Thursday, March 15, 2012

Being in a State of Forced Withdrawal

Yesterday, as I was at the counter preparing to pay for some stuff I was buying at a local hardware store, the Internet died. Neither my bank card nor credit card worked. Thankfully, I had my chequebook with me. So I paid for my stuff by cheque, something I rarely do anymore. I'd almost forgotten how to fill out a cheque. The clerk had to print the sales receipt and write on it with her own hand that it had been paid for by cheque # such and such.

When I got home, my access to the Internet was down, too. As it turned out, there had been some major Sasktel cable severed at a construction site in Regina and a large swath of territory in Southeast Saskatchewan was without Internet or cell phone access. People couldn't even call 911 if there was an emergency. However, strangely enough, texting was possible.

Being an Internet freak, I kept trying to go online, but to no avail. On the radio, in the evening, a Sasktel spokeswoman said the problem may not be fixed until well into the night. So I packed 'er in early last night.

One good thing about it is I got lots of other stuff done, like long overdue housework. But communities all along the TransCanada highway from Regina to very nearly the Manitoba border were without access, so it sure shows how a major disaster might affect us all, if the Internet and cell phone service is knocked out. Good thing we still had electricity.

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5 Comments:

Blogger Dave in Pa. said...

Paying by check, like using a phone-booth nowadays, eh?! I think I also might write about 2 checks a month. (BTW, I must mention that the entire nation of Canada is misspelling check, as "cheque"! For such an intelligent, educated populace, that's a shocking breach of grammar! It ain't acceptable. ;-)

March 15, 2012 10:45 am  
Blogger Louise said...

Indeed! Hip! Hip! Rah! Rah! Ehhhh!!

The English language, as I'm sure you know, has always borrowed words from other languages. And why not from the French. After all, back in the Middle Ages, the regions of the old continent we now call France and England were joined at the hip - Richard the Lion Heart and Eleanor of Aquitaine and all that. King Richard actually lived in Aquitaine - all the better to keep the Saracens at bay.

And where were you in 1066 and all that.

No my friend, it's you Yanks who have bastardized this old and valiant language.

And is not the language of Chaucer and the Venerable Bede, and even Shakespeare akin to Greek?

(Or is it Latin?)

It's unintelligible anyway, but I see you have a good start.

Here's your homework.

Weekend's coming. You can while away the time learning a few Canadianisms.

March 15, 2012 12:45 pm  
Blogger Dave in Pa. said...

Well, since I'm of English stock on my father's side and Scottish on my mother's, that makes me a right mongrel! Celtic, Viking, Angle, Saxon, Norman...a real Heinz 57, as they say. :-)

As for where I was in 1066, my ancestors were possibly fighting on both sides of that battle.

Now, ask me where I was in 1759! My English ancestors were from the county of Lancashire in northern England. A very distinguished (and no longer existing) infantry regiment of the British Army was the Lancashire Fusiliers. (another word stolen from the French, "fusil" for rifle and it's derivative, "fusilier" for rifleman). The Lancashire Fusiliers were in the British line at Quebec. I don't know but I'd like to think one of my ancestors was there wearing the King's uniform that day!

I suppose it's equally likely that one or more of my English ancestors wore the King's uniform in the American Revolution...the Bad Guys.

Maybe family honor was redeemed by an ancestor or two serving with Wellington at Waterloo, when they were definitely the Good Guys, against Napoleon, the late 18th/early 19th century Hitler.

March 15, 2012 7:30 pm  
Blogger Louise said...

Knowledge of the family history in my lineage only goes back so far. Family lore has it that there's a bit of Dutch in there, so maybe there's a bit of William of Orange in the gene pool.

Family lore also has it that somewhere in my ancestry we were related to Lord Stanley, he of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." fame, in Africa, which I think is rather a small and insignificant event in Imperial British history, but I'll take my fame wherever I can find it.

Loyalty to the Empire was big on both sides of my family, but especially on my mother's side which is where the Lord Stanley bit comes from.

Reading the bio of him at the link above, I see there's an American connection there, too. Funny, that was never mentioned in the story that was passed down.

Ah well. Never too late to rewrite history and fill in the missing bits.

A bit closer to the present, my Great Uncle and my Grandfather on my dad's side are said to have freighted supplies for the Brits/Canadians during the Riel Rebellion. There's a couple of grand old stately fir trees on the original homestead that they allegedly brought back with them from the Duck Lake area, where the fighting took place.

Just outside the town where I live there's a historic round barn which was built in a big hurry during that rebellion as a place for the settler folk to assemble if things got nasty. A few years ago, the whole thing was taken apart and moved so as to preserve it. It was on private land. It's now a historic park.

In fact, the town itself was founded as a jumping off point for the Red Coats who rushed west to put down the rebellion and shortly thereafter became a major supply point for the building of the Canadian National Railroad, built to fill up the prairies with loyal British subjects and keep the Yanks out. It worked, too, as you'll notice the 49th parallel is considerably south of here.

But the most famous character in my family history, if you ask me, was a man who was murdered on his way home from a night of drinking and boasting and bragging at a pub in England, which I wrote about here. Now there's a heritage I can be proud of.

March 15, 2012 8:41 pm  
Blogger Louise said...

Did you know the very oldest version extant of the King Arthur legend is in French?

March 15, 2012 10:13 pm  

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