Cathy Cavadini

            On Tuesday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow and picked up a few bedbugs from the curtains. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck, turned the heat on, and went to bed around 1:40. I got up to pee just before 3:00 and turned the heat off. That way it wasn’t so obnoxiously hot when I got up at 5:00. 

            I published “I Find it Super Chic”, my translation of “Je trouve ça coperchic” by Boris Vian on my Christian’s Translations blog and posted the lyrics on Facebook. The next Vian song on my list is “C’est ici” (It’s Right Here) and there’s audio for that one so I’ll start memorizing it tomorrow.

            I worked out the chords for the second verse of “L’île enchanteresses” (The Enchanted Isle) by Serge Gainsbourg. I established the first chord for the chorus. 

            I weighed 90.55 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since October 11.

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it went out of tune about half the time.

            I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and my pillow. I shook out my sheet and comforter. 

            I have three storage containers full of images I’ve collected for collage. I went through one of the containers and got rid of about half. 

            I weighed 91.3 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back. I picked through their grapes and managed to get two bags of red ones and one of the green that were relatively firm. I also bought two bags of oranges. 

            I weighed 90.95 kilos at 18:25. October 4 was the last evening when I was so easy on the scale. 

            I was a bit behind in my journal and worked on catching up. 

            I made a fresh batch of gravy from roast beef drippings and had some with a potato and a slice of roast beef while watching season 4, episode 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. This was a spooky story. 

            Spock and La’an are in a shuttle bringing Kirk back from a leadership conference when they discover the long lost USS Griffin floating dead in space. They beam aboard to investigate. There are no life signs, no life support, and there is no power and yet Kirk hears a baby crying. Power and life support comes on. La’an sees a woman who calls her by name and says she’s been waiting for her, before disappearing. 

            Spock detects negatively charged ions, which in pseudo science indicates the presence of ghosts.

            Spock investigates sick bay while La’an and Kirk head for the bridge. Kirk is scheduled to meet his newborn son David and tells La’an that his relationship with the boy’s mother Carol didn’t work out because she’s afraid he’ll die in space. 

            They access the ships computer and learn that the woman La’an encountered was Security Chief Rose Harper. She reported erratic and violent behaviour among the crew and beamed all the officers off the ship. 

            Meanwhile in sick bay, while at first it was empty, suddenly there are bodies covered in sheets on all of the tables and one of them sits up. It’s his fiancé T’Pring who is as surprised to be there as Spock is to see her. She says moments ago she was on Vulcan. He tells her she is not real but a projection of his mind. She pulls a phaser and shoots him. 

            Outside the ship they see that their shuttlecraft has been destroyed. 

            Kirk thinks his son David is inside the communications equipment and begins tearing through wires to try to reach him. 

            La’an is surrounded by zombies that used to be the crew and they tell her she’s one of them.

            T’Pring has strapped Spock to a biobed and and tells him he needs to come closer to his human half and so she cuts off the pointed tips of his ears. Then she plans to move Spock’s heart to where a human heart should be but Captain Pike, Una, Uhura, Ortegas, and Kirk’s brother Sam beam aboard the ship and stop her. 

            La’an tries to take the turbolift to the bridge but it keeps taking her to deck 17 where she finds Harper’s quarters and while watching her video log entry she turns into La’an. La’an breaks the screen. Uhura and La’an try to beam Ortegas back to the Enterprise but something goes wrong. Uhura accuses La’an of beaming Ortegas into herself. She says she put her in the buffer for her own safety. 

            Una takes a scalpel and begins cutting open her own stomach. 

            There is a crack in the window and Sam is sucked out into space, blood first. 

            Spock seems to transport himself back to the Enterprise simply by repeating a Vulcan mantra.

            Pike starts chopping off his own fingers with a kitchen knife. 

            La’an stabs Kirk and then they are both beamed back to the Enterprise. Pike, Uhura, Una, Ortegas and Sam were never on the Griffin. Spock’s ears are fixed. It seems he cut them off himself in momentary madness. 

            La’an watches the Griffin being towed away and thinks she sees Harper in a window gesturing towards her. 

            The voice of the Griffin computer was done by Cathy Cavadini, who made her film debut in Starchaser: The legend of Orin in 1985. She did the voice of Blossom in The Powerpuff Girls TV series and the movie. She sang “Dreams to Dream” in An American Tale: Feivel Goes West, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Song. She was the speaking and singing voice of Mary in the animated feature Babes in Toyland.