Tomato Surgery

            On Thursday morning during song practice my high E string broke. That was probably a good thing because for the last few months I’d been using a 17-gauge B string for a 13 gauge E string, although I couldn’t really tell the difference.

I found a word for “tomato disemboweler" that rhymes with “potato cannon" and that was "tomato surgeon".

            I finished working out the chords for “C’est la vie qui veut ca” by Serge Gainsbourg and started posting it on my Christian’s Translations blog.

            I went down the street to the hardware store and bought a new bucket to replace the one that got broken and thrown out. I also bought a new scrub brush because the on I had was extremely worn out. I only realized when I got home that my landlord must have thrown away my old brush as well since it had been with the other items on the deck when he trashed them.

            I took another stab at trying to wash and scrub the glue from the floorboards on the threshold between my living room and the kitchen. I made some progress but I’ve concluded that glue is very sticky. The area looks a lot less spotty but it definitely needs at least another session.

            I wanted to get some advice from Parkdale Community Legal Services to find out if I could legally deduct the cost of the items that my landlord threw away. I saw online that they would be open from 15:00 to 17:00 that day and so I delayed my siesta and stayed awake to I could be there when they opened. But when I got to Noble and Queen the building that had once housed Parkdale Legal was now under construction. I asked a guy in a hard hat and he told me they had moved to 201 Cowan. That address is a church but I found out there are offices in the basement of an adjacent building in the back. But those were only the offices for Parkdale Legal and I was told the intake was at the Parkdale Intercultural Association between the Liquor Store and Fullworth.

            I told the receptionist my issue and he told me to take a seat. There were a lot of people waiting. I asked if this was their permanent location but he said it’s only temporary. He told me that they might be moving to the basement of the Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre.

            It was a long wait. I did a bit of reading of George Meredith’s "Modern Love" but it was past my naptime and I was finding it hard to concentrate. Lots of people were there for various issues. There was a guy trying to keep from getting deported; there was a man who needed English versions of his educational certificates from his home country for the purposes of immigration; there was a woman from the States who wanted her visa extended; there was a homeless man who’d gotten an apartment in Hamilton but had lost all of his idea and so he couldn't take the place until he could prove his identity. He had been at Parkdale Legal previously for another issue and they had scanned some pieces of his identification. He wondered if they still had the pictures on their computer. The receptionist had to call the offices on Cowan to find out if they had copies of his identification. They did have them and someone brought them over, saving him from homelessness.

            When I finally saw a law student she told me that it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to just unilaterally deduct the cost of my lost things from my rent. She said one option would be for me to file an application to the Landlord Tenant Bureau for compensation but she said that would be an arduous process. Because of the legal clinic’s current unstable status they only have one supervising lawyer present on a given intake day and on this day that lawyer was not a housing expert and so she told me she would talk with her supervisor about my options and email me next week.

            After leaving Parkdale Legal I ran into my former yoga student, Anna. We chatted for a few minutes. She kept on urging me to come out to some of the regular local events that she goes to. I told her that I’m busy with school.

            It was already 16:20 and so by the time I took a siesta and got up it would be too late to take a bike ride downtown and back, so I decided to just go to the supermarket skip the bike ride. At Freshco I bought a small watermelon for $2 and I’m getting pretty good at picking a good one. I didn’t bother buying nectarines or grapes because they didn't have any good ones. I got some one-year-old cheddar, three bags of milk and three containers of Greek yogurt.

            In the evening I did some exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish is just preparing to start a bank that just keeps people’s money without giving it back when a woman comes into his office thinking it’s the lecture bureau. When she says she has the $50 to pay for the lecturer Kingfish tells her she's in the right place. He arranges for Andy to memorize a speech on the psychology of homemaking but the day of the lecture it turns out that the first lecturer is the man that wrote that speech. Andy fumbles through an alternative lecture but it’s a big success because they think he's being deliberately funny.

            I had a potato, three slices of roast beef and some gravy for dinner while watching Annette. The story begins with Annette's first day at Old South High School. As she expected, since her rural schooling did not have Latin or Algebra, Annette will be held back in Grade 10. But she gets to share a classroom with her new friend Jet. However, because Jet is a farm girl she is not part of the in crowd even though the popular girls would accept Jett if Laura didn’t object to her. Laura still believes that Annette stole her necklace at the party and at lunchtime in the malt shop she insinuates that accusation. Annette confronts her and Laura backs down. We learn that Jet has a major crush on Steve. Aunt Lila tries to steer Annette away from hanging around with Jet because the other girls would advance her social standing. Uncle Archie reminisces about how he and Jet’s father used to be close and he wonders how people drift apart. Steve appoints Annette the entertainment chairman for her class and she asks Jet to be her assistant.

            Those were the last episodes on this digital copy of CD1. The rest is a documentary about Annette, featuring the full Mickey Mouse Club episode that contained the first episode of Annette. It was mentioned that she was the first ethnic teen idol. I hadn’t really thought of her as being ethnic when I was a kid but I guess she did stand out from all of the other Mouseketeers.

            That night I hard some shouting, “Leave me alone!" I looked outside and saw two bike cops hassling a guy in the bus shelter in front of the Elaine Fleck Gallery. He repeated, “Leave me alone” several times and then, “Don’t touch my stuff!” Then, “Let me go!" I heard slamming against the glass of the shelter. He was then outside the shelter and down on the sidewalk as he pleaded with them to leave him alone and told them he wasn’t bothering anybody. People gathered around and someone called to the cops, "He's not fighting back!" The guy being hassled finally said he’d tell them his name. I hope it wasn’t the guy that had been at Parkdale Legal earlier ending up in more hassles that would keep him homeless.