George Holmes

            On Thursday morning I revised my translation of the second verse of "J'ai pas d'regret" (I've No Regrets) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the fourth, fifth and sixth verses of "D'un taxiphone" (From a Payphone) by Serge Gainsbourg. There's just one left to learn and so I might have the whole song nailed down tomorrow. 

            I weighed 84.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I got up to page 137 in David Copperfield. David gets along well with the other students at Salem school. They are united against the cruel headmaster who did not earn his position through scholarship and is in fact an uneducated and stupid man. Because David has read a lot of books he becomes a story teller for the other boys and therefore popular. 

            He goes home for the holidays and finds that his mother has had a baby by Mr. Murdstone. he has a brief joyful reunion with his mother and Peggotty before Murdstone and his sister come home and make the month of his holiday into a boring hell. Shortly after returning to school he learns that his mother has died. 

            I weighed 83.9 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I've been at that time in about a week. 

            It was raining when it was time for my afternoon bike ride and so I just rode to Freshco where I bought three bags of green grapes, two bags of black grapes, blueberries, blackberries, a sirloin tip beef roast, a jug of orange juice, a jug of limeade, three bags of skim milk, kettle chips, salsa, mango chutney, tamarind chutney, and a bag of kettle chips. 

            I weighed 83.9 kilos at 16:45. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 17:51. 

            I made it to page 172 of David Copperfield. After David's mother dies he is kept out of school and then given a low level job at Murdstone's company in London washing and labeling wine bottles. It's child labour and he's the youngest one there. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a few pork ribs with chili sauce and maple syrup while watching season 4, episode 6 of The Beverly Hillbillies. Granny is still running for Possum Day queen even though there is no evidence there will be a Possum Day in Beverly Hills. Drysdale has tried everywhere and hasn't found a town near Beverly Hills that wants it. Drysdale has gotten his wife Margaret to run against Granny without Margaret knowing it. When Margaret finds out she is devastated but Granny thinks Margaret is disappointed about falling behind in the race. Granny decides to let Margaret win and she won't even go downtown to watch the parade. Drysdale is relieved since there won't be one.

            One of the crowd members at Granny's rally was George Holmes, who was a professional ice skater when he started acting in ice skating films such as Thin Ice and Second Fiddle. He also became a wrestler. As he wasn't very good with speaking he became an extra and a stand-in and got more steady work from that than acting. 

            I did my usual search for bedbugs on the walls and baseboards around my bed and didn't find any. But when I was making my bed I picked up something that I'd thought might have been a piece of fabric but it was a bedbug. It wasn't moving and had no blood inside so it might have been dead.