QUART III - HOW MANY BERRIES DOES IT TAKE TO FILL UP A BEAR?

  

So funny that my concern about bears hanging out in our neck of the woods is dead on.  My lips twitch into a half-smile as I remember the look Yvette and I shared when Shane told us about Baby bear having a nap in the birch tree.  It might be funnier but I can tell Shane and his dad, Sam, are really uneasy ‘cause they don’t know where Momma is. 

Yvette and I had decided I should go on ahead since I walk quite a bit faster than her and Sofie, to try and see if my car was okay.  It would be awkward to get home without it.  My spirited walking pace slows a bit as I get nearer the spot where I think Shane and Sam spotted Baby bear.  I’m not too sure exactly where Baby is, since there are a heck of lot of birch trees in these woods.  As I start around the curve in the trail, I hear a low growl.  My heart is in my throat and my breath takes a hitch … luckily it’s the silver truck inching its way down the path toward me and it’s packed to the rafters with Yvette, Sofie, and a young couple, who are all crammed into the back seat of the silver pick-up.  The winter tires have been wedged in between all the stuff in the bed and are quite secure there ‘cause there isn’t much wiggle room for them to move.

Shane’s driving now.  Dad Sam has look-out duty.  I was never so glad in my life to see that silver bullet come to a stop between me and the birch trees.  The back door flings open and everyone squishes together a little more to make room for not-so-slender me.  Sofie is panting up a storm on Yvette’s lap, spit dripping from her little pink tongue in a rivulet.  Yvette does not look too impressed with the dripping but the alternative would be worse – walking and taking her chances with Momma bear finding her on foot.

It isn’t too much further to the parking area and I heave a sigh of relief when we get within eye-sight and I can see my well-seasoned 12-year old Toyota Echo is unscathed.  Apparently Momma and Baby bear preferred the forest’s fare to the delectables in my car.  Thank goodness.  I’ve heard about people’s cars being torn apart by a determined Makwa (bear in native Algonquin).

                        

    

                                    Exactly what I’m afraid of!

We finish jouncing and bouncing our way down the trail about another half mile (about a kilometer) and finally pull into the grassy parking area.   I waste no time opening the door and all but tumble out. The young couple, who have introduced themselves as Carrie and John, locals who frequently visit The Tree Museum, heave a sigh of relief as they peel themselves out of the wedge.  Yvette manages to get the door on her side open and has a tenuous hold of Sofie as she gingerly tries to keeps from touching the side of the truck to keep her outfit clean.  I did mention that she’s a bit of a Diva, yes?  Even when fleeing from bears.

                                                                               Carrie & John

                                                              Our heroes, Sam & Shane are camera shy! 

                                                              

Finally we’re all out of the truck, stretching and searching pockets to find tissues to wipe our sweaty faces.  It’s warm today and excitement has amped up the temp, along with all the body heat generated by being wedged together in the back seat.  Now I know what a sardine feels like. We all start talking at once, as an adrenalin rush kicks in, now that we know we have out-witted the Shash (Navajo for bear).                                                                             

 As we calm down a bit, we introduce all of ourselves to each other and share a little about why, where and how we all came to be there and phew! isn’t it great to be alive?

Then, weirdly, the unmistakable haunting strains of a bagpipe drifts down the path towards us, trailing on the warm autumn air.  A preternatural calmness falls over the 6.5 of us (the half is for Sofie, The Wonder Dog), and I’m thinking in balloon words, ‘Huh?  A bagpipe?  Where is the hell is that coming from and more to the point, who in the hell is playing it?’

             

We all stare with astonishment, as a man dressed in full Scottish regalia, comes striding out of the very same trees we had just fled from, a bagpipe being pumped vigorously and belching out a melody which reminds me of the opening bars to Copperhead Road. 

   

                                            Pat The Piper

All of our mouths drop open simultaneously, our eyes riveted.  The piper realizes he has company and he takes his lips from the mouthpiece of the blow pipe and stares right back at us.  It’s a Gravenhurst stare-down!

It seems Pat (who lives in a town Down Below) arrived at The Tree Museum after Sam and Shane started bouncing their way down the trail looking for the people from two parked cars.  No one knew about Pat until we heard the music.  It turns out that he is piping at a local wedding and took some time to walk the beautiful woods and practice a little before his gig.  Maybe, just maybe, the wailing music spooked Momma and Baby and they skedaddled deeper into the forest to escape what surely was the freakiest noise they’ve ever heard.

