Getting Detained In Canada With David, Theo & Ruby

Incoming "Where in the PNW (Pacific Northwest) are David, Ruby?" email showed up this morning when I woke up my computer.

Text in the email indicated this one is too easy to guess where the Tacoma Trio are. Which it clearly is, what with the Slotemaker Road sign indicating the Tacoma Trio were in the Lynden zone, a short distance from the border with Canada.

The rest of the text in the email, that accompanied four instances of photo documentation, was a chilling tale of what it is like these days at the border, a border which used to be super simple to cross, both going to Canada, and coming back to the U.S.

The email text telling the chilling tale is below the next photo.


There seem to be some details missing in this cross border detention tale. They must have somehow accidentally driven across the border. I don't quite know how one might accidentally do that. At the Lynden crossing you clearly know you are at the border, you pass through a checkpoint to enter, something you don't accidentally do.

I am thinking crossing the border has drastically changed since I last did so. Back then you did not even have to show an I.D., let alone a passport. The Canadian border guy would just ask where you're going and if you are all American citizens. Then on the return the American border guy would ask a question or two, like do you have anything to declare that you purchased.

Ok, this one is too easy. But a funny story. Went to Bellingham for a soccer game. Jake and Joe and Monique and Henry came to the game. Henry is a hoot! And Ruby’s team won 1-0, so now they need to come to all the games. After, we hit up Slotemaker road again, had a lovely lunch with Judy and the Whatcom County cousins, visited mom and dad then got ice cream cones at Edeleen. Since we were so close to the border, we drove to show the kids. But we went too far, had to enter Canada, didn’t have ID for the kids and we got detained! I had pics of their passports on my phone and that worked and they gave us paperwork to get back into the US. It was a bit of an ordeal. They even searched our car. So weird!

I am assuming Edeleens is a dairy store selling ice cream that has arrived in Lynden since I was last there, back in August of 2017.

I assume the above is a border marker at the Lynden border location. I do not recollect ever having seen this myself. 

I am assuming the above photo shows Theo, David and Ruby in the detention area, awaiting being cleared for passage back to America.

When my siblings and I were kids we were often taken to Canada by our parental units. Usually entering via the crossing at Blaine, which is the location of the iconic Peace Arch Park. When we were kids we thought it great fun to jump back and forth across the border, thinking it clever to later say we went to Canada 50 times today, or some such number.

I do not recollect ever going to Blaine's Peace Arch Park with David, Theo & Ruby's Mama Michele. Michele is the youngest of my siblings, younger than me by almost two decades...

I Want A Donald Trump Plus A Couple Bush Piñatas To Smack

I saw that which you see here this morning on Facebook via both Miss Julie and Elsie Hotpepper.

The Miss Julie version seemed to indicate that the source was Mother Jones (no relation).

After Donald Trump's embarrassing longest I'm running for President speech in history, with his idiotic insults to our Mexican neighbors, on both sides of the border, I read that a Mexican piñata maker made a piñata of Donald Trump, with the piñata having an appropriately big mouth under Trump's patented mysterious hair style.

The above was the first look I got of the actual piñata, with the big mouth and unfortunate coif.

It  concerns me that America might be so foolish as to somehow elect Trump. Such an outcome does not seem remotely possible.

But, I thought the same thing prior to the 2000 election, that that which ended up being the result could not possibly happen.

And yet George W. Bush got elected.

Twice.

And is now poised to eventually replace James Buchanan as the Worst President ever by those who rank such things.

Another president from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, has had a Harry S Truman type post-presidency rise in the estimation of those who rank the presidents. In one or two surveys LBJ has joined Truman as one of the Top Ten Presidents. In one survey LBJ was tied with Ronald Reagan at #11.

I think it is likely pretty much universally agreed that there is no chance George W. Bush is going to experience an LBJ/Truman type rise in esteem as the years pass.

Unless somehow Iraq and Afghanistan miraculously morph into peaceful, economically booming, democractic examples of a better way for the other troubled countries in that region.

Fat chance in hell of that happening.

More mortifying, to me, than the idea of Trump somehow managing to get elected is the idea that George W's little brother, Jeb, could possibly be a third Bush president.

Were either to happen, Trump or Bush, methinks I will be making plans to seek refuge in Mexico. Or Canada. Likely my choice would be Mexico. I've always liked Mexico and Mexicans.

