Barbara Eiler

            On Sunday morning after midnight I was making my bed and I noticed a bedbug on the upper frame of the old exit door in my bedroom. I killed it and there was fresh blood inside. It seemed relatively healthy. It was the first one I've seen in almost a month. Steve from Orkin told me that they go high up to try to escape the powder and the poison. It's depressing to find one after thinking the infestation was over. I guess it could still be done and this was just a straggler but since it was full of blood it could have laid eggs. But then again sitting in the open is not egg laying behaviour. 

           When I got up it was raining and there was a new leak in the ceiling, this time from the upper part of the passageway between the living room and the kitchen. It was dripping on top of my Complete Shakespeare book. I put a bucket under the leak. 

            I started adding to my "Paranoiac Utopia" manuscript some of the small edits I've made while singing the poems. I want to try to find time to do some more later today and have the edits finished to send the manuscript to Exile tomorrow. 

            I translated the fifth verse of "Arthur, où t'as mis le corps" (Arthur, Where'd You Put The Corpse?) by Boris Vian: "We got ten years for our crime / That's more than enough time / to learn how to play belote / plus we felt a compulsion / to continuously question / our unfortunate goat."

            I finished translating the last verse of "On n'est pas des grenouilles" (We Are Not Amphibians) by Serge Gainsbourg. While doing so I learned a new word: "veisalgia", which is the scientific word for "hangover." So I used it to invent a new word for "hung over" that would rhyme with "amphibians" and came up with "veisalgian" as in "after a night of drinking I was veisalgian." I sang through my translation of the whole song and uploaded it to Christian's Translations. 

            I weighed 90.2 kilos before breakfast.

            After shaving and showering and doing the dishes I didn't have as much reading time as I'd hoped. 

            I read 4.1 of Henry IV part 1. In the rebel camp Hotspur hears that Prince Henry will be riding against him and basically says bring him on. 

            I read chapter 12 of The Scarlet Letter. The minister Dinnesdale goes out in the middle of the night and stands on the scaffold that Hester Prynne had been forced to present herself. Hester and her daughter Pearl happen by and he calls them up. They hold hands with him in the middle and he feels electricity flowing between them. At the same time there is a meteor shower and three red streaks in the sky form the letter A similar to the Adultery sign that Hester wears. But later other people that saw it thought that it stood for Angel. 

            I started reading 4.2 0f Henry IV. Falstaff has been given money to raise an infantry and has spent most of it on himself. He has ended up with the lowest and weakest of men under his command.

            I weighed 90.2 kilos before lunch.

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. Going down Yonge I followed four bike cops. For some of them it looked like it was their first time on a bike. I weighed 89.7 kilos when I got home. 

            I read chapter 13 of The Scarlet Letter. Over the years Hester had been so kind and helpful to the people that they began to see the scarlet letter she was forced to wear the way some people might understand a cross around the neck of a nun. 

            I read 4.4 of Henry IV. It's a short scene in which the Archbishop and Sir Michael discuss their situation of being in sympathy with the rebels. 

            I read chapter 14 of The Scarlet Letter in which Hester confronts her ex-husband Chillingworth to ask him to stop torturing Dimmesdale. He admits he's a fiend and basically says "What are you gonna do about it?" 

            I read 5.1 of Henry IV in which the king and the prince try to get Worcester to give up the rebellion. 

            I read chapter 15 of The Scarlet Letter. Pearl asks her mother why she wears the letter but for the first time Hester lies to her daughter. 

            I made pizza on naan with the last of the Parmese sauce, a cut up slice of ham and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. 

            In this story Colonel Grey and his wife get Sergeant Carter to babysit their dog Prince. When Prince sees Gomer he is all over him with affection because Gomer is the one who untrained him in a previous story, resulting in the colonel taking him as a pet. Carter wants to go on a date with Bunny and so he gets Gomer to take care of Prince but minutes later Prince runs away while chasing a squirrel. A while later Carter gets a call from the colonel at his lake cottage letting him know that Prince ran all the way there. Carter and Gomer go to get Prince and bring him back to the base. Minutes later they lose him again. They go to the pound and find a dog that Gomer is pretty sure is Prince. But then they get a call from someone answering Carter's ad about the missing dog and it also looks like Prince. Now they have two German Shepherds but then a third one shows up on the base. They have no choice but to take all three to the colonel to get him to call his dog. He does so because Prince is in his house having run to the lake again. Carter has to pay someone to take three dogs off his hands. 

            There have been a few Mrs Greys over the years. It's pretty much a different one every time. This time she was played by Barbara Eiler, who was a regular on several popular radio shows. She played Dennis Day's girlfriend Mildred on "A Day In The Life of Dennis Day", Riley's daughter Babs on "The Life of Riley" and Mary Videau on the TV series "Disneyland".