Riding on the Roof

When I walked out of the Bahen Centre after my first class on Thursday I could see that I had been lucky enough to miss a rain shower. It was still raining a little but the sun was almost coming through. I got a little wet and it was chilly as I travelled down Beverley to Queen and then west but the sun came out before I got to Bathurst.

When I got home I fried some garlic and some green eggplant with the rest of the bacon bits.

I started typing up my lecture notes. I started downloading the course textbook, “Philosophy of the Middle Ages” from Pirate Bay, but it didn’t move, so I went to the Russian Gen-Library site, found the book right away and it was immediately on my computer. What a great resource! Plus it turns out that since I plan on taking Late Medieval Philosophy next year, it turns out that course uses the same textbook.

In the late afternoon I wanted to take a picture of myself riding my bike to go along with my blog entry. First I tried just sitting on my bicycle on the deck but I couldn’t get a full shot with my camera on the rail. It suddenly dawned on me that I could ride on the roof, so I hoisted the machine over to the tar and turned the camera around. I put the self timer on 10 seconds and kept trying to catch myself riding in front of it but it was too hard to time my actions with the camera so I could only get partial captures of myself if I was lucky but usually just shots of the roof by itself.

My next roof neighbour had been sitting in his doorway and started a conversation about my velo. I told him that I’d built it in the spring and it turns out that he knows the guy that sold me the frame. We chatted about his cat and the ones I used to have. When he found out that I’ve been living in my place for twenty years he said, “Your rent must be really low!” I confirmed that it’s still under $600. I found out that his name is Taro.

All this time we were talking I had been keeping on trying to take my own picture with little success. Finally I asked Taro to do it. He took one and then I asked him to come over to my roof to get a closer shot. Meanwhile his girlfriend came out and was interested in what was going on. I think she’s the one that lived with him last year and who had made his little roof area look quite nice with plants, decorations and blue lights. Now since she moved out several months ago it’s all strewn with garbage, cigarette butts and beer cans.

For dinner I cooked carrots, cauliflower and peas and added to that a can of curried cauliflower soup and some curry paste.

I watched the last episode of the third season of Maverick, which was the last appearance of James Garner in the series. It was a funny episode in which he ran into an old friend of his named Foursquare Farley that had a reputation for being honest to a fault. It had been six years since they’d seen one another and so he caught Bret up on the things that he’d been doing with his life. He’d worked as a bricklayer for a while but since then he’d become a professional gambler, but only playing blackjack, the private games of which he ran out of his house. Maverick being a poker player was surprised that he could make a living from blackjack, which is almost entirely based on luck. Foursquare explained that he had a backer that covered his losses until he could pay them back. Maverick was puzzled that someone would back something like that.

Maverick told Foursquare that he’d come there to Denver because the sheriff had found out that there was a safecracker in town but all he knew about him was that he was a gambler. The bank owner, afraid of losing his bank’s reputation for having never been robbed, hired Maverick to try to find the gambling safecracker. When Bret told Foursquare this he fainted. Maverick helped his friend back to his house where he explained why he’d fainted by telling him that his last job as a bricklayer had been to build the five brick thick walls of the safe of the Denver bank. But one section of the safe he’d only made one brick thick. He then showed Bret a bookshelf on a wall of his house. He pulled on it and the bookshelf was a door that swung open directly into the vault of the Denver Bank. He revealed then that his “backer” for his gambling ventures was the unknowing Denver Bank. Sometimes he came out ahead and sometimes he won but he assured Maverick that he always paid back any money that he took from the vault.

As they were standing in the vault they noticed that the lock was moving on the vault door. That must have meant that the safecracker was making his play for the money. Bret got the idea to take all of the money out of the vault, put it into Foursquare’s house and close the wall again. It was a lot of work but they got it done just in time. The robber and his two cronies were surprised to find nothing in the vault. They left and then Bret and Foursquare put all the money back.

The safecracker concluded that the Denver Bank was secretly broke and so the next day he went to the bank owner and threatened to expose him if he didn’t pay. The owner opened the vault to show him that the vault was full of money, then he had the safecracker tossed into the street.

The next night the safecracker cracked the vault again and once again found it empty. This time though he decided that he and his men would wait in the vault until just before the bank opened and then they would leave and catch whomever was bringing the money back. Worried that this might cause an investigation that might expose Foursquare’s fake wall, Bret decided that they would sneak into the bank and close the safe door on the safecracker and his men. While doing so though, Foursquare stumbled and his face went into bouquet of flowers that caused him to sneeze. The men came out and captured Maverick and his friend. They locked them in the safe so that the safecracker and his men could claim they were the safecrackers and then get a reward for capturing them. The safecracker dismissed his men but waited in the bank for the rest of the night.

Meanwhile of course, Maverick and Foursquare easily got out of the vault by way of Foursquare’s house. They went looking for the safecracker’s men and Maverick knocked them out. Then he put them both into the vault so that when the vault was opened it was the safecracker’s men that were discovered and the safecracker burst into tears.

Later Maverick ran into a man who earlier in the episode had cheated him out of a horse. There was an exchange and then they parted. Foursquare had observed that the man had given Bret some money and so assumed he’d paid him back for the horse. Bret explained that he’d rented Foursquare’s house to the man for two months. Foursquare was of course worried about the man learning about the false wall but Maverick assured him that he didn’t tell him. He added though that he would tell him in a year or so, after Foursquare had moved back into his house and bricked up the fake wall. His revenge on the man would be to see his face when he found out that he had been next to an easy $2 million for two months without knowing it.