Oh write your own damn headline with "scoop" in it. I'm too pooped.

Sign number-one that we live in the wealthiest society of all time? We use real folding money to buy something called kitty litter, and that kitty litter actually comes with something called supplies.

Specially manufactured items for cat poop.

There's a pet-supply store on my block called the Kennel Cafe and when I entered an hour ago, without a hi-how-are-you,  I told the clerk I needed a new kitty-litter scoop and he pointed me to a door, saying, "through that door on the left--all the kitty-litter supplies."

Sign number two: There were at least eight different kinds of kitty-litter scoops on offer.

Three: I didn't just grab the one handiest to me; I actually compared the various kitty-litter scoops and hung the first one I picked up back on the display wall. It was a pretty blue and all but as soon as I had it in hand I realized it was a bit big and might not be perfect for getting at the lumps in the corners of the kitty littler box.

Four: I chose a smaller one that actually has a little kitty's face extruded into the scoopy part.

But it wasn't the cat-shaped grate that sold me. And neither did the fact that the label promised:   "CLEANS IN SECONDS!"

Or that it's

"WIDE! with more Triangular-Tines that quickly power through clean litter." (I ask myself, "Who writes this stuff? And then I answer myself, "Me, if asked!")

This next part was the clincher:

"Easily SAVE 30 to 72 hours a year!!" with two exclamation marks.

I took my new scoop over to the clerk and said, rather exclaimed, "this scoop is going to save me 30 to 72 hours a year!!"

I continued: "If I thought I spent more than 30 hours a year cleaning cat litter, I'm not sure it's worth going on any longer."

The clerk agreed.

And added; "That's a pretty big gap. Between 30 and 72 hours! How do you suppose they measured? Do you think they monitored people?"

Me: "I have a few Carleton University credits I earned with less time invested than that."

I bought it anyway. And as I walked home, a little discouraged at the thought that I might actually use, like 40 hours a year scooping up after our cats Kiwi and Iris who don't really contribute that much to my otherwise busy life, I stopped an off-duty security guard and asked her to take that lovely photo of me and my new scoop.

I asked her if she thought 40 hours on litter duty was a lot.

"You might," she said,  "be surprised, if you actually counted."

I'm not going to.

I will, however, heed the advice on the label and follow the scoop-manufacturing company--BEAMER--on Facebook and--with more enthusiasm--Twitter.

Under normal circumstances I'd take the opportunity to make some sort of joke about litter on twitter but it's been a long week and I'm a busy guy.

 I don't have time to waste on crap like that.

How my father raised a bunch of (tea) potty-mouth anarchists

SONS IN ANARCHY: From left, Me, Ed, Pat, Tom Sr.,
Tom Jr., and Alex

When we were little, my brothers and sisters and I frequently rode around in various motor vehicles with my dad, Tom. Most often we were in the family pick-up truck but sometimes Dad drove a car and--because he and his brother owned a fleet of buses--we were frequently the only passengers in a 44-passenger motor coach.

Whatever we were in, Tom had a dad-thing he did: When he saw a police cruiser he said, "The police! Duck!'

It's not that we were doing anything illegal. He just thought it was funny.

And while this is not the point of my story, I think the "duck-it's-the cops" thing was in fact subversive because I realized the other day that my entire family is a bunch of anarchists. I discussed this with my sister Norma recently and we agreed that no Carter in history has ever obeyed the law just because it's the law. That many of the laws of the land happen to be more or less in sync with our own values is a convenient coincidence, but getting a Carter to play by the rules just because they're the rules? Forget it! But that's material for another day.

Back to Dad.

 FUZZ IN A BUS: In one of these units,
 our entire family could hide from
the cops

Another Tom/dad thing? When one or more of us did something that made him angry, rather than yell or lash out, he just hummed. A little melody. Always the same, it sounded like a slow, drawn-out version of the first few notes of that old folk song "Shortnin' Bread." All I do know for sure is that if we heard humming, Tom was steamed.

Other times, he signaled irritation by whistling. Very softly. Like a teakettle before it hits full throttle.

And until I wrote that last sentence, I had completely forgotten this: When Tom saw something that might make you say "holy cow!" or somebody else say  "well go figure!" Tom's go-to expression was--you'll like this: "holy ol' teapot, cream-jug and sugarbowl."

Seriously. How weird is that? He was the only person I've ever heard use that expression; and I just spent the better part of the last 30 seconds Google-searching to see if anybody else ever said it, and nothing.

