Vivi Winkler
Despite giving my younger brother the opportunity of allowing me to operate our Android TV Box last evening to locate an episode of at least one of the T.V. series we follow via that device, we were not to share any evening television.
Due to an early a.m. six-mile walk I had planned for overnight, I was only willing to sit up with him if he got home from his beering (or 'socializing') by 9:30 p.m.
Well, he did succeed. However, he then sequestered himself in the kitchen farting about and talking to himself extensively as he did so for the next 15 minutes ─ I became so upset at being forced to waste my evening while waiting on the dense clod that I made the snap decision to just shut things down and come on upstairs here to my bedroom where I keep my computer.
He would have to entertain himself with whatever he might be able to find on our T.V.'s basic cable package (he has no idea how to operate our Android TV Box).
Thus, I may have been to bed as early as 9:45 p.m., and with my cellphone alarm set for 2:30 a.m. to rouse me for that walk.
I never sleep easily; and I was also feeling some guilt because my wife ─ who had worked the second half of the day at the Thai restaurant where she has part-time employment ─ had not yet arrived home. She wanted to share with me her misadventures earlier that afternoon in trying to track down her DHL shipment that has supposedly been undergoing a succession of CBSA "Clearance Events" since April 14 ─ now over 1½ months!
(She and I have been sleeping in separate bedrooms since early last November due to medical reasons.)
Eventually I did lapse into sleep, and was finally roused by the 2:30 a.m. alarm. I rose and dressed; and by 2:45 a.m. was away on my six-mile walk that was actually something over six miles.
I primarily walked a rectangle that was contained by King George Boulevard and 132nd Street on two sides; and 76th and 96th Avenues on the other two sides.
The centre point of that rectangle should be displayed as the 8600 block of 134th Street on this Google Map, but it is poorly so. There is no 134th Street at that point, and Google Map should not be displaying "8600" as being so much nearer to 88th Avenue than to 84th Avenue ─ "8600" should be equidistant between those two avenues.
Anyway, as often happens, I meandered a little off course on three separate occasions, adding to my overall distance, which is why I claim to have walked in excess of six miles. But I travelled at a good pace. And I was back home by somewhere between 4:50 to 4:55 a.m., as I recall. I do not know why, but my eldest stepson was up by then; but we did not communicate, for I came directly to my bedroom after using the toilet, and shut the door.
I believe that it was something like 5:35 a.m. when I returned to bed.
Again, sleep was very difficult to achieve; and when I checked the time a little past 8:30 a.m., I was uncertain if I ever actually slept ─ if not for some wild recollections that could only have been devised in dream, I might not have allowed for having slept at all.
I rose right around the time that my brother exited from his bedroom, but my bedroom door was still closed. I checked my E-mails until within 10 minutes of the arrival of 9 a.m. before going downstairs for my day's first instant coffee, and to join my brother for some T.V.
When he turned it over to me to seek videos via our Android TV Box, I led us off with a 16-minute Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson video that had been uploaded to Rumble yesterday: I CAME ACROSS THE BORDER FROM THE U.S. TO CANADA – THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED.
Today, I'm going to tell you the story of my border crossing from Montana into Saskatchewan.
Laura-Lynn ─ who had been in the States for extensive travel there ─ is 'unvaccinated'. My brother had previously wondered to me how it was that she was going to be able to return to Canada without that injection, so I knew that he would be finding the video even more interesting than would I.
As luck would have it, I only got to watch a little of the video ─ my wife rose, and soon had me upstairs to hear her tale of woe relating to yesterday afternoon and her effort to locate her missing DHL shipment. She even had a number of papers that had been printed out for her, as well as a business card from someone at CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency).
She did her best to explain, and then asked that I send an E-mail to someone else at CFIA that the person identified on the business card had suggested be E-mailed.
This was going to take some thought, so I returned to the living room to continue watching T.V., and my wife readied for a full work day (the restaurant opens at 11 a.m.).
Ultimately, this was the message that I sent ─ all personal details are of course removed:
Hello, ****;
It was recommended to my wife that you be contacted to see if there is any assistance that you can offer.
Basically, we are trying to track down a shipment from Thailand that DHL estimated would be delivered to us on April 18, but which became held up by CBSA on April 14 with the first of a series of "Clearance Events" ─ that first of which obviously occurred just over 1½ months ago.
The very large box comprising the shipment contains health-related products from what I understand to be a reputable company that is well-known in Thailand, as well as by its expatriates abroad (such as my wife). The company is The iCon Group (theicongroup.co.th).
DHL had kept insisting that CBSA was backlogged, and also that some other government agency seemed to have gotten involved with the shipment. But as the weeks passed and we were unable to receive anything more meaningful from DHL, my wife ─ ******** ******* ─ who has only been in Canada since May 2006, and for whom English is a second language, took it upon herself yesterday to visit CBSA out in Richmond (as well as a DHL office very nearby there).
We live in Surrey.
From what I understand through her efforts, CBSA no longer has the package. Instead, it is claimed that CFIA now has possession, and the Burnaby address was given to my wife. Oddly enough, on a "Target Manifest" DHL printed out for her, someone scribbled back on April 22 the words "HC HOLD", which I would suspect referred to Health Canada, but it was further scribbled "Refer to CFIA. No Health Clearance".
