vehicles requires far more skill, tools, money, time, patience and talent than I will ever possess. I admire these antique aficianados but for myself, if I wanted to restore a decades old chassis, I would just go on a diet.

There's so much more to talk about at the fair but sadly, time and space preclude their inclusion. I know there was lots of activities for the “small fry” (a phrase appropriate for such a sunny day) at the water spray park, however, I didn't go as I am a bit old for face painting and I've always had a deep abiding fear of petting zoos after an incident with a goat. I did see the bench show, whereby people paid 50 cents to enter categories such as “Best Carrot” or “Best Photo” with the first prize being worth $3.00, second $2.00 and third $1.00.

I would have stayed but they shooed me away in fear of their first place cookies. If the fair had been an entry in the bench show, I am sure it would have won first place. On a per capita basis, of course.

Making Sense

I don't often write about news because many nowadays aren't interested in current events and frankly, I need all the readers I can get. An alarming amount of people find that keeping informed is more depressing than my bank balance.

In fact, lots of folk aren't just satisfied to simply avoid the news but are actually actively opposed to it. They feel so strongly about their anti-news stance that they have begun an ad hoc, listless fight for their right to be apathetic. “My grandpappy fought in some kind of war or something to give me the right not to give a rat's patooty about current events and I'm going to exercise that right, dad gum it.” said one spokesman who didn't care to be identified.

Although it's unclear as to what dad's gums has to do with the issue, it's felt that the anti-info backlash is because issues today have become more complex and confusing than a government form. Nothing is black and white anymore, just like TV's. As a result it seems nothing in the news makes sense. Humans have been trying to make sense of the world ever since day one... whenever that was. (I should be upfront and declare that on the creation/evolution debate, I come down strongly on the side that says we're some kid from Alpha Centauri's grade nine science project.)

Fact is, whether you're into creationism, evolutionism or science project-ism, you're just trying to make sense of the world. It's an inate drive within each of us to understand our environment; much like the drives to survive, to procreate and to drink beer.

In an effort to help us figure out what makes the world tick, the team of smarty-pantses (smarty-pantsi?) at the Loco “think tank” embarked on a program to examine the news for logic and pure common sense. (That's think tank, not drunk tank as some have claimed. I'm not mentioning any names but her initials are “Cupcake”. ) Let's look at a simple issue. Bottled water under fire. First introduced as ”Perrier water”, bottled water was so expensive it was only enjoyed by the rich and snooty and those that aspired to snootihood.

It was sold in green glass bottles and was even more money than pop. Everyone who was not in the ranks of the ridiculously rich, simply drank water from the tap. Then, suddenly, bottled water was everywhere. Convenient, portable, healthy, it created jobs, stimulated the economy. It was A Good Thing; the drink of choice for soccer moms and fitness Nazis everywhere. Then, just as suddenly, it became A Very Bad Thing. Bottle pollution. Waste of money. Governments and institutions banning it like it's liquid crack. In the markets, every time water falls and investors take a bath and workers are sent to the showers. People buy pop instead. Less guilt.

As if the bottled water suppliers are the only polluting, wasteful companies. Okay, so that doesn't make much sense. Maybe we can look at politics. Should be simple.

There are only three parties. My Guys, Your Guys and The Other Guys. When my guys are in power, they fumble along as best they can and have things dictated to them from the beaurocracy.

They blame everything bad on the Previous Guys. When Your Guy gets in, he also fumbles along as best he can being equally dictated to by the ever-present, all-powerful, all-seeing beurocracy. Your Guy blames everything on My Guy who was the Previous Guy and would sell his mother's soul to be the Next Guy. Sadly, between the fighting between all Those Guys, nobody ends up remembering it was Us Guys that voted all These Guys in.

Incredibly, all Those Guys get away with it because Us Guys let them. It could be because Us Guys don't actually get to vote for The Big Guy directly; the part that makes the least sense. Here's one more. It's from the sports pages. The names have been changed to protect the stupid. There's a team in a premier two-nation hockey league losing money like a drunken Chev plant at a casino. We'll call them the Flagstaff Wild-Dogs. They lose tens of millions per year because Arizona has a climate so hot, the only ice available is in glasses of scotch and bourbon. There's a Canadian, John Nutfunny, we'll call him, that wants to pay an obscene amount for the team and move it to where people are rabidly fanatical about hockey.

