Sabrina vs. the Baseball Bat

May 10, 2007:
The office at Sabrina's school had called me to inform me of a "little emergency". As far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as a petite or grand one.....I'm already assuming death by the phone call alone.

Je suis des-o-lay...Sabrina was morted by a le petite grand mal (seizure).

Ok, now I'm making fun of the french language and the stupid office people at the school....hey, guess what...Francois, Yves'la'Vek'......and all your weird other men names....WE ALL DON'T SPEAK FROG ! OKAY ! And quit calling me Madam Bergeron...it pisses me off, you bunch of cheese heads.

I'm pissed off about the initial phone call....la petite emergency.......

and that an ESM plan was not put in place....it seems there was no first aid protocols practiced at the onset of injury. Sabrina was NOT assessed, no level of first aid was provided for her, though there should have been at a secondary school.

Their "petite emergency" was to call me, the parent, and have me come and pick her up at school. And if not me, then call her father, who is also working 40 km away from the school, and is not reachable by phone.

When we could not provide either transport, someone in the office reluctantly drove Sabrina home.

I think I should check into these scbool board policies and protocols, as I am fairly certain, Sabrina did NOT receive adequate first Emergency Response...at a public school, as she could have been suffering more from the obvious trauma....such as further eye injury, a hereditary infliction already impeding her sight. An ambulance should have been called immediately for the medical care of my daughter.

They should have NOT swept the action into my hands, at my workplace, where I am NOT the first responder. Coincidentally, I received three phone calls from the school, thereafter....when they removed the liability from their school grounds.

Trust me...I am checking into that.

UPDATE: May 15, 2007

The Good Samaritan

You are a good samaritan, you have no legal duty to being helpful to another human being, when they are sick, in a car accident, or passed out in an aisle at Safeway. You are a good samaritan when you stop and care about the well being of this injured person.

Don't assume the next person will do it...you have to do it, whether you have First Aid training or not, having someone with you helps. Even if you just yell out for this person "I need help!!" is enough to bring this person to recovery. Don't leave them, stay with them and comfort them as much as you can.

If you are a First Aider, then begin your ESM and primary survey,
but I'm not writing about First Aid protocols. I'm writing about the average man or woman or child,
who has no clue what to do when they come across a person who needs medical attention.

I believe our schools should begin teaching our children First Aid, as early as possible. The most basic course takes only a day (8 hours) or could be split into smaller classroom periods. We should ALL KNOW CPR.

It's as simple as remembering 30 then 2....30 then 2.....30 compressions, 2 ventilations (2 breaths in)...30 compressions, 2 breaths, 30 compressions - 2 breaths....

It's as easy as your A ...B.....C's'

airway, breathing, circulation.

But, now I'm getting into other stuff that will bore you....you need to get the book, need to sign up at a St.John's Ambulance course.....and become confident like me...brag about new life-saving skills. Yes....I feel like I can save the world, and so can you! Take the course.

Saving someone's life is crucial, empowering, rewarding....it's hard to explain individual experiences.
You become the Good Samaritan, with no fan fare, no write-up in the papers, the ambulance drivers even ignore you at the scene. But you are the Good Samaritan, who may have just saved a life of another human being............... and just knowing that is good enough.

Nutella Hair

At the cusp of every first long weekend, where we anticipate the return of living in the wilds of British Columbia, where the lake has not yet warmed up to a comfortable swim, yet enough for a ride on the speedboat and children full of jiggy for white wash.

For my family it means hair appointments. Daniel gets the usual plastic cap coverage, turning what is left of his scalp into a spikey blonde bimbo, accompanied with the 10 minute tan sessions.

Then there's Sabrina, with her long, thick mass, pulled and stretched and streaked, and streaked until I can't recognize her anymore.

Brandon...nada...zip....he wants to be a rockstar, so his hair hangs like the Vancouver Canucks flag, down...limp, straight, and careless.

My hair has gone through many changes. Recently, my new hairdresser wants to impress me by making my thick, full hair, thin and dead. It takes her about 4 hours, but she eventually gets it to go thin. $260.00 later.....
This took two days to achieve. The first night was to only cover up my grey roots, after already been streaked two months previous. But I had to come back the next day to have those roots re-streaked, to match the rest of my hair. Instead, the hairdresser re-streaked, and re-streaked to achieve "the blonde look" which I suppose hairdresses do now, to make a 40'ish old fatty feel younger. Geez, the assumptions....I don't want to look younger, I want to feel younger. There's a big difference. And there's no way in Hell I'm gonna' stand at a mirror and flat-iron and prim and priss....my shoulder joints won't allow it.

Anyways, when I got home, Brandon immediately noted that my new hair looks like Nutella, the chocolate/vanilla mix.

Kids, eh....what do they know. But then, he sent home some class work that asked "who is your favorite person...(who turned out to be me this time, instead of Daddy, Daddy, Daddy)...is she thin, medium, or fat? Brandon checked the "thin" box. Now, he's either really stupid, or really, really smart.


