The Midway is in Town

Surprise, surprise, the midway is in town this week. I was going to do a service call in the Federal district and had to go past the Legion on Duncan Ave There were a whole fleet of transport trucks and trailers parked around the property at the Legion. The midway is made up of a company called Canuck Amusements from Selkirk, Manitoba.





There are extra trailers besides the ones that carry
the amusement rides. These are used for living
quarters for the workers and are the same as lots of people use for RV'ing. So you see one could say that these people are sort of on a holiday every day they are away from home working, but I am sure that they don't consider this work a play time.









A normal site at a midway is the concession stands with such items for sale, as pizza, cotton candy, hot dogs, pop, etc. This midway is no exception to that rule. The smells are so good that my wife had to order a slice of pizza and a drink to help fill the empty void in her stomach.







Talking about food, here is a ride made up of
strawberries. These strawberries are hollow with
seats inside for passengers to ride and they go
around and around.










This one is an arrangement with two cars which look like long subway cars for people to ride in and I don't doubt that they will hold around ten people each. The two cars oscillate back and forth in opposite directions to each other while they go
around in almost a complete circle starting at the
bottom, going forward and upward then when they reach the top, they change direction and go the opposite way until they reach the top going backwards. This carries on for awhile until the ride is over.




Here is another ride with some small groups of
cars with seating for about four people each. Each group of people go around in a circle, then the whole ride goes around in a circle, I am afraid that if I were to ride on this one, my lunch would be history!







Anyone like a sleigh ride? Here is one with sleigh
frames for people to lay on and go spinning around in circles. I saw many folks, young and old spinning around enjoying themselves until the cycle was over.





















Here are two rides for the little kiddies, this helicopter appears to be interesting and I can
imagine the thoughts going through the minds of
the little ones. If you like boats, then the second ride should be okay for you as well, after all they are powered by twin outboard motors!!!!!





















We are getting close to the end of the carnival
atmosphere as we approach the games trailers. You can try your hand at bowling as you toss balls
up the ramps and try to land on the centre circle
so you can win a prize of some sort.
There are also many other games of chance to try to win prizes at other skill testing games.












The last attraction is this long slide out in the back fourty, where the participants climb the ramp on the right side of the ride and sit on carpets while they ride the bumpy ride down the ramp to the bottom. If you ever wanted to settle down a meal then this would be the guaranteed way to do it.




Well, it is the end of another day of midway rides at Kirkland Lake. We will look forward to another day of thrills and spills at the midway for another year. The companies are coming up with very interesting ways to create a thrill for the people and more ways to extract dollars from the public as well but I guess that is what business is all about.
I hope you have enjoyed the rides and the tour today, look forward to seeing you come for a visit again soon.
Wilf Blakey

Dominion Day Holiday

I have had the pictures of this event on my computer since the first of July but with the activities of the summer I did not get around to making a blog entry on this.
The town of Kirkland Lake has a grand celebration for this day of the year to help celebrate the birthday of our great country.
The weather has not been that great so far and the rain is plentiful and cool a lot of days. There are many events planned, especially at the Federal Park on Tweedsmuir Rd with live music, concession stands and rides for the kids. The planners should have supplied canoes for the people as there were almost lakes of water on the grounds so it was not really an enjoyable year for outdoor activities.
At night there are fireworks, and what is a celebration without fireworks? There were many varieties of fireworks with rockets shooting high into the sky, sparklers going up a short distance and breaking apart so they can create a small waterfall effect. I like the ones that go what seems like a mile high and then a big boom with sparks spreading out in all directions.
We like going to these events sponsered by the town, it gives you a chance to meet and socialize with lots of folks we haven't seen for many years
Events like this help to build up the spirits of the town's people as well as raising funds for various
needs. I find that I will go out on the town on events like these where I wouldn't even think of venturing away from our home normally.
Parades are another happening that create interest and public closeness, you can tell this especially when the Christmas parade is on and you see the line up of folks standing on the side of the street waiting for the floats and , particularly, Santa Clause to come by throwing out candies to all of the kids, big and small.
I apologize for the delay on writing this story but as I mentioned in another post called " Summer time activities" our time just flies by when the warm weather shows up and presents us with so many possibilities of things to do around here.
I hope you have enjoyed the pictures and story as well as the events if you were in the area at the time.
I will join you again a little later with another story from the story teller.
Wilf Blakey

This Summer

I discovered a comment on one of my posts on the blog today and it amused me very much. Mr Bossence (from the Bayfield Bunch) asked me how come I have not had any updates on here since June (actually he didn't put in the month June but I did ). For some time now, I have been reading and following along with some blogs written by some people who live in their RVs or at least travel in them, especially in the winter and travel down through the southern USA. Mr. Al. Bossence and his wife live and work in the community of Bayfield,Ontario near Goderich. I commented to Al that I felt he did very well keeping up on his blog all through the summer even though they are sitting still and not moving around with their RV

I keep thinking about what a person does to fill in space on the blog when there really isn't too much to chatter about, in this case I mean the summertime. I guess if you really want, you could invent things to talk about but in my case, I didn't care to make a whole bunch of idle chatter and I had been busy with a great lot of jobs and activities around the house and country to keep me busy.