The league, however, would rather keep the team in Flagstaff losing millions rather than sell to this guy. They feel this billionaire businessman is “untrustworthy”. This begs a number of questions. Firstly, why would the league want to maintain a franchise where hockey rates in popularity somewhere below roller derby and belly bucking? Why would anyone smart enough to make a gazillion dollars in a different industry want to buy a business with the financial success of a crown corporation? If professional sports clubs lose money like they claim, why does Nutfunny want to own one and why is a failing franchise worth so much?

When has trustworthiness been a prerequisite for owning a hockey team? It didn't seem to be a rule for owners like Peter, Nelson And Bruce. The biggest question is, of course, how much sense does any of this make? The answer to that question is, “none”. Maybe the anti-news folks are onto something!

The Heat Wave!

I am always leery of writing columns about the weather given the fact that the Pipestone Flyer is a weekly paper. Invariably, by the time a weather-related column hits the newstands, the conditions are radically different than it was when I wrote it. If you thought yesterdays news was boring, try listening to last week's weather report!

Still, it has been hotter than a lava sandwich and we northerners with our obvious willingness to tolerate -40 temperatures in winter, have a hard time with anything over +25. We break out in a sweat with just the slightest movement; drinking beer, having a nap, breathing. Mostly we just suffer in silence, although some, sadly aren't so silent in their unhappiness and want to share that with every person within proximity of their "Hot enough for ya?" conversation starter.

Therefore, in order to help humanity and set myself up for the Nobel Prize for Something-Or-Other, we at the Loco World Headquarters have been experimenting with the best way to stay cool during the screaming hot temperatures we've been having. If we are no longer having screaming hot temperatures when you read this, you may cut this out with scissors (No running with them!) and put it on your fridge with a magnet for future heat waves.

Of course we must caution you about the application of these solutions. Remember; moderation in all things. A good example is a ceiling fan. It can provide a wonderful breeze to sleep under if done in moderation. Unfortunately, Cupcake is a hottie in more ways than one and I'm sure has the ceiling fan wired to 220. Laying under the fan with the blades whipping around at warp factor 5 billion is like sleeping in a wind tunnel. I can barely fight the force enough to get up to go pee in the night.

So, with moderation in mind, here are the findings of the Loco team of investigative researchers. They have assembled them into the top 20 ways of staying cool during crematorium conditions:

1: Hug a bag of frozen peas. This is particularly helpful at bed-time. Carrots and corn also work but broccoli can be a bit bumpy. Make sure whatever frozen fruit or vegetable you select, the bag is sealed perfectly. Having a bedful of frozen strawberries would be a drag.
2: Purchase a "Slushy" ice drink. Rub it all over your body. Watch out for brainfreeze, not to mention torso freeze, buttock freeze and sensitive inner thigh area freeze.
3: Go to the beer cooler of the beverage purveyor you have given the most business to over the years. Bring a comfy chair.
4: Try sitting in the shade... of an iceberg.
5: Stand in front of the fridge for hours with the door open staring inside like teenagers do constantly.
6: Hang out in the freezer section of the grocery store until you're booted out for being thought a creeper.
7: Have a cold shower. All day. Prepare for hate letters from water conservation groups.
8: Burrow underground like gophers do. Watch out for garden hoses and 10 year-old boys with pellet guns.
9: Wait for the end of the screaming hot day for the sudden, intense thunder, lightning, gale force wind, flying garbage can-type storm blow all the hot air from the house along with your roof.
10: Duct-tape popcicles to your body. Try and stay away from taping hairy areas.
11: Tell your wife those pants DO make her butt look big. Enjoy the frosty silence.
12: Buy one of those cheapie, above-ground pools. Get a part-time job at an air-conditioned Wal-Mart to help pay for the water, chemicals, testing kits, water toys and pumps.
13: Hire servants to wave palm fronds over you. It may not be the most efficient manner, but it would be the coolest.
14: Freeze-dry your clothes in the freezer after washing. Put on when not quite dry. Watch out for frostbite in unusual places.
15: Jump and frolic about in the sprinkler. In the front yard. Naked. Psych wards are usually air-conditioned.
16: Catch a cold. Hope for chills.
17: Flip off a bike gang. Bask in how your blood turns to ice when they circle the block for a chat. 18: Drink a lot of beer. You won't actually feel cooler since you are taking on a ton of extra calories and it is a diuretic so it will strip you of precious bodily fluids . Still, you won't care about the heat nearly as much.
19: Move into your parent's basement. Take up computing, texting, video gaming and going to comic conventions.
20: Put on a pair of shades. At least you will look cool.
As you can tell, once again our crack staff of researchers have proven once again that they are useless in a crisis. Don't try these at home kids!