Anyways, on my road to transforming myself, I decided to get my eyebrows waxed...not plucked, waxed. I've never had that done before, maybe because I feared the pain.I feared the thin tramp look, you know the one, where it's mistakenly over-plucked and pencilled in later. It's hard to see in this picture, but my brows have been waxed! It wasn't as painful as I thought it would be. This picture is the first day at the hairdressers, with root touch-up only.

But then my hairdresser asked if I wanted to wax "down there"....you know, "down there". So there I am, lying down on some cot, in the dark, like I'm at the Dentist or getting X-rays, and I suddenly feel nervous about "down there", since my stomach hasn't allowed me to see it for several years now.
OMG, I get this on-rush of realization that my hair-stylist is from Brazil!

I tell her maybe next time.

In the end, I feel rejuvenated by my new transformation and anxiously await our first long weekend at the lake, the enivitable problems we will encounter with poop overloads and come-along friends, the eventual rain that historically ruins every long weekend. But, at least, we will all look fantastic in our misery.

God help me if I become the movie......

Animal Farm .....

Mother nature can be freaky sometimes.

I get lots of animals and critters begging for food at my back door. Racoons, always in pairs or more, sometimes they bring their babies along. I get squirrels, lots of them. And I name them, usually after the fellas from Trailer Park Boys, like Bubbles, Julian, Randy, Mr. Layhee, etc.

A few of them are tamed. Sandy, eats from my hand, and comes when I call her name.

I've had the few odd stray cats, mice. But three days ago, I started feeling this....



I have been feeding him bird seed, borrowed from the neighbour, and the mixture is full of sunflower seeds. Guess who wants a piece of the action...this is Sandy.



The watering hole....


The pigeon has been tagged; a green ring on one ankle and a yellow one on the other. A nearby neighbour had a backyard full of homing pigeons, and they use to fly circles above our cul-de-sac. And he had some birds that flew long distant races, some of them even went to California and back. Sadly, this guy moved away about a year ago....and I think this pigeon just got back from a long haul.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Sabrina and her friends.

Sabrina and her friends, getting so big, growing up so fast.

O No! Not again.....

What can I say.

We watch this team, play after play, day after day, play-off after play-off. We see them skate to and fro, and pass the puck hither. We buy their god-damned hockey cards from McDonalds, and cheer them along in such loving reverance. Why do they hate us so much?

The Canucks suck, big time.

This isn't the first time they let us down, it's been always. Even if they manage to skirt themselves around penalty shots and lucky boards, they suck....they absolutely suck.

Again, up 2 zip, they manage to allow the Ducks to tie the game, then win in overtime. What happened !!??

But wait, we can't blame the entire Canucks organization, it has to be on some player, or players, that priss and pounce their asses to the puck, as if the soccer legendary Beckham is watching in the grand stand and is announcing his soverignty to England, by way of U.S.A. Gollywood.

O, okay, you really don't suck....you just lost, which is a game we can't afford to give up at B.C. Children's Hospital, where we don't care whether you score or not. The kids need you either way.

Trevor and Marcus, promote children's health, volunteer their time, to ensure children of B.C. have a place to go to when they are sick.

My son Brandon's new teacher in English school is a big hockey fan...she loves Sami Salo, and her class sings the Canadian National Anthem over the P.A. system at school. They end their song with 'GO CANUCKS GO'

...she has to do this, needs to do this, because a child in her class suffers from disease, and she simply wants the youth, our youth, to remember the true nature of our Canucks, that they are winners for us all.

How to Poop at Cultus Lake

We've booked our campsites at Cultus Lake for the May and July long weekends. Bookings began April 1, and I made my first booking for May long weekend on April 2. It took all day to get through to the switchboard. Thinking the lines to the booking office must be really busy, I decided to book the July long weekend, too. "They had two spots left"! for the full hookups, ie. water, electricity, sewage. There are 108 full hookup sites, and 133 sites without a thing, except a fire pit.
I then booked two weeks for end of July and was lucky enough to get good sites for all three bookings.

348 Seasonal sites, 104 Full Hook ups, 133 tenting sites

We have our name on the list to get a "seasonal spot" which is a payment of about $2,000 to have a campsite from May 1 to end of September. We are 107 in a list of 150, but only 20 new spots came up for renewal this year.

There are a few beautiful waterfront spots, but without electricity and water, and we have stayed in them before, since our trailer is self sufficient.
Except, all the poop gets stored in holding tanks, where we need to go to a special place to pump it out, and the battery power lasts barely three days, used sparingly.

Last year, however, our holding tanks backed-up, either due to our stupidity in using "real" toilet paper, instead of the expensive trailer kind you should use, or the capacity at the lake was "FULL", and the campgrounds own huge holding tanks underneath the ground got full. Sabrina had brought along a friend, who we also suspected of flushing down her sanitary napkins. Never, ever do that.

Here's what it looks like to have poop boil back up to the ground. They use this really potent deodorizer that stinks to high hell, like Bingo night for seniors.





Here's what they needed to bring in to unplug the mess we made:




Well, you know me, I complained and complained, look at the mess "YOU" made, and we had to move, the inconvenience, etc. etc. We got 4 free days out of the deal.

This year, I plan to stock up on the expensive toilet paper, $4.00 per pack of 4 rolls.

Freak Snow Fall April 2, 2007