My wife and I bought our home in August of 2006 and we, of course, bought it with the realization that it had imperfections and repairs were needed in the future to keep it in liveable condition. Well this year is the year that our shop needed a new roof, or else. We had a certain amount of cash to deal with and everyone knows that money does not grow on trees so a person has to make the money stretch as far as possible and that is what we do all of the time. I had a contractor approach me with an offer to do the rooof for a sum of money and I simply told him that I didn't have that amount of money. I had replaced rooves on previous buildings that we had lived at or owned and I knew that I could possibly do it again here but after my accident 14 years ago, my back does not want to co-operate with me to do this type of labour, including loading and unloading shingles to and from a trailer.

I had talked to different people about roofing and heard the comment that steel was the way to go. I checked out prices on steel roof material and found that a lumber yard near Earlton had excellent prices so this is what I did. I figured that there would be work involved as in strapping the old roof over top of the old shingles and laying the steel on top of that without the back breaking work of handling the old shingles. I also expected that I could get some ocassional help from friends to get the hard parts done and I was correct. Over the period of about three weeks of part time work , the job is done and I expect to have a dry shop and garage area for many years to come.

I also have been busy selling and installing Free to Air Satellite systems this year and it has kept me occupied doing that. I am not an expert in this field but in the past, 1983-1988, I used to sell and install the big 10ft dish systems when we lived in Southern Ontario operating our own tv sales and service business. It has been a real learning experience figuring out how to set up a motorized system but I must say that overall I don't mind doing it.I have installed most of them in the Kirkland Lake area but I did do one below Englehart recently. When I first started doing them this year, I would install them on a tripod mounted on our deck on the south side of the house. I had already had our own there for two winters with no apparent trouble but when I got to the point that I had two systems on the same deck, the frost decided to play havoc with the level of the deck and threw the aim of both of them off so I lost most of my stations. I had to come up with a better solution and I decided to use my cargo trailer to set up the dishes and level them on it, then things started to work out and no doubt people would wonder if I was growing satellite systems instead of a garden.

We also have been working on our basement insulating the walls to keep out the cold and keep in the heat. We had to tear apart the walls of the fruit cellar to be able to apply a proper layer of sheet insulation and also applying a layer of hydraulic cement to the floor to wall join to help keep the moisture out. There is also a small area on the entrance of the house where there are stairs to take you to the second floor and the basement and the basement area had to be insulated as well so this is where we spent many hours.

So as you can see, this is where all of the "spare" hours went this summer instead of writing blog articles. I have included pictures of the new roof, the dish farm on the trailer (most of the dishes are gone now) and the outside of our home. I hope that this has explained our coming and going for the summer.

Wilf Blakey

The Glad Game

I came across a lesson in life recently, as the title says "Rejoice in all things!". It takes time to examine a title or statement and make total sense of it and I am sure I am not the only one who has this trouble. This summer I have had the desire to read some classic novels that normally people read when they are young but in my case it didn't happen. When I was reading "Our Daily Bread", it made mention about the book Robinson Crusoe and I thought " I have never read that book" so I searched the Internet and found a copy there, then I saved it to my hardrive and read it later. As time went on I found copies of more novels and read them. One of the latest ones is "Polyanna", a story about an orphan girl taken in by her spinster aunt, who by the way is a grouch. Polyanna is the daughter of a missionary minister. Her father taught her the art of appreciation and thankfulness by way of what he called the glad game. They used to receive barrels full of things needed and one time Polyanna wanted a doll but got a pair of crutches. Her father told her to be glad that she did not need the crutches and life goes on from there.

When she came to her aunt's home, she got to know many people in the surrounding village and taught them the "glad" game with the purpose of teaching them to be thankfull for things that most people take for granted. She got to know an older gentleman who had hardly talked to anyone for years and always walked on the streets looking down at the ground with no interest in the world around him. On the second or third meeting with the man (Mr Pendleton), Polyanna was able to break the ice with him but not fully. Some time later as she was walking up the road to his house, she came across him laying on the ground with a broken leg, not able to get up so he asked her go to his house and phone the doctor to come and rescue him. This she did and further broke the ice with Mr. Pendleton, especially when she had the opportunity to visit with him in his sick bed at his home. Mr. Pendleton came to realize that Polyanna's cheerfull attitude was infectious as she showed interest in the colourful designs reflected on the walls from some prisms he had that were sitting in the sunlight. Things exploded from there and a close friendship developed between them to the point that this recluse changed so much he asked Polyanna if she would move into his house to be the "child presence" he needed to make his house a home. He had in the past had a relationship with a woman but it did not work out and the lady went elsewhere to join another man as husband and wife so that is why Mr Pendleton became the town hermit.