I'm A Bad Guy!

Man oh man, I am so excited! I couldn't be more energized if I'd just jammed a knife into the toaster. I am so looking forward to the Calmar Fair that is coming up on August 15th. The reason I am twitter-pated about the fair isn't the humungous garage sale extravaganza with tables lining all three blocks of downtown Calmar or the many other entrepreneurial opportunists with tables on their yards. Nor is it the parade or the "Show and Shine" or the ball games or the bench show or the dunk tank or even the beer gardens (Yes, even the beer gardens!). The reason for my excitement stems from the old fashioned melodrama The Calmar Prairie Players are performing that day and, get this; I get to be the bad guy!

The play is a melodrama called "Calamity in Calmar or Dark Doings at the Finley Farm", and it features a hero to be cheered (YAY!) a damsel in distress to be sad for ("AWWWW!") and me, the evil, heartless, wicked villain. (BOO!) (No, I don't play a Bernie Madoff.) There is also the damsel's poor, aged mother who has a terrible saskatoon cordial addiction and a sordid past, a Communities in Bloom operative hot on the trail of fresh fertilizer, as well as an assortment of many other oddball characters.

In the production, written especially for the Calmar Prairie Players by Paula Bosse, I play Percival Portobello, a man who is, not only an evilly malevolent psychopath, but also not very nice at all. Portobello is single-minded in his pursuit of the Finley family farm so he can subdivide it into condominium developments, even if he has to kill farmer Finley, marry his daughter and run her ma off the property in order to do it. His total lack of regard for scruples or principles makes it obvious, if he wasn't in real estate, he would have surely have been in politics.

The reason I am thrilled about the role is that up to now, I have always been cast as a "bumbling fool" sort of character; sometimes even in theatre. Now I get to let loose and go over the top with a totally different performing face on; that of a bad guy! After all, who has more fun than bad guys? They practically invented the phrase, "Mwahahahahaha!" Good guys, however, have no sense of tee hee at all.

Let's use Batman, as an example. Like all the rest of the square-jawed hero set, this good guy is a rather humourless, intense sort of fellow. Even in the campy 1960's version, The Caped Crusader never cracked a smile, no matter how corny his line. Neither did Robin, come to think of it. And as unsmiling and grim as that Batman was, more recent movie incarnations show an even darker spirited person; an individual about as warm and cheery as, say, head lice. Let's face it; when Batman is at work, he laughs about as much as a funeral director.

On the other hand, who’s doing all the laughing? The Joker, The Riddler, even King Tut. And who can forget The Penguin's trademark cackle? True, it does sound an awful lot like someone clearing their sinuses, but at least he and his hired thugs have fun on the job.

Guffawing bad guys aren't limited to Batman comics, either. I'm not just talking about Superman's foe, Laugh-a-Minute Lex Luthor, or the myriad of mirthful arch enemies Spiderman faces constantly. (Ol' Spidey seems to have more foes than Kim Jong-Il). Us bad guys have always laughed throughout recorded history, in literature and performing arts. From Shakespeare’s time and before, the evil were a cheery lot. This was reinforced on the silver screen in the dawn of movie history to present day cinematic creepsters, (Austin Powers' Doctor Evil springs to mind) bad guys have always laughed more than a talk show host's sidekick.

But that's not all. There are other reasons being a bad guy rocks. For one thing, folks that are evil incarnate are usually quite well-to-do. That's how they can afford henchmen and a secret hideout. Even better, they always have awesome looking women around them... Gorgeous women... Bad women... Oh yeah… Sorry, where was I? Oh right, I was being bad! Mwahahahahaha!

