I didn’t get to bed until just before 1:30 on Friday
and stayed awake for quite a while. Despite all that I didn’t feel all that
tired when the alarm rang at 5:07. Maybe I was excited because it was my
birthday.
After
yoga gave myself the present of doing a shortened song rehearsal. I sang three
of my own songs and then seven of my translations. My new denture held very
well and so for the first time in a long time I was able to belt out the songs
with full confidence that nothing was going to start wobbling in my mouth. After
practice I finished uploading a translation to my blog and then transcribed the
lyrics to “Mamadou”, which was the next Serge Gainsbourg song that I planned to
translate and learn to play.
After
doing three rehearsals of the ten minute piece that I plan on performing at the
Words and Music Salon on June 3rd, I had breakfast. Nothing fancy,
just two pieces of raisin toast, a bowl of cereal and half a container of
yogourt with some chocolate. While making coffee, after I’d poured the boiling
water into my French press and put the kettle back on the turned off element, I
reached over it to turn on the oven. At that moment, the kettle suddenly
started spitting steam and in reflex my hand flew backwards and slammed into
the bottom corner of the over the counter shelf. It really hurt and even
started bleeding slightly without the blood running. It looked almost like a
little dog bite afterwards and smarted for the rest of the day.
I
spent the rest of the morning freeing up space on my computer because I’d
started downloading a few porno films and they needed a little more space.
After
taking a shower in the early afternoon, I got dressed and headed out to shop
for a birthday present for myself. I was wearing shorts and at first I
regretted it because it was chillier than I’d expected. I considered going back
home to change but either it warmed up or I got used to it.
The
first place I went was the Salvation Army thrift store in my neighbourhood.
There have been times when I’ve found some good stuff there but in the last
couple of years I don’t think they’ve had much of anything that I wanted. This
is despite the fact that they had a sale of dress pants for $2.
I
rode up to Value Village at Bloor and Lansdowne. I keep looking for a clamshell
shaped light fixture or soap dish at these places but nothing ever turns up. I
noticed they had a rainstick for $25 and I was curious if it sounded as good as
the one I made for almost nothing. It didn’t. They had some reasonable shorts
that might have fit me but I realized while I was there that what I really
wanted to do was to get a curtain rod. A year before that I had bought my
curtains there and put them on my window by folding over and pinning the tops,
but I’d always had in mind actually making them fully functional as curtains by
mounting a rod. I looked around the store but they had nothing in terms of rods
at all, so I left.
I
stopped in at the Salvation Army thrift store just east of Lansdowne on Bloor.
They also had a $2 sale but once again there was nothing in the way of pants
that would fit me. They had no curtain rods either.
I
went down Brock Avenue to the back of the Dufferin Mall. I went in since I was
passing because I wanted to look for an adaptor that would connect my
microphone to Nick Cushing’s drift cam. While locking my bike on my last few
stops I’d been having trouble with the lock. I’d had to fiddle with it for a
while each time to get it to close. Finally I peeled off all the rubber armour
and it closed a little better.
Before
going to The Source I went to the washroom at the north end of the mall. Just
after washing my hands I was about to leave when a big man in a very large
metallic red electric scooter started coming in. He was having a comically hard
time getting his wheelchair around the corner, though for a normally sized
vehicle of that type it would have been a breeze. He had to back up about three
times to change his angle of approach until he finally got in and it
immediately reminded me of that humorous trucker song from the 1960s, “Give Me
40 Acres and I’ll Turn This Rig Around”. When he finally made it in I couldn’t
help but comment, “Maybe you need a smaller machine!” He smiled with
embarrassment and said, “Yeah!” but he probably meant, “Go fuck yourself!”
At
The Source I found that they had the adaptor I need but that it costs $12.99
there. I didn’t want to spend that much because I still wanted to get a curtain
rod and buy some food. I made a mental note to check at Staples for the same
thing the next time I have money. I suspected it would be cheaper there.
I
rolled down Brock Avenue to my neighbourhood and stopped at the Home Hardware
on Queen Street. At the back they had some very long wooden dowels that looked
like they might fit my double window. I tried to figure out the price and there
was a measurement on the end of the dowel but I couldn’t find a matching price
for it on the rack. I asked the moustachioed senior staff guy who’s been there
at least for the two decades that I’ve lived in Parkdale and though he’s often
quite nice, he seemed annoyed this time by my question. He said that the prices
were on the rack but found out for me that it was 2.4 meters long and that it
$7.29. That price seemed okay to me so I went home to re-measure my window
frame. It looked to me that the dowel would fit, so I went back and bought it.
