Taking the Fifth

[captainsblog]

In this case, more or less taking it off. Days like today are what I consider “revenge of the private workforce“- occasions when we get to take the day off while the banks, post office and government offices still have to go do their jobs. The only work I did today essentially involved taking checks to the bank and then chopping them up into smaller checks that went into the mail.

A lot of my other time outside the house was bent in a bunch of different businesses on Transit Road, one of the two north-south state highways that form the eastern and western borders of this town. Since our office was closed today, I began with a workout with a group. I usually can’t join and which is usually prebooked well in advance and doesn’t have room for me even if I could. I was pleased to see, as I headed that way for other things, that there was an open spot, and it also marked a friend's 900th class with them in the last 8 1/2 years. My class count is still somewhere in the mid 800s despite starting a few months before she did, but it was fun sharing the  occasion with her and a bunch of other suitably crazy people.

Then it was off to the thing they went over that way to do in the first place. One thing Wegmans is very overpriced on is diet soda. Since discontinuing their house brand about a year ago, they rarely put 2-liter bottles of any kind of Coke or Pepsi on sale, so they go for around three bucks  a bottle when you figure in the tax and the nickel deposit. A local chain selling mainly 999 brands of beer has those same Pepsi bottles for much closer to two bucks. The decaf version of Diet Pepsi is the refreshing beverage of choice around here these days, and with Eleanor spending as much time outside as she does, she goes through a lot of it, and I join in at the end of the day where it used to be bottles of wine. I picked up six more of those before heading to gas up JARVIS (one, but only one, station just inexplicably jacked the price up by a dime a gallon, but I found one that didn’t), and then it was off to try to find something very unusual in a baseball (and similar) card specialty store.

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My friend from the gym grew up in southern Ontario, although she and her husband have lived in this area for years. I asked her if she was familiar with Kathleen Edwards, the Canadian singer we will be seeing at the end of this month. When she didn’t recognize the name, I forwarded, the video of Kathleen’s probably most famous song, described in one of its comments as “possibly one of the most Canadian videos ever."

Watch on YouTube

The callbacks to weird Canadian names of car models, to CBC announcers, and of course to hockey bring it right up there. The song includes a bunch of self deprecating comparisons between Kathleen and the recipient of the song. One of them compares him to “the Great One,” NHL legend Wayne Gretzky, while likening herself to his long time on-ice enforcer, Marty McSorley. She even got Marty into the video to skate with her and even give her a big  on-Goon hug at the end.



One thing I love about small music venues like Sportsmen's is you almost always get to meet the performer, on a break or after their set, to chat with them and get an autograph on some merch. I’m not sure if she has a new album out, so I decided to try to find one of Marty‘s hockey cards to put her Jouhn Hancouck on.

First, I tried the Dave and Adams warehouse store off of Transit; it's part of a building I visited with my sister on my first apartment hunting trip 43 summers ago, then called Alpert's, that sold me the sofa bed that moved with me half a dozen times before the relocate to Rochester. It also housed a Syms clothing store before that hit the skids, and is now divided between a lumber store and the jerseys, caps and cards of mostly our local teams. An ancient goon from Edmonton? They just pointed to a display case with the old guys in it and I couldn't find one.



Next errand was to a client's car audio shop a couple of plazas over. The new phone is still having connection issues with the audio system in the Smart car, and I wanted to see if they could swap out a fancier JVC one I bought for Emily several cars back and then reclaimed before we virtually junked it.  Custom Audio took a long week off for the holiday, but next to it was a smaller card shop:



Cool, just like the shoeboxes I used to use that Mom threw out:P

They didn’t have it either, but at least the guy there knew what he did and did not have. I finally found one on Amazon for three bucks. It’s no Maserati, but it’ll do for Kathleen to sign:)