I'm going to believe Tom coined "Holy ol' teapot, cream-jug and sugarbowl"  and if I ever form a band I'm calling it Holy Ol' Teapots.

Which brings to mind one of the first times I recall  Tom ever using what I considered a swear. (Which is probably why most of us Carters don't cuss much. I think the pottiest mouth of all of us is my sister Mary, and she used to be a Nun! Most of the others? They're so non-foul mouthed it verges on embarrasing!)

Anyway, Dad was talking about a passenger on his bus who'd had too much to drink and when they got to her stop, he opened the bus doors, she stepped down, tripped, and ended up --and I quote:  "ass over teakettle in the ditch." What a great description! And it begs the question--what part exactly is your teakettle?

Get this:  I just Googled "ass over teakettle."  And what I got was a message from my late mom in heaven.

About "ass over teakettle, the Urban Dictionary has this to say and I'm not making it up: "Used frequently by weird Canadian mother-in-laws. 'Damn, Tom got really wasted and fell out of his chair, ass over teakettle'." 

9 Lessons Learned During the Great Eclipse of 2017

This was me to my wife Helena--in  the moments leading up to the great solar eclipse of 2017--even as we were picking up the free eclipse glasses that the University of Toronto's Dunlap Observatory was distributing: "I don't know what the fuss is about. I really don't care about an eclipse. I have absolutely no interest in this."

LIGHTING UP THE ECLIPSE: Jodie's an award-
winning lighting-store owner.

Me, four hours later: "Holy! That was the greatest afternoon ever."

Here are 9 reasons why:

1) I saw a guy in the men's room, wearing a kilt, using a urinal. Since I've never worn a kilt, the question never arose, but dressed like that he must have been taking a break from some Celtic stage show or something, but there he was, draped over the porcelain. Never expected that.

DOUBLE VISION: Pank and Helena

2) Fritz the Pug might be blind, but he sure is loved. Among the handful of people we met and watched the eclipse with on the patio of the Northern Comfort Saloon was one Jodie Orange, proprietor of the Living Lighting On King store on Toronto's very trendy King West. Her showroom actually won the North American Lighting Showroom of The Year Award and I promised to visit soon but actually, she had me at the story of Fritz, her pug. Poor Fritz was struck blind suddenly by something called Retinal Atrophy. It's a rare and sad condition but when I asked if she could get Fritz, say, a seeing-eye cat, Jodie responded with, "I'm his seeing-eye cat." "He's lucky to have you," I told her. "I'm lucky to have him," she said back.

IT WAS A SIGN: She knew our daughter Ev A
small world indeed.

3) When you Google "Christ vs  Krishna," one of the things that comes up first is "Christ vs Warhol," and here's why you have to know that. Josie, Fritz's guardian, Googled it.  One of the other people we met at this pop-up eclipse party on the patio was a super-friendly New-Delhi-born chap in his early 40's named Pank--"It's like Hank but with a p instead of an h"--and he plays lead guitar in a band called "Christ Vs Krishna".  He said they're thinking about changing the  name, "because some people don't know what to make of Christ Vs Krishna." Me for instance.

4) Except I sort of do now, after talking to Pank and following up on Josie's Google, I've decided I really like "Christ vs Krishna" and I'm doing my darndest to catch them live sometime. Want a sample? Click  here.

5) Don't you just love it that you can see a band instantly like that? Which brings me to another marvelous tech fact:  Three of the other folks at our party--Todd, Fareenza and Diana--all happened to be deaf. Diana teaches American Sign Language (ASL), and when Helena, using her ASL skills, let them know our daughter Ev is a sign student, Fareenza realized that they had actually met Ev.

EARS TO YOU, FOLKS: Todd solved our
 communication problem.

6) I should add that I used to know some sign. My best ASL story is about the time 20 years ago my friend John O'Callaghan and I were in a bar and I saw an ASL guy so I thought I'd show off and strike up an sign conversation but it went off the rails when I asked him his name. He spelled what I thought was J-A-Y.  I grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. "How you doin' Jay?" He signed it again. I shook his hand even more enthusiastically. And then, just to make sure I understood,  he mouthed the word I was failing to grasp. I was mistaking J for G. I'm the Josh Donaldson of mixed messages.

7) But not on the patio Monday. After sitting with Diana, Todd and Fareenza for about 20 minutes, clumsily trying to employ  a few ASL signs so the visit wouldn't be too awkward, Todd came up with an ingenious solution. He texted me. In English. I texted him back. We started conversing.  PROBLEM SOLVED! It verged on the miraculous. And then I told Pank about my mom's campaign to have Alexander Graham Bell Canonized. Within minutes, we were chatting like old pals. Except now, we're new pals.