Polyanna had similar friendships with most of the people in the village and the atmosphere changed dramatically around town. Towards the end of the story, Polyanna had an accident when a car hit her causing her to lose the use of her legs. It was quite awhile after the accident that Polyanna learned the hard fact that she was supposed to be crippled for life. As you can guess, the cheerful attitude of the young lady began to change for the worse as she couldn't find anything to be glad about but there is a silver lining in every cloud as the townspeople whom Polyanna had cheered up came back to try to cheer her up with the reports of the good things that she had done for them after she taught them the glad game and Polyanna's attitude started lifting up again.

The end of the story is good as she was taken to a specialist in a far off town for treatment from which Polyanna was able to gain the use of her legs again and she now had something extremely good to be happy or glad about. As you can see there really is no need to go around in life with a great long lower lip almost dragging the ground just because things are not quite what you want them to be.

Now that the story is over, I can get to where the story fits in with my life. I have read in the Bible many times where it says to rejoice but it is not always easy to rejoice if things seem to be going against you. Since I got injured in a bad fall 14 years ago, I have had things go wrong and I didn't always have a good attitude about them. These things are financial, health, possibly relationship problems, problems with work related tasks not co-operating with me and many other things. This week I have had a bad last few days because something is not right in my physical body and my wife and I spent most of the afternoon at the emergency department of the local hospital with the doctor checking me over, doing tests and asking many question. After all of this time and frustration, we headed home around 5 PM, feeling somewhat better because the doctor has given us a better grasp of what is going on and how to deal with it. We also realize that there may not be an immediate cure to the problem but if we approach the task and have faith that God will help me to overcome the difficulty then life will be much more enjoyable but it can be enjoyable even in the meantime if I keep rejoicing in God's hand in our lives.

I hope I have not been too boring with this story but I felt that it was time to put down some words about my Revelation.God bless everyone here and everywhere who trusts in our Precious Father.

Wilf Blakey

'Tis Fathers' Day

The date is June 21,2009 and it is two events today, first of all it is the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. If you had ever desired to burn the midnight oil then this day is the hardest day(or night) to try this as it has the least amount of darkness of the year and it is hard to burn what doesn't exist (the nighttime darkness). The second event of the day is a celebration that many families take part in when they honor the man of the house or the father. Fathers are responsible for many things in the family, they work to bring home money to pay the bills for the household, they look after the workings of the house and property as well as, all or most. of the mechanical devices. The statement is true as long as the man is mechanically inclined to do so but I have talked to many men about this subject and hear a long string of excuses and pitiful depressing statements because these men feel they are a disappointment to the world as they cannot even change a tire on their vehicles. God made man and woman and He gave them gifts of traits and abilities to do different things and not all men have the same gifts. Imagine what it would be like if all men were able to repair trucks, cars, etc but none could build houses. What if all women could create children and raise them but couldn't cook meals for people. This leaves a great void in society with many jobs that would be left undone and to put it even farther, we would have many vehicles on the road but no place to live and no food to eat. That would be a disaster for sure so I see that it is necessary for men to have differing abilities as well as women the same but there is no set of rules in society that says men "HAVE" to be expert mechanics or women have to be homemakers only because I am sure that we need doctors, plumbers, and experts in many different fields in the world.
Let us put aside the work abilities, the fathers have another very important task and position in the family, they are there to be a guide and a person of respect for their children. If the young people were allowed to grow up without a mentor (or a coach) they would have no example of good and bad to go by and to pattern their life after, even as it is, there are so many families where the father or mother has deserted their family unit for whatever reason and gone to do their own thing. The boys usually look up to the man for a pattern of what a man is supposed to do and be like but if the man is not there, the pattern is badly mucked up with something that is like the blind leading the blind. The same goes for girls with a mother or a father missing. When the child runs into a problem, they normally don't have any idea as to what they can or should do to solve the problem, if there is a parent around, then the child can ask that adult what they would do if they were in their shoes. Most of the time this adult will give good guidance and the problem is looked after quite well, if there is not adult, then there is usually trouble brewing and more trouble over the horizon as well.
You see, I am getting to the point that the father is a statue of liberty and justice to a lot of young people in their early years of life, I remember my own father who helped me out many times when I needed it, even when I was grown up, I still had times with questions that needed answers and Dad was there to help me. He has been gone for over 27 years now and I still miss him. Many times I wish he was here so I could show him what I have been doing and wait for a comment of appreciation by saying "well done, son". I am a father of my own family with a wife and two step daughters and a handicapped son (who is living in a good Christian home a distance from here) who is severely handicapped to the point that my wife and I realized we could not properly raise and look after him for the rest of his life. He has been well looked after for many years now and will still be taken care of for quite awhile as well. We do thank the foster parents, and I do appreciate my wife and daughters who treat me as though I am their own true biological father showing love towards me and respect for all of the years that I have known them. I love you family.
I want to wish all of you men out there a very happy and enjoyable Fathers' Day. I pray that you will get many phone calls and wishes from your family on this day.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY to one and all!!!!!

Wilf Blakey