Floating on the Light

            On Thursday morning I added two more chords to “J'suis snob" by Boris Vian.

            I memorized three more verses of “Puisque je te le dis" by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I washed another section of the living room floor, finishing the ten-board wide strip that I’d started two days before. Now the front of the couch is entirely in the bright area. Also now during yoga my body will be entirely on the clean part. All that's left of the visible living room floor is a strip less than a meter wide and 2.92 meters long. I've already cleaned about have that area when I pulled out my desk a few weeks ago but that was a half assed job without oil soap and a brush, so I'll have to go over it again. For some reason it felt especially good to complete that section. It feels like I’m on the home stretch even though after I get the visible area done there will still be a quarter of the floor left to do under, behind and to the sides of my couch.

            I had a cold chicken wing for lunch and some yogourt with honey.

            There’s a woman and son I often see and I've never seen them apart. They are perhaps recent immigrants from Pakistan or India because I've yet to hear either of them speak English. He looks about ten and appears tall for his age. He almost always holds her hand when they are walking. I looked out my window this afternoon and the mother and child were waiting for the light to change. Next to them was a young woman who sounded like she might be from Jamaica and she was yelling at them. Perhaps either the boy or his mother had tossed a wrapper on the street because the woman said, “Don’t be wastin! You people come over here and you fucking waste!” I’m all for telling people not to litter but I don’t think the "you people” part was necessary and in fact it was probably counter productive.

            I did some exercises and got ready to take a bike ride. I saw my upstairs neighbour in the hall and he asked me what I wanted to eat. He suggested pizza but I told him I don’t eat bread on Thursdays. He said he’d get me some lamb. David is a generous guy.

            I decided to extend my usual bike ride and so I went up Brock to College and then across to Ossington. College turns out to be a much better route right now because while Dundas has those annoying busses right now blocking cycle traffic, College still has the streetcars. I rode down Ossington to Queen and stopped at Freshco on the way home. Since today was Thursday it was the end of last weeks sales and the beginning of new ones. Cherries and grapes had gone up and so I didn’t buy any but strawberries and tomatoes had gone down. I bought a pack of ground beef. I got two containers of Liberte Greek yogourt but didn’t notice until I got home that one of them was cracked in the bottom and slowly leaking. I turned it upside down in the fridge. Their spoon size shredded wheat was still on sale and so I picked up another carton. I needed vinegar to keep my amethyst rock submerged and the extra strength pickling kind was on sale. I grabbed some shaving gel and some petroleum jelly because they are delicious and there’s always room for jelly.

            When I got home there was a plastic bag hanging on my doorknob containing curried lamb with rice from David. I put it in the fridge to have on another day.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I did a bit of work on my review of David Jure’s "The Patient English" but over the last few months there has been a glitch in Microsoft Word that sometimes causes any document that I’m working on to suddenly shut down. When I try to reopen it there is a message saying that the document is locked for editing. The only way to bring things back to normal each time is to open my Task Manager and shut down Word. Then when I reopen the text I get two versions, one saved and the other recovered but the recovered one only has about half of what I’d written before the shutdown. Grrrr! I had planned on editing one of my videos but I had to spend extra time reviewing the poetry of someone I’ve never met.

            I had seven tiny potatoes, a chicken leg, some gravy and three radishes for dinner while watching the final story from "The Veil" TV show.

            Ellie brings her fifteen-year-old daughter Ruth back to her hometown but when they get there Ruth loses her memory and doesn’t recognize Ellie as her mother. Ruth is also complaining of pains in her head and body as if she’d suffered a fall. Ellie takes Ruth to her old family physician, Dr. Madison. There is nothing physically wrong with Ruth but she tells the doctor that when she arrived in Greenville, even though she’d never been there before, it seemed familiar. When Ruth leaves she says to the doctor, "Thanks Uncle Dar". This is a nickname that only one person ever called him. A girl named Peggy Perry who died after a fall down a staircase. The doctor arranges for Ruth to visit the Perry home and she immediately recognizes everything. Suddenly the family dog goes running to her and she greets it by its name. The doctor thinks it might help Ruth if she stayed with the Perrys for a while. Over the next few days she begins to call Martha Perry “mother” and asks her to help her plan her sixteenth birthday party, on the day which was Peggy’s birthday. In fact Peggy died on her sixteenth birthday. Ruth wants to invite all of her friends, not realizing that all of Peggy's friends are grown up now. There is a small get together and Ruth considers it her best birthday ever. She receives a new dress for a present and goes upstairs to try it on. When she is about to come down Martha screams for her not to take the stairs. Ruth begins to descend but Martha’s panicking causes her to stumble. Martha’s husband Ira catches Ruth just in time and takes her to her room. Ruth is upset by her mother’s reaction and in frustration she throws something and breaks the mirror. Suddenly Ruth looks at Martha and Ira and wonders who they are. She asks for her mother and she’s Ruth again.

            Ruth was played by Denise Alexander, who grew up to become a producer and to play the role of Dr. Leslie Webber on “General Hospital”.

            Ellie was played by Shirley Mitchell, who was a regular on several classic radio and television shows. She was married to songwriter Jay Livingston, who wrote “Mona Lisa”, “Que Sera Sera” and the Christmas song “Silver Bells”.

            The Veil was not as good a series as I’d expected it to be and so I’m not surprised that it never aired in its time.

            I had yogourt with honey and strawberries for dessert and watched part one of the 1950s documentary series Victory at Sea.

I was expecting it to be mildly interesting but I was pleasantly surprised at how well paced and informative it was. They collected 80,000 kilometres of film footage from WWII, including some shot by the Nazis. The series follows the war chronologically. It was interesting to find out that Canada basically catered the war by supplying food loaded at first onto ancient, poorly armed merchant ships. But to get it across the Atlantic the Canadian Navy only had 13 of its own vessels at the beginning of the war. Yachts and fishing boats had to be converted. Germany had been building modern u-boats at incredible speed and they sank many ships. All Canada had to fight them was WWI weaponry and it was almost impossible to take out a submarine with what Canada had at the time. The best hope was to just make it through. Canada was in charge of protecting the northwest Atlantic. Canada lost 14 ships to attack and another 8 from accidents during the war. 2000 Canadian Navy sailors died at sea. 58 Canadian merchant ships were lost to enemy fire during the war. The first people from the United States to face enemy fire were US sailors helping to escort the convoys, even though the US was still not in the war.

There was a fight that night outside my O’Hara window. A drunk Sri Lankan punched out a drunk Ethiopian for calling him a “motherfucker”. This is further evidence to support my theory that people are touchy.