Bananas, Gym Bags, and Tires

It was green, or at least about 90% green, bur I peeled it anyway. 

I had bought bananas two days previously and suspected that this bunch was ripe, despite the colour. I was right, for although it was still 90% green it was also 90% ripe.

I can't tell with bananas any more. Green can be ripe, yellow can be overripe and getting mushy.

Not so very long ago, I would purchase green in summer because they would ripen quickly in the hotter weather and yellow in winter because they wouldn't. Now I have no clue and just guess.

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Yesterday morning (as I write this), I was sitting in my easy chair, doing whatever on my iPad, when Danica called. We almost never phone in this family, preferring to text, which is much less intrusive, so I wondered what was up.

She asked what I was doing, and I described what I wrote above, so I shan't bother repeating it. BTW don't you just love shan't? Nobody uses it anymore, but my English grandfather did, and I remember that these 70 years later and am chuffed both to remember and to use it.

Danica takes the bus to school but had forgotten her gym equipment at home. In this quadmester system she takes gym for about 2 hours a day until near the end of January. They use a quadmester system during these COVID times to reduce student contacts. The kids take only two courses at a time. That will assist in tracking should there be an outbreak. Hopefully, they will return to semestering next year. . . . Well, hot off the press, the latest news is that they will probably return to the semester system in January.

She explained that she had forgotten her gym bag at home and described where I might find it if I could see my way clear to assist her.

Of course, I would do just about anything for this child, so I told her I would get dressed and drop her stuff off at the school in probably about 20 minutes.

Sue did the same, for if the bag hadn't been where Danica had thought, we would have had to hunt for it, and this guy isn't the best at finding things.

But it was where Danica had said, and we did get it to the school where she was waiting outside for us. I think we were even there before the bell.

Poor kid is in high school, but due to COVD restrictions they have no lockers, so it becomes easy to forget to have all of your supplies with you at all times. Some restrictions are just overkill when we're all double vaxxed, including the kids over 12, especially when they also wear their masks all day. Another update: the vaccine has just been approved for kids over 5 and over.

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That phone call was just after 8 o'clock, and I had a tire change scheduled for 9. I said to Sue that I was glad we had thought to put the tires in the car on the previous evening. We keep a lot of stuff in the trunk, and cleaning that out and also getting the tires in would have put us in a bit of a time crunch. We likely could have managed but were glad that we didn't have to.

They were incredibly fast with the tires. I had almost no sooner settled down to a Sudoku game than it seemed they were calling my name and demanding a small fortune in recompense for their travails on my behalf.

Indeed, if my memory is correct, this service now costs $20 more than it did at the same place for the same job, 16 years ago for my first tire change there. It almost a 60% increase. Sadly, I'm not sure if my pension has increased even by 6% in that time.

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Although we've  always lived in the same province, we didn't usually bother with snow tires at our previous residence. We lived in Sarnia, just an hour north of Detroit. I know it seems odd to reference an American city for a Canadian location, but it makes it easier for Americans to get a rough idea, most of whom know little about Canadian geography. Indeed, we were almost directly north of Motown, just on the other side of the river, for both Detroit and Sarnia are border cities. 

Winters were somewhat milder there, and we didn't generally bother with snow tires. Here in Eastern Ontario, winters are longer and once the snow sticks, often by the end of November, it sticks until mid-March and has occasionally stayed until April. Snow tires were almost a first purchase when we moved here.