After the food bank on Saturday I went to the bank machine
at King and Dufferin to take out $20, then I went to Freshco to buy some
grapes, bananas and yogourt. I set aside $2.50 because I wanted to go to the
café across the street and find out their correct wi-fi password. I figured
that when I’d gone there on Thursday I must have misunderstood what they’d told
me because what I’d written down hadn’t worked as a network key.
When I got
home I put the groceries away, grabbed my laptop, went across to the café and
stood in line. I was all ready to spend $2.50 plus a tip for a coffee but when
I saw the very obvious password written on the blackboard in capital letters
underneath the name of their network I decided that I was too poor to spend
that much on a small cup of coffee. I went to the liquor store instead to buy a
couple of cans of Creemore. Back home after a couple of tries I was able to log
onto a much less slippery signal than the café’s other network. I finally got
some of my regular internet dependant tasks accomplished that had been so
difficult for the last three days.
There was a
chance of thunderstorms but the sky didn’t look that way in the late afternoon
so I took my bike ride. I made sure before I left though, in case of another
handlebar slippage situation, to fish from my tool drawer the set of Allen keys
that Nick Cushing had given me. It seemed kind of dumb for me not to have had
them with me in the first place, seeing as how they don’t take up much space in
my backpack. Since it was Saturday there was a lot less competition from other
cyclists at that hour. I passed several musical ensembles of various genres as
I travelled along Bloor. Some were busking and some seemed to be part of little
festivals.
Just after
Broadview on the Danforth the cops were diverting the cars off the main drag,
but I signalled to the policeman to ask if that meant me and he waved me
forward. I was worried that they were setting up for the annual Taste of the
Danforth, or as I call it, “The Taste of Hades”, but it turned out that they
were just unloading the barriers to close off a block or two on Saturday for
the sixth annual Taste of the Grill festival.
I rode to
Glebemount and then north to explore the four block grid from Queensdale to
Frater and from Glebemount to Woodbine. On the way back, I stopped at the
Broadview traffic light and on the corner there was an evangelist, with a sign
that read “Sacrifice”, being debated forcefully by a young man on a bicycle.
Together they made for an interesting image and I stayed to take a few pictures
of them but they were backlit by the sun so it didn’t turn out as well as I’d
hoped.
I rode all
the way to Brock on Bloor Street and then home. It had been a satisfying ride
that made me feel healthy and strong. On top of that I discovered that
Coffeetime had repaired its wi-fi, so I had my most dependable connection back.
That night
I watched the last two of the five Jungle Jim episodes that I’d found on Pirate
Bay. In the first one, Jim got shanghaied by a group that wanted him to guide
them to a giant pearl in the jungle of an island in the south seas that was
forbidden to white people. His motivation was that they’d sent one of their
crew, who happened to be a former member of the Gestapo, to Jim’s place, with orders
to kill his son if he didn’t obey them. They found the natives of the island
about to sacrifice a beautiful young woman to their oyster god.
In the
second episode, Jim, because of a clerical error on the part of education
officials back in the States, had received a letter that his son Skipper had
been showing poor test results on his lessons. Because of this Jim hired a very
prim, middle-aged tutor for Skipper named Mrs. Haddock. Despite the fact that
she was working for an expert in the jungle she considered Jim’s knowledge to
be inferior to a certain Dr. Flugle who’d written a book about Africa that she
always carried with her. It turned out though that Flugle was a proven fraud
that’d never even been to Africa. Since Flugle’s book talked about the
elephants graveyard she insisted that it really existed and took Jim’s son with
her to look for it. They found poachers and trouble.
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