8) There were two guys on stage at our party. Buck 20 they were called. And what they taught me was "A Total Eclipse of the Heart" sounds a lot like "Making Love Out of Nothing At All," by Air Supply. Here. Check it out for yourself. Total Eclipse of the Heart vs Making Love out of Nothing at All..

9) An eclipse happened. That was interesting too.

Lost in New York. And loving it.

LOST BUT NOT LEAST: Not knowing where you are doesn't matter
if you don't care where you're going.

Twenty.

That is a conservative estimate of how many times my daughter Ev and I have had to ask strangers for directions over the past three days. 

She and I are on a five-day motorcycle adventure around New York State and we're not done yet, so I'm sure that number will get bigger before we're home. 

20. 

I counted last night. And those are only the ones I remember.

First day out--and the first time we needed directional help, I asked a border guard in Niagara Falls, NY, the best way to get to the parkway. But we were crossing the American border, for Pete's sake.  I was paranoid. Not for any good reason,  I just was. So I didn't hear a word he said so the second time we found ourselves asking for directions, we were about three minutes past the border.

Ev and I are the Josh Donaldson and Serena Williams of not knowing where we are. But the thing is, mostly we didn't care.

Yesterday, we spent 90 minutes and change exploring a series of paved deer trails near the western edge of the Catskill mountains in Southern New York.  We really did, for about five seconds, have two baby deer running along beside us closer than I'd ever been to a deer before, and although they couldn't hear me, I literally yelled "Run Bambi Run!"

Before seeing the fawns, we had come to a dead end but shortly after turning around, we saw a chap in a road-maintenance vehicle sitting on the side of the road. 

I switched my engine off and rolled up beside his machine in silence. Before I could remove my helmet so he could see my face, the grader operator --who would if you emailed central casting with a request for a "Catskills back-woods grader operator" be the guy they send over--said, "Lemme guess. You need directions."

So adept at not knowing where we are, Ev and I have begun to emit signals.

About an hour after the grader-operator meet-and-greet, and during one of the few times we had pulled over NOT lost--a local gentleman in straw cap and bowtie stopped his pickup truck in the middle of the right lane and asked through his open passenger-door window if we needed assistance. 

That reminds me. I think the next edition of "Finding your Way Around the Backroads of New York State" should contain the sentence, "Don't worry about getting lost. There's going to be a guy or couple of guys wearing baseball caps in a pick-up truck at the next crossroads. They'll help you out."

Which reminds me of another ask. 

Thursday afternoon I think it was, we'd stopped for waffle-cone ice-cream cones and sat at a picnic-table studying our map. (Commented one direction-giver when he saw the map duct-taped to my gas tank: "That's some old-school GPS system you got there." But I digress.)

We weren't quite sure what town the waffle-cone joint was in, so we asked the woman at next table. She wasn't sure  either, but then her husband walked around the corner and on to the patio and she asked him.  He, too, was sporting a baseball cap. His said "Cornell."

He said "Interlaken" and then asked what our destination was. 

"We don't have one," was our answer. 

ESCHEWING UP THE SCENERY:  When you're on a trip like this,
nature is for passing through.

Turns out, he was a math prof at the nearby and very prestigious Cornell University. He very generously started offering advice on where we should stop next; specifically, he said, some hiking trails at the nearby park. He mentioned added, "You really should go to Cornell."

I looked at his partner and and said, "Go to Cornell? I couldn't even get into community college in Ontario." (True fact: in my one and only effort to get into Ryerson University's journalism school, back before it was Ryerson U. I failed.)

As kindhearted and as smart as they were, no way that couple could have known that getting off our bikes to hike up some hills or wander around a university were the last things Ev and I wanted to do.

Even though we're passing historic site after historic site and never mind that the scenery has been, at times, as Ev put it, "so beautiful I could cry," when you're on an adventure like this; it's the moving on that counts.  

One more thing.  

Professor Math's car was parked right beside my bike. 

I was climbing on as he was stepping in. I looked at him and said "my wish for any man is that he gets a chance to take a trip like this with his daughter."

Sometimes I think God put scenery on earth to be driven through, and that he created other people so I could say things to them and could quote myself.

