Sol Rodrigues

            On Friday morning I memorized the third verse of “Valse Dingue” (Mad Waltz) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished memorizing “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man) by Serge Gainsbourg. I searched for the chords and found one set. I worked them out for the first line and I hear a couple more chords in the song than the ones that were posted. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I sorted the rest of the stuff that I’d taken out of the bottom drawer to clean it and put most of it back in. A few things went into the drawer above and some things went into the garbage. 

            I continued trying to get my Scarlett USB interface to work on my laptop, but the laptop wouldn’t record with it, or with my USB mic. I tried plugging my microphone into the mic jack and it worked and recorded right away. I called Connor at Steve’s Music and he said for me to bring the Scarlett in with the laptop. 

            I weighed 84.3 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a bike ride downtown and brought along my laptop and the Scarlett interface. On the way home I stopped at Steve’s. Connor said he hadn’t realized how old my laptop is. He couldn’t get the Scarlett interface to work on it. He tried to research my clipping problem but couldn’t figure it out. He called in a colleague who said, “I’m a drummer, not a recording expert.” But he suggested that there is more clipping in Audacity than in Ableton. They both agreed that even the free version of Ableton is far superior to Audacity. Connor said that if Ableton doesn’t work he would exchange the Scarlett that I bought. 

            I weighed 84.5 kilos at 18:00. 

            I got caught up on my journal at 19:30. 

            I was trying to figure out how to download Ableton, which is supposed to come with my Scarlett interface. I looked through my papers to see if I’d overlooked a code for the download, but there was nothing in the box. I looked through the files I’d downloaded for Focusrite but there was nothing. Finally, I went on the Focusrite website but when I tried to log in, Google hadn’t memorized any password. I clicked on “forgot password” and got another one fairly quickly. I started downloading Ableton Live Lite but it’s a very large file and it downloaded extremely slowly. It kept switching back and forth between saying it would be a two or three-hour download but after twenty minutes it was only at .04 gigs out of 2.6 gigs. Then it suddenly said it would take a day, then three hours again. On second thought that wasn’t too bad. I associated .04 gigs in my head with .04 percent and I thought it was going to take forever. 

            I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching episode 3, season 2 of Star Trek Picard. 

            Confederation security has just beamed onto Rios’s ship and severely wounded Elnor with phaser fire. Agnes has fallen back out of sight and connected the Borg queen to the ship. The First Husband demands that his wife President Annika, who we know as Seven of Nine, tell him his full name. She can’t and he realizes she is not the one he married. He slaps her and the emotional moment is enough of a distraction for Seven, Raffi, and Rios to get the jump on their assailants. They disarm and then kill them. They are now faced with fire from Confederation ships. 

            The Borg queen takes control of the ship, destroys the Confederation vessels, and then sends the ship into increasingly higher warp speeds. The highest speed mentioned on the journey is warp nine but I assume she reached or came close to warp ten in order to travel back to 2024. 

            They arrive in Earth orbit and are not sure of the era yet but it is clearly the past because there is no Moon colony. The queen is in a coma after her efforts and the ship doesn’t have the power to resist Earth’s gravity. Picard manually crashes the ship onto his own family’s estate in France. 

            Elnor is losing his battle with death because of the severe phaser wound he sustained. They want to use the life support that is maintaining the queen to save Elnor but Picard says they need her alive. Elnor dies. Raffi is grief stricken but moves forward with the mission in the hope that fixing the timeline will bring Elnor back into existence. 

            Raffi, Seven, and Rios beam to Los Angeles to look for the Watcher. They materialize in separate places. 

            Rios, unfortunately, appears above the street and falls, injuring himself. He is taken to a clinic where his com badge falls off and a little boy picks it up. The doctor is a young, attractive woman named Teresa Ramirez, who tells Rios he has a concussion and she has to set his hand. She asks him to tell her his happiest childhood memory. He talks about when at the age of eight he snuck into a flight training school and got a score on the flight simulator higher than any cadet. At that point, the doctor snaps his hand back into place. Rios sees the little boy with his com badge and tries to get it back. He turns out to be Teresa’s son. Teresa gets Rios’s badge but says she’ll give it back to him when he leaves just in case he tries to steal anything. But this clinic is a place that helps illegal immigrants and it is raided by the cops. Rios tries to help Teresa by posing as another doctor but the cops see through the disguise and they are both arrested. 

            Meanwhile Raffi materializes near a homeless tent city and a guy with a gun immediately tries to mug her. She disarms him, knocks him out, and robs him. Seven finds her and they make their way for the highest tower in Los Angeles so they can scan for the advanced tech they assume the Watcher will be using. All they find is the signal from Rios’s com badge. 

            Back on the ship, Picard and Agnes are trying to revive the queen to find the location of the Watcher. Agnes proposes to be hooked to the queen and to allow herself to be partially assimilated in order to extract the information. She says Picard can monitor her and pull her out if it becomes dangerous. He connects her and she can feel the queen exploring her emotions. But when Agnes begins to talk with the queen’s voice Picard unplugs her. The queen is revived and talking like a normal human. She tells Picard that if he wants the information about the Watcher he must give her the ship. But Agnes reveals that she already has the information. The queen tells Agnes that by impressing her she has done something very dangerous. 

            Teresa is played by Argentinian actor Sol Rodrigues, who started dancing at the age of five. Her family moved to Guatemala when she was eight and she continued dancing and singing and started doing TV commercials at ten. At sixteen her family moved to Miami and she signed with Nickelodeon Latin America, and at seventeen she landed a co-starring role in the fantasy series "Grachi." She is in the cast of the Telemundo soap opera “Marido en alquiler”. She began acting in English movies and television in 2015. 

            Ableton finished downloading after dinner and I installed it but didn’t try to use it yet. 

            I did a search for bedbugs before bed and didn’t find any.