Canada and Canadians, not so much. That ending every sentence with "eh" really wears on my nerves.....

Don't You Be Jeering Us Over-Patriotic Americans

Yesterday I got a feedback email from my Eyes on Texas website from a person who I think lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Alberta is a province of a country called Canada. I point that out for anyone who is over the top America-centric and is unaware of the country that is on the other side of America's northern border.

The reason I think the Canadian emailer is from Calgrary is he has an unique name, Brandon Uptigrove. In Facebook I stuck Brandon Uptigrove into the search window and two Brandon Uptigrove entries came up, one in Canada, one in Oklahoma.

It was via Brandon Uptigrove's email that I gleaned he was a Canadian. Below is what Brandon Uptigrove said in his email...

You can mock and jeer the over-patriotic Americans, but they're usually the first ones to jump in front of a bullet if it means preserving your freedom.  I wish we had more men like that in Canada.

I have no idea what on my Eyes on Texas website caused Brandon Uptigrove to opine the above. Maybe it was my America's Team webpage which sort of mocks how the Dallas Cowboys seem to cling to the ancient myth that they are America's Team.

As for Brandon Uptigrove wishing Canada had more bullet loving men, well, I know America loves its wars, to the point that we hardly ever are without at least one, however, I believe that Canada was fighting in both World War I and World War II long before America joined those wars to bring them to a winning conclusion for the good guys.

I remember watching the show in one of the Canadian pavilions at Vancouver's Expo 86, a show that was devoted to Canadian history. A few of the names were vaguely familiar to me.

Suffice to say, Canada does not quite have a historic legacy that is on a par with America's. There is no Canadian version of Uncle Sam. No Canadian leader who resonates through time like Abraham Lincoln.

Canada has no Statue of Liberty, which seems odd, since it was the French who gave America the Statue of Liberty. It would seem only fair, since Canada has much stronger ties to France than America does, that the French would have given Quebec a Statue of Liberty.

The closest Canada has ever come to a Civil War was when Quebec was in heavy duty pout mode, thinking the French Canadians were being slighted. I think that Civil War was averted by agreeing to add French to every public Canadian pronouncement, which can be really annoying when you are at any Canadian event and have to hear everything twice, once in English, once in French.

Canada has had no equivalent of Elvis Presley. And then when a sort of Elvis type Canadian phenomenon happens, in the form of little Justin Bieber, Bieber moves to America, to Los Angeles, and by the time he is a world wide celebrity most of the world thinks he is American. I know I did til I learned otherwise.

And now the Canadians boo Justin when he returns to Canada acting way too American by dressing way too casually when meeting whoever it is who is Canada's current Prime Minister or Premier or whatever it is they call their president. I used to remember these type things and know who is the current leader of Canada and Mexico and all sorts of other countries.

Currently I think I can only name the leader of America, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany, Egypt, Israel, Syria and North Korea.

I am woefully ignorant.

Will The Fork In The Tandy Trail Take Me To The Metric System Or Kava Kava Tea

When I came to the fork in the trail, on the Tandy Hills today, that you are looking at in the picture, I was momentarily confused as to which fork to take.

Head north? Or head west?

A perfect metaphor for my current perfectly bad mood.

I called my mom, when I hit the hills today, to do the Mother's Day thing. Mom was not home. So, I left a Happy Mother's Day message on their old-fashioned, non-cell phone answering machine.

I could have called mom and dad's cell phone. But that always seems not to work out too well. Usually they are on the road when I call their cell phone. My mom can't see the phone. My dad has to answer it and then give it to my mom. This has accident potential written all over it. So, I don't call their cell phone.

I have no idea why, but last night I found myself reading the Wikipedia article about the country called the United States of America.

Til I read it in Wikipedia, I did not know that soon after the Civil War, in the 1870s, America's economy became the world's largest and has remained so ever since. With China scheduled to become #1 by, I think, 2016.

I also did not know, til I read it in Wikipedia, that America is one of only 3 nations that have not adopted the metric system. America still uses British Imperial Units, like miles, yards and Fahrenheit degrees. Burma and Liberia are the world's other two metric system holdouts. America is in good company.

I remember decades ago learning the metric system because this would soon be the law of the American land. But, that law has not come to pass.

