In The Now

Category: Writing

April 23, 2013

Sharp-Dressed Man

by hadaad

There were long stretches during my university career that I didn’t particularly like who I was. I had basis for this in the form of a romantic attachment that I formed that didn’t work out. I’m sure most of the rest was in my head. However, there are two very overt examples that reinforced what I believed. I can look back at one and think about it with a little distance and realize that maybe I talked myself into letting it get me down. I may fully tell you, one day, about the time God beat me out for a girl but now is not that time. No, tonight, I will tell you about the other time that my ego, my machismo, and my self image took a hit. And this time, I tell you, I have evidence to back up my case.
I’d never intended to sign up for a bachelor auction. But there are times when people can talk you into things. If I had it to do over again, I would have stuck to the inside of my shell like I had every other time with the exception of the one time that I got hypnotized. Still, I guess I just let myself get talked into signing up.
I figured that the fact that I was the second one up wasn’t a good sign. Still, I had a little bit of an insurance policy. Shelley, Dylan’s wife, had a friend who would put up a minimal bid for me in the event that no other offers were sent up. Obviously, I would pay her back but in the end it wasn’t necessary. Someone bid on me.
That was nice, even if the bid was for less than the gift certificate that came along with this hunk of masculinity.
Maybe the girl was just interested in charity. Maybe she was angry at her boyfriend. I really don’t know. I do know that she had a boyfriend. Or at least that’s what she told me to beg out of the date. I’m not saying that I’m the height of amusing or even all that great a guy but she didn’t even want the gift certificate. She got out of there fast after making her excuses. I’m guessing that she was kind and trying to get the bidding going and was surprised when it turned out that she was the winner.
In the end, I treated myself to some Chinese food and consoled myself with the fact that at least mine wasn’t the lowest bid in the entire auction. That was the poor sap who went ahead of me in the auction. He went for a paltry ten bucks.

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April 23, 2013

Sleeping on the Job

by hadaad

Sleep when you’re dead. Come on. Come out. So what if you’re tired? It’s just for a little while. I know you have to work in the morning. but you can make it up on the weekend.
These tried and true sayings have been thrown around since the dawn of time to make people do things and stay up later than they meant to. So it should come as no surprise that I succumbed to their siren call on more than one occasion.
Around Christmas time, when I was working at the bleach factory, my university friends were all out of school with nothing on the agenda but celebration. Another semester was done and they were left with too much time on their hands. And the cascade of out-of-town students meant that some of them had nobody else to celebrate with than those of us who were not beholden to some finals schedule to determine our availability.
So I found myself dragged out on weeknights, to the occasional bar, to the more frequent coffee session or movie. And I was tired. All the time.
One night, after a movie, my car died at Rob’s house (see, it did happen a lot) and I didn’t finish dropping off various friends until three or four in the morning. So, it made perfect sense to me to stay up and go to work rather than sleep a couple of hours and wake up crusty and unhappy. I made myself stay awake with various tactics uncovered in the deepest jungles of South America. Either that or I played hockey on the Sega Genesis.
Whatever the motivation, I was able to stay awake long enough to have a shower and get in the car for work.
I worked that day, unhappy, tired, and unmotivated, but the bleach didn’t stop coming because I wasn’t feeling it.
I did notice that things were a little weird. I would blank out and panic that I was behind on my bottles because I was not on top of things, only to realize that I wasn’t behind at all. Or a pallet would be closer to finished than I expected. It didn’t make sense to me, but I made it through that day without any major incidents. (Or minor, I think.)
It wasn’t until later that I realised that I’d fallen asleep on the job. But that I had kept working. The truth is, a person could almost do all of that job by reflex. It isn’t much more than muscle memory to check bottles for leaks, throw six of them into a box and push it through the tape machine, then when there were three boxes, to go throw them onto the pallet. So it is feasible that I did fall asleep and work through it. I was certainly tired enough to do it.
I’m not entirely convinced that that’s the reality and sixteen years is too long for me to pretend I can one hundred per cent guarantee that’s what happened but it makes sense and is a better story than that I’m blocking some essential truth of that day out.
After that, I did try to make a point of getting enough sleep for the next day of work. I wish I could tell you that I got a solid at least 6 hours, but hey, you can sleep when you’re dead. Or at least, you can make it up on the weekend.

