Children of Paradise

            I’ve been doing yoga every morning for so long that I can and sometimes almost do it in my sleep. On Friday I went through several poses and it was so automatic that I hadn’t been conscious of having done them.

            On Thursday I didn’t feel like riding my bike through the snow to the supermarket to buy meat so I just cooked some beans from scratch and made a chili with onions, zucchini, carrots, jalapenos and four-cheese spaghetti sauce. It turned out pretty good.

            I continued to organize my library using the Library of Congress system like the U of T libraries do.

            I read a little more from The Complete Works of Billy the Kid. There was story about a guy who deliberately tried to breed mad dogs until they finally turned on him and ate him.

            I did a couple of French grammar exercises.

            Since I had some time I wanted to return to working a bit on translating Jacques Prevert’s screenplay for “Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)” which is my favourite movie of all time. I’ve neglected that project for about a year and a half, but when I tried to find the file this time, I couldn’t. I worried that I’d maybe somehow deleted it or lost it as a result of my last computer crash, but I found it on my external hard drive and copied it back to my main drive.

            I also wanted to start translating another story by Boris Vian called “Les Remparts du Sud” (The Southern Ramparts), but I don’t have the original story in French. All I have is an ebook in Spanish of “Le Loup Garou”, his book of short stories. So what I try to do is use Google translate to make a bad French version of a paragraph or two and see if pasting that into a search will turn up the story somewhere in French so I can translate that. Some parts of the book are on Google books but it doesn’t look like this story is.