GODERICH, OUR TOWN

Having lived in a city for many years we had now gotten tired of it. It is not like the way it used to be. Back then you pretty well knew almost everyone in your close neighborhood. Now the next door occupants stay in their thousand square foot box of a home and don't say "diddley- squat". The times when I did go and introduce myself to someone they would be stand=offish, as if maybe I was going to ask them for something.HEAVEN FORBID.
Gangs were now starting to spring up here and there. One night a bunch of stupid, care-less teens thought it would be "funny" to shoot parked car windows out with a gun as they drove the streets. They smashed over 50 windshields on their nightly foray. My big concern was the fact that these jerks might miss their target and hit my bedroom window or someone elses and kill somebody. This was one of the many factors that helped to make up our minds to leave Guelph, Ontario.

In the previous years Karen and I had stumbled on a quaint little town  on the banks of Lake Huron .We planned to retire there someday in the future. Population 8,000. It has shopping, Walmart, Zellers, restaurants and Lake Huron. It was now time to get "out  of Dodge", as the saying goes. We found a cute "fixer-upper" in this town. I put pen to paper, made up a realty offer, presented said offer, offer accepted, put my home up for sale, sold it and moved into our new home 6 weeks later. Talk about determination. We sure had that. We fixed the home to our specifications. We changed not only the landscape of our property but the landscape of our lives. Not one single regret. Wish we had done it sooner.

Our Main street is a circle with streets eminating from it like the spokes of a wheel. Our beach is a five minute walk away. In the middle of the circle sits the courthouse surrounded by a good expanse of trees and grass. Every weekend in the spring and summer this area is set up with a Farmers Market and Flea Market. What a treat. Whenever one of the big trees starts to die they chop it down to about the ten foot level. They have this artist come in and he cuts, saws, chisels, hammers and paints a figure out of the tall stump. This is one of his creations. It takes him
about a week to do it and everyone watches him at his craft.



Trivia:  "Rule of thumb". The meaning of this saying comes from the 1800's  . It meant that a husband could not beat his wife with a stick thicker than his thumb.

Did You Know?  " Snake Boy". Uorn Sambeth from Setbo, Cambodia, has an unusual pet for a nine year-old boy. He has developed a friendship with a huge 16 foot (4.9m) python snake.He gives the serpent hugs and kisses and sometimes sleeps inside the coils of the snake, which weighs over 220 lbs( 100 kg) and requires three adults to carry . The python first slithered into the boy's bedroom when he was three months old, and now has its own room in the family home.