Spitting Off of Bridges

            I first found out about my English essay assignment five weeks before the deadline of February 28. I thought I would have plenty of time to dedicate to writing a great paper, but what with bike repairs, work and other things that came up, after almost two weeks I haven’t got much more than a seventh of the thing thrown together. On Sunday I needed to do laundry and since it’s winter and I’ve been wearing a lot of layers, the garbage bag full of clothing that I had to carry while riding my bike was bigger than usual. With the Phoenix when I carted laundry there was sometimes the problem of the bottom of the bag getting whipped by the spokes and a small hole getting ripped in the corner. But this was my first time carting laundry with the mountain bike, which has a much wider space between the forks and the spokes and on the way back with my clean clothes the corner of the bag got pulled right into the wheel, pulling some of my clothes right out to wind around the front wheel. I had to get off and carry my bike over to the bike stands in front of the liquor store. I tried to pull the back out but I couldn’t until I started turning it to unwind the clothing, some of which ended up touching the wet ground after having just been washed and dried. The bag now had two holes at opposite ends. I managed to stuff the clothing back inside and to tie the bag with the slack around each ragged opening.

            I put the torrent file that I’d downloaded of Microsoft Office onto a flashdrive and tried to install it on my laptop but the program copied as an image file and so it was useless. The next thing I did was to go online with my laptop but it seems that I get a better signal when I’m sitting with it on the floor. I downloaded Bit Torrent but when I tried to access Pirate Bay the site was down. Since I had to work early the next morning, since I had no idea how long Pirate Bay would be down and because I definitely needed to be able edit Word documents with my laptop during breaks at work, I had no choice but to join the cult of Open Office like Nick Cushing and Neil Rich have been bugging me about. I downloaded Open Office and had it working in half an hour. Since I tend to create the files on my main computer in Microsoft Word, I would only be using Open Office for minor edits anyway.

            I roasted four chicken legs and marinated them with Chardonnay Citrus gourmet sauce. It isn’t bad but it tastes more like onion than either chardonnay or citrus. I guess it’s not as sexy to call it “Onion Gourmet Sauce” though.

            I watched two episodes of “Leave It To Beaver”. The second one had some interesting parts. Beaver was trying to make some money because Wally, Tooey and Eddy Haskell had decided to build a clubhouse but Eddy said Beaver couldn’t join unless he paid them three dollars. Beaver set about to try to make the money. He asked his mother who the richest person in town was and found out that he’d made his money through advertising. While sitting in the park he met a guy who makes a living wearing a sandwich board, so Beaver made his own sandwich board. While walking across his favourite spitting bridge he talked to a worker that was painting it and asked him who owned the bridge. The painter said, “Well, everybody, including you”. Beaver wrote a sign that read: “Ten Cents To Spit Off My Bridge” and he ended up making about six dollars. But later in the park the same bum came to sit down and upon hearing that Beaver had made some money he gave him a sob story about how his daughter had nothing to eat. He said that he’d stolen her mother out from under the nose of a sultan and that she had danced with bells on her ankles. But after they’d had a daughter together the mother died and so he was left to fend for both himself and his little girl who had blue eyes during the day and brown eyes at night. Beaver gave him all his money. When Beaver told the story to his brother, Wally told him that he’d gotten duped because everybody knows that guy was a con man. Beaver informed Wally that he’d known that the story wasn’t true all along. Wally asked, “Well, why did you give him your money then?” Beaver answered, “Cause nobody ever told me a story like that before.”