Mona Bruns

            On Saturday morning I memorized the fourth verse of “La vie grise” (The Grey Life) by Boris Vian and the third verse of “Aux enfants de la chance” (To the Children of Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first session of four. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I rode in the rain down to No Frills where only one bag of grapes was firm enough to bother buying. I got a pack of raspberries, some bananas, a couple of packs of flatbread for pizza, spreadable butter, a beef sirloin tip roast, mouthwash, mango-lime salsa, two containers of skyr, a jug of calamansi lemonade (judging by the picture on the bottle, calamansi looks like lime), Tingly Ted’s hot sauce, vanilla bean Hagen Dazs, frozen pub fries, beer battered fish fillets, and a small pack of physalis berries. On my way home in the rain I realized that I made a mistake when I painted my bike frame. I’d forgotten it was acrylic paint and it was already peeling off. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before lunch. I had a toasted Montreal style bagel with tzatziki and five-year-old cheddar.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride but it was lightly though steadily raining and so I only went as far as Bloor and Dovercourt. On the way home I stopped at Metro to look for some decent grapes but they only had one bag of firm red ones and I settled for four more bags of green grapes. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:15. 

            I started a Movie Maker project for my September 11 song practice. I imported videos A and B and the audio for the whole session and then I synchronized them. Tomorrow I’ll copy it and name the copy “The Accordion (acoustic)”, then I’ll isolate that song, add some effects, adjust the audio balance and publish the movie. Maybe I’ll have time to upload it to YouTube. 

            I finished editing the Greta Garbo video montage I’d downloaded and isolated the clip of her lighting a candle. Then I inserted it into the main video after my line, “I felt fire, I felt ice attack”. Then I synchronized the concert video with the studio audio for the lines, “I felt the ripping of a hole deep in my chest and then still further back”. After that, in the video the line, “until it brushed against my soul” goes ahead of the studio audio and so I looked for a clip to correspond with that line to push the video back in the timeline to meet the audio again. I found one possibility but I’ll keep looking. 

            I scanned three more slides from box three of the last eight boxes. There are thirteen slides left in box three. There were two shots in which it looked like I blew a big bubble on the street and then tried to take a picture of the image on the other side. 

            I half cooked some bacon in the oven, then I cut it up and put it on a naan pizza with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 6, episodes 8 and 9 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver finally has a bumper crop of apples and someone has offered him a good price for them. Now he just needs pickers but none are available for him or the other farmers. He proposes that they work together to pick each other’s apples. They put names in a hat to determine the order and Oliver out last. So by the time everyone has picked the other farmers’ crops they are too tired or injured to help Oliver. So Oliver and Eb start picking just the two of them but the task is impossible within the deadline for the deal that Oliver made with the buyer. Meanwhile Oliver has been trying to teach Lisa to drive. He lets her drive the car on a quiet stretch of country road but she slams into the sheriff’s car. She doesn’t even have a learner’s permit and on top of that Oliver’s license is just past expiration. She gets a learner’s permit and is going to take lunch to Oliver and Eb in the orchard and decides to take the car. She hits an apple tree and solves the picking problem because all of the apples fall into the car. Oliver makes $1200 on the deal but after fines and repair costs he ends up $12 in the hole. 

            In the second story the parents of Eb’s girlfriend Darleen Wheeler invite Oliver and Lisa to come for dinner because they think they are Eb’s parents. Mr. Wheeler asks Oliver if he wants a drink and he says yes but it’s just a trick to find out if Oliver is a drinker because they are against drinking. Oliver gives Eb two acres to build a house on for when he marries Darleen. But Eb needs $8000 to build the house. He wants Oliver to lend it to him but Oliver tells him to use his ingenuity. Eb tries to charge $2 a truckload for people to dump junk on his acreage but the drivers keep dumping the garbage in front of Oliver’s house. Then he rents it out as a trailer park. Then he sells the two acres for $2000 in hopes that Oliver will give him another two acres to build the house on. Oliver and Lisa are about to go to bed when a woman comes out of their bedroom looking for the bathroom. She’s a newlywed and Eb has rented Oliver and Lisa’s bedroom to the couple. Eb is also boarding six horses in Oliver’s barn.

            Mrs. Wheeler was played by Mona Bruns, who started acting at the age of 15 in the play The Innocent Sinner. She was one of the stars of the soap opera A Brighter Day, playing Aunt Emily Potter and appearing in 1820 episodes. She then played Emily Hastings on Another World. Both she and her husband Frank M. Thomas lived to over 100.