"Those Nice Young Men In Their Clean White Coats"

            On Tuesday evening I took my first bike ride since Saturday. It started to rain a bit just as I was getting ready to go but had stopped by the time I’d gotten rolling. It was quite a bit chillier than it had been the week before and so I wore an unbuttoned long sleeved shirt over my tank top but I had shorts on. I went as far as Yonge Street but only went south as far as College because Dundas is generally a boring route home and Queen has too many busses on it until September. Once I got to Dovercourt I descended to Queen because I wanted to stop at Freshco on the way home. I only had a toonie to spend and so though I didn’t have any fruit at home I decided to get a container of zero fat yogourt instead.

            For dinner I sautéed some garlic and onions, poured a carton of chicken broth on top of that and then opened up the container of frozen ground chicken that I’d gotten a while ago from the food bank and heated it in the broth until it was thawed. After that I poured it all from the frying pan into a pot, added three cut up three potatoes and let everything boil for the next half hour. It turned out pretty tasty.

            I got rid of a bunch of torrents that I’d started downloading a year ago but had either not even gotten past 0% or never reached 100%. I played the ones that had gotten to over 30%, though only some of them would something. The only real keeper among them was 97% of an episode of the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. Not so much for the silly story but for the segment at the end where they do a dialogue onstage similar to heir old vaudeville routine. Gracie was telling George about the last four of her Aunt Clara’s nine husbands. For number six he had placed an ad in the paper looking for a man that was young, tall, handsome and brave. Several men answered it but she picked Earnest, who was short, old, bald and knock-kneed. George asked why she’d picked him and Gracie answered that she figured that if he was brave enough to answer that ad it made up for the rest. Husband number eight, Uncle Leo was a doctor and a fine man but when he started coming home and repeating the things that his patients said to him every day it made her very nervous, so she left him. George wondered why that bothered her. Gracie explained that he was a tree surgeon. George inquired, “Who came after Uncle Leo?” “A couple of men in white coats.”