More Stuff
Well its been a busy week. We took David to Edmonton to be tested for Irlen’s syndrome. This manifests itself by the subject experiencing difficulty in reading black print on white paper causing reading problems. They found that if Dave has a coloured filter over the page when he is reading then his reading improves. The next step is to get him coloured lenses in his glasses. The down side of this is that none of it is covered by Alberta Health or the private health insurance that we have, but if it improves his performance then it would be worth it.
This Saturday we volunteered to cook hot dogs at Sears to raise money for the Youth and Volunteer Centre. They are the organisation that runs the The Youth club and Camp Alexo that David goes to. Things got off to a bad start when the gas Barbeque would not light. They went and got a new gas bottle but the built in piezo electric lighter didnt work either, so we had to fall back on the burning tissue method to get it going. Fortunately some one was a smoker and had a lighter otherwise we would have been stuck. Sears provided all the ingredients and float we just had to cook and sell the hot dogs which were actually large smokeys.
Some other things to note. Over here we have bank charges and pay for cheque books. The mobile phone companies not content with charging for receiving phone calls have now started to charge users for in coming text messages.
You may remember we commented a while ago on the caboose that seemed to move up and down a siding by the level crossing without really going anywhere. Well now we have found out where it goes. The siding it is on runs 5 -10 miles into Red Deer from Blackfalds and serves the heavy industries at Edwards Industrial site on the west side of the city. Because there are no run around faciliites the locomotives have to push the wagons when going south and the caboose is put on the front of the train so that the guard (conductor?) can keep a look out. We saw this the other day and were amazed to see 3 mainline diesel locos pulling a train consisiting of one oil tanker and the caboose. Talk about over kill.
There were several petrol (gas) shortages this week. There had been problems with a refinery in Edmonton after a storm took out their power. So our local FasGas and others had run out of fuel. This was particularly ironic as they were able to see the Fas Gas terminal the other side of the highway that loads large quantities of oil in to railway tankers on a daily basis. I guess as they say it was the wrong type of gas ?
Talking of storms, that funnel cloud we talked about in an earlier blog entry. It touched down in central park, right by our friends. Well the weather people have looked at the damage and upgraded it to F1 status. Which means it really was a tornado, and they think was the 1st one of the season. Thank goodness no one was injured.