Singing at Sunrise

            On Monday morning I shot another video and audio of my song practice. I started at 6:20 and though the sun had been up for 21 minutes it was cloudy. The initial dimness made for an interesting video in which the image vibrates. I was singing in French this time but playing in English and I hit a wrong chord on the second verse of the first song. If it happens on the first verse I’ll just start again but I don’t want to spend the whole session on one song. I use a barred E chord on the seventh fret to play B and so when I throw my hand up there suddenly it doesn’t always hit the mark and I’m trying to train myself to do it without looking. I’m getting better at it but that’s the chord that I screw up the most.

            I’m running out of room again on my computer so I think I’ll have to stop recording my song practices for a while until I go through them and decide which ones I can work with and which ones to either save on my external hard drive or get rid of all together.

            Later that morning I got a call from the Toronto Housing Allowance Program. They’d called me a few months ago and told me about a subsidy I could apply for and then sent me an application. I had forgotten about it though and noticed that I’d missed the deadline so I figured I’d missed the boat and forgot about it again. The caller was contacting people that had missed the deadline in order to tell them they could still apply. If I get the subsidy I could get an extra $250 a month, so it’s worth giving it a try. I guess I wasn’t broke when they called me last time. I still had the application form in my drawer of papers and so in the early afternoon I filled it out. I attached a copy of my 2015 notice of tax assessment. Since I didn’t have a voided cheque to send them I called up my bank to find out how I could arrange for direct deposit. A very patient person guided me through the process of downloading and filling out a direct deposit form. That’s something that may come in handy later on.

            I took a siesta in the early afternoon and when I got up an hour and a half later I saw that it had rained quite a bit while I’d been sleeping. I decided then not to take a bike ride because I envisioned myself splashing through big puddles on the way. Instead I did some knee exercises and listened to the 1946 Amos and Andy Christmas episode. It was a slightly rewritten repeat of an earlier holiday show in which Andy gets a job as Santa Clause on Christmas Eve in order to get the money to buy a doll for Amos’s daughter. He funniest part was when Andy was showing Lightning some monogrammed handkerchiefs that he was giving as a gift to his current girlfriend Evelyn. Lightning observed that they were embroidered with the letter “C” and so Andy explained that he had originally bought them for his ex-girlfriend, Carmen, but they broke up before last Christmas. Lightning wondered how he was going to get away with giving Evelyn handkerchiefs with the letter “C” on them. Andy told him that he’d planned on this three months ago and so he started giving Evelyn the pet name “Cookie”.

            I still haven’t reviewed all of the video I shot of my weekend song practices, but later I looked at most of it. The recording of my song “Insisting On Angels” that I did on Sunday sounds pretty good.

            That night I moved some more videos to my external hard drive and freed up more than ten gigabytes on the internal one. The only videos of me that I didn’t transfer are the ones from the current song practice project. Later I’ll probably also put away the videos that weren’t shot simultaneously with the voice recorder captures. This way I have more room to record a few more sessions before I have to start editing.