On the road with Ed. I just can't wait to be on the road with Ed

BOB (TULK) COULD WELL BE MY UNCLE:
He knew all the new and old Newfie jokes

It takes about four hours to drive south from my hometown of Sudbury to my house in mid-Toronto, Ontario.

Over the past half century, I and members of my extended family have driven that road a few thousand times. (You'll be happy to hear I actually took the time out of my busy day to do the math. Thousands it is.)

We’ve done the highway in cars, buses, big trucks, beat-up trucks and a few times I biked. Hitchiked, too. We’ve steered through raging thunder storms, blizzards and fog. 

But I really want to tell you about one of memorable trip that stands out from all the rest.

It was a southbound run, Sudbury to Toronto. I was driving our red Dodge Caravan.  Helena was riding shotgun. Behind us sat our daughters Ev and Ria and on the long bench at the back my son and my older-by-29-months brother Ed.  

About 30 minutes into the drive, Eddie asked me a riddle. I can’t remember what it was exactly, but I recall the format and the fact that it was directed at me. 

It went something like and could have even been this. “Hey Pete! Whattaya call a guy with no arms and no legs flying over the fence?  Homer!”

I riddled him back. “Hey Ed! What’d the elephant say when he walked into the bar? ‘This’s some big bar!’”

He lobbed another: “A termite walks into the bar, goes ‘where’s the bartender?”

And like that.

FOR MORE THAN AN HOUR! Helena timed it. 

We traded dumb jokes back and forth and back and forth almost all the way to Parry Sound, 160 klicks south of Sudbury

Add this: Because of the audience, we kept our material Disney clean.

I hope this next part doesn’t shock my kids but uncle Ed and I also know a few not-so-polite jokes. Like this one. “Hey Ed! Did you hear about the flasher who almost retired but decided to stick it out for another year?”

But the G-rated numbers we tossed about in the van represented such a microscopic percent of our joke repertoire, I’m pretty sure that if we flung the joke gates wide open, we could have kept it up til we hit Patagonia.

It’s not just me and Ed.  

My whole family’s like that. The more I think about it, the more I realize that wherever two or more Carters meet, they don’t converse as much as compete.

On Planet Carter, jokes are as important as air. Remember a baker’s dozen paragraphs ago I mentioned the Sudbury house we grew up in? It had books in every room including the two johns, on every shelf and of every variety:  novels, history books, Classic Comics (the only place I ever really read the real classics, btw,) nursing books with pictures of naked people, Readers’ Digest Condensed Collections, books about saints and miracles, and last and in a class of their own, “joke” books. 

Books given over entirely to jokes meant for telling. Do they even  print books like this anymore?

HENNY FRIEND OF YOUNGMAN's
is a friend of Ed's.

One I recall specifically was “New Newfie Jokes.” Clearly there is a earlier version with old ones. Were there like, thousands of Newfie jokes or what?

We had collections of Catholic jokes, Irish jokes and at least one compendium of Henny Youngman one-liners though I bet this kind of book has never been called a compendium before. (Youngman’s jokes are like this: “Doctor says to patient in hospital. ‘Bad news. We had to amputate your feet. Good news is, guy in the next bed wants to buy your shoes.’") 

No wonder we know so many jokes. They were in the very air we breathed. (Very air. How close to derriere is that? Where's Ed when I need him?)

I just thought of something. Remember I described how joke-filled that one drive from Sudbury to Toronto was? It just occured to me that all road trips with Eddie are like that.

Him and me, swapping dumb jokes we learned at our mother’s knee.

What a horrible waste of  human brains. 

Born to be M-i-i-i-i-ld

Me&Ev, as in, ever notice daughter is 1 letter away from laughter? 

If you asked me yesterday at breakfast if I've ever had a musical gig that paid me money, I would have: a) thanked you for even thinking the question; b) laughed; and c) said "nope".
But. Had you asked me at lunchtime, you'd have gotten a "yup."

Here's why.

First you have to know I enjoy travelling on my motorcycle and although you can't tell by looking, I frequently sing while I ride.
My motorbiking daughter Ev does too-- a fact I added as an excuse to use this  picture.
I have a limited repertoire of motorcycling songs but I admit that one is the '60s hit, "Born to Be Wild," written and recorded by a Canadian band called "Steppenwolf" in 1968.
The thing about "Born To Be Wild," is that it became the unofficial theme song for the movie "Easy Rider," starring Peter Fonda who--I'm just stating a fact here--I've been told I kinda look like.
And Peter Fonda rode a Harley-Davidson. Which is the brand of bike I currently own.

