Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Freedom of the Press

           


             Tuesday, May 17th was my daughter, Astrid’s birthday. The day before that I finally hooked up the Canon scanner that Nick Cushing gave me a few months ago. It took me quite a while to find a driver for it though. I went through some old photos of Astrid from when she was two and scanned it. There were scratches on the picture though, so I opened it up in paint and enlarged the image, then copied and pasted pixels until the scratches were filled in. It took two or three hours. On Tuesday, I decided to see if I could find the journal entry to match the day I took the picture. I figured it would be in my 1993 journal and based on the way I had dressed Astrid to be outdoors it had to have been sometime from May of that year on. I found it in about ten minutes.
            On Tuesday evening went for my bike ride. There was a young man preaching with a portable microphone and an amplifier at the corner of Dufferin and Bloor. I’d never seen anyone dealing religion in that area before.
            East of Sherbourne, a cyclist in logoed spandex whizzed past me, then a shaved headed guy in black with a wallet chain also barrelled by. The bald guy made a valiant effort and was almost able to pass the spandexed rider, but he fell behind. Was he faster than me? Ultimately, no, because I passed him where he had stopped, out of breath, just before Castle Frank.
            A jogger wearing a hot pink t-shirt had a face that was almost the same colour. At first I thought that she had sunburn but I think the sun was reflecting off of her breasts and into her face.

            I went north on Broadview, and about halfway to Mortimer I stopped to look at some stuff that had been thrown out in two big open boxes. There was a Pyrex French press, which I took, even though I have a working one already. Considering how long I went without a French press after the last one broke, I think it’s a good idea to have a back up. There was a wooden honey dipper, which I took even though I rarely buy honey. I took three sizes and colours of Tupperware bowls with covers, a skillet and a large wooden salad bowl with wooden tongs. There were a lot of books, mostly romantic novels, but the one book I took contained ten French stories by Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Claudel, Gide, Mauriac, Ayme and Camus. Not only that, but the stories are presented in both English and French, which I think will be useful as I continue to try to learn the language.

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