Then I inquired about brackets for attaching the dowel but their selection
wasn’t very good. He suggested that I go a couple of doors down to the fabric
place because they have a fairly large selection of curtain accessories. I did
that and found they had some nice curtain brackets for $5 each. I said I might
be back and went to the Dollarama to see if by chance they had curtain rod
brackets. They didn’t, but they did have something that looked like it might
serve as pretty good rod holders: coat hooks. I decided though to check through
my junk drawer at home before buying two coat hooks because I was pretty sure I
had some. Before leaving though I checked their minimal electronics section to
see if they had the adaptor I needed, but they didn’t.
My
two adjacent junk drawers in the kitchen have things that I’ve accumulated
since the 80s and carried around from apartment to apartment. I don’t even
remember now where most of the stuff came from but I’m pretty sure that at
least 90% of it consists of found items. Going through the bottom one I found
several double coat hooks. The two smallest ones matched and their bottom hooks
fit the diameter of the dowel perfectly.
I
found four small screws and secured the two hooks to the upper left and right
corners of my window frame. When I placed the dowel on the hangers they made
very cute curtain rod holders and I wondered why I’d never heard of anyone
doing that before. I can see online that it’s been done but it seems rare.
Next
I pulled all the thumbtacks out that had been holding the folded upper parts of
the curtains on top of the window frame. Once the curtains were unravelled I
was surprised to discover that they were far too long to hang from the curtain
rod at the level that I’d placed the coat hooks.
The
loops of the curtains were quite long, so I decided to tie each of them in a
knot to shorten them, but they still weren’t short enough. I held the rod with
the curtains hanging from it up until the hem skirted the top off the radiator
cover that I was standing on. I marked how high on the wall the rod would have
to be and saw that it was 31 centimetres above the window frame. That meant
that I couldn’t use the coat hooks after all because the screws that they
required were too small to grip anything inside the wall. I needed to find an
entirely different solution.
I
took a break from working on the curtain rod problem and went out to the liquor
store to buy three cans of Creemore. Then I rode to Freshco where I bought
bananas, pears, strawberries, a tomato, four chicken legs for $3, milk and
yogourt.
When
I got home, after putting away my groceries I got back to work on finding an
answer to my curtain rod attachment problem. I found a few L-brackets, with two
larger screw holes on each arm, that I’d bought years ago to repair drawers
that were falling apart. I thought about possibly bending one arm of each
bracket so that it curved up enough to hold the rod. I thought about going up
the street to Bike Pirates to ask if I could use their vice but I thought it
would be too easy to do an uneven bend and difficult to get the exact same bend
for each bracket without a machine doing it. Besides, Bike Pirates was closed
on Fridays. I dug through my junk drawers some more and found two rubber
O-rings for attaching bicycle bells or horns to handlebars. Suddenly I started
to feel very clever. The idea that came to me was to screw the two L-brackets
into the wall with the top arm extending away from the wall and then to use the
screw and bolt combo that was already part of each O-ring to attach them to
each side of the outer screw holes of the extended bracket arms.
I
spent some time measuring in order to make sure the brackets would be in the
right positions so the rod wouldn’t be slanted. I screwed them in into the wall
and they held but I think eventually I might have to re-secure them with screw
plugs. Then I attached the O-rings and they looked and worked great as rod
holders. I really felt like I’d given myself the present of doing something
innovative on my birthday.
The
next problem though was that there was only a finger width between the rings
and the ends of the dowel, so when I tried to open or close the curtains, one
end would slip out of its ring. I went back to my junk drawer and almost right
away found my solution: two matching four centimetre long wooden cone dowels
with screws already attached. I screwed one into each end of the curtain rod
with the widest part on the inside. That way there was enough to catch on the
outside of the ring so the rod wouldn’t slip out just from moving the curtain.
My
final problem was that the curtains were too narrow to fully close by coming
together in the middle. I figured that this was because I had bunched them up a
bit when I’d tied knots in the loops. So I untied each loop and that released
them enough for the curtains to come together. It was very satisfying to gat
something accomplished on my birthday and to now have curtains that would now
easily open and close too.
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