Last weekend we went down to the Lantzville Pub to see Mike playing. We had dinner with Barb and then listened to them perform. It was fun, Mike always puts on a good show. The best part is that he sings songs that I know, that I can sing along with. Even better he performs in my key. I sing in the key of “it’s too noisy in here for anyone to hear me”, so the Lantzville Pub or The Rod and Gun, are great places to see him.

OK, as you probably know there are those expensive “pod” coffee makers. I don’t drink coffee so I don’t know much about them other than they are very expensive, are made my companies with names like Kordwald, or Kneurod, or KobaKabana something like that, (EDIT: It’s Keurig. MGA) and the people that use them are, as often as not, coffee “connoisseurs”. Mention a drip coffee maker to them or coffee from McDonalds and they will snort and look down on you like you suggested drinking bilge water. 

Which is why I found it so amusing today when I saw an ad that announced that Maxwell House Coffee now comes in pods. Maxwell House, the coffee that you can get in five pound tins on sale at Walmart. Maxwell House, the coffee known far and wide as It’ll Do, It’s Only Family. Maxwell House, the coffee on more factory floors and assembly lines than any other, (unless generic is on sale). Maxwell House is now available for the same pod machines that will make single cups of rare exotic civet cat poop coffee, or smoked Peruvian lotus flower tea.  The same machine that will produce imported French Vanilla Ethiopian Espresso now makes Maxwell House. What makes them think that people who paid serious bucks for a gleaming stainless steel computer controlled Knorgwal coffee maker to set next to the matching Krupp bread machine, the T-Fal cookery, and the KitchenAid Professional mixer, would even consider the coffee loved by plumbers the world over? I mean really, it’s akin to K-Mart sending dresses to Milan for fashion week. 

But then as I said I don’t really know much about coffee.

Then this morning at the store I happened to go down the coffee aisle, to get tea I hasten to add. Twining’s English Breakfast Tea, what the Queen, myself, and other civilized people drink to wake up. Anyway, in the section where all the “pod” coffees were I found a shelf of actual McDonalds Coffee Pods. Nobody could figure why I was giggling like a crazy person.

But I do get that a lot.

By now you’ve probably heard that there was a terrible earthquake in Nepal.  It’s not really a surprise. A few million years ago there was a terrible crash. The continent of India slammed into the side of Asia. The crash is still going on and Nepal is the bumper, so earthquakes are fairly common, though this one was bigger than most. The Nepal earthquake did distract from our earthquake. A 6.2 well north of us near Haida Gwai. We didn’t even feel it in Nanaimo. Once again this was an area that gets a lot of quakes, though this was bigger than most.

At work they keep a radio station playing most mornings. They usually have CFOX out of Vancouver on for its mix of light rock, morning chatter, and news. Friday morning though, they broke into normal music and chatter with a bulletin. “This just in. There has been a major earthquake in BC” and then they went to five minutes of commercials, and then a couple of songs, and more chatter, and traffic. Finally I gave up and checked QuakeFeed, an app on my iPad that tracks seismic activity. It told me the location, the magnitude, and that the initial Tsunami concern had been relaxed and no warning was issued. The CFOX however only finally said something about the quake at the next news break about 20 minutes later. I thought that was pretty poor. This is earthquake and tsunami country. If a quake happens they need to get us the information now. I sure as heck want to know if there has been a tsunami warning more than the latest song from Mumford and Son. I really should be hearing if the quake happened near somebody I know more than the DJs chatting about the Canucks playoff chances. (They lost by the way.) I just thought it was amazingly poorly handled.

But there has been a lot of things handled poorly over the last year. I’m sure that you’ve heard about the troubles in Baltimore. Now there are many who will blame it on this or that but nobody is mentioning what I think could be a major issue: The water. You see I ran across an article this week entitled “An Immense Concentration of Orb-Weaving Spiders With Communal Webbing in a Man-Made Structural Habitat.” Translation:  the Black River Wastewater Treatment Plant near Baltimore MD had been overrun by spiders. Nearly 100 Million of them have filled every inch and path and scaffolding and truss with webbing. Parts are filled from the roof sheathing to the space between the steel walkway planking and the water below. In places it’s tumbling down by it’s own weight forming thick ropes of webbing. Don’t click on this if you are arachnophobic:

But the part that got me was that the investigators decided that the spiders aren’t harmful, if they took them down they’d just come back, and that pesticides would be inappropriate as it would contaminate the treated water. Their solution was to call the place, The Black River Arachnotopia, and tell the staff that cleaning the webbing as needed was a custodial issue. 

Eww.

Meanwhile Canada came in fifth in a list of countries ranked by happiness. We’re up there with Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway. 
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-among-the-10-happiest-countries-in-the-world-yay-us#__federated=1 
Notice that these are all cold countries. You know, countries where all the spiders die off every winter. I think there’s a direct correlation between the number and size of spiders and happiness. We’re happy, and Laos, home of the Giant Huntsman Spider ranked somewhere over 100th. Mexico, the US, and Brazil came in 14th, 15, and 16th respectively and they’re home to various species of tarantula. I think there might be something to this. 

On May 29th, Auntie Barbara will turn 90.  We are having a birthday party for her on June 16 in Costin Hall in Lantzville- if anyone is interested in attending, please let me know.  If not, I would very much appreciate if you could drop Barb a birthday card.  These can be sent to Doug and I . Our address is 7338 Harby Road, Lantzville, BC  V0r 2H0

As long as there isn’t a coffee pod spider.

Doug & Marsha

PIX: A Very Vancouver Island Morning