That seems to be a common theme among a lot of Newfoundlanders who have ventured abroad in chase of opportunity, prosperity and happiness. However, for far too many, happiness eludes them. For those, their happiness is hinged on their eventual, inevitable return to da rock. For those, the word home is synonymous with the word Newfoundland. They can live anywhere, have prosperous careers, raise families, but home will always be Newfoundland.

The internet is full of Newfoundlanders proclaiming their love for, and desire to return to, their home. One of those, this post’s namesake, chronicles the life and observations of Nadine and her family as they manage their way through life somewhere on da mainland, yearning for the day when they can reasonably provide for themselves back on da rock. She says, “There is something about the Island that seeps into your soul, and never allows you to truly leave.” Nadine is not alone. It may not give her any comfort knowing there’s more of us out there, but there are. I was once content being away, but lately I’ve had a strong desire to be a CBFA. (Come Back From Away) Maybe someday the opportunity will present itself (fingers crossed).

Just this morning, I received an email from a colleague of mine, another Newfoundlander who has built a life and career off the rock and who truly appreciates all things Newfoundland.

So my daughter sends me these….They’re from some companies web-cam I’d guess, and they are real time this morning. Between Quidi Vidi and the Narrows, I don’t know what makes me feel more homesick this morning. You know the beauty of Newfoundland, like most things is wasted on the young. She just wanted to show me, or prove to me that it was a beautiful day in St. John’s. How do I explain that every day in Newfoundland, at home, or ‘on da rock’ is a beautiful day.

I just thought I spread the home sick virus…

If you are a Newfoundlander and you are somewhere other than home, I dare you to look at these pics and honestly say you don’t wish to be back there, if not now, at least someday… and for good.

Text messaging as a form of communication is getting as embedded into our lifestyles as the cellphones they are sent with.

It seems we have come full circle with communication technology. Once upon a time, all we had to communicate with folks far away, was the the postal system or a telegraph using morse code. Then, along came the telephone. Wow, press a few buttons and you can actually speak to someone far away. Cool! Then, came the cellular phone. You don’t have to be connected to a wire attached to the walls of your house… you can talk to anyone, anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world with this little gadget you can carry with you. Super cool!

But now, we are using those cell phones primarily to send cryptic text messages back and forth to people. At least that’s what the younger generation seems to use it for. My 16-year old son regularly accumulated enough text messages on his cell phone to drive the monthly bill up by 20, 30, and even 60 dollars. At 15 cents a message, that’s a lot of text messages that say nothing more than: “Wassup?”, “Nutn”, “me 2, wtf”, “ruok?”, “yup, wan2 gwan a d8 2moro”, “yes qt”, “gr8 cu l8r”

This amazing technology that allows us to speak with people anywhere is being used to text people anywhere anytime. Seems like a mismatch. It’s only a matter of time when a cellular provider offers a product that can be used only for texting.

My phone goes so far as to anticipate what the rest of your sentence might be. This morning, I tried to type “Enjoy your day” to a colleague who was taking a well-deserved day off. After I had “enjoy” typed, it inserted “toronto”. I ignored that and continued typing “your” and it inserted “mom”. Both suggestions were wrong and to be honest, made me feel a little creepy. Brrr…

While convenient at times, I despise the things. I guess I feel that way mostly because of how accessible they make you when you may not want to be. I’ve resisted carrying them since the nightmares started in the Blackberry days of my previous job.

What do y’all think? Could you live without your cell phone? Would you miss it if it fell into a toilet and got ruined? (Hmmm, that’s an idea!)

(This post was created using the web-browsing features on my Samsung M500 cell phone… NOT!)

I’ve written several posts over the years using the word “Newfie” as it refers to Newfoundlanders. Last week, one of those posts, written back in September 2005 (originally on my Blogger site and later transferred to this one when I bought my own domain) was found by someone who enjoyed it enough to leave me a comment relaying her own story which was similar to mine. Essentially, I had run into a person who was perplexed that I had referred to myself as a “Newfie”. She apparently had not associated the term as meaning “someone from Newfoundland”. She had grown up associating the term to mean “stupid”.

Ignorance is bliss, huh?

Well, you know how the thought process works, eh? You think about one thing, see something or hear something and then the synapses in your brain fire up and across and whatever else synapses do. Soon, you find yourself thinking about things you hadn’t thought of in years. Perhaps your conversations lean toward your newly discovered thoughts. My conversations did. I talked to those around me about someone finding such an old post and about the use of the word that, while so many use it to refer to themselves, could be used in hurtful and demeaning ways. My re-introduction to this word stirred memories of a “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” skit that made drew parallels to another “N” word as it poked fun of Michael Richards’ tirade on a comedy stage and his subsequent apology. In many ways, while usually not as harshly intended nor deeply wounding, the two words bring forth similar feelings and social consequences.

In true 22 Minutes style, they made the point very well, possibly seeing through Mr. Richards’ apology, and was hilarious in doing so. Here it is:

I try to avoid using the word now.

The question, Alex, is “What is St. John’s”.

That, of course, would be the answer if you were a contestant on Jeopardy. However, if you were giving the punchline to a joke, the answer would be Fort McMurray. With the outward migration to the boomtown oil fields of Alberta, this is an emotional reality to many Newfoundland families. I was reminded of this fact as I read my CBC.ca news feeds today. I get several feeds from CBC: a national feed, a New Brunswick feed, and a Newfoundland feed. I found it very interesting to see the following headline on my Newfoundland feed.

