Telemarketers. They call constantly, and usually manage to call right around suppertime or early enough on Saturday morning to interrupt a good sleeping in. Even though I’ve had a bad experience, I find it against my nature to be rude to them, but sometimes it’s downright frustrating trying to deal with them. Here’s how the typical solicitation goes when I answer the phone:

• Me: Hello.
• TM: Hello. I wonder if I may speak with Mr. Steve Meelay. (mispronounced last name)
• Me: Speaking.
• TM: Mr. Meelay, I’m calling on behalf of [blank] company. I would just like to inform you that this call may be recorded for quality assurance reasons. The reason I am calling you, sir, is to introduce you to a one-time offer only presented to our most preferred customers…
• Me: (interrupting) I’m not interested.
• TM: But, Mr. Meelay, this amazing offer is available to you at no cost for thirty days and no commitment to continue beyond thirty days. You will have a full month to enjoy benefits such as [blank], [blank], or [blank]. If after thirty days you don’t want to continue receiving this service, simply call us up and we’ll cancel your service, no questions asked.
• Me: Sounds wonderful, but I’m not interested.
• TM: Mr. Meelay. Do you own a [blank] , or do you intend to [blank] or [blank] over the next several months?
• Me: Nope… and like I said, I’m just not interested. Do you want me to hang up on you?
• TM: Thank you for your time Mr. Meelay. [blank] company values your patronage. Have a nice day.

Now… that seemed rather painless right? Wrong. Try doing that 5 or 10 times every night and pretty soon “I’m not interested” turns into “Piss off!”.

In comes our great Canadian Government to the rescue. No longer will they tolerate their citizens being verbally trespassed by the pestering persistence of these tele-solicitors. The government created a federally monitored “do not call list” or DNCL and telemarketers would be forced to abide by the wishes of those not wishing to be called. To register your number on the list, all you would have to do is call 1-866-580-3625 or visit LNNTE-DNCL.gc.ca and they would suffer no more. Wrong again!

The volume of calls and hits on the website was unanticipated. Within 9 hours, the website crashed and the phone lines were down. Only 200,000 people were able to register. (Perhaps the DNCL employees registered their own number!) Now it’s back to the drawing board. I think the DNCL should hire telemarketers to call every household in Canada asking if they want to be added to the list.

I think we might be stuck with doing what our son does. He picks up the phone and lays it down in front of his computer speakers blasting rap music.

There’s no place like home.

This week, the Hebron deal was signed and is expected to bring thousands of jobs and billions of dollars into Newfoundland. This is supposedly going to change our fair rock into a “have” province. Many are hoping, myself included, that this is good enough news and a financial reality that is solid enough not only to stop the population bleeding out of Newfoundland, but will actually lure many back home.

Others, like my buddy Dave who recently left Newfoundland for Yellowknife to advance his career are remaining tentative. Dave carefully wonders if this is hype, similar to the buzz surrounding the Hibernia deals from a couple of decades ago.

Maybe cautious optimism is in order. But, to those of us who wouldn’t be heartbroken if presented with an opportunity to prosper in our home province, it’s hard to reign in that optimism. A friend and colleague of mine reflected this to me this week. It’s easy to be hopeful:

I remembered back in the early ‘90s working at the College trying to convince Fisher-folk in Gaultois, Hermitage, and Harbor Breton to train to be Computer ‘fixers’, Hair dressers, or ‘double knot spies’. That was part of the NCARP and then the TAGS program. Remember the news stories about the boys taking the rocks and towing them from one part of the bay to the other on the upside down roof of an old pick-up??

Brian Peckford was almost castigated back in the day when in his Nostradamic way he said “some day the sun will shine, and have not will be no more”.

My son, the sun came up first in NL today. The arse is back in ‘er.

I hope he’s right.

According to CBC.ca, there were four separate moose vehicle collisions last evening in a span of about 45 minutes, all of them within a few minutes of our normal vacation destination of Conception Bay South, Newfoundland. The article says that three of them were in the Fowler’s Road area on the Manuels Access Road and the other near Paddy’s Pond.