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April 22, 2013

80-Pound Bake

by hadaad

I’ve never been good at admitting incompetence. I like to imagine that if I put my mind to it, I can accomplish anything. I just have to try hard enough.
There are two exceptions to this rule, apparently.
The first is calculus. Calculus and I are old enemies. Granted, it was co-ordinate geometry before I went to University. Geometry with its calculations that came, seemingly, out of nowhere. Quadratic equations where guessing was as good as going through the steps for me. University cleared that all up for me, and I fell in love with geometry, where an angle could be bisected with a compass and a straight edge. There was something seriously Sherlock Holmesian about the detection that went on in that class. Calculus, though, despite my half-hearted efforts, eluded me, and continues to elude me, to this day.
It’s a good thing that Calc was not required to graduate from Lethbridge in Computer Science, because it was not something I could either do or even bring myself to try at the end.
The other thing I could not do, even though I put every effort — good efforts, too — into, and that was to successfully navigate a bake at Tim Horton Donuts.
I know, it’s not the sort of thing that most people have tried, and even if they have, failing at something like that isn’t a thing that would stick in most people’s craw. But it did mine. I failed at it and, while I had the good grace to quit before they punched my ticket, I can take a hint and I knew that if I didn’t pick up my socks they were going to kick me to the proverbial curb.
I don’t know what it was about baking that so stymied me. I could do the individual steps for each type of donut. I had that stuff down. The donuts I made were good — way better than the pre-fab stuff they shove down your gullet nowadays — but it just took me longer. And not a little bit longer. We’re talking four to five hours longer than your average baker.
The one positive about working there was the girls. It was nice, after working a bunch of jobs in the industrial sector, to work at a place where girls were. It was also nice to have people to talk to when I was at the end of a long shift. I did get a date out of it, but I don’t know if Sandy was more uncomfortable or if I was. We went out and played pool, which she was happy to do, but I think I probably had more fun on that date than she did. She kept talking about her ex-boyfriend and the things they got up to. I don’t know if it was supposed to intrigue me, but it was a massive turnoff. We didn’t go out again after that.
Another girl, Sherry, was an interesting one. She was five to ten years older than I was, and I remembered her from a temp-job I’d had a couple years before, taking inventory at a clothing store. Sherry and I had some interesting conversations. She gave me a hard time, I gave it right back. Some weeks after the last time I saw her, another baker, Cathy, told me that Sherry had been avoiding me because she was interested but in a relationship with another man and didn’t want to jeopardize that. I could understand that.
A funny story goes along with Cathy. Unlike me, she was a serious baker. She took the occasional shift at Tim Horton Donuts when she had the time, usually on the weekends, but she had a full-time job at the local grocery.
The grocery was on strike, complaining about wages or hours or something. I was young, stupid, and I wanted to cross the line. So I did. And Cathy was in the line. I heard it from her, let me tell you. I made some stupid one-liner about how I was breaking up the union by buying some batteries or something equally lame.
My own tenure at the Donut shop, as I said, didn’t last. I’m not happy at a job unless I can hold my own, and as I said, at Tim Horton Donuts, I was definitely over-matched.

