Don Edmonds

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the second verse and second chorus of "Charlotte Forever" by Serge Gainsbourg. All that's left is the instrumental, which seems to have the same chords as the chorus, and the final verse, which probably has the same chords as the other two. I might have it finished on Saturday. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice and video and audio recorded the session. Saturday will be the final day of this year's recording project. This seemed to be a pretty good session with fewer mistakes on the songs I've been playing the longest. I got through "Comment te dire adieu" in a couple of takes although there was a lot of fumbling, but that's no surprise because it may be the most difficult song that I play right now. I also broke my record for this year and made it all the way to "Eliza" before the camera timed out. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished scrubbing and scraping the glue from the area where the fourth tile had been in front of the kitchen counter. I started on the space where the fifth tile had been and got over half of it off. 

            I weighed 84.3 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I've been at that time in fifty one days. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I spent about half an hour chiseling fossils out of the slate that I'd found at the top of Keele Street. I was trying to free up some green parts in the rock that seem like they might be million year old roots. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:12. 

            I reviewed the video of this morning's song practice and I think it's the best one of this year's recording project. I did "Megaphor" in one take and it was one of the best I've done. The takes of every song up until "Les sucettes" were all pretty good. After that the songs all need work but are showing improvement. My take of "Comment te dire adieu" was the best I've recorded even with the mistakes. 

            I tried to figure out how to synchronize and edit in Ableton two drum tracks for my song "Sleep in the Snow". I looked at a couple of tutorials but they seem to be geared towards users who already know what they are doing. They are very unlike the tutorial I followed last year that very simply showed me how to record with Ableton. I find Ableton to be very user unfriendly and not designed for amateurs. In the last five minutes I'd allotted to this I opened Audacity and was immediately able to line up two drum tracks and see from the wave forms how I'd probably be able to synchronize them. I'll start again with Audacity tomorrow and follow their tutorials. I know that Ableton is probably better but I need something I can understand. Maybe later on I can graduate to Ableton. 

            I scanned the last strip from the set of colour negatives from March of 1987. There were again a lot of fire escape shapes. I started a new set of black and white negatives but only got the first couple of frames before the memory was full and it was time for dinner. So far it was just shots of a fountain but I don't know where. 

            I made a new batch of gravy from yesterday's chicken drippings. I had some with a potato and a chicken leg while watching season 3, episodes 4 and 5 of Petticoat Junction. 

             In the first story Bobbie Joe is supposed to be preparing to compete in a spelling bee but she doesn't seem to be a very good speller. Kate's rival Salma Plout's daughter Henrietta by contrast appears to be a spelling whiz. One day Bobbie Joe puts a coin in a weighing machine, then she looks down and sees a scarab ring on the sidewalk. After she picks it up, suddenly pennies start pouring out of the machine. When she goes home wearing the ring she is able to spell every word that Kate tests her with. She lends it to Billie Joe and suddenly Henry asks her to the dance. She lends it to Betty Joe and her team wins their baseball game. She lends it to her mother before Kate goes to the bank to ask for an extension on her mortgage payment but Mr. Guerney tells her that an error was made and the bank owes her money. Joe borrows it before a checkers game with Sam Drucker. With the dog's help Joe wins against Sam for the first time. But Joe loses the ring on the way home. Bobbie's contest is that night and so Joe rushes to Pixley to buy an imitation scarab ring for fifty cents. He gives it to her but feels so guilty that he doesn't want to go to watch her lose because of him. But then he finds the ring and rushes to Hooterville on the hand car and in the middle of the competition he brings her the ring on a tray with a glass of water. But she puts down the ring with the other one and drinks the water, then picks up the imitation ring again. When Chester misspells "spheroid" it is down to Bobbie and Henrietta, but Henrietta misspells "kimono" while Bobbie gets it right and wins even though she doesn't have the lucky ring. 

             Chester was played by Don Edmonds, who came to Hollywood and started working in local California theatre. In the movies he became typecast as a goofy sidekick in teen films like "Gidget Goes Hawaiian", "Beach Ball", and "Wild Wild Winter". In 1972 he began writing and directing sexploitation films like "Wild Honey" and "Tender Loving Care". His most famous film is "Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS", followed by "Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks". He then wrote and directed the action film "Bare Knuckles". He directed "Terror on Tour". He wrote and directed "Tomcat Angels". He directed the pilot for the TV series "Silk Stalkings". He wrote "The Night Stalker". He became a producer and in that capacity helped Quentin Tarantino make his early films. 

            In the second story Kate gives Joe $10 to buy some canary yellow paint for the front of the hotel. But while he's at Sam's store he hears that Lisa Douglas is looking for a contractor to fix up her and Oliver's old farmhouse that they just purchased. Joe goes to her claiming to be a contractor and she gives him the job. Sam warns him he'll go to jail for trying to contract without a license and so he gives Sam the $10 to send for one. Kate wonders where her paint is and so Joe goes to Lisa to ask for a $10 advance on his fee. But when he comes back to Sam he finds that the fee for a license is now $20 so he gives the money to Sam. Kate is still waiting for her paint and so Joe convinces Floyd that he needs a backup career and he can enroll him in his painting school for $10. But Lisa needs Mediterranean blue paint for her house and so he buys that. She also needs doorknobs and light fixtures and so he removes those things from Kate's hotel. Kate goes over to the Douglas house and finds her things. Oliver says it will all be returned, then he asks Lisa how she could accept Joe as a contractor. She says he made such good sense because he agreed with everything she said. Kate makes Joe pay Floyd back by stoking the fuel on the train.