That’s a pretty scary statistic. When we were there just this past Christmas, we came across one such collision within minutes of it occurring about 7:30 pm Christmas Day.

It’s quite a problem back there. With an approximated moose population of 120,000 on the island and with the hunting season and old age about all that can kill them, it’s no wonder that so many of them end up with cars wrapped around them. There’s about 700 moose-vehicle accidents per year on the island. In my own travels I’ve had several near misses, countless sightings, and I have two brother-in-laws who have had collisions with them (one was very serious and the other was so close that it took the mirror off his car!).

We are heading back that way fairly soon for vacation. The moose on the roads is always an additional stress added to the strain of driving for 15 hours across a 24-hour timeframe. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

In the Moncton area, there are 17 different varieties of mosquitoes breeding over an area of about 800 thousand hectares of marshland.

They say… and by “they”, I mean the chairperson of the pest control board in southern New Brunswick so there could be some tendency to draw a more dismal picture for personal benefit… ahem, but I digress. They say that due to the long winter and the wet spring we are in for a worse mosquito season than we’ve had in decades. I’ve only been living in Moncton for 8 years, but that sounds pretty bad. They continue on to say that without a pest control program (spraying) Monctonians will be subject to up to 29 bites per minute from these rascally little nuisances. With the pest control program in place, we will only suffer 6 nips per minute.

The mosquitos are pretty bad around here. I’ve always said that if they were smart and organized, there are enough of them to single out a human from the herd, carry him away and devour him like piranhas on a wild boar or whatever kind of animal crosses rivers in South America.

I had actually build screened panels to enclose my front deck to find some relief from the relentlessness of these little suckers a few years back. However, since there’s been a lot of development in my area and fewer trees as a result, I didn’t have to put the panels up last year. Perhaps it’s time to dust them off…

“If it weren’t for flies, snakes alive, we’d be living in paradise.” Buddy Wasisname

So… this is old news, but I’ve had this one in the queue for a while. It’s regarding Nalgene bottles and the fact that it has been recently disclosed that and ingredient in some of the plastics used in the bottles, Bisphenol A, is particularly harmful to one’s health. Retailers everywhere were and are jumping on the bandwagon to remove all such products off the shelves.

Apparently, even small doses of this chemical can increase prostate, breast and ovarian cancer cell growth. There’s evidence linking it to infertility problems. It behaves as some sort of synthetic estrogen that can alter the way normal estrogen interacts with developing nerve cells important for brain development and normal functions of the mature brain. I think my risk for ovarian cancer remains pretty low, but the other stuff really scares me.

Curious, I wondered if the bottle I was using at my desk was a potential culprit that could be leading to my premature demise and made a stark discovery. This bottle was indeed one which could potentially contain this dreaded chemical. My first clue, when I went to a CBC.ca article describing the situation, was that my water bottle looked exactly like the bottles they show in the picture attached to the story! Another clue, as indicated in the article, is the presence of the number “7″ in the recycle symbol located on the bottle.

They indicated that if you were unsure if your bottle contained the questionable chemical, then you should contact the manufacturer. Upon close inspection of my bottle, the only clue indicating the manufacturer’s identity was a “Made In China” stamp. I called China and left a message. I expect they’ll get back to me soon. Listen up folks, if you haven’t already done so… If you are unsure if your bottle contains the questionable chemical: throw…the…bottle…away! I threw out my son’s favourite water bottle and he fished it out of the garbage can. Kids are immortal, or so they think. I retrieved his bottle again, told him that I scooped dog poop into it (I didn’t really), and then threw it out again. This time it stayed in the garbage.

I don’t want her to get any ideas.

“An American woman who says she accidentally shot and killed her husband in central Newfoundland is now suing two life insurance companies.” According to the news story in my CBC news feed, she mistook him for a bear.

Stop laughing. It’s not funny. I’m sure it was unintentional, regardless of the fact that he was worth more than a half a million bucks upon his death. He should have worn his orange vest instead of the first thing he pulled out of his closet.