Kitchen Light

            On Friday morning I found four sets of chords for “Je suis venu te dire je m’en vais” (I just came by to tell you I'm gonna leave" by Serge Gainsbourg. I picked the set that might be the official ones in an actual chord but I still didn't agree with all of them. Maybe it's different for guitar rather than piano but he just doesn't sound to me like he's singing a G#minor at the beginning of the second line. I went with a C7.

            Now that I’ve finished with school deadlines for a few weeks I felt I had the time to go back to my floor cleaning project. I washed and brushed a six floorboard wide section of my kitchen floor in front of the bookcase at the southwest corner of the room. Since the last section I cleaned is covered up by the bookcase, this is the first visible bit of progress I’ve made with the kitchen floor.

           It didn’t take me long and so I had time to ride down to Freshco before lunch. They didn’t have much in the way of grapes and so I just bought three bags of green ones. I got two half pints of raspberries, a jar of hot salsa and Balderson extra old cheese was on sale for $5, so I got a hunk.

            I had a cold pork chop for lunch and some yogourt with honey.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises for the first time in a few days while listening to Amos and Andy. This is the first show after the summer break of 1946. Andy has been working at a summer resort in the country where he's met a rich woman whom he's asked to marry him. She says she’ll marry him as long as they can live in the mountains that she loves. Andy buys a lot on the side of a mountain that's ridiculously steep. Kingfish has a job with a real estate company and he shows him the property. When they get there Andy says the lot is too big. Suddenly there is the rumbling of an avalanche and after it dies down Kingfish asks, “It ain't too big now is it?” There is a lot of humour around the post war shortages of building materials and housewares. There is mention of a law at that time against building but I can’t find any evidence of that. In the end Andy finds that Louise has left Andy without any word. He says he’ll get back at her by holding onto the property that he bought so she can’t get it. Kingfish looks at her picture and tells Andy that she’s the one that owns the whole mountain.

            I read chapters 3 and 4 of The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King.

            Chapter 3 was about how much North America loves and profits from dead Indians. Live Indians are invisible except when they dress up as dead Indians and North Americans find legal Indians just plain annoying.

            Chapter 4 was about all of the many forced relocations of Indians that have taken place in the history of the United States and Canada. It was also about how treaties mean diddlysquat.

            I read about half of chapter four of Ways of Knowing by Yale Belanger. It covers what chapter 4 of King’s book does but King does it with humour while still giving the relevant information.

            I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy for dinner while watching Wanted Dead or Alive starring Steve McQueen. In this story Josh is escorting a prisoner to the town of Bannach because in three days Josh’s friend is going to hang for that prisoner's murder, which obviously didn't happen. Perry, the leader of a freight coach carrying a load of dynamite reluctantly agrees to let Josh and his prisoner ride with them. At first he and Josh are enemies and agree that when they get to Bannach they will fight it out. Along the way a bridge is out and Josh shows ingenuity in using some of the dynamite to blast a passage across. This causes Perry to gain respect for Josh. At one point Josh’s prisoner gets hold of dynamite and says he’s going to kill everybody if he can’t be free. He lights a match but the coach boss knocks it out of his hand with a whip. When they get to Bannach past the deadline it turns out that his friend’s trial has been delayed because everyone has left town because of a gold strike. Josh and Perry go for a drink and forget about their animosity.

            I read the rest of chapter four of Ways of Knowing. It does seem that progress has been made in the treaty process, especially with the creation of Nunavut.