And, hmmm, I wonder what Pat’s wearing under that beautiful kilt?

And yes, I still want to know how many berries it takes to fill up a bear, even if it’s  just a Baby bear.

DEMOCRACY IS ALIVE & WELL IN SCA – NOT!

                              

                                  

Well, my first foray into the world of political ambition was a bust!  A group of residents here in South Park, SCA, decided to organize and kick the SCA HOA’s (Sandycove Home Owners’ Association) butt.  Why?  Because the HOA decided that they would not fight Parkbridge’s filing for an Above Guideline Increase (AGI) by filing an appeal at the Landlord & Tenant Board.  Why?  Because apparently Parkbridge applies every year for an AGI and the SCA HOA wants to save the $40,000.00 + dollars they currently have in short-term GICs; money paid by its members over the years, so they can fight the AGI next year.  "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today".  Does anyone see the logic in delaying?  I don’t.  Perhaps if Parkbridge is challenged ‘today’, there won’t be an AGI next year?  Oh, and the cost to hire a Paralegal (when the HOA finally got off their asses and moved forward to deal with the AGI), is estimated to be between $1,500.00 and $2,000.00.  Based on that, I would say that the HOA has enough to hire legal representation for the next 20+ years, if necessary.

That’s one reason.  The other and, perhaps, the most compelling one is not only the deterioration of some of our services but the complete cessation of others, since Parkbridge bought Sandycove Acres in late 2013.  The worst?  The snow clearance and maintenance of the common areas in the grass growing seasons.   Yet the HOA Board of Directors voted unanimously NOT to meet with some of the member residents to even discuss the issue of filing a T-6 for a rent abatement.  In my opinion, there are 10, count ‘em, ten useless Directors on the HOA Board.

Parkbridge Adult Lifestyle Communities,  bought ‘us’ just before Christmas 2013, which made it my second winter here in South Park, SCA. The existing Community Manager was staying on and since she was privy to the previous year’s problems, the winter of 2013/2014 snow clearance wasn’t terrible.  OMG, it hasn’t been terrible since then, it has been absolutely abysmal. I could write a book about the problems here in South Park, SCA but that isn’t the reason I am writing this blog post.  It is the main reason I decided to stand for election to the Home Owners’ Association Board of Directors.

It is, once again, about the sense of entitlement and small-and-petty minded residents here in SCA, who think that they ‘deserve’ things, I think mostly because they’re been here a long time; or because they’ve volunteered on some of the committees, that they deserve to get whatever it is they want.  I used to have a next door neighbour like that.    Though this attitude is not unique to The Entitled here in SCA, north or South Park, it is the mind-set I live with and see every day, including the bossy-pants women I’ve met in Aquayak but that’s a sequel, which I’ll get to one day.  

Since most of the SCA Home Owners' Association Board of Directors have been in ‘office’ since Time Began, I decided to run for the Board and hopefully inject new blood and new thinking.  Most of the Directors are dinosaurs and I believe that their creative juices fossilized somewhere around the Jurassic period. Sad to say that the President of the SCA HOA BoD (Sandycove Acres Home Owners’ Association Board of Directors) is the oldest dinosaur still roaming SCA soil and the one I call The DoAsIsayasarus.  If you don’t, you’re out of the herd.  So, 9 people seem to just blindly follow The Leader.  I can just hear my mother now, “So, if your best friend decides to jump off a cliff, will you be jumping right behind her?”  The Leader is so wrong so much of the time and it seems to have rubbed off on ALL the Board of Director members, who don’t even seem to realize that running to be elected, even if only to a Board of Directors, is a political process, witness by this message received on Monday, May 30/16 via bulk snail mail and I quote verbatim: 

A MESSAGE FROM YOUR CURRENT HOME OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION DIRECTORS

CONCERNING THE ELECTION OF DIRECTORS FOR 2016/2017

At the Wheel – Sunday June 12 @ 1:30 p.m.

                                   

“Your Board of Directors has noted with considerable dismay that, for the first time in over 40 years, the election of your representatives has become a “political party” situation with canvassing for support and a candidates meeting.  This meeting, by the way, is NOT an Association event but is being held by a separate group of residents primarily to promote their own slate of nominees.  

                                   

Wrong again, DoAsIsayasarus, we are ALL brand new INDEPENDENT candidates, who had the help and support of some residents, who are enlightened enough to see that change is needed, and instead of the lip service, which is all we seem to get from the current and past SCA HOA BoD.  The group put their money, time and effort where their mouths are and actually did something constructive to help promote the new candidates to become known to SCA residents.  We also helped increase membership in the HOA because only members can vote. 