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April 20, 2013

A One-Legged Man in a Kicking Contest

by hadaad

Misconceptions have a habit of dropping dead to the ground when confronted by the cold reality of the truth.
I’d just finished a job at Canadian Tire, having taken a moral stand and started at Venger Electrostatic Paint Company. Jason, a neighbour from down the road, and another neigbour from a neigbourhood a couple of blocks away worked there. My first trip with Venger was to West Edmonton mall where we painted a couple of doorways and the poles for the vending machines for those carts you can rent. Unless I’m way off base, they’re still there and they haven’t been painted since that day.
There were some colourful characters there. A couple of younger guys who were very hard-working and who spent every ounce of energy that was not spent directly on prepping surfaces for paint giving each other grief. I mean every second of the day, any silence not filled with the sounds of their verbal sparring was spent in shocked recovery or respectful silence because what someone had said was just that amazing.
I’m sure they thought they were destined for a comedy troupe or a spot on a sitcom. But it was diverting enough and made the hours pass.
The misconception I’d spoken of before walked through the door sometime into my second week, when I was prepping a Safeway display counter for a liberal coating of salmon. Or was it coral? I’m not sure but something in a conservative pink.
Hlynn (yes that was his name) was a painter who’d spent the last two weeks in Saskatchewan, painting office fixtures for some company who was Venger’s second-biggest client.
The reason Hlynn was such an enigma, such a colossal paradox was not because he was a mormon. As a person, he was a nice guy. Very up-front and outgoing. He never tried to preach to us. I think that any of that he’d had in him had been removed over the years he’d worked for Venger. That was weird enough in and of itself. Venger did not lend itself to the savouriest of characters and for a guy like Hlynn to last there more than a couple of months, he would have had to be stronger in his faith and his convictions than most people I know.
I had been working with a painter named Brad. He was a ridiculous perfectionist when it came to painting. I mean, it makes sense. If you don’t do it right, you get to go back on the company’s dime and fix it. So he didn’t leave a site until he was sure how it would look. Not just while he was working. Not just when he was done, but how it would look when the paint had dried and completed its flashing process.
For those of you ignorant of painting, flashing is the process where paint pulls back a bit as it dries. If the coverage isn’t proper, the edges of the paint can pull back over a couple of coats and look uneven. Nothing is more frustrating for a crew getting paid seven dollars an hour than to be given shit because the painter didn’t account for flashing and all the work that had been done had to be redone. We were paid regardless but the attitudes of the bosses became much less positive when we returned from a trip to another province where we had to redo all that we had done before.
Brad had been through that more than once, and, as was said, he would not leave a site until he was sure that we wouldn’t be called back.
Being on a crew with Hlynn was completely different. He wanted to get the job done and he wanted to get back home. I guess maybe he wasn’t as comfortable around the Venger people as he made out to be. Or maybe he just really liked his wife. I suppose that is a reasonable thing. But he would do his coats of paint and we would leave. It was nice to get out when I thought the job would be done, but we did get a lot of call backs. The bosses didn’t seem to ride Hlynn as hard about that as they did the other painters. I couldn’t figure out if it was because of his religion, because one of them was his family, or something like that.
It wasn’t until one of my last couple days that the truth came to light. It made everything so obvious. His ambivalence toward the quality of the final product. The bosses’ understanding. His seeming ineptitude.
And when I found out the truth, a thing I had always understood to be true was shattered.
One could indeed be a painter if he was colour-blind. He just couldn’t be a good painter.

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April 18, 2013

One Hundred Pallets a Day

by hadaad

As my time at Flo-Pak was stretching along, Wayne, the cigar-smoking, lame-footed shop manager was coming to realize that I wasn’t the average run-of-the-mill zombie putting in minimum work for the pay. He had increased my wage on my first day and now he was grooming me for taking over.
He’d put me in charge of mixing the bleach and cleaners and had me in charge of a night crew. But that was in the past. I’d asked to be relieved of those duties (mostly because they didn’t result in increased pay for increased responsibilities — apart, that is, from a 50-cent-an-hour shift differential). He moved me back to where I was comfortable on the main bleach line. But he still had plans for me.
“You know, Liam,” he told me one day while I slaved away putting bleach in boxes, “one day, we’re going to get a rotary line in here.” He got a faraway, almost dreamy look, something I’d never seen from him — hope. “With a rotary line, we can just keep filling bottles. The line would never be still and we could clear a hundred pallets a day.”
I had a hard time matching his excitement. For one, it was never my dream to spend my life pushing bleach out of a warehouse. For another, when I had been on night shift, I spent part of my time on a forklift, moving pallets of bleach from the line to the warehouse. That made it 50 pallets a day, running two shifts, and we had nowhere near enough space for that. I didn’t want to think of the logistics of storing twice that in the same amount of space.
Still, it was his dream and I didn’t see any reason to burst his bubble. So I went along with it, asking questions about the rotary line. He was all about it. He’d get two guys, one to box the bleach and one to palletize it. It would be glorious. They could switch off, but they would be two of the same kind of person. People who were willing to work hard for the money they took home. I knew where he was going, particularly since he’d asked me the fateful question about the next forty years just a few days prior.
“One of those guys could be you,” he said. I’m not sure if he came out and said it because he thought I wanted him to ask me, or if he honestly thought I didn’t know where he was going with his story of burly men doing manly, burly work, but he laid it all out there, a suitor with his heart on his sleeve.
I couldn’t be completely dishonest with him. I thought that if he wanted to make his home a palace of bleach, that was good for him, but it wasn’t my dream. I told him that I would try, but that I didn’t know how much time I would be able to give the company, with my back problems and my desire for something more mentally challenging. He knew I was planning on going to school, but I think he thought that he could entice me away from scholastic endeavours with the promise of a $9.00 per hour job with all the bleach and fabric softener I could use. Maybe if I’d been one of those European grandmothers who cleaned everything with bleach, it would have been worth it but I knew there was a career in an office just waiting for me and I wanted to seize that. So, I dashed Wayne’s dreams of my indentured servitude but until the day I quit, he was still talking about his pie-in-the-sky dream of one hundred pallets a day.

