Norman Grabowski

            On Wednesday morning I finished memorizing "Le mal intérieur" (The Ache Inside) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords but no one had posted them and so I worked them out for the intro and the first line. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I've been in the morning in nine days. 

            I changed the soil for David's rosemary plant on Sunday but when I went up there today it looked dead. He said his late mother gave it to him and he's had it for twenty years. It was already three-quarters brown when he left it with me. Twenty years is old age for rosemary. 

            I re-read some of the parts of Jane Eyre that I think are mirror moments for Jane. I think her friendship with Helen Burns is a mirror experience and later on when she meets the Rivers sisters who turn out to be her cousins. Maybe the end is an anti-mirror moment when she marries the now blind Rochester. Her "I" is perhaps fully formed at this point and so she does not need to see her reflection anymore. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos before lunch. I had the last of my rice crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            I took a short bike ride in the afternoon, just around the block three times. Tomorrow I'll pedal further and just ease myself back into regular rides downtown. 

            When I got home I was about to but my bike away but to do so I have to use a heavy concrete block that I've upholstered with a colourful blanket in order to hold the door open. I've used that block hundreds of times and it's starting to wear a hole in my hallway floor. The reason I've needed the block is because there is a hydraulic door closer on my door that's been there since before I moved in 26 years ago. It's because of that closer that people have sometimes walked into my place mistaking it for the exit. I decided today to stop using the concrete block. I grabbed a Phillips screwdriver and removed the contraption. Now my door stays open for bringing my bike in or out. I think I have to lock my door from the inside now though because it can probably be opened by shifting air currents without the closer. 

            I weighed 84.3 kilos at 16:15. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:35. 

            I re-read the mirror moments from Jane Eyre up until after Jane's first experience of seeing her own reflection doubled in the personages of the Rivers sisters. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce, hot Italian sausage and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 4, episode 19 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            There is a cat burglar on the loose in Beverly Hills and the Clampetts think that the thief literally steals cats. Elly May's cats have given birth to a ridiculous amount of kittens and so she is worried and has set traps all around the property, which Jethro keeps getting caught in. 

            A good looking young man named Wilcox comes to the house posing as a detective but he is really one of the cat burglars. The other just drops him off there. Elly gladly shows Wilcox where all of her traps are and Granny tells him where she keeps her jewelry and money. That night Wilcox and his accomplice come to rob the Clampetts. Granny catches Wilcox opening the wall safe but she always thought it was a broken radio and she kisses him for being such a dear boy and trying to fix it for her. Elly catches his accomplice in Granny's bedroom and Wilcox, still posing as a detective, takes him into custody. But then Drysdale hears about the detective and realizes he didn't hire one. Just then Wilcox and his partner are caught outside in a spring net set by Elly. 

            Wilcox's accomplice Bernie was played by Norman Grabowski, who was an award winning custom car designer. In 1952 he mated a 1922 Ford Model T with a Model A pickup truck and powered it with a Cadillac engine. This hot-rod was much imitated by car builders. He built the T-bucket hot-rod driven by Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip and he turned a 1924 Model T Ford into a hot-rod that was used in the sitcom My Mother the Car. It was through renting out his cars to movie and television productions that he got into acting. Later in life he became a world renowned wood carver. Many of his cars have custom carved gear shifts. 

            

            So far I've made it to eight days without seeing a bedbug. The last time I went that long without a sighting was between August 31 and September 8 of last year.