When my youngest boy was 10, he began to pressure us to quit smoking; it was a daily event. My wife finally said that she was quiting smoking, and I said, “Me too,” before really thinking it through. We set a date a week from that day, we got the patch kits and other various items like mints and gums, and we were ready.
I went to the store a couple of hours before the time we had set and bought a pack of smokes, came home and gave Gina half of them, and we sat there and smoked 10 each, finishing just before our quit time. I quickly put on a patch, not thinking about all those smokes I had just smoked. Damn near blacked out from a nicotine high.
I had a big bag of bunk that I could roll up to smoke, and I bought wagon wheel cookies by the case. The bunk helped me wean off the habit of having a smoke in my hand. The patches were giving me my nicotine in continuously reduced amounts. The wagon wheels were my reward. I ate them by the boxfuls. Both Gina and I quit and have not smoked since. The wagon wheels tasted so good that over the next year, I gained almost 50 pounds.
For most of my life, I have been in top shape and yet I now find myself quite round in the belly area. So we sold our car and bought bikes. We rode them for the next 5 years. I dropped those 50 pounds and got my health back.
At first, my wife and I rode 10-speed road bikes with 28-inch tires, and we would ride out on the highways as well as around town. We had a blast, but if we wanted to go off pavement, we would need to be careful, as they tended to slip on corners. I slipped once at high speed on mud and broke a rib in the fall. We eventually purchased mountain bikes and took our adventures off the road. We never looked back.
We loved biking and thought nothing of 30 km bike rides, but we wanted to get out further. I bought a couple of gas motor kits to adapt our mountain bikes into motorized bikes. After we built those 2 and tried them out. We built 3 more so that all the kids had one. We could travel at around 25 km an hour on the logging roads, we would head out on family trips into the backwoods. It was pretty awesome. The bikes began to get noticed, and we got lots of orders for them. The cost of bikes and kits was around 300.00, I could build a bike a day, and we sold them for 650.00. Not too bad. Then the government made them illegal, and we could only ride them on the back roads, which was fine for us, but sales died completely as people wanted to ride them in town. It had been awesome while it lasted.
Eventually, the RCMP began to hassle us about the bikes. There was this one time my wife had just left a friend’s house, where we had purchased a big bag of skunkweed. I put that weed in my pocket, and then we headed to the grocery store. As we pulled into the lot, they saw us, but we did not see them. Our bikes were loud, and we did not hear them behind us; we just kept riding, oblivious to the sirens and lights of the police car behind us. Two cops hopped out of their car as we pulled to a stop and rushed up to us. I slowly looked around, and everyone in the parking lot was looking at us. It took a second to figure it all out. These members of the law were not very impressed and said they would be impounding our bikes. The lead cop said he knew the law on these bikes. I got into a pretty heated argument with this Police Officer, filling his head with Transport Canada rules on these bikes; it was mostly bullshit that I was laying on him, but it was enough to confuse him. During the argument, I would move in close to get into his face, but then I would smell that weed in my pocket, and I would need to back off, almost lost the argument because of this. I could see this cop was having second thoughts and finally agreed not to take the bikes. We sold these bikes not long after this and went back to just riding mountain bikes with no motors.
Around this time, I started to notice my eyesight was beginning to fail, and it was coming on fast. My doctor made me an appointment to see an eye specialist, but it was going to be a year before I could get in. My eyes kept getting worse. I started to not see well enough to drive, so my wife would come with me to read signs and watch for things I might hit, you know, like people on a crosswalk. When I had to go out by myself, like when I would pick up the kids from school. I would take our cockatiel; he loved the kids. His name was Buddy, and he would ride on the steering wheel, where he would squawk if I was going to hit something. When we were waiting for the kids, I could not tell one from another, but Buddy would be watching and as soon as he saw them, he would get all excited. Sometimes when driving alone, I would hold a big plastic spoon with holes drilled in it over one eye; this would, for some reason, allow me to see better.
When I went in to see the eye doctor, he was surprised at how bad my eyes were. These are a new type of cataract that was showing up more often, something to do with the environment. He said he was seeing them in a younger group of workers who were predominantly in the outdoors. He was going to book me in sometime shortly, and if I wanted, he would put me on a cancellation list. I would need to be on notice. I agreed, and a week later, I got the call for the next day.
2 types of lenses could be used; the old type required some cutting and a few stitches to insert them. As they were solid lenses, the only good thing about them was that they were free. Or I could have the new ones that come rolled up. They only require a small hole where they are pushed in through and then rolled out. No stitches. They would be 300.00 per lens, paid before the operation. I opted for the rolled ones. On the day of the procedure, I was brought in and had some stuff put in my eyes. I was then taken into the operating room, with my town clothes and boots still on. They put me on the table and stuck a needle in my eyes to freeze them. Then the doctor hit my eyes with sound, which shattered my old lenses, and he then vacuumed the pieces out. I instantly could only see white, damn scary. He then put the first new lens in, and as he rolled it out, I saw him, and he was so damn clear looking down at me that I let out a yell. I could not believe how clear things were. I began to call myself the 600-dollar man. (Some of you will understand the term) My sight was awesome after this.