The shows are at the Calmar Ball Diamonds, or, as we called it in my slow-pitch days, "Brewski Park" at 1:00, 3:00 and 5:00 and the cost is free, although be prepared for a hat being passed.
In the cast with me are Richard Jackson as Tom, the Hero, Jennifer Moore as the fair Fiona Finley, Cindy Thornton as The Widder Finley (also known as Diamond Gert!), Tammy Bateman as Pat Schmidt the Communities in Bloomer, Gloria Wilson in her debut appearance with the Calmar Prairie Players as Mrs. Bricco, the stuffy restaurateur and Prairie Player Angela Jahnke in a dual role. There are also cameo appearances by Sharon Shudra of SS Office Services, Rudy Seneca and Scouter Bob with his entourage consisting of Kamil and Gabriel Bitar.

The Origins of the Places

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the origins of the place names in our area. Our researchers covered the biggies; Wetaskiwin, Leduc, and of course, Alder Flats. Unfortunately for me, I was inundated with an angry letter from a reader that suggested I should have included all places within the Pipestone Flyer's trading area.

I'd have ignored the letter, since one always runs the risk of upsetting a certain segment of our highly valued readership with the type of hard-hitting, sharp-edged reporting I try and avoid. However, this particular letter came from my editor, Brian "You WILL Comply" Hahn, a man so mean, he once docked me a weeks pay for dangling a participle. So, without further ado, here are more place name origins from around the region.
　
Ma-Me-O-Beach: According to Wikipedia, which is almost as accurate as a dollar store watch, Ma-Me-O is a Cree word for "white pigeon". This is entirely erroneous. The researchers at Loco World Headquarters have discovered that this tiny summer village on Pigeon Lake had got it's name to honour the fact that it was the site of the provinces first mameogram in 1897. It occured when an elderly woman accidently got her breast caught between two heavy logs. (This one was Brian's, I hasten to add.)
Warburg: A small but vibrant village west of Thorsby and then over that way a bit, Warburg is...uhhh... did I mention it was small? The name of the village was coined during the bitter and violent "Burger Wars" of the 1970's when Burger King's Whopper went toe-to-toe with its arch rival The Big Mac of Macdonalds fame. (Get it? Arch rival? Never mind.)
Buck Lake/Buck Creek: These two aquatic features were named after Buck Owens and his Buckaroos. We're not sure why. Owens, of course, is most famous for his deep cerebral humour and profound insights into the human condition on the hit TV show "Hee-Haw". Also for "grinnin'".
Rolly View: This small municipality east of Leduc was named for the spectacularly gorgeous view of some guy named Rolly. Mind you, the guy I paid the twenty bucks to, for the information, may have been mistaken as he was rather drunk at the time. He promised me that he knew, though.
Kavanagh: This hamlet that boasts of a population of almost 50 people has little on their Wiki page other than this interesting tidbit of information; "Town council members/presidents are: Tim and Kim Rhodes, and Pat and Sarah Gillis, whom act not only as diplomatic, fair leaders, but also as the hamlets key law upholders that scrutinize all of the going ons that occur within Kavanagh. " My goodness, with that much scrutiny, no wonder there's only 50 people there! I couldn't find out anything about the origin of the village's name but apparently, after "googling" the place, I did discover the important fact that Matchmaker.com claims there are "thousands of women from Kavanagh" who want to date me!
Hoadley: The community of Hoadley, according to it's flashy, expensive tourism guide, lies between Breton and Rimbey on Highway 20 at the scenic junction of Secondary Highway 611. It was named after an early Alberta politician by the name of George Hoadley who championed the Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928. It seems the townfolk were extremely impressed that he would even discuss anything with the word "sexual" in it, in 1928, let alone act on it.
Rimbey: Rimbey is a quaint, typical small Alberta town of 2000 people, three cows and a goat. Its original name was Kansas Ridge but they broke up into two entities; the folk band Jeruselem Ridge and the rock band Kansas. The town now tours around the country doing folk festivals and rock revival weekends in the summer.
Ponoka: According to sources close to the municipality who wish to remain nameless, Ponoka is the Blackfoot word for "elk". This was a good choice as the Blackfoot don't have words for the community's other name candidates which included "rhinoceros", "wombat" and "giant kimodo lizard".
Winfield: This hamlet, in the County of Wetaskiwin is a place I have visited many times. Not on purpose, mind you, but I always end up there when I am looking for The Village at Pigeon Lake. The origin of the name is indicative of the history of the community. Apparently it was named after the first prize of a farmers' lottery in the 1800's. By the same token, the City of Winnipeg was named for a contest for pirates.
Drayton Valley: Drayton Valley is a modern Alberta municipality nestled between the mighty Drayton Mountains from whence it gets its name. The peaks of these majestic promontories are almost as high as the ones that gave Two Hills it's name.
That's all the places we have space for in this edition of our look into place names from around the region. In columns to come we will explore the stranger side of place names with close attention to such places as Boyle, Fallis, Bickerdike, Bonar, Harry Hill, Bredin, and no less than seven places with the word "beaver" in it.

