Kaye Elhardt

            On Monday morning I saw an email from Tom Smarda saying he’d been trying to call me about us meeting to rehearse for the anti shock rally at Queen’s Park on Saturday. I didn’t see any calls from him on my phone. I called him and we arranged to meet on Friday.

 I worked on my journal for a lot of the day.

In the afternoon a yellow happy face balloon came floating down Queen Street. I went to get my camera but it was gone by the time I had it.

             It suddenly got cloudy and quite a bit cooler in the afternoon and I considered not taking a bike ride but went anyway. I wore my hoody and my leather jacket but it was a lot warmer up on Bloor Street than it had been down by the lake. I took the hoody off at Sherbourne but I was still hot for the rest of my ride.

            There were a lot of fire trucks on Danforth and the cops had blocked off Jones Avenue. The smoke was blowing northeastward and so it didn’t hit Danforth until Greenwood and it was pretty fowl. I went as far as Coxwell and turned around. On the way back the wind was blowing the choking smoke into me. As I crossed Jones I didn’t see what building was burning but the smoke coming up was yellow.

            It turns out the fire was at the Jones Avenue Adult Learning Centre. The school will be closed until further notice.

            I went to No Frills before going home and bought a few bags of grapes and three mangoes.

            I posted my blog and got caught up on my journal.

            For dinner I boiled a carrot and a potato, sautéed an onion and a zucchini, heated a chicken leg and some gravy and watched one episode of Sea Hunt. I normally watch two, since it’s only a half hour show, but since I finished my meal and dessert before first was over I didn’t feel like viewing the second one.

            In this story Mike has hired a new assistant named Billy. They are having lunch on the dock one day when two men named Steve and Ed approach them. They are salvage men and they want Mike’s help to retrieve $100,000 worth of gold dust from a safe in a sunken ship. They offer him 20% of the take but Mike flat turns them down. After they leave Mike explains to Billy that he knows these men by reputation because they double-crossed a friend of his on a similar expedition in Alaska. Billy tells Mike he’s going to meet his girlfriend Betty for an hour but instead he swims out to Steve and Ed’s boat and takes the deal that they'd offered Mike. Betty comes to tell Mike that she’d begged Billy not to go. When Steve, Ed and Billy arrive in Acruz, Mexico to get supplies, they find Mike there. He joins their expedition to make sure nothing happens to Billy. After a lot of work and several dives, Mike finds the wreck. In the next dive he finds the safe. It has to be opened by a torch but Mike’s tank malfunctions and Billy has to go down alone with Steve. Mike repairs his tank and then tells Ed that he knows he sabotaged his tank in order to separate him and Billy. Ed pulls a gun but Mike tells him that he’s done a little sabotaging of his own the night before and removed the firing pin. They fight but Mike knocks Ed out and ties him up. Mike goes down to save Billy. But while Billy is fighting Steve off with the bag of gold dust the old bag breaks and the dust scatters in the ocean. It’s bit of a clichéd ending.

            Betty was played by Kaye Elhardt, who got a lot of work in television from the 50s to the 70s.

            As I was getting ready for bed the nozzle of my Waterpik had a tiny fragment of something stuck just inside the tip that was blocking the flow of water. I didn’t have any wires thin enough to poke it out. I tried removing the nozzle, attaching a narrower nozzle that I tend not to use to the Waterpik and then tried to put the two tips together to push the speck down through the tube and out the larger end but that didn’t work. After trying a toothpick and a wire again, I retried blasting with the other nozzle and it finally worked.