Toronto Tap-water

            Every morning during song practice I drink two tall glasses of tap water. Every now and then the water tastes a bit chemically but it’s bearable. On Friday though it tasted like iodine. I had to drink some just to keep my throat from drying out but I could only force down at the most about a third of a glass. It was the absolute worst tap water I’ve tasted in the 36 years that I’ve lived in Toronto. That afternoon I left a message of complaint to the city’s water filtration service.

            My internet connection continued to be sporadic. The Coffeetime network still hadn’t been repaired but since it allows users to go on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter I wonder how many complaints the staff get about it. Maybe most people don’t use free wi-fi for much besides social media. In the late morning I was able to connect to the Capital network and got some stuff done.

            In the late afternoon I’m took a bike ride, but as I was rolling through the heat and the Annex I felt my handlebars slip a little forward. I ignored it but then they tilted again. Just before Spadina they went all the way forward and I had to stop to avoid wiping out. The Allen nut in the quill stem that locks the handlebars must have gotten loose. I straddled the cross bar and pulled the handlebars back up, then I crossed Bloor and very carefully rode back the way I came because I knew that eastbound there wasn’t a bike shop until somewhere out on the Danforth. While pulling up on my handlebars I pedaled a few blocks until I saw Sweet Pete’s. I went in and asked if I could borrow an Allen key. The mechanic said that they don’t let people use their tools but he’d tighten for me. I told him that I couldn’t afford to pay him. He assured me that he’d do it for free but they have a very strict policy against lending tools. It’s actually a very sensible rule, so I had no problem with it, especially since I didn’t have to pay for his help.

            He tightened the stem but warned me that if it happens again I should change both the stem and the handlebars. He explained that where the stem meets the bars there are supposed to be little teeth for gripping. If I have another slippage of the handlebars then it means that the teeth inside the stem are too worn to grasp the handlebars properly. That made sense but I don’t understand why I would need to change the handlebars as well.

            Going into Sweet Pete’s I hadn’t been sure if it was going to use up too much of my bike ride time, but when I left I felt still gung ho for a ride and so I went for it. There was less cyclists riding east than usual and I wondered if it was just a matter of those fifteen or so minutes that I’d lost putting me behind the bicycle rush hour.

            I went to Glebemount and then north to explore the six block grid from Glebeholme to Queensdale and from Glebemount to Woodbine. Just after turning the corner of Queensdale and Woodbine to head south I saw a little slip-on crock so tiny that it was probably kicked off by a pre-walking child in a stroller.

            On Woodbine just north of Danforth is a Chinese Mennonite church. If someone asked me to name the whitest religion I think the Mennonite faith would only be second to the Amish. I turns out though that they are pretty diverse these days.

            After turning west on Danforth a seagull that had just taken off came within a meter of slamming into my head. It veered off of its collision course just in time.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home and they had a good deal on grapes prominently displayed so that it was the first thing most customers would see. I wanted some, even though it would have been more practical to buy bananas. I had $3.70 but I needed yogourt, so I got a container of zero fat and then went back to the grapes. All the bags of grapes were approximately one kilogram each but I could only afford half that so I removed a bunch from one bag and put it into another and then bought the lighter one.

            After my ride, when I removed my denture it was extremely salty.

            That night I watched two episodes of Jungle Jim. The first went the fantasy route as Jim, his son Skipper and a female botanist went to look for a famous scientist who’d gone missing on a mysterious mountain. The mountain turned out to have been inhabited by giant lizards. No one referred to them as dinosaurs but they did call their habitat a “lost world” and said that it was “out of the past”. To depict the giant lizards the producers just used blown up film footage of normal sized lizards in rocky environments.

            The next episode took Jim, his son and Tamba to the Amazon jungle with a couple of men they think are archaeologists but are really treasure hunters. Hey find a lost city with a map drawn by Sir Walter Scott. The bad guys get killed by Natives. Well, he IS called “Jungle” Jim, so I guess he’s an expert on every jungle.