There is something wrong with my radio. It seems more prevalent since we have moved out west. Often after my wife has driven the van somewhere I will get in and turn the van on and the radio just sounds terrible. It is all twangy and bad.

I have noticed that a lot of radios around here suffer this same affliction. Even stranger.. people seem proud of their malfunctioning radios. When I ask what that awful noise is, people respond with one word: “country”.

Now, I have lived in rural, country environments before and it has never affected how the music sounds like this. It must be that the land is so flat that it distorts the radio waves or something.

One of the changes that I have had to make upon arriving in the West concerns something I have always taken for granted in my 35 years living in Eastern Canada. It concerns a matter of convenience, and has even been tied to the Canadian identity in verse. Yet it is conspicuously absent here in western Canada. I am, of course, talking about milk in a bag.

Plastic jugs are the dominant milk form here. This adds a certain inconvenience to the late night milk drink as a tall cool glass of milk can not be poured in one fluid motion. With the milk bag, a pitcher can simply be pulled from the fridge, poured out in a glass and returned. Now with a milk jug I must take it out and remove the cap, pour a glass and replace the cap before putting the milk back. Certainly an inefficient way to get tall cool glass of milk.

Growing up in the Maritimes we always had milk in a bag. It permitted such great family games like “Who left an empty bag in the pitcher!?!” and “Where are the scissors?”. I remember when this packaging was taken to an extreme as a kid when we could even purchase orange juice in a bag. We had one pitcher for milk and one for OJ. And of course, the inevitable happened one day. Someone had changed out the empty bags and put fresh ones in the wrong pitcher. Fruit Loops really are a little too rich with orange juice on them.

Anyway.. I will stand strong. I will adjust.