My younger brother is undoubtedly under considerable duress after having been issued a three-month roadside driving suspension around 10 days ago, for even a lawyer he consulted was negative about any chance of having the charges dismissed that my brother is confronted with.
My brother says that he was not paying the attention he should have while driving home in the evening after some drinking, and his van "bumped" into the rear of a woman's car. According to him, there was no visible damage to either vehicle, but the woman ─ whom I suspect was determined to play vigilante and get the evil drunken driver banned from driving ─ called 9-1-1, and would not be dissuaded.
All my brother could do was wait helplessly in his van for the gendarmes to arrive ─ heck, even a fire engine showed up.
Early this week he asked me "when [I] got the chance" to research online for solutions to his dilemma ─ maybe someone who was in his predicament posted what was done to beat the wrap.
My brother is computer illiterate, so there is no chance of him doing this sort of detective work.
Well, I do not have nothing better to do, so I told him that a lawyer ought to know how bleak the situation is, and that I could probably spend an entire day futilely scouring the Web on such a fool's errand.
My thinking is that if it's so infernally important to him, then he can put aside a day and do that sort of work ─ it is not going to be my burden.
As it is, none of this has kept him home. He may have to bus if he doesn't wish to hike the nearly two miles to where he generally drinks; but no later than mid-afternoon every day since the incident, he has gone off to do his drinking, not thereafter arriving home until the evening.
If he's got the time to keep doing that, he can bloody well find it to stay home at least just once and do his own research. I won't be doing it.
Today, he said a letter arrived from ICBC. Apparently the woman is now pressing for some sort of claim on damages. However, I do not know if it's for damages to her vehicle, or if she saw a lawyer and now sees an opportunity to get a bit of a financial windfall for physical symptoms that cannot easily be disproven, and generally have to be given the nod as being possible.
My brother is retired and into his latter 60s, so it is not as if he needs to drive for a living or to get to work or anything like that. And being retired as he is, to find his way back on the road is going to be a dreadfully costly endeavour.
I have never owned a car nor possessed a driver's licence, so I don't exactly understand just how desperate someone in his plight might be to be able to finally be allowed to drive again. I just understand that it seems to be one of the topmost privileges or rights that someone who drives feels they must have.
I am not unsympathetic to him. He can be beyond tolerating when he's home drunk; but I love the sober version of my brother, and do not enjoy that he is under this level of stress.
On another matter, I am unhappy with the amount of activity I have been getting this workweek by way of walking, and today I did not even exercise. However, that was primarily due to wrestling this afternoon (following a nap) with the vain attempt to replace the washers I felt were responsible for a constant drizzle from the bathtub faucet.
Those of us with sufficient hand strength would crank the taps as closely right as possible to reduce the drizzle to a steady cascade of drips. This has been the steadily worsening situation for several months.
Well, this afternoon I managed to disassemble as much as I could and accessed the two faucet stems.
It seems to me that it was in December of last year that I last replaced the washers, and memory has now gone foggy as to just what it was that I did back then.
As it turned out, we only have new ½-inch washers, but it looks like the bathtub faucets probably require ⅜-inch washers.
Nevertheless, neither of the two washers I expected to be replacing appeared to require it.
As I fussed about, I got all of the various parts to the hot and the cold taps rather confused, and ultimately I had to seek the superior vision of my eldest stepson who was newly home from work.
He agreed that there seemed to be no washer requiring replacement, and eventually we figured out how to reassemble everything.
And guess what?
There's no damned leaky faucet anymore!
So just what happened to restore the state of things?
I sure haven't a bloody clue.
Anyway, I wasted so much time with the attempt at repair that I had none left for exercising.
I did get out early this morning and walked over to the elementary school approximately a half mile or so from here, and performed four sets of pull-ups on the gymnastics-style rings the school has in its playground. First, though, I had to figure out how to unwrap the chains (to a pair of the rings) from the suspension bar well overhead ─ some hooligans had managed to wrap the rings and their chains around that overhead support bar to thereby render the rings uselessly out of reach.
It had rained a lot earlier, so all was slick. But I got two of the rings liberated, and I used them for the four sets of pull-ups I spoke of.
There is an alleyway immediately beside our house that is used to get from the cul-de-sac that we live in, out to the main road. The alleyway has four twists to it; is very short in distance overall; and is blocked to vehicles at each end by cement barriers.
Well, I was nearly through it on my way home when I met up with a young Black dude bearing what proved to be a pair of boots. Keep in mind that it was not yet even 5:00 a.m., so it was still utterly dark.