And it goes on to say, in the typical SCA HOA BoD fascist way: 

"This development – which we feel is not the Sandycove way and most inappropriate – is not of our choosing or to our liking."  

Well now, isn’t that just too bad??!!!!  Tsk, tsk, imagine that someone(s) would DARE to run against the current Board of Dictators, who seem to believe that being on the SCA HOA BoD is for their lifetime.  Which actually just might be so, judging by the way they’ve written their Constitution and By-laws (you can access on their website), and which are woefully out-dated since the last time they were updated was in 2010, pre-Parkbridge.  

There is a lot more that can be said for the two-sided piece of SCA HOA BoD political propaganda I received on May 30/16 (but I'll keep it short), which they were very clear to print on the front of the mailing envelope “(Paid for by the Directors personally)”.  What exactly did the Directors pay for?  Did they pay for just the printing of this piece of s*%t?  If so, who picked up the cost of the envelopes and the postage?  Oh, and talking about propaganda - who paid for the 3 page piece, load of crapola, which I feel is mis-information, half-truths and untruths, which I received via bulk snail mail on March 21/16? 

Trying to get answers on the voting process, in particular the proxy voting, is like getting a root canal – lengthy, half-assed and not satisfying.  Answers were not forth-coming unless I pushed like mad and were contradicted by information which was made public by the HOA, usually right after I asked the questions.  AND, if the President didn’t like my responses, I got this from him a bunch of times:  “We stand by our previous responses and this is our final communication on the matter.”  Nice, huh?

The proxy ballot is a work of art and set-up totally slanted to favour as many of the current Board Members as possible by the way the names are put in order.  Instead of being in a single column and alphabetical by last name, they made two columns and set the names up alphabetically, side-to-side.  Oh, and their rules for the disbursement and pick-up of the proxy ballots are only verbal and are even more slanted. They have holes in the procedure big enough to drive a Mack truck through.  Some of it seemed to be made up as they went along.

So, a few Newbies decided to run for the SCA HOA BoD to try and make a difference in the tunnel-thinking SCA HOA BoD, as dictated by the President.  Two people dropped out fairly quickly, as they were, according to one of the new candidates, “so persecuted for deciding to run, they couldn’t take the heat" and got out of hell’s kitchen.  One other was a late nomination and one I believe was brought in as a ringer to split the number of votes other new candidates might get and thus, diminish the chances of a newbie winning.  And so, the result?  The same 10 dinosaurs were re-elected.  So I assume that we can look forward to another year of the same old close-minded, narrow-minded, petty-minded, tyrannical, despotic ruling by the very committee who seems to be in Management’s pocket, judging by the decisions they make and why.  

And, yes, once again, speaking from both sides of his face as usual, the President informed some members that a count by candidate was available, it just has to be requested and yet, on their website, it is VERY CLEARLY stated:  

”As has been the tradition with the Home Owners AGM & Elections actual vote counts are not made public.   Only the successful candidates names.”    

Man-oh-man, Mad Magazine sure had it right with their feature, ‘What They Say and What It Really Means’. Or, maybe it’s more a case of the Horse’s Ass just not knowing the Horse’s head is doing.  They deserve each other. 

  

We, as SCA resident members, definitely deserve better.

© 2016 Phyllis Mahon aka Undercover Sandycove-r 

LOVE ME, LOVE ME NOT

Funny the reasons some people may like you … or not.  Recently, I had an epiphany about something as mundane as sod.  Yes, I mean sod.  You know, the green stuff which is your lawn, besides the weeds.

As Wiki defines it:  The Poaceae (English pronunciation: /poʊˈeɪ.siˌiː/) or Gramineae are the large and nearly ubiquitous family of monocotyledonous flowering plants known as grasses. The Poaceae include the cereal grasses, bamboos and the grasses of natural grassland and cultivated lawns (turf) and pasture. Grasses have stems that are hollow except at the nodes and narrow alternate leaves borne in two ranks. The lower part of each leaf encloses the stem, forming a leaf-sheath.   Leaf-sheath, leaf-sheath, leaf-sheath.  You try to say that 5 times fast.

