Jann Arden

            On Monday morning I worked out the chords for the second and third verses of "Lost Song" by Serge Gainsbourg and about half of the fourth. I think that those four verses complete the melody and then the subsequent verses and the instrumental repeat the cycle. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first day of two. 

            I think I saw the woman who'd been walking naked last week. She'd added some pink to her blonde hair and was walking with a coffee while looking at her phone. I think I saw her closer sitting in front of the Pizza Pizza yesterday and she looks older than I'd thought she was when I saw her from my window. She might be in her forties. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before breakfast, which is heaviest I've been in the morning in a long time.

            My computer fan has been frequently surging and making a lot of noise going on and off. I was thinking there might be a connection with why Movie Maker has been crashing so I looked for solutions online. I uninstalled a program and tried to get rid of the remnants of NVIDIA but it keeps coming back. Maybe on Tuesday I'll open up the computer and see if the fan needs a blow job. 

            I've been listening to the Jann Arden discography and I'm almost finished. In general I find her songs and lyrics pretty boring. The melodies are often derivative and the lyrics tend not to break any creative ground or say anything that lots of other writers haven't said before. She has tons of songs about being broken hearted. Her best and most unique song is "Insensitive" but "Where No One Knows Me" is pretty good. Two of her songs, "Best Dress" and "Rock This Girl" are not bad. Her album of covers commits the crime that no cover artist should commit: She does every song with the exact same arrangement as it was originally done, for instance the same strings on You're So Vain. One of her own songs talks about being herself and so it's ironic that she tries to be Carly Simon and Janis Ian. She could have learned from Elton John's version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Jimi Hendrix's elevation of "All Along the Watchtower", or The Flying Lizards' adaptation of "Money". If you can't make a cover your own then don't bother. Frankly I would rather hear her do stand-up comedy. I listened to her live album with the Vancouver Symphony and her patter with the audience was very funny. She sounds like she might be fun to drink with. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before lunch. I haven't been that hefty at midday in a long time. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. On my way downtown along the Bloor bike lane at around Dovercourt I found a box of food items. There was a quarter jar of flour, some kind of fancy basket for baking bread, some other little package of things for baking bread that I've never needed for baking bread, a half a bottle of corn syrup, and some empty jars, but I didn't take any of that. What I took was the unopened one kilo bag of dark brown sugar, about a third of a 375 gram jar of blackstrap molasses, and three 40 gram jars of Newfoundland sea salt: one plain, one smoked, and one green alder (a finishing salt with floral, earthy tones and a hint of citrus). I actually stopped and looked in two other boxes on the way to that one but they didn't have anything I was interested in. A lot of stuff gets thrown out this time of year. 

            I chiseled some more black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos at 17:30. At least it's slightly less than yesterday evening. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:39. 

            I opened Movie Maker dreading that it would crash like on Sunday but was happy that it didn't. I managed to almost synchronize the audio and the video of my August 5, 2023 song practice. The audio is just a split second behind and so I should have them lined up on Tuesday. Then I'll create a separate project for that day's final take of my song "Megaphor". 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio audio of my song "Megaphor" I added four more images of gods to line the concert video up with the studio audio for the end of the first verse when I sing "to my head" as the camera pans to Brian Haddon at the keyboard. It's panning back to me when I start singing, "Well someone slipped a tab of moon into our drink of sky and now Parkdale is hungry but it don't know why". The concert video is about a second behind the studio audio for that line and so on Tuesday I'll try to synchronize them. If I can't I'll need to find more video or images to insert.

            I finished scanning one set of colour negatives of my Paranoiac Utopia collage, its parts and extra shots from my window that didn't make it in. I started on the second set and there are about forty negatives left. 

            I cut up a long rack of pork ribs and grilled some on top of the pan while the rest I cooked in water underneath the ones being grilled. I had three ribs with a potato and gravy while watching season 7, episodes 22 and 23 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story Joe brings home a hammock that he bought at a church rummage sale. He sets it up and then Salma Plout comes to announce that her daughter Henrietta is enrolled in a very exclusive finishing school. Then Betty Joe comes out with Kathy Joe and asks Joe to take their picture. They are about to sit on the hammock to pose when Salma asks to have her picture taken and sits on the hammock. The hammock breaks and she shouts out about her back. Janet examines Salma and can't find anything wrong with her but they feel obligated to put her up while she is recovering. She is very demanding and they wait on her hand and foot whenever she rings a bell, which is about every hour. Salma sends a letter to a lawyer named Timothy T. Temkin and so in self defence Joe goes to Oliver Douglas's law offices in Pixley but he's closed his office for spring planting on his farm. However a lawyer with offices in the same building invites him to tell him about the case. Joe doesn't notice that the name on the door is Timothy T. Temkin. Joe ends up telling him that he was at fault and then he learns that he's talking to Salma's lawyer. Temkin comes to the Shady Rest to serve Joe a summons. Joe runs away and Salma runs after him. Then Henrietta arrives having heard that her mother was injured. Salma explains to her that she sat on Joe's defective equipment. Joe says he didn't know it was defective. Henrietta points out that her mother knew it was defective when she donated it to the rummage sale. Salma's lawyer gives up on the case. 

            In the second story, as usual in this show the continuity is totally jumbled. It begins with a retirement party for Floyd Smoot the Cannonball engineer, despite the fact that over a year before this Wendell Gibbs became the engineer after Floyd got a job in an office of the C&F W Railroad. Wendell was not there at the beginning of season 7 and Floyd only appeared again once a couple of episodes ago. So now Floyd is retiring and there is no one to run the Cannonball. Betty Joe could do it but she is too busy raising her daughter. So Joe says he'll do it but he winds up keeping such a tight schedule that the people of the valley, used to the casual operations of the Cannonball, all miss the train. Everyone is angry at Joe but then a guest of the hotel named Mr. Billingham tells them there is no need to quarrel, since he represents the C&F W and he's closing down the Cannonball anyway now that Floyd has retired. Everyone takes a last sad ride on the Cannonball, reminiscing as they go, when suddenly the train has to stop because someone piled wood on the track. The sudden stop causes a small strongbox to fall from the luggage rack containing a legal document holding a promise from the C&F W to provide service to the people of Hooterville Valley and to pay a dollar a year to every citizen over whose property the tracks pass. It's been seventy five years since the document was drawn up and Janet calculates the C&F W owes the valley about half a million dollars. She tells Billingham they'll forget about that if he just makes up another seventy five year contract to keep the Cannonball serving the community. Then Floyd arrives, saying he's coming out of retirement because of all the letters he's received asking him to come back. The first letter he got was from Joe.