On the Road to the Retirement House

April and John walk the dogs and John makes puns about the dog’s behaviour, in an effort to rekindle the “my dog’s do the same thing” aspect of For Better or For Worse. Sniffing was pretty normal dog behaviour, but getting showered by snow from a squirrel was a “never occurred” kind of situation for me. Everyone seems to be of the opinion that they are going to walk down to George Stibb’s place. If it is a typical John / April situation, April is going to be the one who makes the all-knowing and all-wise suggestion of moving in to George Stibbs’ place and selling the old house to Mike and Deanna, while John stands there amazed by April’s sudden burst of intelligence.

Lynn has set this whole thing up by making April the one who has suffered the most by Mike and Deanna moving in. In other words, if April had not been thrown out of her room, she would have no motivation for moving along with John and Elly. John wants to move so he can set up 3 full lots of outdoor model trains, which is a pretty clear indication that he does not have a homeowner’s association in his neighbourhood. Elly doesn’t want to move, because the old house is large enough for entertaining, but she may be placated by the idea that the house would still be available for doing those things, particularly if she lives close enough to meddle.

April, on the other hand, would be forced to move in her last 2 years of senior secondary into a house where her band will no longer have the space to rehearse, and where she may actually be embarrassed to bring friends, because of the model train eyesores which will fill metre after metre of the outside yard of her home. Lynn’s answer to the question is “Make April so miserable she will want to move.” In order for this to work, of course, you have to ignore the fact it doesn’t take an insurance company 3 months to get a family into new accommodations after a fire. You also have to ignore the fact April’s misery is inflicted upon her by her parents and her brother’s inability to move his family some other place. If you ignore these facts, you can make the story work. And what is For Better or For Worse these days, but a series of ignored facts in favour of completing a story.

In the meantime, I have been reading up on appeals for criminal cases in Ontario, and as near as I can tell from what I have read, Howard Bunt has a strong case. qnjones wanted to do a prison break story with lemurs, and I have only hinted around how that would work, in case she wanted to drop in more details. In the meantime, I have contrived to have him turn himself in from his prison break to Constable Paul Wright, so we can have a little follow-up on what’s going on there. I am not sure what would happen in real life, if there was such a place in Canada as Milborough, where they don’t follow the proper trial procedure and Howard made a break from there as if he were seeking asylum from a country with a hateful dictatorship. I remember there being some towns in the hills of Utah, where people supposedly escaped from, and I am pretty sure the authorities who rescued them did not respect the authority of those from whom they escaped. I am going to work on the same principal in this case with the unusual Milborough justice system.