The Black chap was shorter and trimmer than I, so in the dark I am sure that I appeared rather imposing with my shaven head and my beard.
The Black chap was shorter and trimmer than I, so in the dark I am sure that I appeared rather imposing with my shaven head and my beard.
Anyway, he initiated some conversation ─ ostensibly asking me if I wanted to buy a pair of new boots (the ones he was carrying).
I had a flashlight, so I turned it on and shined the light upon the brown footwear and asked the size.
He responded that they were 10.
I then strongly demurred, citing that I required an 11 ─ so he offered that they might even be 10½.
When I didn't display renewed interest, he then asked if I could offer $5, but quickly pumped that up to $10.
The problem with this guy was that he spoke rather mumbly and I had to several times ask him what he was saying.
As a result, I thought that he was bumming the money off me; I was not realizing that he was still bartering to be rid of the boots.
With Christmas so near, I felt merciful; and since my wallet contained exactly a $10 bill, I pulled it out and presented it to him. Only then when he thrust the boots toward me did I fathom that we were still involved in an exchange ─ he could have kept the boots.
But I took them, thinking that maybe I could gift them to my younger brother who has smaller feet than do I.
Alas, after I brought them into the house and examined them, I discovered that they were far from new, and the inner soles were well conformed to somebody's feet.
Also, they stank.
Initially I felt ripped off...and of course I was.
However, since I originally thought that I was making a $10 handout and gave away the money with that mindset, the fact that I was given a foul pair of boots in return was irrelevant. I might as well have been given a handshake, n'est ce pas?
After all, I did not realize that I was actually still buying the boots ─ I was freely giving away the money. Therefore, I was not actually gypped.
The Black dude may have believed himself to have hoodwinked me, but that concept is within his own convoluted reasoning and had nothing to do with what actually played out. I expected nothing for the money.
And for all I know, maybe the boots were a pair of his own that he perhaps used (as opposed to being stolen); but since he was in a tight spot and needed some money, on the spur of the moment in that dark alley he thought to try and sell them to me.
Therefore, I feel entirely at liberty to just toss the things into the trash, and will not feel I have lost out. But I will first see if I can rescue them from their smelly state by liberally applying baking soda ─ into which I will have added some oil of oregano and maybe some tea tree oil ─ liberally throughout the boots' interiors.
Maybe leaving them like that for a week or so ─ perhaps contained within the confines of a plastic bag ─ will rid the boots of their stink. And if so, I can then offer their use to my brother, if he sees any value to them.
Anyway, switching topics once again, yesterday in the forenoon I tuned in a so-called Christmas movie for my brother and I to watch, using our T9 Android 8.1 TV Box to locate a source for it with one of the 'apps' that I have downloaded into the device.
The Christmas movie had almost nothing to do with Christmas, but it was quite interesting ─ it was a 2005 feature titled Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.
The two lead male actors (Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer) worked very well together ─ I loved the interplay of their two characters.
However, I never would have expected to enjoy lead actress Michelle Monaghan so very much! I found her to be most attractive ─ she looked especially sexy in a brief Santa Claus suit toward the end of the movie.
Initially I recognized her (although her name was unfamiliar to me), but I could not immediately place her. The beautiful blonde surely had to have been acting in something I've been watching very recently, but I could not identify just what.
And then it struck me ─ she is one of the stars of the T.V. series that my brother and I are working our way through called The Path.
In that series, she is a brunette with brown hair. However, more than just her brown hair colour made it difficult for me to place why I knew the younger actress in the movie.
You see, in The Path, I do not like her character. Nor does she physically attract me in the slightest.
So the conflict of finding her to be so sexy in the movie, and yet quite physically or biologically unpalatable in the T.V. series, was almost irreconcilable.
I thus had a lot of trouble linking the two women. How could one actress affect me to such extremes?
I want nothing to do with the Michelle Monaghan from the T.V. series, but I would have loved to have been a younger man who got to know the Michelle Monaghan from the movie...if that makes sense.
I am going to close this post with three photos that I forgot until today that I had taken last Sunday evening around 6:15 p.m. while I was in Holland Park in Whalley, and more or less facing toward the King George SkyTrain Station:
I wanted to capture as much as I could of the Christmas lights everywhere ─ even the lit-up construction cranes severally present atop various buildings being erected.
I only this afternoon got the three photos downloaded from my phone into my computer, and then uploaded into a Google Photos album. However, Google Photos has already of its own volition created this melded montage from those photos:
My evening is already well underway, but I would like to get out of here before my brother shows up ─ I want to do some local shopping, so I must hastily proofread this post and get it published.
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