Waterloo

 Gah. Waterloo is stuck in my head. Yeah, the song by ABBA. It's been in my head for the past week or so after it was played a couple times while at work. Can't say I know the lyrics very well, and I'm not looking them up for fear that the song will burrow even deeper in my head. So here and there, I find myself repeating Waterloo... couldn't escape if I wanted to-ooo and yeah, this song isn't escaping anywhere. It's not a bad song by any means - ABBA is always catchy - but I'd like something else, please.

Here's some bullet points of things I've been thinking about or observed:

• I saw two cats, on the same street, a few houses apart, tied up and leashed to a tree or porch in a front yard. Seems kind of sad if I'm being honest, but I guess they're getting fresh air and not cooped up indoors which I find sad as well. The cats I live with don't really go outside as much, they seem content to be indoors while the weather gets colder. And they seem happy, so to say it's sad isn't objectively true.
• I get very annoyed when drivers just skip on past an activated crosswalk light. Like, all you have to do is step off the gas pedal for a few seconds, and you can't be bothered to do that? It's just dangerous behaviour, and I actually find it safer to jay walk because I never know if cars are going to stop or not.
• The Raptors are a fun team to watch again. They had a rough start to the season, but they're actually demolishing top teams like the Bucks and Mavericks. Some players have some off days where they're not playing anywhere near their potential, but then other players step up and take over. It's fun.
• Who the hell thinks that launching a cyberattack against the Toronto Public Libraries is a good idea? Absolute scumbag behaviour - couldn't you attack corporations like Nestle or Big Oil or something instead? Libraries enhance the quality of life for so many people: from those without a home to scholars advancing human knowledge. I get that the hackers are trying to score big cash, but this kind of greed is so detrimental and is totally anti-humanist.
• I feel naked if I don't have a deck of cards to fiddle around with somewhere - either in my backpack, or on my desk, or in my room. Even if I don't touch them, just knowing that I have a lightly used deck of Bicycle playing cards lying around somewhere brings me a bit of joy.

Waterloo... toodeloo...

The light in the shed

There's this rectangular shed in the backyard that I go into fairly regularly. The shed's concrete floor has a long crack in the middle running length-wise, and the gap grows every year due to the shed being built on uneven ground. For now, the shed is still perfectly usable as storage because the crack is mostly hidden underneath some shelving.

The roof is in good shape. Every year during cherry season, I use the roof as an elevated platform to pick cherries from the tree growing right next to the shed. There's raccoon droppings that I have to circumnavigate when I'm cherry picking, but otherwise it's super convenient. Unfortunately the cherries sucked this year, but that's besides the point.

This shed, you see, has a single tubular fluorescent light to illuminate it. It does a good job - when it works. For some strange, unknown reason, the light only turns on 33% of the time when I flick the switch. The percentage used to be around 50% a few years ago, but it's gone down recently. When it's dark out and I have to use the shed, I now go in expecting it to not turn on and am pleasantly surprised when it does turn on. For the times when it doesn't turn on, a feeble glimmer of light still appears at the extremity of the light bulb, as if to taunt me. I can flick the switch on and off a couple times, and still that faint glimmer will appear - but no real illumination. It's only when I give it a couple days and come back another time to try the light that it will magically turn back on.

I think this phenomenon is weather dependant. May be not the temperature, because the likelihood of it turning on doesn't seem to change from winter to summer in any given year; perhaps the humidity, then? Or barometric pressure? Something affecting the electrical connection, somehow. An electrician would probably have an answer, but for now, I'm content with playing a sort of roulette with the light in the shed.