I Hate The Wind

A Blow Your Stack special rager with “Blow” being the keyword.

I fucking hate the wind. Short, sweet, and ugly.

I live on the southern plains of Alberta, Canada. I’m not too fond of it here. I wouldn’t say I like the prairies. I come from the mountains, born and raised in the highest city by elevation in Canada, surrounded by mountains and our town on top of one. So how did I end up in the flatlands of this depressing landscape? Work.

Decades ago, newly married and working my ass off as a top Chef, I was making a name, but that’s about all. Here’s a secret about Chefs—they starve. Those celebrity chef’s you see on tv? Those guys are the less than 1% that break a six-figure salary. They deserve it for sure, well, most of them do. Guy Fieri? He can go screw a light pole.

And I’ve always wanted to add this little phrase into my stories;

I moved here for work in the oil and gas sector after my wife “suggested” a career change might be more beneficial all around. It worked out, I got a job, worked hard, got a better job, and the company asked me to relocate.

Then, for the following nearly two decades, I traveled to every corner of the province and had the howling, relentless, ignorant, unnecessary wind beat the hell out of me in each of the four seasons.

But even before all of that occurred, I lived in an even worse place in the province a great time earlier. Lethbridge. The wind whipping, dust blowing, armpit of the province. That place is a vortex of misery, anger, and depression in a perpetual shit-tornado of wind — what a shithole.

The whole reason for this rant is because I was lying in bed last night feeling the house shake from the wallops of wind. I was very, very sad. I was sad because I had been painstakingly working on setting the liner for the backyard hockey rink over the past several days. It was an involved process. I had to re-level the back half of the rink since our yard sinks and slopes away about a half foot or so each year due to the slough that sits beneath our neighborhood. Last year’s ice rink had two feet or more of ice on the back end and 6 inches on the front. It took forever to get the ice in.

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