Making Room For Packrats or Hoarders Caused 9-11

           

            On the Thursday afternoon of July 28^th I went up to Cad and Goldie’s for my annual rearrangement of their storage lockers in order to make room for more of their junk. First of all though, they wanted me to assemble a little chest of drawers for their bathroom, made of canvas, metal pipes and plastic connectors. I found it very complicated to put together because of the two different kinds of connectors. I guess if I’d realized right away that one kind was for the middle it would have been quicker. Plus, the three of us were engaged in conversation the whole time I was working on it, which seems to have been about three hours. It was embarrassing to hear from them that Nick Cushing had put together their other one very quickly. I felt vindicated though when I saw that the one I did was a little more complicated, but Nick probably could have done this one faster as well.

            We talked a lot about the required changes in diet for people with diabetes. I made suggestions to Cad which I found out later were all wrong. I thought that diabetics could eat any kind of meat but didn’t realize that it has to be fat free. I also suggested that maybe gluten free spaghetti would be okay for diabetics but apparently not. Of course, just about anything is okay in moderation.

            We were talking about a mutual friend that needs a hernia operation. Cad thought that hernias are not covered by OHIP but I insisted that they are. That’s one medical subject that I was right about.

            Another thing they needed me to help them with is a coat rack that I put together for them a couple of years ago. Last year it needed to be reinforced with duct tape, but this year the whole shelf was leaning to one side. The only thing I could do was to put more tape on at a different angle: this time between the bottom of one side and halfway up the other. I warned them that this solution was very temporary and that what they really needed was a real solid metal coat rack.

            We didn’t have time to work on their storage locker, but Goldie gave me ten dollars for my help, along with a bottle of beer she had mysteriously acquired.

            I left there at around 19:00 and had a nice rain-free ride home.

            That night I watched a hilarious episode from the second season of “I Love Lucy” in which Lucy and Ricky get locked together with a pair of handcuffs for which there is no key. While they are waiting for a locksmith, Ricky has to appear on television, so he performs in front of a curtain with his right hand behind his back, but Lucy extends her right arm from under his armpit and does gestures with her hand to correspond with the words of his song. It kind of looks like something that was probably done years ago on vaudeville, but it was very clever anyway.