I just know my lawn grows like crazy, beginning in mid-to-late April and I usually have to mow it by the first week in May.  This year was kinda weird, in that the grass had grown so high in the first 5 or 6 feet out from the porch, it was almost taller than Sofie, The Wonder Dog.  Sometimes, when that happens, she tends to wander over to the neighbour where the grass is shorter and use the facilities there, ‘cause she really doesn’t like it when the grass tickles her cute little pink belly.  It really doesn’t have to be very high for that to happen. 

For whatever reason, the rest of the lawn right to the driveway wasn’t growing much at all, except for those yellow-headed cheery mop heads, aka dandelions.   Dilemma time.  Should I just mow the part of the lawn that really, really needs it so Sofie would stay on our side?  Or should I mow everything even though 80% of the mowing time and effort would show zero results?

As I stand at my front door and survey my queendom, I sigh and know that I know the answer.  I have to mow.  At least the part gone wild and decide to just get it over with.  I change into my early spring lawn mowing outfit; old jeans (hmmm, they’re a little big at the waist – nice) and a ratty old Taz T-shirt, sweat-stained Mickey Mouse baseball hat and erstwhile running shoes I have kept for the very purpose of mowing.  Oh yeah and sun glasses.  I carry the lawnmower battery to the back door (it lives in the ‘Dora’ bedroom during the winter, as per the user’s manual and gets charged once a month.  The weed whacker battery is charged and ready to go too.

I tromp though the shortish grass out the back to the 3' x 8’ storage shed Management so generously provides and unlock the door.  For some reason, I always scoot back when I open the door ‘cause I kinda expect a swarm of something to come bursting out.  I consider this necessary though, ‘cause when I first inspected my storage locker after moving here, I had to knock down quite a number of small roundish mud wasp nests from the cardboard covered chicken wire, which separates my storage from my neighbours.  And, you never know what other critters may have taken refuge in there over the cold winter months.

A few things need to be rearranged to get to the lawnmower and I finally lug the thing out along with the weed whacker.  I push it mightily, making a trail in the longish grass around the locker area to the back door, where its energy source is waiting and get both batteries inserted.  I lift the yellow handle on the lawnmower and pull it up and the lawnmower starts with a reassuring roar.  I wasn’t quite sure if the battery charger was working, as the little red light is supposed to turn green when the charge is complete (it takes about 12 hours).  The little light hadn’t been turning green anymore toward the end of last summer.  I called the company which supplies new battery chargers (for $80.00 yikes!) and explained the problem and the man I spoke to said that it could just be the green bulb was burnt out.  Well, I wasn’t going to pay $80.00 for a green bulb and decided to take my chances that the charger would charge.   It appears that it is.

I chug off to the front of the house and start with the section gone mad.  It didn’t take too long to get that done and I finally decide to just leave the rest.  There really was no point in mowing something if it didn’t look like you mowed it.  Sofie was happy.

A week later I get home from a meeting and survey my (leased) land.  This time the grass is undeniably long all over and dandelions are running rampant. Sighing, I change into my lawn mowing outfit and trudge out to the storage shed, doing my little dash-backward dance when I fling the door open.  I sometimes wonder what my neighbours think when they see me doing that.

I trek to the front yard and turn on the lawnmower, which shows 2-out-of-3 green lights, meaning the charge is 2 thirds full.  I hope that’s enough to get everything done, especially the insane first 5-6 feet from the porch.  There’s just enough juice to get both front, sides and back yard done and then I weed whack. I’m pretty sweaty by the time I finish sweeping the sidewalk off but it all looks good and I love the smell of freshly mown grass.

So where is all this heading, you ask?  Well, a good friend of mine, Jae, who’s an avid gardener and the one responsible for the little garden I now have at the front of my house, called while I was out.  I called her back and she very casually asks what I plans I had for Thursday or Friday, as she had some gardening in mind.  My gardening and expanding my garden, as it turns out.  Yep, she had been busy splitting some of her mature perennials and wanted to share them with me. Here we go again. Without her sweat-equity though, and plants from her garden, I would still just have Poaceae growing right up to my porch.

Well, it turned out that I hadn’t made any plans for Thursday and it was a beautiful sunny, warm day.  My house faces south, so gardening in the morning is definitely a sweaty affair.  My friend, Jae, does most of the heavy stuff, as a wonky knee does not lend itself to pushing a shovel into the cement-like ground.  Jae seems to push it down effortlessly and gently pries a good-size piece of freshly mowed lawn, now known as sod, out the ground.  Jae casually mentions that her husband, Dave, said "hi", which makes me pause for thought, as we're not exactly friends.  I’m not sure what caused the disapproval I sense from him but I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it or him, if any.   And, really, what it boils down to for me, is that I only care what people think of me, if they are important in my life.

