Welcome to my new blog, "Dr T is On Location". I am not yet sure what this blog is going to be about. Right now, it is a creative outlet for me. Maybe it will be fun. Hopefully it won't become an exercise in ego-mania. But isn't it exciting to start a project and not know where or how it will end? I suppose there are times where that sort of project would not be good. Like during heart surgery. If I had to have heart surgery, I would like the doctor to know where the surgery was headed and I would hope that the end included me waking up. I prefer that the pilots flying airplanes have a game plan, too. Still, sometimes it is fun to set out on an adventure and see where it will lead. I suppose that means that I see this blog as a place to record my adventures and mis-adventures.
Of course, I also want to use the blog to share my opinions. I share them with the guys I live with all the time, but they are not very interested in my views. They just want to be fed. Well, they are cats. I guess that explains why they don't care about my opinions. I'm sure you will read a lot about my two cats, Dave and Winston.
In this inaugural post, I will tell you about why it is good not to pre-judge things, like adventures. (I'm making a pitch here: don't pre-judge this blog! Return to it! Read more!)
Some things sound like great adventures: mysterious, exciting, romantic, challenging, and so forth. But those things, once experienced, turn out to be wretched and miserable. Take sailing, for example. Although my ancestors were allegedly sea-faring people (mostly pirates and that sort of thing), I did not inherit the love of the sea. Still, sailing seemed romantic to me. I dreamt of a crew in their whites, releasing the grand sails under a peacock blue sky while the sailboat bobbed merrily over azure blue waters. Yes, I would be just like a Kennedy on the open sea, standing with my sea legs firmly beneath me, tying knots and other doing sailorly things.
Reality check. Not only did I not inherit my ancestors' love of the sea, I did not inherit their sea legs or sea stomach. Instead, I inherited the firmly in-land genes. My Dad may have grown up a mile from the sea, but he never sailed and that should have been an important clue: we are not sea-faring people anymore.
Nevertheless, when I finally had the opportunity to sail with a friend of mine, I jumped at the chance. I got up early and wore my "dockers", ready for adventure on the high seas (or at least on Lake Ontario). This is when I learned that there is nothing at all remotely romantic about throwing up over the side of a sailboat. However, there is something charming about calling puking over the rails "feeding the fish". I learned that sailboats bob up and down, up and down, up and down, and that you do not care what colour the sky is when you want to die from seasickness. I felt the motion of that boat for three days after I finally returned to land. I learned that sailing is not so much an adventure for me as it is an opportunity to lose my lunch, breakfast, and dinner. At least the fish were happy.
Sometimes you stumble onto things. It may not be an adventure, but it is far more fun than you thought. Take, for example, the time I had to help my dad move calves from the calf barn out to the pasture. It was spring, and the calves had spent the winter in the barn, where it was warm and dry. I like animals and I like helping my dad with these sort of chores, so this wasn't really a task that I was dreading. But it was work to get the calves into the little trailer we would use to transport them the 200 or so meters to the new, outdoor pasture.
Calves are kooky creatures. They're very cute and smarter than you might think. They get skittish, and when they decide that they do not want to go somewhere, it is difficult to persuade them otherwise. We backed the trailer up to the barn door and open the back gate. We led the calves from their pens to the door. All they had to do was step up onto the trailer. But the calves were having none of it. They saw sunlight peeking through the barn door, around the sides of the trailer, and they were deeply suspicious of it. Then they noticed their shadows on the barn floor. All hell broke loose.
Calves turned around and ran back toward their pens. As we nudged whichever calves we could catch toward the barn door, they locked their little legs straight and refused to move. They bawled mournfully, warning the others: "It's a trap! It's a trap!" The other calves responded by heading into the furthest corners of the barn, attempting to hide in the shadows.
It took a lot of work to push, nudge, chase, and coax those calves onto the trailer. Once in the half-light of the trailer, they relaxed a bit, although the odd calf did try to make a run for it and leap off the trailer from time to time. Finally, we shut the trailer door. Now the calves were happy again, presumably because they were safely tucked into a half-lit space with stale air. To them, it felt familiar.
Our next challenge was getting the calves out of the trailer. We opened the door and pulled down the ramp. Come on out, calfies! It was a gorgeous day, with a brilliant blue sky and fresh air that smelled like the fresh, green grass in the pasture. But again, the calves were suspicious. So into the trailer we went, nudging and herding the beasts out of the trailer and into the pasture. And as each calf stepped blinkingly into the light, a remarkable transformation occurred. They finally understood that they were moving into an upgrade: fresh air, sunshine, green grass, and lots of space to run around.
The timorous calves began to have fun. They literally kicked up their heels, delighting in the feeling of running on fresh, soft grass. They chased each other around, bellowing happily. To this day, those calves bouncing around the fresh, sweet air under the warm sun remains one of the most joyous embraces of new beginnings that I have ever witnessed. What started off as just another farmyard task became a four-star performance.
Sometimes you have to be nudged out of the shadows before you discover an amazing new world just waiting to be explored and enjoyed. If you are willing to take a step or two forward, you'll see that there is adventure everywhere...maybe even on a blog, written by some crazy professor in TO.
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