At the Laundromat

            On Friday morning I memorized the first verse of “Le régiment des mal-aimés” (The Regiment of Broken Hearts) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the second and third verses of “J'ai déjà donné” (I Already Gave) by Serge Gainsbourg and almost nailed down the last verse. I should have the song in my head on Saturday and start looking for the chords. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast. 

            At around 10:00 I right clicked on a photo to rename it and Windows froze. I had to restart Windows Explorer and tried again but it still froze. Trying to fix this problem took up the rest of my morning and I left to do my laundry an hour later than I’d planned. 

            When I got to the laundromat I noticed that they still had the Masks Required sign up. I asked the attendant and he said, “Yes, put your mask on.” I argued that the mandate had been lifted and he said it was just the boss’s rules. There was a maskless customer sitting at the back who called out, “The masks are over!” The attendant said I could go ahead without a mask. There might have been a communication problem because the attendant’s English is not that strong. 

            When the wash was done I looked for a dryer and thought for sure that number seven was the one I put my clothes in. I even noted that I was putting seven quarters into number seven. The cycle would last 45 minutes and so I went home, but on the way I realized I wasn’t wearing my gloves. I thought that maybe I had left them at home, all the while doubting that because I would have noticed that my hands were cold. I saw they weren’t at home and so I headed straight back to the Laundromat where my gloves were on the table. I looked at dryer number seven and saw that there was only seven minutes left. That surprised me because I hadn’t thought that much time had passed, but I decided there was no point going home for that amount of time. But when the dryer stopped it was someone else’s clothing inside. I was puzzled and then I saw that all my clothing was in dryer eleven, but it seemed to me that I hadn’t walked that far over. I wondered if someone had moved my stuff but when I realized what a silly thought that was I considered the possibility that I was getting Alzheimer’s. 

            My clothes still had another 26 minutes so I went home for a while. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos before a lunch that was an hour and fifteen minutes later than usual. I made a salad of avocado, tomato, scallion, cucumber, and olive oil vinaigrette. 

            The Windows Defender scan turned up nothing. In online forums, several people had this same problem with Windows Explorer freezing on the right click of a photo. A lot of experts suggested downloading “shellexview”, which reveals the shell extensions of programs. I was reluctant at first to download strange software but enough people vouched for it that I finally gave in. It shows hundreds of shell extensions but there’s an option to eliminate Microsoft shell extensions from display. That just left all the extensions for my Nvidia video card, which I don’t use, and so I disabled them all. But that didn’t fix the problem either. 

            I found a legitimate version of Malwarebytes and downloaded the free trial, which turns into a non-real-time service after fourteen days. I did a scan and it turned up ten pieces of malware, but after removal of the malware the problem was still there.

            In the afternoon I didn’t take a bike ride because I’d lost so much of my day already and besides I’d already been riding back and forth to the laundromat. 

            I emailed the guy I’d bought my computer from to see if he had a solution to my problem or at least to ask if he should reinstall Windows since the PC is still under warranty. 

            For dinner I made an avocado, tomato, cucumber, scallion, radish, and mushroom salad with olive oil vinaigrette. I ate while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            In this story an alien spacecraft lands in a remote area but it is witnessed by an evil scientist. The pilot of the craft emerges and dies. The professor enters the ship and finds plans for a super powered robot unlike anything on Earth. He pretends they are his own plans and takes them to the Institute of Science to have the robot built. 

            Dr. Elefun builds it and it is enormous. He has yet to attach the head when Astro Boy and Astro Girl come to see it. When Elefun leaves the lab Astro Girl touches some controls and a robot arm attaches the head. Suddenly the robot begins to glow with a blinding light that overwhelms the pair. Then the robot begins laughing and addresses Astro Boy by his name. It explains that its computer brain can read the minds of all robots. It says its master and it will rule the universe. Astro Boy attacks it but it easily knocks him away. Astro Boy tries again but is caught in the robots grip and being drained of life when Elefun returns just in time to pull a switch and shut the robot down. 

            Astro Boy urges Elefun not to finish the assembling the robot but he says he has to because they are under contract. Astro Boy breaks the law and steals the robot’s glowing head to fly far away and bury it on a tropical island. But a little boy is watching from the bushes. Meanwhile the robot’s owner goes to the Institute and commands the headless robot to find its head. It flies away and the head seems to act as a homing device. The robot finds Astro Boy and they fight. It catches him but Astro Boy is being held above the empty space where its head should be and he shoots his rocket boots inside, causing the robot to release him and stagger in pain. The robot spins away into the ocean. 

            Meanwhile the little boy has dug up the robot’s head and placed it on top of a hill. Joey’s mother finds him and spanks him with his pants down for being late for dinner. But then she forgives him when he explains that he put the glowing head on the hill to be a beacon for his father who is fishing at sea. Astro Boy approaches and explains that he needs to bury the head again and the mother says he can take it, but now the head is gone. Joey has taken it and hides in the shed. His mother breaks down the door and falls and Joey runs out but then realizes his mother is hurt. He cries over her unconscious body and promises to be good. We see that she is only pretending to be knocked out and she feigns waking up after the promise. 

            Astro Boy lets Joey use the head as a beacon for one night. But the robot returns and recovers its head. Astro Boy leads the robot on a winding chase in the sky. The robot flies by spinning head over feet like a pinwheel. When the robot grabs Astro Boy they are flying downward into the ocean and the water begins to cause the robot to crack until it explodes. The head flies into the side of a mountain to serve as a permanent lighthouse for Joey’s father. 

            After dinner I realized that some of the “malware” I’d allowed Malwarebytes to delete turned out to be all of my Bit Torrent files. I tried to re-download BitTorrent but Malwarebytes kept blocking it. I was able to find the Allow function and let the initial download happen but then it blocked the installation. I had to figure out the address of each stage to post it in the Allow section so it would finally download. When it finally was launched I was pleasantly surprised to see that all of my torrents had been restored as well. 

            I also discovered that the problem of right clicking on images had changed character. Right clicking on an image no longer froze Windows Explorer but now just shut it down. I found however that I could left click on images and they would open in Photos and I was able to right click on the fully opened image. But there is no option for renaming an opened file so I was only able to rename it by saving it as a copy with a new name and then deleting the old one. It’s an annoying roundabout way but it works. 

            I paid my rent as usual by E-transfer and I always have to pose a security question for the receiver to answer before they get the money. My question for the last couple of years has been “What is my building number?” But this time I decided Raja needed a little reminder of his responsibilities as a landlord and so I asked, “What kind of bugs infest your building?”