On Friday morning
I had a functional guitar tuner again, which saved a lot of time and on top of
that my guitar didn’t go out of tune very much, so I was way ahead.
Since the beginning of the summer a
short school bus has stopped in the Dollarama parking lot at the same time
every morning. The driver, a man that looks like he’s in his late 60s, turns on
all the flashers, extends the crossing arm, then walks all around the bus to do
a safety check. He even uses a flashlight to see if everything is hunky dory
underneath. His assessment takes about ten minutes and then he drives away.
I looked online for images of the
Fullworth store to post with my blog about the day before but there weren’t any
good ones, so I went out to take my own. It’s not a very photogenic store,
especially not in the glare of almost midday.
I spent about an hour working on my
book cover.
It looked like it was going to rain
in the early afternoon but it didn’t and the sun came out at the time I would
normally go for my bike ride, so I went. The Waste of the Danforth festival had
Danforth blocked off, so I rode up Broadview to where it becomes O’Connor,
continued on to Woodbine, across the bridge over Taylor Creek to St Clair and
then north past Yardley, which I’d ridden on the day before but now the
pavement had been stripped. The next street was Galbraith, which I followed to
Victoria Park.
On one of the side streets off
Galbraith there was a rattling little car that had been punched in where its
left headlight used to be. It was obviously not a recent wound because the
crumpled metal was all rusted in its wrinkles.
I went back by way of O’Connor also.
At Pape it started to lightly rain and it kept it up till Mortimer where I
stopped at Whistler’s to use the washroom. When I came out the sun was shining
again.
At Yonge Street my crankset started
to behave strangely again. It wasn’t the same warped movement as last week but
rather more like the problem I’d had at the end of June when I needed to change
the cotter pins. The thing was though that I’d just changed both pins the week
before. Was one of the new pins faulty or is there something wrong with my
crankset? It looked like I’d be spending another Saturday at Bike Pirates, even
though I wouldn’t have any money to donate for another two and a half weeks.
When I got home there was a letter
from the Toronto Transitional Housing Allowance Program. I opened it hopefully
only to read that I was not eligible for the program. The reason for rejecting
my application though was absurd. They said that my application was sent after
the March 21st deadline. I knew that I had missed that deadline and
that’s why I hadn’t sent in the application, but on Monday July 24th
I got a call from someone that told me she was contacting people that had
missed the deadline in order to tell them they could still apply and that it
wasn’t too late if they did it right away. That afternoon I filled it out. I
attached a copy of my 2015 notice of tax assessment. I downloaded and filled
out a direct deposit form from my bank. I would accept just about any excuse
for rejecting my application, but not because I was past the deadline since
someone called to tell me it wasn’t too late. I thought this was probably a
bureaucratic error resulting from one section of the same government office not
knowing what another is doing. I was angry and ready to fight this, but it was
Friday night and I couldn’t call them till Monday. I hadn’t deleted the list of
phone calls made to my phone for a long time so I scrolled back to the morning
of July 24th. The number that had called me was 416-397-7438. I did
a search on the number and found that it was from Social Services. So it was I
assume a Toronto social worker that had called me and not someone from the
Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Somehow it seems the two offices got
their wires crossed. I guessed the Ontario people might be able to just claim
that the Toronto people got it wrong. I would have to call both offices on
Monday and see what could be done.
One assumes that since the worker
told me on July 24th that she was calling everyone that had not sent
in their applications by March 21st, there must have been a lot of
people whose applications were turned down based on her call. I’ll bet that I
sent mine in a lot sooner than the others that she’d called.
There was one funny segment in the
Maverick episode I watched that night. The sheriff of Virginia City told Bart
maverick that he had to leave town in 24 hours unless he’d become gainfully
employed. The next day when the sheriff came to kick him out Bart announced
that he couldn’t legally make him leave because he had found a job. When asked
what the job was he told him that he was a camel spotter. Every hour he had to
look outside to see if there were any camels and if there were he would notify
the state department about the invasion.
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