A French Press is Better than a Coffee Bar

On Thursday my connection to the internet from Coffee Time was still limited, so later that morning I went over to the Capital Espresso with my laptop and spent $2.75 on a small cup of coffee that really wasn’t as tasty as what I make with my French press only to find out that my laptop still has the right password. While I was there I renewed some OISE library books that re due that day. The Capital has another network called CAP_WEB_2G and the guy behind the counter claimed the name was the password too but when I tried it at home it wouldn’t work.
            After that I went to Coffee Time where I splurged on a tea. I asked about the wi-fi and a counter person said that a customer had complained about the network. I sat by the window and had the same problem connecting as I’d had upstairs. I walked back to the counter to tell them when I saw Dennis, from Bike Pirates in the line-up. He asked if I’d be coming by the shop later but I said that fortunately I had nothing that needed to be done. He affirmed that was a very good thing. I checked my watch, saw that it was 10:30 and since Bike Pirates opens at noon on Thursdays I wondered why Dennis was there so early. He said he needed to saw up some bike frames for the scrap guy. I told the other counter person that the wi-fi wasn’t working properly. She responded apologetically in a British accent that it was indeed not working “propahly”. For some reason I found it very charming that an attractive young Black woman was speaking like Lady Di and she was so nice that it put me in a good mood. She told me that the “managah” would be coming in the afternoon and hopefully he would deal with the problem. At least now I knew that it was a hopefully temporary glitch on their part.

At home I was able to sporadically connect to the internet through the Capital network, though I had to constantly retry over and over throughout the rest of the day in order to complete tasks like posting on my blog and accessing my OCADU pay statement that would have normally taken me just a few minutes.

My day got kind of screwed and skewed around my internet limitations. I had expected it to rain because I’d heard there would be a 60% chance and so I didn’t take a bike ride to the east end. I might have been tempted to chance it though if my web connectivity problems hadn’t eaten up so much time. I did ride over to the mailbox to send my income statement to social services and while I was out I decided to ride a little further. I thought I’d go up to College, east to Dovercourt, south to Queen and then on the way back stop into Freshco, but I realized that I’d left my $3.70 at my place so I just went around the block to home. I thought about about grabbing my money and going back out but nature was calling and by the time I’d shut it up I felt like it was too late to go out again.

That night I watched the final episode of Leave It To Beaver. Rather than going out with a bang they opted for an excuse to show flashbacks of previous episodes. The premise was that they were looking at a family scrapbook and each picture was a still from a different situation, which was zoomed in on for the flashback. The thing was there wouldn’t have been anyone there with a camera to capture any of those moments. The whole series was entertaining and interesting but there was only one outstanding episode in the whole six years. That was the one where Beaver and Wally played with the two sons of the garbage man and learned from them how to appreciate their lives.

I watched the first episode of Jungle Jim, starring Johnny Weismuller. It was a TV show in the mid 50s that carried on after a series of films that he started after he was no longer buff enough to swing around half naked as Tarzan but still looked good enough with his clothes on to play the comic strip hero. The premise was that Jungle Jim was a legendary guide who lived in the jungle in some unnamed part of Africa with his son Skipper, his assistant Kaseem and their chimpanzee Tamba. The original newspaper-strip character’s adventures started in 1934 and were set in southern Asia. In the first television story Jim was on his way home to his house in the jungle by riverboat, but also on the vessel was a big game hunter who Jim diverted from shooting a lion that was on the shore but for some illogical reason the wild shot inadvertently caused the beast to turn into a man eater. Jim had to fight and kill both the lion and earlier a crocodile with only a knife. Skipper is shown to be an expert archer who used his arrows to scare away animals that the hunter was trying to bag. Kaseem is a very good knife thrower. Tamba was comic relief, though he did help save the day. He almost killed everyone with a rifle in the end though but they thought it was hilarious. They’d probably give a monkey a gun license in the United States.