Victoria Day

            On Monday I rode down the street to mail my renewal form for this year’s Toronto Housing Allowance. The deadline is the end of June but I thought I’d get it out of the way. That extra $250 a month has saved my life over the last year and eight months.

Afterwards I locked my bike up the street from the hardware store because I wanted to buy some Murphy’s Oil Soap for my floor or something else that’s good fro cleaning wood. When I got to Home Hardware it was caged up and I suddenly remembered that it was Victoria Day. That’s the second time I’d forgotten it was a long weekend.

For lunch I had the rest of the roasted potatoes from the pot roast dinner.

I started working towards synchronizing the sound and video for the song “L’alcool” in Movie Maker. It took me a while to remember how to do it because it’s been over a year since I last edited a video. I always turned on the sound recorder first in those sessions and it kept on recording until I turned it off, while the camera’s memory card only lasts for just under half an hour. I had to delete the first few minutes of nothing from the sound recorder. I stopped with the sound and video being out of sync by about two minutes and I’ll narrow it down next time.

I took a bike ride in the late afternoon but when I started out I was only wearing a tank top with an open shirt on top. I’d shoved my hoody in my backpack in case it was cooler than I’d thought and it was, so I stopped before the underpass on Brock to get my hoody, but it turned out that I’d grabbed my sweat pants instead. I decided to button up my shirt and see if that would be enough. I was halfway between the underpass and Dundas when I realized it wasn’t enough and so I turned around and went home to get my hoody, a scarf and my spring gloves.

I was wondering why there was so little traffic and then realized that I’d forgotten again that it was Victoria Day.

Since my hip had still been bothering me a bit when I got up that morning I decided to only ride as far as Broadview.

I stopped at Freshco on my way home because I wanted to buy toilet paper and realized that I’d once again forgotten that it was Victoria Day.

I ate some watermelon when I got home and weighed 91.2 kilos after that.  I haven’t had a bowel movement for a couple of days so that might be why my weight is going up.

I grilled three chicken legs in the oven, boiled a potato, sautéed chopped onion and green pepper and heated some gravy. I had dinner while watching two episodes of Sea Hunt.

In the first story Mike has been hired by an insurance company to find a ship that has gone down in the Caribbean. The man he was supposed to work with had arrived earlier because Mike’s plane had been delayed by the hurricane that sunk the ship. We see that Mike’s partner is attacked and murdered underwater before Mike’s plane arrives. Mike is told by authorities that only one other man knows where the Minerva went down. He’s a local man named Lord Christobal. Mike goes to see him and finds him singing a calypso song called Dive Deep while being shouted at by his boss Webley. Webley is trying to manipulate Christobal’s superstition into avoiding diving for the Minerva by telling him the ship is hexed. Webley tells Mike that Christobal is under contract to him and so he can’t help him. Mike hires Webley’s boat to get around the problem. But Webley is the one that murdered Lambert and he tries to kill Mike as well. With a hose he fills Mike’s spare tank with the carbon monoxide exhaust from the compressor that is supposed to put oxygen in the tanks. But Christobal ends up using the tank. Mike discovers that the Minerva was scuttled for the insurance because it had no cargo. Christobal becomes poisoned and there is no spare tank for Mike to go down and save him. Webley tries to stop Mike from going down and Mike knocks him out. The authorities arrive in a boat that happens to have a resuscitator. Mike saturates his lungs with oxygen so he can hold his breath longer while diving to rescue Christobal. He saves him and Webley is arrested.

Christobal was played by Bernie Gozier, which I think is a Hawaiian name.

In the second story Mike is called to Baja, Mexico to investigate the sightings of a sea monster. It moves at incredible speed, scares the whales and tears through fishing nets. Two fishermen claim to have seen it briefly. It arrives at the same time every day. Mike dives to try to photograph it but when it comes it creates so much turbulence that he his tossed around too much to see it. Finally they set up a series of fishing nets along its route and it is caught in the fourth one. As I suspected it was a man made object. It was spherical and looked very much like the Japanese landmine Mike encountered in a previous episode. Navy intelligence says it’s an underwater satellite from an unknown country. I did not know there was such a thing and I don’t think there is. There was nothing about that object that could have propelled it through the water like that. There are objects called underwater satellites but they follow currents and don’t move under their own power. There are now underwater drones but there certainly weren’t at that time.