Nydia Westman

            On Wednesday morning I woke up at 4:00 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I got up and did some writing towards getting caught up on my journal. I went back to bed for fifteen minutes at 4:45. 

            My computer behaved itself for quite a while. It’s as if it’s been reading all I’ve written about shopping for a new desktop and now it’s trying to prove that it doesn’t need to be put out to pasture. 

            I worked out the chords for most of the first verse of “Laide jolie laide” (Ugly Pretty Ugly) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            I weighed 87 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Best Buy to look at their desktops. The guy at Mod Electronics had told me that he’d only seen one PC in the store, but there were more than that. But their desktops are scattered among the laptops throughout the computer section, with no two PCs side-by-side. 

            The first I saw for $799 was an Asus Intelcore i5-10400 57005A; Desktop PC-EN. Hexacore processor at 2.90 Hz. 8 gigs of Ram; DDR 4 Ram, 512 gig solid state drive; Wifi 6 (802 11 AX); Bluetooth 5.0 (Dual band) 2 X 2 HDM1 14 VGA display port; Ports USB type-C; 6 X USB 3 1; 4 X USB 2 0. 

            Then for $729, there was an HP Pavilion Intel Core i5-10400/512GB SSD/8GB RAM/Windows 10. It includes a mouse and keyboard. It also comes with an integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth combo for accessing wireless networks. 10/100/1000 ethernet port and integrated Realtek Wi-Fi 5 (1x1). Four SuperSpeed USB Type-A ports, one SuperSpeed USB Type-C 5Gbps port, four USB 2.0 Type-A ports, one audio jack, one HDMI port, and one VGA port offer convenient wired connectivity with a wide range of peripherals and storage devices. One PCIe x16 expansion slot and one PCIe x1 expansion slot let you upgrade your computer with more hardware components. 

            Third, they had an Acer for $799 with TC-Intelcore i5-11400. 8 gigs of Ram. Keyboard and mouse. Basically, it’s got the same specs as the HP but with half the SSD. 

            So far, I am torn between the new HP at Best Buy and the refurbished one at PCS. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos at 18:00. 

            I heated the last slice of spanakopita and melted extra-old cheddar on top. I had it with a beer while watching the first season finale of Adam-12.

            In this story, they were back to fragmented situations with a background theme of Reed trying to relate a joke to Malloy while they are on patrol. He keeps getting interrupted by calls. 

            The first is from an elderly lady named Alice who thinks her friends stole the mink scarf that she keeps in the fridge. Malloy finds it in the freezer. 

            Then a woman calls the police saying her husband hit her and then cut her with a knife. At first Malloy and Reed arrest Henry Fletcher but then Malloy thinks there’s something fishy because there is no blood on the floor where Henry supposedly cut Muriel. He gets Henry to admit that this was all a ploy so Muriel could support their five kids. If Henry went to jail she could get more welfare. 

            Finally, they are called to an apartment building where a loud party is going on. The host turns out to be a high school friend of Reed’s who is surprised and disgusted when Reed insists that he turn the music down or he’ll arrest him. 

            Reed finally tells the joke, but Malloy doesn’t laugh. He says it’s funny but not that funny. It’s really not funny at all. Reed doesn’t understand why it doesn’t crack Malloy up. In the end, he hears the lieutenant telling the joke to some officers and they are laughing their heads off. Malloy explains that Reed has to make lieutenant to get that kind of reaction. 

            I’m not going to watch the second season of Adam-12. Cop shows are not really my cup of tea and even as cop shows go the manner of having no solid story or continuity makes it especially boring.

            Alice was played by Nydia Westman, who performed as a child on Vaudeville in her parents’ act. She made her Broadway debut in 1924 at the age of 22 and was in demand on stage throughout the 1920s. She started doing movies in 1932. She won an Obie award for her performance in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.” She played Mrs. Featherstone in the series Going My Way.