Time of the Yo-Yo

            On Sunday morning I worked out the chords for the tenth verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Street) by Boris Vian. There is only one more verse to figure and I think it’ll be the same as the tenth except for the final note. 

            In Christian’s Translations I blog-published “Seeking Samantha in the Bronx”, which is my translation of “Your Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. I still have to post it on Facebook and then I’ll start learning the second song from his last album. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second session of two. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic. 

            For the first morning in a few years I didn’t play “Le temps des yoyos” or “Time of the Yo-Yo” during my practice because I've finally uploaded them to YouTube. 

            I sang instead “When They Put Me in that Hole”, which is my translation of “Le moribond” by Jacques Brel which I’ll be singing every day now in either English or French until I record uploadable takes of those. 

            I weighed 85.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I painted a second coat of “Berry Patch” onto the main areas of my kitchen counter front. As far as I could tell after it dried, it looks like a second coat is enough. I just need to put a second coat on the edges and in between spaces and that part should be done. There’s probably not much more left in the can than for that anyway. Then I need to take a trip to Rottblott’s to see if they have the cheap peel and stick tiles that Mikey at Home Hardware told me about. Otherwise I’ll have to paint a checkerboard pattern on the Masonite in front of the counter. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in two weeks. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. I stopped at Yonge and Dundas to put on my winter gloves. I think I’ll automatically put them on before leaving for my ride from now on. I stopped at Metro on the way back and bought five bags of red grapes. 

            There was a notice under my door that pest control is coming to do the whole building on Tuesday. So instead of painting tomorrow I’ll start preparing. Hopefully this will get rid of them or at least hold them back until my upstairs neighbour Caesar is dead and then the whole building can really be done.

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:25. 

            I reviewed my song practice performances of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” from August 2 to 5. On August 2 and 4 I played the electric but August 2 was the day that a string broke on the Kramer and so I played the Fibson. I didn’t start a full take until 9:45. It wasn’t very good. On August 4 I was too close to the camera and I played quite a few off chords, especially at the end. On August 5 I played my Martin acoustic and the take at 15:30 wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t that great either. 

            I finished watching the 1945 film tribute to the Ziegfeld Follies and it was interesting in parts but there was nothing that I could use for the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Megaphor”. I think I’ll make a separate video though of the segment when Lucille Ball is cracking a whip to tame several dancing cat women. I opened my Megaphor project and began inserting into the main video the clips that I’ve made from the 1945 film Ziegfeld Girl. I placed them to correspond to my line, “Behind the tango between Venus and the planet Mars twists a Ziegfeld Folly of a zillion stars”. I’ll finish doing that tomorrow and then see if I can synchronize the concert video with the studio audio for the line, “That make stumbling look like dancing just like you and I”. 

            I cleaned and scanned a strip of colour negatives from 1987. They are about half of them pictures of my late friend Mike Copping with his kids and the rest are of a concert, probably at the Copa in Yorkville. I don’t recognize the band but obviously I would have gone there with my ex-girlfriend Brenda. There are 31 more full sets of negatives to scan. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, a cut up chicken burger and five year old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 3, episodes 14 and 15 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story, the Monroe brothers have promised to finally finish Oliver and Lisa’s bedroom after six months of working on it. But then Ralph shows up alone at 3:00 saying that she and Alf had a fight. He had accused her of letting his saw get rusty but it was when he called her homely that she gave him a black eye. Lisa says she can stay with them and sleep on the couch. But Ralph shakes the whole house with her snoring. When Alf shows up for work and discovers Ralph is staying there he refuses to work. Ralph also refuses to work on the bedroom and so Lisa hires her as a maid. Oliver tries to talk Alf into apologizing but he says he won’t. That night Oliver discovers that Ralph is a fantastic cook and now he’s happy to have her. So when Alf shows up to apologize Oliver tries to stop him. But he does and they reconcile. Lisa reminds Oliver that he knew when he married her that she couldn’t cook, sew or clean. All she could do is speak Hungarian and do imitations of Zsa Zsa Gabor. Oliver says “Who?”

            In the second story Oliver is under a lot of strain because he has to do all the work while Eb is on his honeymoon. Lisa takes Oliver on a picnic to unwind and it’s helping but she forgets to bring food. She has brought a bottle of champagne and so Oliver tells her to put it in the lake to cool. Lisa opens the bottle and pours the champagne in the lake. While picking some apples Oliver is suddenly staring down the barrel of a shotgun held by a little man with a long beard. The man shows him a “no trespassing” sign that Oliver had missed. It reads Private Property Ira Hatch. Hatch makes Oliver pay for the apples and the fish he caught. Then Lisa asks Oliver who he's talking to and suddenly Hatch, his apple tree and his signs have disappeared. Later Oliver tells Sam, Fred and Haney about Hatch and they tell him that Ira Hatch died twenty years ago. Lisa tells Oliver’s mother that he’s been seeing things and she sends Dr. Faber down from New York. Faber tells Oliver to stop worrying and he takes his problem with him. When he leaves on the Cannonball, Hatch is on the train as well, waving goodbye.