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April 17, 2013

The Coasters, One Night Only

by hadaad

We gathered in the living room. Sides were not so much chosen out as preordained.
Along with the majority of the living room furniture, Brad, when he’d moved in, had provided the dishes and most of the things that make a building a home.
One of those things — certainly not as noticeable or remarkable as the disco ball, but still with a part to play in the first year — was a set of coasters made out of some sort of pressed paper. They were either black or dark blue. And they were almost perfectly symmetrical.
I can’t say whose idea it was to launch them. I like throwing things so it could have been me, I suppose. No matter whose idea it was, it wasn’t shouted down nor was it even politely suggested that it might not be the best idea. In fact, more people began throwing them. Eventually, they started throwing them at each other.
I remember people diving for cover, black discs soaring across the room and thudding into the wall.
At its most hectic, it was like a war-zone. Then I got distracted by one of the coasters buzzing by my head. That distraction was crucial because the next one hit me square in the eye.
I could embellish history and say that, despite my injury, I carried on, that I grunted a manly grunt and bravely soldiered on, winning the coaster battle for my side as much with my steely gaze as with my constant arm. But I won’t.
I don’t know if I shrieked like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween or anything like that but I wouldn’t be surprised. Hostilities ceased right away and I curled up, my hand going over my eye. I will confess to manliness on occasion but anything related to my eyes takes me out of the moment and straight into panic.
If I’d been left on my own to nurse my pain, even if they’d continued chucking coasters while I recovered my manliness enough to continue, all would have been well. But one guy, a guy worthy of a blog post himself, Scott, got in my face and wouldn’t leave me alone.
“You okay, buddy?” Concern was painted in neon on his face.
I tried to shake him. I needed room, I needed to get away from the panic. But he kept following me around. I suspect he’s the one that threw the fateful coaster but still, gimme some room.
And that’s what I shouted at him. Finally, he backed off and I got over it. We even started with the coasters again but I was useless. I flinched away from them all and even got hit in the face again.
After that, the coasters were good only for keeping condensation off the furniture and the occasional late-night game of “Throw the coaster into the VHS box,” a game at which Daryl and I got really good.
When the first year was over and it was time to move out of the north-side townhouse, I have no idea what Brad did to distract the lady who did the damage deposit walk-through. We’d scrubbed the wall for a half-hour with no appreciable change to the state of the walls, blackened with the stain of all the errant throws, but we got the whole deposit back.
She even remarked on the great state of the bathroom carpet but that’s a story for another time.

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April 15, 2013

Bob’s Ugly Blue Truck

by hadaad

It was a 1987 GMC. It was baby blue. It either used to be an automatic or had the steering column from an automatic installed but it was a 4-speed manual with the shifter on the floor. This truck was exactly what I said. It was Bob’s Ugly Blue Truck.

There were flakes of … something on the bottom of the gas tank so that if you let the tank go below about a quarter of a tank, those flakes would get disturbed and they’d get caught in the fuel filter. At that point, you could replace the filter or drive around with no power. One time, Meghan was driving the truck home and the fuel filter got dirty. I think she said it took her almost twice as long to get home as it should have.

The steering wheel had been replaced with a racing steering wheel. This was because the man who sold the truck to my dad was a big man and couldn’t fit his legs under the steering wheel that came with it. But it looked ridiculously out-of-place in the cab of that truck.

The tires were always going flat. There was one time I had to jack the truck up on a jack with 4 2X4s providing enough height to get the tire changed. That was a quick and stressful job.

