Thursday, October 25, 2007

and in today's news

Two things on my mind:

1) on my way home from nursery school I got stuck behind a bus. A van pulled up (going the other way) to talk to two of the teenage boys who got off the bus (it's a nice day my windows were down).

"Is Hillcrest in lockdown?" she asked.

There is a serious (in my opinion) problem in Ottawa at the moment. As of last Friday (and I haven't looked into it since) there had been 17 anonymous calls to 9-1-1 saying that there were armed men entering a school in the Ottawa area (the first one seem to have been the Ridgemont episode 3 weeks ago). There were 5 last Thursday alone.

The emergency services are overloaded. Paramedics are sitting at schools that have not been "cleared" (as safe, that there is no intruder) and having to listen to calls that they can't take because they are waiting for the all clear. That's people caling 9-1-1 for an ambulance and not getting one - because of a prank call.

Apparently the stress level at the schools, at the police stations, with the emergency response teams is terrible - I can only imagine. Last week Stuart had an emergency lockdown test at school... while I know it's a good idea and proactive, I can't help but think all we ever had was fire drills.

Someone has a very sick sense of humour and it's just not right.

2) My father's house is for sale. Yup, you heard me right. The house that I sold to his neighbour's sick daughter who had dreamed of living next to her mother for 20 years and was finally moving home from Florida to be with her family - that house.

Apparently her husband didn't tell anyone (this is from my mother who spoke with her father about the $3800 Hydro bill she got for said house, even though it was sold 5 months ago) but he was in meetings for a job in Florida the whole time - and got it. The dream job, once in a lifetime chance. So the house - and it's thousands and thousands (and THOUSANDS!) of dollars of renovation - on the market. They never even moved in.

I have no clue how I feel about htis (I had wanted to keep the house but it didn't make sense financially). Just weird. It's just not the right week for this I guess - or maybe it is, since the whole thing is rather prevalent in my mind anyways.

1 comment:

Traveller said...

No, it's not right. Someone is being a smart ass and that's where he needs to be kicked.

If all you went through as a child are fire drills then you are lucky. As you know, I'm a COUPLE years older than you and was Stuart's age at the height of the Cold War, when Brezhnev was threatening us all with nuclear annihilation. We were taught to stop, drop and roll, which we all knew, even at that young age, was futile because NO ONE would survive a nuclear bomb. I was afraid of death for years when I was in elementary school. Seems crazy times just evolve into another kind of craziness.

I hope the crank caller gets caught and that Stu is able to overcome any trauma he's suffered. Poor little guy. And he's the one who didn't want to leave Luxembourg. Figures that the adjustment would be toughest on him.

We're finally getting a little bit of cloud here after a fantastic Indian Summer. But it's colder than usual, which is very odd. Hopefully it doesn't mean we'll have a cold winter. You know how fragile we are over here when it comes to adverse winter weather ;-) I'm really losing my Canadian heartiness.