January Blahs

I'm not fond of this time of year, at least not here in Ontario, Canada. It's cold and damp and dark. That's an Ontario winter. I need warmth and sunshine. How many days until the first forsythias bloom and their cheery yellow blossoms herald an imminent spring? I don't know. Too damn many, for sure.

A new friend of mine, an engineer from Colorado who I met in Boquete, Panama, is on his way back there to look for land for us to acquire. Ideally, we are looking for a larger parcel that we could purchase together and subdivide into lots. He wants to retire there. I don't, but wouldn't mind owing some land in the interior of Panama. The land I purchased when I was in Panama last November is on the Pacific coast where it is hot and humid. In the Boquete area, at an elevation of about 3,300 feet, the climate is more temperate.

I wonder sometimes how my life could have been very different had my parents not left Germany in 1949, or had they ended up elsewhere than in Canada. We could have moved to Brazil, where my father's sister lived near Sao Paolo. It's warm there. On the other hand, Canada was good to my parents while they were alive and it has been good to me too. My Brazilian relatives have had a much harder time of it.

I have told my son that in many other countries, past and present, I would never have made it to my current age of 60. I would have been sent to a gulag somewhere to shut me up, or simply shot instead, so as not to waste resources of the state necessary to keep me alive. Tyrannies of the left or the right, either, would have treated me the same. Bang. You're dead. Bye and good riddance.

That's why I am not likely to leave Canada. I still have the freedom to speak my mind, to point out idiocies perpetrated by our anointed and to rail against laziness, sloth, indifference, stupidity, ignorance, irresponsibility and more. And you, dear reader, have the freedom to read my blog and millions of others and either accept or ignore what we have to say. Maybe with the vigilance of so many, our leaders won't be able to get away with so much nonsense.

Nah, that would be too much to ask.

Still, we all have it pretty good, overall. Now if it were only a little warmer.