Regardless, my wife then visited your Burnaby offices yesterday, which I was quite surprised to find out were immediately adjacent to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada ─ I actually retired from there in early April 2011. I had worked in Human Resources as a Compensation Advisor, a position that was made obsolete by the Conservative Government of the time, and the duties passed along to personnel at Miramichi in New Brunswick, putting me out of a job. I chose to retire rather than seek some other position, since I was already 61 years old at the time.
So you and I ─ if you worked at CFIA in Burnaby at the time leading up to my retirement ─ were almost 'colleagues' of sorts.
I thought that aside might slightly interest you.
Anyway, someone my wife spoke with at CFIA did her best to help, but could not find any trace of any packages ─ large or small ─ being identified under my wife's name, ******** *******, nor that of the sender ─ a Thai woman named ****** ********.
I don't know if such packages would possibly be recorded by their original MAWBs or HAWBs, but this one is listed as follows:
MAWB (Master airway bill): 4**********
HAWB (House airway bill): 4*********
That latter is the number DHL uses as the package's tracking code on the tracking page for the shipment.
I am rather desperately hoping that you might have a magical touch that can actually locate this errant shipment. I don't exactly know which products it was that my wife ordered, but I expect that it included things like Room Coffee, Boom Coca Plus, Boom D-Nax (apparently a daily multivitamin), and Boom Collagen.
It ought to have been a swift and easy process to verify that these were exactly what they claimed to be, and with no prohibited ingredients.
As for the destination address on the large box, our address is:
**** ***** *****
Surrey, B.C.
*** ***
Man, I sure do hope that you can help with this! My only income comes of my monthly pension (I never achieved higher than an AS-02 Classification in the government), and my wife only works part-time at a Thai restaurant.
If the package is lost through incompetence or negligence, then this is going to hurt. There is no recompense that I am aware of ─ DHL washes its hands of all liability for any damages or losses if a claim has not been filed within 30 days of them originally taking possession of the shipment, and that was on April 11. May 11 has now come and gone, so we cannot even file for reimbursement of just the shipping and duty fees that we paid DHL ($58), let alone the value of the shipment itself. How could we file a claim? We still have not been officially told that the shipment is irrevocably gone.
Anyway, if you have read this far, then I at least thank you for that.
By the time I had sent off the message and had my first reasonably light meal of the day, it was something like 2:08 p.m., so I sought a nap. My brother had already left for the afternoon to reengage his daily 'socializing'.
I might have gone and sat outside in sunshine had there been any ─ the east was darkly overcast, and the west heavily hazed and allowing only some vague sunlight to make its way through.
I venture that it may next have been something like 3:48 p.m. when I decided to check the time and rise. I then checked my E-mail, and found this very short message from the contact at CFIA:
Hi ******,So nothing yet of use in the sense of relieving the weight that my wife and I are bearing, but at least it has encouragement in its potential.
I’m away from my normal position with our import surveillance team, but I’ll have my relief dig into this and see if we can find out what is going on.
If we have any other questions, we will let you know.
-*****
I was quite surprised to discover that the afternoon had become very sunny, so I decided to not waste the opportunity to get some colouring to my face. And at 3:56 p.m., I was slouched in a chair on the backyard lawn and facing directly into the Sun for possibly a full 45 minutes. I was fully clothed, but it was warm enough that I could have been wearing just shorts.
Once the Sun exposure was done, I fixed myself a second coffee, and then got to work on this post.
I feel some obligation to mention a couple of the other videos that my brother and I watched this morning.
One was a 43-minute video by Glenn Greenwald that had been uploaded to YouTube on May 12, but I doubt its security on that heavily censored platform, so I am going to link to its Rumble source: The US Anti-War Left is Dead. The Squad's $40b War Vote Just Killed It.
He focused much on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an American politician whom I have been vaguely familiar with for some years now, but Glenn revealed that she is as unreliable as are too many Canadian politicians whose positions depend entirely upon prevailing popular winds.
My brother and I also watched a 52-minute YouTube video about The Finders, whom I had never heard of before. It had been uploaded on May 13: The Finders with Elizabeth Vos | The Nick Bryant Podcast.
Elizabeth Vos is a journalist who has written extensively on the cult known as the "Finders.” In 1987, two members of the Finders were arrested for the abuse and neglect of six feral children in Tallahassee, Florida. The two Finders were charged with multiple accounts of child abuse. A search warrant was then executed on the Finders wearhouse in Washington, DC. Law enforcement found child pornography and evidence of the Finders purchasing children. The CIA quashed the investigation into the Finders, and the two Finders who had been jailed were released and all child abuse charges were dropped. The CIA has subsequently disavowed all connections to the Finders. Vos has taken a deep dive into the Finders and their connections to the CIA and published a 3-part series of articles on the cult. Today she tells us about her experience.
This video makes me wonder why there is not more activity aimed at revealing the full truth behind this group. I am interested in learning more, so I may look for other videos concerning them.
There was one further video that I intended to mention, but it is already after 8 p.m., so I am going to halt today's post here.























