Don't Forget what You Came to Get Because You Can't Come Back

            On Saturday morning I almost finished posting “Le bras mécanique” (The Mechanical Arm) by Serge Gainsbourg on Christian's translations. I would have finished on Thursday if not for persistent connectivity problems each morning.

            At around 11:00 I headed down to No Frills earlier than usual in hopes of beating the line-up but it was even worse than the week before. The line went from the door to the end of the parking lot, back down the other side of the parking lot, west on King Street to Springhurst and then south to the alley. Several guys that had expected Springhurst and King to be the end of the line said, "What the fuck?” when they looked south and saw that it kept going. One old Portuguese guy did the same but also said, Fuck you!” a couple of times, once while looking straight at me. A guy ahead of me said to a guy ahead of him that they want us to be two meters apart but once we’re inside they don’t seem to care. One man asked me how far the line went down. I told him it went to Hamilton and he’d have to take a bus to get to the end. Then I assured him I was joking. There were probably about seventy people in line all together.

            It was cold on that side of the block and I had to wear my spring gloves while I read a few pages of the chapter on Indigenous health in Yale Belanger’s Ways of Knowing. There was no sun until the line was up to the parking lot and it wasn’t warm sun until we were in the first half of the parking lot line-up with the commercial and residential high rise on our right.

            Altogether I was in line for about an hour.

            I bought strawberries. The grapes weren’t very good but I needed something so I gout a few bags of green ones. I grabbed an apple pie and some bacon. I was looking at the steaks when a woman on the other side of the barrier told me they were cheaper on her side. I went around to the aisle heading in that direction and picked up mouthwash on the way. I got three strip loin steaks, three bags of skim milk, a tub of margarine, roasted garlic and onion spaghetti sauce, kidney beans, kettle chips, eggs, three containers of Greek yogourt and one container of Icelandic yogourt.

            The main problem with the long line-up these days is that if one forgets something one can’t go back. I had planned on buying both paper towels and toilet paper but wasn't going to wait in line for another hour to get them. I would have to stretch what I had out until later next week.

            I had peanut butter on toast for lunch with some orange juice.

            I worked a bit on studying for Monday's exam but the supermarket kind of ate into my day and so after a siesta and doing the dishes there wasn’t a lot of time.

            I added chilli paste, garlic and Worcestershire sauce to the pasta sauce I’d bought. I boiled some rotini to put it on and had it with a beer while watching two episodes of the Sooty Show.

            In the first story Sweep is obsessed with becoming a firedog and has encouraged Matthew to buy smoke detectors for the house. Then while Soo is trying to decide which of her jelly babies to eat Cousin Scampy (also a bear) asks if she wants to swap jelly babies for something. When he produces a box of matches she immediately takes him to Matthew to be lectured about playing with matches. Sooty asks if the smoke alarms work and so Matthew decides to test one with a beekeeper’s smoke gun. One smoke detector goes off but they can’t stop it even after it’s been smashed but it turns out it was a different alarm ringing which could have been simply switched off. Matthew then starts a controlled garden fire to burn brush but Sweep comes along and puts it out with his hose. Matthew then starts a barbecue fire but sweep douses that as well. Then Sweep sees smoke coming over their neighbour’s wall. Matthew says he’ll handle it and dumps a bucket of water over the wall. But he has dumped water on a very big man smoking a very big pipe. The angry giant dumps a bucket on Matthew. They finish the show by telling kids to remind their parents to buy smoke detectors and then the sing a song about not playing with matches.

            In the second story Sweep is Super Dog but his powers are not working accurately. It turns out that this is because his archenemy The Comedian has a machine that can drain the brain of anyone whose photograph he hooks to it. He causes Sooty, Soo and Matthew to do naughty things. Sooty uses a magic wand to make the Comedian and his machine appear in their home. While the Comedian is distracted performing his bad comedy routine, Sooty feeds the Comedian’s picture to his own machine and causes him to do nasty things to himself. Sooty’s magic wand then sends the comedian back to his planet. Then everyone wakes Sweep up because he’s been dreaming about being Superdog.