Cigarette People of the Smokerings of Earth and Other Stories

            
            On Monday I put my essay aside for a few hours to go and meet my daughter and her fiancé at Timothy’s across from the Eaton’s Centre while they waited to catch their bus. I think I waited with Astrid and Lauren for at least three hours and they had been there even longer. They were using the Timothy’s network. I tried to go on too and then my phone started screwing up in a way that it never had before. It seemed to be freezing like a computer using Windows 98. Astrid and I reminisced pleasantly for quite a while.

            At around 15:45 I walked with them to the bus station. Astrid ate a couple of soggy microwaved beef patties while Lauren ate a burger from the Plastiverse. Then I walked them to their platform and hugged them goodbye when the Megabus arrived.

            I rode home and spent about five hours on my essay, almost finishing a second draft by bedtime. My editing process is that I will read a paragraph out loud. If I notice anything that needs to be adjusted, even if it’s the adding of a one comma, I will make the change and then start the paragraph again. I spent an hour on one of the paragraphs.

            I ate dinner while working and so didn’t view any downloaded shows, but the night before that I watched the third episode of “Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe”. This one was called “Cosmic Vengeance” and it featured Cody, Joy and Tim rocketing to Venus in Cody’s spaceship to take on the Universal Ruler who had set up a mining base and weapons lab there. Joy and Tim stayed in the ship while Cody walked directly into the leader’s cave. He was invited in with the intercom, and then the leader gave him a tour, showing off his ray gun that could melt a building on Earth from Venus. He showed Cody the chair he planned on putting him in which would extract his knowledge about spaceships. That’s when the fistfight began. For some reason the leader only had two assistants. The aliens always seem to want to fistfight with Cody even though the knockout spray they use on everyone else would probably work better. Anyway, Cody knocked them all out and stole the ray gun, which he set up outside the cave and began melting the mountain down around the ruler. Then he flew with Joy and Tim back to Earth.

            This was the last episode in which William Schallert played Tim Richards. That guy has been working steady in film and television from then pretty much till now, though he’s slowed down a touch in his old age.