The Karma Kid

Two The majority of us have them; two annoying avatars of behaviour modification that reside on our shoulders. One is an angel, guiding us to be the good, kind, decent people most only think they are. It encourages us to hold open doors for grannies, sign up to sponsor a World Vision child/village/third world country or shovel your neighbour's sidewalk. This angel goes by a number of names, including 'Restraint', ' Generosity', and 'Whatta sap!' I don't know about you but mine goes AWOL occasionally...

On shoulder ' B' is the other little dude that, instead of the ' halo, wings and harp' ensemble favoured by its 'Goody-Two-Shoes' counterpart, wears goat horns, a pointy tail and has skin colour that can only be gotten by being devilish or laying too long on a sunny beach.

He's the guy whispering in my ear to have another beer, stand up to Cupcake when I should just sit down and shut up, or suggest I eat an entire gigantic bag of potato chips with a huge tub of onion and garlic dip. His name is Temptation and unlike his partner, Restraint, is never, ever absent.

Most are well acquainted with these two competing sprites, but there is also that other guy. The scary one dressed in judge' s robes. The one we call Karma.

Karma is the only creature known to man that lives on irony. The way Karma works is this; if I listen closely to the angelic entity whispering in my ear, generally, good things happen in return.

However, if I live my life allowing my demonic side (oh, come on, we all have one) free rein, bad things follow like a bad smell. Your behaviour needn't be all that evil for Karma to sneak up and kick you in your ironic pants.

I have a case in point. Last weekend, Cupcake and I were working outside; giving the weeds a whack job, putting the blade to the grass, sprucing up the trees, that sort of thing. Since her cantankerous, arthritic knees doesn't allow her to kneel, (Dang! No begging!) she decided to sit on a small table. This way she could get down low enough to snip whatever low-lying branches on our apple tree she found offensive. Why they were deemed offensive I'm not sure. They weren't drinking beer or passing gas or anything. Either way, the table she was using is an ugly thing, pretty much an 18 inch square piece of countertop bolted to some tubular aluminum legs.

As she sat on the table, on the spongy soil that sits sheltered from the hot sun thanks to the tree's lush foliage, one of the tubular legs of the table began to penetrate the damp soil like a stick in a marshmallow. Cupcake immediately realized her ship was listing heavily to starboard but was unable to do anything about it given the aforementioned state of her knees.With arms and legs flailing about askew and akimbo like a lady bug flipped on its back, Cupcake slowly, inexorably ended up dumped unceremoniously on the ground.

I suppose I might have handled things differently. I could have tried to contain my amusement and show concern and compassion for my partner of 27 years. Unfortunately, rather than rushing to the aid of my poor, vulnerable, loving wife, I was busy being convulsed in hilarity. The look of shock, indecision and embarrasment on her face was beyond hysterical. I guffawed my guts out. The only thing that would have made the scene better was if we'd caught it on video.
That night, preparing to sleep on the couch, I realized that I should consider alternative strategies to my discredited 'laughing my face off' approach to helping Cupcake in a time of personal crisis. This was particularly made the next day when Karma paid a visit.

Once more, Cupcake and I were puttering outside. When we stopped for a break, we went inside our gazebo and I flounced onto one of our comfy, padded patio chairs. Suddenly I experienced the greatest sinking feeling I've had for years. It was like being on a dentist chair when he lowers it to let you escape. What was causing my change in altitude was the aluminum legs on the patio chair decided to give up the ghost and began splaying out like a squashed cartoon spider, albeit one with just four legs. I ended up on the floor of the gazebo unable to extricate myself from my awkward position.

Cupcake's face contorted into the very picture of mirth. Her eyes crinkled up like a chip bag in the firepit. She began making the oddest trilling noise until she finally dissolved completely into a five minute giggle fit. Very unseemly, I thought from my low-level vantage point. She didn't care. She was getting hers back in spades.

And so it goes with Karma. You reap what you sow. It is beneficial in life to be nice and kind with no expectation of gain. In other words, we should all strive to be good for nothing.