570News Blog: Glenn Pelletier

You just never fully know how a particular day is going to unfold. Take for example, today.

I had just finished reading the 9:30 a.m. news, when I decide that while I’ve got a few minutes to spare, I’ll clean out my backpack. So I’m in the process of doing just that…..rummaging through assorted papers, pens and junk….when what do I see stuck to the bottom of the backpack but one of my favourite bass lures…..embedded via its three treble hooks.

You may ask at this point why there was a fishing lure in my backpack. Well, I had meant to take it out, but kept putting it off. Know what I mean?

Since fishing season, the thing had been in a little box in the bottom of my backpack, but somehow had managed to become separated from its container….and ended up firmly attached to the nylon lining. Should have grabbed a pair of pliers and carefully removed the thing…but I had to get working on the ten a.m. news and was short on time.

So I reach down and start pulling on it. And wouldn’t you know it…..in typical “America’s Funniest Videos” fashion…doesn’t the darn thing sink one if its razor-sharp barbed treble hooks deep into the flesh of my right palm. I mean deep. Such that the barb prevented it from being removed.

How do I explain this one to my colleagues in the newsroom, none of whom have handled a fishing lure at all, let alone got one embedded in their hand……at work…..in the middle of December?

“Hey Lisa!”, I extort, “I gotta go to emerg. I’ve got a fishing lure stuck deep in my palm. Can you cover for me?”

Off to the Urgent Care Clinic with my designated driver Theresa Chiavaroli, where a doctor familiar with this kind of thing (having worked at a hospital in the Kawartha Lakes area of the province) applies a local anasthetic….pokes the barbed hook through the surface of my palm, snaps off the barb with a pair of wire cutters….and yanks out the remainder of the hook.

Somedays, it’s better to stay under the covers!

I feel like calling Jeff Allan’s “Hour of Rage.”

So I’m standing in a very long line at the supermarket the other day, with my 16 items, queuing up in the “18 items or less” line, eagerly awaiting my departure from the madding crowd, when I says to myself “Self, why is it taking so darn long to get to the checkout?”

So I glance up ahead of me, and darn it if the couple at the cashier has decided to unload 32 items! And while it is never a precise science to engage in stereotyping, they call it stereotyping for a reason. So allow me to proceeed. These are the same type of folks who park in the disabled spot, talk during movies, throw stuff out the car window, smoke with kids in the car, yada yada yada. The kind of people who don’t realize that they are sharing the planet and that the world does not exist for them.

On the other hand, maybe they simply didn’t see the “18 items or less” sign.

I would prefer to believe that, lest I become a lesser person myself.