Song Practice

            My knee didn’t ache on Wednesday morning but it felt very tight.

Last fall Nick Cushing loaned me his drift cam, but because of school, darkness and heat I didn’t find time to use it to record my morning song practice until Wednesday. I suspected that the internal microphone wouldn’t produce a quality audio recording but I thought I’d start with that just to find out. It actually picked up my voice surprisingly well without it being drowned by the guitar but it came out sounding tinny. Also my video ended up on its side because I ignored the fact that Nick had written “top” on the top of the camera. I noticed later though that if one records with the top up then the microphone is down. The camera does have an input for a mic but my microphones will only fit amplifiers and with the help of some adaptors they will fit a computer.

Another thing with the video was that around the apartment I wear a very comfortable pair of black sweatpants but they are torn now all the way up to the crotch, revealing the white lining. If I’m going to record uploadable videos I’m going to have to wear something else.

I wanted to keep my knee moving so I thought I’d take at least a short bike ride. I decided that ride was going to be to the bank at King and Dufferin and then to the Laundromat.

            At the Bank of Montreal at King and Dufferin there was one customer in front of me and one teller working. When the other customer left and I was waiting for the teller to call me over, a perky young man with a nametag was suddenly standing between the teller and I and asking me, “How can I help you today?” Considering that the person that could actually help me was standing next to the money and he wasn’t going to give me any, his offer to help was somewhat ironic since it was already an impediment. I answered, “Ahh… I want to take some money out.” Then he gestured towards the teller and told me, “--- will be happy to help you!” I informed him that was something I could have figured out for myself. “No problem!” he responded and then turned to offer his services to person behind me. It seemed that the teller had taken the same “obvious pill” as the other guy, since after I stuck my card in their little log-in machine she suggested that I type in my PIN. I had $18.00 in my account so I took out $15.00.

            It’s probably about the same distance from the bank to Freshco as it is from my place but it always feels like I’m halfway there when I’m leaving the bank. I only needed $5.00 to do laundry so I went to get a few things like oranges, bananas, a tomato, raisin bread and yogourt.

            When I got home with the intention of bagging my laundry to cart it to the washing and drying place, it dawned on me that it was so warm outside that I could wash my clothes in the tub, dry them outside, save five dollars and a lot of time, so that’s what I did. Most everything was dry on the railing of my building’s deck by the late afternoon.

            I organized the overhead shelf in my bedroom and put a lot of stuff away that had been taking up space in other parts of the apartment for a long time. I’m missing some brackets for my shelves, though they must be here somewhere.

            Since I had only taken a very short bike ride I did some knee exercises in the afternoon while listening to an episode of Amos and Andy from 1945. In the story, Andy and Kingfish decided they would profit from the shortage of men in Harlem caused by the war and so they opened an escort service. They ran an ad offering men to lonely women, with a small deposit required in case she doesn’t bring him back. The only escort they could find though was  Shorty the barber and their only customer was twice his size. She also happened to be Andy’s ex-landlady, Hattie McDaniel. She told Kingfish that she wanted a man who, when he kissed her she felt like the air was going out of her insides and there would be a buzzing in her ear. Kingfish told her that she didn’t need a man but a vacuum cleaner. Since she rejected Shorty, Andy was offered as a substitute. The problem was though that they had a bad history because she knew him and hated him and said he was a no good bum that still owed her back rent, but she didn’t want to waste the extra ticket to a concert that she had so she went out with him. Because she had some money, Andy decided to marry her but she needed an engagement ring and he couldn’t afford it. Since she was a very big woman, Kingfish got the idea that Andy could stall for time by presenting her with his wife Sapphire’s engagement ring because it wouldn’t possibly fit, but it did, which of course created a major dilemma.

            For the last few years, from time to time my amplifier starts humming loudly and the only way I can stop it is to turn it on and off. On Wednesday though it started humming almost right away after every time I’d turned it back on so I finally tried finding the source of the problem. I have a long cord that runs from the back of my computer to another cord that splits into stereo and plugs into my amp. The place where they come together is behind a hard to move shelf, so I had to untangle several cords and pull them out. After I reconnected the two cords the humming didn’t repeat.

I also disconnected my DVD player since I don’t have a TV anymore and can play DVDs with my computer. There’s really nothing on television that I couldn’t eventually download so if I had the price of a TV I’d just get a bigger monitor. Anyone that wants a DVD player can have it.