Track Lighting

On Saturday after the food bank I came home to put my groceries away and saw my landlord and his wife out on the deck cleaning up the mess of months of strewn garbage caused by a combination of raccoons and the lousy job that Sundar does as a superintendent. There are three plastic garbage cans on wheels, but the wheels are pointless, since these cans are not wheeled downstairs and out to the curb. There are plastic fasteners to hold the lids on the cans but either other tenants don’t close them or the racoons know how to unhook them. Other times the cans are so full that it’s impossible to put the lids on them. Of the three cans though, one of them has been sitting upside down and unused for the last year. I asked Sundar why he didn’t use that can and he answered that there was no cover for it. But now I could see that there was a cover all along. Maybe he meant the cover had no snaps like the others, which is true.

I told Raja that what he needs is for someone to build a big wooden bin with a liftable lid on hinges to put under the fire escape that we can put the garbage into and which would be too heavy for the raccoons to lift. He thought that was a good idea. I said that the deck would be a nice place to sit if not for the garbage situation. He agreed and mentioned that he was considering making a gate in the railing on the deck so that the garbage could be kept off the deck on the roof.

I headed up to Long and McQuade to buy a small E-string, because I always want to have an extra in case of breakage. If this weren’t the lean time of year I would have bought three, because Es and Bs are the ones that break the most. When I got there, as usual there was a mix up in communication because I asked for the string in its metric measurement. I requested a 0.33mm string but he looked for a .033-inch string, which would be a D. When I finally told him that in Imperial he was looking for a .013 he understood. Most strings that I’ve seen have both the metric and its conversion written on the package, so I was surprised when he handed me one that only showed “13”. It cost $1.10.

I’d thought that it was the law in Canada to show the metric measurements on packaging but when I looked it up I saw that it doesn’t seem to be enforced in every area. Canada is a strange incompatible mutation of the old and the new systems. Some of that is based on ties to, mixed with resistance to the British monarchy. Many Canadians are as slow to change as people in the States. I’ll bet that if there had been a referendum on the matter we wouldn’t even have universal health care in Canada. In many regards we are lucky to have a large population of more socially progressive people in Quebec than in the rest of Canada, so it keeps our country from turning into the States.

On the way home I was riding under the railroad bridge at Dufferin and Queen and I thought the light coming through the tracks above and hitting shadows below looked interesting so I stopped to take a picture. I opened my backpack but I couldn’t find my camera. I rode home and couldn’t find it there either. I was starting to worry when I looked in my bag again and found it exactly where it was supposed to be. It’s a mystery why I couldn’t find it before. I headed back to the underpass and took a few shots.

That afternoon I took a bike ride to finish exploring the Parkview Hills neighbourhood. There wasn’t much bike traffic on Bloor or Danforth in either direction. There was a jazz band busking in front of the Manulife Centre. I took Bermondsey from where it goes west off of O’Connor and then followed its curve north to Eglinton, which I took east to Victoria Park, then back to O’Connor and home. My next few rides will be to explore the streets that run east from Don Mills Road to the Don River as far north as Eglinton.