Need a New Fridge

            On Tuesday the freezer door broke off of my fridge and I called the landlord to tell him I need a new one. This fridge was here when I moved in 21 years ago and now it must be about 40 years old. The ice in the freezer builds up very quickly and when it does the whole fridge gets warmer. I think about ten years ago I asked Raja for a new fridge. I think he measured it and said they don’t make ones as narrow as mine anymore. I think at the time I wanted it to be able to fit in beside my filing cabinet, but I can move things around and make room.

I tried to open a video project in Movie Maker for which I’d synchronized the audio and video last summer but the file no longer existed. It turned out that when I changed the names of all the files a couple of weeks ago so they would appear in chronological order, I effectively destroyed my project. I would have thought that Movie Maker would have just made a copy of the video for the project but it seems that it draws from the original file each time I edit a project even though no changes are made to the original. It seems like a dumb system. I created a document so I can list all of the videos and which songs in them that might be worth editing into separate videos. So now I'll have to re-sync the sound and video for the August 5, 2017 song practice video. I think that another video that I’d synced earlier that summer only had two good takes on it and I already uploaded two songs from that one back in August of last year.

I took a bike ride in the afternoon. This has been a summer with a lot of boringly clear skies but there were some nice clouds this time.

I felt a slight urge to pee at Danforth and Woodbine but I kept on riding. I really had to urinate though while I was climbing Pharmacy. I rode north to Leahurst and took it to its dead end two blocks east. On the way back I stopped to look in a box where I found a few superhero action figures like Iron Man and Goku. There was also a cool looking Spiderman figure that was as tall as the distance from my elbow to my fingertips. I considered bending it into my backpack but then I wondered where I would put it and so I tossed it back in the box. As I rode to Pharmacy the urge to piss was getting extreme and I didn’t think that I was going to make it to the Starbucks on Danforth. Fortunately though there was a gas station on the corner with a washroom.

After relieving myself I went up to Comstock, then crossed the street and started my return trip. By the time I got to Starbucks I had to pee badly again.

When I got home I discovered that the password for the wi-fi had been altered again, just like the Tuesday before. Maybe it’s going to be a weekly thing now. I figured they weren’t going to divert very far from “coffee12", so I tried various combinations like “coffee123" and “coffee1234" until I finally grabbed my laptop and went downstairs to buy a small tea. It looks like even I was getting too fancy because it had only been changed to “coffee16”.

About fifteen minutes after that my landlord came by to look at the fridge. At first he argued that I should just put some hot water in the freezer but I convinced him to get me a fridge. He said that if I would commit to helping him bring it up the stairs he’d get me a new one next week.

I heated up a chicken leg and some gravy and boiled a small potato for dinner and watched two episodes of Dobie Gillis.

The first story was kind of suspenseful and funny but overall pretty silly. Dobie is dating Mrs Osborn's niece, Victoria. They are at the mansion and getting ready to go dancing when Mrs Osborn challenged Dobie to an arm wrestling competition for $25. She wins immediately and suddenly he has no money to take Victoria out. He calls home and talks to his cousin Duncan who is minding the store with Maynard about somehow getting hold of $25 for him. A truck driver comes into the store to use the phone and they overhear him talking to his girlfriend about having to cancel a date with her because he has to pick up a canister of weed killer from the warehouse and deliver it to a golf course. Duncan and Maynard offer to make the pick up and delivery for him for $25, which he gladly agrees to. But at the warehouse a couple of explosives transporters come to pick up a canister of nitro-glycerine for a road building crew. They are about to very carefully cart the canister of nitro-glycerine to their truck when Duncan and Maynard arrive in the Gillis Grocery van. Maynard walks up to the canister of nitro-glycerine that the two experts are gingerly preparing to very slowly move, roughly picks it up, thinking that it’s the weed killer, takes it to the truck and they drive away. The city goes into a panic and is evacuated and roadblocks are set up while Duncan and Maynard drive through town, oblivious to the danger. At one point the truck stalls on a railroad track as a train approaches. Finally they arrive at Osborn Manor where they’ve heard the news reports about the nitro. Dobie lowers the canister down a very deep well on the grounds but Mrs Osborn, angry with Maynard, hits a golf ball towards his head, but slices and it curves around to go down the well and hit the nitro. There is a terrific explosion but the only result is that the Osborns have struck oil on their property.

Victoria was played by Judi Sherven.

In the second story Dobie is trying to be of interest to a gorgeous medical student and so he tells her that he only has six months to live. The word gets out to Dobie’s parents and so they dote on him in between bouts of sobbing and he gets the girl too. It doesn’t go well for him in the end when everyone finds that he’s been lying. His father actually turns Dobie over his knee and spanks him! Dwayne Hickman, the actor that played Dobie would have been 28 or 29 years old at the time.