This headline wasn’t on my New Brunswick feed nor was it on my Canadian national feed. It turns out that this is becoming a problem as Newfoundlanders are coaxing their elderly parents to come join them in their new homes out west. “Why are you here all alone, Mom, with all of those expenses? Why don’t you come to Fort McMurray and live with us?”

Let’s hope that the soon-to-be-booming Newfoundland economy will support an eastward migrating repatriation. I wouldn’t be heartbroken if my family and I went along for the ride.

Last March, I wrote a post about cleaning up dog shit in my back yard. There was so much crap out there that I didn’t know where to start. I likened it to picking blueberries. Well, I really like to illustrate my posts, so I decided that I would include a picture of blueberries. So, I went picking blueberry pictures using Google Images. I perused dozens of photos and finally chose a beautiful picture of blueberries. I completed my post and it garnished three, count ‘em, three comments. All in all, a resounding success by OMeN standards.

Or so I thought.

I got an email today from Michele Stapleton. Michele is a very talented photographer from Maine who politely informed me that I had stolen her copyrighted photo:

Hey, do me a favor, will ya? Please take my very nice copyrighted blueberry
picture off your website.

It’s bad enough that you used my copyrighted photo without permission, but to
use it to illustrate a diatribe about doggy do-do??? That’s just not cool.

Please email and let me know as soon as you’ve removed the photo.

Funny thing is that I didn’t get the photo from her site. I found it somewhere else. (Those buggers stole her photo. I simply found it for her!) When I attempted to explain the fact that I didn’t realize I was taking her copyrighted photo, she set me straight. I’m paraphrasing here, but she said my explanation simply told her that I stole it from someone who stole it from her. Same difference; stealing from a thief is still theft.

Good point, Michele. You have shown me the error in my ways.

So, I went to Google, found another photo of blueberries, downloaded it, and posted it in place of the original.

“Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.” Al Franken.

I’ve learned something over the last couple of days. Actually, I’ve learned several things. I’ve learned that you can really piss people off if you give any hint of an opinion to either side of a controversial social issue; I’ve learned that people are very passionate about their views on those issues and will argue their points supporting them even if the discussion does not directly involve said issue; I’ve learned that you can disappoint people because of those views; I’ve learned that making a casual statement supporting one side of certain issues spurs others to believe you are passionately standing on that issue.

My last posting was about some news items and blog postings that had caught my eye that day. The web-cam image in my sidebar had the typical RDF weather conditions in St. John’s and struck me as blogworthy. A couple of CBC News feed stories perked my senses, one about a St. John’s woman treated unjustly by a Universal Studios employee because she was breastfeeding her child in a public area of the them park and another story about Ottawa’s plans to impose heavy fines on smokers who smoke within 30 feet of a bus stop. Finally, I read a blond joke that I hadn’t heard before. (Insert double-take here… HOLD the phone Steve… back up a couple of sentences.)

Did I type the word “breastfeeding”? Uh oh. Steve! You are such a moron!

Take this post as kind of a qualified retraction of my opinion. Firstly, I’m not that passionately opinionated about the issue of publicly displayed breastfeeding. I have been witness to it on several occasions in my lifetime. It attracts neither disapproval nor matter-of-fact approval from me. It does attract the same kind of curious, looking-out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye whisper-to-your-companion kind of attention as would a homosexual couple openly displaying their mutual affection in public. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. (Ok, I’m not gay-bashing, I’m just saying… oh, no… am I digging another hole?) It’s simply not ubiquitous enough to blend into the background unnoticed.

The real point I so poorly attempted to make was that folks should not be offended about others noticing you doing something that challenges the currently established social or cultural norm. For example: Yesterday, living together outside the sanctity of marriage was considered “living in sin”. Today, marriage without this “test drive” is uncommon. So, yesterday, it might have been common for people to have been met with social pressure or criticism for shacking up outside of wedlock. Today, it’s met with a shrug. No big deal. Yesterday it would have been unreasonable to expect premarital cohabitation to be accepted outright. Today it would be unreasonable to be morally questioned for the exact same thing.

This young lady was simply doing the natural thing. She was providing her child with life-giving nourishment in the way that biology intended. It would be hard to argue that she wasn’t doing what was best for her child. But… and there is a but… she did so in a city that was not her own, in a country that she was a guest in, in a culture that is not openly accepting of this oh-so-natural act of love. While it is arguable that the Universal Studios employee was being unreasonable in her stance (this is evidenced by the public apology issued by the company), it is equally arguable that it was unreasonable for this lady to expect that what she did would be automagically accepted by all who observed her behaviour.

So, ladies… feed you children to your heart’s content. Line them up two by two and sell tickets to the show. Sell the extras to Tim Horton’s and Cracker Barrel for all I care. Unless I feel strongly about it, you’ll not see me write about this anytime in the near future. I’ll keep my posts benign and limited to non-controversial topics like genetic engineering, stem cell research, religion in schools, religion in general, vegetarianism, affirmative action, capital punishment, right-to-life, the seal hunt, corporal discipline, cloning, gun control, circus animals, euthanasia, censorship, hunting, sex education, gambling, and whether Miller Lite has great taste or is less filling.