I tell you these things not so that you’ll understand why I hated the truck. Because I didn’t hate it. It got me around during university. It got my stuff down to Lethbridge. It was a more relaxed driving experience. Someone once saw me driving down to Lethbridge and described my driving as “old man slow.” It helped me move friends. And even while it had the occasional fuel filter problem or flat tire that saw the truck up on the rickety, jury-rigged jack system, there was nothing ever wrong with it that I couldn’t fix myself.

I think Dad retired the BUB truck some years ago, when he upgraded to a Dodge Ram but I sure did appreciate the use of Bob’s Ugly Blue Truck while it lasted.

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April 14, 2013

Mr. Gleam

by hadaad

I made the decision in early April to shave my head. I didn’t really talk to many people about it. It was just something that I wanted to try. After all, if it looked stupid or it didn’t work out for some other reason, it was a matter of a couple of months for my hair to grow back if it didn’t work out.
I will say that it was a bit of a shock to my sister, who I asked to join me in the bathroom one evening. I was having a hard time taking the hair off the back of my head and I wanted her help. She laughed about the shaving for awhile, probably more incredulity than mockery. But maybe twenty minutes later, I walked out of the bathroom with a bare head. I didn’t think it looked too bad. It was a big change. I probably shocked the heck out of my mom. Her main comment was that I should let her know that I was going to do things like that beforehand so she had a chance to get used to the idea. My dad and my brother had always had long hair and you can’t really spring something like that on a person. Shaving, on the other hand…
The folks at work were another matter entirely. There was mockery there, along with the shock and the laughing. I imagine they didn’t really know what to say. In 1997, people weren’t shaving their heads as much as they are nowadays. Hard to think that I’m saying nowadays like 1997 was some long time ago. Heck, it was only fifteen years. I’ll just let that sink in before I continue. A decade and a half.
The shock did wear off and there were some pretty good comments that came out of it. Wondering if I’d lost a bet. Wondering if I was going to keep it that way or let it grow out again. But Bryan had the best comment of them all.
He and my boss at the time, Darrell, came up with a whole marketing gimmick. I worked at the bleach factory at that point and I don’t know if you remember or not, but there is a cleaning product company with a fairly prominently-placed bald man as their front-man.
“Mr. Gleam, for all your cleaning needs. Need your whites whiter? Call Mr. Gleam. You want your clothes ultra-fresh? Call Mr. Gleam. You want a bunch of boxes on a pallet? Call Mr. Gleam. He’ll get your dirty stuff clean. He’ll make it GLEAM!”
Whenever I think of my time at the bleach factory, I think of Mr. Gleam and the ludicrous advertising opportunity. Bryan and Darrell had planned on mocking up a bottle with my likeness on it and a giant Mr. Gleam slogan, but they seemed to think I might take offense at that. After all, I’d shaven my head. That proved that I was a bad-ass and they didn’t know what to make of me anymore. Or something. It’s too bad, really. I would have thought that was the funniest thing ever, and I would have kept the bleach bottle forever.
Ah well, at least the shaven head didn’t look terrible.
That, along with the fact that I’ve had my head shaven for fifteen years, are relatively impressive to me. Granted, every time I grow my hair out even a little, I’m reminded of the fact that my hairline is nothing at all like it was when I first shaved my head. At least I don’t have as much real-estate to cover with the razor now, I suppose.

