Flying Saucers

            On Friday morning I got up at 5:00 because I’d reset the alarm on the flying saucer clock. It’s a pretty quiet sound of a rooster crowing, just like the sound one would expect to come from a flying saucer.

It was raining heavily and it was dark as night up until an hour after sunrise.

            I went to Freedom Mobile to pay for my July phone service. I also finally took all my accumulated beer cans to the Beer Store and got $3.20 for them. Then I went home and counted out my rent money. I had enough on top of that to buy two cans of Creemore for the weekend, and since the liquor store would be closed on Saturday, I made the purchase in the early afternoon to avoid the line-ups. I had $2 left over.

            In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. There was a small amount of traffic on the Bloor bike lane but very little after Yonge Street once I’d passed everyone. On the Danforth there was no one behind me, no one ahead and there wasn’t very much car traffic either. Maybe everyone left early for their cottages or someone else’s cottages for the Canada Day weekend.

            I went up Woodbine, then west on St Clair to Parkview Hills Crescent and then north on Alder. I should have gone one block further to go north on Aspen but I got the two tree-named streets mixed up. Alder re-met Parkview Hills Crescent and I followed that to Hackberry and took that east, exploring the its southern tributaries along the way. I think it might take me at least a month to finish exploring the areas between Don Mills Road and Victoria Park south of Eglinton.

            On the way back I stopped at a Starbucks near Pape to use the washroom but both of them were locked, so I continued on a few blocks until I saw a Timothy’s and stopped there. I guess I could have gone into any bar just as or even more easily, but I guess maybe the atmosphere of a pub or tavern seems sometimes like too much of a contrast to the street when one is not drinking. There’s less compression when one walks into a coffee place.

            Going home along College there was more bike traffic.

            I watched the first episode of Maverick that featured Jack Kelly alone as Bart Maverick as opposed to James Garner as Bret. I prefer the James Garner stories. He had a graceful charm about him that made and a calm manner of movement and speech.