NOW THAT I THINK
about it, Nicholson kinda
 looks like my brother Ed

The model of Harley I have is called Sportster and until recently the Sportster was the littlest Harley-Davidson going.
When Sportsters first appeared in the late '50s, they were considered very cool but that's changed. One clever writer described the transformation thusly: When they were introduced, people knew a Sportster was the kind of bike The Fonz would ride. Now it'd be Potsie.
Still, it's big and fast enough for me.
Besides, I seriously don't care what kind of bike I'm riding. I've never been on a motorcycle I didn't like. And I digress.
Tuesday morning, I was roaring along Toronto's Lakeshore Blvd, belting out "Born to Be Wild."
"Like a True Nature child,," I sang, "we were born born to be wild fly so high never wanna die-ie-ie. Born to be Wi-i-i-i-ild" and like that.
That's when I recalled my money-making singing gigs.
When I was a little kid, before Easy Rider made the song famous, I used to go over to  my lifelong friend Trevor MacIntyre's house. There was a guitar there. Neither of us knew any chords though I just this minute remembered Trevor took drum lessons.
I banged on the guitar; Trevor and I would sing the phrase "Born to Be Wild"over and over and over again as loudly as our little pre-pubescent voices would let us, and his father would pay us to stop.

I think this might well be my favorite blog yet!

(Not the most flattering photo, but I do look concerned.
 Also I would like to note that I have no relation to the SPCA,
I think this coat came from a Goodwill.) 

Channeling Tom Sawyer yet again, this week at Pete's B&G I'm going to let somebody more capable than myself get the work done.

Baxter Naday lives next door to us on Grenadier Road in mid-town Toronto. He just finished high school and he'll be off to Kitchener-Waterloo University in the fall. I'm sure he'll wow them there just as he does everybody else I know who has met him. 

The following story recently appeared in the Ontario Field Ornithologists News. 

Read it and you'll see why it's been so great having this guy for a neighbour.

                     Birding when you’re not “birding”

                                                    by Baxter Naday

On one rainy September day last year, while in the middle of writing a math test, a Bay-breasted Warbler appeared at the window I was facing. I was so delighted that I just happened to see this soggy little warbler that I stood up and told the math teacher about my sighting (knowing full well that he would not care one bit). He promptly told me, “I think it’s better if you sit somewhere else”, so I did, in front of another window, where I unfortunately could not spot any other soggy birds in the trees. That momentary sighting of something that I could spot fairly easily elsewhere during migration made that day a good one. Having these little birding breaks when stuck in places we do not particularly enjoy being, can make these times bearable, and sometimes even fun.

I live in Toronto, and there are a good number of natural spaces for birding places here; however, one cannot be in these prime locations all the time because of work or, for me, school. When I cannot escape to a better “habitat”, I might take some time out of my lunch break to scour the school grounds for any possible birdlife. So far at school, I have been able to turn up 43 species and counting. With some, I had gone looking for them – such as looking up over the playing field for Broad-winged Hawks, Bald Eagles, and other migrating birds of prey during fall migration – however, most were just incidentals, like that Bay-breasted Warbler. 

I have another short story of a bird encounter in the city, making one typical weekday better, even though the story is a bit sad. One morning in late October two years ago, I was coming out the garage about to ride my bike to school, when I nearly stumbled (literally) over an American Woodcock. It was laying on the ground in my concrete, garbage-ridden alleyway, still alive. I figure it must have hit a wire or a windshield. Unfortunately, there was no saving the poor bird as its neck seemed broken. (All of this made me very late for school that morning, but fortunately my English teacher was understanding enough, especially after I had shown him my photo evidence.) Despite the bird’s death, this event made me think about all the birds that must go overhead or near my little house crammed into this very urban part of Toronto (something I often think about, even as I write this on an early May night).

When homework and general laziness prevent me from getting out for a couple hours at a time, I still try to take quick breaks in the local neighbourhood dog-walking park, with binoculars or at least a monocular in hand, especially during the migratory seasons. It’s not a very appealing spot to go birding at all; it lacks many trees, and there’s an abandoned warehouse beside a set of busy railroad tracks. Nonetheless, every time I go I say, “hey, you never know.” It’s always a reliable spot for a melodious Northern Mockingbird, even outside of the migratory seasons.

Even when we don’t have access to a birding hotspot or much time in our busy schedules, it is still worth it to take short birding breaks. Whether they are planned or incidental, they are always worth it, even if we do get a few strange looks from time to time.