Then Jae casually mentions, that Dave mentioned, that if there was any sod from turning more of my lawn into garden, he wouldn’t mind having it to fill in some of the bald spots around their yard, which is where all the sod from my now-garden went the first two times.  Ah ha!  The penny drops.  Dave may not like me but he loves my sod!  And I just know that every time he looks at the not-so-bald spots-anymore, he can’t help but remember where all that nice green Poaceae came from.  Put that grass in your pipe and smoke it, dahlink!

© 2016 Phyllis Mahon aka Undercover Sandycove-r - “ALL IMAGES AS COPYRIGHTED BY PHYLLIS MAHON ARE PROTECTED AND REGISTERED … IT’S UNLAWFUL TO REPOST, COPY OR PUBLISH IMAGES FROM THIS WEBSITE.”

                                  

                             

QUART 2 - HOW MANY BERRIES DOES IT TAKE TO FILL UP A BEAR?

 I catch a glimpse of an intriguing looking metal box of some kind stuck way up the hillside and decide to make the climb up the natural cascade of what used to be liquid rock from back in the day when the earth was still being formed by volcanoes.  Although the climb is not too strenuous, my friend and travelling companion, the 2-legged one, waits at the bottom, content to enjoy the crisp autumn day.  Sofie makes the trek to the top of the hill with me, bounding ahead of me and then turning back to hurry back to my side,  guarding me from the forest’s wild critters.

 

                                                                 

When I reach the top, piles of rounded boulders curve snake-like, fitting into the natural depression of the rock-face.   Pleasing in a way, the symmetry of the rocks flows, almost like a waterfall away from the 4-legged metal watcher.

The Watcher

The Snake from a different angle

                                            

                                  

Sofie and I pick our way down the petrified waterfall and the three of us meander down the path, keeping our eyes peeled for the next object d’art.  You just never know what you’ll see next and, most of the time, why.

A newish looking wooden frame peeks out from amongst the foliage and we get close to try and figure out what it is.  Looks like a double door entrance-way that’s still on the Honey Do list to get finished.

 We continue down the leaf littered path and something shiny flicks here and there as we come around the curve.  Hmmm, we think as we come across a fair-size chunk of forest with rectangular strips of what looks like aluminum foil tacked to a lot of trees.  What message is the artist trying to convey with this one?

Shiny!

               

The next exhibit is kinda weird.  A pile of flattened vehicles, mostly cars I think and then mashed somehow into the side of a hill. 

                        

                              

Photo:  Roger Henriques

 "Badanna Zack's roadside sculpture, Mound of Cars (1998) intertwines the raw materials of nature with the vestiges of technology.  Six discarded vehicles found on the property in a derelict state were towed, stacked in a pyramid fashion, crushed, and covered with earth."  Carolyn Bell Farrell

So far, this one is my favourite.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe because it’s the most recognizable and almost understandable.  After all, what does one do with the thousands and probably millions of old, defunct horse-less carriages?  They have to go somewhere.

We continue our journey down this very interesting albeit puzzling path of perplexing art projects and come to a fork in the road.  Off to our right is a placard announcing artist’s names of the pieces which can be found down a side trail and that it’s a linear path, not a loop.  I’m more curious as to why people need to be told that you have to go out the same way you went in.  I figure the local search and rescue teams probably got tired of having to go find people who thought the trail looped around and met up with the main path somewhere down the line, only to become hopelessly lost.  911.

                                            

Yvette and I finish reading the sign and dissecting its meaning and decide to stay on the main path to its end.  As we turn to continue, we can hear a car engine grinding in low gear coming up the trail towards us.

We look at each other and our eyebrows lift skyward, as we both recall the sign near the parking area which states that motorized vehicles are not permitted on the path.

Figuring there must be a dire emergency of some kind, we stop and wait for the vehicle to catch up with us.  It's safer that way, anyway. 

Stayed tuned for Quart III.

BOO! BOO! BOO-YA!

I can’t count how many times people have said to me, “But I deserve it!”  So many times when I talk with people, I perceive this huge sense of entitlement, which flows off them in gigantic waves.  And, I think I’ve seen most of it since I moved here to South Park, so patently obvious.  Silver heads, at least a lot of them, take it for granted here.

What is it with people?  What makes them entitled?  What makes them deserve ‘it’?  Even I have used that term over the course of my 61+ years of age, like buying myself a little treat when I got a raise when I was in ‘The Big Job’, because I worked hard for that raise and I deserve ‘it’.

