Cleaning the Gutter
By the time I woke up Lizy had already gotten up, so I went to go find her. When I got to the kitchen I was surprised to see her cleaning the back windows of the solarium.
Before I could ask her what was going on, Lizy said, “Get the hose from the garage.”
The hose was hooked up in the front of my parents’ garage, so to get it to the back windows, I’d have to stretch it through the garage, out the backdoor of the garage, past the stone lined walkway, and across the backyard. I wasn’t sure it would stretch all that way, but it was worth a shot.
When I got to the hose I found it in a shambled mess, so I started untangling.
From behind me I heard my mom, “Oh no, we haven’t used the hose for like a year. the holder I had on the wall broke. I need to go to Home Depot to get another holder. And I need to sweep the floor of the garage.”
She started sweeping, while I continued to untangle the hose. After I finished untangling the hose, my mom dragged it out the back of the garage, while I fed her slack, so it wouldn’t tangle while she was pulling it out. It miraculously made it to the back porch where Lizy was.
Lizy had been spraying the windows and the outdoor furniture with Dawn Power Wash and now with the hose in hand she rinsed off the furniture on the lawn. Once she finished the outdoor sofa, she started on the windows. My Dad was sitting inside watching. He was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear him through the window.
While Lizy was rinsing things down, I grabbed the ladder from the garage. I set the ladder up next to the back of the house and started to pull leaves out of the gutter.
The vertical drainage gutter was completely clogged with leaves, so Lizy unscrewed the connector piece and disassembled the pieces, so we could pull out the leaves.
“I was going to hire a guy to do that,” called my Dad from inside. I heard him that time for some reason.
Once we got the gutters flowing smoothly, we moved on to cleaning the windows. We squeegeed them, then rinsed them down. The vertical windows looked good as new, but the slanted windows on top had streaks that we couldn’t rinse off. After a bit we threw in the towel and my parents took over. I got some photos of them cleaning the windows.
Lunch With Eli
Lizy and I went out and met my old friend Eli at Pappanios, an old school italian sandwich shop. It was good to see Eli after so much time apart. I don’t think I’d seen him in over a year and a half. It was a small restaurant with no indoor seating and only a picnic table and two benches outside.
We waited in line, in front of the counter, to order. To the right of us there was an older, stout, Italian man frying veal in a pan with peppers and mushrooms. Then he seamlessly moved over to a bag of buns and cut one open, so he could scoop a meatball inside. There was no one at the counter where we were lined up, but there was a nervous looking woman taking some food out to people outside and she would come inside soon to take our orders. When she finally came inside the stout man making the food said to her to not take any more orders yet.
“Yeah no problem,” I said, “Take your time.”
“I was going to,” the cook said with a smirk before turning back to his frying pans.
After we waited for a little bit, a different man came to work the register. He was between the ages of the girl and the cook, also italian, and had a wry smile. We all ordered sandwiches and Eli graciously payed for all our meals. After we ordered the man behind the counter offered us free cookies to eat while we waited for our meal.
We looked at the assortment of cookies through the glass below the counter. Lizy and Eli got walnut banana cookies. I was impressed by their decisiveness, but unable to match their speed at ordering. I asked the man what cookie he thought was the best.
“They’re all horrible,” he said, “Or what, you think I’d put out a cookie I’d like less than the others. Of course I would. Each one is worse than the last, but they’re all horrible.”
“Ok, I’ll also get the walnut banana cookie,” I said.
As we were walking out, the cook asked if we wanted our sandwiches a little spicy. I told him to make mine extra spicy. He said, “No, they’ll be medium spicy. You have to be able to taste the sandwich, not just the spice.”
Lizy and Eli sat on the bench outside and I stood facing them so we could talk. Since I was standing, I saw over their heads back into the restaurant. As I was finishing the cookie, the man behind the counter made a thumbs down sign as if asking for confirmation that indeed the cookie was horrible. I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to play along, but I just smiled and gave him a thumbs up because the cookie was delicious.
After not so long, the man behind the counter brought out our sandwiches and we ate them. The sandwich was indeed not so spicy that you couldn’t taste the other ingredients.
I remember two anecdotes that Eli told us over lunch. His current girlfriend’s stepfather was Noah Richler, the son of Mordechai Richler, a famous Jewish Canadian author. When he met her father, he introduced himself, but Eli said “I know who you are” and that he voted for him when he ran as an NDP candidate.
“Well, thanks for that,” he said, “If only there were 10000 more people like you.”
His second anecdote was about a ski trip he had taken to Jay Peak. On the drive there he had stopped off at a smaller resort called Bromont. The hill was nothing special, but the chairlifts were spectacular. They were all new, fast, and had footrests.
When he got to Jay Peak, the hill was spectacular. But he kept thinking in the back of his mind, they should get better lifts.
Hanging out in the Park
After lunch we walked over to Vermont Square Park. There was a band of twelve-year-olds playing in the park as part of Open Tunings, a free Toronto musical festival consisting of a series of free concerts in unconventional locales, like people’s porches, parks, and backyards. We sat on a bench at the south end of the park to hang out. The music drifted over to us from the other side of the park , accentuated by sounds of distress from a group of middle-aged people playing bocce ball in a nearby game.