I remember when Canada switched to the metric system. Buying gas by the liter was confusing. As were the speed limit signs saying things like speed limit 100 KPH. That sounds so fast. And 85 kilometers sound so much further to the border than 52.8165 miles. 32 degrees Fahrenheit seems so much warmer than 0 degrees Celsius. 10 liters of gasoline for $10.12 sounds like a much better bargain than $10.12 for 2.65 gallons of gas.

Anyway, I have never been at all good with math, so for me, it is a good thing America has never switched to the metric system. Even though the metric system seems logical. Isn't the American currency method sort of metric?

I've got sun tea outside brewing a big container of kava kava tea. I'm hoping this will have a salubrious soothing effect on me when I drink some later.

Being a Valentines Day Melancholy Baby Today In Texas Thinking About Washington

I am being a Melancholy Baby today.

In the picture you are looking at my house in Mount Vernon.

Well, actually, what used to be my house in Mount Vernon. It was sold in 2002.

The house was built in 1985. I lived there from then til I moved to Texas in December of 1998.

When I moved to Texas it was to a house I had not seen with my own eyes. I'd only seen pictures.

This morning's melancholy has me feeling a bit homesick for Washington. I think what got me started on the melancholy thing was Betty Jo Bouvier's weekend stay in Leavenworth, an Alpine Bavarian type village set on the eastern side of the Cascade foothills

There are no Alpine villages in a mountain setting in Texas.

There is a town called Alpine, in Texas, in sort of a mountain-like setting, down in the Big Bend Country Region of Texas. But, it is no Leavenworth.

I'm thinking if I still had a house up in Washington, I would move back. Having a place waiting for you to move in, makes the moving thing way easier.

When you live in Western Washington you are close to mountains and ocean beaches. If you're in the mood for a total scenery change it is a relatively short drive over the Cascades to Eastern Washington, with its more desert-like climate, turned green in a lot of locations courtesy of the Columbia River's many dams and reservoirs.

Going over to Eastern Washington in summer and fall you can get yourself all kinds of fresh fruit.

Where I lived in Washington it was about a 20 mile drive, to Anacortes, to get on a ferry to go to the San Juan Islands or Canada.

In Washington I lived about 40 miles from another country. Vancouver was just a bit further north than Seattle was south.

The San Juan Islands is in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. Meaning the islands get way less rain than you get if you are closer to the Cascade Mountains. The New York Times recently had a list of the 41 places in the world you need to go to in 2011. The San Juan Islands was #2 on the list.

When I lived in Washington I took living in one big theme park for granted, because it was what I'd always known. Only when you move away, and return for a visit, do you really see real clear, for the first time, just how special the Pacific Northwest is.

The scenery, the tall trees, the air smelling like Christmas trees, all the fresh produce, some growing wild, like blackberries and blueberries.

The fresh seafood.

I could drive about 15 miles and catch fresh dungeness crab and dig horse clams. I lived 2 miles from the Skagit River. You can easily catch salmon in the Skagit River. Or any of the Washington rivers. And eat the fish you catch. Unlike the polluted waterway I currently live about a mile from called the Trinity River.

In Texas my big hiking thrill, which I will likely do today, is to hike some short hills. In Washington I could see the Mount Baker volcano from my living room. It was a short drive to hike up a real mountain. It was a short drive to hike up all sorts of mountains.

Well, I better get going if I want to get a hike in on some Texas hilly scrubland called the Tandy Hills Natural Area, so I can make it to my Valentines Day lunch at the appointed time.

Oh Canada, Oh Canaduh

Last week. Or was it the week before, I blogged about some of the dumb comments I get, to this blog and to my YouTube videos. With the dumb comments usually being in reference to the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup or the Dallas Cowboy Stadium Scandal.

I was motivated to comment about the comments due to a comment I got from a 28 year old Canadian calling him/herself diflorio007, in which phrases like "you taxas rednecks" and "how stuped they are" were used.

And then yesterday I got another YouTube comment to the same Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup video from yet one more product of the Canadian public school system.

This Canadian called himself (I know it is a him, or assume so, due to his name being Neil) ExodicSnakes. Note the exotic spelling of "Exodic."

Neil, aka, ExodicSnake's comment was...

"im all down for catcking rattel snakes but y do they kill them maby for food but ok kill it dont exploied the snake.. when thay milk the snake it is just useless they dont do it in a stairl invirement so it is all junk venom."