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April 13, 2013

Boost at the Movies

by hadaad

A Pontiac Sunbird was the first car I ever owned. It left me high and dry a couple of times but I want you to know that it was a relationship of mutual apathy. At least a half a dozen times (likely more) I left the lights on in the car so there was no power left the next morning, at the end of the day, or when I eventually returned to the car, no matter where I’d been in the interim.
Another staple of my late teens was the Cineplex Odeon Cinema City on the south side of Edmonton. For a 25-minute drive, a viewer could take in a movie a half a year old for two dollars. That was a deal, especially since the next cheapest theatres were all charging four times that, in the city. Granted, the Leduc theatre was five dollars but most of my friends lived in Edmonton and were much less willing to come to me than I was to them.
A number of times, I went to the movies in that theatre with my friend Rob, who would go on to be the best man at my wedding, with me the best man at his. It was a summer night, cooled down significantly from the day that came before when the tendency to leave the lights on collided with the Cinema City tendency.
It was dark out. The movie had gone on until eleven and the two of us were eager to get out of there and back to our respective homes for a long sleep. Finding the car was no difficulty, but once it was found, the aforementioned difficulty came to the surface. I turned the key. No dice.
“All right, Rob, take the wheel. I’ll try to push-start it.” I was no stranger to popping the clutch, having done this at least three times before.
“Do you think we should maybe ask someone for a boost?” Rob asked. “People are leaving and if we can’t get this to work, they could be all gone by the time we’re ready to ask for help.”
“This’ll work. Trust me.” I was a veteran of this. And it had to work. I’ve always been a little stubborn like that.
“Okay,” he said, not convinced.
He got into the driver’s side and I gave him the instructions.
“Push in the clutch. I’ll push the car. When it gets going good, pop the clutch out and the rest should take care of itself. Just remember that when the car gets running, you push the clutch back in, put it in neutral, and stop the car.” He understood. We were going to do this. And it was going to work.
I started pushing. The car started moving. It went a little faster, and when I was jogging a little to keep up, Rob popped the clutch. Just in time. But the car sputtered to a stop and it wasn’t running.
“Try again!” I called, and started pushing the car again.
Once again, when the clutch went out, the car stopped.
Apparently, when I’d push-started the car before, with someone who had done it in the past, they knew enough to put the car in fourth gear to get it running. With no experience behind the wheel (I had strong legs and never minded pushing, especially since it was my fault, the state the car was in), I assumed they’d put it in first gear. After all, that’s the gear that you use when you start driving. Unfortunately, that’s because it has the most torque and in order to use the gear to push the car’s engine to start, you have to overcome the torque and keep pushing until it starts. And that wasn’t happening with just me pushing the car. None of that knowledge was available to me and the two of us puzzled over the unstarting car. We looked out over the parking lot and there was one car left. Thank goodness. Rob and I scurried over to the car where two ladies, ten or fifteen years older than us, sat.
“Car won’t start?” the lady in the driver’s seat asked, amusement plain on her face.
“No,” I said, rueful at the thought of asking for help.
But I did ask for help and she and her friend were more than willing to help Rob and I. We got things hooked up and the Sunbird started without a hitch.
We thanked them profusely and they left while we were still stowing my booster cables.
“You think they waited around because they saw what we were doing?” Rob asked.
“Probably,” I replied.
“You know, they were probably having a good laugh over it,” he continued. “Reminiscing over how they killed the battery in a car or something.”
It made me think of my friendship with Rob. He was my oldest friend. We’d been friends since I moved to Leduc well before my ability to remember. Over thirty years now, for sure. Will we be sitting in a car in our later years, laughing at a pair of idiots trying to push-start a car in the wrong gear? I hope so, even though I always look bad when he tells this story. For good reason, I’m sure.

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April 12, 2013

Street Hockey

by hadaad

Through high school and for a long time after, we were crazy for street hockey. Every night, some winters, we would spend in the high school parking lot, running around, slapping at an orange plastic ball. Once we figured out how useless tennis balls were for the sport, we had a much better time of it.
I remember starting out, outside of Trevor’s house, with the same group of people I’d discovered playing baseball in the East Elementary field while I rode by on my Dickie Dee shift.
Dickie Dee didn’t pay very well and I didn’t stick with it very long. It’s fair to say that I hated the job but I did discover those guys so there’s some redemption for you.
Eventually, after having played a couple of months (maybe a couple of years — the timelines are fuzzy in my head after all these years), through Rob, we met another group of guys who played all the time. They became THEM and we played against them all through high school.
For years, it was great. Three were always more than enough people to play and never so many that you felt you weren’t getting enough playing time.
We would, quite frequently, go back to the cul-de-sac by Trevor’s house or into the church parking lot just beside and it was there that I had my most memorable hockey experience.
Derek was harrassing my goalie. I think it was Rob but I’m not sure. So I shoved him. Maybe harder than I needed to, maybe it was slippery. Anyway, he took a tumble and came up. We wrestled. I let him up and turned away. I remember getting angry after he punched me in the back of the head. I remember my hand getting sore and switching to my elbow. It was okay, though, because it was a hockey fight. No big deal.
Things were re-energized after high school by the insertion of “The Codgers.” They were a group of guys a couple years older than we were and THEM and us joined forces against the old guys. But even that didn’t last.
Eventually, street hockey became an anemic thing where we would struggle to get six guys out. Then I went to Lethbridge for school. But it was great while it lasted.

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