Hanging Around the Strip

            On Tuesday morning I woke up with a cold that had been coming on for a couple of days. I was stuffed up and had a sore throat but my energy wasn’t drained and so far it was pretty mild.

When I got up there were people sleeping across the street against the doorway to the Dollarama. It looks like a pretty good place to sleep because the roof extends over to offer shelter in case it rains or snows and there’s shelter from two walls as the door is in the corner. I’d noticed that the couple had their stuff piled up on the sidewalk in front of the store for several hours before it closed on Sunday night. One of the two was in a wheelchair. They were totally bundled up under a white blanket when I got up and I could see the blanket rippling in the wind. During song practice I wondered what was going to happen at 7:00 when the manager arrived to try to get in the door. It turned out that they were able to step around the sleeping couple. Shortly after that the guy got up, got in his wheelchair and rolled down to the alley behind the Dollarama, I assume to pee. About ten minutes later he came back and got under the covers again. At about 7:30 they both got up and I saw that one of them was a woman. They sat in front of the store for a couple of hours with a sign asking for money. Later they were gone but had left their blankets piled up, so I assumed they’d be back again that night.

I finished memorizing “L’Hippopodame” by Serge Gainsbourg. It will be interesting to see if anyone's posted the chords for this one. It wasn't a hit while Gainsbourg was alive but it was one of the songs featured in the 2010 movie “Gainsbourg: Une vie héroïque.”

I washed, brushed and scraped another section of my bedroom floor in the walking area of the room. I was just eleven boards away from the north wall when I’d finished.

I emptied a can of fava beans into the squash and mushroom soup I’d thrown together the night before and had half of it for lunch with a bowl of potato chips.

I did my exercises in the afternoon while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish gets an old washed up racehorse from his brother-in-law and talks Andy into buying it for $300. Then he becomes the horse’s trainer and charges him for that. So far Andy has yet to even see the nag. Kingfish presents Andy with a bill for expenses and one of them is a pair of shoes from Florsheim, meaning Kingfish has bought himself shoes on Andy’s bill. He also says that he bought the horse a chicken for a companion but the bill just says “Chicken breast $3.50”. Finally Andy goes out to the racetrack and insists on seeing the horse. He finds that it has no teeth and it has the mange on its neck. Kingfish insists that those are just scratches from being decorated with roses after winning so many times. Andy fires Kingfish as a trainer and Kingfish has heard that he’s hired someone else and that he’s entered it in a race. Kingfish scoffs at the possibility of it winning but he goes over to Amos’s place to listen to the race. The race starts before Andy gets there and Kingfish is surprised to hear Rover has won and that Andy had just won $1500. When Andy gets there Kingfish asks if he’s been listening to the radio and since he hasn’t heard about his horse’s victory Kingfish says he wants to buy the horse back from him for $450. Andy takes the deal and gives Kingfish the horse’s papers. Kingfish reveals that Andy’s former horse has just won the race. Andy reveals that he had a record made of someone announcing that his horse had won and that’s what Kingfish had heard.

I looked at my rehearsal videos to see which one to edit next. I decided on “Les feuilles mortes” from August 5, 2017. There was another date in August with an okay version but this one is better and more expressive. There’s a lot of traffic noise but hopefully once I mix it with the voice recording from the mic I can minimize that background noise. Since I don’t rehearse this song anymore it’s my only chance to put it on display. Plus I already uploaded my English version, “Dead Autumn Leaves” so it seems appropriate for the French to be up there as well.

I worked on “My Blood in a Bug” and on a couple of translations.

I had three small potatoes, two drumsticks and gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

In this story Carlos Murietta’s brother Pedro arrives from South America. Just as Carlos is an expert with a whip, Pedro is adept at throwing the bolas. Meanwhile Don Diego is trying to solve the mystery of what happened to the stolen jewels at the tannery. Bernardo had found them in the false bottom of a crate of boots but then he had been knocked out by Jose. Jose had put them in a bag and lowered them on a rope into the well before dying in his fight with Zorro. As Bernardo was unconscious he does not know what happened to the gems. Don Diego sends Bernardo dressed as Zorro back to the tannery to search for them while Diego is obliged to be a guest at a party thrown by Sgt Garcia. Garcia tries to court Dolores and asks Corporal Reyes to dance with her and extol his virtues but Reyes and Dolores are enjoying themselves more than Garcia had anticipated. The brothers go to the tannery to look for the jewels. They are trying to get the mute Bernardo to talk when Zorro arrives. They fight with swords. Bernardo knocks out Pedro with his own bolo. Zorro and Bernardo leave the two locked in the tannery.