Now, Canada does have some different ways of pronouncing and spelling some words. Like they add a "u" to humor, making it humour. Stuff like that.

Maybe I have fallen behind the times and Canada has gone to some new futuristic, phonetic, fractured, abbreviated, punctuation-free spelling method, hence Neil's "rattel" for rattle and "catcking" for catching and "y" for why and "maby" for maybe and "exploied" for exploited and "stairl" for sterile and "invirement" for environment.

I dunno. Maybe Neil/ExodicSnakes is simply spelling challenged and the fact that I've received two of these type things, from Canada, in a week, is just a fluke and has no reflection on the bad job Canada may be doing teaching its kids.

Or, like I sort of alluded to in the previous blogging about this serious subject, could the bad education Canadians are getting explain why, in ways we can measure a nation's accomplishments, such as number of Nobel Prizes, America wins so many and Canada wins so few?

It is a conundrum that may have no easy answer.

In the meantime while we ponder that conundrum, below is the YouTube video that causes too many Canadians to sound so stuped, I mean stupid.....

Sweetwater Sucks & Other Dumb Comments

I find amusement in reading a TV Forum called Survivor Sucks. Part of the amusement comes from being appalled at how people can get so worked up, so angry. At each other and about people on TV. And so inarticulate, to the point that, at times, they come across as so seriously deficient I don't understand how they can manage to navigate a computer, let alone the Internet.

The worst of the forums, for sheer mean-spirited idiocy, are the ones for shows like American Idol or Survivor. They really draw in the bottom feeders. And then I go to the Survivor Sucks forum for LOST and I feel like I've entered some high level discussion by a bunch of college professors analyzing a work of art.

Now, there is a slight corollary between Survivor Sucks comments and comments I get to videos I put on YouTube. To the YouTube videos, like the one for the State Fair of Texas and the 40th JFK Assassination Anniversary I get LOST-like, thoughtful, insightful comments. To the videos I made of of my visit to the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup and videos I've made of the building of the Dallas Cowboy Stadium and Chesapeake Energy Natural Gas Drilling I get American Idol Survivors Sucks dumb/angry type comments. Though there have also been quite a few thoughtful LOST-like comments regarding the Dallas Cowboy Stadium and Chesapeake Energy's dirty deeds.

So, with that all as preface, yesterday I got a comment to the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup YouTube video, from a Canadian calling him/herself diflorio007.

diflorio007 said, "see my point has been made...you taxas rednecks...you would think the US would have smart people....but just goes to show how stuped they are....and you guys make fun of the middle east......stop sleeping with your mothers and cousins...."

So, this Canadian, diflorio007, is concluding all of us Americans are "stuped" because some people in "taxas" have an annual roundup of rattlesnakes that they turn into a big festival. The Canadian goes on to suggest we Americans make fun of the Middle East. And that we are all the result of inbreeding.

I wonder how many baby seals this Canadian clubs to death every year? Baby seals seem way more harmless and cuter than rattlesnakes.

How many Canadians have died 'making fun' of the Middle East so that a country or two in that region might enjoy the benefits of freedom and democracy?

I can't remember, what was the name of that most recent Canadian to win a Nobel Prize? How many Canadian Nobel Prize winners have their been? I think, maybe one Canadian has won the Nobel Peace Prize. How many Americans have won the Peace Prize?

Okay, I'll tell you, only one Canadian has ever one the Nobel Peace Prize in that peace-loving, world-leading country, that being Lester Pearson, for his role in trying to end the 1956 Suez Conflict.

Meanwhile 21 Americans or American Organizations have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Teddy Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Gates Dawes, Frank B. Kellogg, Jane Addams, Cordell Hull, John Raliegh Mott, American Friends Service Committee, Ralph Bunche, George C. Marshall, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., Norman E. Borlaug, Henry Kissinger, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Elie Wiesel, International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Jody Williams, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore.

I wish Canada would breed more American style "stuped" people, so that Canada might contribute more to the world than the Canadians currently do. Maybe if Canada bred some more American style "stuped" people Canada might contribute more to the development of technology, science, medicine and the arts and win more of those illusive Nobel Prizes that us Americans win way too high a percentage of, compared to Canada, even when one factors in the population difference.

Anyway, I love the "stuped" comments I get. Especially from Canadians.