Sheila Larken

            This is the beginning of the thirteenth year of this journal. 

            On Tuesday morning my tongue still hurt from me biting it while biting supper. Luckily the tongue heals quickly but I do seem to bite my tongue more often in the last few years. I probably do that because of having had some teeth removed, leaving the remaining teeth with edges that didn’t meet my tongue before. 

            I finished memorizing “Notre Derniere Chance” (Our Final Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg. Tomorrow I’ll look for the chords but I doubt anyone has posted them and so I’ll start working them out. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of four sessions and it stayed in tune the whole time. I almost bit my tongue again but on the other side. 

            I weighed 87.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I brought in the stepladder and started sanding the second coat of drywall compound from the bathroom ceiling and walls. I did the southeast corner of the ceiling and the top of the walls in that area. At the top of the south wall there is still a bit of a groove in some places just before it meets the ceiling but I’m not going to bother adding a third coat of filler. It’s not really obviously visible from the floor. I think my neighbour Benji banged on the wall to complain about the noise of my sanding. I only do it for about half an hour a day and it’ll probably only take another three days for me to do all the areas that are on the other side of his walls. When I move on to the next phase of my bathroom renovation he’ll probably complain about the smell of the paint. Tomorrow I’ll sand the northeast corner of the ceiling and the tops of the walls in that area. I might also have time to do the northwest corner. 

            I weighed 87.05 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back I stopped at Freshco to buy grapes. I got five bags of red grapes but then noticed they finally had Canadian cherries (and they were cheap!). I grabbed five bags. I did a price match on the grapes with the No Frills price of $4.14 a kilo and saved $45. I didn’t notice until I was packing my purchases away that they’d mixed the bags of Canadian cherries with those of US cherries so I only actually bought two bags of the Canadian ones. I also noticed that the grapes are from the US but apparently the company is Canadian.

            I weighed 85.55 kilos at 18:15, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since July 18. 

            I was caught up with my journal at 19:20. 

            I worked on the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia”. The concert video continues to drag behind the studio audio and so every few words I have to delete some of it to bring it forward. In the third verse I managed to synchronize the concert video with the studio audio for “across a”, “hostile ocean”, “of time. I am”, “a ghost but only”, and “part, so”. 

            I compared the song practice video of my October 5 Kramer performance of “Comment te dire adieu” to my October 3 Gibson performance. I like the feel of the October 3 video but the action on the Gibson was too low and making it sound rattly. I compared October 9 to October 5 and I think October 9 is better, plus that session is already in Movie Maker, so that’s the version I’ll upload to YouTube. 

            I compared my September 2 electric performance of “How to Say Goodbye to You” with that of September 18 and I think September 2 sounds better. I compared September 20 to September 2 and September 20 looks better. I compared September 24 to September 20 and September 24 looks and sounds better. There are five more to compare. 

            It was too hot to cook and so I had three barbecued pork ribs cold with potato chips, skyr and dill. I had supper with a beer while watching the penultimate episode of The Bold Ones: The New Doctors. 

            A jaundiced 14 year old girl named Ali is brought into the hospital but they have trouble communicating with her because she is intellectually disabled (Ali’s mother Anita has kept her at home since birth. But it was her father that really took care of her, patiently spending seven months teaching her to tie her shoe laces. But then the father died and Ali’s sister found her under the covers clutching her father’s shoes. They still used the word “retarded” in 1969. It wasn’t officially considered pejorative until 2010). Dr. Hunter thinks it’s her liver and that she might have infectious hepatitis so she is isolated. But they don’t know if it’s viral or toxic. Her liver has enlarged. They give Ali 24 units of blood. After time if they can keep her alive the liver cells may stop dying and start regenerating. Ali is in a coma. Hunter examines the mother’s garage and finds carbon tetrachloride, which Ali might have breathed or ingested. Now hunter thinks Ali’s kidneys may have been damaged. Anita is reluctant to allow a renal biopsy because she thinks Ali has had too many tests but she finally agrees. Ali’s beloved sister Liz agrees to allow her own liver to be connected to Ali’s so it can have a rest. Ali’s blood will run through Liz’s system to be purified by her liver. Liz doesn’t need her mother’s permission because she’s 21 but they still need Anita’s consent for Ali. She takes quite a bit of time to convince. Later Liz sings to Ali and she stirs from her coma. 

            Liz was played by Sheila Larken, who played Dana Scully’s mother on 17 episodes of The X-Files. She has also made guest appearances on several TV series and played supporting roles in made for TV movies.