 

Recently, on a luxury coach outing to the big city of Toronto with a local organization, I got to experience this sense of entitlement first hand, up front, in my face and I have to say, it left a really bad feeling in my mouth. 

The bus was departing from a local mall uptown from me, about a 20 minute drive away.  Having grown up in a house where one of my parents (my dad) was a punctuality fanatic, I was brain-washed from an early age, to always being about 15 minutes early, wherever I had to be; school when I finally got to start kindergarten; then when I started dating, yep never did figure out the ‘Keep ‘em waiting’ philosophy; then when I started working, especially my first ‘real’ job after I got out of high school. If I wasn’t at least 15 minutes early, I would start hyperventilating, especially when I wasn’t in charge of my mode of transportation, i.e. public transit to downtown Montreal, working in a lawyer’s office as a court runner/file clerk and couldn’t control the speed of the train I was on or the bus I got onto after the train. 

                                                   

To me, being on time, is the epitome of respect.

Anyhoo, I digress.  On a recent Saturday morning, here’s a bus load of 44 people, plus the driver, sitting and waiting, sitting and waiting.  I wasn’t sure what we were waiting for until a person of importance in the group finally got on the loudspeaker at 8:26 and mentioned that we were waiting for a couple and asked if we should leave now or give them 3 more minutes, which would mean an 8:30 a.m. departure, instead of 8:00.   Since we had already been waiting for almost an entire half hour, a lot of the bus people felt, “So what’s another 3 minutes?”  This tardy twosome finally arrived right on the nose of 8:30. Yay for them – NOT.  

I don’t know what the other 44 people did while we were waiting for this tardy twosome, but I spent the time figuring out how much time these two tardy people wasted on behalf the 45 people, who were there on time.  Let’s do some math – you probably won’t even need to drag out your smart phone and find the calculator app.  Forty-five people x .5 (half) of an hour.  That’s a collective 22.5 hours!  or almost one full 24 hour day, waiting for two people who thought our departure time was 10:00.  Huh?

So because of two people who couldn’t get their act together enough to make note of the correct departure time, 45 other people paid the price.  AND when these two people finally made it onto the bus, they didn’t even apologize to the 45 people they had kept waiting.  What’s all that about?  Why is it their due that we had to wait for them?  Does their poop not stink like the rest of the bus people?  What makes them so special that they just ignore the social niceties for keeping 45 people waiting and not apologizing?  Why did they deserve to have a bus load of people kept waiting for 30 minutes?  And, I guess, more to the point, why did the trip organizer allow that to happen?  

This tardy twosome appeared to be totally bewildered by some of the bus people who actually booed them (and not in a ‘Casper, The Friendly Ghost’ kind of way) when they finally boarded.  Although, I admit, booing is (somewhat) bad manners on the Boo’ers part, I applaud them for their courage in expressing their unhappiness to the people who caused the situation.   After all, don’t people who have been kept waiting for the tardy two deserve to express their opinions? Judging by the expression on the tardy twosome’s faces upon hearing the booing, they had no idea why someone would boo them.  Where did they learn their manners? 

Maybe they’ll say something later, at the restaurant where we were all lunching together? 

Nope, not even then and that would have been a perfect opportunity for them to do so.  It, at least, was quieter than the bus and stationary.  During the course of the day it became obvious to me that these two people were totally oblivious as to having done something wrong, which required an apology, probably because they’re special in some way I have yet to figure out.

I grew up in a family where you worked to accomplish your goals.  They weren’t handed to you on a platter.  Where you weren’t praised for every act you so cleverly achieved and which seems to be the way a lot of kids are being parented these days.  Get up, get dressed and go to school  - oh what a wonderful person you are, Ashley!  Thank you for doing that.  Seriously?  What happens when they grow up and start working?  Is the boss going to applaud them on a daily basis for doing what is expected of them?  “Oh, Ashley, you got to work on time today.  Thank you so much!”  What are we setting our children or grandchildren up for by praising them to the moon and back for things and actions that should just be?  Let’s get real.  Life just isn’t like that, unless you’re your own boss and then you can pat yourself on the back as many times during the day as you want BUT will it pay the bills?

So for all those people out there who think that they deserve to have 45 people sit and wait for them, I say “BOO”.  And for the ones who enable people to have this sense of entitlement, I say “BOO”.

One day, that something that's going around, will.  BOO-YA!