I messaged my friend James to also meet us at the park, but before he could get there we ran into my cousin, Nick, walking across the park with his girlfriend, Sarah. Nick told us he was currently cat-sitting for his mom, my great aunt Eleanor, while she was on vacation. Nick insisted that we all go to his mother’s house to see his mom’s cat and Sarah’s dog. Eli was too deep in an unrelated conversation on his mobile to protest the family reunion, so we all went along. On the way over, Eli realized I recognized Nick from some local comedy shows Nick had performed at and realized he had filmed comedy specials for some of Nick’s stand up friends.
Eleanor’s House
Eleanor’s house was just a few block away from the park. I’m not sure if I had ever been there before. It was a funky house, like imagine whatever the word bohemian means, it was kind of like that. Her walls were all adorned with many paintings. Her brother, Ed, had collected paintings and I wonder if she had inherited some of them from him. He had died just a few years before.
We stood by the kitchen table. Nick kept running through the house to find the animals, then he’d bring them back, carrying them in his arms, and present them to us, like Rafiki presenting Simba. Sarah’s dog was a miniature greyhound. It was constantly shaking because it was old. Eleanor’s cat reminded me a little of my childhood cat, Misty. That reminded me that Lizy wanted to get a cat and name it Musty, so it could be a spiritual successor of Misty and her cat, Dusty.
Nick gave me a copy of his Dad’s book of poetry. Here’s a photo of the cover.
(still need to add the photo.)
James arrived at the house and he asked about the progress I was making on my game, “It’s A Snake Eat Snake World.”. I talked about the progress a little. Nick heard what we were talking about and yelled from the other room that he had experience and that if I needed any enemy dialogue he should surely be the one to do it.
“There’s no dialogue because the characters are snakes,” I said.
“But if there is, you have to come to me. I have a lot of experience. I’m still sort of part of this collective. We one time made a game, Chimps On A Blimp, about chimps on a blimp. Here I think I can find a playthrough of it on youtube.
“And we also did a cartoon called Bart the General. It’s reusing the title of the Simpson’s episode. It’s sort of a satire of that episode in a way. Let me show it to you.”
He started the video up on his phone. It started with a fast edit of visuals from the Simpson’s but altered to make them look more trippy. Then it went into their custom animations. The animation style was most similar to Ren and Stimpy. It had the same kind of line work as Ren and Stimpy and the same kind of close ups. The plot was hard to follow, the flow was disjointed, but the weirdness of it made us laugh and i think that was the point. We only watched a few minutes of it, and then we left since Nick and Sarah still had to eat lunch.
Getting Coffee with James
Eli had to leave us as he had other plans. James showed us to a nice coffee shop with tables outside. We all got some almond croissants and we sat together outside.
James told me about how he had been sad about one of his coworkers leaving his company.
“He was a cool guy,” James said, “I had started hanging out with him outside of work too. It felt like it came out of nowhere.”
“well you’ve lost a coworker,” i said, “but you’ve gained a friend.”
He wasn’t so sure.
At this point in the day Lizy was tired. She was pregnant and she had been dragged all around the city after cleaning my parents’ gutters in the morning. It was understandable. We decided to order a pizza from North of Brooklyn, they had another location near the Danforth. It was going to be a while before the pizza was ready, so we tagged along with James back to his apartment to wait.
Jame’s Place
James had invited some of our mutual friends over to his place so they could check out Tuning Toronto together. I was glad to see some of my old friends, who I hadn’t seen in a while all in one place.
Erin was there. Erin was doing a postdoc in Boston in psychology. She talked about her quest to expose false scientists. One scientist that she had investigated had already been exposed for using fake data, but she additionally found out that in his papers he had been plagiarizing undergraduate papers.
“I just typed sentences from her paper in google. Not Google Scholar, just regular Google.”
“It was really that easy?” I asked.
“Almost every sentence of every paper was stolen. And the ironic part was that the professor that taught the class that the undergrads wrote the papers for, herself does research into academic integrity.”
Julie asked Erin if she’d been following Jordan Peterson at all.
“It’s hard to keep tabs on everyone,” Erin said, “There’s too many scientists doing terrible things.”
“I didn’t know you were a fan of his,” I said.
“Of course, she’s not a Jordan Peterson fan,” Julie said. “Jordan Peterson is a misogynist. But he does a lot of it under the guise of pseudo-psychology.”
“Oh, I didn’t know he was a psychologist,” I said, “I thought he was a self help guru type from when I saw him on Bill Maher’s show.”
“He’s really gone off the deep end,” Erin said.
“What’s something he said recently?” I asked.
“He recently said western feminists support Hamas because they have a hidden desire to be oppressed,” Erin said.
That did seem quite extreme to me.
After not too long we left to go get the pizzas and bring them back to my parents’ house. The downtown location wasn’t too far away. It was two floors with pinball machines on the top floor. It seemed like a fun place to eat.
We ate the pizzas with my family. They were great again, but you know how it is. When you take the pizza to go and it sits in the box for a while, it’s not as crispy as when you eat it fresh out of the oven.